by tyler | Sep 28, 2023 | CNN, europe
A 32-year-old student has been arrested after a “targeted” shooting rampage in the Dutch city of Rotterdam left three people dead on Thursday, according to local authorities.
According to police spokesman Fred Westerbeke, the shooting first erupted in a private home on the city’s Heiman Dullaert square, where the suspected gunman fatally shot a 39-year-old woman and “seriously injured” her 14-year-old daughter, then set fire to the house.
The teenager was hospitalized but died of her injuries.
The suspect later went into a classroom at the prestigious Erasmus University Medical Center nearby, where he fatally shot a 46-year-old doctor, Westerbeke said.
The alleged gunman – who studied at Erasmus University – was ultimately arrested under the hospital’s helipad, Westerbeke said.
“After this, the shooter went to another part of the EMC. He also set a fire there. The suspect was then arrested under the helicopter deck of the EMC by the arrest team, the special interventions service,” Westerbeke said.
Authorities say they believe he acted alone.
“We see his act as a targeted action, but it requires further research to gain clarity about how and why,” Westerbeke said.
Posts on social media by local police described the suspect as tall with black hair, wearing “combat-style” clothes and carrying a backpack. He had a gun in his pocket and was wearing a bullet-proof vest when he was detained, according to Westerbeke.
CNN affiliate NOS reported that the suspect has a criminal record, including being convicted of animal abuse in 2021.
Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Thursday afternoon expressed his “great dismay” after the two shootings.
“My thoughts are with the victims of the violence, their loved ones and all those who have been in great fear. Many thanks to the people of the services for their actions and assistance at the scene,” the Prime Minister wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, europe
Russia is formally seeking to rejoin the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, nearly 18 months after it was suspended from the body following its invasion of Ukraine.
The country is listed on the UN website as a candidate for the election of members of the council for the 2024-2026 term, with a vote due to take place on October 10.
Any move to reinstate Russia would be met with fury from the West, with several leading NATO states repeatedly insisting that Moscow’s illegal invasion of a neighboring state should disqualify it from membership of international bodies. A US spokesperson on Wednesday called the bid “preposterous.”
Russia has been accused of a huge number of human rights abuses over the course of its war in Ukraine, and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for its President Vladimir Putin over an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
According to Russia’s position paper, which CNN obtained, Russia considers the Human Rights Council as a “key body in the United Nations systems.”
The position paper, which Russia is circulating to UN members to drum up support, states that Moscow “believes it is important to prevent the increasing trend of turning the Human Rights Council into the instrument, which serves political wills of one group of countries punishing non-loyal governments for their independent internal and external policy.”
Russia was removed from the body in April 2022, weeks after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Membership of the council is based on equitable geographical distribution, with two vacant seats in the Eastern European States regional group. Russia, along with Albania and Bulgaria, is listed as having announced their candidacy for that region so far.
Russia’s position paper claimed it would “firmly promote principles of cooperation and strengthening of constructive mutually respectful dialogue” if re-elected to the body.
But Western countries have already strongly pushed back against the effort. “We hope UN members will firmly reject its preposterous candidacy as they overwhelmingly did last year,” a US spokesman told CNN.
“Russia has committed violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, as well as violations and abuses of human rights in Russia, including the arbitrary arrests of Russians endeavoring to exercise their freedom of expression to condemn Putin’s brutal war,” the spokesman said.
“In fact, the Council created a Special Rapporteur last October on the human rights situation in Russia, further demonstrating Russia’s unfitness for membership on the Council.”
A Human Rights Council commission said on Monday that there is “continuous evidence that Russian forces are “committing war crimes in Ukraine,” alleging that its attacks on the country include “unlawful attacks with explosive weapons, attacks harming civilians, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and attacks on energy infrastructure.”
In the vote to suspend Russia from the council during the April 2022 UN General Assembly, 93 of the UN’s 193 countries supported the move to remove Moscow, while 24 voted against and 58 abstained.
China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Vietnam, alongside Russia, were among those opposing the move, while Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were among the abstentions.
Russia had joined the council in January 2021, as one of 15 countries elected to serve a three-year term.
It became the first country to be removed from the council since Libya, in 2011, following the repression of political protesters by its then-leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Russia remains one of five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council, and no clear legal framework exists to remove it from that post.
