Swastika-wearing ex-pupil kills 15 in Russian school shooting

Update Swastika-wearing ex-pupil kills 15 in Russian school shooting
This screen grab taken from a footage released by the Investigative Committee of Russia on September 26, 2022 shows investigators working by the body of a gunman in school No88 in Izhevsk. (INVESTIGATIVE COMMITTEE OF RUSSIA / AFP)
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Updated 26 September 2022

Swastika-wearing ex-pupil kills 15 in Russian school shooting

Swastika-wearing ex-pupil kills 15 in Russian school shooting
  • Russia’s health ministry said “14 ambulance teams” were working at the scene to help the injured

MOSCOW: A gunman with a swastika on his teeshirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and wounded 24 at a school in Russia on Monday before committing suicide, investigators said.
The attacker, a man in his early thirties who was named by authorities as Artem Kazantsev, killed two security guards and then opened fire on students and teachers at School Number 88 in Izhevsk, where he had once been a pupil.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles major crimes, said it was looking into the perpetrator’s suspected neo-Nazi links.
“Currently investigators...are conducting a search of his residence and studying the personality of the attacker, his views and surrounding milieu,” the committee said in a statement. “Checks are being made into his adherence to neo-fascist views and Nazi ideology.”
Investigators released a video showing the man’s body lying in a classroom with overturned furniture and papers strewn on the bloodstained floor. He was dressed all in black, with a red swastika in a circle drawn on his teeshirt.

The Investigative Committee said that of the 24 people wounded, all but two were children. Regional governor Alexander Brechalov said surgeons had carried out a number of operations.
He said the attacker had been registered with a “psycho-neurological” treatment facility. Investigators said the man was armed with two pistols and a large supply of ammunition.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin “deeply mourns” the deaths. He described the incident as “a terrorist act by a person who apparently belongs to a neo-fascist organization or group.”
He said doctors, psychologists and neurosurgeons had been sent on Putin’s orders to the location of the shooting in Izhevsk, about 970 km (600 miles) east of Moscow.
Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years.
In May 2021, a teenage gunman killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan. In September last year, a student armed with a hunting rifle shot dead at least six people at a university in the Urals city of Perm.
In April 2022, an armed man killed two children and a teacher at a kindergarten in the central Ulyanovsk region before committing suicide.
In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly fellow pupils, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.


Cause and ‘people responsible’ for India train crash identified: minister

Cause and ‘people responsible’ for India train crash identified: minister
Updated 12 sec ago

Cause and ‘people responsible’ for India train crash identified: minister

Cause and ‘people responsible’ for India train crash identified: minister
NEW DELHI: India’s Railway Minister said Sunday the cause and people responsible for the country’s worst train crash in decades had been identified, pointing to an electronic signal system without giving further details.
“We have identified the cause of the accident and the people responsible for it,” India’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told news agency ANI, but said it was “not appropriate” to give details before a final investigation report.
The death toll from Friday’s crash near Balasore, in the eastern state of Odisha, was expected to climb above 288.
Ashwini said the “change that occurred during electronic interlocking, the accident happened due to that,” a technical term referring to a complex signal system designed to stop trains colliding by arranging their movement on the tracks.
“Whoever did it, and how it happened, will be found out after proper investigation,” he added.
There was confusion about the exact sequence of events but reports cited railway officials as saying that a signalling error had sent the Coromandal Express running south from Kolkata to Chennai onto a side track.
It slammed into a freight train and the wreckage derailed an express running north from India’s tech hub Bengaluru to Kolkata that was also passing the site.
Odisha state’s chief secretary Pradeep Jena confirmed that about 900 injured people had been hospitalized.

Pentagon says concerned over China’s ‘increasingly risky’ actions in Asia

Pentagon says concerned over China’s ‘increasingly risky’ actions in Asia
Updated 04 June 2023

Pentagon says concerned over China’s ‘increasingly risky’ actions in Asia

Pentagon says concerned over China’s ‘increasingly risky’ actions in Asia

SINGAPORE: The Pentagon voiced concern on Sunday over the Chinese military’s “increasingly risky and coercive activities” in Asia.
“We remain concerned about the PLA’s increasingly risky and coercive activities in the region, including in recent days,” said Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, who is with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a security conference in Singapore.

