German police have detained an Iranian national on suspicion of planning a terror attack, authorities in the country said Sunday.
Police in the western city of Munster said the 32-year-old man is believed to have procured unspecified amounts of the toxins cyanide and ricin in preparation for an “Islamist-motivated attack.”
The suspect was detained following an investigation by the North Rhine-Westphalia Central Office for the Prosecution of Terrorism, a unit of the Düsseldorf Public Prosecutor’s Office, according to police.
Police retrieved materials during a search of the suspect’s home in the city of Castrop-Rauxel and an investigation is ongoing, police said.
Another person is also being held in connection with the case, police said, without providing more details.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian missiles hit apartment buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, killing at least seven people, with at least five others missing, in a region that Moscow has illegally annexed, a local official said.
Two strikes damaged more than 40 buildings hours after Ukraine’s president announced that his military had retaken three more villages in another of the four regions annexed by Russia, Moscow’s latest battlefield reversal.
The Zaporizhzhia regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, who provided the casualty figure, said more than 20 people were rescued from the multistory apartment buildings. Rescuers who earlier took a 3-year-old girl to a hospital continued to search the rubble early Friday. Starukh wrote on Telegram that Russian forces used S-300 missiles in the attacks.
Russia has been reported to have converted the S-300 from its original use as a long-range antiaircraft weapon into a missile for ground attacks because of a shortage of other, more suitable weapons.
“Absolute meanness. Absolute evil,” Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskky said of the attacks, in a video speech to the inaugural summit of the European Political Community in Prague. “There have already been thousands of manifestations of such evil. Unfortunately, there may be thousands more.”
Zaporizhzhia is one of the four regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed as Russian territory in violation of international laws. The region is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, announced Thursday after meeting with Zelenskyy in Kyiv that the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog will increase the number of inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia plant from two to four.
Grossi talked with Ukrainian officials — and later will confer in Moscow with Russian officials — efforts to set up a protection zone around the nuclear power station. Grossi said mines appear to have been planted around the perimeter of the plant, which has been damaged during the war and caused worries of a possible radiation disaster. Zelenskyy said Russia has stationed as many as 500 fighters at the plant.
Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the six-reactor facility, a move Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called a criminal act that was “null and void.”
Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant, whose last operating reactor was shut down Sept. 11 because of frequent outages of external power needed to run critical safety systems. Transmission lines to the plant have been repeatedly shelled, and Grossi on Thursday reported shelling in an industrial area close to the plant’s access road.
Outside the battlefront, Russian authorities detained several hundred Ukrainians trying to flee Russian-occupied areas Wednesday near the Russian-Estonian border, according to Ukrainian Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets. Citing the Estonian Ministry of Internal Affairs, he wrote on Facebook that Russian forces took the Ukrainians on trucks to an unknown destination.
Most of the detained Ukrainians had fled through Russia and Crimea and were seeking to enter the European Union — Estonia is a member state — or find a way to return home, Lubinets wrote.
Russian has forced thousands of Ukrainians into “filtration camps” to determine their loyalties. Zelenskyy said Thursday more than 1.6 million Ukrainians have been deported to Russia.
The precise borders of the areas in Ukraine that Moscow is claiming remain unclear. Putin has vowed to defend Russia’s territory — including the annexed Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine — with any means at his military’s disposal, including nuclear weapons.
Ukrainian forces are seizing back villages in Kherson in humiliating battlefield defeats for Russian forces that have badly dented the image of a powerful Russian military. Ukrainian officials said Thursday they have retaken 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of territory, including 29 settlements, in the Kherson region since Oct. 1.
Ukraine also was pressing a counteroffensive in the Donetsk region, which Moscow-backed separatists have partially controlled since 2014 but which remains contested despite Putin’s proclaimed annexation.
In battered Chasiv Yar, a city in the Donetsk region 7 miles (12 kilometers) from heavy fighting, the human impact became clear as retirees waited to collect their pension checks at a post office.
“We are hoping for victory of the Ukrainian army,” Vera Ivanovna, 81, a retired English and German teacher, said as artillery booms echoed. “We lived in independent Ukraine as you are living in America. We also want to live how you are living.”
