Bits and Bites from around the World > A heartwarming story

 

Woman, 18, Severely Wounded in Apparent Terror Stabbing in Israel

Police arrest alleged attacker, a Palestinian man, after shooting him in the leg;

victim in serious condition in Afula hospital

By JUDAH ARI GROSS

An 18-year-old woman was stabbed and seriously wounded in the northern city of Afula on Monday in an apparent terror attack, authorities said.

Police arrested her suspected attacker, who had fled the scene, after a brief manhunt. The suspect was identified by police as a Palestinian man in his 20s from the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

“Police shot the suspect in the leg after calling upon him to stop,” a police spokesperson said. “The suspect was arrested with a knife in his possession.”

Police said they were still investigating the motive for the stabbing, but were working under the assumption that it was a terror attack.

“The main line of investigation is that this was a terror attack, however the investigation is continuing in order to rule out other motives,” the police spokesperson said.

Later in the day, Hebrew media reported police were closer to determining the attack was nationalistically motivated.

The Palestinian suspect, reportedly from the West Bank city of Jenin, was in Israel without a permit, police said.

Videos of the suspected terrorist’s arrest were quickly posted to social media by bystanders.

The victim was identified as Shuva Malka, an 18-year-old resident of Migdal Ha’emek.

She was stabbed shortly before noon on the street and collapsed outside a local coffee shop, police said.

“When we arrived at the scene, it was very chaotic. There was an 18-year-old girl sitting on a chair at the entrance to a store. She was conscious and suffering from multiple stab wounds to the upper body,” one of the medics who treated her said.

She was taken to the nearby HaEmek Medical Center in serious condition, according to the Magen David Adom ambulance service.

Hospital officials said that her condition had stabilized but remained serious.

When Fact is Worse than Fiction: ‘Feral Child’ Story Untrue for all the Wrong Reasons

The child appears to be mentally disturbed and was abandoned by her family

© Ruptly

A widely-published story regarding an eight-year-old girl who was found in a wildlife sanctuary in northern India and was allegedly raised by a colony of monkeys has now been debunked as untrue, but the truth is even more tragic, it seems.

The child was discovered by police at the side of a road with a colony of monkeys nearby which led rescuers, and the media, to believe that she had been raised by them.

She exhibited violent behavior in reaction to human contact and was unable to speak or communicate effectively, leading healthcare professionals to the conclusion that this was a case of a feral child raised in the wild by animals.

Or so everyone believed when the story first broke.

Police superintendent Dinesh Tripathi spoke to the New Indian Express and speculated that it appeared as though the girl had been living in the wild “since birth.”

However, forestry officer JP Singh came forward in the aftermath of the story’s publication to dispute such claims, speaking with the British media.

“I think the family members of this girl had been aware that she is not able to speak, and they may have abandoned her near the forest road,” he said.

“If she was living with monkeys it would have been for a few days only, not for a long time,” he added.

D.K. Singh, the chief medical officer of the hospital where the girl was treated, also disputed such claims.

“In India, people do not prefer a female child and she is mentally not sound, so all the more [evidence] she was left there,” he said, as cited by The Independent.

The chief medical officer of the district of Bahraich, Ankur Lal, told reporters that he believes the symptoms of the girl’s mental and physical illnesses led her family to abandon her and rescuers to mistakenly believe that she had been raised in the wild.

The girl has been taken to a children’s home in the city of Lucknow for ongoing treatment and long term care.

This child is 8 years old, there must be dozens, if not hundreds of people who know who she is. 

Small Kurdish Girl Pictured Firing a Huge Machine Gun

What is the world coming to when even the 'good guys' teach their little children to kill? If there are any 'good guys'?

BBC Trending
Does a video of a Kurdish girl firing a machine gun mean that those fighting Islamic State are now mimicking their propaganda techniques?

The girl looks about six or seven years old. She chats away with an off-camera adult, possibly her father, who asks her how many Islamic State fighters she has killed. "Four hundred!" she says, speaking in a Kurdish dialect local to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq.

'Four hundred", she's hardly old enough to count to 400.

Then the little girl leans over a machine gun bigger than she is, and using both hands, she fires away into the distance. As the shots echo across the desert, the man behind the camera eggs her on: "Kill! Kill!"

The striking footage appears to have first surfaced in mid-January on a Facebook page devoted to pro-Kurdish videos, and shortly thereafter it cropped up on a YouTube channel called "Kurdish YPG". The YPG, or People's Protection Units, are the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party in Syria.

The Kurdish YPG channel includes several other films glorifying the famous female Kurdish fighting battalions, alongside films about cooking potatoes and other random subjects. The channel also includes reports ripped straight from news organisations - here's a link to the original version of one of the news reports featured on the channel, a BBC video about Kurdish female warriors.

It's unclear how popular the video of the girl was until the social news site Vocativ reported on it a week ago - but since then other news outlets have picked up the story and various versions have clocked up hundreds of thousands of views in total.

The Islamic State militants who control huge areas in Syria and Iraq have increasingly been using children in propaganda videos. So does the video of the girl herald a new propaganda tactic on the part of Kurdish militias who are fighting IS?

It's unlikely, according to media analyst Hiwa Osman. "I think this is an isolated incident," he told BBC Trending via phone from the Iraqi city of Irbil. "I haven't seen other videos such as this - the most militarised pictures I've seen are of children dressing in the clothes of the Peshmerga [Iraqi Kurdistan fighters] for celebrations."

Osman added that Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq have gone out of their way to avoid mimicking the techniques of Islamic State. "After a failed [IS] attack in Kirkuk, one of the militants fell into the hands of the public, and the people who captured him were angry, and they beheaded him. The military leaders and the political leaders in the area came out strongly against the beheading. They don't want to be seen to be using the tactics of ISIS."

It's also clear that the girl isn't actually shooting at IS troops, says British-Kurdish blogger Ruwayda Mustafah. There are no other fighters or any other people pictured in the video, and the girl and the man behind the camera don't appear to be in any danger.

"I've seen the footage on several Facebook pages in Kurdish. Most people are outraged at the prospect of a young girl 'shooting'" Mustafah says. "But it's obvious from the video that this is just sensationalist and not factual ... the girl in the video hasn't really killed 400 ISIS terrorists."

Messages to the Facebook account that initially posted the video went unanswered, but Trending did manage to speak to the man behind the YouTube channel. The man, who (somewhat oddly) lives in Gaza, says he has no Kurdish family connection - he says he simply admires the Kurdish fighters and also runs websites and blogs devoted to the Russian Army and other fighting forces.