 


Five Greek police officers in custody pending trial for assisting illegal migrant crossings

Five Greek police officers in custody pending trial for assisting illegal migrant crossings
Updated 03 June 2023

Five Greek police officers in custody pending trial for assisting illegal migrant crossings

Five Greek police officers in custody pending trial for assisting illegal migrant crossings
  • The five officers had been testifying before an examining magistrate since Saturday morning at the border town of Orestiada
  • Agents from the internal affairs division of the Greek police had been monitoring the five officers since October 2022

THESSALONIKI, Greece: Five police officers accused of cooperating with human traffickers to facilitate the entry of at least 100 migrants into Greece are being held in custody pending trial.
The five officers had been testifying before an examining magistrate since Saturday morning at the border town of Orestiada, in northeastern Greece.
Agents from the internal affairs division of the Greek police had been monitoring the five officers, who serve in a special border guard unit, since October 2022. They also listened into their phone conversations, whose transcripts run into over 2,000 pages. The officers had aroused suspicion by volunteering to patrol at certain times, together.
Authorities say the offices facilitated at least 12 border crossings, collaborating with four traffickers of undetermined nationality who operated from Turkiye.
Authorities allege that the accused officers took a cut from the money the traffickers received from the migrants to take them across the border. When the officers were arrested last Monday in the border town of Didymoteicho, police confiscated some 26,000 euros ($28,000) in cash, and nearly 60 mobile phones.
Almost all the land border between Greece and Turkiye is formed by the Evros River, called Meric in Turkiye. The Evros is a key crossing point into Greece for people seeking a better life in the European Union. Greece has built a high fence along much of the border to prevent migrants crossing, and is planning to further extend it.


Death toll climbs in Senegal after two days of violent protests

Death toll climbs in Senegal after two days of violent protests
Updated 03 June 2023

Death toll climbs in Senegal after two days of violent protests

Death toll climbs in Senegal after two days of violent protests
  • The flow of migrants from Tunisia has intensified since President Kais Saied made a fiery speech on Feb. 21 claiming illegal immigration was a demographic threat to Tunisia

DAKAR: The death toll from anti-government protests in Senegal has risen to 15, police said on Saturday, as authorities in the capital Dakar began to clear up debris and secure looted shops after two days of unrest.
Most of Dakar appeared quiet on Saturday, but tensions remained high after violent protests in several cities killed six people on Friday, taking the total number killed this week to 15, a police spokesperson said by phone.
The toll has now surpassed the number killed in multi-day protests in 2021, when supporters of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko first took to the streets over a rape trial they say is politically motivated.
Sonko denies any wrongdoing.

FASTFACT

Mobs smashed windows and looted at least two gas station shops in Dakar’s Ouakam and Ngor districts.

Sonko’s sentencing on Thursday, which could prevent him from running in the February presidential election, sparked the latest turmoil as protesters heeded his call to stand up to the authorities.
Mobs smashed windows and looted at least two gas station shops in Dakar’s Ouakam and Ngor districts, while a supermarket in densely populated Grand Yoff was torched and ransacked. Rubble littered the roads that were scarred black by fires.
“The police could not do anything, there were too many of them. The police had to leave after several attempts to control the crowd with tear-gas grenades,” said resident Khadija by the supermarket whose interior was gutted and strewn with broken shelves, mud and trash.
The government has enlisted the army to back up the many riot police still stationed around the city. Over a dozen soldiers guarded the trashed gas station in Ouakam on Saturday, as some shop owners tentatively opened their doors, although streets were unusually empty.
Abdou Ndiaye, the owner of a nearby corner shop said he had closed early the two previous days and opened late on Saturday, fearful of the unrest that he said was the worst he’d seen in his 15 years of business.
“We are so scared because you don’t know when the crowds will come, and when they come they take ... your goods, they are thieves,” he said in a storeroom stacked with sacks of food and household items.
“There are people who demonstrate but there are others who do whatever they want.”
The unrest is the latest in a string of opposition protests in Senegal, long considered one of West Africa’s most stable democracies, sparked by Sonko’s court case as well as concerns that President Macky Sall will try to bypass the two-term limit and run again in February elections.
Sall has neither confirmed nor denied this.

 


Greek police find €3.2 million of cocaine in banana containers

Greek police find €3.2 million of cocaine in banana containers
Updated 03 June 2023

Greek police find €3.2 million of cocaine in banana containers

Greek police find €3.2 million of cocaine in banana containers
  • Police seized two suspect containers at the port of Piraeus
  • The drugs are estimated to be worth about €3.2 million, police said

ATHENS: Police in northern Greece have seized dozens of packages of cocaine stashed in containers laden with bananas that had been shipped from Latin America, they said on Saturday.
Police seized two suspect containers at the port of Piraeus and, after taking them to the port of Thessaloniki, found 100 “bricks” of concealed cocaine, weighing 161 kilos.
The drugs, which would have been distributed across Greece and other European countries, are estimated to be worth about €3.2 million, police said.
The consignment was found as part of an investigation Greece launched last month with North Macedonia authorities and the US anti-drug agency, following the seizure of about 100 kilos of cocaine also hidden in banana containers at a warehouse in Thessaloniki. Some 14 people have been arrested in that case.