EL HUR, Somalia -- One of two Iranian fishing vessels hijacked by Somali pirates sneaked off in the waters off the coast of El Hur in central Somalia according to residents, Garowe Online reports. Abdullahi Hamud, a resident of Hobyo confirmed on VOA Somali Service that the vessel with sixteen Iranian and four Somali crew members on board escaped on Thursday.
Somali government officials couldn’t be reached for comments on the matter, though large swathes in central Somalia remain under the control of hostile clan militias and moderate Islamists.
In late March, Somali pirates seized the Iranian vessel which was allegedly fishing illegally in territorial waters, making it the first hijacking since 2012 when pirates held Liberian-flagged MT Smyrni.
Credible sources reported that the sailors who had since been held captive subdued four pirates on the boat.
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08/30/2015 00:00 ||
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Three suspects were arrested in Libya on Saturday over possible involvement in recent migrant crises that nearly killed 200 people, the authorities said.
A statement from Tripoli's Special Intervention Squad said an organised crime group of three members have been arrested. The group was involved in human trafficking and managed many migrant boats to Europe through the Mediterranean, Xinhua reported. The three suspects are detained in Zuwarah for investigation for now.
Nearly 200 illegal immigrants are feared dead on Thursday off Libya's Zuwarah coast when a boat overcrowded with 400 people sank on its way to Europe. Eighty-two bodies have washed ashore, while almost 100 people are still missing, a Libyan coast guard said, adding that the immigrants on board are from Southern Sahara, Pakistan, Morocco, Syria, and Bangladesh.
Long ways away from home, Bangladesh to Libya...
The International Organization for Migration estimates that around 150,000 migrants have reached Europe by sea by mid-July in 2015, many of whom departed from Libya.
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[ALMANAR.LB] Bahrain's main opposition bloc condemned as "unacceptable" the recent kaboom in the Karana village in the northern part of the Persian Gulf country.
One police officer was killed and seven others, including a child, were maimed when the kaboomdestroyed the Karrana village, west of the Bahraini capital of Manama, on Friday, the country's Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Four coppers as well as two parents and their child were maimed in the "terrorist blast," according to the statement. One of the coppers was injured seriously.
In its statement issued after the kaboom, the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society said such acts of violence are condemned and are unacceptable.
The bloc added that these violent acts are also against the interests of Bahrain and its people regardless of which side it came from.
It reaffirmed the popular movement's commitment to the Declaration of Non-Violence Principles, reached by the Bahraini opposition parties in 2012, as a strategic option that is not to be put down.
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08/30/2015 00:00 ||
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#1
"Not ours. Nuffin to do wid us. Nope"
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[AnNahar] Tajikistan on Saturday accused the country's beleaguered Islamic party of ties with the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... group based mainly in Iraq and Syria.
Members of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) have been "in active contact with holy warriors in Syria" and have responded to the holy warriors request to "raise the black flag of IS," an interior ministry front man said.
"Activists and members of the IRPT directly engaged in the propaganda of IS's bully boy ideas, destabilizing the peaceful situation in different parts of Tajikistan by raising the black flag of IS," the front man told Agence La Belle France Presse.
He said "around 20" people had been jugged Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! in connection with flag-raising incidents in the southern provincial towns of Shaartuz and Nurek but did not say how many were members of IRPT.
An IRPT spokesperson in Nurek confirmed one of its members had been arrested but said the party lacked enough information to comment further. Party representatives in Shaartuz could not be reached for comment.
Critics of Tajikistan's highly authoritarian secular government will view the arrests as further pressure on a party it recognized as legitimate following a bloody five-year civil war that ended in 1997.
Citing the party's lack of formal representation in almost 60 regions and cities, the Central Asian country's justice ministry on Friday ordered IRPT to "cease its illegal activities" in a move seen as an effective ban on the country's largest opposition party.
On Tuesday, an economic court in the Tajik capital sealed off the party's headquarters.
The party became an umbrella opposition bloc following the U.N.-backed 1997 peace deal struck in Moscow between the government and the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) but failed to win a single seat in a disputed March vote that left 62-year-old President Emomali Rakhmon's party unchecked in the parliament.
