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A Wisconsin teenager accused of murdering two family members and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was inspired by Terrorgram, a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade, according to federal court records.

The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.

The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”

In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, Terrorgram was a constellation of scores of Telegram channels and chat groups focused on inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism and anti-government sabotage. At the network’s peak, some Terrorgram channels drew thousands of followers. Over the past six months, however, the network has been disrupted as authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have arrested key Terrorgram influencers and community members.

But the violence hasn’t stopped.

Casap in February allegedly shot and killed his mother, Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, Donald Mayer; stole their property; and fled in their Volkswagen Atlas, Waukesha County prosecutors say. He was arrested in Kansas. Prosecutors have charged the teen with two counts of first-degree homicide, as well as identity theft and other theft charges. He is expected to be arraigned on May 7, according to court records.

A witness told local investigators that Casap “was in touch with a male in Russia through the Telegram app and they were planning to overthrow the U.S. government and assassinate President Trump,” according to charging documents in the Wisconsin case.

The newly unsealed federal court filings indicate that the FBI is investigating Casap in connection to the alleged assassination plot.

The bureau declined to comment on the matter.

Last fall, federal prosecutors accused two Americans of acting as leaders of the Terrorgram Collective and charged them with soliciting the murder of federal officials and a host of other terrorism-related offenses. The U.S. State Department has officially designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, as have officials in the United Kingdom and Australia. The two Americans have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“Do absolutely anything you can that will lead to the collapse of America or any country you live in,” Casap allegedly wrote in his manifesto, according to an FBI affidavit. “This is the only way we can save the White race.”

The teen’s writings and online postings that are cited in the affidavit indicate that he is a believer in militant accelerationism, a concept that has become increasingly popular with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists over the past decade. Militant accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern society through acts of spectacular violence; from the ruins of today’s democracies, they aim to build all-white ethno-states organized on fascist principles.

Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, a nonprofit think tank, called the alleged Casap plot unique. “It’s the first time we’re explicitly seeing an individual tie an accelerationist act or plot with the president of the United States as a means of collapsing society,” Kriner said. “I think what we have here is a fairly clear-cut case of an individual who is being groomed to take drastic terrorist action in an accelerationist manner.”

Casap’s public defender could not be reached for comment.

A Telegram spokesperson said, “Telegram supports the peaceful exchange of ideas; however, calls for violence are strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service and are removed proactively as well as in response to user reports."

A ProPublica and FRONTLINE review shows that Casap was recently active in at least five extremist Telegram channels or chat groups, including a Russian-language neo-Nazi chat in which posters uploaded detailed instructions for crafting explosives, poisons and improvised firearms. He was also a member of a chat group with more than 4,300 participants run by the Misanthropic Division, a global neo-Nazi organization.

Casap, according to the federal documents, also sought out information online about the Order of Nine Angles, a cult that blends Satanic concepts and Nazi ideology and has increasingly turned to Telegram to recruit and proselytize.

“This is a clear example of how Terrorgram continues to influence murder,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who studies online extremism. “Nikita was influenced online by an assortment of ideologies and groups that intersect with the Terrorgram ecosphere.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and James Bandler, ProPublica.

On Friday, March 28, the Facebook page “Noticias Chiapas al ROJO” published the names of 17 journalists active in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, and accused them, without evidence, of working for the alleged leader of a local gang.

“It is deeply concerning that alleged criminals use social media to smear journalists, placing their lives at risk,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative. “Mexican authorities must provide protection to reporters implicated by this Facebook page and find those responsible and bring them to justice.”

Two Tapachula journalists who spoke to CPJ by phone on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal, believe Noticias Chiapas al ROJO was created by a criminal gang to spread disinformation against rivals, authorities and journalists.

Social media profiles posing as legitimate news outlets to spread disinformation is common practice in Mexico, according to numerous journalists and government officials CPJ has spoken with over the past several years.

