Tag: InternationalNews

{Attacker still at large after killing 39 and wounding 70 in New Year’s Eve shooting rampage at upmarket Reina club.}

A manhunt was on in Turkey for at least one assailant who shot dead 39 people in a crowded Istanbul nightclub during New Year’s celebrations and fled the scene.

About 70 others were wounded, three of those people in critical condition, Binali Yildirim, Turkey’s prime minister, said on Sunday.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu described the attack as a “massacre, a truly inhumane savagery”.

“Our security forces have started the necessary operations. God willing, he will be caught in a short period of time,” Soylu said.

Police said the gunman was in his mid-20s and spoke in broken Turkish.

The attacker, armed with a long-barreled weapon, killed a policeman and a civilian outside the popular Reina nightclub at around 1:15am before entering and opening fire on people partying inside, Istanbul Government Vasip Sahin said.

Yildirim said the attacker left a gun inside the venue and escaped by “taking advantage of the chaos” that ensued.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack and authorities did not name any suspects. The bloodiest attacks that Turkey endured in 2016 were the work of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or outlawed Kurdish fighters.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vehemently condemned “the terror attack in Istanbul’s Ortakoy neighbourhood in the first hours of 2017” and offered condolences for those who lost their lives, including “foreign guests”.

Of the 21 dead identified so far, 15 were foreigners. Nationals of Saudi Arabia, India, Morocco, Israel, Lebanon, Belgium and Libya were among those killed, authorities said.

On Sunday, heavily armed police blocked the street in front of the nightclub in the Ortakoy neighbourhood as crime scene investigators were inside searching through piles of chairs, tables and pieces of clothing left behind by partygoers during the attack.

The Reina lies on the shore of the Bosphorus Strait and is one of Istanbul’s best-known nightclubs, popular with locals and tourists alike. Turkish police boats patrolled the Asian side of the Bosphorus on the other side of the club.

At least 500 people were thought to have been inside when the attack happened.

NTV broadcaster said the gunman fired between 120 and 180 rounds in the seven-minute attack, during which many revellers threw themselves into the freezing waters of the Bosphorus to escape death.

Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu, reporting from Istanbul, said security services believe the timing and target suggest ISIL involvement. Eight ISIL members had been detained, suspected of preparing a suicide attack on New Year’s Eve, she said.

The Reina nightclub is not only frequented by partygoers but also used as a venue by businessmen and diplomats to conduct meetings, she added.

Koseoglu said those in the club reported seeing up to three attackers carrying Kalashnikov assault weapons.

An eyewitness quoted by the Hurriyet newspaper said she had seen two attackers.

“Two people were shooting with weapons,” she said. “Suddenly people started to run. My husband told me not to be afraid. He jumped on top of me. People ran over me. My man was shot in three places.”

Turkey, part of the US-led coalition against ISIL, faces multiple security threats including fallout from the war in neighbouring Syria.

It has seen repeated attacks and bombings blamed on ISIL as well as fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in recent months.

The PKK and its affiliates are known to target mostly members of Turkey’s security forces rather than civilians.

The prime minister’s office issued a media blackout on the events and asked media to refrain from broadcasting and publishing anything that may cause “fear in the public, panic and disorder and which may serve the aims of terrorist organisations”.

Security measures had been heightened in major Turkish cities, with police barring traffic leading up to key squares in Istanbul and Ankara.

In Istanbul, 17,000 police officers were put on duty, some disguised as Santa Claus and others as street vendors, Turkey’s Anadolu news agency reported.

{French president also visits Iraq to salute troops which are taking part in a US-led military coalition against ISIL.}

French President Francois Hollande has arrived in Baghdad to meet the French forces helping Iraq in the fight against ISIL and to hold talks with top officials.

Hollande, who was travelling with French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, had already visited in 2014 and remains the most prominent head of state to come to Iraq since the launch two and half years ago of a US-led coalition against the armed groups.

“We’re not done with the plight of terrorism. We have to keep on fighting it,” Hollande said in a New Year address to the nation that was broadcast on French television.

