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Arab News
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
More than 100 migrants freed in Libya after being held captive by gang, officials say
BENGHAZI: More than 100 migrants, including five women, have been freed from captivity after being held for ransom by a gang in eastern Libya, the country's attorney general said on Monday. 'A criminal group involved in organizing the smuggling of migrants, depriving them of their freedom, trafficking them, and torturing them to force their families to pay ransoms for their release,' a statement from the attorney general said. Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe via the dangerous route across the desert and over the Mediterranean following the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011. Many migrants desperate to make the crossing have fallen into the hands of traffickers. The freed migrants had been held in Ajdabiya, some 160 km (100 miles) from Libya's second city Benghazi. Five suspected traffickers from Libya, Sudan and Egypt, have been arrested, officials said. The attorney general and Ajdabiya security directorate posted pictures of the migrants on their Facebook pages which they said had been retrieved from the suspects' mobile phones. They showed migrants with hands and legs cuffed with signs that they had been beaten. In February, at least 28 bodies were recovered from a mass grave in the desert north of Kufra city. Officials said a gang had subjected the migrants to torture and inhumane treatment. That followed another 19 bodies being found in a mass grave in the Jikharra area, also in southeastern Libya, a security directorate said, blaming a known smuggling network. As of December 2024, around 825,000 migrants from 47 countries were recorded in Libya, according to UN data released in May. Last week, the EU migration commissioner and ministers from Italy, Malta and Greece met with the internationally recognized prime minister of the national unity government, Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and discussed the migration crisis.
SBS Australia
09-07-2025
- SBS Australia
Blessing scams in Australia: 80 reports, $3 million stolen and fresh charge
A 62-year-old man has been charged as part of an investigation into 'spiritual blessings scam' which target Asian communities. NSW Police said the man was arrested at Brisbane Airport on Friday, extradited to NSW, and charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception. He is due to appear in court today. The investigation into so-called 'blessing scams' started in April, and NSW Police said they had received reports for more than 80 incidents across Sydney, including Ryde, Burwood, Parramatta and Hornsby areas, with more than $3 million in cash and valuables stolen. Police will allege in court that the charged man was involved in defrauding a 77-year-old woman of a large sum of money and jewellery at Parramatta in June. He was further charged with participating in criminal group activity and demanding property in company with menaces with intent to steal. What are spiritual blessing scams? Spiritual blessing scammers approach victims in public, often working in pairs or groups. They will ask a victim if they know a spiritual healer and escalate the conversation, telling the victim their family are in danger and they will need to seek a spiritual blessing. Often they threaten that the person or their family will be seriously injured if they don't have their wealth blessed. They tell the victim they need to put their cash and jewellery in a bag and have the bag blessed by a spiritual healer. The bag is then returned empty.
Al Jazeera
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Azerbaijan accuses Russia of ‘unacceptable violence' over custody deaths
In 2001, a man was stabbed to death near a lakeside restaurant in Yekaterinburg, an urban centre in Russia's Ural Mountains region. With his dying breath, he whispered the names of his alleged killers to the police, local media claimed. The man and his presumed murderers were ethnic Azeris, Turkic-speaking Muslims whose families fled to Russia in the 1990s after the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azeri region dominated by ethnic Armenians. But it took Russian authorities 24 years to identify and detain the presumed suspects – even though they ran the restaurant and never went into hiding. Two alleged suspects died while being rounded up on Friday. One suffered a 'heart attack' while the other suspect's cause of death 'is being established', according to Russian prosecutors. They also purported that the suspects were part of 'a criminal group' allegedly involved in other murders and the sale of counterfeit alcohol that killed 44 people in 2021. The prosecutors provided no answers as to why the presumed 'criminals' were at large for so long – and did not elaborate on the apparently brutal manner in which they were detained. The deaths triggered a diplomatic storm that may contribute to a tectonic shift in the strategic South Caucasus region, Russia's former stamping ground, where Azerbaijan won Nagorno-Karabakh back in 2020, and Turkiye is regaining its centuries-old clout. Azerbaijan slams Russia's 'unacceptable violence' The spat has so far resulted in the arrest of two Russian intelligence officers in Azerbaijan, the shutdown of a Kremlin-funded media outlet there, and the cancellation of 'cultural events' sponsored by Moscow. Russian police and intelligence officers used 'unacceptable violence' that killed two brothers, Ziyaddin Safarov and Gusein Safarov, and left their relatives severely injured, Azerbaijan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday. One of the injured men reportedly said masked officers began breaking his front door at dawn, frightening his children. The officers 'turned the house upside down and kept beating us for an hour without asking anything', Mohammed Safarov told the MediaAzNews website. He said his elderly father was also beaten and electrocuted for hours and claimed they were both forced to 'volunteer' to fight Russia's war in Ukraine. Other Azeri media outlets published photos of bruises and wounds the men claimed were caused by Russian officers. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, in response to a question about Azerbaijan's reactions, 'We sincerely regret such decisions'. He added, 'We believe that everything that's happening (in Yekaterinburg) is related to the work of law enforcement agencies, and this cannot and should not be a reason for such a reaction.' But Emil Mustafayev, a political analyst based in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, said the incident highlighted a xenophobic strain in Russia. 'The killing of Azeris is a link in the chain of tendentious politics where ethnic minorities are used as a lightning rod,' he said. 'This is not just a tragedy, this is a symptom of a deep sickness of the Russian society.' The Azeri diaspora in Russia is at least two million strong, but they face discrimination, police brutality and hate attacks. 'The Kremlin has long ago mastered a trick – when domestic dissent is on the rise, there is a need to switch attention to 'the enemies from within', be that Ukrainians, Tajiks, Uzbeks or, like now, Azeris,' Mustafayev added. The Kremlin uses state propaganda, police brutality and the taciturn approval of top officials to create an atmosphere of violence against migrants that is 'seen as normal, as inevitable', he said. Back in the 1990s, Azeri migrants nearly monopolised fruit trade and mini-bus transportation in Russian urban centres. Many still run countless shops selling vegetables and flowers. 'We are the boogeymen, cops always need to check our documents and need no excuse to harass us and call us names even after they see my Russian passport,' an ethnic Azeri owner of a flower shop near a major railway station in Moscow told Al Jazeera, on condition of anonymity. Until the early 2000s, the Azeris 'undoubtedly were the number one' most-hated ethnic minority in Russia, until the arrival of labour migrants from Russia's North Caucasus and ex-Soviet Central Asia, said Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany's Bremen University. Since then, some ultra-nationalists and skinheads who considered Azeris their main enemies joined law enforcement agencies, he added. 'So, the cruelty in Yekaterinburg may have been caused by' the decades-old hatred, Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera. Strained ties Other geopolitical factors contributed to anti-Azeri sentiments in Russia. In 2020, Azerbaijan put an end to the seemingly unsolvable political deadlock over Nagorno-Karabakh. 'The success undoubtedly became possible thanks to Turkiye's military aid,' Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London, told Al Jazeera. Baku bought advanced Turkish-made Bayraktar drones that could easily strike large groups of Armenian and separatist soldiers, together with their trenches, tanks and trucks. An Azeri-Turkish alliance emerged, 'allowing Baku to get rid of Moscow's obtrusive 'peacekeeping' mission and depriving it of a chance to manipulate the Azeri-Armenian conflict to keep both [Azerbaijan and Armenia] in its political orbit', he said. The alliance tarnished Moscow's clout in South Caucasus, while Baku sympathised with Kyiv in the Russian-Ukrainian war, he said. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev also accused Russia of obstructing an investigation into the downing of an Azeri passenger plane over Chechnya last December. The plane was apparently hit by panicking Russian air defence forces during a Ukrainian drone attack on Grozny, Chechnya's administrative capital. Aliyev also refused to take part in the May 9 parade on Moscow's iconic Red Square to commemorate Russia's role in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945. Baku fiercely resists the Kremlin's campaign to forcibly enlist Azeri labour migrants to join Russia's war effort in Ukraine. Ilkhamov said the violent sting in Yekaterinburg became part of the Kremlin's efforts to 'frighten the Azeri community in Russia'.
CTV News
25-06-2025
- CTV News
Man shot and killed alongside son linked to Edmonton extortion arsons by court documents
Court documents show alleged inner-workings of the group believed to be behind a series of arsons and extortions targeting south Asian homebuilders in Edmonton.
News.com.au
12-06-2025
- News.com.au
Three men charged after daylight shooting at Merrylands home linked to alleged crime boss
Three men have been charged after the broad daylight shooting of a house linked to an alleged crime boss in Sydney. Police were called to the home on Earl St in Merrylands in the city's west at about 9.20am on Thursday. Nobody was inside at the time or injured in the shooting. A burnt-out Porsche was found a short time later in Chester Hill. Ali Elmoubayed, an alleged member of the Alameddine enterprise, is linked to the address. A police helicopter followed the alleged attackers as they fled the scene in the suburb of Merrylands. Three men – aged 20, 22, 23 – have since been arrested and charged with conspire to discharge firearm etc. intend cause grievous bodily harm, fire firearm at dwelling etc. organised criminal activity, damage property by fire/exp > $15,000, and participate in a criminal group. The 22-year-old was also charged with acquire etc. pistol subject to firearms prohibition order. All three men were refused bail to appear in Parramatta Local Court on Friday. Police allege that at about the same time, a Ford Territory was seen driving erratically before crashing on Prospect Rd in Greystanes. Two 17-year-old boys allegedly travelling in the car were caught and held by members of the public until police arrived at the scene and arrested them. It is alleged jerry cans containing fuel, bleach, balaclavas, and a knife were found inside the car. The teenagers have since been charged with take and drive conveyance without consent of owner, accessory before the fact to damage property by fire/exp > $15,000, custody of knife in a public place, and participate in a criminal group. They are scheduled to front a Children's Court on Friday.
