Belarus journalist and girlfriend moved from jail to house arrest
KYIV, Ukraine — The dissident Belarusian journalist and his Russian girlfriend who were arrested after being pulled off a flight that was diverted to Minsk have been transferred from jail to house arrest — a move the country’s exiled opposition leader said Friday was positive but still left them “hostages.”
Raman Pratasevich, whose messaging app channel was widely used in last year’s massive protests against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, and girlfriend Sofia Sapega were seized May 23 when their flight from Greece to Lithuania was forced to land in Minsk because of a reported bomb threat.
Several world leaders denounced the dramatic gambit as a hijacking and it prompted another round of Western sanctions on Belarus, where Lukashenko responded to the months of mass protests with a brutal crackdown.
Pratasevich, who faces a potential 15 years in prison, has been seen since his arrest in videos on state television and at a government press briefing expressing regret for his activities.
The opposition said he spoke under duress.
Belarus’ Investigative Committee said in a statement that Pratasevich and Sapega have been moved to house arrest after they had cooperated with investigators and accepted a pretrial deal.
Virgin Galactic gets OK:
Virgin Galactic finally has the federal government’s approval to start launching customers into space from New Mexico. Richard Branson’s rocketship company announced the Federal Aviation Administration’s updated license on Friday.
It’s the final hurdle in Virgin Galactic’s yearslong effort to send paying passengers on short space hops.
The company is working toward three more space test flights this summer and early fall, before opening the rocketship’s doors to paying customers.
The original plans called for company engineers to launch next to evaluate equipment, followed by a flight with Branson and then a science mission by Italian Air Force officers.
In the meantime, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos earlier this month announced plans to ride his own rocket into space July 20 from Texas.
Virgin Galactic officials acknowledged the growing chatter over whether Branson will try to beat Bezos into space but did not provide any details on the date of Branson’s flight.
McAfee widow wants probe:
The widow of John McAfee, the British American tycoon who died in a Spanish prison this week while awaiting extradition to the United States, on Friday demanded a “thorough investigation” of his death, saying her husband did not appear suicidal when they last spoke.
Authorities in Spain are conducting an autopsy on McAfee’s body but have said that everything at the scene in his cell indicated that the 75-year-old killed himself.
An official source familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press that a suicide note had been found in McAfee’s pocket.
McAfee’s Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, said that the family had not been informed by authorities about the note.
In her first public remarks since the software entrepreneur’s death on Wednesday,
Janice McAfee said she wanted a “thorough investigation” to provide “answers about this was able to happen.”
“His last words to me were ‘I love you and I will call you in the evening,’ ” the 38-year-old told reporters outside the Brians 2 penitentiary northwest of Barcelona. She said they spoke earlier on the day he was found dead.
John McAfee was arrested at the Barcelona airport in October last year on a warrant issued by prosecutors in Tennessee who were seeking up to three decades of imprisonment for allegedly evading more than $4 million in taxes.
The day before he was found dead, Spain’s National Court had announced that it was agreeing to his extradition to the U.S. but the decision was not final.
Charity ‘horrified’: The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Friday it was “horrified by
the brutal murder” of three colleagues in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the latest attack on humanitarian workers helping civilians in the deadly conflict there.
A statement by the aid group, also known by its French acronym MSF, said two Ethiopian colleagues and one from Spain were found dead Friday, a day after colleagues lost contact with them while they were traveling.
“We condemn this attack on our colleagues in the strongest possible terms and will be relentless in understanding of what happened,” MSF added, calling it “unthinkable” that the three — emergency coordinator Maria Hernandez, assistant coordinator Yohannes Halefom Reda and driver Tedros Gebremariam Gebremichael — paid for their work with their lives.
In a statement, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry expressed condolences for the deaths it said occurred in the town of Abi Addi, and it suggested
that Tigray fighters were to blame.
Deadly knife attack: A man armed with a long knife killed three people and injured five others, some seriously, in Germany’s southern city of Wuerzburg on Friday before being shot by police and arrested, authorities said.
Police identified the suspect as a 24-year-old Somali man living in Wuerzburg. His life was not in danger from his gunshot wound, they said.
The suspect was in psychiatric treatment before the attack and had been known to police, Bavaria’s top security official Joachim Herrmann said.
There was no immediate word on a possible motive.
Moscow’s maneuvers: The Russian military on Friday launched sweeping maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea featuring warplanes armed with state-of-theart hypersonic missiles, a
show of force amid a surge in tensions following an incident with a British destroyer in the Black Sea.
Moscow said one of its warships fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of British destroyer Defender on Wednesday to force her out of an area near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters.
Britain insisted its ship wasn’t fired upon and said she was sailing in Ukrainian waters.
The Russian drills that began Friday in the eastern Mediterranean come as a British carrier strike group is in the area. Earlier this week, British and U.S. F-35 fighters from HMS Queen Elizabeth flew combat sorties against the Islamic State group.
The Defense Ministry said the maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean also involve several warships, two submarines and longrange Tu-22M3 bombers along with other combat aircraft.