France has around 500 troops fighting alongside coalition forces in Iraq, backed by Rafale fighter jets.

In the last New Year message of his presidency, Hollande paid tribute to those killed in attacks in France this year, including the 86 mown down in the Bastille Day attack in Nice and smaller-scale attacks on a priest and two police officers.

The fight against “terrorism” is also domestic, stressed Hollande, citing efforts to foil attempted attacks, closely watching “dangerous individuals” and fighting against “radical extremism”.

“I know that you are worried about the terrorist threat which has not diminished as shown by what happened in Berlin,” where a Tunisian smashed a truck into a Christmas market on December 19, killing 11 people and also shooting dead the lorry’s registered driver.

This was Hollande’s last New Year appearance after he announced earlier this month he would not stand for re-election in presidential polls next year.

{With much of the country on the verge of starvation, food trafficking has become one of the biggest businesses.}

When hunger drew tens of thousands of Venezuelans to the streets in protest last summer, President Nicolas Maduro turned to the military to manage the country’s diminished food supply, putting generals in charge of everything from butter to rice.

But instead of fighting hunger, the military is making money from it, an Associated Press investigation shows. That’s what grocer Jose Campos found when he ran out of pantry staples this year. In the middle of the night, he would travel to an illegal market run by the military to buy pallets of corn flour – at 100 times the government-set price.

“The military would be watching over whole bags of money,” Campos said. “They always had what I needed.”

With much of the country on the verge of starvation and billions of dollars at stake, food trafficking has become one of the biggest businesses in Venezuela. And from generals to foot soldiers, the military is at the heart of the graft, according to documents and interviews with more than 60 officials, business owners and workers, including five former generals.

As a result, food is not reaching those who most need it.

“Lately, food is a better business than drugs,” said retired General Cliver Alcala, who helped oversee Venezuela’s border security. “The military is in charge of food management now, and they’re not going to just take that on without getting their cut.”

After opposition attempts to overthrow him, the late President Hugo Chavez began handing the military control over the food industry, creating a Food Ministry in 2004. His socialist-run government nationalised farms and food processing plants, then neglected them, and domestic production dried up.

Oil-exporting Venezuela became dependent on food imports, but when the price of oil collapsed in 2014, the government no longer could afford all the country needed.

Food rationing grew so severe that Venezuelans spent all day waiting in lines. Pediatric wards filled up with underweight children, and formerly middle class adults began picking through trash bins for scraps. When people responded with violent street protests, Maduro handed the generals control over the rest of food distribution, and the country’s ports.

The government now imports nearly all of Venezuela’s food, according to Werner Gutierrez, the former dean of the agronomy school at the University of Zulia, and corruption is rampant, jacking up prices and leading to shortages.

“If Venezuela paid market prices, we’d be able to double our imports and easily satisfy the country’s food needs,” Gutierrez said. “Instead, people are starving.”

The Food Ministry’s annual report shows significant overpayments across the board, compared to market prices.

“What’s amazing about this is it’s like a clean form of corruption,” said Carabobo state lawmaker Neidy Rosal, who has denounced food-related government theft worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “It’s like drug trafficking you can carry out in broad daylight.”

By putting the military in charge of food, Maduro is trying to prevent soldiers from going hungry and being tempted to participate in an uprising against an increasingly unpopular government, said retired General Antonio Rivero. Venezuela’s military has a long history of coups against governments, and Maduro has arrested several officials for allegedly conspiring against him from within.

“They gave absolute control to the military,” Rivero said from exile in Miami. “That drained the feeling of rebellion from the armed forces, and allowed them to feed their families.”

The Defence Ministry and presidential press office refused to answer repeated calls, emails, and hand-delivered letters requesting comment. In the past, officials have accused the opposition of exaggerating the problem of corruption for political gain. They have said the military’s hierarchical structure makes it ideally suited to combat the real culprits: Right-wing businessmen trying to bring down the economy.