This places journalists at an immediate risk of being targeted by gangs; in 2022, Tijuana photographer Margarito Martínez was killed after being targeted by similar social media pages.

CPJ attempted to contact Facebook via email for comment but did not receive a reply. The offices of the Chiapas state prosecutor and Chiapas governor Eduardo Ramírez did not respond to calls by CPJ for comment. 

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which coordinates protection of reporters at risk, told CPJ on Friday, March 28, that his agency was in the process of evaluating the risk facing reporters named by the Facebook page. He asked not to be identified by name, as he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

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Saying the Trump administration is sabotaging civil rights enforcement by the Department of Education, a federal lawsuit filed Friday morning seeks to stop the president and Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out the mass firing of civil rights investigators and lawyers.

Two parents and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, jointly filed the class-action lawsuit. It alleges that decimating the department’s Office for Civil Rights will leave the agency unable to handle the public’s complaints of discrimination at school. That, they said, would violate the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The complaint comes three days after the Education Department notified about 1,300 employees — including the entire staff in seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices — that they are being fired, and the day after a group of 21 Democratic attorneys general sued McMahon and the president. That lawsuit alleges the Trump administration does not have the authority to circumvent Congress to effectively shutter the department.

The complaint filed on Friday argues that the “OCR has abdicated its responsibility to enforce civil rights protections” and that the administration has made a “decision to sabotage” the Education Department’s civil rights functions. That, the lawsuit alleges, overrides Congress’ authority. It names the Education Department, McMahon and the acting head of OCR, Craig Trainor.

“Through a series of press releases, policy statements, and executive orders, the administration has made clear its contempt for the civil rights of marginalized students,” the lawsuit says.

The parents’ lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It asks the court to declare the “decimation” of the OCR unlawful and seeks an injunction to compel the office to “process OCR complaints promptly and equitably.”

A Department of Education spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the department has said it would still meet its legal obligations.

The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. It alleges the firings are “so severe and extreme that it incapacitates components of the Department responsible for performing functions mandated by statute.” It cites the closing of the seven regional OCR outposts as an example.

Each year, the OCR investigates thousands of allegations of discrimination in schools based on disability, race and gender and is one of the federal government’s largest civil rights units. At last count there were about 550 OCR employees; at least 243 union-represented employees were laid off Tuesday.

The administration plans to close OCR locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit brought by the parents and advocacy group reveals concerns by students and families who have pending complaints that, under President Donald Trump, are not being investigated. There also are concerns that new complaints won’t get investigated if they don’t fall under one of the president’s priorities: curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students.

After Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, the administration implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work. Although OCR investigators were prohibited from working on their assigned discrimination cases, the Trump administration launched a new “End DEI Portal” meant only to collect complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. It has said it is trying to shrink the size of government, including the Education Department, which Trump has called a “big con job.”

Trump’s actions so far have led many to wonder “if there is a real and meaningful complaint investigation process existing at the moment,” said Johnathan Smith, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Smith is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

“They are putting the thumb on the scale of who the winners and losers are before they do the investigation, and that is deeply problematic from a law enforcement perspective,” Smith said.

The lawsuit is perhaps the most substantive legal effort to require the Education Department to enforce civil rights since 1970, when the NAACP sued the agency for allowing segregation to continue. That lawsuit resulted in repeated overhauling of the OCR and 20 years of judicial oversight, with the goal of ensuring that the division fairly investigated and enforced discrimination claims.

Students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their schools or colleges. Both individuals named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit are parents of students whose civil rights complaints were being investigated — until Trump took office.

One of the plaintiffs, Alabama parent Nikki S. Carter, has three students and is an advocate for students with disabilities in her community. Carter is Black. According to the lawsuit, Carter filed a complaint with OCR in 2022 alleging discrimination on the basis of race after her children’s school district, the Demopolis City Schools, twice banned Carter from school district property.

When reached by ProPublica, the district superintendent said he’s not aware of the lawsuit or the civil rights complaint and could not comment; he is new to the district.