Analysts have warned that the government crackdown on the party could radicalize the moderate Moslem opposition.
Tajikistan's security structures say up to 600 nationals are fighting with faceless myrmidons in Iraq and Syria.
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08/30/2015 00:00 ||
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[AlAhram] A razor-wire barrier along Hungary's border with non-EU member Serbia, aimed at keeping out migrants, has been completed, the Hungarian defence ministry said on Saturday.
"Two days before the August 31 deadline, the first section of the border closure has been completed," the ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency MTI.
The barrier consisting of three rolls of razor wire along the 175-kilometre frontier is however failing to prevent people getting across, AFP saw in a recent visit.
A four-metre-high (13-foot) fence is due to follow and is already being built by the Hungarian army which will "also provide a defence against illegal border-crossers," the defence ministry said.
Around 1,000 border police currently control the border, and 2,000 more are due to be in operation from September 1, the government says.
Hungary, a member of the European Union and of the visa-free Schengen zone, has this year intercepted more than 140,000 migrants entering from Serbia.
In the past week along, some 10,000 have crossed over as the surge reaches record levels.
The vast majority have trekked up through the western Balkans and want to travel onwards to western European countries like Germany and Sweden.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban's right-wing government has been criticised by Brussels for building the barrier, which it announced in June it would construct.
[AlAhram] Austrian police said Saturday that they intercepted another truck containing 26 migrants and that three young children had to be hospitalised, days after 71 people died in an abandoned vehicle.
"The three small children had to be hospitalised... because of the extremely bad state of their health. Doctors said they were treated for severe dehydration," police said in a statement about the incident on Friday morning.
"If the journey had continued the situation could probably have become critical," a front man from police in Upper Austria state told AFP.
The vehicle, pulled over by police after a chase, contained 26 "illegal foreigners" from Syria, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who said they wanted to go to Germany, police said.
The incident happened near Braunau am Inn in western Austria close to the border with Germany. The Romanian driver, who had refused to pull over for a routine check, was tossed in the calaboose You have the right to remain silent... Austria borders Hungary, which has seen more than 140,000 migrants enter from Serbia this year, most of whom then seek to travel onwards to western European countries like Germany and Sweden, via Austria.
[AlAhram] The discovery of the decomposing bodies of 71 migrants including four children shut inside an abandoned truck on an Austrian motorway on Thursday marked a chilling new low in Europe's migrant crisis.
Police are still investigating the vehicle and autopsies are ongoing, but the following is a breakdown of what we know so far about the passengers, how they died, the vehicle and four suspects incarcerated Yez got nuttin' on me, coppers! Nuttin'! in Hungary.
Police found inside a Syrian travel document, leading them to believe that the dead were refugees from the war-torn country. Police are also evaluating SIM cards from mobile phones found among the bodies.
Inside the vehicle, found in a motorway lay by near Parndorf in the Neusiedl am See district near the Hungarian border, were 59 men, eight women and four children including a girl one or two years old and three boys between eight and 10.
Investigators are seeking to identify the victims with fingerprints, DNA and their teeth. Their faces were reportedly barely recognisable due to the advanced state of decomposition. Reports said that even nearby, the stench was unbearable.
Autopsies being carried out Saturday in Vienna will determine the exact cause and estimated time of death, but police say they most likely suffocated and could have been dead for a day and a half to two days.
The doors to the refrigerated truck were locked and also bound with cables. The 71 men, women and kiddies were tightly crammed into an area of around 15 square meters (160 square feet), and in the dark.
Police are investigating whether the refrigeration system would have let any air in. If not, Austrian daily Oesterreich calculated that they would have asphyxiated in 63 minutes, the children suffocating first because they were lower down.
Damage inside the vehicle shows potentially how the migrants tried to break out, but police said the markings could pre-date the tragedy.
The truck used to belong to a Slovakian poultry firm but has Hungarian number plates and is now registered to one of four men -- three Bulgarians and an Afghan -- arrested by Hungarian police.
Police in Austria and Hungary think they are low-ranking members of one of the numerous human trafficking gangs that prey on the tens of thousands migrants seeking new homes in Europe.