And yet the corruption persists from the port to the markets, according to dozens of people working in Puerto Cabello, the town that handles the majority of Venezuela’s food imports.

Bribes are also required for any missing paperwork, and can exceed $10,000 for a single shipping container, customs worker Aldemar Diaz said.

“Sometimes you actually want to do it legally, but the officials will say, ‘Don’t bother,’” he said.

Luis Pena, operations director at the Caracas-based import business Premier Foods, said he pays off a long roster of military officials for each shipment of food he brings in from small-scale companies in the US.

“You have to pay for them to even look at your cargo now,” he said. “It’s an unbroken chain of bribery from when your ship comes in until the food is driven out in trucks.”

Lieutenant Miletsy Rodriguez, who is in charge of a group of national guardsmen running security at the port, said people are just looking to scapegoat the military. If her unit wasn’t around, looting would be even more widespread, she said.

“The majority of us are doing our best. And sooner or later we’ll catch people who are not doing the job right,” she said.

In Puerto Cabello, hungry residents said it feels like corrupt soldiers are taking food off their children’s plates.

Pedro Contreras, 74, watched more than 100 trucks carrying corn rattle onto the highway, and walked stiffly into traffic to sweep up the kernels that had sifted out. He planned to pound them into corn flour that night to feed his family.

“The military is getting fat while my grandchildren get skinny,” he said. “All of Venezuela’s food comes through here, but so little of it goes to us.”

{The Barada Valley region is not part of the ceasefire because of the presence of the rebel group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.}

Hundreds of civilians fled a mountainous region outside the Syrian capital on Sunday where government forces battled several insurgent groups, including one excluded from a recent nationwide ceasefire.

The Syrian military said some 1,300 people fled the Barada Valley region since Saturday. The region has been the target of days of air strikes and shelling despite the truce, which was brokered by Russia and Turkey and appears to be holding in other parts of the country, despite some reports of fighting.

The truce went into effect early Friday, and the government and the opposition are expected to meet for talks in Kazakhstan later this month.

How blood feud is growing among the Syrian youth

Russia, a key military ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Turkey, a leading sponsor of the rebels, are acting as guarantors of the agreement, which excludes Jabhat Fateh al-Sham – formerly known as al-Nusra Front – and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

On Saturday, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution supporting efforts by Russia and Turkey to end the nearly six-year conflict in Syria and jump-start peace negotiations.

The military said those fleeing Barada Valley were relocated to safer areas and their names were registered by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said there were buses in the region ready to evacuate civilians but could not confirm how many people had left.

He said the Barada Valley region is not part of the ceasefire because of the presence of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.

The Barada Valley Media Center said Lebanese Hezbollah fighters were firing on villages and towns in the water-rich region as Russian and government aircraft carried out raids for the 10th consecutive day Saturday. The Lebanese group has sent thousands of fighters to Syria to bolster Assad’s forces.

The Barada Valley is the primary source of water for the capital Damascus and its surrounding region.

Clashes erupt near Damascus despite truce

The government assault has coincided with a severe water shortage in Damascus since December 22. Images from the valley’s Media Center indicate its Ain al-Fijeh spring and water processing facility have been destroyed in air strikes. The government says rebels spoiled the water source with diesel fuel, forcing it to cut supplies to the capital.

The Syrian Observatory and the Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, reported government air strikes on rebel-held villages near the northern city of Aleppo, which was recently returned to full government control.

State news agency SANA said two suicide attackers blew themselves up in the coastal city of Tartus, killing two security officers who had stopped them shortly after midnight, as residents were celebrating New Year’s Day.

A news website close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, meanwhile, said General Gholam Ali Gholizadeh, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, was killed fighting in Syria. It did not provide further details. Iran is also closely allied with Assad.

{After last New Year’s spate of sex assaults, German police question hundreds of men appearing to be of African origin.}

Police in the German city of Cologne say they screened hundreds of men “seemingly of African descent” on New Year’s Eve as part of a precautionary measure in reaction to last year’s allegations of robberies and sexual assaults.

