New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says 40 people were killed and more than 20 seriously wounded in mass shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch on Friday. 

New Zealand has been placed on its highest security threat level, she said, adding four people with extremist views are held in police custody but they had not been on any police watchlists. 

One of the suspects is Australian, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said. “I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen,” he told reporters in Sydney.

Video footage widely circulated on social media, apparently taken by a gunman and posted online live as the attack unfolded, showed him driving to one mosque, entering it and shooting randomly at people inside.

One man who said he was at the Al Noor mosque told media the gunman was white, blond and wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. The man burst into the mosque as worshipers were kneeling for prayers.

“He had a big gun … he came and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere,” Ahmad al-Mahmoud told Reuters. He said he and others escaped by breaking through a glass door.

“This is one of New Zealand’s darkest days,” Prime Minister Ardern said.

Police advised people living in the city center to stay indoors. All mosques, schools and council buildings were also placed on lockdown.

The Bangladesh cricket team was also at the mosque attending Friday prayers. The team was slated to play New Zealand in a third cricket test starting on Saturday.

Presstv

Another damning Human Rights Report on Cameroon by the US State Department. The question remains: after documenting all these abuses, some of which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, what will the US do?

 
Excerpts of the 2018 US State Dept. report: 
“Government security forces were widely believed to be responsible for disappearances of suspected Anglophone separatists, with reports of bodies dumped far from the site of killings to make identification difficult. According to credible nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the government did not readily account for some of the activists arrested in connection with the Anglophone crisis. Family members and friends of the detainees were frequently unaware of the missing individuals’ location in detention for a month or more.

For example, authorities held incommunicado Ayuk Sisiku Tabe, the “interim president” of the so-called Republic of Ambazonia, along with 46 other Anglophone separatists, from January 29 until late June when they were allowed to meet with their lawyers and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“There were credible reports that members of government forces physically abused and killed prisoners in their custody. In its July report, Human Rights Watch highlighted the case of Samuel Chiabah, popularly known as Sam Soya, whom members of government forces interrogated under harsh conditions and killed, following the killing of two gendarmes by armed separatists at a checkpoint between Bamenda and Belo in the Northwest Region.

A video widely circulated on social media featured Sam Soya sitting on the floor and being questioned about the killings, along with one other suspect. In the video Sam Soya could be heard crying in agony and denying participation in the killings. Photographs were released on social media that showed members of security forces in uniform using a bladed weapon to slice open Sam Soya’s neck and the leg of the other man, both of whom were lying face down on the floor and in handcuffs.

In July human rights lawyer Felix Agbor Nkongho Balla reported an incident in which guards at the Yaounde Kondengui maximum security prison abused 18 Anglophone detainees who had been transferred from the Buea Central Prison and the SED. He indicated that prison guards kept the detainees in tight chains and brutally beat them, repeatedly referring to them as Ambazonians. In solidarity with the victims, other Anglophone detainees staged a violent protest.

The prison registrar allegedly told the inmates that he had received orders from his hierarchy to keep the detainees in chains. In an attempt to resolve the tension, after long hours of negotiations, the prison registrar removed the chains and the situation returned to normal.

Two black boxes from the Boeing 737 MAX airplane that crashed in Ethiopia arrived on Thursday in Paris for expert analysis, officials said, as regulators around the world awaited word on whether it was safe to resume flying the jets.

A spokesman for France’s BEA air accident investigation agency said the flight data and cockpit voice recorders would be handed over to the agency later in the day. Their data are critical to finding out what caused the brand-new aircraft to plunge to the ground shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday.

Following the lead of other global aviation regulators unnerved by the second crash involving a 737 MAX in less than five months, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued orders on Wednesday for the planes to be grounded.

Boeing, which maintained that its planes were safe to fly, said in a statement that it supported the FAA move. “Boeing has determined – out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft’s safety – to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft.”

The FAA along with the National Transportation Safety Board, the Ethiopian civil aviation authority, and Boeing, have been investigating the crash at the site, some 60 km (around 40 miles) outside the Ethiopian capital.

On Thursday morning in Addis Ababa, grieving relatives of some of the 157 victims of Sunday’s air disaster boarded buses for a three-hour journey to the crash site.

Others described their visit on Wednesday to the arid farmland where the passenger jet crashed. Relatives of the victims lay flowers during a visit to the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX crash site on March 13, 2019 Tony Karumba, AFP

“We saw where he died and touched the earth,” said Sultan Al-Mutairi, who had come from Riyadh to mourn his brother, Saad, who ran a recruitment agency in Nairobi and perished in the crash.

Experts say it could take weeks or months to identify the victims, as their remains were scattered, charred and in fragments due to the impact of the crash and ensuing fire.

Investigation

Frustration is growing among the families of victims of the crash who are in Addis Ababa. On Thursday morning, some asked Ethiopian Airlines for greater transparency. Both the Ethiopian Airlines crash and a Lion Air crash in Indonesia occurred just minutes after take-off.

Fresh information from the wreckage in Ethiopia and newly refined data about the plane’s flight path indicated some similarities between the two disasters “that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause,” the FAA said in a statement.

Acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said he did not know how long the U.S. grounding of the aircraft would last. A software fix for the 737 MAX that Boeing has been working on since a fatal crash last October in Indonesia will take months to complete, Elwell told reporters on Wednesday.

Deliveries of Boeing’s best-selling 737 MAX jets were effectively frozen, though production continued, after the United States joined a global grounding of the narrow-body model over safety concerns, industry sources said.

All 737 MAX jets have now been grounded, flight tracking website FlightRadar24 said. An Air Canada flight from San Francisco to Halifax was the last to land late on Wednesday.

With the uncertainty hanging over the 737 MAX, a French presidential source said European planemaker Airbus and Ethiopian Airlines are discussing a possible new contract as part of the airline’s fleet overhaul.

The official said President Emmanuel Macron and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had spoken about a possible new contract during Macron’s visit to Addis Ababa earlier this week.

Airlines operating the 737 MAX jets that have been delivered since its 2017 debut said they had cancelled some of their flights and rearranged schedules to use other jets in their fleets.

“Our goal is to operate our schedule with every available aircraft in our fleet to meet our customers’ expectations during the busy spring travel season,” said U.S. carrier Southwest Airlines Co, the world’s biggest operator of the 737 MAX.

(REUTERS)

The top United States diplomat to Africa says perhaps it’s time to take the deadly separatist crisis in Cameroon to an “international forum.”

An exasperated Tibor Nagy told reporters on Tuesday that “my heart breaks for Cameroon … I just don’t understand why this crisis goes on and on and on.”

Some half a million people have been displaced as Cameroon’s government battles an Anglophone separatist movement in the largely French-speaking country. Weary residents in the middle have pleaded for peace.

Nagy, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Africa, called for “open, unlimited national dialogue.”

Cameroon’s government in a strongly worded statement last week criticized Nagy’s earlier comments on the Anglophone crisis, accusing him of misunderstanding the situation and interfering in the West African country’s internal affairs.

Associated Press