Yahoo News
5 accused of human sacrifice in India
Niamh Cavanagh·Reporter
Fri, April 7, 2023 at 10:37 AM CDT
As reported by CBS News, police in India arrested five men for allegedly conducting a Hindu ritual human sacrifice four years ago. The female victim, Shanti Shaw, was found decapitated at the Kamakhya Temple in the northeastern city of Guwahati in 2019. “During the investigation, we found this was a case of human sacrifice to please Maa Kamakhya [a Hindu goddess],” Guwahati police commissioner Diganta Barah told journalists on Tuesday. “The accused apparently believed that the sacrifice would appease the soul of the deceased.”
The primary suspect, 52-year-old Pradeep Pathak, is accused of organizing the human sacrifice on the 11th anniversary of his brother’s death. In June 2019, Shaw had traveled to the annual fair at the temple with two other women and a man claiming to be a Hindu “god-man.” Police say 12 people took part in orchestrating the murder.
Why it matters: Human sacrifices in India occur more than you think. From 2014 to 2021, 103 ritualistic human sacrifices were recorded there, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. More prevalent than human sacrifices, however, is violence against women. According to a report by German news outlet DW, Assam — the state where Shaw was murdered — had the country's highest rate of violence against women in 2021. However, according to human rights organizations, this government-collected data is likely just the “tip of the iceberg.” Across India, 2021 had the highest rates of crimes against women since it began recording data. Statistics found that there were 31,878 rapes and 28,222 kidnappings of women in 2021.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/5- ... 12271.html
Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
CBS News
Kenya starvation cult death toll hits 90: "Mass graves of children"
CBSNews
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 1:31 PM CDT
The death toll from a suspected Kenyan starvation cult climbed to 90 on Tuesday, including many children, as police said investigators were pausing the search for bodies because the morgues were full.
The discovery of mass graves in Shakahola forest near the coastal town of Malindi has shocked Kenyans, with cult leader Paul Mackenzie Nthenge accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God.
There are fears more corpses could be found as search teams unearthed 17 bodies on Tuesday, with investigators saying children made up the majority of victims of what has been dubbed the "Shakahola Forest Massacre."
Kenya's government has vowed to crack down on fringe religious outfits in the largely Christian country.
"We don't know how many more graves, how many more bodies, we are likely to discover," Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki told reporters, adding the crimes were serious enough to warrant terrorism charges against Mackenzie.
"Those who urged others to fast and die were eating and drinking and they were purporting that they were preparing them to meet their creator."
The majority of the dead were children, according to three sources close to the investigation, highlighting the macabre nature of the cult's alleged practices which included urging parents to starve their offspring.
"The majority of the bodies exhumed are children," a forensic investigator told AFP on condition of anonymity.
An officer from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) also confirmed that children accounted for more than half of the victims, followed by women.
Hussein Khalid, executive director of the rights group Haki Africa that tipped off the police to Mackenzie's activities, told AFP that the cult appeared to require children to starve first, followed by women, and finally men.
He said 50 to 60 percent of the victims were children, whose bodies were found wrapped in cotton shrouds.
"The horror that we have seen over the last four days is traumatizing. Nothing prepares you for shallow mass graves of children," he said.
Investigators told AFP they found bodies squeezed into shallow pits -- with up to six people inside one grave -- while others were simply left exposed in the open air.
As the fatalities mounted, the DCI officer told AFP that search teams would have to pause their efforts until autopsies were completed.
"We won't dig for a couple of days, so we have time to do the autopsies because the mortuaries are full," he said on condition of anonymity.
The state-run Malindi Sub-County Hospital had warned that its morgue was running out of space to store the bodies and was already operating well over capacity.
"The hospital mortuary has a capacity of 40 bodies," said the hospital's administrator Said Ali, adding that officials had reached out to the Kenya Red Cross for refrigerated containers.
Kindiki said 34 people had been found alive so far in the 800-acre area of woodland.
"We pray that God will help them to go through the trauma, to help them recover and tell the story of how one time a fellow Kenyan, a fellow human, decided to hurt so many people, heartlessly, hiding under the Holy Scriptures," Kindiki said of the survivors, according to Reuters.
It is believed that some followers of Mackenzie's Good News International Church could still be hiding in the bush around Shakahola and at risk of death if not quickly found.
Kenya's President William Ruto has vowed to take action against rogue pastors like Mackenzie "who want to use religion to advance weird, unacceptable ideology", comparing them to terrorists.
As the investigation unfolds, questions have emerged about how the cult was able to operate undetected despite Mackenzie attracting police attention six years ago.
The televangelist had been arrested in 2017 on charges of "radicalization" after urging families not to send their children to school, saying education was not recognized by the Bible.
Mackenzie was arrested again last month, according to local media, after two children starved to death in the custody of their parents.
He was released on bail of 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($700) before surrendering to police following the Shakahola raid.
Mackenzie is due to appear in court on May 2.
"We do not expect that Mr. Mackenzie will get out of jail for the rest of his life," said Kindiki said, according to Reuters,
The Kenya Red Cross said 212 people had been reported missing to its support staff in Malindi, out of which two were reunited with their families.
The case has prompted calls for tighter control of fringe denominations in a country with a troubling history of self-declared pastors and cults that have dabbled in criminality.
Last year, the body of a British woman who died at the house of a different cult leader while on holiday in Kenya was exhumed. Luftunisa Kwandwalla, 44, was visiting the coastal city of Mombasa when she died in August 2020, and was buried a day later, but her family has claimed foul play.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 00702.html
Kenya starvation cult death toll hits 90: "Mass graves of children"
CBSNews
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 1:31 PM CDT
The death toll from a suspected Kenyan starvation cult climbed to 90 on Tuesday, including many children, as police said investigators were pausing the search for bodies because the morgues were full.
The discovery of mass graves in Shakahola forest near the coastal town of Malindi has shocked Kenyans, with cult leader Paul Mackenzie Nthenge accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God.
There are fears more corpses could be found as search teams unearthed 17 bodies on Tuesday, with investigators saying children made up the majority of victims of what has been dubbed the "Shakahola Forest Massacre."
Kenya's government has vowed to crack down on fringe religious outfits in the largely Christian country.
"We don't know how many more graves, how many more bodies, we are likely to discover," Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki told reporters, adding the crimes were serious enough to warrant terrorism charges against Mackenzie.
"Those who urged others to fast and die were eating and drinking and they were purporting that they were preparing them to meet their creator."
The majority of the dead were children, according to three sources close to the investigation, highlighting the macabre nature of the cult's alleged practices which included urging parents to starve their offspring.
"The majority of the bodies exhumed are children," a forensic investigator told AFP on condition of anonymity.
An officer from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) also confirmed that children accounted for more than half of the victims, followed by women.
Hussein Khalid, executive director of the rights group Haki Africa that tipped off the police to Mackenzie's activities, told AFP that the cult appeared to require children to starve first, followed by women, and finally men.
He said 50 to 60 percent of the victims were children, whose bodies were found wrapped in cotton shrouds.
"The horror that we have seen over the last four days is traumatizing. Nothing prepares you for shallow mass graves of children," he said.
Investigators told AFP they found bodies squeezed into shallow pits -- with up to six people inside one grave -- while others were simply left exposed in the open air.
As the fatalities mounted, the DCI officer told AFP that search teams would have to pause their efforts until autopsies were completed.
"We won't dig for a couple of days, so we have time to do the autopsies because the mortuaries are full," he said on condition of anonymity.
The state-run Malindi Sub-County Hospital had warned that its morgue was running out of space to store the bodies and was already operating well over capacity.
"The hospital mortuary has a capacity of 40 bodies," said the hospital's administrator Said Ali, adding that officials had reached out to the Kenya Red Cross for refrigerated containers.
Kindiki said 34 people had been found alive so far in the 800-acre area of woodland.
"We pray that God will help them to go through the trauma, to help them recover and tell the story of how one time a fellow Kenyan, a fellow human, decided to hurt so many people, heartlessly, hiding under the Holy Scriptures," Kindiki said of the survivors, according to Reuters.
It is believed that some followers of Mackenzie's Good News International Church could still be hiding in the bush around Shakahola and at risk of death if not quickly found.
Kenya's President William Ruto has vowed to take action against rogue pastors like Mackenzie "who want to use religion to advance weird, unacceptable ideology", comparing them to terrorists.
As the investigation unfolds, questions have emerged about how the cult was able to operate undetected despite Mackenzie attracting police attention six years ago.
The televangelist had been arrested in 2017 on charges of "radicalization" after urging families not to send their children to school, saying education was not recognized by the Bible.
Mackenzie was arrested again last month, according to local media, after two children starved to death in the custody of their parents.
He was released on bail of 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($700) before surrendering to police following the Shakahola raid.
Mackenzie is due to appear in court on May 2.
"We do not expect that Mr. Mackenzie will get out of jail for the rest of his life," said Kindiki said, according to Reuters,
The Kenya Red Cross said 212 people had been reported missing to its support staff in Malindi, out of which two were reunited with their families.
The case has prompted calls for tighter control of fringe denominations in a country with a troubling history of self-declared pastors and cults that have dabbled in criminality.
Last year, the body of a British woman who died at the house of a different cult leader while on holiday in Kenya was exhumed. Luftunisa Kwandwalla, 44, was visiting the coastal city of Mombasa when she died in August 2020, and was buried a day later, but her family has claimed foul play.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 00702.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
CBS News
Kenya starvation cult death toll hits 90: "Mass graves of children"
CBSNews
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 1:31 PM CDT
The death toll from a suspected Kenyan starvation cult climbed to 90 on Tuesday, including many children, as police said investigators were pausing the search for bodies because the morgues were full.
The discovery of mass graves in Shakahola forest near the coastal town of Malindi has shocked Kenyans, with cult leader Paul Mackenzie Nthenge accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God.
There are fears more corpses could be found as search teams unearthed 17 bodies on Tuesday, with investigators saying children made up the majority of victims of what has been dubbed the "Shakahola Forest Massacre."
Kenya's government has vowed to crack down on fringe religious outfits in the largely Christian country.
"We don't know how many more graves, how many more bodies, we are likely to discover," Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki told reporters, adding the crimes were serious enough to warrant terrorism charges against Mackenzie.
"Those who urged others to fast and die were eating and drinking and they were purporting that they were preparing them to meet their creator."
The majority of the dead were children, according to three sources close to the investigation, highlighting the macabre nature of the cult's alleged practices which included urging parents to starve their offspring.
"The majority of the bodies exhumed are children," a forensic investigator told AFP on condition of anonymity.
An officer from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) also confirmed that children accounted for more than half of the victims, followed by women.
Hussein Khalid, executive director of the rights group Haki Africa that tipped off the police to Mackenzie's activities, told AFP that the cult appeared to require children to starve first, followed by women, and finally men.
He said 50 to 60 percent of the victims were children, whose bodies were found wrapped in cotton shrouds.
"The horror that we have seen over the last four days is traumatizing. Nothing prepares you for shallow mass graves of children," he said.
Investigators told AFP they found bodies squeezed into shallow pits -- with up to six people inside one grave -- while others were simply left exposed in the open air.
As the fatalities mounted, the DCI officer told AFP that search teams would have to pause their efforts until autopsies were completed.
"We won't dig for a couple of days, so we have time to do the autopsies because the mortuaries are full," he said on condition of anonymity.
The state-run Malindi Sub-County Hospital had warned that its morgue was running out of space to store the bodies and was already operating well over capacity.
"The hospital mortuary has a capacity of 40 bodies," said the hospital's administrator Said Ali, adding that officials had reached out to the Kenya Red Cross for refrigerated containers.
Kindiki said 34 people had been found alive so far in the 800-acre area of woodland.
"We pray that God will help them to go through the trauma, to help them recover and tell the story of how one time a fellow Kenyan, a fellow human, decided to hurt so many people, heartlessly, hiding under the Holy Scriptures," Kindiki said of the survivors, according to Reuters.
