Detained Canadians are ‘spies’
China
volunteers used chain saws to clear paths for emergency workers. Neighbours and friends helped one another find some of their belongings in the ruins.
Carol Dean found her wedding dress among the wreckage of her mobile home. But the storm took her 53-year-old husband. She said David Wayne Dean was at home and had texted a friend to beware when the tornado hit.
‘‘He didn’t make it out,’’ she said.
Dean said she rushed home from her job at Walmart when she couldn’t reach her husband on the phone. She pushed her way past sheriff’s deputies who tried to keep her out of the damaged area. Her children had found David Dean’s body in a neighbour’s yard.
‘‘They took me down to him,’’ Dean said, ‘‘and I got to spend a little time with him before they took him away.’’
The National Weather Service said one and possibly two tornadoes struck the area, with a powerful EF-4 twister with winds estimated at 274kmh blamed for most of the destruction.
It carved a path nearly 1.6km wide and 39km long, said meteorologist Chris Darden.
Darden said the ‘‘monster tornado’’ was the deadliest twister to hit the U.S. since May 2013, when an EF-5 killed 24 people in Moore, Oklahoma. ‘‘It looks like someone almost just took a giant knife and scraped the ground,’’ Sheriff Jay Jones said. –AP China yesterday accused two detained Canadians of stealing state secrets, a serious allegation that comes just days after Canada said it would proceed with the extradition case against a top Chinese executive.
The charges will only intensify concerns that Beijing is exacting revenge against Canada for detaining Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies.
Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who had been working as a China analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank, ‘‘had spied on and stolen sensitive information and intelligence through contacts in China,’’ according to a statement from the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission.
Michael Spavor, a Canadian businessman who promoted exchanges with North Korea, was Kovrig’s ‘‘main intelligence contact’’ and had provided intelligence to him, the statement said.
Kovrig and Spavor were detained on December 10, just 10 days after Meng was arrested at the Vancouver airport while in transit.
Kovrig and Spavor, meanwhile, have been detained in Beijing and Dandong, on the North Korean border, respectively.
They have been denied access to their families and to lawyers, and have been kept in cells with the lights on round the clock. Consular officials, however, have been permitted to make several short visits to both men.
Kovrig, who was based in Hong Kong, has travelled to China frequently since 2017 with a regular passport and a business visa.
Spavor had been running Paektu Exchanges, a company based in Dandong that he founded to promote cultural, sporting and business contacts with North Korea.