At least two Russian strikes have hit Chasiv Yar in recent days, with one person reportedly buried under the rubble of a dormitory. More than 40 people were killed in July when Russian rockets struck a residential building.
Russia said it had seized the Donetsk region village of Zaitsevo. The governor of the neighboring Luhansk region said Ukrainian forces had recaptured the village of Hrekivka. Neither battlefield report could be independently confirmed.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, sent its international development chief to Kyiv on Thursday, the highest-ranking American official to visit Ukraine since Russia illegally annexed the four regions. The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, met with government officials and residents and said the U.S. would provide an additional $55 million to repair heating pipes and other equipment.
USAID said the United States had delivered $9.89 billion in aid to Ukraine since February. A spending bill that U.S. President Joe Biden signed last week promises another $12.3 billion for Ukraine’s military and public services needs.
“This war will be won on the battlefield, but it is also being won in Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to strengthen its democracy and its economy,” Power told reporters at Kyiv’s train station.
She said Ukraine’s success as a democratic country with a modern economy tackling corruption incensed Putin.
The European Union on Thursday froze the assets of an additional 37 people and entities tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine, bringing the total of EU blacklist targets to 1,351. The newly sanctioned included officials involved in last week’s illegal Russian annexations and sham referendums. The latest sanctions also widen trade bans against Russia and prepare for a price cap on Russian oil.
At the United Nations in New York, Russia called for a secret ballot next week on a Western-backed resolution that would condemn Russia’s annexation of the four Ukrainian regions and demand that Moscow reverse its actions. Russia apparently hopes to get more support from the 193 nations in the General Assembly if their votes aren’t made public.
Russia vetoed a legally binding Security Council resolution on Sept. 30 to condemn annexation referendums in the four Ukrainian regions as illegal. The General Assembly’s resolutions aren’t legally binding.
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Associated Press writers Hanna Arhirova in Ukraine and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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MOSCOW/TOKYO, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Russia’s FSB security agency said on Monday it had detained a Japanese consul in Russia’s Pacific port city of Vladivostok for alleged espionage and ordered him to leave the country, Russian news agencies said.
The consul was released after a few hours of detention by the Russian agency, Japan’s Kyodo news reported on Tuesday, citing government sources.
The FSB said the consul was declared persona non grata after he was caught “red-handed” receiving secret information on the effects of Western sanctions on the economic situation in Russia’s far east.
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It said the classified information, which also concerned Russia’s cooperation with an unnamed Asia-Pacific country, had been obtained in return for a “monetary reward”.
Russia has protested to Japan, the agencies quoted the FSB as saying.
Japan’s Embassy in Russia lodged a severe protest about the detention to Moscow’s foreign ministry, saying “it was a clear violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations” and the order to leave the country was “unreasonable”, according to Kyodo.
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Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Nick Macfie and Gerry Doyle
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Vicky Bowman was taken into custody along with her husband, Myanmar national Htein Lin, on Wednesday night, according to local media outlets and a person in Yangon with knowledge of the situation.
Myanmar’s military government has not announced the detentions. However, local news outlets The Irrawaddy and Myanmar Now and the international news agency Reuters all reported Bowman could be charged under the country’s Immigration Act.
The Irrawaddy reported Bowman and Htein Lin are being held in Yangon’s Insein Prison.
A UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said on Thursday the British government is “concerned” by the arrest of a “British woman” in Myanmar.
“We are in contact with the local authorities and are providing consular assistance,” the spokesperson said.
Bowman served as the UK’s top diplomat in Myanmar from 2002 to 2006 and has since remained in the country as the founder of the non-government organisation Myanmar Center for Responsible Business.
On Wednesday the UK announced a fresh round of sanctions targeting businesses linked to Myanmar’s junta, which took power in a bloody coup in February 2021.
On Thursday the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said the measures were being taken “to target the military’s access to arms and revenue.”
Among the firms on the sanctions list are the Star Sapphire Group of Companies, International Gateways Group of Companies and Sky One Construction Company.
The UK government highlighted that the sanctions were being taken exactly five years after a series of brutal attacks carried out by the Myanmar military on Rohingya communities living in the country’s Rakhine state.
The Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim group in Myanmar’s majority Buddhist state, have suffered decades of persecution.
The UK government also announced its intention to intervene in a legal case that will determine whether Myanmar breached its obligations under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention regarding the military’s acts against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017.
“Our decision to intervene in The Gambia v. Myanmar case and a further round of sanctions sends a strong signal of our continued support to seek accountability for the atrocities in 2017 and also restrict the military junta’s access to finance and the supply of arms,” UK Minister for Asia Amanda Milling said.
Milling reiterated the UK’s condemnation of “the Myanmar Armed Forces’ horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing” five years on from the campaign’s launch.
KYIV, Ukraine—Russia on Tuesday intensified its major offensive to take a chemical plant that has become the last bastion for Ukrainian forces in the strategic eastern city of Severodonetsk, as Ukrainian authorities called for more military aid and detained two of its own officials on suspicion they spied for Russia.
Serhiy Haidai,
the Ukrainian governor of the Luhansk region, said all regional towns that aren’t under Russia’s control are being shelled by its forces as Moscow mounts relentless artillery barrages in an attempt to complete its capture of Donbas.
President
Volodymyr Zelensky
late on Monday again appealed to the international community to help ensure that Ukraine’s fight against Russian forces doesn’t fade from global attention, saying he would do everything possible to achieve that.
A Ukrainian soldier on the front line in Shevchenkove, a village east of Kyiv.
Photo:
Guillaume Binet / MYOP for The Wall Street Journal
The last check point before the village of Pryshyb, Ukraine. Russian forces hold another village nearby.
Photo:
Guillaume Binet / MYOP for The Wall Street Journal
The conflict has morphed into a war of attrition, with Russia deploying heavy artillery to outgun Ukrainian forces. Mr. Zelensky has been pleading with Western leaders to send Kyiv more supplies of howitzers and other heavy weapons to counter the barrage.
“This is an evil that can only be defeated on the battlefield,” he said of Russia’s invasion. “We are defending Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. Throughout this whole region, the toughest, most serious battles are taking place.”
Ukraine has been counting on Central European countries that were subjugated by Moscow during the Cold War to donate Soviet-era equipment that Ukrainians have the training and spare parts to maintain. Slovakia has sent Soviet-type helicopter gunships, grad rockets, howitzers and an S-300 air-defense system.
But most of those countries are only willing to do so if they can buy replacement systems from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s allies such as Germany, France or the U.S. Germany’s limited supply of equipment and production bottlenecks have left it unable to provide those countries with all the weaponry they need to keep giving Ukraine more.
On Tuesday, Slovakia said a plan to donate a tank battalion to Ukraine fell through after Germany was unable to supply the tanks Slovakia needed.
Under the plan, Slovakia would have given 30 T-72 Soviet-type tanks to Ukraine, enough for a tank battalion, the Slovak Defense Ministry’s spokeswoman said. For months, the Central European government had been in talks with Berlin to replace those tanks with modern German Leopard tanks. But Germany, Slovakia said, now says it can only offer Slovakia 15 Leopard main battle tanks.
“The Slovak Ministry of Defense is intensely seeking ways to aid Ukraine, however this is being done on the principle of solidarity, ensuring that our solutions are advantageous for all sides,” said Slovak Defense Ministry communications director Martina Kakaščíková.
A spokesman for the German government didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the tanks. Ukrainian Defence Minister
Oleksiy Reznikov
thanked the German government for sending the long-range howitzers, which he said would be put to full use in the battlefield. The shipment was made, a German official said, after Ukrainian troops had completed training for the systems in Germany.
In occupied regions of Ukraine, Russia is handing out passports, teaching its version of history, and sending trucks blasting the Kremlin’s propaganda. But convincing people to support the invader can be complicated. WSJ’s Thomas Grove reports. Photo: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the SBU, has meanwhile moved to clamp down on people it suspects of working on Russia’s behalf in occupied areas and in government structures elsewhere.
The SBU said on Tuesday that it had detained two men suspected of spying for Russia, one working as a deputy in the cabinet of ministers and the other as director of one of the departments in the country’s chamber of commerce and industry.
