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Kidnap, torture, murder: the plight of Pakistan’s thousands of disappeared
Despite promises in opposition to end enforced abduction by the security forces, under Imran Khan’s government numbers have increased
Mon 14 Dec 2020 11.15 GMT
The Guardian
Hannah Ellis-Peterson
A march from Quetta in Balochistan to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, in late 2013 to highlight the plight of the missing
The abductors moved with an ease and stealth that suggested they had done this before. As Qayyum* and his family slept, 12 masked and uniformed soldiers used a ladder to scale the gate of the house, in an affluent neighbourhood of the Pakistani city of Quetta in Balochistan. The family woke as they burst in but the officers silenced them with an order: don’t scream or we will beat you. One demanded Qayyum’s national identity card.
“Bring your phone and laptop,” barked an officer. A bag was shoved over Qayyum’s head and he was dragged outside and thrown into the back of a car.
Qayyum, a Pakistani government official, did not know why he had been seized, but he knew what was happening. Extrajudicial abductions and enforced disappearances by shadowy military agencies have been a feature of life in Pakistan for two decades. Those suspected of having ties to terrorists, insurgents or activists are picked up and taken to secret detention centres, without trial or official judicial process. Here they face days, months or even years of torture. Some are eventually released, but most are never seen again.
Those weeks in August 2014 were the worst of Qayyum’s life. Deep in a covert detention centre, he was left outside the torture cell to listen as four others were beaten. One after another, the men were brought out, unconscious, bloody and limp, carried on the shoulders of masked men, until finally it was his turn.
“Once I entered the torture cell, a soldier was told to strip me,” says Qayyum. “I started begging them not to dishonour me, I was crying and pleading, ‘please don’t disgrace me’. I was laid down on the floor and someone started hitting my buttocks with a leather belt.”
Qayyum never saw their faces. They whipped him until he was bleeding all over, and broke his fingers. “I felt then I was already dead, that I could never live having suffered such humiliation.” Like the others before him, Qayyum left the torture cell unconscious.
Families hold a protest against enforced disappearances in Quetta, Balochistan, where, despite assurances,
the practice continues
But the next night after prayers he was taken back to the cell, and this time the officers had specific questions: what he knew about four security personnel killed in Quetta, and whether he had met with a man called M*.
“The interrogator kept asking ‘Who is M? When did you last meet him?’,” says Qayyum. “I replied that there must be some miscommunication, I do not know this person, I’m not the person you require. Suddenly he gave me an electric shock on my testicles. I fell and he kept giving me electric shocks around my head, face and neck.”
Some nights his head was plunged into buckets of icy water, pushing him to the brink of drowning, all the while asking him the same questions he could not answer. But Qayyum still considered himself one of the lucky ones: after weeks of torture, the officers finally let him go, dumping him on the streets of Quetta at night with a warning never to speak of what had happened. “I was not the person they were looking for but those weeks in a torture cell killed my spirit and ambition,” he says. “I was brought back as a dead body.”
Families of the missing people hold a protest in Karachi in October
Families of the missing hold a protest march in Karachi in October. Photograph: Shahzaib Akber/EPA
“Disappearing” is nothing new in Pakistan, justified by the military as an essential tool of national security in a country which has seen thousands die in attacks by Islamic militants and separatist insurgents. It began in the 1970s but became a standard practice of Pakistan’s security agencies, in particular the shadowy spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), after 2001. As Pakistan became central to the US “war on terror”, ISI and paramilitary forces rounded up hundreds of suspected al-Qaida militants for the US administration, who secretly shipped them to Guantánamo Bay.
There is much more to this very disturbing story on The Guardian.
Four men threaten to blow up Belgian train unless ‘cancer Jews’ get off
Dec 15, 2020 |
Christians Against Anti-Semitism, News
Police in Belgium are looking for four men who used a train’s public address system to threaten a bombing of the vehicle near Antwerp unless Jewish passengers step off.
The passengers took control of the public address system on Wednesday afternoon between Antwerp and Mechelen, the city that Nazis and their collaborators used as an internment and dispatch station for Jews whom they sent to be murdered in Poland.
