MEMPHIS, Tenn., Jan 28 (Reuters) – The specialized police unit that included the five Memphis officers charged with the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols was disbanded on Saturday as more protests took place in U.S. cities a day after harrowing video of the attack was released.
The police department said in a statement it was permanently deactivating the SCORPION unit after the police chief spoke with members of Nichols’ family, community leaders and other officers. A police spokesperson confirmed all five officers were members of the unit.
Video recordings from police body-worn cameras and a camera mounted on a utility pole showed Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, repeatedly screaming “Mom!” as officers kicked, punched and struck him with a baton in his mother’s neighborhood after a Jan. 7 traffic stop. He was hospitalized and died of his injuries three days later.
Five officers involved in the beating, all Black, were charged on Thursday with murder, assault, kidnapping and other charges. All have been dismissed from the department.
Nichols’ family and officials expressed outrage and sorrow but urged protesters to remain peaceful. That request was largely heeded on Friday when scattered protests broke out in Memphis – where marchers briefly blocked an interstate highway – and elsewhere.
Cities across the United States saw renewed nonviolent demonstrations on Saturday. In Memphis, protesters chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” angrily catcalled a police car that was monitoring the march, with several making obscene gestures. Some cheered loudly when they learned of the disbandment of SCORPION.
[1/12] People protest next to a police car after the release of the body cam footage showing police officers beating Tyre Nichols, the young Black man who died three days after he was pulled over while driving during a traffic stop by Memphis police officers, in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, U.S., January 28, 2023. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Hundreds of protesters gathered in New York’s Washington Square Park before marching through Manhattan, as columns of police officers walked alongside them.
Taken together, the four video clips released Friday showed police pummeling Nichols even though he appeared to pose no threat. The initial traffic stop was for reckless driving, though the police chief has said the cause for the stop has not been substantiated.
The SCORPION unit, short for the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in our Neighborhoods, was formed in October 2021 to concentrate on crime hot spots. Critics say such specialized teams can be prone to abusive tactics.
Friends and family say Nichols was an affable, talented skateboarder who grew up in Sacramento, California, and moved to Memphis before the coronavirus pandemic. The father of a 4-year-old child, Nichols worked at FedEx and had recently enrolled in a photography class.
Nate Spates Jr., 42, was part of a circle of friends, including Nichols, who met up at a Starbucks in the area.
“He liked what he liked, and he marched to the beat of his own drum,” Spates said, remembering that Nichols would go to a park called Shelby Farms to watch the sunset when he wasn’t working a late shift.
Nichols’ death is the latest high-profile instance of police using excessive force against Black people and other minorities. The 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, galvanized worldwide protests over racial injustice.
Reporting by Maria Cardona in Memphis, Tennessee, and Diane Bartz in Washington; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Robert Birsel
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Diane Bartz
Thomson Reuters
Focused on U.S. antitrust as well as corporate regulation and legislation, with experience involving covering war in Bosnia, elections in Mexico and Nicaragua, as well as stories from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Nigeria and Peru.
MONTEREY PARK, Calif., Jan 24 (Reuters) – Just two days after a gunman killed 11 people at a Los Angeles-area dance studio, seven more victims were shot dead in an agricultural area near San Francisco, as California suffered one of its bloodiest spates of mass gun violence in decades.
Authorities said they had not identified the motive for either of the rampages. The attacks seemed especially baffling in part because the suspects in each were men of retirement age, much older than is typical for perpetrators of deadly mass shootings that have become numbingly routine in the United States.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said he was visiting wounded survivors from Saturday night’s massacre in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park when he was informed of Monday’s killings in northern California.
“Tragedy upon tragedy,” Newsom wrote on Twitter.
Otherwise, the back-to-back shootings appeared to have little in common.
The latest gun carnage struck the coastal town of Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, where a gunman opened fire on groups of farm workers at two locations about a mile apart, leaving a total of seven dead and one badly wounded, then fled.
The accused gunman, identified as Chunli Zhao, 67, was taken into custody a short time later after he was found sitting in his vehicle, parked outside a sheriff’s station, where authorities said they believe he had come to turn himself in.
A semi-automatic handgun was found in his car, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus told an evening news conference.
Corpus said the suspect, who was “fully cooperating” with investigators following his arrest, had worked at one of the two crime scenes. She described the sites as agricultural “nurseries,” where some of the workers also lived. Local media reported one site was a mushroom farm.
President Joe Biden said in a statement on Tuesday that he was briefed by his homeland security team on the shooting in Half Moon Bay and has directed his administration to ensure local authorities have support from the federal government.
“Even as we await further details on these shootings, we know the scourge of gun violence across America requires stronger action,” he said, calling on Congress to reintroduce a federal assault weapons ban.
