CCTV images released in Oxford attempted murder case
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The Independent
26 minutes ago
- The Independent
Former US soldier is suspected in Montana bar shooting that killed 4, prompting search
A shooting at a Montana bar Friday left four people dead, and law enforcement officers were searching for a suspect described by his niece as a former U.S. soldier who struggled to get help for mental health problems. Officers searched a mountainous area west of the small town of Anaconda for the 45-year-old suspect, Michael Paul Brown. He lived next door to the site of the 10:30 a.m. shooting at the Owl Bar, according to public records and bar owner David Gwerder. The bartender and three patrons were killed, said Gwerder, who was not there at the time. He believed the four victims were the only ones present during the shooting, and was not aware of any prior conflicts between them and Brown. "He knew everybody that was in that bar. I guarantee you that,' Gwerder said. 'He didn't have any running dispute with any of them. I just think he snapped.' Brown's home was cleared by a SWAT team and he was last seen in the Stump Town area, just west of Anaconda, authorities said. More than a dozen officers from local and state police converged on that area, locking it down so no one was allowed in or out. A helicopter also hovered over a nearby mountainside as officers moved among the trees, said Randy Clark, a retired police officer who lives there. Brown was believed to be armed, the Montana Highway Patrol said in a statement. Brown served in the U.S. Army as an armor crewman from 2001 to 2005 and deployed to Iraq from early 2004 until March 2005, according to Lt. Col. Ruth Castro, an Army spokesperson. Brown was in the Montana National Guard from 2006 to March 2009, Castro said. He left military service in the rank of sergeant. His niece, Clare Boyle, told the AP on Friday that her uncle has been mentally sick for years and that she and other family members have tried repeatedly to seek help. 'This isn't just a drunk/high man going wild,' she wrote in a Facebook message. 'It's a sick man who doesn't know who he is sometimes and frequently doesn't know where or when he is either.' As reports of the shooting spread through town, business owners locked their doors and sheltered inside with customers. Anaconda is about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Missoula in a valley hemmed in by mountains. A town of about 9,000 people, it was founded by copper barons who profited off nearby mines in the late 1800s. A smelter stack that's no longer operational looms over the valley. The Montana Division of Criminal Investigation is leading the investigation into the shooting. The owner of the Firefly Café in Anaconda said she locked up her business at about 11 a.m. Friday after getting alerted to the shooting by a friend. 'We are Montana, so guns are not new to us," café owner Barbie Nelson said. 'For our town to be locked down, everybody's pretty rattled.'
Daily Mail
27 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Fate of parents accused of attempting to murder daughter outside American school in 'honor killing' revealed
A Washington couple accused of trying to strangle their teenage daughter in an alleged 'honor killing' outside a suburban high school have both been found not guilty of attempted murder. Ihsan and Zahraa Ali stood trial for the shocking broad-daylight attack last fall outside Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington State where prosecutors said the pair tried to kill their 17-year-old daughter after she refused an arranged marriage. After three days of deliberations, jurors convicted Ihsan Ali of assault and unlawful imprisonment. His wife Zahraa was found guilty of violating a court order but acquitted of the more serious charges, including attempted murder, assault, and unlawful imprisonment. Ihsan, who remains in custody, faces up to 14 months in prison for assault and an additional 12 months for unlawful imprisonment while Zahraa was released on Thursday on personal recognizance and is under strict orders to remain in Thurston County and avoid any contact with her daughter. The case drew national attention last October after terrifying video footage emerged of Ihsan Ali putting his 17-year-old daughter, Fatima Ali, in a chokehold outside her high school, allegedly in retaliation for refusing an arranged marriage and for dating an American boy - actions he reportedly viewed as bringing shame upon the family. The viral footage first published by the Daily Mail showed Fatima collapsing on the pavement, only for her father to continue strangling her unconscious body for nearly 20 seconds, according to prosecutors. 'She's unconscious, and he continues to strangle her around the neck for another 15-18 seconds and would have continued to do so even longer but for the intervention of those adults,' prosecutor Heather Stone told jurors at the trial. Video showed Ihsan on the ground outside his daughter's school, Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, with her in a chokehold while her boyfriend and classmates repeatedly punched and kicked him to force him to release her Witnesses testified that even after Fatima went limp, Ihsan refused to let go. Among the rescuers were Fatima's boyfriend Isiah, and multiple classmates who repeatedly punched, kicked, and stomped the 44-year-old father in a desperate effort to break the chokehold. In the most gut-wrenching moment of the trial, Fatima, now 18, took to the stand to testify against her own parents. 