“Attention, attention,” the men said in Flemish, “the cancer Jews need to leave the train now or we’ll blow you all up,” witnesses said.
Security personnel on the train failed to locate the perpetrators, according to Michael Freilich, a Belgian-Jewish lawmaker who has looked into and filed parliamentary questions about the incident to the Transportation Ministry.
Freilich asked the ministry to explain why the perpetrators were not caught, how they gained access to the address system and what can be done to prevent a recurrence.
Better start with looking into the history of the Security personnel. My guess is that there may be far-right loonies responsible for this, as opposed to Islamists.
Mechelen, Belgium
‘We have problems with people from MENA’: Denmark changes immigrant statistics to tackle crime & unemployment
15 Dec 2020 13:23
A large group of immigrants living in Denmark welcome new migrants at Rodby September 8, 2015.
File photo: © REUTERS/Jens Norgaard Larsen/Scanpix
In order to better inform public policy while tackling issues of immigrant crime and unemployment, Denmark will now reclassify immigrant groups from various regions of the world.
Denmark currently sorts immigrants into those of ‘Western’ (EU, UK, US, Canada and Australia) and ‘Non-Western’ (everywhere else) origin in immigration and other population statistics.
However, Immigration and Integration Minister Mattias Tesfaye has now announced the introduction of the so-called MENAPT group (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey), a separate category in official statistics.
“We need more honest numbers, and I think it will benefit and qualify the integration debate if we get these figures out in the open, because fundamentally, they show that we in Denmark don’t really have problems with people from Latin America and the Far East. We have problems with people from the Middle East and North Africa,” Tesfaye said.
Immigrants from the MENAPT group are consistently over-represented in crime and unemployment statistics, and addressing the group’s unique concerns separate from other non-Western immigrant groups may bear fruit in Tesfaye’s estimation.
In 2018, 4.6 percent of young men from MENAPT countries were convicted of committing a crime, compared with 1.8 percent from all the other 190 non-Western countries on the list combined.
The same year, MENAPT women had a 41.9 percent employment rate while women from other non-Western, non-MENAPT countries boasted a 61.6 employment rate.
Undoubtedly, a language issue there.
Descendants of immigrants will now also be classified as foreign under the new statistical regime, despite being born in Denmark. Curiously, Tesfaye, who describes himself as “half Ethiopian and 100 percent Danish,” falls under this category, and insists “I think you should be proud of who you are.”
Immigrants and their descendants account for roughly 14 percent of Denmark's 5.8 million population, while those from the MENAPT group specifically account for 54.5 percent of the total 516,000 non-Western classification.
“These new figures will provide a more honest political discussion about the minority of immigrants who create very great challenges for our society,” Tesfaye claims.
Halima El Abassi, chairwoman of the Council for Ethnic Minorities, feels the new initiative unfairly divides segments of the population and places a rather negative focus on certain immigrant groups.
“We can agree that we have challenges with integration, but a new collective term cannot stand alone. We need professionals to address what politicians are missing out on,” El Abassi tweeted.
Tesfaye added that the creation of new designations for immigrant groups is not a tool in and of itself, but merely a means by which politicians can make better-informed policy decisions in future.
He highlights the unique challenges faced by immigrants from Thailand, the Philippines, and Latin America, in contrast to those faced by those from the Middle East, and the need to tailor solutions to each group.
US indicts Kenyan man for planning 9/11-style terrorist attack
on American skyscraper
16 Dec 2020 19:40
The suspect named as Cholo Abdi Abdullah by the US Department of Justice
© Reuters / Philippines National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group
A Kenyan national, allegedly linked to the Al-Shabaab terrorist group, has been charged with planning to fly an airplane into an American skyscraper in a repeat of the 9/11 attacks, the US Department of Justice has said.
The indicted man, identified as Cholo Abdi Abdullah, spent several years training to become a pilot in the Philippines as part of the plot, eventually obtaining the license, according to US officials.
During this time, the 30-year-old was allegedly researching ways to hijack a commercial airliner, studying security on flights and how to gain access to the pilot's cabin.