In a separate Bay-area incident on Monday evening that drew far less attention, one person was killed and seven wounded in a “shooting between several individuals” in Oakland, police reported, in circumstances suggesting a case of gang violence. Police gave few details, but said the surviving victims had all gotten themselves to area hospitals.
News of the massacre in Half Moon Bay surfaced as police worked through a second full day of their investigation into the shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, just east of downtown Los Angeles, where a gunman shot 11 people to death. Nine others were wounded.
[1/5] People gather for a candle light vigil after a mass shooting during Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations in Monterey Park, California, U.S. January 23, 2023. REUTERS/David Swanson
Authorities said the suspect, Huu Can Tran, 72, drove next to an adjacent town and barged into a second dance hall but was confronted by the club’s operator, who wrestled the weapon away during a brief scuffle.
Tran, himself a longtime patron of the Star Ballroom, catering mainly to older dance enthusiasts, fled again and vanished overnight.
He shot himself to death in his parked getaway vehicle, a cargo van, on Sunday morning, about 12 hours after his rampage, as police surrounded him in the town of Torrance, south of Los Angeles, authorities said.
LETHAL RECORD
Saturday’s violence unfolded in the midst of a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, a hub of the Asian-American community in Southern California, giving rise initially to concerns the attack may have been racially motivated. The second day of the event was canceled.
It ranked as the deadliest mass shooting ever in Los Angeles County, according to Hilda Solis, a member of the county Board of Supervisors.
By comparison, the 1984 massacre of 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Diego stands as the greatest loss of life from a single shooting incident on record in California.
The two latest shootings were also notable for the age of the suspects, one in his late 60s, another in his early 70s.
A database of 185 mass shootings between 1966 and 2022 maintained by the nonprofit Violence Project includes just one carried out by someone 70 or older – a retired miner who killed five people in Kentucky in 1981.
Attesting to the firepower unleashed at the Monterey Park ballroom, investigators collected 42 bullet casings and a large-capacity ammunition magazine from the scene, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told reporters on Monday.
He said a search of the suspect’s mobile home in a gated senior-living community in the town of Hemet, 80 miles east of Los Angeles, turned up a rifle, electronic devices and items “that lead us to believe the suspect was manufacturing homemade” weapons silencers. Police also seized hundreds of rounds of ammunition from the dwelling and a handgun from the suspect’s vehicle.
Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said investigators were looking into unconfirmed reports that the violence may have been sparked by jealousy or relationship issues.
Adam Hood, who rented a home from Tran in the Los Angeles area, told Reuters his landlord enjoyed ballroom dancing and was a regular at the Star Ballroom, though he complained that others there were talking behind his back.
“He was distrustful of the people at the studio, angry and distrustful. I think he just had enough,” Hood said.
Reporting by Tim Reid in Monterey Park and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Rich McKay, Gabriella Borter, Brendan O’Brien, Brad Brooks, Jonathan Allen, Joseph Ax, Dan Whitcomb and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Chizu Nomiyama
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Shooter later kills himself when approached by police
MONTEREY PARK, Calif., Jan 22 (Reuters) – A 72-year-old gunman killed himself when approached by police on Sunday, about 12 hours after he had carried out a Lunar New Year massacre at a dance club that left 10 people dead and another 10 wounded.
The gunman tried to carry out another shooting at a separate club just minutes after the first one on Saturday night, but authorities said two bystanders wrestled the man’s weapon away from him before any shots could be fired. He fled that scene.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna identified the suspect as Huu Can Tran, a septuagenarian he said used a high-capacity magazine pistol to shoot up a ballroom dance venue popular with older patrons in Monterey Park, about 7 miles (11 km) east of downtown Los Angeles.
Investigators did not yet know a motive, although gun violence is frequent in the United States. Luna did not identify any of the victims but said the five men and five women appeared to be in their 50s, 60s and beyond. The sheriff said the pistol Tran used appeared to be illegal in California, where state laws ban any magazine holding more than 10 rounds.
“We want to know, we want to know how something this awful can happen,” Luna told reporters.
After police say Tran carried out the shooting in Monterey Park at about 10 p.m. PST Saturday (0600 GMT on Sunday), he was confronted by bystanders at a second dance club in the neighboring city of Alhambra about 20 minutes later, Luna said.
“I can tell you that the suspect walked in there, probably with the intent to kill more people, and two brave community members decided they were going to jump into action and disarm him,” Luna said.
The sheriff said that Tran turned a handgun on himself on Sunday as police approached a white van he was driving in Torrance, about 20 miles (34 km) from the site of the shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park. Officers heard a single gunshot from the van as they approached, then fell back and called for a SWAT team.
Of the 10 people injured, seven remained hospitalized Sunday night, with at least one person in critical condition.
The shooting took place around the location of a two-day Chinese Lunar New Year celebration where many downtown streets are closed for festivities that draw thousands of people from across Southern California.