It is believed that some followers of Mackenzie's Good News International Church could still be hiding in the bush around Shakahola and at risk of death if not quickly found.
Kenya's President William Ruto has vowed to take action against rogue pastors like Mackenzie "who want to use religion to advance weird, unacceptable ideology", comparing them to terrorists.
As the investigation unfolds, questions have emerged about how the cult was able to operate undetected despite Mackenzie attracting police attention six years ago.
The televangelist had been arrested in 2017 on charges of "radicalization" after urging families not to send their children to school, saying education was not recognized by the Bible.
Mackenzie was arrested again last month, according to local media, after two children starved to death in the custody of their parents.
He was released on bail of 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($700) before surrendering to police following the Shakahola raid.
Mackenzie is due to appear in court on May 2.
"We do not expect that Mr. Mackenzie will get out of jail for the rest of his life," said Kindiki said, according to Reuters,
The Kenya Red Cross said 212 people had been reported missing to its support staff in Malindi, out of which two were reunited with their families.
The case has prompted calls for tighter control of fringe denominations in a country with a troubling history of self-declared pastors and cults that have dabbled in criminality.
Last year, the body of a British woman who died at the house of a different cult leader while on holiday in Kenya was exhumed. Luftunisa Kwandwalla, 44, was visiting the coastal city of Mombasa when she died in August 2020, and was buried a day later, but her family has claimed foul play.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 00702.html
Kenya starvation cult death toll hits 90: "Mass graves of children"
CBSNews
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 1:31 PM CDT
The death toll from a suspected Kenyan starvation cult climbed to 90 on Tuesday, including many children, as police said investigators were pausing the search for bodies because the morgues were full.
The discovery of mass graves in Shakahola forest near the coastal town of Malindi has shocked Kenyans, with cult leader Paul Mackenzie Nthenge accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God.
There are fears more corpses could be found as search teams unearthed 17 bodies on Tuesday, with investigators saying children made up the majority of victims of what has been dubbed the "Shakahola Forest Massacre."
Kenya's government has vowed to crack down on fringe religious outfits in the largely Christian country.
"We don't know how many more graves, how many more bodies, we are likely to discover," Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki told reporters, adding the crimes were serious enough to warrant terrorism charges against Mackenzie.
"Those who urged others to fast and die were eating and drinking and they were purporting that they were preparing them to meet their creator."
The majority of the dead were children, according to three sources close to the investigation, highlighting the macabre nature of the cult's alleged practices which included urging parents to starve their offspring.
"The majority of the bodies exhumed are children," a forensic investigator told AFP on condition of anonymity.
An officer from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) also confirmed that children accounted for more than half of the victims, followed by women.
Hussein Khalid, executive director of the rights group Haki Africa that tipped off the police to Mackenzie's activities, told AFP that the cult appeared to require children to starve first, followed by women, and finally men.
He said 50 to 60 percent of the victims were children, whose bodies were found wrapped in cotton shrouds.
"The horror that we have seen over the last four days is traumatizing. Nothing prepares you for shallow mass graves of children," he said.
Investigators told AFP they found bodies squeezed into shallow pits -- with up to six people inside one grave -- while others were simply left exposed in the open air.
As the fatalities mounted, the DCI officer told AFP that search teams would have to pause their efforts until autopsies were completed.
"We won't dig for a couple of days, so we have time to do the autopsies because the mortuaries are full," he said on condition of anonymity.
The state-run Malindi Sub-County Hospital had warned that its morgue was running out of space to store the bodies and was already operating well over capacity.
"The hospital mortuary has a capacity of 40 bodies," said the hospital's administrator Said Ali, adding that officials had reached out to the Kenya Red Cross for refrigerated containers.
Kindiki said 34 people had been found alive so far in the 800-acre area of woodland.
"We pray that God will help them to go through the trauma, to help them recover and tell the story of how one time a fellow Kenyan, a fellow human, decided to hurt so many people, heartlessly, hiding under the Holy Scriptures," Kindiki said of the survivors, according to Reuters.
It is believed that some followers of Mackenzie's Good News International Church could still be hiding in the bush around Shakahola and at risk of death if not quickly found.
Kenya's President William Ruto has vowed to take action against rogue pastors like Mackenzie "who want to use religion to advance weird, unacceptable ideology", comparing them to terrorists.
As the investigation unfolds, questions have emerged about how the cult was able to operate undetected despite Mackenzie attracting police attention six years ago.
The televangelist had been arrested in 2017 on charges of "radicalization" after urging families not to send their children to school, saying education was not recognized by the Bible.
Mackenzie was arrested again last month, according to local media, after two children starved to death in the custody of their parents.
He was released on bail of 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($700) before surrendering to police following the Shakahola raid.
Mackenzie is due to appear in court on May 2.
"We do not expect that Mr. Mackenzie will get out of jail for the rest of his life," said Kindiki said, according to Reuters,
The Kenya Red Cross said 212 people had been reported missing to its support staff in Malindi, out of which two were reunited with their families.
The case has prompted calls for tighter control of fringe denominations in a country with a troubling history of self-declared pastors and cults that have dabbled in criminality.
Last year, the body of a British woman who died at the house of a different cult leader while on holiday in Kenya was exhumed. Luftunisa Kwandwalla, 44, was visiting the coastal city of Mombasa when she died in August 2020, and was buried a day later, but her family has claimed foul play.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 00702.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
BBC
Uganda school attack: Dozens of pupils killed by militants linked to Islamic State group
Patience Atuhaire in Kampala & James Gregory in London - BBC News
Sat, June 17, 2023 at 2:18 PM CDT
Uganda security forces at the Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School on 17 June
Some of the victims died as attackers burnt a dormitory
Nearly 40 pupils have been killed at a school in western Uganda by rebels linked to the Islamic State group (IS).
Five militants attacked the Lhubiriha secondary school in Mpondwe at around 23:30 (20:30 GMT) on Friday.
They entered dormitories, setting fire and using machetes to kill and maim the pupils, officials said.
The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) - based in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - have been blamed and a manhunt is under way.
More than 60 people are educated at the school, most of whom live there.
Uganda's information minister said 37 students were confirmed to have been killed, but did not give their ages.
Twenty of them were attacked with machetes and 17 of them burned to death, Chris Baryomunsi told the BBC.
Survivors said the rebels threw a bomb into the dormitory after the machete attack. It is not clear if this resulted in a fire in the building which was reported earlier.
Six students were also abducted to carry food that the rebels stole from the school's stores, he added. The militants then returned across the border into the DRC.
Some of the bodies are said to have been badly burnt and DNA tests will need to be carried out to identify them.
Eight people remain in a critical condition after the attack.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned the "appalling act" and called for those behind it to be brought to justice.
Soldiers are pursuing ADF insurgents towards the DRC's Virunga national park - Africa's oldest and largest national park which is home to rare species, including mountain gorillas.
Militias including the ADF also use the vast expanse, which borders Uganda and Rwanda, as a hideout.
"Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted and destroy this group," defence spokesperson Felix Kulayigye said on Twitter.
The Ugandan army has also deployed helicopters to help track the rebel group over mountainous terrain.
Uganda and the DRC have held joint military operations in the east of DR Congo to prevent attacks by the ADF.
Security forces had intelligence that rebels were in the border area on the DRC side for at least two days before Friday night's attack, Maj Gen Olum said.
But local residents have criticised the authorities for not being prepared for an attack.
"If they are telling us the borders are secure and security is tight, I want the security to tell us where they were when these killers came to kill our people," one resident told reporters.
Inside view of IS rebels behind Uganda suicide attacks
The deadly episode follows last week's attack by suspected ADF fighters in a village in the DRC near to the Ugandan border. Over 100 villagers fled to Uganda but have since returned.
The attack on the school, located less than 2km (1.25 miles) from the DRC border, is the first such attack on a Ugandan school in 25 years.
In June 1998, 80 students were burnt to death in their dormitories in an ADF attack on Kichwamba Technical Institute near the border of DRC. More than 100 students were abducted.
The group may target schools as a way of recruiting children, according to Richard Moncrieff, an expert in the region at the International Crisis Group. But they also do it for the shock value, he told the BBC.
"These are terrorist groups who want to make and impact through violence, they want to show that they are there, show that they are active to their colleagues and allies in ISIS in other parts of the world," Mr Moncrieff said, using another acronym for IS.
The ADF was created in eastern Uganda in the 1990s and took up arms against long-serving President, Yoweri Museveni, alleging government persecution of Muslims.
Muslims make up almost 14% of the Ugandan population, according to official government figures, though the Ugandan Muslim Supreme Council estimates the figure is closer to 35%.
Some members of the Ugandan Muslim community say they face discrimination in public life, including in education and the workplace.
After defeat by the Ugandan army in 2001, the ADF relocated to North Kivu province in the DRC.
The group's principal founder, Jamil Makulu, was arrested in Tanzania in 2015 and is in custody in a Ugandan prison.
ADF rebels have been operating from inside the DRC for the past two decades.
Makulu's successor, Musa Seka Baluku, reportedly first pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in 2016, but it was not until April 2019 that IS first acknowledged its activity in the area.
Islamic State as a group has been mostly defeated, though there are significant numbers of IS-affiliated militant groups across the Middle East and Africa.
After years of not operating openly in Uganda, the ADF was blamed for a series of attacks in late 2021 including suicide bombings in Uganda's capital Kampala.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ug ... 46831.html
Uganda school attack: Dozens of pupils killed by militants linked to Islamic State group
Patience Atuhaire in Kampala & James Gregory in London - BBC News
Sat, June 17, 2023 at 2:18 PM CDT
Uganda security forces at the Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School on 17 June
Some of the victims died as attackers burnt a dormitory
Nearly 40 pupils have been killed at a school in western Uganda by rebels linked to the Islamic State group (IS).
Five militants attacked the Lhubiriha secondary school in Mpondwe at around 23:30 (20:30 GMT) on Friday.
They entered dormitories, setting fire and using machetes to kill and maim the pupils, officials said.
The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) - based in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - have been blamed and a manhunt is under way.
More than 60 people are educated at the school, most of whom live there.
Uganda's information minister said 37 students were confirmed to have been killed, but did not give their ages.
Twenty of them were attacked with machetes and 17 of them burned to death, Chris Baryomunsi told the BBC.
Survivors said the rebels threw a bomb into the dormitory after the machete attack. It is not clear if this resulted in a fire in the building which was reported earlier.
Six students were also abducted to carry food that the rebels stole from the school's stores, he added. The militants then returned across the border into the DRC.
Some of the bodies are said to have been badly burnt and DNA tests will need to be carried out to identify them.
Eight people remain in a critical condition after the attack.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned the "appalling act" and called for those behind it to be brought to justice.
Soldiers are pursuing ADF insurgents towards the DRC's Virunga national park - Africa's oldest and largest national park which is home to rare species, including mountain gorillas.
Militias including the ADF also use the vast expanse, which borders Uganda and Rwanda, as a hideout.
"Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted and destroy this group," defence spokesperson Felix Kulayigye said on Twitter.
The Ugandan army has also deployed helicopters to help track the rebel group over mountainous terrain.
Uganda and the DRC have held joint military operations in the east of DR Congo to prevent attacks by the ADF.
Security forces had intelligence that rebels were in the border area on the DRC side for at least two days before Friday night's attack, Maj Gen Olum said.
But local residents have criticised the authorities for not being prepared for an attack.
"If they are telling us the borders are secure and security is tight, I want the security to tell us where they were when these killers came to kill our people," one resident told reporters.
Inside view of IS rebels behind Uganda suicide attacks
The deadly episode follows last week's attack by suspected ADF fighters in a village in the DRC near to the Ugandan border. Over 100 villagers fled to Uganda but have since returned.
The attack on the school, located less than 2km (1.25 miles) from the DRC border, is the first such attack on a Ugandan school in 25 years.