Abdullah also showed interest in information on the tallest buildings in major US cities and ways to obtain an American visa, a statement by the Attorney's Office said.
The suspect had been receiving orders from the same Al-Shabaab commander – who was responsible for an attack on a hotel in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, last year, in which 21 people were killed – it added. Al-Shabaab is an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, active in Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa.
Abdullah was arrested in the Philippines last summer and transferred to the US earlier this month.
“This chilling callback to the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, is a stark reminder that terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab remain committed to killing US citizens and attacking the United States,” said Audrey Strauss, acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The Kenyan was charged with six counts of terrorist-related offenses. If convicted, he could face between 20 years to life in prison.
According to the US Attorney's office, Abdullah's thwarted plot and the hotel attack in Nairobi were part of an Al-Shabaab operation in response to the US decision to move its embassy in Israel from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that angered many Muslims.
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14 convicted over Charlie Hebdo & Paris terrorist attacks in 2015,
key suspect sentenced to 30 years in prison
16 Dec 2020 18:58
© AFP / THOMAS SAMSON
A French court on Wednesday found 14 people guilty of being accomplices in the Paris 2015 terrorist attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, with one person jailed for 30 years for funding the attacks.
She was among three suspects to be tried in absentia after the trio reportedly fled to Syria to join the Islamic State group. Two of them are said to have been killed during bomb attacks against the militant group.
In total, 17 people were killed in the 2015 attacks carried out by Coulibaly and brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, all of whom claimed loyalty to IS.
On January 7, the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, killing 12 people, including editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, his police protection officer, seven journalists, two visitors, and a policeman. The attackers were killed two days later in a shootout with police.
The day after the Charlie Hebdo raid, Coulibaly shot a policewoman dead in the Parisian suburb of Montrouge, before later taking hostages in a kosher supermarket, where he killed an employee and three customers before himself being killed by police.
The primary defendant of the attacks who appeared in court, Ali Riza Polat, was found guilty of complicity in a terrorist crime, while other suspects' charges included membership of a criminal group, funding terrorism, and direct complicity in the attacks.
For six of the 11 defendants who appeared in court, terrorism charges were dropped, and they were found guilty of lesser crimes.
Reacting to the verdicts, Charlie Hebdo lawyer Richard Malka said that “justice had been done. It was the trial of a nebula more or less close to the terrorists; what this decision says is, without this nebula, there is no attack,” the lawyer added.
The trial, which had been delayed due to the pandemic, comes during another year of bloodshed for France, which has seen multiple Islamist terrorist attacks on its soil in 2020, including a teacher beheaded near Paris and an assailant killing three people in Nice.
Earlier this month, France announced a new bill to “strengthen Republican values,” while the government threatened to close some 76 mosques suspected of promoting “separatism.”
President Emmanuel Macron previously said that France “must tackle Islamist separatism,” although the draft legislation, which covers schooling and other areas, stops short of explicitly mentioning radical Islam.
It's OK to shoot, kill, throw them into prison, but, God-forbid you should tell the truth about Islam.
France: Muslim arrested at train station with two handguns,
balaclava, Qur’an and prayer rug
DEC 17, 2020 4:00 PM
Breitbart
Rail safety teams had their hands full on Friday, December 11, when at the beginning of the afternoon, they checked a 21-year-old man at the Matabiau station in Toulouse and found him to be in possession of two loaded handguns, a balaclava, of suras from the Koran and a prayer rug.
Alerted by his behavior, railway police officers asked him for his papers while he was about to board a train towards Lyon. This young man, whose last known domicile is in Troyes, in Aube, carried two loaded pistols and several objects related to religion.
Once arrested, he was brought back to the Toulouse central police station and very quickly entrusted to investigators from the regional service of the Toulouse judicial police (SRPJ), in charge of investigations by the prosecution.
He was hanging out in the Izards district.
What did he want to do with these weapons? Difficult to say, since during his police custody, this gentleman was obviously not very explicit … Even if the weapons were real and could have killed anyone, the possibility of terrorism is not being considered. “It has been dismissed at the moment”, a source close to the case assures us.