A CLOSE-KNIT COMMUNITY
[1/33] Flowers are left near the scene of a shooting that took place during a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, in Monterey Park, California, U.S. January 22, 2023. REUTERS/Allison Dinner
Residents stood gazing at the many blocks sealed off with police tape on Sunday in Monterey Park. Chester Chong, chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles, described the city of about 60,000 people as a quiet, peaceful, beautiful place where everybody knows each other and helps each other.
The city has for decades been a destination for immigrants from China. Around 65% of its residents are Asian, according to U.S. Census data, and the city is known for its many Chinese restaurants and groceries.
“People were calling me last night, they were scared this was a hate crime,” Chong said at the scene.
The Star Ballroom Dance Studio opened in 1990, and its website features many photographs of past Lunar New Year celebrations showing patrons smiling and dancing in party clothes in its large, brightly lit ballroom.
Most of its patrons are middle-aged or seniors, though children also attend youth dance classes, according to a teacher at the studio who asked to not be named.
“Those are normal working people,” the teacher said. “Some are retired and just looking for an exercise or social interaction.”
A flyer posted on the website advertised Saturday night’s new year party, running from 7:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Sunday.
The gunshots were mistaken by some for new year fireworks, according to Tiffany Chiu, 30, who was celebrating at her parents’ home near the ballroom.
“A lot of older people live here, it’s usually really quiet,” she said. “This is not something you expect here.”
President Joe Biden condemned the killings in a written statement and said he had directed his Homeland Security adviser to mobilize federal support to local authorities.
The attack in Monterey Park was the deadliest since May 2022, when a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas. The deadliest shooting in California history was in 1984 when a gunman killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, near San Diego.
Reporting by Tim Reid in Monterey Park, Jonathan Allen in New York and Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas;
Additional reporting by Leah Douglas, Kanishka Singh, Gabriella Borter, Dan Whitcomb, Timothy Gardner, Mary Milliken, and Maria Vasilyeva
Writing by Brad Brooks, Raissa Kasolowsky and Jonathan Allen
Editing by Paul Thomasch, Frances Kerry, Matthew Lewis, Chris Reese, Mary Milliken and Lisa Shumaker
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MEXICO CITY, Jan 21 (Reuters) – Just after sunset on Thursday, February 10th, two men in a white Dodge Ram pickup pulled up in front of Heber Lopez Vasquez’s small radio studio in southern Mexico. One man got out, walked inside and shot the 42-year-old journalist dead. Lopez’s 12-year-old son Oscar, the only person with him, hid, Lopez’s brother told Reuters.
Lopez was one of 13 Mexican journalists killed in 2022, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based rights group. It was the deadliest year on record for journalists in Mexico, now the most dangerous country for reporters in the world outside the war in Ukraine, where CPJ says 15 reporters were killed last year.
A day earlier, Lopez–who ran two online news sites in the southern Oaxaca state–had published a story on Facebook accusing local politician Arminda Espinosa Cartas of corruption related to her re-election efforts.
As he lay dead, a nearby patrol car responded to an emergency call, intercepted the pickup and arrested the two men. One of them, it later emerged, was the brother of Espinosa, the politician in Lopez’s story.
Espinosa has not been charged in connection with Lopez’s killing. She did not respond to multiple requests for comment and Reuters could not find any previous comment she made about her role in corruption or on Lopez’s story.
Her brother and the other man remain detained but have yet to be tried. Their lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I already stopped covering drug trafficking and corruption and Heber’s death still scares me,” said Hiram Moreno, a veteran Oaxacan journalist who was shot three times in 2019, sustaining injuries in the leg and back, after writing about drug deals by local crime groups. His assailant was never identified. “You cannot count on the government. Self-censorship is the only thing that will keep you safe.”
It is a pattern of fear and intimidation playing out across Mexico, as years of violence and impunity have created what academics call “silence zones” where killing and corruption go unchecked and undocumented.
“In silence zones people don’t get access to basic information to conduct their lives,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “They don’t know who to vote for because there are no corruption investigations. They don’t know which areas are violent, what they can say and not say, so they stay silent.”
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about attacks on the media.
Since the start of Mexico’s drug war in 2006, 133 reporters have been killed for motives related to their work, CPJ determined, and another 13 for undetermined reasons. In that time Mexico has registered over 360,000 homicides.
Aggression against journalists has spread in recent years to previously less hostile areas–such as Oaxaca and Chiapas–threatening to turn more parts of Mexico into information dead zones, say rights groups like Reporters Without Borders and 10 local journalists.
Lopez was the second journalist since mid-2021 to be murdered in Salina Cruz, a Pacific port in Oaxaca. It nestles in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a skinny stretch of land connecting the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific that has become a landing spot for precursor chemicals to make fentanyl and meth, according to three security analysts and a DEA source.