By early Sunday police had received reports of two women being sexually assaulted in Cologne. One suspect was arrested.

Cologne’s police said in a tweet on Saturday the men were stopped at two main train stations in the city so that officers could question them and check their identities.

Authorities fielded more than 1,500 officers across Cologne for New Year’s Eve celebrations in response to criticism that they failed to stop hundreds of robberies and sexual assaults – blamed largely on men of North African origin – a year ago.

Police installed new video surveillance cameras to monitor the station square in Cologne this New Year’s Eve.

“Hundreds of Nafris screened at main railway station,” Cologne police tweeted using a colloquial expression for North Africans. With the tweet, the police showed a picture of a large group of men waiting behind barriers.

Last year’s attacks in Cologne, where police said the suspects were mainly of North African and Arab appearance, fueled criticism of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million asylum seekers into Germany in 2015 and 2016.

This year police at the flashpoint central railway station and on trains targeted large groups of men of North African origin, checked the identity papers of some 900 people, and ordered many of them to leave the area.

City police chief Juergen Mathis denied criticism on social media that a police focus on men from Maghreb countries amounted to “racial profiling”, arguing many had acted in an “aggressive” manner.

“I reject such criticism,” Mathis told a press conference. “The clear aim was to prevent similar events to those of last year.”

In January 2016, police in Cologne said they had received upwards of 516 criminal complaints from individuals or groups in relation to assaults on New Year’s Eve. There were at least 133 charges in the northern city of Hamburg.

The incidents set off a vicious debate over immigration in Germany.

{Kyriakos Amiridis’ wife denies participating in killing but says she knew of crime as police question her account.}

Greece’s ambassador to Brazil was murdered in a plot hatched by his Brazilian wife and her police officer lover, who confessed to the crime, officials said.

The envoy, Kyriakos Amiridis, 59, was killed on Monday by the officer, Sergio Gomez Moreira, Rio homicide division chief Evaristo Pontes told a news conference on Friday.

Amiridis’s charred body was found on Thursday in Rio in his burned-out rental car, a day after his Brazilian wife, Francoise de Souza Oliveira, declared him missing.

Oliveira, 40, and Moreira, 29, both admitted to having an affair, police said.

The pair is in custody, along with Moreira’s 24-year-old cousin, Eduardo Tedeschi, who allegedly also took part. According to the homicide division chief, Oliveira denied participating in the murder itself, but confessed she knew of the crime.

Family vacation

Amiridis, who was named ambassador this year, had been on a family vacation with his wife in the north of Rio de Janeiro since December 21. They had been due to fly back to the capital Brasilia on January 9.

His wife had originally told police that he had left the Rio apartment they were staying in, taken the car and not returned.

But her version had contradictions, and after Amiridis’s body was found in the burned-out car under a bridge, police took Oliveira in for more questioning, and also detained Moreira.

Traces of blood were reportedly found on a sofa in the apartment Amiridis and Oliveira had been using, leading investigators to believe he had been killed there, then his body was placed in the rental car and driven to the spot it was found.

Pontes said that Oliveira had offered Tedeschi the equivalent of $25,000 to help with murdering the ambassador.

Moreira acknowledged that he and Amiridis had had a physical fight and that he had strangled the ambassador in self-defence.

Amiridis had previously served Greece’s consul general in Rio from 2001 to 2004, where he met Oliveira. The couple has a 10-year-old daughter.

A Greek police team was headed for Brazil to take part in the investigation, while Greece’s ambassador in Argentina was travelling to Brasilia, Athens said.

{Group of 23 Nobel laureates and global leaders write to UNSC about “crimes against humanity” taking place in Myanmar.}

More than a dozen Nobel laureates have criticised Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to uphold the human rights of Rohingya Muslims in the country’s Rakhine State, urging for immediate action to avoid “ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

In an open letter to the United Nations Security Council late Thursday, 23 global icons, including 13 laureates and 10 global leaders, expressed their disappointment at what they see as state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s failure to ensure Rohingya rights.