This individual from Mayotte “does not present any objective sign of radicalism”, according to Dominique Alzéari, the public prosecutor. Homeless, he has crisscrossed France for several months. He was recently checked by the police force in the district of Izards, north of Toulouse, where he was allegedly “employed” as a supervisor of a drug outlet.
Charged and imprisoned
Did he get his pistols to protect himself, in this neighborhood where many shootings took place during the summer? To answer these questions and the gray areas of this case, the prosecution decided to open a judicial investigation.
The suspect was indicted for weapons law violations before being jailed. The SRPJ’s investigation is now continuing on an interrogatory commission. While waiting to learn more about his profile, the police will try to analyze the weapons to find out if they were used for a felony or an offense.
Islamist gunman behind failed 2015 Thalys train attack
jailed for life by French court
17 Dec 2020 20:15
on August 21, 2015. © REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol
An Islamist militant who opened fire on a train bound for France during a thwarted terrorist attack in 2015 has been given a life sentence by a French court. The attacker was jumped by three Americans who helped foil his raid.
Moroccan citizen Ayoub El-Khazzani, 31, was convicted of attempted murder with the intent to commit terrorism after he fired gunshots on the high-speed Thalys service as it crossed the France-Belgium border, heading for Paris, on August 21, 2015.
Three other men were handed sentences of between seven and 27 years for helping El-Khazzani plot his attack, which involved him boarding the train while heavily armed and wounding two passengers, before he was overpowered by three US servicemen and some other passengers.
After foiling the attack, the American trio – Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler – later starred as themselves in a Clint Eastwood-directed movie, ‘The 15:17 to Paris’.
In his testimony, El-Khazzani said he had been ordered to carry out the attack by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian terrorist of Moroccan origin who allegedly plotted the Paris massacres of November 2015 which killed 130 people.
El-Khazzani was with Abaaoud in Syria and traveled with him back to Brussels. The judge called him “a puppet” controlled by Abaaoud, who was killed by French special forces after the Paris attacks.
During his trial, El-Khazzani told the court that his victims were to have included Americans and members of the European Commission.
Thursday’s ruling comes a day after 14 people were found guilty of being accomplices to the gunmen behind the Paris attacks that killed 17 people in January 2015.
The defendants were found to have provided financial and logistical support to a trio of attackers who murdered 12 people in the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, plus a policewoman and four other people at a Jewish supermarket.
Video ‘made by Boko Haram’ Islamist fighters claims to show kidnapped Nigerian schoolboys pleading for release
17 Dec 2020 18:30
where hundreds of schoolboys were abducted. © AFP / Kola Sulaimon
A video reportedly made by Boko Haram fighters has been released. It purports to show some of the 300 Nigerian schoolboys kidnapped by the Islamist militant group last week in the northwest of the country.
The six-minute video, published on Thursday by Nigerian news site HumAngle, apparently shows some of the children pleading with the government to free them by paying the ransoms demanded by the terrorists.
In the footage, a visibly upset child says he is among the hundreds of students taken by the Boko Haram group led by Abubakar Shekau, who oversaw the 2014 kidnapping of at least 200 schoolgirls in the Nigerian town of Chibok.
Speaking in both English and the local language Hausa, the boy goes on to claim that some of the abducted children have been killed by Nigerian soldiers, and that other troops sent to rescue them should be sent back.
Dozens of children can be seen in the background of the footage, shot in a wooded area, and some appear to be crying.
Militants armed with AK-47s entered the town of Kankara in Katsina state on December 11, before storming the Government Science Secondary School, firing shots and abducting the boys, in an attack claimed by Boko Haram.
At least 337 students remain unaccounted for, Katsina’s Governor Aminu Masari said on Thursday.
A parent and school employee said at the time of the attack that around half of the 800 pupils were missing.
Speaking about the abduction of the boys on Monday, Masari said that Nigerian intelligence had “located their position” and that President Muhammadu Buhari had been briefed on rescue efforts.
“The abductors of our children have made contacts with the government and talks are ongoing to ensure their safety and return to their respective families,” he said in a tweet.