In a video posted to Telegram, SBU spokesman Artem Dekhtyarenko said the officials had been passing classified information to Russia, ranging from details about Ukraine’s defense capabilities to the personal data of Ukrainian law-enforcement personnel. He said Russian handlers paid sums of up to $15,000 for an assignment to the two men. Russia didn’t immediately comment on the allegations.
The two officials, whose names weren’t given in the video, were shown saying they had been recruited by Russia’s Federal Security Service. It couldn’t be determined if they were speaking under duress or if they had legal representation.
Also on Tuesday, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova met with U.S. Attorney General
Merrick Garland
in Ukraine to discuss U.S. and international efforts to help Ukraine identify, apprehend and prosecute individuals involved in war crimes and other atrocities. Ukrainian prosecutors have said they are investigating more than 10,700 potential war crimes involving more than 600 suspects.
Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated to reporters on Tuesday that he couldn’t guarantee that two American military veterans feared captured in Ukraine wouldn’t face the death penalty. Alexander Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, both from Alabama, volunteered to serve alongside Ukrainian forces.
“We can’t rule anything out, because this is a decision for the court,” Mr. Peskov said.
A refugee center in Odessa, Ukraine, which is supporting hundreds of people fleeing the war.
Photo:
Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal
Ukrainian student sailors near the opera house in Odessa, Ukraine.
Photo:
Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal
John Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, said Tuesday that the government was still trying to learn more about the two men and criticized the Russian threat.
“It’s appalling that a public official in Russia would even suggest the death penalty for the two American citizens,” Mr. Kirby said. “We’ve got more homework here to do. But I do think it’s important for us to make it clear: Truly appalling for even the suggestion” that the men could be put to death.
Authorities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which broke away from Ukraine with Russian arms and financing in 2014, recently sentenced to death three foreigners—two from the U.K. and one from Morocco—after they were captured fighting alongside Ukrainian forces against Russian-backed troops near Mariupol.
Russia has accused Ukraine of attacking strategic objects on territory under its control.
Sergei Aksyonov,
the Russian-appointed head of the Crimean Peninsula that was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, wrote on Telegram on Monday that Ukrainian forces had struck drilling platforms owned by gas company Chernomorneftegaz, injuring three people.
The apparent Ukrainian attack on the gas rigs has prompted a search-and-rescue operation in Crimea and is expected to cost Russian authorities billions of dollars in damage and lost revenue. Just hours after Mr. Aksyonov reported the attack, Russia launched a series of rockets toward Odessa in Ukraine’s south, scrambling the city’s air defenses and causing some residents to flee to bomb shelters in fear of the largest assault on the city in recent weeks.
Russian President
Vladimir Putin
on Tuesday told military-school graduates that Russian forces had started receiving S-500 air and missile defense systems. The Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile will be ready for combat at the end of the year, said Mr. Putin. He oversaw the first test-launch of the RS-28 Sarmat system in April.
Russia would “continue to develop and strengthen our armed forces, taking into account potential military threats and risks based on the lessons of contemporary armed conflicts,” Mr. Putin said.
Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov on Monday raised $103.5 million for Ukrainian child refugees after auctioning off the Nobel Peace Prize he won last year. “I was hoping that there was going to be an enormous amount of solidarity,” Mr. Muratov said after the sale, which shattered the record haul for a Nobel medal. “But I was not expecting this to be such a huge amount.”
Mr. Muratov is a co-founder and editor in chief of the now-closed independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, an outlet that had for years published investigations on state corruption and the role of Russia’s military on the world stage.
Meanwhile, the continued blockage of Ukraine’s sea ports is intensifying an export crisis that has left millions of metric tons of grain stranded in the country and unable to reach countries that desperately need it. Kyiv has sought to move out the grain by land, but the amount that can be transported by rail and truck pales in comparison with that shipped each year through southern ports.
Also in his address late Monday, Mr. Zelensky said capacity at the Krakovets-Korczowa checkpoint on the border with Poland had been increased by 50%, a move he expects to facilitate the flow of some grain out of the country.
“Modernization awaits other checkpoints on the borders with the European Union,” Mr. Zelensky said.
A Ukrainian soldier in a roadside bunker near the village of Bashtanka.