Lopez’s last story, one of several he wrote about Espinosa, covered the politician’s alleged efforts to get a company constructing a breakwater in Salina Cruz’s port to threaten workers to cast their vote for her re-election or else be fired.
The infrastructure was a part of the Interoceanic Corridor–one of Lopez Obrador’s flagship development projects in southern Mexico.
Jose Ignacio Martinez, a crime reporter in the isthmus, and nine of Lopez’s fellow journalists say since his murder they are more afraid to publish stories delving into the corridor project, drug trafficking and state collusion with organized crime.
One outlet Reuters spoke to, which asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said it had done an investigation on the corridor, but did not feel safe to publish after Lopez’s death.
Lopez Obrador’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about corruption accusations related to the corridor.
THE MECHANISM
In 2012 the government established the Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists.
[1/4] Marilu Sanchez holds a framed picture of her late husband Gustavo Sanchez, a journalist killed by assailants while riding his motorcycle with his son, at her home in Morro de Mazatan, in Oaxaca state, Mexico, October 18, 2022. REUTERS/Jorge Luis Plata
Known simply as the Mechanism, the body provides journalists with protections such as panic buttons, surveillance equipment, home police watch, armed guards and relocation. Since 2017, nine Mechanism-protected reporters have been murdered, CPJ found.
Journalists and activists may request protection from the Mechanism, which evaluates their case along with a group of human rights defenders, journalists and representatives of nonprofits, as well as officials from various government agencies that make up a governing board. Not all those who request protection receive it, based on the analysis.
At present there are 1,600 people enrolled in the Mechanism, including 500 journalists.
One of those killed was Gustavo Sanchez, a journalist shot at close range in June 2021 by two motorcycle-riding hitmen. Sanchez, who had written critical articles about politicians and criminal groups, enrolled in the Mechanism for a third time after surviving an assassination attempt in 2020. Protection never arrived.
Oaxaca’s prosecutor at the time said Sanchez’s coverage of local elections would be a primary line of investigation into his murder. No one has been charged in the case.
Sanchez’s killing triggered Mexico’s human rights commission to produce a 100-page investigation into authorities’ failings. Evidence “revealed omissions, delays, negligence and breach of duties by at least 15 public servants,” said the report.
Enrique Irazoque, head of the Interior Ministry’s department for the Defense of Human Rights, said the Mechanism accepted the findings, but highlighted the role local authorities played in the protection lag.
Fifteen people within government and civil society told Reuters the Mechanism is under-resourced given the scope of the problem. Irazoque agreed, though he noted its staff of 40 increased last year to a staff of 70. Its 2023 budget increased to around $28.8 million from $20 million in 2022.
In addition to the shortage of funding, Irazoque said that local authorities, state governments and courts need to do more, but there was a lack of political will.
“The Mechanism is absorbing all the problems, but the issues are not federal, they are local,” he said in an interview with Reuters.
More convictions are what Irazoque believes are most needed, saying the lack of legal repercussions for public officials encourages corruption.
Impunity for journalist killings hovers around 89%, a 2021 report from the Interior Ministry, which oversees the Mechanism, showed. Local public servants were the biggest source of violence against journalists, ahead of organized crime, the report found.
“You would think the biggest enemy would be armed groups and organized crime,” said journalist Patricia Mayorga, who fled Mexico after investigating corruption. “But really it’s the ties between those groups and the state officials that are the problem.”
Many Mexican journalists killed worked for small, independent, digital outlets that sometimes only published on Facebook, noted Irazoque, saying their stories dug deep into local political issues.
Mexico’s National Association of Mayors (ANAC) and its National Conference of Governors (CONAGO) did not respond to requests for comment about the role of state and local governments in journalist killings or allegations of corrupt ties to crime groups.
President Lopez Obrador frequently pillories the press, calling out reporters critical of his administration and holding a weekly segment in his daily news conference dedicated to the “lies of the week.” He condemns the murders, while accusing adversaries of talking up the violence to discredit him.
Irazoque says he has no evidence the president’s verbal attacks have led to violence against journalists. Lopez Obrador’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
“What type of life is this?,” journalist Rodolfo Montes said, eyeing security footage from inside his home where the Mechanism, in which he first enrolled in 2017, had installed cameras with eyes on the garage, street and entryway.
Years earlier, a cartel rolled a bullet under the door as a threat, and he has been on edge ever since. An entire archive box of threats spread over a decade sat in the corner. Looking down at his phone after a cartel threatened his 24-year-old daughter just a few days before, he said, “I’m living, but I’m dead, you know?”
Reuters Graphics
Editing by Claudia Parsons and Dave Graham; Additional reporting by Pepe Cortes in Oaxaca
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Convicted for his part in killing anti-mafia prosecutors
PALERMO, Italy, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Italy’s most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested by armed police at a private hospital in Sicily on Monday, where the man who has been on the run since 1993 was being treated for cancer.
