British officials hand over evidence after mother of one of accused men loses challenge
The prosecutions of two alleged Islamic State members accused of carrying out a series of beheadings can go ahead in the US after British officials handed over key evidence.
The material was given to Washington after high court judges sitting in London dismissed a challenge brought by the mother of one of the accused men.
Continue reading...Six NGO staff and two local guides were ambushed in a nature reserve in August
The Islamic State extremist group has claimed responsibility for the murder of six French aid workers and their two local guides while they were visiting a nature reserve in the west African country of Niger.
The six French humanitarian workers, aged between 25 and 30, their guide and their driver were killed on 9 August in the Kouré national park, a wildlife haven 37 miles (60km) from Niger’s capital, Niamey.
Continue reading...Child is thought to be first to have returned from the country since November
A British child left orphaned by the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate has been repatriated from Syria, the Foreign Office has said.
The child is understood to be the first to have returned to the UK from Syria since November, when a small number of other unaccompanied British children were repatriated.
Continue reading...Fourteen charged over killing of 17 people at satirical magazine and kosher supermarket
The trial of 14 suspects accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher has opened in Paris.
The hearing, expected to last 49 days and recorded live for “the historical record”, began amid high security and will relive the three days of terror in January 2015 that left 17 people dead and others injured.
Continue reading...Assurances on Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh dependent on UK handing over evidence
The US has promised not to pursue the death penalty against two British Isis members accused of taking part in the beheadings of western hostages, in return for UK cooperation with the prosecution.
The pledge was given in a letter from the US attorney general, William Barr, in the case of Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, members of the “Beatles” group of British Isis members, who were captured by Syrian Kurds and then handed over to US custody last October.
Continue reading...Residents of Kukawa in Borno state had just returned home after almost two years displaced in refugee camps
Jihadists in the restive north-east of Nigeria have taken hundreds of people hostage who had only recently returned home from refugee camps, after local government officials claimed their town was safe.
More than 20 trucks of militants stormed into Kukawa town, in Borno state on Tuesday night. The jihadists captured hundreds of fleeing residents and attacked a nearby military base protecting the town.
Continue reading...Militants seized the Mocímboa da Praia site, which is near gas projects worth £45bn, last week
Government troops are taking up positions outside a port in the far north of Mozambique which was captured by Islamist extremists last week in the latest escalation of the insurgency in the southern African country.
Hundreds of reinforcements have been rushed into position around the port in the town of Mocímboa da Praia.
Continue reading...Women’s rights activist Fawzia Koofi, a member of the team negotiating a deal with the Taliban, was shot in the arm
A female member of Afghanistan’s peace negotiating team has been slightly wounded in an assassination attempt, officials say.
Fawzia Koofi, who is also a former parliamentarian, was attacked on Friday afternoon near the capital, Kabul, while returning from a visit to the northern province of Parwan.
Continue reading...Government audit alleges that poor west African country lost at least $137m over eight years
More than $100m of public money in Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries and a key regional recipient of western aid, was wasted in a series of potentially corrupt international arms deals, a leaked official document alleges.
A confidential government audit of defence spending found that at least $137m had been lost due to malpractice over an eight-year period ending in 2019.
Continue reading...Amnesty calls for action to help victims overcome trauma, as families return home to landscape littered with landmines
Child survivors of Islamic State captivity and their families have been left to fend for themselves when dealing with lasting trauma and health complications, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
Almost 2,000 Yazidi children living in the Kurdish regional government area have been “effectively abandoned”, according to a new report highlighting their struggles to recover from the violence inflicted by Isis.
Continue reading...Twenty-year-old has won right to return to UK from Syria to challenge citizenship decision
The case of Shamima Begum, the now 20-year-old woman who fled to Syria to join Islamic State as a child, has sparked fierce debate over how the UK should deal with “foreign fighters”.
Opponents of her return say she is a threat to the country’s security and must live with the consequences of her actions, while critics of her exile say greater human rights principles are at play, and the UK must not shirk its responsibility to administer justice for any alleged crimes she may have committed.