The district has said it barred Carter after a confrontation with a white staff member. But Carter has said that a white parent who had a similar confrontation wasn’t banned, leading her to believe that the district punished her because of her advocacy. She said it prevented her from attending parent-teacher conferences and other school events.

The other parent, identified by the initials A.W., filed a complaint with OCR alleging their child’s school failed to respond properly to sexual assault and harassment by a classmate.

Investigations of both families’ discrimination complaints have stopped under the new OCR leadership, according to the lawsuit.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination.

Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing.

Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die.

There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan.

Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18.

Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry.

And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.

“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.”

Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death.

This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine.

Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks.

In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors.

As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled.

“It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand.

The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries.

In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job.

West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home.

In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.”

Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him.

“This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team.

He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder.

On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.”

The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …”

At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said.

On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise.

“I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.”

Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective.

He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl.

“Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective.

Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings.

The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana.

That charge would only stick for a few hours.

Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival.

At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said.

Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.

On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.

Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls.

Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.”

West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”

In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death.

The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings.

West has said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.

At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t.

By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.”

The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.”

Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning.

West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him.

When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project.

Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub.

After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter.

A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them.

Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police.

Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names.

Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.

In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time.

West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney.

A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human.

Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.

Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases.

When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that.

West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method.

Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison.

“When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.”

When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.”

In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks.

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.”

Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.

All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars.

During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct.

Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial.

According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.”

What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.”

After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.”

The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense.

Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.

In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed.

He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense.

Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said.

Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls.

Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault.

“There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams.

Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures.

When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died.

None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded.

In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show.

Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team.

Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.”

One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Richard A. Webster, Verite News.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Press freedom groups are raising alarm after New York police arrested and charged videographer Samuel Seligson for allegedly filming pro-Palestinian activists hurling red paint at the homes of top officials of the Brooklyn Museum, part of a campaign by activists demanding the institution divest from Israel. Seligson faces eight counts of criminal mischief with a hate crime enhancement, which is a felony. Police also raided his home twice. Seligson is a well-known local journalist whose work has appeared on major news outlets, and his attorney Leena Widdi says the charges are an attack on constitutionally protected press freedoms. “It is an extremely concerning assault on the First Amendment. The reason why the freedom of press is so strongly protected is because there’s some underlying belief that in order for the public to meaningfully participate in a democracy, they must be actually informed,” Widdi tells Democracy Now!

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The online casinos, known as POGOs in the Philippines, proliferated during the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte, whose term ended in 2022. They attracted customers from mainland China, where gambling is illegal, and other foreigners and were frequently embroiled in controversy.

“We now hear the loud shouts of the people to ban POGOs,” Marcos said during his third state of the nation speech. “Disguising as legitimate entities, their operations have ventured into illicit areas, furthest from gaming,” he told  a joint session of Congress.

“Effective today, all POGOs are banned,” Marcos said. The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation has been instructed to wind down and cease operations of the online casinos by the end of the year, he said.

The gaming industry regulator has said more than 250 POGOs were suspected of operating without a license. 

Marcos’ announcement came amid a Senate probe involving a suspended mayor who had alleged links to illegal gaming operators.

In February and March, authorities raided two POGOs operating in a property allegedly owned by a company of Alice Guo, mayor of a town in Bamban, Tarlac province.

Documents that senators presented during their investigation alleged that Guo is a Chinese national named Guo Huaping, who reportedly faked her identity as a Filipino.

Guo’s case has surfaced against the backdrop of heightened tensions between Manila and Beijing in their maritime dispute in the South China Sea. 

The Philippines and China are locked in a years-long dispute over the resource-rich waterway. Other countries including Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia have overlapping claims to the waters. Taiwan is also a claimant.

Various Philippine security officials had raised concerns that Beijing could be using illegal gaming operations to stir up trouble in the Southeast Asian country.

Marcos has blamed the pro-China stance of the Duterte administration for emboldening Beijing to be more assertive in the South China Sea.