Moscow last took the presidency of that council, which rotates among the 15 members on a monthly basis, in April.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, europe
The biggest-ever drug seizure in the history of Ireland was intercepted off the coast of Cork in the southeast of the country on Tuesday, Irish police said.
Cocaine weighing 2,253 kg, worth an estimated 157 million euros ($165 million), was seized from the vessel “MV Matthew” traveling from South America, Director General of Revenue and Customs Gerry Harrahill said at a news conference in Dublin Wednesday.
“It is the largest drug seizure in the history of the State,” Justin Kelly, Assistant Commissioner of An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s police force, said at the same conference.
“This is a hugely significant operation and it shows our unrelenting determination to disrupt and dismantle networks which are determined to bring drugs into our country,” Kelly added.
Three men, aged 31, 50 and 60, have been arrested on suspicion of organized crime and are currently being questioned at Garda stations in County Wexford, according to a Garda press release.
Officers said the drugs originated from South America and were bound for crime groups in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Europe.
A task force made up of members of the Irish Revenue Customs Service, the navy, and An Garda Síochána coordinated to detain the Panamanian registered bulk cargo vessel in the early hours of Tuesday, according to the Garda press release.
Video shared by the Irish Defence Forces on X, formerly Twitter, shows the army fast-roping from a helicopter onto the deck amid challenging weather conditions as the vessel attempted to make its way back out of Irish waters.
After the army secured the vessel, members of the task force were transferred on board and escorted by a naval ship to Cork harbor, where it is currently being forensically examined.
“Yesterday was an extremely complex day from a military perspective and the defense forces ran an extremely complex military operation,” Tony Geraghty, fleet commander of the Irish Naval Service, said at the Dublin press briefing.
“It was (made) even more complex by environments that we had no control over. The weather was extremely poor and also we were trying to predict the actions of a number of crime gangs and how that would impact on us. But it was very successful from a defense force point of view.”
The intelligence-led operation was conducted in collaboration with the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre – Narcotics (MAOC-N) based in Lisbon, according to a Garda press release. The MAOC-N is an initiative by seven EU member countries, including France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK, with financial support from the European Union.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, europe
Germany announced Wednesday that it is ramping up its border controls with neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic to “limit human trafficking,” as the country faces fierce debate on its migration policy while asylum applications surge.
Police will carry out “additional flexible checks and mobile controls along the smuggling routes at the borders with Poland and the Czech Republic,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told the press.
She added that the measure would be effective immediately, with the support of Polish and Czech authorities.
“We must absolutely stop the smugglers’ cruel business because they put human lives at risk with maximum profit,” the minister said.
The announcement came as the interior minister raised the possibility of implementing fixed controls along the borders with its two eastern neighbors this week. Such a measure may only be temporary and exceptional under the Schengen Area’s rules.
Until now, the southern state of Bavaria on the Austrian border was the only part of Germany with stationary border controls, a legacy of the 2015-2016 migration crisis when Europe’s leading economy took in over a million refugees.
Immigration has once again become a hot topic in German politics in recent weeks. There is less than two weeks until regional elections in traditionally conservative stronghold Bavaria and central state Hesse, which may put Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition to the test.
Earlier this month, the country’s Interior Ministry said it would postpone “until further notice” its intake of migrants coming via Italy, under a European voluntary solidarity plan.
Berlin argues it has made the largest contribution and blames Rome’s decision to withdraw from its obligations to take back asylum seekers rejected in other countries.
During remarks on Wednesday, Faeser, who is running as the candidate for Scholz’s Social Democratic Party in Hesse, called on countries on Europe’s borders – including Italy – to “better protect” those borders and “apply the procedures” laid down by Brussels.
“We are fighting to keep internal border controls open within the European Union. But we need this European solution,” she said. “Otherwise, Schengen is in danger,” she added.
Between August and January 2023, the German Office for Migration and Refugees registered over 204,000 asylum applications, marking a 77 percent increase from the same period last year. These add to the estimated one million refugees who arrived in Germany fleeing the war in Ukraine and did not have to apply for asylum.
Meanwhile, the German Federal Police counted 70,753 illegal entries into the country in the same period, a nearly 60 percent increase from last year’s data.