In June 1998, 80 students were burnt to death in their dormitories in an ADF attack on Kichwamba Technical Institute near the border of DRC. More than 100 students were abducted.
The group may target schools as a way of recruiting children, according to Richard Moncrieff, an expert in the region at the International Crisis Group. But they also do it for the shock value, he told the BBC.
"These are terrorist groups who want to make and impact through violence, they want to show that they are there, show that they are active to their colleagues and allies in ISIS in other parts of the world," Mr Moncrieff said, using another acronym for IS.
The ADF was created in eastern Uganda in the 1990s and took up arms against long-serving President, Yoweri Museveni, alleging government persecution of Muslims.
Muslims make up almost 14% of the Ugandan population, according to official government figures, though the Ugandan Muslim Supreme Council estimates the figure is closer to 35%.
Some members of the Ugandan Muslim community say they face discrimination in public life, including in education and the workplace.
After defeat by the Ugandan army in 2001, the ADF relocated to North Kivu province in the DRC.
The group's principal founder, Jamil Makulu, was arrested in Tanzania in 2015 and is in custody in a Ugandan prison.
ADF rebels have been operating from inside the DRC for the past two decades.
Makulu's successor, Musa Seka Baluku, reportedly first pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in 2016, but it was not until April 2019 that IS first acknowledged its activity in the area.
Islamic State as a group has been mostly defeated, though there are significant numbers of IS-affiliated militant groups across the Middle East and Africa.
After years of not operating openly in Uganda, the ADF was blamed for a series of attacks in late 2021 including suicide bombings in Uganda's capital Kampala.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ug ... 46831.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Richard Pérez-Peña
Sun, June 25, 2023 at 9:40 AM CDT·6 min read
( A case study: 5 people died on a very expensive excursion mission verses 750 immigrants drowned near Greece. Only 108 saved)
On one vessel, five people died on a very expensive excursion that was supposed to return them to the lives they knew. On the other, perhaps 500 people died just days earlier on a squalid and perilous voyage, fleeing poverty and violence in search of new lives.
After contact was lost with the five inside a submersible descending to the Titanic, multiple countries and private entities sent ships, planes and underwater drones to pursue a faint hope of rescue. That was far more effort than was made on behalf of the hundreds aboard a dangerously overcrowded, disabled fishing trawler off the Greek coast while there were still ample chances for rescue.
And it was the lost submersible, the Titan, that drew enormous attention from news organizations worldwide and their audiences, far more than the boat that sank in the Mediterranean and the Greek coast guard’s failure to help before it capsized.
The submersible accident, at the site of a shipwreck that has fascinated the public for more than a century, would have captivated people no matter what. But it occurred right after the tragedy in the Mediterranean, and the contrast between the two disasters, and how they were handled, has fueled a discussion around the world in which some see harsh realities about class and ethnicity.
Aboard the Titan were three wealthy businessmen — a white American, a white Briton and a Pakistani-British magnate — along with the billionaire’s 19-year-old son and a white French deep-sea explorer. Those on the fishing boat — as many as 750, officials have estimated, with barely 100 survivors — were migrants primarily from South Asia and the Middle East, trying to reach Europe.
“We saw how some lives are valued and some are not,” Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at the group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. And in looking at the treatment of migrants, she added, “We cannot avoid talking about racism and xenophobia.”
At a forum in Athens, Greece, on Thursday, former President Barack Obama weighed in, saying of the submersible, “the fact that that’s gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank, that’s an untenable situation.”
Status and race no doubt play a role in how the world responds to disasters, but there are other factors as well.
Other stories have been followed in minute detail by millions of people, even when those involved were neither wealthy nor white, like the boys trapped deep in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. Their plight, like that of the submersible passengers, was one-of-a-kind and brought days of suspense, while few people knew of the migrants until they had died.
And in study after study, people show more compassion for the individual victim who can be seen in vivid detail than for a seemingly faceless mass of people.
But the disparity in apparent concern shown for the migrants versus the submersible passengers prompted an unusually caustic backlash in online essays, social media posts and article comments.
Laleh Khalili, a professor who has taught international politics and the Middle East at multiple British universities, wrote on Twitter that she felt sorry for the 19-year-old, but that “a libertarian billionaire ethos of ‘we are above all laws, including physics’ took the Titan down. And the unequal treatment of this and the migrant boat catastrophe is unspeakable.”
Many commenters said they could not muster concern — some even expressed a grim satisfaction — about the fates of people on the submersible who could afford to pay $250,000 apiece for a thrill. Before the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that the vessel had imploded and the five were dead, jokes and the phrase “eat the rich” proliferated online.
That schadenfreude partly reflects the rising anger in recent years at economic inequality, at the wealthy themselves and at the growing sense that the economy works only for those at the top, said Jessica Gall Myrick, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University, whose specialty is the psychology of how people use media.
“One of the functions of humor is it helps us bond with people socially, so people who laugh at your joke are on your team and those who don’t aren’t on your team,” she said in an interview. Expressions of anger, she said, can serve the same purpose.
For human rights advocates, their anger is directed not at the rich but at European governments whose attitudes toward migrants have hardened, not only doing little to help those in trouble at sea but actively turning them away, and even treating as criminals private citizens who try to rescue migrants.
“I understand why the submersible captured attention: It’s exciting, unprecedented, obviously connected to the most famous shipwreck in history,” said Sunderland, of Human Rights Watch. “I don’t think it was wrong to make every effort to save them. What I would like is to see no effort spared to save the Black and brown people drowning in the Mediterranean. Instead, European states are doing everything they can to avoid rescue.”
The chasm between the two tragedies was particularly noted in Pakistan, home to many of those who died on the fishing trawler, and to Shahzada Dawood, the tycoon aboard the Titan. It highlighted Pakistan’s extreme divide between the millions who live in poverty and the ultrarich, and the failure of multiple governments over many years to address unemployment, inflation and other economic woes.
“How can we complain about the Greek government? Our own government in Pakistan did not stop the agents from playing with the lives of our youth by luring them to travel on such dangerous routes,” said Muhammad Ayub, a farmer in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, whose younger brother was on the fishing vessel that capsized and is believed to have died.
One factor that made the two maritime disasters very different is the degree of familiarity — though that in no way explains the lack of effort to aid the migrants before their boat sank. It is not just that some people are indifferent to the suffering of migrants — it is also that migrant drownings in the Mediterranean have become tragically frequent.
The rescues of a few people in Turkey who had survived more than a week under the rubble of a powerful earthquake in February — unusual victories amid an unusual disaster — drew the kind of global attention rarely given to the millions of refugees from Syria’s civil war who, for a decade, have lived not far away.
In 2013, the deaths of more than 300 migrants in another boat disaster off the Italian island of Lampedusa produced an outpouring of concern and increased rescue patrols. When Syrian asylum-seekers began trying to reach Europe in enormous numbers in 2015, some governments and people portrayed them as alien, undesirable, even dangerous, but there was also considerable interest and empathy. The wrenching image of a drowned 3-year-old washed up on a beach had an especially profound effect.
Years and countless migrant boat calamities later, the deaths are no less appalling but attract far less attention. Aid workers call it “compassion fatigue.” The political will to help, always spotty and precarious, has waned with it.
“No one cared about the several hundred people” who drowned in the Mediterranean, said Arshad Khan, a student of political science at the University of Karachi. “But,” he added, “the United States, the United Kingdom and all the global powers are busy finding the billionaire businessman who spent billions of rupees to view the wreckage of the Titanic in the sea.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
https://news.yahoo.com/5-deaths-sea-gri ... 31431.html
Sun, June 25, 2023 at 9:40 AM CDT·6 min read
( A case study: 5 people died on a very expensive excursion mission verses 750 immigrants drowned near Greece. Only 108 saved)
On one vessel, five people died on a very expensive excursion that was supposed to return them to the lives they knew. On the other, perhaps 500 people died just days earlier on a squalid and perilous voyage, fleeing poverty and violence in search of new lives.
After contact was lost with the five inside a submersible descending to the Titanic, multiple countries and private entities sent ships, planes and underwater drones to pursue a faint hope of rescue. That was far more effort than was made on behalf of the hundreds aboard a dangerously overcrowded, disabled fishing trawler off the Greek coast while there were still ample chances for rescue.
And it was the lost submersible, the Titan, that drew enormous attention from news organizations worldwide and their audiences, far more than the boat that sank in the Mediterranean and the Greek coast guard’s failure to help before it capsized.
The submersible accident, at the site of a shipwreck that has fascinated the public for more than a century, would have captivated people no matter what. But it occurred right after the tragedy in the Mediterranean, and the contrast between the two disasters, and how they were handled, has fueled a discussion around the world in which some see harsh realities about class and ethnicity.
Aboard the Titan were three wealthy businessmen — a white American, a white Briton and a Pakistani-British magnate — along with the billionaire’s 19-year-old son and a white French deep-sea explorer. Those on the fishing boat — as many as 750, officials have estimated, with barely 100 survivors — were migrants primarily from South Asia and the Middle East, trying to reach Europe.
“We saw how some lives are valued and some are not,” Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at the group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. And in looking at the treatment of migrants, she added, “We cannot avoid talking about racism and xenophobia.”
At a forum in Athens, Greece, on Thursday, former President Barack Obama weighed in, saying of the submersible, “the fact that that’s gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank, that’s an untenable situation.”
Status and race no doubt play a role in how the world responds to disasters, but there are other factors as well.
Other stories have been followed in minute detail by millions of people, even when those involved were neither wealthy nor white, like the boys trapped deep in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. Their plight, like that of the submersible passengers, was one-of-a-kind and brought days of suspense, while few people knew of the migrants until they had died.
And in study after study, people show more compassion for the individual victim who can be seen in vivid detail than for a seemingly faceless mass of people.
But the disparity in apparent concern shown for the migrants versus the submersible passengers prompted an unusually caustic backlash in online essays, social media posts and article comments.
Laleh Khalili, a professor who has taught international politics and the Middle East at multiple British universities, wrote on Twitter that she felt sorry for the 19-year-old, but that “a libertarian billionaire ethos of ‘we are above all laws, including physics’ took the Titan down. And the unequal treatment of this and the migrant boat catastrophe is unspeakable.”
Many commenters said they could not muster concern — some even expressed a grim satisfaction — about the fates of people on the submersible who could afford to pay $250,000 apiece for a thrill. Before the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that the vessel had imploded and the five were dead, jokes and the phrase “eat the rich” proliferated online.
That schadenfreude partly reflects the rising anger in recent years at economic inequality, at the wealthy themselves and at the growing sense that the economy works only for those at the top, said Jessica Gall Myrick, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University, whose specialty is the psychology of how people use media.
“One of the functions of humor is it helps us bond with people socially, so people who laugh at your joke are on your team and those who don’t aren’t on your team,” she said in an interview. Expressions of anger, she said, can serve the same purpose.
For human rights advocates, their anger is directed not at the rich but at European governments whose attitudes toward migrants have hardened, not only doing little to help those in trouble at sea but actively turning them away, and even treating as criminals private citizens who try to rescue migrants.
“I understand why the submersible captured attention: It’s exciting, unprecedented, obviously connected to the most famous shipwreck in history,” said Sunderland, of Human Rights Watch. “I don’t think it was wrong to make every effort to save them. What I would like is to see no effort spared to save the Black and brown people drowning in the Mediterranean. Instead, European states are doing everything they can to avoid rescue.”
The chasm between the two tragedies was particularly noted in Pakistan, home to many of those who died on the fishing trawler, and to Shahzada Dawood, the tycoon aboard the Titan. It highlighted Pakistan’s extreme divide between the millions who live in poverty and the ultrarich, and the failure of multiple governments over many years to address unemployment, inflation and other economic woes.
“How can we complain about the Greek government? Our own government in Pakistan did not stop the agents from playing with the lives of our youth by luring them to travel on such dangerous routes,” said Muhammad Ayub, a farmer in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, whose younger brother was on the fishing vessel that capsized and is believed to have died.
