Rescue groups say Malta coordinated the return of 500 migrants to Libya instead of saving them

Rescue groups say Malta coordinated the return of 500 migrants to Libya instead of saving them
People smugglers have increasingly packed migrants and refugees into old and dangerous fishing vessels that set out from Libya to Italy or Malta. (AP)
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Updated 30 May 2023
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Rescue groups say Malta coordinated the return of 500 migrants to Libya instead of saving them

Rescue groups say Malta coordinated the return of 500 migrants to Libya instead of saving them
  • The migrants, who included 55 children and several pregnant women, had been trying to reach Europe on May 23 aboard a fishing vessel
  • Three days later they were reportedly disembarked in eastern Libya and sent to a detention center in Benghazi

BARCELONA: A group of non-governmental organizations dedicated to rescuing migrants in the central Mediterranean is accusing the European island nation of Malta of coordinating the return of around 500 people to Libya where they were subsequently imprisoned, in violation of international maritime law.
The group of migrants, which included 55 children and pregnant women, had been trying to reach Europe on May 23 aboard a rusty iron fishing vessel when they reported to Alarm Phone — a hotline for migrants in distress — that they were adrift and taking in water, the NGOs said in a statement.
People smugglers have increasingly packed migrants and refugees into old and dangerous fishing vessels that set out from Libya to Italy or Malta.
Migrants aboard the vessel shared their GPS location with Alarm Phone showing they were in international waters in an area of the Mediterranean where Malta is responsible for search and rescue.
Despite repeated requests for help sent to Maltese authorities, the migrants were reportedly taken back to Benghazi in eastern Libya three days later, Alarm Phone said, citing relatives of the migrants.
“Instead of bringing people who had tried to escape from the extreme violence people on the move experience in Libya to a place of safety, … (the Rescue Coordination Center of) Malta — decided to organize a mass pushback by proxy at sea, forcing 500 people across 330km into a Libyan prison,” read the joint statement issued by Alarm Phone, Sea-Watch, Mediterranea Saving Humans and EMERGENCY on Monday.
The Maltese Armed Forces responsible for search and rescue operations did not immediately respond to the AP’s questions sent by email or answer the phone.
The International Organization for Migration and the UN Refugee Agency told the Associated Press that 485 people were reportedly brought back to Benghazi by a vessel belonging to the self-styled Libyan National Army, a force in the east of the country led by military commander Khalifa Haftar. The UN agencies could not immediately confirm it was the same group of migrants reported by Alarm Phone.
The vessel that intercepted the 485 migrants, the Tareq Bin Zeyad, is named after a militia led by Haftar’s son. In a report last year, Amnesty International accused the Tareq Bin Zeyad militia of subjecting “thousands of Libyans and migrants to brutal and relentless abuses since 2016.”
In their statement Monday, the NGOs said the Tareq Bin Zeyad had been spotted navigating in “peculiar patterns” close to the last known location of the boat in distress on May 24, suggesting the militia was looking for it.
Separately, eastern Libyan forces said over the weekend they had intercepted a large vessel carrying over 800 migrants, including entire families and children. The migrants were brought back to Libyan shores in Benghazi on May 26, three days after their vessel broke down in the Mediterranean.
In a video posted by the same east-based forces on May 27 showing the disembarkation of migrants intercepted at sea, one migrant interviewed says that the vessel broke down off Maltese shores, and that the Libyan navy rushed to rescue them. The AP could not independently confirm if this was the same vessel that had reached out to the NGOs near Malta.
Both the IOM and the UNHCR have repeatedly condemned the return of migrants and refugees to Libya, saying the lawless nation should not be considered a safe place for disembarkation as required by international maritime law.
Migrants returned to Libya are subject to arbitrary detention, extortion, torture and enforced disappearances by militias and human traffickers, in what a UN panel of experts said may amount to crimes against humanity.
Human rights organizations have long accused Malta of a policy of “non-assistance” and of colluding with Libyan forces, who are trained and funded by the European Union, to take back the migrants.
Alarm Phone said it was contacted by relatives of some of the intercepted migrants on May 26 to denounce their detention in Benghazi.
“The people fled wars and prisons in Syria, and now, unfortunately, they have been returned to Libya,” the statement read, quoting one relative.