Continue reading...Appeal court partially overturns earlier ruling that backed Home Office
Shamima Begum, the 20-year-old woman who left east London as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, should be allowed to return to the UK to challenge the Home Office’s decision to revoke her British citizenship in person.
The court of appeal partially overturned an earlier ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) this year, which held that she had not been illegally rendered stateless while she was in Syria because she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.
Continue reading...A British student who ran away to join the Islamic State group in Syria has died while being held in prison in the country, according to reports.
Ishak Mostefaoui, 27, who travelled to Syria in 2014 and had his British citizenship revoked, is said to have died either trying to escape custody or amid serious disorder in a jail in Hassakeh, which holds Isis prisoners from across the world.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch suggests involvement of security forces in deaths over recent months
At least 180 civilians have been killed in recent months in a single town in Burkina Faso, with evidence pointing towards the country’s often-accused security forces, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Between November 2019 and June this year, groups of dozens of dead bodies were found often tied and blindfolded, strewn along major highways, beneath bridges and across fields in the rural region, the report published on Thursday said. Most of the bodies were buried by residents while the remains of others were left unclaimed.
Continue reading...Hisham al-Hashimi backed action to tackle Iraq’s powerful militias, despite knowing risks
As Hisham al-Hashimi pulled up outside his Baghdad home on Monday night, a gunman strode purposefully towards the Iraqi official’s white four-wheel drive, drew a pistol and fired four shots through the driver’s window.
Each jolting flash was captured by security footage from a camera on Hashimi’s roof. So was the hitman’s escape on the back of a motorbike, and the helpless vigil of his three young children as their father’s body was dragged on to the driveway.
Continue reading...Isis planted mines across Sinjar and displaced the Yazidi community. Now a group of women are clearing the way for the return of their people
Behind Hana Khider is a large grey wall map, with the minefields her team have been clearing marked in green. “This is the place where Yazidis lived together,” she says. “It’s where I lived in my childhood; I have so many memories here, it’s very important to me.”
The place is Sinjar, or Shingal as Yazidis know it, on Iraq’s north-western border with Syria. Khider, 28, is speaking via video call from her office in the region.
Continue reading...The Afghan government is facing hard decisions over the futures of hundreds of detained radicalised women and their children
The “Daesh wives” from the Afghan branch of Islamic State look very young. Most are already mothers.
Hundreds of them have fled combat, airstrikes and near-starvation in eastern Afghanistan where the faction of Isis known as Islamic State in Khorasan (ISK) has been under fierce bombardment from Afghan and US special forces, as well as involved in violent clashes with rival militants the Taliban.
Continue reading...Amnesty records 200 state killings and forced disappearances in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, state members of internationally-backed G5 group
Hundreds of civilians have been killed by their own governments in Africa’s Sahel region since countries pledged a surge against militant groups at a regional meeting held by France in January.
Amnesty International said on Wednesday that it had documented 200 cases of unlawful state killings and forced disappearances in February and March in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which are members of the internationally backed G5 force set up to fight militants in the Sahel.
Continue reading...Woman who fled as schoolgirl to join Isis cannot fight fair appeal from Syria, lawyers say
Shamima Begum, the woman who left Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, cannot effectively challenge the government’s decision to deprive her of British citizenship while she is in a detention camp in northern Syria, the court of appeal has been told.
At the start of a two-day online hearing, her lawyers challenged a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) this year that she has not been rendered stateless because she is entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.
Continue reading...Nineteen-year-old Soraya Ameri had just given birth when gunmen stormed the ward. She recounts her escape – and the desperate search for her daughter
Soraya Ameri’s premature baby daughter had been whisked off to an incubator and the new mother was lying down, exhausted and sore from her stitches, when the shooting started.
Gunmen – dressed in police uniforms – had stormed the maternity ward of a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, where Ameri had just given birth. She was bundled into a safe room with others, one woman next to her in labour, but her baby was outside.
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