Chris Garrett: Bomb expert killed in Ukraine to be repatriated to Isle of Man
Mr Garrett had been working to clear mines and train Ukrainian troops after co-founding a humanitarian and mine clearance charity called Prevail Together.
'An honour'
Mr Quinn served in the Royal Corps of Signals in the British Army for 14 years, including tours of Bosnia and Afghanistan.He said: "The respect and admiration that Chris has out in Ukraine is mirrored here within both the Ukrainian community and the Manx community."The veteran first met the bomb disposal specialist in 2014, later joining him in Ukraine for two missions delivering humanitarian aid in Kyiv.Mr Garrett's remains will be met with a guard of honour, with members of his family also present.The Moddey Dhoo Motorcycle Club will then lead the cavalcade from Ballasalla to Peel on the west coast of the island.Chairman Brian Corrie said: "It's an honour to be able to do something to help the family."He added that one of their members also served in Ukraine with Mr Garrett, and he would be among those taking part.The convoy is due to leave at 15:30 BST.
Read more stories from the Isle of Man on the BBC, watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer and follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook and X.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- The Guardian
Eleven minute race for food: how aid points in Gaza became ‘death traps'
Raed Jamal sends the message shortly after he returns, empty-handed, from an aid distribution point to his tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in south-west Gaza. 'The tanks came and started firing. Three boys near me were martyred,' says the 36-year-old, who has four children. 'I didn't even get anything, just two empty boxes.' Jamal's journey involved a long walk to and from a former residential neighbourhood bulldozed by Israeli forces and turned into one of four militarised aid distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is based in Delaware in the US. The GHF sites – Tal al-Sultan, Saudi neighbourhood, Khan Younis and Wadi Gaza – are located in evacuation zones, which means civilians seeking food have to enter areas they have been ordered to leave. According to GHF's Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, has said 'the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.' The system favours the strongest, so it is mostly men who travel along the designated routes. Then they wait – often for hours – for a centre to open. Finally, there is a dash into the centre of the zones and a scramble to grab a box. At every stage, those seeking aid pass Israeli tanks and troops, as quadcopters fly above. In another clip shared by Jamal he ducks as bullets pass overhead. 'We have purged our hearts of fear,' Jamal says of his near daily walks to the site. 'I need to bring food for my children so they don't die of hunger.' GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, employs US mercenaries at the sites, which opened in May. They replaced 400 non-militarised aid points run under a UN system that Israel claimed had to be shut down because Hamas was diverting aid from it. No evidence for this has been provided. Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking food from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN. The sites' opening times are usually announced in posts on a Facebook account and, more recently, messages sent through a Telegram channel. A WhatsApp channel was also set up in the first weeks. People have been warned not to approach the centres until they open. As the chart below shows, for the site Jamal visited, the amount of time between the site's opening time being announced and the opening itself decreased dramatically in June. Mahmoud Alareer, a 27-year-old living in a tent in western Gaza City, says the opening time announcements for the aid site he uses – Wadi Gaza – have become useless, because of the distance from where he is living. Instead, he travels to the edges of the site in the middle of the night and gambles on it opening at 2am, as it has on every visit so far. First he climbs on to the back of a truck for the long ride south from Gaza City through the militarised Netzarim corridor. Then he waits in the dark until Israeli forces allow him to enter. 'You get there and you slowly, slowly advance,' he says. 'You always know that it could be you who gets shot, or it might be someone next to you.' Alareer says chaos always ensues when the aid point opens, as people start running towards the packages, which are left in the middle of the distribution zone. People trip over craters and tangled wires. GHF has faced severe criticism from the humanitarian community due to the dangers posed to Palestinians both at the sites and on the roads around them. In early July, more than 170 NGOs called for GHF to be shut down, accusing it of violating the principles of humanitarian aid, and calling for the resumption of non-militarised aid in Gaza. Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, says night-time distributions are particularly dangerous because so many roads in southern Gaza have been made unrecognisable by Israeli bombing, making it hard for Palestinians to stick to routes designated by GHF. Zabalgogeazkoa is scathing about the GHF system. 'This is not humanitarian aid,' he says. 'We can only think that it was designed to cause damage to the people seeking aid.' GHF and the IDF have been approached for comment. GHF has previously said the UN figures for deaths around distribution sites are 'false and misleading'. It has also defended its operations more generally and accused its critics of engaging in a 'turf war' over humanitarian supplies. It says it bears no responsibility for deaths outside the perimeters of its sites. The Israeli military has previously acknowledged firing warning shots at Palestinians who it says have approached its forces in a suspicious manner. It has also disputed some of the death tolls provided by the Palestinian authorities. GHF runs only four sites to feed 2 million people, in a territory where extreme hunger is widespread and food security experts have warned of looming famine. It says it has delivered more than 85 million meals 'via roughly 1,422,712 boxes' since its operations began. According to these figures, each box would provide a family with about 60 meals. The organisation has posted photos of GHF-marked boxes that have items such as flour, potatoes, beans and oil. However, Palestinians in Gaza have shared pictures showing open boxes at GHF sites containing a smaller range of items. Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says she could not comment on the specific logistics of GHF, but that aid should go beyond food and should include water, cooking gas or other cooking facilities. 'If you look at Gaza now … people have been deprived of everything that sustains life: shelter materials, fuel, cooking gas, hygiene materials, everything that one needs to feel dignified, to have some sort of semblance of normality,' she says. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), nearly a third of Gaza's population is going several days without food, and 470,000 people are expected to face the most severe levels of hunger between May and September this year. The WFP has also warned that dietary diversity declined sharply in May and continued to worsen in June. Damage to farmland over the course of the war has only increased Palestinians' reliance on aid. A study published this year using satellite imagery to assess damage to farmland found up to 70% of tree crops had been damaged. A Unosat assessment from April found that 71.2% of Gaza's greenhouses had been damaged. This sequence shows damage to greenhouses and orchards in Beit Lahiya. In late March, dozens of bakeries supported by the WFP halted production due to the Israeli blockade. A handful briefly resumed bread production in May when some trucks were allowed into the territory, as this timeline shows. Jamal reiterates that he has no choice but to return to his nearest GHF site, despite the dangers. 'I have gone four days in a row and not brought anything back, not even flour – nothing,' he says. 'Sometimes you just can't beat the others. But what else can we do, our life is a struggle.'
Sky News
14 hours ago
- Sky News
Middle East latest: Trump 'caught off guard' by recent Israeli strikes in Gaza and Syria
Food situation in Gaza 'the worst its ever been' A charity director based in Deir al-Balah has said the food situation in Gaza is "absolutely desperate" and "the worst its ever been". Rachael Cummings, humanitarian director for Save The Children, has been based in the Strip since February last year. Speaking to Sky's chief presenter Mark Austin, she said: "One of my colleagues said to me yesterday, 'We are all walking together towards death'. And this is the situation now for people in Gaza. "There is no food for their children, it's absolutely desperate here." "The markets are empty," Ms Cummings said. "People may even have cash in their pockets yet they cannot buy bread [or] vegetables. "My team have said to me, 'There's nothing in my house to feed my children, my children are crying all day, every day." She also shared fears over Israel's latest evacuation orders "forcibly displacing people when there is nowhere for people to go". Gazans in Deir al-Balah have been told to head south and towards the coast. "Where people are being pushed into is extremely overcrowded," she said. "It's a very dangerous place, especially for children."
The Guardian
16 hours ago
- The Guardian
In Ukraine's bombed out reservoir a huge forest has grown – is it a return to life or a toxic timebomb?