Photo:
Guillaume Binet/MYOP for The Wall Street Journal
—Bojan Pancevski contributed to this article.
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com
Tokayev told Putin the situation in his country was “progressing on the way to stabilization” and expressed his “appreciation” for the deployment of a Russia-led military bloc to Kazakhstan to try and control violence on the streets, the Kremlin said in a statement on Saturday.
Meanwhile, former head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee Karim Massimov and some other unnamed officials have been detained on suspicion of treason, the country’s National Security Committee announced, according to state media Khabar 24 on Saturday.
Violent protests in Kazakhstan in recent days have seen the government resign and the declaration of a state of emergency as troops from a Russia-led military alliance head to the Central Asian country to help quell the unrest. Dozens have been killed, hundreds injured and thousands of protesters detained.
It’s the biggest challenge yet to autocratic Tokayev’s rule, with initial public anger over a spike in fuel prices expanding to wider discontent with the government over corruption, living standards, poverty and unemployment in the oil-rich, former Soviet nation, human rights organizations report.
On January 5, protesters reportedly stormed the airport in the country’s biggest city, Almaty, forcibly entered government buildings, and set fire to the city’s main administration office, local media reported. There were also reports of deadly clashes with police and military, a nationwide internet blackout and buildings damaged in three major cities.
The violence continued into the following day, with dozens of protesters killed and hundreds injured, according to an Almaty police official. Security forces reportedly fired on protesters and explosions were heard close to Republic Square in Almaty, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
In a read-out of Tokayev’s call with Putin on Saturday, Tokayev reportedly told Putin that the situation in the country is stabilizing but “hotbeds of terrorist attacks persist. Therefore, the fight against terrorism will continue with all decisiveness.”
‘Kill without warning’
Tokayev declared January 10 a day of national mourning for the victims of violent protests, his press office announced Saturday.
As of January 7, a total of 18 law enforcement personnel had been killed in the violence and 748 injured, state television Khabar 24 reported, quoting the Interior Ministry. According to the state broadcaster, 26 “armed criminals” have been killed and 18 injured, and more than 3,000 protesters have been detained during unrest across the country.
The Kazakh president “signed an order declaring January 10, a day of national mourning in Kazakhstan in connection with the human victims as a result of the terrorist acts in the country,” the press office said on Twitter.
It comes after the leader said Friday hehad ordered security forces to “kill without warning” to crush the violent protests that have paralyzed the former Soviet republic.
In a defiant public address, Tokayev claimed the unrest, which began earlier this week as protests against rising fuel prices, had been masterminded by well-trained “terrorist bandits” from both inside and outside the country. CNN has not corroborated any claims made by the government or president defending their use of violence and excessive force against the protesters.
Flurry of rumors
Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev remains in the country, his press secretary said on Twitter Saturday following rumors that he had left amid the violence.
His press secretary Aidos Ukibai said the longtime leader remains in the capital city, Nursultan, without offering evidence.
“The leader of the nation remains in the capital of Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan city. We ask you not to disseminate false information. Leader of the nation is holding consultations and is direct line with the President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev,” Ukibai said.
Ukibai said Nazarbayev had held several phone calls with the leaders of countries friendly to Kazakhstan.
“The leader of the nation calls to unite around President of Kazakhstan to overcome current challenges and to ensure safety in the country,” he added.
It comes after Tokayev said in a televised address on Wednesday that he had taken over from Nazarbayev as head of the country’s Security Council.
Earlier this week a statue of Nazarbayev was torn down by protesters in the town of Taldykorgan, in the country’s southeast Almaty region.
Prime Minister Askar Mamin resigned amid the protests. Alikhan Smailov was appointed acting prime minister, and members of the government will continue to serve until the formation of the new cabinet, according to a statement published on the presidential website Wednesday.
Nazarbayev announced his resignation as president in March 2019, after nearly three decades in office. The former Communist Party official was the last of the leaders who were running the 15 Soviet republics when the USSR collapsed in 1991.
The country’s capital was named after him following his resignation.
