Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{{Egyptian security officers checked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his top aides with a metal detector as they arrived for a meeting on Tuesday with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an unusual screening for a senior State Department official.}}

Foreign officials usually extend every courtesy to Washington’s top diplomat.

Footage taken at the Egyptian presidential palace and seen by media showed an official briefly raising a handheld metal-detecting wand to the lower part of Kerry’s jacket before waving him through for the meeting, which is to discuss how to stop the two-week conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.

More than 500 people, the vast majority Palestinians, have died in the fighting.

Kerry appeared for only a few seconds in the footage, which showed his senior aides walking through a stationary metal detector and being checked with a handheld wand. At least one was asked to empty his pockets.

The aides included Kerry’s deputy chief of staff Jonathan Finer, senior adviser David Thorne and spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

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{{Gambia has taken steps to improve its poor human-rights record after the European Union suspended 150 million euros in development aid this year, activists said on Tuesday, urging tougher action by the international community.}}

Gambia received 75 million euros of aid over the past six years from the European Development Fund, but in the spring northern European member states blocked disbursement of further aid, citing grave human rights violations.

Gambia President Yahya Jammeh has drawn international condemnation by subjecting political opponents to torture, forcing them to confess to sedition on television and executing prisoners in 2012.

At the U.N. General Assembly in September, he stirred outrage by attacking gay rights as a threat to humanity.

However, in the past six months, Gambia has acceded to the U.N. statelessness conventions and invited U.N. special rapporteurs for extrajudicial executions and torture to visit the West African country, in an apparent shift in strategy.

“Jammeh is trying to placate the EU by keeping a low profile,” said Amadou Janneh from the Coalition for Change Gambia. “Once he gets the funding, he’ll go back to his old ways.”

Janneh said the president had not made any significant progress in key areas like torture, executions, the death penalty and freedom of expression.

He called on the European Union to impose targeted sanctions such as travels bans and asset freezes. “Only then will we begin to see significant changes,” he said.

A spokesman for Jammeh was not immediately available. The president seized power 20 years ago in a coup and has been elected four times since, albeit in elections criticised by international observers.

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{{Seleka rebels have demanded that Central African Republic be partitioned into a Muslim north and a Christian south, a surprise move at talks aimed at halting religious violence, sources at the meeting said on Tuesday.}}

Seleka’s head of delegation to the three-day forum in Brazzaville, General Mohamed Moussa Dhaffane, told a session it was time to formalise the split after tens of thousands of Muslims had fled the south.

The talks, bringing together 169 delegates from the transitional government, civil society and armed groups, are aimed at reaching a ceasefire and disarmament of the mostly Muslim Seleka rebels and ‘anti-balaka’ Christian militia.

Thousands have been killed and more than a million forced from their homes by months of sectarian violence in the country which erupted after Seleka fighters seized power in the majority Christian country in March 2013.

After a 10-month rule marked by looting, torture and murder, Seleka leader and interim president Michel Djotodia stepped down under international pressure.

The Christian militias stepped up revenge attacks on Muslims, driving the rebels along with Muslim civilians northwards, creating a de facto partition.

Abakar Sabone, a Muslim former minister and leader of the MLCJ movement who was in the meeting, said the Seleka were demanding as a precondition to continue talks that the country should be split in two.

“They (Seleka), represent the Muslim community in the north. The partition is already effective because all Muslims are now in the north and the current government has no access to the north,” Sabone said. “Seleka are voicing what that community in the north wants,” he added.

The partition calls came as a surprise to mediators including Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou N’Guesso, who was chairing the session.

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{{Benin has detained 10 people on suspicions of child-trafficking just weeks after a group in neighbouring Niger was held for links to a “baby factory” ring, police sources said on Tuesday.}}

While it was not immediately clear if there was a connection between the two cases, the latest detentions point to the persistence of human trafficking across West Africa.

“There have been around 10 people detained in the civil prison since last week,” said Ghislaine Bokovo, director of the Benin police force’s central office for child protection.

Bokovo did not give further details of this case, such as the age of the children, citing judicial secrecy for an ongoing investigation.

But she said trafficked children in the region were typically sold either for use in voodoo practices or to crooked adoption agencies.

Martial Degbessou, from the Porto-Novo police division, said people operating in trafficking networks often purported to be holding children on behalf of a nongovernmental organisation.

He said his division was familiar with the problem of child sales since his town is a stopover point for traffickers on the way to next-door Nigeria.

“Once they (the children) arrive in Nigeria, they are sold at a very high price, often between 20 million CFA Francs ($41,000) and 30 million CFA Francs ($62,000) per child,” he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Authorities in Niger have detained 17 people, including wives of senior politicians, after an investigation by Niger’s police into 30 people suspected of acquiring new-born babies from “baby factories” in Nigeria, two legal sources said last month.

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