Nicknamed “Diabolik” and “‘U Siccu” (The Skinny One), Messina Denaro had been sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, crimes that shocked the nation and sparked a crackdown on Cosa Nostra.
Messina Denaro, 60, was led away from Palermo’s “La Maddalena” hospital by two uniformed carabinieri police and bundled into a waiting black minivan. He was wearing a brown fur-lined jacket, glasses and a brown and white woolly hat.
Judicial sources said he was being treated for cancer and had an operation last year, followed by a series of appointments under a false name.
“We had a clue to the investigation and followed it through to today’s arrest,” Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said.
Magistrate Paolo Guido, who was also in charge of investigations into Messina Denaro, said dismantling his network of protectors was key in reaching the result following years of work.
A second man who had driven Messina Denaro to the hospital was arrested at the scene on suspicion of aiding a fugitive.
Images on social media showed locals applauding and shaking hands with police in balaclavas as the minivan carrying Messina Denaro was driven away from the suburban hospital to a secret location.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni travelled to Sicily to congratulate police chiefs after the arrest.
“We have not won the war, we have not defeated the mafia but this battle was a key battle to win, and it is a heavy blow to organised crime,” she said.
Maria Falcone, sister of the murdered judge, echoed that sentiment.
A screengrab taken from a video shows Matteo Messina Denaro the country’s most wanted mafia boss after he was arrested in this handout photo obtained by Reuters on January 16, 2023. Carabinieri/Handout via REUTERS
“It proves that mafiosi, despite their delusions of omnipotence, are ultimately doomed to defeat in the conflict with the democratic state,” she said.
FAST CARS, FLASHY CLOTHES
Messina Denaro comes from the town of Castelvetrano near Trapani in western Sicily, and is the son of a mafia boss.
Police said last September that he was still able to issue commands relating to the way the mafia was run in the area around Trapani, his regional stronghold.
Before he went into hiding, he was known for driving expensive cars and his taste for wearing finely tailored suits and Rolex watches.
He faces a life sentence for his role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people in 1993 and is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.
In 1993 he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an attempt to dissuade his father from giving evidence against the mafia, prosecutors say. The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
The arrest comes almost 30 years to the day since police arrested Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Sicilian Mafia’s most powerful boss of the 20th century. He eventually died in jail in 2017, having never broken his code of silence.
“It is an extraordinary event, of historic significance,” said Gian Carlo Caselli, who was a prosecutor in Palermo at the time of Riina’s arrest.
Despite the euphoria, Italy still faces a struggle to rein in organised crime groups whose tentacles stretch far and wide.
Experts say that Cosa Nostra has been usurped by the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, as the most powerful organised crime group in Italy.
“There is a sense that the Sicilian Mafia is not as strong as it used to be, especially since the 90s, they have really been unable to enter the drug market and so they are really second-fiddle to the ‘Ndrangheta on that,” said Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University.
additional reporting by Angelo Amante and Alvise Armellini, writing by Keith Weir and Cristina Carlevaro, editing by Gavin Jones, Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Dec 30 (Reuters) – A grad student seeking a criminal justice degree from Washington State University has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students more than six weeks ago, officials said on Friday.
Police in eastern Pennsylvania acting on a fugitive arrest warrant took Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, into custody on Thursday night, according to James Fry, chief of police in Moscow, Idaho, where the University of Idaho campus is located. Fry said Kohberger resides in Pennsylvania.
Kohberger was arraigned in Pennsylvania and remained jailed without bond awaiting a hearing on Tuesday to determine whether he will waive extradition and return voluntarily to Idaho to face charges in the high-profile case, said Latah County, Idaho, prosecutor Bill Thompson.
Thompson said Kohberger was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and felony burglary in a crime that unnerved the small college town in Idaho’s northwest panhandle where the four victims – three women and a man in their early 20s – were slain.
The four were all found fatally stabbed on the morning of Nov. 13 inside the off-campus house where the three women lived, two of them staying in one room, and one sharing her room with the fourth victim, her boyfriend.
Two other female roommates in the house at the time were unharmed, apparently sleeping through the killings. Police said the cellphone of one of the survivors was used to call emergency-911 when the bodies were first discovered.
“This is not the end of this investigation. In fact it is a new beginning,” Thompson told a news conference.
The victims – identified as Ethan Chapin, 20, of Conway, Washington; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Avondale, Arizona; Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum, Idaho – all suffered multiple stab wounds, Fry said. Some of the bodies also showed defensive wounds, Fry said, suggesting they had tried to fend off their attacker.