One factor that made the two maritime disasters very different is the degree of familiarity — though that in no way explains the lack of effort to aid the migrants before their boat sank. It is not just that some people are indifferent to the suffering of migrants — it is also that migrant drownings in the Mediterranean have become tragically frequent.
The rescues of a few people in Turkey who had survived more than a week under the rubble of a powerful earthquake in February — unusual victories amid an unusual disaster — drew the kind of global attention rarely given to the millions of refugees from Syria’s civil war who, for a decade, have lived not far away.
In 2013, the deaths of more than 300 migrants in another boat disaster off the Italian island of Lampedusa produced an outpouring of concern and increased rescue patrols. When Syrian asylum-seekers began trying to reach Europe in enormous numbers in 2015, some governments and people portrayed them as alien, undesirable, even dangerous, but there was also considerable interest and empathy. The wrenching image of a drowned 3-year-old washed up on a beach had an especially profound effect.
Years and countless migrant boat calamities later, the deaths are no less appalling but attract far less attention. Aid workers call it “compassion fatigue.” The political will to help, always spotty and precarious, has waned with it.
“No one cared about the several hundred people” who drowned in the Mediterranean, said Arshad Khan, a student of political science at the University of Karachi. “But,” he added, “the United States, the United Kingdom and all the global powers are busy finding the billionaire businessman who spent billions of rupees to view the wreckage of the Titanic in the sea.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
https://news.yahoo.com/5-deaths-sea-gri ... 31431.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Asheville Citizen-Times
Opinion
Opinion: Haunted by images of July 3 Israeli attack on Palestinian Jenin refugee camp
Lee Sease
Sun, July 16, 2023 at 4:06 AM CDT
Where were you on July 3 when Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp? I know where I was ― on the West Bank in Bethlehem, 60 miles south of Jenin, which is at the northern tip of the West Bank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, the West Bank is a Palestinian Arab section walled off by the Israeli government. When I say walled off, I mean there is a wall several stories high built by Israel with the intent of keeping the Palestinians on the other side. It is a harsh looking, intimidating wall with barbed wire and entry points staffed by armed Israeli military personnel.
On the Palestinian side of the wall, there is painted artistic graffiti asking for peace and reconciliation. Israel has nuclear capacity and an extremely well equipped army. This is an army that defeated a half dozen neighboring Arab countries in six days in 1967. At that time Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. The Palestinians do not have a standing army, navy or air force. The Palestinians have no heavy weaponry. It is unclear why Israel finds it necessary to invade a refugee camp. It is true that the Jenin refugee camp is known for its militancy but militancy in the face of occupation is not uncommon. The Hebrew people had a similar reaction to the Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago.
We were in a restaurant in Bethlehem when the news of the invasion broke. A Palestinian news network provided the coverage on TV. They did not shy away from showing the carnage. I will be haunted for a long time by a picture of a woman lying face down between two parked cars. I assume she was dead. So why must we ponder a conflict between people that results in death?
This probably can be traced back to the Zionist movement that began in Europe. Jewish people in Europe had suffered centuries of persecution at the hands of non-Jewish Europeans. The antisemitism attitudes and practices of Europe naturally migrated to this hemisphere. There was no safe haven for the Jewish people and so the Zionists began to look for a homeland and considered the area where the Hebrew people had once flourished to be a desired site. The problem is that the land they sought was already occupied by the Arab people who were Muslim, Jew and Christian. Today, that problem persists.
Hitler’s persecution of the Jews made the desire for a homeland that much stronger at the conclusion of World War II. The fact that neither Europe nor the United States wished to accommodate those Jews surviving the Nazi concentration camps, made the need to find a homeland even more desirable. So European Jews took it upon themselves to displace a people and claim a region, largely out of self-preservation. Let’s be clear, Judaism defines a religion and a culture. It does not define national boundaries.
We need to abandon the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Muslim-Jewish conflict, for it is not. It is not a Jewish-Arab conflict as many indigenous people who embrace Judaism as a religion and/or culture, will also embrace their Arabic ancestry. These perceptions cloud what is really taking place ― an indigenous population is resistant to being controlled by people who are not indigenous to the area. The situation is not too different from what the Native Americans faced when Europeans decided to settle the Western Hemisphere.
With the exception of a few indigenous people who accepted occupation by an invading population in 1948, the indigenous people of Palestine do not have citizenship. They have no voter rights. While the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, populated by Jews from other countries, primarily the United States, have a voice in the affairs of the Israeli government, the surrounding indigenous Palestinian population does not. The indigenous Palestinians are an occupied population. When an indigenous population is occupied by a non-indigenous population, resistance and radicalization becomes a natural occurrence. That same condition existed in the pre-Constitution days of the United States, which resulted in our founding fathers declaring independence from British rule. That intent was made clear in the Declaration of Independence.
The present day conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people is not a religious conflict nor is it a conflict in culture. It is a conflict that arises from the occupation of an indigenous population by an non-indigenous population. The Hebrew people resisted Rome and the Palestinians are resisting a government of non-indigenous people. It is that simple.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/op ... 01812.html
Opinion
Opinion: Haunted by images of July 3 Israeli attack on Palestinian Jenin refugee camp
Lee Sease
Sun, July 16, 2023 at 4:06 AM CDT
Where were you on July 3 when Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp? I know where I was ― on the West Bank in Bethlehem, 60 miles south of Jenin, which is at the northern tip of the West Bank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, the West Bank is a Palestinian Arab section walled off by the Israeli government. When I say walled off, I mean there is a wall several stories high built by Israel with the intent of keeping the Palestinians on the other side. It is a harsh looking, intimidating wall with barbed wire and entry points staffed by armed Israeli military personnel.
On the Palestinian side of the wall, there is painted artistic graffiti asking for peace and reconciliation. Israel has nuclear capacity and an extremely well equipped army. This is an army that defeated a half dozen neighboring Arab countries in six days in 1967. At that time Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. The Palestinians do not have a standing army, navy or air force. The Palestinians have no heavy weaponry. It is unclear why Israel finds it necessary to invade a refugee camp. It is true that the Jenin refugee camp is known for its militancy but militancy in the face of occupation is not uncommon. The Hebrew people had a similar reaction to the Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago.
We were in a restaurant in Bethlehem when the news of the invasion broke. A Palestinian news network provided the coverage on TV. They did not shy away from showing the carnage. I will be haunted for a long time by a picture of a woman lying face down between two parked cars. I assume she was dead. So why must we ponder a conflict between people that results in death?
This probably can be traced back to the Zionist movement that began in Europe. Jewish people in Europe had suffered centuries of persecution at the hands of non-Jewish Europeans. The antisemitism attitudes and practices of Europe naturally migrated to this hemisphere. There was no safe haven for the Jewish people and so the Zionists began to look for a homeland and considered the area where the Hebrew people had once flourished to be a desired site. The problem is that the land they sought was already occupied by the Arab people who were Muslim, Jew and Christian. Today, that problem persists.
Hitler’s persecution of the Jews made the desire for a homeland that much stronger at the conclusion of World War II. The fact that neither Europe nor the United States wished to accommodate those Jews surviving the Nazi concentration camps, made the need to find a homeland even more desirable. So European Jews took it upon themselves to displace a people and claim a region, largely out of self-preservation. Let’s be clear, Judaism defines a religion and a culture. It does not define national boundaries.
We need to abandon the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Muslim-Jewish conflict, for it is not. It is not a Jewish-Arab conflict as many indigenous people who embrace Judaism as a religion and/or culture, will also embrace their Arabic ancestry. These perceptions cloud what is really taking place ― an indigenous population is resistant to being controlled by people who are not indigenous to the area. The situation is not too different from what the Native Americans faced when Europeans decided to settle the Western Hemisphere.
With the exception of a few indigenous people who accepted occupation by an invading population in 1948, the indigenous people of Palestine do not have citizenship. They have no voter rights. While the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, populated by Jews from other countries, primarily the United States, have a voice in the affairs of the Israeli government, the surrounding indigenous Palestinian population does not. The indigenous Palestinians are an occupied population. When an indigenous population is occupied by a non-indigenous population, resistance and radicalization becomes a natural occurrence. That same condition existed in the pre-Constitution days of the United States, which resulted in our founding fathers declaring independence from British rule. That intent was made clear in the Declaration of Independence.
The present day conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people is not a religious conflict nor is it a conflict in culture. It is a conflict that arises from the occupation of an indigenous population by an non-indigenous population. The Hebrew people resisted Rome and the Palestinians are resisting a government of non-indigenous people. It is that simple.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/op ... 01812.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Lakhimpur case: Life in jail for India sisters' rape and hanging
Mon, August 14, 2023 at 5:38 AM CDT
The family is mourning the loss of their daughters
The girls' mother was inconsolable when she spoke to the BBC after their deaths last year
A court in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has sentenced two men to life in prison for raping and murdering two Dalit sisters last year.
Two other convicts were found guilty of destroying evidence and were sent to jail for six years each. The convicts are likely to appeal in the high court.
The teenaged girls were found hanging from a tree in Lakhimpur district in September.
The gruesome crime had made headlines and sparked global outrage.
Police had arrested six people - four of them were convicted on Friday while judgements against two minors are pending.
On Friday, a special court that deals with cases of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) convicted two of the four adults of kidnapping, gangraping and murdering the girls.
On Monday, Judge Rahul Singh described the crime as "rarest of the rare" and said that the two convicts' life sentences would "run until their last breath". They have also been ordered to pay 41,000 rupees ($500; £390) each as fine.
The bodies of the two sisters - aged 17 and 15 - were found hanging on 14 September near their home in Tamoli Purva village, just over 200km (124 miles) from the state capital, Lucknow.
Rape and murder of sisters shatters India family
Less than 24 hours after the crime, police had arrested all the six suspects.
Police said the girls had been friends with some of the accused and had "willingly gone" with them on their bike. They said the accused raped and strangled the girls as they were putting pressure on them to get married and later, hanged them from a tree with the help of their associates.
But the girls' family had questioned the investigation and alleged that the sisters had been kidnapped by the accused from outside their home.
The police claim was also contested by families of the accused who said their sons were innocent.
On Friday, after the court convicted four of the adult accused, prosecution lawyer Brajesh Kumar Pandey told the media that the judgement against the two minor accused would come at a later date.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/la ... 08503.html
Mon, August 14, 2023 at 5:38 AM CDT
The family is mourning the loss of their daughters
The girls' mother was inconsolable when she spoke to the BBC after their deaths last year
A court in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has sentenced two men to life in prison for raping and murdering two Dalit sisters last year.
Two other convicts were found guilty of destroying evidence and were sent to jail for six years each. The convicts are likely to appeal in the high court.
The teenaged girls were found hanging from a tree in Lakhimpur district in September.
The gruesome crime had made headlines and sparked global outrage.
Police had arrested six people - four of them were convicted on Friday while judgements against two minors are pending.
On Friday, a special court that deals with cases of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) convicted two of the four adults of kidnapping, gangraping and murdering the girls.
On Monday, Judge Rahul Singh described the crime as "rarest of the rare" and said that the two convicts' life sentences would "run until their last breath". They have also been ordered to pay 41,000 rupees ($500; £390) each as fine.
The bodies of the two sisters - aged 17 and 15 - were found hanging on 14 September near their home in Tamoli Purva village, just over 200km (124 miles) from the state capital, Lucknow.
Rape and murder of sisters shatters India family
Less than 24 hours after the crime, police had arrested all the six suspects.
Police said the girls had been friends with some of the accused and had "willingly gone" with them on their bike. They said the accused raped and strangled the girls as they were putting pressure on them to get married and later, hanged them from a tree with the help of their associates.
But the girls' family had questioned the investigation and alleged that the sisters had been kidnapped by the accused from outside their home.
The police claim was also contested by families of the accused who said their sons were innocent.