In recent years, Nigeria’s northwest region has been blighted by violence involving Boko Haram and other groups, with 8,000 people killed since 2011, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank.
Thursday’s video has not been verified, and there has not yet been any comment about it from the Nigerian Armed Forces or President Buhari.
Putin says outrage over 'anti-Islam' cartoons & French street beheading is evidence that 'multiculturalism has failed' in West
17 Dec, 2020 17:56
FILE PHOTO The front page of the new issue of satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo entitled is displayed at a kiosk in Nice © REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
Russian President Vladimir Putin has weighed in on the debate around freedom of speech and the rights of religious believers, saying the clash of cultures is an existential problem in the West.
In response to a question from RT correspondent Igor Zhdanov as part of his annual end-of-year press conference on Thursday, Putin said there was a fine balance between expressing yourself and insulting the feelings of entire groups of people.
“Where is the boundary between one freedom and another freedom,” the president asked. “It is well known that where one man’s freedom begins, another’s must end.” He added that those who “act thoughtlessly, insulting the rights and feelings of religious people, should always remember there will be an inevitable backlash. But, on the other hand, this shouldn’t be an aggressive one.” He pointed to recent incidents in France as evidence that, in the West, “multiculturalism has failed.”
Last week, Putin instructed Russia’s foreign ministry to “initiate discussions through international organizations on issues relating to those insulting the beliefs of religious people, and inciting inter-religious hatreds and conflict.” Officials will now compile a report on their plans by the start of March next year.
The comments come after seven men of Chechnyan origin were charged in France over their alleged involvement in the killing and beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in Paris in October. Prosecutors say Paty was targeted by 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov for showing a series of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to his class in a lesson on free speech.
French President Emmanuel Macron sparked controversy across the Islamic world after the incident, paying tribute to Paty as “a quiet hero” and “the face of the Republic.” A number of Muslim countries announced boycotts of French products, with some demonstrators taking to the streets to burn effigies of Macron himself.
The head of Russia’s majority-Muslim Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, condemned the attack, but “urged people not to provoke believers or hurt their religious feelings. In the meantime, find the strength to admit that Muslims have the right to religion, and no one will take it away!”
I have no problem with that, but should they have the right to practice their religion in Christian countries when their religion is so violently opposed to Christianity? Or, even secular countries where freedom of speech came at great cost. I think not.
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EU allocates full €6 billion to Turkey in deal aimed at stopping migrants
heading to Europe
17 Dec 2020 16:11
on the waters of the North Aegean Sea, off the shores of Canakkale, Turkey, March 6, 2020.
© Reuters / Umit Bektas
The European Union has allocated a multibillion-euro sum to Turkey to fund the welfare of refugees hosted by the country, after Ankara pledged to stop the flow of illegal migrants and refugees to Europe.
“Today marks the finalization of the contracting of €6 billion in EU support to refugees and host communities in Turkey,” said Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, the EU’s envoy to Ankara. The move has “put an important milestone behind us, the diplomat said, adding that the two sides will “now focus on making sure that the refugees and host communities will benefit from our projects.”
In 2015, at the peak of the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, Europe saw a million people arriving, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa. The following spring, the European Council reached an agreement with Turkey, which hosts about 3.6 million refugees from Syria.
Ankara was to accept the return of migrants arriving in Greece, and, in return, was promised €6 billion ($6.79 billion) to accommodate migrants, as well as visa-free travel in the EU for Turks.
However, the Turkish government has long accused EU leaders of failing to keep their promises, and, in March this year, Ankara said it would no longer stop refugees heading to Europe.
The EU funds will not be paid directly to the Turkish government, as they have already been earmarked for social projects inside Turkey, including supporting refugees’ access to health services and improving their living conditions.
In recent months, relations between the EU and Turkey have deteriorated, mostly over Ankara’s energy exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean and the consequent rows with Greece and Cyprus.
Last week, a European Council summit announced it planned more sanctions against Ankara, adding that the EU was nonetheless “prepared to continue providing financial assistance to Syrian refugees and host communities in Turkey.”
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