'Did you have any fear?' Stone asked. 'Yes.' 'Fear of what?' 'Of dying,' Fatima choked out, her voice breaking into a sob. She was barely able to respond 'no' when asked if she could say anything during the attack. '[I'm] heartbroken for what my dad did,' she said, sobbing as she described losing consciousness four times during the attack. Fatima recalled the sensation of dirt on her face, pain in her neck, and her father's arms around her throat. She said she saw 'darkness' before glimpsing her boyfriend and another friend standing over her. The court heard how Fatima had run away that morning after discovering her parents had bought her a one-way plane ticket to Iraq, allegedly to force her into marriage. She fled with just a bag of clothes and $100 she had stolen from her mother. But when school ended that day, her parents were waiting for her at the bus stop. Ihsan's fury erupted when she refused to come home. Witnesses said he punched Isiah in the face, then lunged at his daughter. Prosecutors argued the attack was rooted in a planned 'honor killing,' a culturally motivated act meant to restore perceived family honor. While the court barred the phrase from being used in front of jurors, investigators and witnesses referenced it repeatedly in early police reports and pretrial interviews. Fatima had told police at the time that her father threatened to kill her several times for refusing the arranged marriage and dating a non-Muslim boy. She said she feared she'd never return if sent to Iraq. Prosecutors attempted to argue that motive in court, but Judge Christine Schaller excluded it, citing potential prejudice. Without the motive, prosecutors leaned heavily on video evidence and eyewitness testimony. Bus driver John Denicola testified: 'Obviously, she was in distress, her eyes were rolling into the back of her head, you could tell she was not able to breathe… The look on [Ihsan's] face and the way he was squeezing, he was choking her.' Another rescuer, Josh Wagner, a US Army veteran, testified he 'held Ihsan down' until police arrived. 'Her face was changing color… it was very obvious she was being choked,' he said. Zahraa Ali's fate was more complex. While prosecutors alleged she attempted to finish the job after her husband was subdued - with Fatima testifying she felt her mother grabbing at her neck - the jury rejected the murder charge, citing insufficient evidence of intent. 'And when you look at that video, you see she does not provide any aid at any time to her child, zero aid,' prosecutor Stone argued. 'That is not an effort to comfort her child.' But defense attorney Tim Leary insisted Zahraa was simply 'trying to protect [Fatima] from the chaos.' 'You will see my client, her mom, come and attempt to help her daughter,' he said. 'She is holding her daughter, she's not holding on to her neck.' Leary also reminded the jury that Fatima initially told police she didn't believe her mother tried to hurt her - though she later changed her mind. 'She was just trying to protect me from the chaos,' Fatima told officers. On the stand, she said it was more that she 'didn't want to believe' her mother would harm her. Throughout the trial, defense attorneys hammered home one point that there was no intent to kill. 'There's no nefarious intent,' said Ihsan's lawyer Erik Kaeding. 'There's no intent to hurt anybody badly, there's no intent to kill anybody. There's an intent to take your daughter home.' Zahraa's attorney said similar. 'They certainly could've done things differently, but that does not make this a crime,' Leary said. Legal experts say prosecutors faced an uphill battle from the outset, largely due to pretrial rulings that barred them from discussing the alleged motive. Judge Schaller ruled that discussing arranged marriage, threats of honor killings, or family history of abuse would unfairly bias the jury. As a result, what began as a trial labeled by the media and public as an 'honor killing case' never once used the phrase inside the courtroom. Prosecutor Olivia Zhou never alluded to the motive in her opening statement, focusing instead on the severity of the attack. Ihsan Ali remains behind bars until his mid-August sentencing. His wife Zahraa is free but under strict conditions.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Precrime profiling is no longer a fantasy
This week the UK government introduced an 'artificial intelligence violence predictor' into the prison system, a tool to analyse factors such as criminal record, age and behaviour, to calculate which inmates are most likely to resort to violence so officers can intervene before they do. With attacks on prison officers increasing, AI profiling of inmates is the latest example of so-called precrime technology, based on the dubious theory that science can foresee individual criminal behaviour and prevent it by disrupting, punishing or restricting potential law-breakers. The idea was popularised in the 1956 Philip K Dick novel The Minority Report, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, in which teams of psychic 'precogs' exercise foreknowledge of criminal activity, including premeditated murder, to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future. • Prisons