Paramilitary shells kill 10 civilians in Khartoum: activists

Paramilitary shells kill 10 civilians in Khartoum: activists
Updated 11 sec ago
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Paramilitary shells kill 10 civilians in Khartoum: activists

Paramilitary shells kill 10 civilians in Khartoum: activists

PORT SUDAN, Sudan: Paramilitary artillery that struck a mosque and other civilian buildings in the Sudanese capital killed 10 people on Tuesday, local activists said.
It is the latest incident in which multiple civilians have been killed in Khartoum during nearly six months of war between Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
A local resistance committee said “10 civilians were killed and 11 wounded in artillery shelling by the Rapid Support Forces in Al-Samrab neighborhood,” across the Blue Nile river to the north of central Khartoum.
The committee is one of many groups that used to organize pro-democracy protests and now provide assistance during the war.
“Some shells fell on a mosque, a health center, and citizens’ homes,” the committee said by telephone to AFP in the eastern city of Port Sudan.
On September 12 a medical source told AFP that “17 civilians were killed” by paramilitaries in northern Khartoum, where witnesses reported RSF shelling.
Those deaths came two days after at least 51 people were killed and dozens wounded in air strikes on a southern Khartoum market, according to United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk.
The worst of the violence has been concentrated in Khartoum and the western region of Darfur, but North Kordofan — a crossroads between the capital and Darfur — has also seen fighting.
Nearly 7,500 people have been killed in Sudan since the conflict broke out on April 15, according to a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.
Battles have displaced almost 4.3 million people within Sudan, in addition to around 1.2 million more who have fled across borders, UN figures show.


Leap into future: Qatar begins construction on mega gas field expansion

Leap into future: Qatar begins construction on mega gas field expansion
Updated 03 October 2023
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Leap into future: Qatar begins construction on mega gas field expansion

Leap into future: Qatar begins construction on mega gas field expansion
  • Qatar is set to raise its output of LNG by 60 percent or more to 126 million tons a year by 2027

RAS LAFFAN, Qatar: Qatar’s state-owned energy giant began construction Tuesday on a project to expand production from the world’s biggest natural gas field through an export terminal on the country’s northeast coast.

There has been mounting demand for Qatari gas as European consumer nations have scrambled to replace lost Russian deliveries since President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale war on Ukraine early last year.

The emir presided over a glitzy ceremony to lay the foundation stone for the North Field expansion at Ras Laffan, QatarEnergy’s onshore gas processing base 80 km north of Doha.

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the project “falls within our strategy toward strengthening Qatar’s position as a global producer of liquefied natural gas.”

Qatari Energy Minister Saad Al-Kaabi called the project a “leap toward our country’s leadership in the field of energy.”

By increasing production at the field, which extends under the Gulf into Iranian territory, Qatar is set to raise its output of LNG by 60 percent or more to 126 million tons a year by 2027.

LNG from the expansion is expected to start coming on line in 2026.

Asian countries led by China, Japan and South Korea have been the main market for Qatari gas, but it has also been increasingly sought by European countries since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year.

Chairman of France’s TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanne told reporters the North Field Expansion was a “huge project,” coming as demand for LNG from Europe increases.

“We need more supply. That’s clear. Still the market is fragile,” Pouyanne said. “This project is a major one and will give some relief to this market,” he added.

Total signed a $1.5 billion deal with QatarEnergy in September last year giving it a 9.3 percent stake in Qatar’s North Field South project, the second phase of the field’s expansion.

In June 2022, the French energy giant became the first partner in the first phase of the expansion, North Field East, investing more than $2 billion for a 25 percent share.

In June, Doha announced a 27-year deal to supply 4 million tons of gas a year to the China National Petroleum Corporation. The agreement matches the terms of a 2022 deal with China’s Sinopec that was the longest ever seen in the industry.

Britain’s Shell, Italy’s ENI and US giants ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil have also signed deals to partner in the expansion.

Qatar is one of the world’s top LNG producers, alongside the United States, Australia and Russia.

Qatar Energy estimates the North Field holds about 10 percent of the world’s known natural gas reserves.


Teen girl in coma after Iran metro assault: rights group

Teen girl in coma after Iran metro assault: rights group
Updated 03 October 2023
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Teen girl in coma after Iran metro assault: rights group

Teen girl in coma after Iran metro assault: rights group
  • The teenager, named as Armita Garawand, had been badly injured in a run-in on the Tehran metro with female morality police officers
  • This has already been denied by the Iranian authorities who say that the girl “fainted” due to low blood pressure