On Friday, after the court convicted four of the adult accused, prosecution lawyer Brajesh Kumar Pandey told the media that the judgement against the two minor accused would come at a later date.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/la ... 08503.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
The Telegraph
Saudi retired teacher sentenced to death for criticising ruling family on social media
Edmund Bower
Tue, August 29, 2023 at 8:36 AM CDT
A Saudi court has sentenced a retired teacher to death for criticizing the ruling family in messages to his nine social media followers.
According to Human Rights Watch, 54-year-old Mohammed al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death on July 10 for various offences related to his activity on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. The ruling may be the first death sentence for social media posts.
The charges reportedly levied against the retired teacher include “describing the King or the Crown Prince in a way that undermines religion or justice”, “supporting a terrorist ideology”, and disseminating fake news “with the intention of executing a terrorist crime”.
On Thursday, Mohammed’s brother, Saeed al-Ghamdi, tweeted that his brother’s sentencing may be an attempt “to spite me personally after failed attempts to return me to the country”. Saeed, an Islamic scholar, lives in self-imposed exile in London and is wanted by the Saudi authorities.
“I appeal to anybody who can help to save my brother from this unfair and unjust ruling,” he said.
Saudi Arabia has long faced criticism for its frequent use of the death penalty. In 2022, the kingdom performed 196 confirmed executions, according to Amnesty International, making it the third-most prolific executioner after China and Iran.
‘Silence its critics’
Saudi Arabia has also handed down numerous decades-long sentences for crimes related to social media posts.
Last August, a Leeds University doctoral student was sentenced to 34 years in prison when she returned home to Saudi Arabia for the summer holidays. Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother of two, was accused of “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts”.
Mohammed al-Ghamdi has been held by Saudi security forces since last June when he was arrested outside his house in Mecca. Following his arrest, Human Rights Watch reports that he spent four months in solitary confinement and was denied access to a lawyer for over a year.
His trial was conducted in Saudi Arabia’s controversial Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) that was established in 2008 to deal with a backlog of terrorism cases but has since become notorious for handing heavy sentences to political prisoners.
In 2020, Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director, said: “The Saudi Arabian government exploits the SCC to create a false aura of legality around its abuse of the counter-terror law to silence its critics. Every stage of the SCC’s judicial process is tainted with human rights abuses.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sa ... 614705.htm
Saudi retired teacher sentenced to death for criticising ruling family on social media
Edmund Bower
Tue, August 29, 2023 at 8:36 AM CDT
A Saudi court has sentenced a retired teacher to death for criticizing the ruling family in messages to his nine social media followers.
According to Human Rights Watch, 54-year-old Mohammed al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death on July 10 for various offences related to his activity on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. The ruling may be the first death sentence for social media posts.
The charges reportedly levied against the retired teacher include “describing the King or the Crown Prince in a way that undermines religion or justice”, “supporting a terrorist ideology”, and disseminating fake news “with the intention of executing a terrorist crime”.
On Thursday, Mohammed’s brother, Saeed al-Ghamdi, tweeted that his brother’s sentencing may be an attempt “to spite me personally after failed attempts to return me to the country”. Saeed, an Islamic scholar, lives in self-imposed exile in London and is wanted by the Saudi authorities.
“I appeal to anybody who can help to save my brother from this unfair and unjust ruling,” he said.
Saudi Arabia has long faced criticism for its frequent use of the death penalty. In 2022, the kingdom performed 196 confirmed executions, according to Amnesty International, making it the third-most prolific executioner after China and Iran.
‘Silence its critics’
Saudi Arabia has also handed down numerous decades-long sentences for crimes related to social media posts.
Last August, a Leeds University doctoral student was sentenced to 34 years in prison when she returned home to Saudi Arabia for the summer holidays. Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother of two, was accused of “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts”.
Mohammed al-Ghamdi has been held by Saudi security forces since last June when he was arrested outside his house in Mecca. Following his arrest, Human Rights Watch reports that he spent four months in solitary confinement and was denied access to a lawyer for over a year.
His trial was conducted in Saudi Arabia’s controversial Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) that was established in 2008 to deal with a backlog of terrorism cases but has since become notorious for handing heavy sentences to political prisoners.
In 2020, Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director, said: “The Saudi Arabian government exploits the SCC to create a false aura of legality around its abuse of the counter-terror law to silence its critics. Every stage of the SCC’s judicial process is tainted with human rights abuses.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sa ... 614705.htm
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Yahoo News UK
Gaza 'most dangerous place in the world' to be a woman
Charity ActionAid warns two mothers are killed every hour in the Gaza Strip
Rabina Khan·Contributor
Wed, December 13, 2023 at 9:23 AM CST·
Women and girls in Gaza face alarming levels of brutality with more than three women killed every hour, a charity has warned.
Thousands of women in the besieged enclave have been killed during the recent escalation of violence sparked by Hamas insurgents' brutal assault on 7 October, which itself has prompted the gathering of more than 1,500 testimonies about Hamas fighters committing sexual violence during the attack.
The Hamas-run health ministry puts the toll in Gaza at more than 4,000 women, constituting nearly 70% of the total death toll in the region. The numbers tell a grim story – two mothers lose their lives each hour, and seven women perish every two hours.
Yara, a mother and humanitarian worker displaced to southern Gaza, told ActionAid: "Today, I no longer have hope. I have become more afraid than before. Every day that passes, this fear and terror increases more. I, as a mother, have only two wishes. The first thing I wish is that I die before my children. I don't want to see my children die in front of me.
“The second wish is that I die quickly, so when the missile comes to bomb us, I die quickly and I do not stay under the rubble for 16, 17, 18 hours.” she added.
The crisis extends to maternal health, with about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza risking their lives daily due to the lack of adequate medical care.
Naimah, a midwife at Al-Awda hospital, recounted the experiences of pregnant women in Gaza to ActionAid, including that of one woman whose house was bombed. Despite suffering multiple injuries, the woman was in active labour and urgently taken to the operating room. Both mother and child were lucky to survive.
“This woman, who had suffered physical abuse due to the attacks, will also suffer mental health and psychological repercussions. Food scarcity will heavily affect her milk supply when she’s breastfeeding her baby,” said Naimah.
Riham Jafari, coordinator of advocacy and communication for ActionAid Palestine and a gender specialist said: “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman or girl right now. The number of women and girls being senselessly killed in this violence rises by the hour.”
Hana, a doctor at ActionAid’s partner Al-Awda hospital in the north of Gaza recounts another incident: “One woman's house was bombed, resulting in her needing an emergency C-Section. She lost her newborn, tragically, her husband and the rest of her children were also killed. This woman, who dreamt of a safe family life, is now grappling with mental health issues after losing her newborn and family.”
What is gender-based violence?
The issue of gender violence in warzones is one of major concern to human rights organisations. Sexual violence in conflict zones is a gross violation of human rights, recognised as a war crime as rape as a weapon of war, and a crime against humanity under international law.
The Hamas attack on 7 October, in which more than 1,200 civilians and soldiers in Israel were killed, includes accounts of rape and mutilation to the UN.
Human Rights Watch has warned that, while there is little data on current trends in Gaza, women and girls typically are at increased risk of sexual violence in times of armed conflict.
These critical needs are at risk of going unmet as Gaza already struggles to treat those injured by Israeli airstrikes, women urgently require medical supplies, treatment for injuries and diseases, including psychosocial support.
The United Nations defines violence against women as, ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women.
In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, 87% of women had experienced gender-based violence, while in Yemen, a woman dies in childbirth every two hours. In South Sudan, more than 65% of women face sexual or physical violence, and more than 40% of Nigerian girls marry before 18.
Displacement of women
In Gaza the displacement of 800,000 women, often multiple times, exacerbates the crisis, leading to overcrowded facilities with severe sanitation challenges.
‘We are among the displaced people from Beit Lahia from the north of the Gaza Strip. We have no clothes and no water. We go to a far place to gather water. It is not only the lack of clothes or cold weather, but until now we have slept on the ground. The rain has impacted us,” Lina told ActionAid.
Women and girls, living in these conditions, lack essential hygiene resources, privacy, and face additional hardships during menstruation.
Aya, a displaced mother, voiced her struggles: "As a woman, I’m suffering. I don’t have access to the basic necessities of life. There is no water. I suffered during my period. There was no water available for me to get clean during my period. I had no sanitary pads for my own needs throughout my period.”
Psychological impact
Even before the current war women and girls had experienced human rights violations due to Israel’s blockade and previous offensives, impacting their mental health. Now with the crisis the psychological toll on women and girls in Gaza is severe, ActionAid has said.
“The war is disproportionately affecting women. Women who have lost their children, husbands, relatives and family members will continue having feelings of sadness for years,” ActionAid's Riham Jafari told Yahoo News.
“Women who have children with deep injuries will feel pain and sorrow for them. They will be frustrated as those children could not be treated under the collapse of the health system in Gaza.”
The future
Last Friday the United States vetoed and Britain abstained on the UN resolution at the UN Security Council to pause hostilities.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in response that the US "displayed a callous disregard for civilian suffering” and “brazenly wielded and weaponised its veto to strongarm the UN Security Council”.
ActionAid says that women and girls in Gaza feel the world has abandoned them and the NGO is demanding a permanent ceasefire.
For women like Inaya, a displaced woman from East Rafah, whose home was destroyed by bombing, fled with her family to southern Gaza, will continue to face the challenging conditions of living in a refugee camp.
“Don’t we need to sleep or [water] to drink? Don’t we deserve protection?” she asks.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ga ... 50928.html
Gaza 'most dangerous place in the world' to be a woman
Charity ActionAid warns two mothers are killed every hour in the Gaza Strip
Rabina Khan·Contributor
Wed, December 13, 2023 at 9:23 AM CST·
Women and girls in Gaza face alarming levels of brutality with more than three women killed every hour, a charity has warned.
Thousands of women in the besieged enclave have been killed during the recent escalation of violence sparked by Hamas insurgents' brutal assault on 7 October, which itself has prompted the gathering of more than 1,500 testimonies about Hamas fighters committing sexual violence during the attack.
The Hamas-run health ministry puts the toll in Gaza at more than 4,000 women, constituting nearly 70% of the total death toll in the region. The numbers tell a grim story – two mothers lose their lives each hour, and seven women perish every two hours.
Yara, a mother and humanitarian worker displaced to southern Gaza, told ActionAid: "Today, I no longer have hope. I have become more afraid than before. Every day that passes, this fear and terror increases more. I, as a mother, have only two wishes. The first thing I wish is that I die before my children. I don't want to see my children die in front of me.
“The second wish is that I die quickly, so when the missile comes to bomb us, I die quickly and I do not stay under the rubble for 16, 17, 18 hours.” she added.
The crisis extends to maternal health, with about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza risking their lives daily due to the lack of adequate medical care.
Naimah, a midwife at Al-Awda hospital, recounted the experiences of pregnant women in Gaza to ActionAid, including that of one woman whose house was bombed. Despite suffering multiple injuries, the woman was in active labour and urgently taken to the operating room. Both mother and child were lucky to survive.
“This woman, who had suffered physical abuse due to the attacks, will also suffer mental health and psychological repercussions. Food scarcity will heavily affect her milk supply when she’s breastfeeding her baby,” said Naimah.
Riham Jafari, coordinator of advocacy and communication for ActionAid Palestine and a gender specialist said: “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman or girl right now. The number of women and girls being senselessly killed in this violence rises by the hour.”
Hana, a doctor at ActionAid’s partner Al-Awda hospital in the north of Gaza recounts another incident: “One woman's house was bombed, resulting in her needing an emergency C-Section. She lost her newborn, tragically, her husband and the rest of her children were also killed. This woman, who dreamt of a safe family life, is now grappling with mental health issues after losing her newborn and family.”
What is gender-based violence?
The issue of gender violence in warzones is one of major concern to human rights organisations. Sexual violence in conflict zones is a gross violation of human rights, recognised as a war crime as rape as a weapon of war, and a crime against humanity under international law.
The Hamas attack on 7 October, in which more than 1,200 civilians and soldiers in Israel were killed, includes accounts of rape and mutilation to the UN.