Last month, the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines urged Manila to ban the online casino operators. It said Beijing “prohibits all forms of gambling.”

“POGO is detrimental to both Philippine and Chinese interests and images as well as China-Philippines relations,” the embassy said in a statement. 

On July 1, officials from Manila and Beijing agreed to boost joint effort against transnational crimes, including illegal activities involving POGOs.

Manila’s fight in the South China Sea 

In his speech, Marcos also said that Manila would not back down in a territorial dispute with Beijing, shortly after both sides issued conflicting statements over resupply missions to disputed outposts in the South China Sea. 

“The Philippines cannot yield,” he said. Manila will continue to assert its rights through a “fair and pacific way.”

The president said the country continues to strengthen its “defensive posture, both through developing self-reliance and through partnerships with like-minded states.”  

Early this month, the Philippines and Japan signed a historic Reciprocal Access Agreement, which allows the deployment of troops on each other’s soil.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said on Monday that the Philippines is eyeing similar defense pacts with France, Canada, and New Zealand. They will allow greater interoperability among Manila’s partners, he said.

“The West Philippine Sea is not just a figment of our imagination. This is ours,” Marcos said in his speech. “And this will remain ours until the flames of our beloved country, the Philippines, continue to burn brightly.”

Manila refers to territories in the South China Sea within its exclusive economic zone as the West Philippine Sea.

On Monday, a diplomatic tit-for-tat between Manila and Beijing erupted hours before Marcos’ speech in Congress. 

On Sunday, Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs announced that the two countries reached a “provisional agreement” on the Philippines’ resupply missions to a military outpost in the Second Thomas (Ayungin) Shoal. 

It did not provide any further details.

But on Monday, China’s foreign ministry imposed restrictions and demanded that the Philippines remove BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II-era ship deliberately grounded in the shoal in 1999 in response to China’s earlier occupation of nearby Mischief Reef.

“China is willing to allow it in a humanitarian spirit if the Philippines informs China in advance and after on-site verification is conducted. China will monitor the entire resupply process,” a ministry spokesperson said on Monday.

Shortly after, DFA spokesperson Teresita Daza denied such conditions in the deal. 

Jojo Riñoza and Gerard Carreon contributed to this report from Manila.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for BenarNews.

At least 210 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were wounded on Saturday in the central Gaza Strip, in what Israel is celebrating as a “heroic” military operation to rescue four Israeli captives that were being held in Gaza.

Palestinian media reported intense bombardment in the early afternoon local time in various areas in the Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

Video footage from the main market in the Nuseirat refugee camp showed crowds of Palestinian civilians fleeing under the sound of heavy artillery fire.

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مشهد مروع يظهر اللحظات الأولى من ارتكاب الاحتلال مجزرة النصيرات وسط قطاع غزة pic.twitter.com/8Jn03n1Cod

— أنس الشريف Anas Al-Sharif (@AnasAlSharif0) June 8, 2024

Translation: A horrific scene shows the first moments of the [Israeli] occupation committing the Nuseirat massacre in the middle of the Gaza Strip.

Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif reported that Israeli forces “infiltrated” the Nuseirat refugee camp in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid trucks.

The Gaza government media office said in a statement that Israeli forces launched an “unprecedented brutal attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp” directly targeting civilians, and that ambulances and civil defence crews were unable to reach the area and evacuate the wounded due to the intensity of the bombing.

The media office added that according to its count, at least 210 Palestinians were killed and an estimated 400 others were wounded during the Israeli operation.

Video footage published on social media showed dozens of bodies of men, women and children lying in the streets in the Nuseirat area, as well as bloodied and injured civilians being rushed to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

‘Complete bloodbath’
Al Jazeera quoted Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan with Doctors Without Borders as saying the emergency department at Al-Aqsa Hospital “is a complete bloodbath . . . It looks like a slaughterhouse”.

“The images and videos that I’ve received show patients lying everywhere in pools of blood . . .  their limbs have been blown off,” she told Al Jazeera, adding “that is what a massacre looks like.”