At the southern tip of Europe's largest river island, the ground falls away into a vast and unexpected vista. From a high, rocky ledge on Khortytsia Island, the view opens on to a sea of swaying young willows and mirrored lagoons. Some of the trees are already many metres tall, but this is a young forest. Just a few years ago, all of it was under water. 'This is Velykyi Luh – the Great Meadow,' says Valeriy Babko, a retired history teacher and army veteran, standing on the former reservoir shoreline at Malokaterynivka village. For him, this extraordinary new-old environment represents more than nature alone. 'It is an ancient, mythic terrain, woven through Ukrainian folklore,' he says. 'Think of all those Cossacks galloping through its valleys of forests so dense the sun barely pierced them.' That historic landscape vanished in 1956, when the Soviet Union completed the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant and flooded the entire region. What had once been an ecological and cultural cradle became a reservoir, and its rich, living systems were entombed beneath the water. Water flows over the collapsed Kakhovka dam on 7 June 2023. Photograph: AP Then, in 2023, that water was unleashed as weapon: the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, under the control of Russian forces, was blown up (Russia denies bombing it). It sent a vast, destructive flood of water and sediment downstream, destroying villages and killing an unknown number of people; figures for the death toll range from a few dozen into the hundreds. Up to one million people lost access to drinking water. Two years on from the disaster, the reservoir's future still hangs in the balance. Scientists say it represents both a 'return to life' for the ecosystem and wild creatures that inhabit it – and an unpredictable, potentially toxic 'timebomb'. It is a case study in the complexity of how nature responds to vast changes wrought by humankind – and what happens to ecosystems in the wake of disaster. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, Kakhovka reservoir resembled a desert of drying mud and cracked silt. Now, plants grow so thickly you must scythe through the vegetation covering the earth embankment before the basin comes fully into view. The bone-dry former shoreline is studded with husks and shells of aquatic organisms that once lived here. Beyond it, a vast sea of young trees stretches over the horizon towards the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. The size of it is difficult to take in: the reservoir's surface area was 2,155 sq km (832 sq miles) – bigger than New York City and its five boroughs. The latest report from the Ukrainian War Environmental Consequences Work Group (UWEC) confirms what satellite images, ecologists and field researchers began to observe over the past two years: the ecosystem of the lower Dnipro is not only recovering, it is evolving. The drained reservoir is now home to dense growths of willow and poplar and enormous wetlands; endangered sturgeon have returned to waterways; wild boar and mammals to the forests; and there are signs of spontaneous regeneration across a huge stretch of floodplain. 'We are witnessing the emergence of a massive natural floodplain forest system,' says Oleksiy Vasyliuk, co-author of a 2025 report on the reservoir for the UWEC and head of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. 'It is not a managed project. It is the land itself returning to life.' Instead of an artificial lake on their doorsteps, Malokaterynivka residents have a new forest landscape to contend with. Photograph: Vincent Mundy That return is increasingly measurable for ecologists. 'Native fauna are returning to the section of the river freed from the dam and reservoir,' the report confirms. 'As well as a rapid expansion of native vegetation, as many as 40bn tree seeds have sprouted, which could lead to the formation of the largest floodplain forest in Ukraine's steppe zone.'According to Eugene Simonov, international coordinator at Rivers without Boundaries, what is unfolding in Velykyi Luh is not just a local wetland rebound, it is the rare and spontaneous reconstitution of a vast riverine ecosystem, with implications that stretch far beyond Ukraine. 'Prior to the dam, the Dnipro floodplain here hosted huge oak forests and many types of wetlands over thousands of square kilometers, creating a mosaic of biodiversity-rich habitats for hundreds of bird species and gigantic fish such as the Ukrainian sturgeon, which used to come here to spawn,' Simonov says. Clockwise from top left: Critically endangered sturgeon are returning to their ancient spawning grounds; billions of freshwater clams died when the reservoir emptied; young sturgeon at a caviar aquaculture facility – a small wild population is now found in the Dnipro; the fountains in Dubovy Gai (Oak Park), which will not work again now the water supply has dried up, says Valeriy Babko, pictured; the floodplain is littered with the remains of aquatic organisms. Photographs: Vincent Mundy The Great Meadow, he says, also represents an opportunity for Ukraine as it seeks to attract global funds for postwar recovery and join the EU. 