Hungarian Sherlocks say the 7.5-tonne vehicle picked up the migrants near the Hungarian town of Kecskemet, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of the Serbian border where huge numbers have crossed over in recent months.
Once autopsies have been completed, the dead will be buried near to where they were found on the A4 autobahn (motorway) in eastern Austria, one of the main routes from Hungary into Austria and beyond.
In addition to physical evidence, police in the state of Burgenland have set up a hotline (+43 59133 10 3333) for people who believe family members may be among the dead. The hotline is staffed by translators and open around the clock.
The four suspects appeared before a court in Kecskemet, Hungary on Saturday, with prosecutors seeking to remand them in jug for a month. Austria may then seek their extradition. The Volvo truck is still being investigated.
[AnNahar] More than 300,000 refugees and migrants have risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, and some 2,500 more have died while making the perilous journey, the U.N. said Friday.
Nearly 200,000 people had landed in Greece since January, while another 110,000 had made it to Italia, Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, told news hounds in Geneva.
The numbers tower high above arrivals in 2014, when some 219,000 made the crossing over the entire year.
Fleming said people fleeing Syria's bloody civil war were now heading directly for Europe and no longer towards the neighboring countries already bursting at the seams with millions of Syrian refugees.
But getting to Europe is no easy task. Since the beginning of the year, some 2,500 people are known to have died or gone missing trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, compared to 3,500 for all of last year.
That means slightly under 1% of those trying to get to Europe are dying in the attempt...
Fleming said this number did not include the latest boat tragedy off Libya on Thursday, with dozens found dead and others missing. She hailed a joint European search and rescue operation for saving "tens of thousands of lives this year", but warned "the Mediterranean Sea continues to be the deadliest route for refugees and migrants."
[DAWN] A three-member observer team of the United Nations ...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks... (UN) visited the Working Boundary at Kundanpur village in Sialkot on Saturday to review damages caused by firing at the border, said a report published on Radio Pakistain.
At least 11 civilians -- eight Paks and three Indians -- were killed and several others maimed on Friday during an exchange of fire between Indian and Pak border troops along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmire and Working Boundary in Sialkot's Charwah, Harpal, Chaprar and Sucheetgarh sectors.
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[DAWN] Pakistain Tehrik-e-Insaf ...a political party in Pakistan. PTI was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party's slogan is Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem, each of which is open to widely divergent interpretations.... (PTI) chairman Imran Khan ... aka Taliban Khan, who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five... announced on Saturday to hold a sit-in in front of Election Commission of Pakistain (ECP) in Islamabad if its members do not tender their resignations by October 4.
Imran Khan, who was addressing a public gathering after chairing a party meeting in Lahore, said "there was no justification for the ECP members to hold their posts after 21 political parties had claimed that rigging took place during the 2013 elections".
"We will stage a sit-in on October 4 infront of the ECP's office in Islamabad if the current members do not resign from their posts," said Imran Khan.
Imran on the occasion, invited all his party activists and supporters to join the planned sit-in.
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[MIRROR.CO.UK] Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... is bankrolling its campaign of terror by demanding protection money off the gangs smuggling migrants from Libya to Europe, the Sunday People can reveal.
Jihadists have seized at least four long coastal stretches east of the Libyan capital Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... -- a departure point for boat-loads heading to Italia.
Security services fear the racket is funding the purchase of guns and ammunition for the rising number of IS fighters arriving from the West.
A United Nations ...an idea whose time has gone... source in Tunisia said: "Our contacts in Tripoli were quite clear that IS units are in control of major lengths of beach around the city and are effectively stealing the profits of the people-trafficking gangs at gunpoint.
"The IS message is simple -- do business with us or die. The smugglers hate dealing with IS but they have no choice.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/30/2015 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
EL HUR, Somalia -- One of two Iranian fishing vessels hijacked by Somali pirates sneaked off in the waters off the coast of El Hur in central Somalia according to residents, Garowe Online reports. Abdullahi Hamud, a resident of Hobyo confirmed on VOA Somali Service that the vessel with sixteen Iranian and four Somali crew members on board escaped on Thursday.