Human Rights Watch has warned that, while there is little data on current trends in Gaza, women and girls typically are at increased risk of sexual violence in times of armed conflict.
These critical needs are at risk of going unmet as Gaza already struggles to treat those injured by Israeli airstrikes, women urgently require medical supplies, treatment for injuries and diseases, including psychosocial support.
The United Nations defines violence against women as, ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women.
In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, 87% of women had experienced gender-based violence, while in Yemen, a woman dies in childbirth every two hours. In South Sudan, more than 65% of women face sexual or physical violence, and more than 40% of Nigerian girls marry before 18.
Displacement of women
In Gaza the displacement of 800,000 women, often multiple times, exacerbates the crisis, leading to overcrowded facilities with severe sanitation challenges.
‘We are among the displaced people from Beit Lahia from the north of the Gaza Strip. We have no clothes and no water. We go to a far place to gather water. It is not only the lack of clothes or cold weather, but until now we have slept on the ground. The rain has impacted us,” Lina told ActionAid.
Women and girls, living in these conditions, lack essential hygiene resources, privacy, and face additional hardships during menstruation.
Aya, a displaced mother, voiced her struggles: "As a woman, I’m suffering. I don’t have access to the basic necessities of life. There is no water. I suffered during my period. There was no water available for me to get clean during my period. I had no sanitary pads for my own needs throughout my period.”
Psychological impact
Even before the current war women and girls had experienced human rights violations due to Israel’s blockade and previous offensives, impacting their mental health. Now with the crisis the psychological toll on women and girls in Gaza is severe, ActionAid has said.
“The war is disproportionately affecting women. Women who have lost their children, husbands, relatives and family members will continue having feelings of sadness for years,” ActionAid's Riham Jafari told Yahoo News.
“Women who have children with deep injuries will feel pain and sorrow for them. They will be frustrated as those children could not be treated under the collapse of the health system in Gaza.”
The future
Last Friday the United States vetoed and Britain abstained on the UN resolution at the UN Security Council to pause hostilities.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in response that the US "displayed a callous disregard for civilian suffering” and “brazenly wielded and weaponised its veto to strongarm the UN Security Council”.
ActionAid says that women and girls in Gaza feel the world has abandoned them and the NGO is demanding a permanent ceasefire.
For women like Inaya, a displaced woman from East Rafah, whose home was destroyed by bombing, fled with her family to southern Gaza, will continue to face the challenging conditions of living in a refugee camp.
“Don’t we need to sleep or [water] to drink? Don’t we deserve protection?” she asks.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ga ... 50928.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
BBC
Woman paraded naked: A familiar headline in India
Geeta Pandey - BBC News, Delhi
Tue, December 26, 2023 at 5:31 PM CST·
Incidents similar to the one in Karnataka have made headlines in recent years
Earlier this month, a woman was stripped and paraded naked in India, sparking outrage. It's a depressingly familiar headline, but legal experts and gender rights activists say the law is still not equipped to deal with such heinous crimes against women..
It was sometime after 1am on 11 December when more than a dozen people barged into Sasikala's [not her real name] house.
The 42-year-old was dragged out, stripped and paraded naked around the village, tied to an electricity pole and beaten for hours.
A resident of Hosa Vantamuri village in Belagavi district in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, she was being punished because her 24-year-old son had eloped with his 18-year-old girlfriend.
The young woman had been betrothed by her family to another man and was to get married the next day. Her furious family wanted to know where the couple were.
The police reached the village around 4am after they received a tip-off and rescued Sasikala and took her to hospital. She's reported to be suffering from severe trauma. Her husband later told a visiting state minister that "my wife and I didn't even know about the relationship".
More than a dozen people have been arrested and a local police officer has been suspended for "dereliction of duty".
The incident made national headlines and authorities took notice. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah called it an "inhuman act" and promised justice to her.
The government also gave her some agricultural land and money, although authorities have acknowledged there could be no compensation for the humiliation she endured.
Karnataka high court Chief Justice Prasanna Varale and Justice MGS Kamal, who summoned the police and initiated a hearing on their own, said they were "shocked" that such an incident could take place in modern India.
But the incident in Belagavi is not really rare and several similar incidents have made headlines in India in recent years.
One such story that sparked global outrage came from the north-eastern state of Manipur in July. A viral video showed two women being dragged and groped by a mob of men before one of them was allegedly gang-raped.
The horrific attack had a political angle - Manipur was gripped by violent ethnic clashes involving the Kuki and Meitei communities.
But reports from other states show such incidents are often rooted in caste or familial conflicts, with women's bodies routinely becoming the battleground.
In August, a 20-year-old pregnant woman was paraded naked in Rajasthan by her husband and in-laws after she reportedly left him for another man. A 23-year-old tribal woman in Gujarat was punished in a similar manner for eloping with another man in July 2021.
In May 2015, five Dalit women were paraded naked and caned by members of a higher caste in Uttar Pradesh after one of their girls eloped with a Dalit boy. In 2014, a 45-year-old woman in Rajasthan was paraded naked on a donkey after being accused of killing her nephew.
These are just some cases that made headlines, but there's a general lack of data on such incidents. Some cases get politicised, with opposition parties raising them to embarrass a state government. But activists say women often do not report these crimes because of fear of insensitive questioning by the police and in courts.
"Cases involving assault of women are always under-reported because of shame. Families don't come forward because it's a matter of honour and the system does not support the survivors or give them a safe space to report these crimes," says lawyer and rights activist Sukriti Chauhan.
In the National Crime Records Bureau database, disrobing is recorded under a broad description called "assault with intent to outrage [a woman's] modesty", which clubs the crime with cases of street harassment, sexual gestures, voyeurism and stalking. Last year, 83,344 such cases were recorded with 85,300 affected women.
Such cases are dealt with under article 354 of the Indian Penal Code and are punishable by a mere three to seven years in jail - which, Ms Chauhan says, is "grossly inadequate".
"It's a mockery of justice. Law works only when it deters. Right now this law is not a deterrent and that undermines women. It needs to be amended to enhance the punishment," she says.
In the Karnataka high court, the justices also noted that the assault in Belagavi was watched by "a crowd of 50-60 villagers", adding that "only one man tried to intervene and he was also beaten up".
Highlighting the need for "collective responsibility" to stop such atrocities, the judges cited a case from the 1830s - when India was governed by the British - pointing out that an entire village was made to pay for a crime.
"All village people should be made responsible... Somebody could have tried to stop that," they said.
Chief Justice Varale also invoked Draupadi from the epic Mahabharat, who's saved by Hindu god Krishna when she's being disrobed, to advise women "to pick up arms as no god will come to protect you".
That advice, Ms Chauhan believes, is not practical.
"We are not Draupadis and there are no weapons to be picked up. Also, the onus cannot be on women. The law has to talk to the wrongdoer, but it's still telling women that they have to find a way to stay safe," she says.
"The message we need to get across is stop fighting your ethnic, caste and family battles on our bodies, they are not your battlefield," she adds.
Maumil Mehraj, a research analyst who works with young people on gender equity, says the reason a woman's body is treated as a battlefield is because it's connected to her - and by extension her family, caste and community's - honour.
"It's always why women disproportionately have to bear the brunt during conflicts," she says.
Such incidents, she says, also have an element of voyeurism because they are seen, photographed and filmed.
In Belagavi, she says, one of those arrested is a minor, indicating that such crimes have been normalised to such an extent that even the next generation has grown up with entrenched gender ideas.
"So will a law be enough to deal with such cases? I think the only solution is bringing up better boys. It's necessary to teach them that connecting a woman's body to her honour is problematic," she says.
"It's a Herculean task, but has to start early. Otherwise this vicious violence against women will continue."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wo ... 53668.html
Woman paraded naked: A familiar headline in India
Geeta Pandey - BBC News, Delhi
Tue, December 26, 2023 at 5:31 PM CST·
Incidents similar to the one in Karnataka have made headlines in recent years
Earlier this month, a woman was stripped and paraded naked in India, sparking outrage. It's a depressingly familiar headline, but legal experts and gender rights activists say the law is still not equipped to deal with such heinous crimes against women..
It was sometime after 1am on 11 December when more than a dozen people barged into Sasikala's [not her real name] house.
The 42-year-old was dragged out, stripped and paraded naked around the village, tied to an electricity pole and beaten for hours.
A resident of Hosa Vantamuri village in Belagavi district in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, she was being punished because her 24-year-old son had eloped with his 18-year-old girlfriend.
The young woman had been betrothed by her family to another man and was to get married the next day. Her furious family wanted to know where the couple were.
The police reached the village around 4am after they received a tip-off and rescued Sasikala and took her to hospital. She's reported to be suffering from severe trauma. Her husband later told a visiting state minister that "my wife and I didn't even know about the relationship".
More than a dozen people have been arrested and a local police officer has been suspended for "dereliction of duty".
The incident made national headlines and authorities took notice. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah called it an "inhuman act" and promised justice to her.
The government also gave her some agricultural land and money, although authorities have acknowledged there could be no compensation for the humiliation she endured.
Karnataka high court Chief Justice Prasanna Varale and Justice MGS Kamal, who summoned the police and initiated a hearing on their own, said they were "shocked" that such an incident could take place in modern India.
But the incident in Belagavi is not really rare and several similar incidents have made headlines in India in recent years.
One such story that sparked global outrage came from the north-eastern state of Manipur in July. A viral video showed two women being dragged and groped by a mob of men before one of them was allegedly gang-raped.
The horrific attack had a political angle - Manipur was gripped by violent ethnic clashes involving the Kuki and Meitei communities.
But reports from other states show such incidents are often rooted in caste or familial conflicts, with women's bodies routinely becoming the battleground.
In August, a 20-year-old pregnant woman was paraded naked in Rajasthan by her husband and in-laws after she reportedly left him for another man. A 23-year-old tribal woman in Gujarat was punished in a similar manner for eloping with another man in July 2021.
In May 2015, five Dalit women were paraded naked and caned by members of a higher caste in Uttar Pradesh after one of their girls eloped with a Dalit boy. In 2014, a 45-year-old woman in Rajasthan was paraded naked on a donkey after being accused of killing her nephew.
These are just some cases that made headlines, but there's a general lack of data on such incidents. Some cases get politicised, with opposition parties raising them to embarrass a state government. But activists say women often do not report these crimes because of fear of insensitive questioning by the police and in courts.
"Cases involving assault of women are always under-reported because of shame. Families don't come forward because it's a matter of honour and the system does not support the survivors or give them a safe space to report these crimes," says lawyer and rights activist Sukriti Chauhan.
In the National Crime Records Bureau database, disrobing is recorded under a broad description called "assault with intent to outrage [a woman's] modesty", which clubs the crime with cases of street harassment, sexual gestures, voyeurism and stalking. Last year, 83,344 such cases were recorded with 85,300 affected women.
Such cases are dealt with under article 354 of the Indian Penal Code and are punishable by a mere three to seven years in jail - which, Ms Chauhan says, is "grossly inadequate".
"It's a mockery of justice. Law works only when it deters. Right now this law is not a deterrent and that undermines women. It needs to be amended to enhance the punishment," she says.
In the Karnataka high court, the justices also noted that the assault in Belagavi was watched by "a crowd of 50-60 villagers", adding that "only one man tried to intervene and he was also beaten up".
Highlighting the need for "collective responsibility" to stop such atrocities, the judges cited a case from the 1830s - when India was governed by the British - pointing out that an entire village was made to pay for a crime.
"All village people should be made responsible... Somebody could have tried to stop that," they said.
Chief Justice Varale also invoked Draupadi from the epic Mahabharat, who's saved by Hindu god Krishna when she's being disrobed, to advise women "to pick up arms as no god will come to protect you".
That advice, Ms Chauhan believes, is not practical.
"We are not Draupadis and there are no weapons to be picked up. Also, the onus cannot be on women. The law has to talk to the wrongdoer, but it's still telling women that they have to find a way to stay safe," she says.