Nazarbayev ran Kazakhstan as a typical autocrat: The State Department’s 2018 human rights report noted Kazakhstan’s 2015 presidential election, in which Nazarbayev received 98% of votes cast, “was marked by irregularities and lacked genuine political competition.”
Security forces appeared to reclaim the streets of Kazakhstan’s main city Almaty after days of violence.
The former head of Kazakhstan’s domestic intelligence agency has been detained on suspicion of high treason after he was fired amid violent protests.
The National Security Committee, or KNB, said in a statement on Saturday its former chief Karim Masimov – a close ally of Kazakhstan’s founding president Nursultan Nazarbayev – was arrested on Thursday after it launched an investigation into charges of high treason.
“On January 6 of this year the National Security Committee launched a pre-trial investigation into high treason,” it said. “On the same day, on suspicion of committing this crime, former chairman of the KNB KK Masimov was detained and placed in a temporary detention centre, along with others.”
Dozens have died and public buildings across Kazakhstan have been ransacked and torched in the worst violence experienced by the former Soviet republic in 30 years of independence.
Security forces appeared to have reclaimed the streets of Kazakhstan’s main city Almaty on Friday after days of violence. The Russian-backed President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said he ordered his troops “to shoot to kill” to put down a countrywide uprising.
Karim Masimov, left, seen with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in 2009 [File: Alexei Nikolsky/RIA Novosti via Reuters]
A day after Moscow sent troops to help quell protests, police patrolled the debris-strewn streets of Almaty on Friday, although some gunfire could still be heard.
The demonstrations began as a response to a fuel price increase but swelled into a broad movement against the government and Nazarbayev, the 81-year-old longest-serving ruler of any ex-Soviet state until he turned over the presidency to Tokayev in 2019.
His family is widely believed to have retained influence in Nur-Sultan, the purpose-built capital that bears his name.
Nazarbayev’s press secretary said on Saturday the ex-leader is in Nur-Sultan, dismissing rumours of him leaving the Central Asian country in the wake of unprecedented unrest.
Nazarbayev “calls on everyone to rally around the president of Kazakhstan to overcome current challenges and ensure the integrity of the country”, Aidos Ukibay said on Twitter.
He also called against spreading “knowingly false and speculative information”, likely referring to unconfirmed reports that Nazarbayev had fled the country.
A man wore Sudan’s flag as a pile of tires burned during a protest in Khartoum, Sudan, last week.Credit…Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters
NAIROBI, Kenya — Military forces detained Sudan’s prime minister early on Monday in an apparent coup that endangered the northeast African nation’s fragile transition to democracy from authoritarian rule.
The Sudanese Ministry of Culture and Information said in a Facebook post that the joint military forces had placed Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok under house arrest and pressured him to release a “pro-coup statement.” After refusing to “endorse the coup,” the ministry said, Mr. Hamdok was then moved to “an unknown location.”
The military also detained several top cabinet members and civilian members of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, the ministry said.
The detentions came about one month after the authorities said they had thwarted a coup attempt by loyalists of the deposed dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
As news of the arrests spread, protesters filled the streets of the capital, Khartoum, early Monday. Television stations showed people burning tires in Khartoum, with plumes of smoke filling the skies. The information ministry also said that internet connections had been cut and that the military had closed bridges.
The possibility of a coup has haunted the country’s transitional government since 2019, when Mr. al-Bashir was overthrown, and Sudan has been rocked by protests from two factions. One side had helped topple Mr. al-Bashir after widespread mass protests, and the other backs a military government.
On Monday, pro-democracy demonstrators chanted: “The people are stronger. Retreat is impossible.” Some clapped, and the procession of demonstrators grew larger.
Relations between the leaders of the transitional government, which is made up of civilian and military officials, have been strained. In recent days, pro-military protesters have demanded the dissolution of the transitional cabinet, a step many pro-democracy groups have denounced as setting the stage for a coup.
The Sudanese Professionals Association, the main pro-democratic political group, had warned on social media that the military was preparing to seize power. The association urged residents on Monday to take to the streets to resist what they called a “military coup.”
“The revolution is a revolution of the people,” the group, which is made up of doctors, engineers and lawyers organizations, said in a Facebook post. “Power and wealth belongs to the people. No to a military coup.”