“Despite repeated appeals to Aung San Suu Kyi, we are frustrated that she has not taken any initiative to ensure full and equal citizenship rights of the Rohingya,” the letter, with signatories including Desmond Tutu and Shirin Ebadi, said.

“Ms Suu Kyi is the leader and is the one with the primary responsibility to lead, and lead with courage, humanity and compassion,” it said.

Azeem Ibrahim, of the Center for Global Policy – a US-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that it was first time a Nobel laureate has been denounced by such a high number of fellow laureates.

“This is an unprecedented letter, never have we seen one Nobel laureate being condemned by so many other laureates,” he said.

“I think this letter was born out of complete frustration from many activists around the world of Aung San Suu Kyi simply unable to get a handle on the situation despite the many opportunities afforded to her.

“We must also be aware that this is not the first time such a letter has been issued. In May of last year we had seven Nobel laureates accusing Aung San Suu of actually presiding over a genocide.”

In recent weeks, more than 27,000 people belonging to the persecuted Muslim minority, a group loathed by many of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority, have fled a Burmese military operation in Rakhine state launched in response to the attack of border posts by armed groups.

At least 86 people have been killed in the crackdown launched after attacks on police posts near the border with Bangladesh on October 9.

Rohingya survivors say they suffered rape, murder and arson at the hands of soldiers, accounts that have raised global alarm and galvanised protests around Southeast Asia.

“The Rohingyas are among the world’s most persecuted minorities, who, for decades, have been subjected to a campaign of marginalisation and dehumanisation,” said the authors.

“If we fail to take action, people may starve to death, if they are not killed with bullets, and we may end up being the passive observers of crimes against humanity which will lead us once again to wring our hands belatedly and say ‘never again’ all over again.”

The violence had the hallmarks of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, as well as ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s western Darfur region, Bosnia and Kosovo, said the letter.

The group asked the 15-member Security Council to add the “crisis” to its agenda “as a matter of urgency, and to call upon the secretary-general to visit Myanmar in the coming weeks” – either current UN chief Ban Ki-moon or his successor Antonio Guterres, who will take over the post next month.

Ibrahim accused Suu Kyi failing to acknowledge the Rohingya’s persecution and even helping fuel the problem.

“On repeated occasions, in interviews with the foreign media, whether it was the Washington Post or BBC, she actually refuses to even use the term Rohingya,” he said.

“She refers to them as either Muslims, Rakhine, or Bengalis, which is essentially the narrative hardened in the public spheres that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.”

The Rohingya have languished under years of dire poverty and discrimination from a government that denies them citizenship.

The UN and other rights groups have repeatedly called on Myanmar to grant them full rights.

Bangladesh’s government has been under pressure to open its border to the fleeing refugees, but it has reinforced its border posts and deployed coastguard ships to prevent fresh arrivals.

{“Imminent terrorist attacks” in India’s southwest the reason given behind warning issued by Israeli PM’s office.}

Israel’s anti-terrorism directorate has issued a travel warning for India, citing immediate “terrorist attacks” on tourists and Western targets, particularly in the southwest of the country.

The Counterterrorism Bureau, in a statement released by the Israeli prime minister’s office on Friday, raised the alert level and said it corresponded to a “concrete basic threat”.

“We are warning Israeli tourists in India of the possibility of imminent terrorist attacks against Western targets and tourists, particularly in the southwest of that country,” the statement said.

“A particular emphasis should be put on events in the coming days in connection with beach and club parties celebrating the new year where a concentration of tourists will be high.”

The statement recommended that tourists avoid participation in such parties. It also called on families in Israel to contact their relatives in India and tell them of the threat.

In addition, it recommended avoiding markets, festivals and crowded shopping areas.

Unusually, the warning was published on Friday evening in Israel, after the start of the Jewish Sabbath, when government offices close for business.

The directorate did not say what prompted the warning.

India is a popular destination for young Israelis, especially after they have concluded their military service.

In 2012, the wife of Israeli diplomat stationed in India, her driver and two others were wounded in a bomb attack on her car. Israel and India share close military ties.