Many local governments and municipalities say they have been overwhelmed by the influx, forcing Berlin’s center-left coalition government to react.
“Municipalities must not be left to bear the costs, which would be fatal,” Alexander Handschuh, spokesperson for the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, told CNN Wednesday.
“These irregular refugees are occupying places that are urgently needed for people with the right to stay,” he added.
Handschuh also said local populations are finding it increasingly difficult to welcome migrants, who are often housed in gymnasiums, limiting capacities for sports which had already suffered during the pandemic.
As the migration crisis intensifies on Europe’s borders, weekly magazine Der Spiegel’s cover wonders “Will we make it again?” this week – a reference to former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous 2015 phrase “We’ll make it,” a symbol of her government’s openness to migrants.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, europe
Sicilian mob boss Matteo Messina Denaro, widely thought to be the last godfather of his kind, was buried Wednesday in a private funeral in Castelvetrano, Sicily. But he won’t be the last leader of Italy’s most famous Mafia organization.
The mobster will likely be remembered for his bloody legacy – sentenced to 20 life sentences in absentia for the murders of 26 victims.
His victims include Nicola Consales, who ran a beach hotel in Sicily, who Messina Denaro was convicted of murdering after he flirted with a girl the mobster had his eyes on.
And there was Antonella Bonomo, the pregnant wife of a rival boss who got in the way. And Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a turncoat who was held hostage and tortured for 779 days before being dissolved in acid. And anti-Mafia magistrates Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, blown up in car bombs 57 days apart.
But when Messina Denaro – aka “Diabolik” – was laid to rest in the elaborate marble family mausoleum, the only names being mentioned were those of potential successors.
Italy’s anti-Mafia investigators agree on four or five possible names: Giovanni Motisi, a 64-year-old Palermo boss nicknamed “u pacchiuni” or the “fat guy” – a former hitman for the late “boss of bosses” Toto Riina – leads the pack. He’s been in hiding since 1998 after being convicted of a string of murders including of two police officers.
Also mentioned are Stefano Fidanzati, a 70-year-old drug kingpin, who former anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso suggests has a good shot at the job, and Giuseppe Auteri, 49, known as “Vassoio” or “tray,” who had been a close associate of Messina Denaro for years while he was in hiding.
“With the death of Matteo Messina Denaro, a life full of violence, plots and mysteries ends,” Grasso told CNN. “An era of Cosa Nostra also ends, but not Cosa Nostra itself… Cosa Nostra changes, evolves, transforms, but remains the main obstacle for a Sicily and for an Italy free from the yoke of violence, blackmail and poverty.”
Before him, Salvatore “Toto” Riina led the bloodiest era of the Sicilian Mafia’s storied history, and hand-picked Messina Denaro to carry out some of his bloodiest crimes, including murdering the anti-Mafia magistrates.
It was that trajectory that led Messina Denaro to the top in 2016. But it was cancer that led to his arrest in a private clinic in Palermo in January 2023 and what eventually put him in his grave.
In keeping with all mob bosses in Italy, Messina Denaro was denied a public funeral, but it was he who shunned the church, writing once in a coded note that he wanted to reject “every religious celebration because it is made up of unclean men who live in hatred and sin,” according to the dossier of his belongings collected by Italy’s anti-Mafia unit.
Messina Denaro, even with his rap sheet of murders, was highly critical of the Catholic church over the clerical sex abuse scandal.
“It is not those who proclaim themselves the soldiers of God who can decide and execute my lifeless body,” said the note that the unit found in his hideout in Campobello di Mazara. “God will be my judge.”
After an autopsy revealed that he died of “natural causes” tied to his battle with colon cancer, his casket was taken in an armored police van from Abruzzo, where he died, to Calabria, where it crossed the strait by ferry. Once in Sicily, his body was transferred to a cedar coffin he had apparently requested in his last wishes, then moved into a hearse with wide windows.
Shortly after 8 a.m. on Wednesday, the hearse was escorted through the backstreets of his hometown to avoid any semblance of a procession, but onlookers lined the streets leading to the cemetery, taking photos as if he was a celebrity.
Police prohibited anyone but the immediate family from entering the cemetery and blocked all the entrances at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning, though there were flowers along the road.
Inside the family chapel, his body was laid to rest beside that of his mobster father, Don Ciccio Messina Denaro.