NIGHT OUT BEFORE KILLINGS
[1/5] The Sigma Chi fraternity house, where victim Ethan Chapin was a member, is pictured after four University of Idaho students were found killed in their residence on November 13 in Moscow, Idaho, U.S., November 30, 2022. REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson
Chapin and his girlfriend, Kernodle, had attended a fraternity party the night before, while Mogen and Goncalves, who were best friends, had visited a local bar and food truck. Both pairs returned to the house shortly before 2 a.m. The two other roommates had gotten home about an hour earlier.
Authorities say they believe the slayings occurred between 3 and 4 a.m. on Nov. 13.
The victims appeared to have been killed with a knife or some other “edged” weapon, police have said. Fry said the murder weapon has not been recovered, though police had found a car they were searching for in connection with the killings.
Authorities said Kohberger was a graduate student at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, Washington, about 10 miles from the University of Idaho campus.
WSU issued a statement on Friday saying its police department and Idaho law enforcement officers searched both Kohberger’s apartment residence and his office on campus.
It said Kohberger “had completed his first semester as a PhD student in WSU’s criminal justice program earlier this month,” suggesting he had remained on campus, just miles away from the crime scene across the Idaho state line, for a number of weeks before returning to Pennsylvania.
Asked at the press conference in Moscow whether authorities there were seeking additional suspects, Fry said, “We have an individual in custody who committed these horrible crimes, and I do believe our community is safe.”
Fry said his department had received more than 19,000 tips from the public and had conducted more than 300 interviews as part of its investigation, assisted by state police and the FBI. He and Thompson urged anyone who knew anything about the accused killer to come forward.
He declined to offer a possible motive for the crime or to give any details about the investigation, such as how authorities traced Kohberger to Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, a small community in the Pocono Mountains resort region about 90 miles north of Philadelphia, where he was arrested.
Thompson said more details would emerge publicly from a probable-cause affidavit that summarizes the factual basis for the charges but remains under court seal until the suspect is physically back in Idaho to be served his arrest warrant.
Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Neil Fullick
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Dec 24 (Reuters) – Iran’s Supreme Court has accepted an appeal by rapper Saman Seydi Yasin against his death sentence even as it confirmed the same sentence against another protester, the judiciary said on Saturday.
Yasin, a Kurd who raps about inequality, oppression and unemployment, had been accused of attempting to kill security forces, setting a rubbish bin on fire and shooting three times into the air during anti-government protests, charges which he denied.
Yasin’s mother last week pleaded in a video for help to save her son. “Where in the world have you seen a loved one’s life is taken for a trash bin?” she said in the video posted on social media.
The court had initially said it had accepted the appeals of Yasin and another protester, but in a subsequent statement the judiciary’s Mizan news agency said only Yasin’s appeal had been accepted.
“The public relations of the Supreme Court of Iran has corrected its news: ‘The appeal of Mohammad Qobadloo has not been accepted … Saman Seydi’s appeal has been accepted by the Supreme Court,” the agency said.
Explaining the decision in its original statement, it cited flaws in investigating the case and said it had been referred back to the court for re-examination.
Qobadloo had been charged with killing a police agent and injuring five others with his car during the protests.
Unrest erupted across Iran in mid-September after the death in custody of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police enforcing the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women.
Late on Saturday, the 100th day of the protests, videos posted on social media showed night demonstrations said to be in areas including the capital Tehran, the northeastern city of Mashhad, Karaj west of Tehran, and Sanandaj, the centre of Kurdistan province in the northwest.
Dozens of protesters were seen braving rain and snow to chant slogans including “Death to the dictator” and “Death to (Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei!” Reuters could not immediately verify the videos.
DEATH PENALTY
Saturday’s announcement follows the Supreme Court’s suspension of protester Mahan Sadrat’s death sentence 10 days ago. He had been charged with various alleged offences such as stabbing a security officer and setting fire to a motorcycle.
Iran hanged two protesters earlier this month: Mohsen Shekari, 23, who was accused of blocking a main road in September and wounding a member of the paramilitary Basij force with a knife, and Majid Reza Rahnavard, 23, who was accused of stabbing to death two Basij members, and publicly hanged from a construction crane.
Amnesty International called on the international community to pressure Iran to halt Qobadloo’s execution and “not allow Iran’s machinery of death to claim another victim while (the) world’s attention is on celebrating the festive season”.
Amnesty has said Iranian authorities are seeking the death penalty for at least 26 people in what it called “sham trials designed to intimidate those participating in the popular uprising that has rocked Iran”.
It said all of those facing death sentences had been denied the right to adequate defence and access to lawyers of their choosing. Rights groups say defendants have instead to rely on state-appointed attorneys who do little to defend them.
Rights group HRANA said that, as of Friday, 506 protesters had been killed, including 69 minors. It said 66 members of the security forces had also been killed. As many as 18,516 protesters are believed to have been arrested, it said.
Officials have said that up to 300 people, including members of the security forces, had lost their lives in the unrest.
Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, David Holmes and Nick Macfie
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
PARIS, Dec 24 (Reuters) – Clashes broke out for a second day in Paris on Saturday between police and members of the Kurdish community angry at the killing on Friday of three members of their community.
Cars were overturned, at least one vehicle was burned and small fires set alight near Republic Square, the traditional venue for demonstrations in the city where Kurds earlier held a peaceful protest.
Clashes broke out as some demonstrators left the square, throwing projectiles at police who responded with tear gas. Skirmishes continued for around two hours before the protesters dispersed.
A gunman carried out the killings at a Kurdish cultural centre and nearby cafe on Friday in a busy part of Paris’ 10th district, stunning a community preparing to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the unresolved murder of three activists.
Police arrested a 69-year-old man who the authorities said had recently been freed from detention while awaiting trial for a sabre attack on a migrant camp in Paris a year ago.
Following questioning of the suspect, investigators had added a suspected racist motive to initial accusations of murder and violence with weapons, the prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.
After an angry crowd clashed with police on Friday afternoon, the Kurdish democratic council in France (CDK-F) organised a gathering on Saturday at Republic Square.
[1/8] Smoke billows from a fire, as members of the Kurdish community attend a demonstration, following a shooting, in Paris, France December 24, 2022. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier
Hundreds of Kurdish protesters, joined by politicians including the mayor of Paris’ 10th district, waved flags and listened to tributes to the victims.
“We are not being protected at all. In 10 years, six Kurdish activists have been killed in the heart of Paris in broad daylight,” Berivan Firat, a spokesperson for the CDK-F, told BFM TV at the demonstration.
She said the event turned violent after some protesters were provoked by people in a passing vehicle who displayed a Turkish flag and made a nationalistic gesture.
Friday’s murders came ahead of the anniversary of the killings of three Kurdish women in Paris in January 2013.
An investigation was dropped after the main suspect died shortly before coming to trial, before being re-opened in 2019.
“The Kurdish community is afraid. It was already traumatised by the triple murder (in 2013). It needs answers, support and consideration,” David Andic, a lawyer representing the CDK-F, told reporters on Friday.
Kurdish representatives, who met with Paris’ police chief on Saturday, reiterated their call for Friday’s shooting to be considered a terror attack.
The questioning of the suspect was continuing, the prosecutor’s office added.
Reporting by Manuel Ausloos, Antony Paone, Gus Trompiz, Kate Entringer and Caroline Pailliez; editing by Philippa Fletcher and Nick Macfie
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
KYIV, Nov 26 (Reuters) – Ukraine accused the Kremlin on Saturday of reviving the “genocidal” tactics of Josef Stalin as Kyiv commemorated a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-33.
The remembrance day for the “Holodomor” comes as Ukraine is battling to repel invading Russian forces and deal with sweeping blackouts caused by air strikes that Kyiv says are aimed at breaking the public’s fighting resolve.
“Once they wanted to destroy us with hunger, now – with darkness and cold,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram. “We cannot be broken.”
The Holodomor, which roughly translates as “death by hunger”, has taken on an increasingly central role in Ukrainian collective memory since the Maidan revolution in 2014 ousted a Russian-backed president and bolstered national consciousness.
In November 1932, Soviet leader Stalin dispatched police to seize all grain and livestock from newly collectivised Ukrainian farms, including the seed needed to plant the next crop.
Millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death in the following months from what Yale University historian Timothy Snyder calls “clearly premeditated mass murder”.
“The Russians will pay for all of the victims of the Holodomor and answer for today’s crimes,” Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential administration, wrote on Telegram.
Russia has targeted critical infrastructure across Ukraine in recent weeks through waves of air strikes that have sparked widespread power outages and killed civilians.
Millions of Ukrainians were still without power after fresh strikes this week, Zelenskiy said late on Friday.
“The winter is already difficult, and if everything continues the same way, then it will be very similar to what we read in history books,” Artem Antonenko, a 23-year-old marketing specialist, told Reuters in central Kyiv.
The Kremlin has denied that its attacks, which have only galvanized Ukrainian public anger, were aimed at civilians but said on Thursday Kyiv could “end the suffering” by meeting Russia’s demands to resolve the war.
In a statement on Saturday, Ukraine’s foreign ministry accused Moscow of reviving the tactics of the 1930s.
“On the 90th anniversary of the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine, Russia’s genocidal war of aggression pursues the same goal as during the 1932-1933 genocide: the elimination of the Ukrainian nation and its statehood,” it said.
Moscow denies the deaths were caused by a deliberate genocidal policy and says that Russians and other ethnic groups also suffered because of famine.
Ukrainians typically mark the memorial day, which was established after the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and which falls on the fourth Saturday of November, by placing candles in their windows.