get 'Minority Report' AI profiling to avert violence In the film, set in 2054, the chief of the Precrime agency explains the advantages of pre-emptive justice: 'In our society we have no major crimes … but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.' Thirty years ahead of schedule, instead of clairvoyance as a crime prevention tool, we have AI. The theory of precrime dates to the early 19th century and the Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso, who is purported to have invented the term 'criminology'. Lombroso believed that criminals were born lawless, inheriting atavistically villainous characteristics and physiognomies. Criminal anthropometry, the precise measurement of faces and bodies, he argued, could be used to identify crooks and stop them from committing crimes. This 'positivist' school of criminology claimed to recognise criminals not only by biological characteristics but also through psychological and sociological forms of behaviour. 'Born criminals', nature's psychopaths and dangerous habitual offenders, could thus be eliminated using capital punishment, indefinite confinement or castration. The sinister notion that a system might detect the mere intention to offend is echoed in the 'thought crime' of George Orwell's 1984. Richard Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, advised the president to run mass tests for 'pre-delinquency' and confine those juveniles to 'camps'. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hutschnecker insisted these would not be concentration camps but holiday camps in a 'pastoral setting'. In the 1970s, the University of California, Los Angeles attempted to set up a Centre for the Long-Term Study of Life-Threatening Behaviour, using scientific data to predict 'dangerousness'. It planned to 'compile stocks of behavioural data to understand crimes that had not yet occurred but were 'in formation'.' The project foundered when it was suggested the centre intended to use 'psychosurgery' to modify behaviour. • Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge But precrime is not some sci-fi fantasy or a wacko theory from the fringes of eugenics; it is already here. 'Predictive policing' — using data to forecast future criminal activity — is expanding rapidly. The UK Ministry of Justice is said to be developing a 'homicide prediction project' using police and government data to profile individuals with the aim of forecasting who is more likely to commit a murder. The project, revealed in April by the investigative group Statewatch, will 'review offender characteristics that increase the risk' and 'explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide'. In the US, the software system Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is used by police and judges to forecast the risk of recidivism among more than one million offenders. The software predicts the likelihood that a convicted criminal will reoffend within two years based on data that include 137 of each individual's distinguishing features as well as criminal or court records. This is where actuarial science (mathematical and statistical methods used to assess risk in insurance, pensions and medicine) meets crimefighting and sentencing guidelines: a technological tool to predict the risk of reoffending by rating factors such as type of crime, age, educational background and ethnicity of the offender. In Chicago, an algorithm has been created to predict potential involvement with violent crime to draw up a strategic subject list — or 'heat list' — of those the algorithm calculates to be the city's most dangerous inhabitants. Precrime is most obvious and advanced in the context of counterterrorism to identify threatening individuals, groups or areas, but inevitably invites conflict between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the needs of national security. In the traditional justice and criminal system, the law attempts to capture and punish those responsible after crimes have been committed. AI could invert that equation by meting out punishment or imposing surveillance where no crime has been committed — yet. As the chief of the Precrime agency in Minority Report observes: 'We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.' Critics fear that precrime techniques could remove the presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of the justice system, and increase guilt by association since an individual's known contacts would influence any risk assessment. It also threatens to dehumanise individuals by reducing people to the sum of their accumulated data. Latter-day predictive policing already deploys data analysis and algorithms to identify higher risks of criminality, triggering increased police presence in certain areas and communities. Critics argue that this leads to increased racial profiling, with certain populations disproportionately flagged as high risk. If the data pool being 'learnt' by AI is already racially biased, then its predictions will be similarly skewed. Until the digital age, crimefighting was based on solving crimes or catching criminals in the act. In the age of AI, the sleuth will rely on machine learning to uncover clues to crimes that have yet to be perpetrated. 'It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,' said Sherlock Holmes. In the brave new world of precrime, the data will take over from the detectives.