It was the same chapel that had been previously bugged by police when the younger Messina Denaro went into hiding, since the family and associates might feel safe discussing business there. But family members later discovered loose wires from the listening devices and reported the bug to police, according to a police report of the incident.
The private burial lasted an hour and police kept the cemetery closed and guarded all day.
by tyler | Sep 27, 2023 | CNN, europe
Fears grew of a humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh Tuesday as a senior US official warned of malnutrition among the tens of thousands fleeing the breakaway region for Armenia.
Senior US officials – including US Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power and US State Department acting assistant secretary Yuri Kim – met Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the capital Yerevan Monday.
Power traveled to Yerevan “to affirm US support for Armenia’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and democracy and help address humanitarian needs stemming from the recent violence in Nagorno-Karabakh,” the aid agency said in a statement Monday.
The visit came days after Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive and said it had taken back full control of the breakaway region, sparking an exodus of the area’s ethnic Armenian population.
By Tuesday evening, over 28,000 “forcibly displaced” people from Nagorno-Karabakh had arrived in Armenia, the Armenian government announced in a Facebook post.
Speaking from the Armenian village of Kornidzor, near the border with Azerbaijan, Power said, “It is absolutely critical that independent monitors as well as humanitarian organizations get access to the people in Nagorno-Karabakh who still have dire needs.
“The military attacks of last week have made a dire situation even worse,” Power said Tuesday, adding that many of those who had arrived were suffering from “severe malnutrition,” according to doctors at the scene.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been under blockade since December 2022, when Azerbaijan-backed activists established a military checkpoint on the Lachin corridor – the only road connecting the landlocked enclave to Armenia.
The blockade prevented the import of food, fuel and medicine to Nagorno-Karabakh, prompting fears that residents were being left to starve. A former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor said in August there is “reasonable basis to believe that genocide is being committed against Armenians” in the region.
The closure of the Lachin corridor has also prevented international organizations and foreign media from accessing Nagorno-Karabakh. The road was only opened last weekend to allow residents to flee.
“We know that there are injured civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh who need to be evacuated,” Power said, adding that Azerbaijan has a responsibility to facilitate this.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday about the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, according to a State Department spokesperson.
“The secretary spoke again to President Aliyev today and underscored the urgency of no further hostilities, that there be unconditional protections and freedom of movement for civilians, that there be unhindered humanitarian access to Nagorno Karabakh,” said State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller at a press briefing.
Miller also said that the US expects Aliyev to abide by his commitment to “no further military action.”
Power announced Tuesday that the US would provide $11.5 million in humanitarian assistance to the region.
The European Union also announced 5 million euros (around $5.2 million) in aid.
“This aid will be delivered by various EU humanitarian partners operating in Armenia to reach around 25 000 people,” the EU said in a statement Tuesday. “The priority is to provide cash assistance, shelter, food security and livelihoods assistance.”
Azerbaijan’s brief but bloody offensive killed more than 200 people and injured many more, before Karabakh officials agreed to a Russia-brokered ceasefire in which they agreed to dissolve their armed forces.
A further 100 bodies were recovered in the latest search and rescue operations following Azerbaijan’s military operations, Karabakh emergency services told Armenian state news agency Armenpress Monday. Among the bodies were two children and an elderly couple, officials said. CNN could not independently verify the claims.
A mass evacuation of the local population began over the weekend. Images shared on social media showed residents of Stepanakert, the region’s capital, packing their belongings into cars and vans, and searching for gas. The local government had offered each family five liters of fuel to make the trip to Armenia, a resident told CNN.
But as thousands were attempting to flee the enclave on Monday evening, a powerful explosion ripped through a gas station near Stepanakert, where people had been attempting to get fuel before driving to Armenia.
The incident left at least 68 people dead and 290 injured, according to the Nagorno-Karabakh Human Rights Ombudsman. Over 100 people remain missing, the Ombudsman’s office also said.
Videos on social media showed a crowded hospital in the city as medical staff attempted to treat burn patients. “At this moment, we do not have any medical resources left that can help us. In terms of medication, we do not have [anti-burn] antibiotics. We have a very high number of burn patients,” said a member of the medical staff at a hospital in Stepanakert, in a video shared Monday by local journalist Siranush Sargsyan.