"The message we need to get across is stop fighting your ethnic, caste and family battles on our bodies, they are not your battlefield," she adds.
Maumil Mehraj, a research analyst who works with young people on gender equity, says the reason a woman's body is treated as a battlefield is because it's connected to her - and by extension her family, caste and community's - honour.
"It's always why women disproportionately have to bear the brunt during conflicts," she says.
Such incidents, she says, also have an element of voyeurism because they are seen, photographed and filmed.
In Belagavi, she says, one of those arrested is a minor, indicating that such crimes have been normalised to such an extent that even the next generation has grown up with entrenched gender ideas.
"So will a law be enough to deal with such cases? I think the only solution is bringing up better boys. It's necessary to teach them that connecting a woman's body to her honour is problematic," she says.
"It's a Herculean task, but has to start early. Otherwise this vicious violence against women will continue."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wo ... 53668.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Indian police arrest 5 more after Spanish tourist gang raped
AFP Published March 5, 2024 Updated about 11 hours ago
Indian police have arrested five more men in connection with the gang rape of a Spanish tourist, taking the total detained to eight, local media reported on Tuesday.
The attack on the woman, who was on a motorbike trip with her husband, took place last week in Dumka district in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where the couple was camping.
The Press Trust of India news agency broadcasted footage of five suspects, handcuffed and tied to each other in a line by a rope, in front of seated police officers.
On Monday, three other men appeared in court — also with sacks on their heads — and were later remanded in custody.
“Eight arrests have been made so far in connection with the alleged gang rape of a Spanish woman”, PTI said, citing police officers.
The authorities have handed a cheque of $12,000 to the couple as compensation under a “victim compensation scheme”, broadcaster NDTV reported.
An average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in India in 2022, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. However, large numbers go unreported due to prevailing stigmas around victims and a lack of faith in police investigations.
Convictions remain rare, with cases getting stuck for years in India’s clogged-up criminal justice system.
The notorious gang rape and murder of an Indian student made global headlines in 2012. Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was raped, assaulted and left for dead by five men and a teenager on a bus in New Delhi in December that year.
The horrific crime shone an international spotlight on India’s high levels of sexual violence and sparked weeks of protests, and eventually a change in the law to introduce the death penalty for rape.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1819398/india ... gang-raped
AFP Published March 5, 2024 Updated about 11 hours ago
Indian police have arrested five more men in connection with the gang rape of a Spanish tourist, taking the total detained to eight, local media reported on Tuesday.
The attack on the woman, who was on a motorbike trip with her husband, took place last week in Dumka district in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where the couple was camping.
The Press Trust of India news agency broadcasted footage of five suspects, handcuffed and tied to each other in a line by a rope, in front of seated police officers.
On Monday, three other men appeared in court — also with sacks on their heads — and were later remanded in custody.
“Eight arrests have been made so far in connection with the alleged gang rape of a Spanish woman”, PTI said, citing police officers.
The authorities have handed a cheque of $12,000 to the couple as compensation under a “victim compensation scheme”, broadcaster NDTV reported.
An average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in India in 2022, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. However, large numbers go unreported due to prevailing stigmas around victims and a lack of faith in police investigations.
Convictions remain rare, with cases getting stuck for years in India’s clogged-up criminal justice system.
The notorious gang rape and murder of an Indian student made global headlines in 2012. Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was raped, assaulted and left for dead by five men and a teenager on a bus in New Delhi in December that year.
The horrific crime shone an international spotlight on India’s high levels of sexual violence and sparked weeks of protests, and eventually a change in the law to introduce the death penalty for rape.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1819398/india ... gang-raped
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
The Telegraph
Taliban leader says women will be stoned to death in public
Akhtar Makoii
Mon, March 25, 2024 at 2:52 PM CDT·
The Taliban’s Supreme Leader has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.
“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials.
“But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public,” he declared in his harshest comments since taking over Kabul in August 2021.
“These are all against your democracy but we will continue doing it. We both say we defend human rights – we do it as God’s representative and you as the devil’s.”
Afghanistan’s state TV, now under Taliban control, broadcasts voice messages purporting to be from Akhundzada, who has never been seen in public aside from a few old portraits.
He is believed to be based in southern Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban.
Despite promising a more moderate government, the Taliban quickly returned to harsh public punishments like public executions and floggings, similar to those from their previous rule in the late 1990s.
The United Nations has strongly criticised the Taliban and has called on the country’s rulers to halt such practices.
In his voice message, Akhundzada said that the women’s rights that the international community had been advocating for were against the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia.
“Do women want the rights that Westerners are talking about? They are against Sharia and clerics’ opinions, the clerics who toppled Western democracy,” he said.
“I told the Mujahedin that we tell the Westerners that we fought against you for 20 years and we will fight 20 and even more years against you,” he said, emphasising the need for resilience in opposing women’s rights among Taliban foot soldiers.
“It did not finish [when you left]. It does not mean we would now just sit and drink tea. We will bring Sharia to this land,” he added. “It did finish after we took over Kabul. No, we will now bring Sharia into action.”
Women ‘living in prison’
His remarks have incited outrage among Afghans, with some calling on the international community to increase pressure on the Taliban.
“The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” Tala, a former civil servant, told The Telegraph from the capital Kabul.
“As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future,” she added.
“We, the women, are living in prison,” Tala said, “And the Taliban are making it smaller for us every passing day.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ta ... 43252.html
Taliban leader says women will be stoned to death in public
Akhtar Makoii
Mon, March 25, 2024 at 2:52 PM CDT·
The Taliban’s Supreme Leader has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.
“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials.
“But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public,” he declared in his harshest comments since taking over Kabul in August 2021.
“These are all against your democracy but we will continue doing it. We both say we defend human rights – we do it as God’s representative and you as the devil’s.”
Afghanistan’s state TV, now under Taliban control, broadcasts voice messages purporting to be from Akhundzada, who has never been seen in public aside from a few old portraits.
He is believed to be based in southern Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban.
Despite promising a more moderate government, the Taliban quickly returned to harsh public punishments like public executions and floggings, similar to those from their previous rule in the late 1990s.
The United Nations has strongly criticised the Taliban and has called on the country’s rulers to halt such practices.
In his voice message, Akhundzada said that the women’s rights that the international community had been advocating for were against the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia.
“Do women want the rights that Westerners are talking about? They are against Sharia and clerics’ opinions, the clerics who toppled Western democracy,” he said.
“I told the Mujahedin that we tell the Westerners that we fought against you for 20 years and we will fight 20 and even more years against you,” he said, emphasising the need for resilience in opposing women’s rights among Taliban foot soldiers.
“It did not finish [when you left]. It does not mean we would now just sit and drink tea. We will bring Sharia to this land,” he added. “It did finish after we took over Kabul. No, we will now bring Sharia into action.”
Women ‘living in prison’
His remarks have incited outrage among Afghans, with some calling on the international community to increase pressure on the Taliban.
“The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” Tala, a former civil servant, told The Telegraph from the capital Kabul.
“As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future,” she added.
“We, the women, are living in prison,” Tala said, “And the Taliban are making it smaller for us every passing day.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ta ... 43252.html
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Lahore woman ‘gang-raped’ in front of husband, child
Asif Chaudhry Published July 26, 2024 Updated about 23 hours ago
LAHORE: A woman was allegedly gang-raped by robbers at gunpoint in front of her husband and a three-year-old daughter in Hafizabad district here on Thursday.
The gangsters took the woman to nearby fields and ‘gang-raped’ her in front of her husband and daughter, a horrific crime that caused outrage in the country and abroad.
The reports suggested that the family was going to Chiniot by motorcycle when it was stopped by three robbers near Sukheke.
Instead of helping the victim family, the police officials of the Hafizabad and Nankana Sahib districts reportedly clashed over the ‘dispute of jurisdiction’, blatantly violating the Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs) which were issued in the wake of the Lahore-Sialkot motorway gang-rape incident [2020] to respond to the sexual assault attacks on women.
Hafizabad, Nankana police differ over crime scene jurisdiction
The rape survivor has been shifted to a hospital.
An official said the family was resident of Chiniot district. He said the woman was going back to her home along with her husband and three-year-old daughter after meeting her maternal uncle late on Wednesday.
He said they were intercepted by three robbers at around 11:30pm. The gangsters later fled the scene after committing the heinous crime.
He said as the incident was reported to 15, the Nankana police diverted the call to the Hafizabad district police claiming that it was not their jurisdiction.
The Hafizabad police sent a team to the crime scene and after a brief investigation declared the crime spot the jurisdiction of Nankana police.
During the dispute over jurisdiction, the family remained unattended for an hour or so, the official said, adding that when the matter was brought to the notice of the DPO Hafizabad he directed the police to reach the spot and lodge a case.
The Sukheke police later registered a rape case against the unknown suspects and took into custody a suspected robber, recovering from his custody two pistols.
On Thursday morning, the official said, the police of both districts again entered into the dispute over jurisdiction.
When the Nankana Sahib police rejected the claim that it took place in their area, the Hafizabad police took tehsildar and other relevant staff of the Board of Revenue to the crime scene to establish the jurisdiction. The matter remained under discussion between the police all the day on Thursday.
Hafizabad DPO Faisal Gulzar told Dawn that though the incident took place in Nankana Sahib district, he had ordered to register the FIR in his district’s police station.
“We arrested one of the three criminals who looted the family and raped the woman”, he said adding that during interrogation the arrested suspect told the police that his accomplices fled towards Rawalpindi.
He said a police team dispatched immediately to Rawalpindi was working on the given instructions to trace and arrest other suspects.
The DPO claimed that the woman was raped by one criminal.
Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2024
vhttps://www.dawn.com/news/1848007/lahore-woman- ... band-child
WHAT A SHAME, IT HAPPENED IN A MUSLIM COUNTRY, STUPID RAPE LAWS. CULPRITS SHOULD BE HANGED.
Asif Chaudhry Published July 26, 2024 Updated about 23 hours ago
LAHORE: A woman was allegedly gang-raped by robbers at gunpoint in front of her husband and a three-year-old daughter in Hafizabad district here on Thursday.
The gangsters took the woman to nearby fields and ‘gang-raped’ her in front of her husband and daughter, a horrific crime that caused outrage in the country and abroad.
The reports suggested that the family was going to Chiniot by motorcycle when it was stopped by three robbers near Sukheke.
Instead of helping the victim family, the police officials of the Hafizabad and Nankana Sahib districts reportedly clashed over the ‘dispute of jurisdiction’, blatantly violating the Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs) which were issued in the wake of the Lahore-Sialkot motorway gang-rape incident [2020] to respond to the sexual assault attacks on women.
Hafizabad, Nankana police differ over crime scene jurisdiction
The rape survivor has been shifted to a hospital.
An official said the family was resident of Chiniot district. He said the woman was going back to her home along with her husband and three-year-old daughter after meeting her maternal uncle late on Wednesday.
He said they were intercepted by three robbers at around 11:30pm. The gangsters later fled the scene after committing the heinous crime.
He said as the incident was reported to 15, the Nankana police diverted the call to the Hafizabad district police claiming that it was not their jurisdiction.
The Hafizabad police sent a team to the crime scene and after a brief investigation declared the crime spot the jurisdiction of Nankana police.
During the dispute over jurisdiction, the family remained unattended for an hour or so, the official said, adding that when the matter was brought to the notice of the DPO Hafizabad he directed the police to reach the spot and lodge a case.
The Sukheke police later registered a rape case against the unknown suspects and took into custody a suspected robber, recovering from his custody two pistols.
On Thursday morning, the official said, the police of both districts again entered into the dispute over jurisdiction.
When the Nankana Sahib police rejected the claim that it took place in their area, the Hafizabad police took tehsildar and other relevant staff of the Board of Revenue to the crime scene to establish the jurisdiction. The matter remained under discussion between the police all the day on Thursday.
