World news in brief
Five Palestinian gunmen killed in West Bank raid by Israel
Israeli forces killed five Palestinian gunmen linked to the Islamic militant Hamas group in a raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank yesterday, after the latest bloodshed in the region that will likely further exacerbate tensions.
The Palestinian president’s office called the violence a crime, urging the United States to pressure Israel to hold back on its incursions. The military said the raid was meant to apprehend a militant cell that staged a botched shooting attack on a
restaurant in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The violence extends one of the deadliest periods in years in the West Bank and comes during the first weeks of Israel’s new government, its most right-wing ever, which has promised to take a tough stance against the Palestinians.
The Israeli military said it was operating in the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp to apprehend the suspects behind a failed shooting attack last month at a West Bank restaurant, where attackers allegedly were thwarted by a weapon malfunction. The attackers then fled the scene, the military said, adding that they were members of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and has elements in the West Bank as well.
The military said yesterday it was searching for the militant cell behind the shooting that it said had sealed itself inside a home in the refugee camp. During the search, troops encountered gunmen and a gun battle erupted. The military said several of the gunmen who were killed were involved in the attempted attack on the restaurant. “The new Israeli government is continuing its series of crimes against our Palestinian people,” a statement from Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s office said. AP
FBI arrests two for plot to attack Baltimore grid
The FBI arrested two people, including a neo-Nazi leader, before they could attack Baltimore’s power grid, officials said yesterday. The suspects, Brandon Russell and Sarah Clendaniel, were taken into custody last week, officials said in a briefing yesterday. The FBI said the plot was racially motivated but did not provide details. The majority of residents in Baltimore are Black, according to US Census data.
Russell is a founder of a neo-Nazi group named Atomwaffen Division that works toward “ushering in the collapse of civilisation”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organisation that tracks US hate groups. “Clendaniel and Russell conspired and took steps to shoot multiple electrical substations in the Baltimore area aiming to ‘completely destroy
this whole city’, but these plans were stopped,” Erek Barron, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, said in the press briefing.
“The accused were not just talking but taking steps to fulfill their threats and further their extremist goals,” said Thomas Sobocinski, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore office. Baltimore Gas and Electric, a subsidiary of Exelon Corporation, which owns the targeted substations, said there was no damage to any of its equipment or outages. The company said it did not believe its equipment was targeted for particular vulnerabilities. Reuters
Nepal aircraft had no thrust before crash, says panel
An aircraft that crashed in Nepal last month, killing 71 people on board, had no thrust motion in its engines in the final leg of its descent, a government-appointed panel investigating the accident said yesterday. The plane crashed just before landing in the tourist city of Pokhra on 15 January, in one of Nepal’s worst airplane accidents in 30 years.
There were 72 passengers on the twin-engine ATR 72 aircraft operated by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines, including two infants, four crew members and 10 foreign nationals. Rescuers recovered 71 bodies, with one unaccounted person presumed to be dead. Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder showed the propellers of both engines went into “feather in the base leg of descending”, the panel said in a statement. Reuters
Civil rights groups seek halt to Missouri execution
The president of the national NAACP is urging Missouri governor Mike Parson to halt the execution of Raheem Taylor, who is scheduled to die by injection today for the deaths of his girlfriend and her three children. “There are many reasons to spare Mr Taylor’s life, but they all come down to one: the state of Missouri has the life of a man in its hands and, in this life and death decision, lies the weight of moral responsibility,” NAACP
president Derrick Johnson wrote to the Republican governor. “The evidence presented at trial does not support Mr Taylor’s conviction.”
Separately, nearly three dozen civil rights and religious groups asked St Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell to reconsider his decision not to ask a judge for a new hearing on Taylor’s claim that he was not even in Missouri when the killings occurred. The letter said Bell has a “clear opportunity here to free an innocent Black man whose case was riddled with prosecutorial misconduct, police coercion and brutality, and ineffective assistance of counsel”.
Mr Bell said in his 30 January decision that the “facts are not there to support a credible case of innocence”. Meanwhile, former St Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, whose office prosecuted the 2004 case, told the Associated Press that Taylo’'s claims of innocence are “nonsense”, and that the evidence against him was overwhelming.
Taylor, 58, who previously went by the first name Leonard, shared a house in the St Louis suburb of Jennings with Angela Rowe and her children 10-year-old daughter Alexus Conley, sixyear-old daughter AcQreya Conley, and five-year-old son Tyrese Conley. Taylor boarded a flight to California on 26 November 2004. AP
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