Pope Francis
this week compared Russia’s war in Ukraine to what he called the “terrible genocide” of the Stalin-era and said Ukrainians were now suffering from the “martyrdom of aggression”.
GRAIN EXPORTS
Kyiv’s foreign ministry also condemned what it said were Russia’s current attempts to weaponize food by undermining a U.N.-brokered deal to unblock Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg echoed a similar sentiment on Saturday when he addressed an International Summit for Food Security in Kyiv by video link alongside several other European leaders.
“Today, Russia is using hunger as a weapon of war against Ukraine, and to create division and further instablity among the rest of the world,” he said.
Russia’s ambassador to Turkey said on Friday that Moscow sends its representatives to more ship inspections in Istanbul per day than mandated under the Black Sea grain deal, rejecting a Ukrainian accusation that Russia is slowing down the process.
Reporting by Dan Peleschuk
Additional reporting by Yurii Kovalenko in Kyiv and Alan Charlish in Warsaw
Editing by Tom Balmforth and Frances Kerry
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CHESAPEAKE, Va., Nov 23 (Reuters) – A manager at a Walmart Inc. (WMT.N) store in Virginia entered a break room and opened fire on fellow employees before turning the gun on himself, an eyewitness said on Wednesday, leaving a total of seven dead in the latest mass shooting in the United States.
The gunman, identified as Andre Bing, 31, of Chesapeake, Virginia, said nothing as he began firing on the workers gathered ahead of their shift late Tuesday, Walmart employee Briana Tyler told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“I looked up and my manager just opened the door and he just opened fire,” Tyler said. “He didn’t say a word. He didn’t say anything at all.”
At least four people were injured in the shooting, Chesapeake Police Chief Mark Solesky told a news conference. He did not disclose a possible motive for the shooting, but said the suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Bing was armed with a single handgun and carried multiple magazines of ammunition, according to a tweet from Chesapeake, a city of about 250,000 people south of Norfolk.
Coming on the heels of the killing of five people at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub on Saturday, the latest massacre prompted a fresh round of condemnations by public officials and calls by activists for tighter gun control.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday called the shooting “yet another horrific and senseless act of violence,” vowing any federal resources needed to aid in the investigation.
“There are now even more tables across the country that will have empty seats this Thanksgiving,” he said in a statement, noting a shooting earlier this month that left three University of Virginia students dead. “We must take greater action.”
Bing worked at the company since 2010, most recently as an overnight team leader at the cavernous Walmart Supercenter just off Battlefield Boulevard in Chesapeake.
“The Battlefield Walmart just got shot up by one of my managers. He killed a couple of people. By the grace of God I made it out,” another employee, Kevin Harper, told CBS.
[1/6] FBI agents stand in the parking lot after a mass shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, U.S. November 23, 2022. REUTERS/Jay Paul
Jessie Wilczewski told WAVY-TV that she hid under a table and the shooter pointed the gun at her and told her to go home.
“It didn’t even look real until you could feel the pow-pow-pow. You can feel it,” the store employee said. “I couldn’t hear it at first because I guess it was so loud. I could feel it.”
Tuesday’s bloodshed marked the latest spasm of gun violence in the United States, where an average of two mass shootings — defined as an incident killing or injuring four or more people — occur every day, according to GunViolenceArchive.org.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who was already facing stepped-up calls for policies to address gun violence in the wake of the University of Virginia killings, ordered flags at local, state and federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.
Kimberly Shupe told WAVY-TV that her son Jalon Jones, 24, was stable after being shot in his ear and back. He told her that he arrived for his overnight shift around 10 p.m., and that in their nightly meeting his manager was acting “strange” and “then started shooting,” she told the news station
Dr. Jessica Burgess, a surgeon who treated victims at a Norfolk hospital where two people died, two were in critical condition and one was recovering, said she contacted a colleague in Colorado Springs just two days prior to offer support.
“So it’s very disheartening that I’m now in the same position with my colleagues from across the country checking in on me and my team,” Burgess said. “Sometimes there is only so much we can do when the injuries have already been done.”
It is not the first mass shooting at a Walmart, which has thousands of stores across the country.
At a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019, 23 people were killed in a mass shooting near the U.S.-Mexico border in an act described as domestic terrorism by law enforcement. It was also the deadliest attack on the Hispanic community in modern times. Patrick Wood Crusius, then 21, from Allen, Texas, was arrested in the shooting and he left behind a manifesto with white nationalist and anti-immigrant themes.
“The devastating news of last night’s shooting at our Chesapeake, VA store at the hands of one of our associates has hit our Walmart family hard,” Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.
Reporting by Rich McKay, Susan Heavey, Bharat Govind Gautam, Abinaya Vijayaraghavan and Shubham Kalia; Additional reporting by Juby Babu; Editing by Gerry Doyle, Nick Macfie, Gareth Jones and Mark Porter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