Sudan’s prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, was detained by military forces in an apparent coup.Credit…Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
As the protests intensified on Monday, NetBlocks, an internet monitoring organization, said there had been a “significant disruption” to internet services affecting cellphone and some fixed lines in the country. That disruption, it said, “is likely to limit the free flow of information online and news coverage of incidents on the ground.”
For months, the country has been wracked by political uncertainty and the challenges brought by the coronavirus pandemic, and Sudan’s economy is in a precarious state, with growing unemployment and rising food and commodity prices nationwide.
The army chief of staff had been expected to hand over leadership of the transitional cabinet to Mr. Hamdok in November, which would have given him a largely ceremonial post, but one that would have signified full civilian control of Sudan for the first time in decades.
On Saturday local time, Jeffrey Feltman, the United States special envoy for the Horn of Africa, met with the Sudanese prime minister and reiterated the Biden administration’s support for a civilian democratic transition.
On Monday, Mr. Feltman said the United States was “deeply alarmed at reports of a military takeover of the transitional government.”
“This would contravene the Constitutional Declaration and the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people and is utterly unacceptable,” Mr. Feltman said in a statement. “As we have said repeatedly, any changes to the transitional government by force puts at risk U.S. assistance.”
After the detentions on Monday, state television played national patriotic songs, and local news reports said that Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the sovereignty council, was expected to make a statement about the unfolding events.
Sudan’s prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019.Credit…Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
After President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who ruled Sudan for nearly 30 years, was ousted in a coup in 2019, the country began taking tenuous steps toward democracy, but has been plagued with unrest and an attempted military takeover.
His government was replaced by an 11-member sovereign council consisting of six civilians and five military leaders, who were given the task of preparing the country for elections after a three-year transition period.
The council appointed Abdalla Hamdok, an economist who has held several United Nations positions, as prime minister, and his government immediately embarked on an ambitious program designed to placate pro-democracy demonstrators and rejoin the international community.
Mr. Hamdok’s government eased decades of strict Islamist policies, scrapping an apostasy law and abolishing the use of public flogging. It also undertook a political and economic overhaul. It revived talks with rebel groups, and began investigations into the bloody suppression of the Darfur region under Mr. al-Bashir, promising to prosecute and possibly hand over to the International Criminal Court those wanted for war crimes there.
But stubborn obstacles to progress remained, including the coronavirus pandemic, stagnant economic growth and continued violence in Darfur. Mr. Hamdok survived an assassination attempt, and concerns of a coup swirled when the country entered lockdown last year to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Last month Sudanese authorities said they had thwarted an attempted coup by loyalists of Mr. al-Bashir. Soldiers had tried to seize control of a state media building in the city of Omdurman, across the Nile from the capital, Khartoum, but they were stopped and arrested.
Mr. Hamdok blamed the failed coup on Bashir loyalists, both military and civilian, and described it as a near miss for the country’s fragile democratic transition.
The army chief of staff had been expected to hand over leadership of the sovereign council next month to Mr. Hamdok — a largely ceremonial post, but also one that signifies full civilian control of Sudan for the first time in decades.
Sudan’s ousted president Omar al-Bashir during his trial in the capital Khartoum last year.Credit…Ashraf Shazly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Three years ago Sudanese protestersprotested against the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who had ruled the country for three decades since a 1989 coup.
Mr. al-Bashir had led his country through disastrous wars and famine, but it was anger over the rising price of bread that incited the first protests in December of 2018. After nearly four months of demonstrations and dozens of deaths at the hands of security forces, Mr. al-Bashir was forced from power in April 2019.
He had ruled Sudan longer than any other leader since the country gained independence in 1956, and was seen as a pariah in much of the world. He hosted Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, leading to American sanctions, and in 1998 an American cruise missile struck a factory in Khartoum for its alleged links to Al Qaeda.
Mr. al-Bashir presided over a ruinous 21-year war in southern Sudan, where his forces pushed barrel bombs from planes onto remote villages. The country ultimately divided into two parts in 2011, when South Sudan gained independence. But Mr. al-Bashir kept fighting brutal conflicts with rebels in other parts of Sudan.