PARIS: An Iranian girl aged 16 has been left in a coma and is being treated in hospital under heavy security after an assault on the Tehran subway, a rights group said on Tuesday.
The Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw said the teenager, named as Armita Garawand, had been badly injured in a run-in on the Tehran metro with female morality police officers.
This has already been denied by the Iranian authorities who say that the girl “fainted” due to low blood pressure and that there was no involvement of the security forces.
Iranian authorities remain on high alert for any upsurge of social tension just over a year after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested for allegedly violating the strict dress rules for women.
Her death sparked several months of protests that rattled Iran’s clerical leadership and only dwindled in the face of a crackdown that according to activists has seen thousands arrested and hundreds killed.
Hengaw said that Garawand was left with severe injuries after being apprehended by agents of the so-called morality police at the Shohada metro station in Tehran on Sunday.
It said she was being treated under tight security at Tehran’s Fajr hospital and “there are currently no visits allowed for the victim, not even from her family.”
Though a resident of Tehran, Garawand hails from the city of Kermanshah in Kurdish-populated western Iran, Hengaw said.
Maryam Lotfi, a journalist from the Shargh daily newspaper, sought in the aftermath of the incident to visit the hospital but was immediately detained. She was subsequently released, it added.
The case has become the subject of intense discussion on social media, with a purported video of the incident said by some to show the teen, with friends and apparently unveiled, being pushed into the metro by female police agents.
Masood Dorosti, managing director of the Tehran subway system, denied there was “any verbal or physical conflict” between the student and “passengers or metro executives.”
“Some rumors about a confrontation with metro agents... are not true and CCTV footage refutes this claim,” Dorosti told state news agency IRNA.
The IranWire news site, based outside Iran, cited a source as saying she had sustained a “head injury” after being pushed by the officers.
A year after Amini’s death, Iranian authorities have launched a renewed push to crack down on women defying the Islamic republic’s strict dress rules for women, including the mandatory hijab.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said women and girls “face increased violence, arbitrary arrests and heightened discrimination after the Islamic Republic re-activated its forced-veiling police patrols.”


Torture scandal at Syrian military hospital

Torture scandal at Syrian military hospital
Updated 03 October 2023
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Torture scandal at Syrian military hospital

Torture scandal at Syrian military hospital
  • Sick prisoners abused and left to die, new report by rights watchdog says

JEDDAH: Prisoners were routinely abused, tortured and left to die at a Syrian military hospital in Damascus, according to a damning report published on Tuesday.

Sick prisoners sent from detention centers for treatment at the Tishreen Military Hospital rarely received any medical attention. Instead, security forces and even medical and administrative staff inflicted “brutal torture” on detainees, including physical and psychological violence.

The report by the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, a watchdog in Turkey, covers abuses from the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011 to 2020, but the authors said they believed many of the practices persisted today.
Inmates arriving at the hospital were first held “in the same room where bodies of detainees were collected,”and sick detainees were forced to help transport prisoners’ corpses, the report said.
No postmortems were conducted and the hospital issued “death certificates with false information,” often giving heart attack, kidney failure or stroke as the cause of death. Sometimes inmates “between life and death”were placed among the corpses and left to die or even killed.
A survivor of the abuse, Abu Hamza, 43, was taken to the jail at the Tishreen hospital three times during his incarceration, but saw a doctor only once. “Prisoners were afraid to go to the hospital, because many did not return,” he said. “Those who were very sick would be left to die in the hospital lockup.”

The report said a jail officer would sometimes kill very sick detainees, or prisoners would be ordered to take part in doing so.
Tishreen hospital plays a “central role in enforced disappearances, covering up torture, falsifying the causes of death and other abuses amounting to crimes against humanity,” said watchdog co-founder Diab Serriya.


President Biden thanks Qatar’s emir for mediation in freeing Americans from Iran

President Biden thanks Qatar’s emir for mediation in freeing Americans from Iran
Updated 03 October 2023
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President Biden thanks Qatar’s emir for mediation in freeing Americans from Iran

President Biden thanks Qatar’s emir for mediation in freeing Americans from Iran
  • Biden praised “Qatar’s active and constructive role on the international stage.”

WASHINGTON D.C.: US President Joe Biden called Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani to thank him for Doha’s mediation that resulted in the release of a number of Americans from Iran, the Amiri Diwan said on Tuesday.

“During the call, the strategic relations between the two countries and aspects of supporting and strengthening them in various fields were reviewed,” the Amiri Diwan, or Emir’s office, said in a statement.

It also said that Biden had praised “Qatar’s active and constructive role on the international stage.”

Last month, with Doha’s mediation, Iran freed five Americans as part of a prisoner swap for five Iranians held in the United States and the transfer of $6 billion in Iranian funds.