Hafizabad DPO Faisal Gulzar told Dawn that though the incident took place in Nankana Sahib district, he had ordered to register the FIR in his district’s police station.
“We arrested one of the three criminals who looted the family and raped the woman”, he said adding that during interrogation the arrested suspect told the police that his accomplices fled towards Rawalpindi.
He said a police team dispatched immediately to Rawalpindi was working on the given instructions to trace and arrest other suspects.
The DPO claimed that the woman was raped by one criminal.
Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2024
vhttps://www.dawn.com/news/1848007/lahore-woman- ... band-child
WHAT A SHAME, IT HAPPENED IN A MUSLIM COUNTRY, STUPID RAPE LAWS. CULPRITS SHOULD BE HANGED.
Re: Cruel Acts Against Humanity
Protests sweep the country as Kurram toll rises to 43
Javed Hussain Published November 23, 2024 Updated 31 minutes ago
Services suspended; schools, markets remain shut across Parachinar
• Senior official describes situation in region as ‘extremely tense’
• Protesters slam govt inability to protect citizens
KURRAM: The death toll from Thursday’s attack on passenger vehicles in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kurram district area rose to 43, authorities said on Friday as they imposed a curfew and suspended mobile service in the remote mountainous district.
Businesses, educational institutions and markets remained closed across Parachinar and surrounding areas in Kurram, a district near the Afghanistan border with a history of sectarian violence.
Thousands of people took to the streets in various cities on Friday.
The convoy of around 200 vehicles, carrying Shia passengers between Peshawar and Parachinar, came under heavy gunfire in the densely populated Bagan town.
According to witnesses, the vehicles were ambushed from four sides. Muhammad, a 14-year-old survivor, told Dawn that the assault lasted around 30 minutes.
Authorities said that the victims included seven women and three children, with 16 others injured — 11 of whom are in critical condition.
Sajid Kazmi, a leader of Majlis-i-Wahdat-i-Muslimeen (MWM), condemned the attack, accusing law enforcement agencies of negligence. He alleged that despite the convoy being escorted by police from Thal to Alizai, the forces failed to protect passengers. Mr Kazmi demanded the formation of a joint investigation team (JIT) to investigate the massacre.
Kurram Deputy Commissioner Javedullah Mehsud confirmed the death toll, adding that efforts were underway to restore normalcy. He told Dawn that a grand jirga would be convened to find a viable solution to the unrest.
The attack has sparked outrage across the district, with demonstrations held in various locations, including outside the Parachinar Press Club. Thousands of people participated in a sit-in in Parachinar, where protesters criticised the government’s failure to protect civilians.
Funerals for the victims, including journalist Janan Hussain, a member of the Parachinar Press Club, were held in their respective villages before Friday prayers. Mr Hussain had recently returned from Malaysia.
An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AFP news agency that mobile signals across the district had been shut down, describing the situation as “extremely tense”.
“A curfew has been imposed on the main road connecting Upper and Lower Kurram, and the bazaar remains completely closed, with all traffic suspended,” the official said. **After the funerals, the youth gathered, chanted slogans against the government and marched toward a nearby security checkpoint, resident Muhammad Ali told the news agency.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that “some broke CCTV cameras at the checkpoint… burned tyres and caused damage to property”, before the situation de-escalated.
Mourners pray for victims of a gun attack on passenger vehicles in KP’s Kurram District that killed more than 40, outside the Parachinar Press Club on November 22. — via author
Several hundred people also demonstrated in Lahore, according to AFP.
“We are tired of counting the bodies. How long will this bloodshed continue?” Khanum Nida Jafri, a 50-year-old religious scholar protesting, said. “We are demanding peace for our children and women. Are we asking too much?”
Hundreds also demonstrated in Karachi.
Sectarian violence
Thursday’s ambush is the latest in a series of sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shia tribes in Kurram. Previous clashes in July and September claimed dozens of lives and were resolved only after tribal councils brokered ceasefires.
The latest violence drew condemnation from officials and human rights groups. “The frequency of such incidents confirms the failure of the federal and provincial governments to protect the security of ordinary citizens,” the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in a statement.
“We demand immediate and decisive steps from both governments to permanently break this cycle of violence,” it said.
‘She died in my arms’
Danish Turi, a survivor of the deadly ambush, described the attack as “horrifying”. He witnessed a vehicle ahead of his being struck by a rocket launcher, leaving the passengers and the vehicle in ruins, according to a BBC Urdu report.
Mr Turi, the chairman of Parachinar Youth Council, recounted the chilling moments when gunfire erupted on the road connecting Peshawar to Parachinar. Travelling in a passenger coach with mostly women onboard, he was seated in the front when the attackers struck.
“When we reached the Mandori area, the convoy from Peshawar to Parachinar arrived, and within moments, heavy firing started,” Mr Turi recalled, according to the report.
He and several other passengers sought refuge in a nearby stream surrounded by dense trees. “I was carrying an eight-year-old girl, trying to move her to safety when a bullet hit her. She died in my arms.”
Mr Turi said the “vehicle in front of us, a Fielder car, was hit by a rocket, causing a massive explosion. We were terrified, thinking any moment could be our last.”
He helped evacuate around 10 to 12 women to safety. “But I couldn’t save the innocent girl who passed away in my arms.”
Journalist’s life cut short
The family of Janan Hussain, a journalist from Parachinar who was among the victims, went through the anguish of searching for him throughout the day, only to receive his body late at night.
Mr Hussain had recently returned from a trip to Malaysia. Known for his charitable work with his organisation, Mr Hussain was also working on community-focused journalism.
His cousin, Rizwan Hussain, shared how Janan had informed his wife during the journey that he was on his way home. “We were hopeful he was safe, but then his body arrived at 11pm, plunging the family into grief.”
Ali Afzal, a fellow journalist, recalled that Janan Hussain “often talked about how far the world has progressed while we remain entangled in conflicts”.
Mr Afzal told BBC Urdu that Janan had sent him a video from Malaysia with beautiful views saying that people lived there “like they were in a paradise”. “We will get heaven only after death,” Janan said in the video.
The attack also claimed the life of Gulfam Hussain, a taxi driver who had travelled to Peshawar to meet acquaintances. A father of five young children, Mr Hussain had planned to return to Parachinar with the convoy.
“We learned in the evening that Gulfam was among those injured in the attack. He later succumbed to his wounds,” said his uncle, Ali Ghulam.
With input from agencies
Published in Dawn, November 23rd, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1874164/prote ... ises-to-43
Javed Hussain Published November 23, 2024 Updated 31 minutes ago
Services suspended; schools, markets remain shut across Parachinar
• Senior official describes situation in region as ‘extremely tense’
• Protesters slam govt inability to protect citizens
KURRAM: The death toll from Thursday’s attack on passenger vehicles in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kurram district area rose to 43, authorities said on Friday as they imposed a curfew and suspended mobile service in the remote mountainous district.
Businesses, educational institutions and markets remained closed across Parachinar and surrounding areas in Kurram, a district near the Afghanistan border with a history of sectarian violence.
Thousands of people took to the streets in various cities on Friday.
The convoy of around 200 vehicles, carrying Shia passengers between Peshawar and Parachinar, came under heavy gunfire in the densely populated Bagan town.
According to witnesses, the vehicles were ambushed from four sides. Muhammad, a 14-year-old survivor, told Dawn that the assault lasted around 30 minutes.
Authorities said that the victims included seven women and three children, with 16 others injured — 11 of whom are in critical condition.
Sajid Kazmi, a leader of Majlis-i-Wahdat-i-Muslimeen (MWM), condemned the attack, accusing law enforcement agencies of negligence. He alleged that despite the convoy being escorted by police from Thal to Alizai, the forces failed to protect passengers. Mr Kazmi demanded the formation of a joint investigation team (JIT) to investigate the massacre.
Kurram Deputy Commissioner Javedullah Mehsud confirmed the death toll, adding that efforts were underway to restore normalcy. He told Dawn that a grand jirga would be convened to find a viable solution to the unrest.
The attack has sparked outrage across the district, with demonstrations held in various locations, including outside the Parachinar Press Club. Thousands of people participated in a sit-in in Parachinar, where protesters criticised the government’s failure to protect civilians.
Funerals for the victims, including journalist Janan Hussain, a member of the Parachinar Press Club, were held in their respective villages before Friday prayers. Mr Hussain had recently returned from Malaysia.
An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AFP news agency that mobile signals across the district had been shut down, describing the situation as “extremely tense”.
“A curfew has been imposed on the main road connecting Upper and Lower Kurram, and the bazaar remains completely closed, with all traffic suspended,” the official said. **After the funerals, the youth gathered, chanted slogans against the government and marched toward a nearby security checkpoint, resident Muhammad Ali told the news agency.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that “some broke CCTV cameras at the checkpoint… burned tyres and caused damage to property”, before the situation de-escalated.
Mourners pray for victims of a gun attack on passenger vehicles in KP’s Kurram District that killed more than 40, outside the Parachinar Press Club on November 22. — via author
Several hundred people also demonstrated in Lahore, according to AFP.
“We are tired of counting the bodies. How long will this bloodshed continue?” Khanum Nida Jafri, a 50-year-old religious scholar protesting, said. “We are demanding peace for our children and women. Are we asking too much?”
Hundreds also demonstrated in Karachi.
Sectarian violence
Thursday’s ambush is the latest in a series of sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shia tribes in Kurram. Previous clashes in July and September claimed dozens of lives and were resolved only after tribal councils brokered ceasefires.
The latest violence drew condemnation from officials and human rights groups. “The frequency of such incidents confirms the failure of the federal and provincial governments to protect the security of ordinary citizens,” the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in a statement.
“We demand immediate and decisive steps from both governments to permanently break this cycle of violence,” it said.
‘She died in my arms’
Danish Turi, a survivor of the deadly ambush, described the attack as “horrifying”. He witnessed a vehicle ahead of his being struck by a rocket launcher, leaving the passengers and the vehicle in ruins, according to a BBC Urdu report.
Mr Turi, the chairman of Parachinar Youth Council, recounted the chilling moments when gunfire erupted on the road connecting Peshawar to Parachinar. Travelling in a passenger coach with mostly women onboard, he was seated in the front when the attackers struck.
“When we reached the Mandori area, the convoy from Peshawar to Parachinar arrived, and within moments, heavy firing started,” Mr Turi recalled, according to the report.
He and several other passengers sought refuge in a nearby stream surrounded by dense trees. “I was carrying an eight-year-old girl, trying to move her to safety when a bullet hit her. She died in my arms.”
Mr Turi said the “vehicle in front of us, a Fielder car, was hit by a rocket, causing a massive explosion. We were terrified, thinking any moment could be our last.”
He helped evacuate around 10 to 12 women to safety. “But I couldn’t save the innocent girl who passed away in my arms.”
Journalist’s life cut short
The family of Janan Hussain, a journalist from Parachinar who was among the victims, went through the anguish of searching for him throughout the day, only to receive his body late at night.
Mr Hussain had recently returned from a trip to Malaysia. Known for his charitable work with his organisation, Mr Hussain was also working on community-focused journalism.
His cousin, Rizwan Hussain, shared how Janan had informed his wife during the journey that he was on his way home. “We were hopeful he was safe, but then his body arrived at 11pm, plunging the family into grief.”
Ali Afzal, a fellow journalist, recalled that Janan Hussain “often talked about how far the world has progressed while we remain entangled in conflicts”.
Mr Afzal told BBC Urdu that Janan had sent him a video from Malaysia with beautiful views saying that people lived there “like they were in a paradise”. “We will get heaven only after death,” Janan said in the video.
The attack also claimed the life of Gulfam Hussain, a taxi driver who had travelled to Peshawar to meet acquaintances. A father of five young children, Mr Hussain had planned to return to Parachinar with the convoy.
“We learned in the evening that Gulfam was among those injured in the attack. He later succumbed to his wounds,” said his uncle, Ali Ghulam.
With input from agencies
Published in Dawn, November 23rd, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1874164/prote ... ises-to-43