In addition, he sent thousands of Sudanese soldiers to fight outside the country, including in the civil war in Yemen.
Mr. al-Bashir, 77, has been imprisoned since his ouster. He has been wanted by the international court in The Hague since 2009 over atrocities committed by his government in Darfur, where at least 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million displaced in a war from 2003 to 2008, the United Nations estimates.
The international court has been pressing Sudan’s transitional government, which took over after Mr. al-Bashir was deposed, to hand him over along with other leaders accused of crimes in Darfur.
Sudanese courts convicted Mr. al-Bashir of money laundering and corruption charges in late 2019 and sentenced him to two years in detention. He still faces charges related to the 1989 coup, and could be sentenced to death or life imprisonment if he is convicted.
NAIROBI, Oct 2 (Reuters) – A former senior official in an interim government for Ethiopia’s Tigray region appeared in court on Saturday over allegations of inciting conflict between the Tigrayan people and the central government, and possessing an illegal gun, his lawyer said.
War erupted in Nov. 2020 in the northern region of Tigray between the federal government and forces aligned with the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Soon after, the federal government seized the Tigray capital and appointed an interim administration for Tigray.
Abraha Desta served in that federally-appointed administration as the head of the Bureau of Social Affairs of Tigray. He was previously a member of Tigrayan opposition party Arena, which resisted the TPLF, and had spent three years in jail under the former TPLF-led government. He is the highest-ranking official from the interim administration to be arrested.
Abraha held his position until late June, when Tigrayan forces retook most of Tigray and he left for the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
He was arrested there on Thursday, one day after writing an open letter to Addis Ababa’s new mayor on Facebook denouncing what he alleged were arbitrary arrests of ethnic Tigrayans and mounting discrimination.
A Reuters investigation earlier this year found that Ethiopian police had arrested hundreds of ethnic Tigrayans in Addis Ababa without charge. Police denied at the time that suspects were being targeted over their ethnicity. read more
On Saturday, Abraha was remanded for nine days, said his lawyer, who requested Reuters not publish his name.
Neither the federal police spokesman Jeylan Abdi nor the attorney general’s office spokesman Awol Sultan could immediately be reached for comment.
There has been increasing international criticism of conditions in Tigray, with the U.N. warning hundreds of thousands of people face famine. All parties fighting in northern Ethiopia face the possibility of sanctions from the U.S. government.
Reporting by Ayenat Mersie
Editing by Peter Graff
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
BEIJING — The authorities in China have taken into custody the top two executives of a conglomerate that bought up businesses around the world before quickly collapsing under heavy debts, the latest move to discipline the country’s corporate leaders.
The conglomerate, a transportation and logistics company called HNA Group, said late on Friday that the police on Hainan Island, where it is based, had seized its chairman, Chen Feng, and chief executive, Tan Xiangdong.
Both men were detained “in accordance with the law for suspected crimes,” the company said in a statement, without specifying those offenses. HNA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The detention of the two men comes as global investors await the fate of another troubled Chinese corporate giant, China Evergrande Group. The company, which is struggling under more than $300 billion in debt, is widely seen as at risk of defaulting on its obligations. It isn’t clear yet whether it made a payment on $83 million in foreign debt that was due on Thursday.
The problems of Chinese companies with big ambitions but wasteful borrowing practices have come under a spotlight in Beijing. Chinese leaders increasingly see such debt-fueled corporate activity as counterproductive and have moved to tame those practices.
HNA became a symbol of the mercurial rise and profligate spending of China’s first wave of private conglomerates with strong political backing. It acquired large stakes in Hilton Hotels, Deutsche Bank, Virgin Australia and other businesses, and at its height employed 400,000 people around the world.
HNA struck 123 deals in three years, only to begin running into trouble in 2017 in repaying the debt incurred to pay for its acquisitions.
Mr. Chen’s co-chairman, Wang Jian, died in 2018 when he fell off a wall while sightseeing during a business trip to France. The death was ruled an accident.
HNA, Evergrande and other large, private Chinese companies that grew quickly only to face financial collapse in the last several years are often referred to in China as gray rhinos. The term refers to obvious dangers that are ignored until they suddenly become very dangerous, and had been taken up by Chinese officials.