'Restoring natural freshwater ecosystems along a 250-km stretch of the lower Dnipro could be the largest project of its kind in Europe and has the potential to become Ukraine's decisive contribution to meeting EU commitments to restore rivers to their natural state by 2030,' he says. Yet, as scientists are quick to emphasise, this recovery is not guaranteed. Much of the former reservoir remains inaccessible due to active shelling and mined terrain. Comprehensive biological monitoring is difficult. Heavy metals and chemical contamination are a growing concern for researchers. And the future of the area remains politically uncertain. Clockwise from top left: trees sprout from the basin of the former reservoir; Vadym Maniuk, ecologist, surveys the dense growth; white willows and black poplars have grown rapidly, turning the area into forest; some of the trees have already grown many metres tall. Photographs: Vincent Mundy and Alessio Mamo While the reservoir forest looks like an oasis, sprung up in the absence of people, it is still marked by the residue of human enterprise. Over time, the banks of the reservoir eroded. Their fine particles of dust sank into a thick layer at the basin's floor. At the same time, pollutants were entering the water – particularly heavy metals from industrial enterprises along and upstream of the reservoir. Oleksandra Shumilova, a freshwater ecologist, says: 'All these pollutants were absorbed into these fine particles that were deposited on the bottom.' The sediment acted 'like an enormous sponge that was accumulated on the bottom of this reservoir. We estimate that it was about 1.5 cubic km of polluted sediments'. The industrial chimneys of Zaporizhzhia tower over the ancient Scythian burial monuments of Khortytsia island. Photograph: Vincent Mundy When the dam was drained it sent an enormous quantity of polluted, potentially toxic waste flowing into the wider area. Its heavy metals could easily contaminate water sources, soil, and be taken up by plants. Even in small concentrations, they can 'have negative effects on virus systems of human organisms, for example, they can cause cancer, endocrine disruptions, problems with lungs, with kidneys,' Shumilova says. She compares their effects to radiation: as those toxins move up the food chain, they can concentrate, causing particular problems for bigger animals and meat eaters. 'As for how these pollutants are also transferred within the food web, it's not known. It is not possible to investigate at the moment, because it's dangerous to enter the area. There is no systematic research,' she says. With the Dnipro River's water table permanently altered, the artificially fed ponds in Dubovy Gai are expected to be fully dried out by the end of the summer. Photograph: Vincent Mundy A 2025 report co-authored by Shumilova and published in the journal Science concluded that the pollutants represented a 'toxic timebomb', and warned of significant concerns for animal food webs and human populations living in the area. But, as in other environments – such as the site of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster – contamination and natural regeneration can occur side by side. In the same paper, the scientists concluded that within five years, 80% of the ecosystem functions lost to the dam's presence will be restored and that the floodplain's biodiversity would recover significantly within two years. The UWEC report frames this moment as a strategic turning point for Ukraine's environmental and cultural policy. If left to regenerate, the site could become one of Europe's largest contiguous freshwater ecosystems, rivalling even the Danube delta in ecological importance. But the emerging forest at Kakhovka could disappear as quickly as it emerged. 'If the hydropower dam is rebuilt,' Vasyliuk warns, 'this young forest and all the life it now sustains will be lost again.' The state energy company Ukrhydroenergo has already signalled its intention to reconstruct the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. For some officials, this represents a return to 'normality': a reinstatement of industrial productivity, energy security and geopolitical control. 'Rebuilding the dam the way it was would not be a recovery,' says Vasyliuk, 'it would be an ecocide. It would destroy a young, spontaneous forest before we even have a chance to understand it.' The decision holds significance beyond Ukraine's borders. Roughly 80% of the territory affected by the reservoir's collapse lies within nationally and internationally protected zones, many of them part of Europe's Emerald Network, placing the fate of Velykyi Luh within a larger continental mandate to safeguard ecological and cultural heritage. People fish in the river, which dropped by several metres after the dam was destroyed. Photograph: Vincent Mundy From a climate perspective, the newly forming ecosystem offers significant potential for carbon capture and storage, the 2025 UWEC report concludes. 'This is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss,' says Simonov. 'If Ukraine chooses to protect Velykyi Luh, it won't just be saving a landscape, it will be choosing to believe in its own future.' 'This is our biocultural sovereignty at stake and that means our nature, our identity, our independence, and a symbol of the kind of nation we want to become.' Across the lower Dnipro, warblers nest in reeds where water once lapped against concrete and sturgeon spawn in shallows they haven't visited in 70 years. The new wetland echoes an ancient rhythm. 'What will happen with this area? We cannot predict at the moment with full confidence, but it's true that it is reestablishing very rapidly,' says Shumilova. 'From a human point of view it was, of course, a disaster for people living there. But from a scientific point of view, it's a very rare event: how an ecosystem [can be] re-established. It is a big natural experiment. And it is still ongoing.' Beyond the riprap (rocks placed at the shoreline to control erosion) of the former reservoir the new forest emerges. Photograph: Vincent Mundy Additional reporting by Tess McClure Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