As the death toll from the central Gaza Strip continued to rise, Israeli reports emerged that four Israeli captives were rescued in the operation and transferred back to Israel.

The four captives were identified as Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40. They were all reportedly taken on October 7 from the Nova Music festival in southern Israel close to the Gaza border.

According to Israeli media, the four captives were found in good health, and were transferred to a hospital in Israel where they were reunited with their families. One member of the Israeli special forces was killed during the attack.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz cited Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari as saying the captives were “rescued under fire, and that during the operation the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] attacked from the air, sea, and land in the Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah areas in the center of the Gaza Strip.”

Haaretz added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant approved the operation on Thursday evening. Netanyahu hailed the operation as “successful,” while Gallant reportedly described it as “one of the most heroic operations he had seen in all his years in the defence establishment”, according to Israeli media.

Families praised military
The families of Israeli captives held a press conference on Saturday afternoon in reaction to the news. Relatives of the four captives rescued on Saturday praised both the Israeli military and the government.

Some relatives of the remaining captives still being held in Gaza demanded an end to the war and a prisoner exchange in order to secure the release of those still being held in Gaza.

On Saturday evening local time, spokesman for the Qassam Brigades Abu Obeida said “the first to be harmed by [the Israeli army] are its prisoners”, saying that while some of the captives were freed in the operation, a number of other Israeli captives were reportedly killed.

The Israeli government and military have not commented on the reports that Israeli captives were killed in the operation.

It is reported that there are 120 captives still held in the Gaza Strip, including 43 who have been killed since October, many reportedly by Israel’s own forces.

Hostages: pic.twitter.com/lQ6uxdjeNS

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) June 8, 2024

On its official Telegram channel, Hamas said the release of the four captives “will not change the Israeli army’s strategic failure in the Gaza Strip” and that “the resistance is still holding a larger number of captives and can increase it.”

Reports of US involvement in Nuseirat massacre
As news flooded on the scale of the massacre in central Gaza, and of celebrations in Israel at the release of the four captives, reports emerged of alleged US involvement in the operation.

Axios, citing a US administration official, reported that “the US hostage cell in Israel supported the effort to rescue the four hostages.”

Of the operation, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said: “The United States is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by Hamas, including American citizens. This includes through ongoing negotiations or other means.”

Some reports claimed that American forces were involved in the operation on the ground, and that the humanitarian aid trucks that were reportedly used to disguise the entry of special forces into Nuseirat departed from the US built humanitarian pier off the Gaza coast.

Mondoweiss has not been able to independently verify some of these reports.

Videos circulating on social media showed the helicopters that were used in the operation to evacuate the Israeli captives taking off from the vicinity of the US pier that was built off the coast of Gaza in order to deliver “much-needed humanitarian aid” to Gaza.

The US$230 million pier, which was completed last month, has drawn significant criticism from rights groups and activists who say the pier is an ineffective way to deliver aid.

According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.

Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel’s use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 8, 2024

Intense criticism
Reported US involvement in the attacks on central Gaza on Saturday, and the alleged use of the pier in the operation, has sparked intense criticism and outrage online.

In response to the reports, Hamas said it proves “once more” that Washington is “complicit and completely involved in the war crimes being perpetrated” in Gaza.

US President Joe Biden has not commented on US involvement in the operation, but in response said: “We won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a ceasefire is reached. It is essential that it happens.”

Reported by the Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau. Republished under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Minnesota attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit Tuesday against a home seller who allegedly targeted the East African Muslim community for real estate deals that authorities called “predatory and deceptive.”

The lawsuit alleges that Chadwick Banken and six of his limited liability corporations broke state and federal laws, including Minnesota’s laws against religious discrimination, by using transactions known as contracts-for-deed to sell homes at higher prices than warranted and on worse terms to Muslim buyers.

Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said in an interview that while the complaint focuses on Banken, the case is intended to send a message to others engaged in similar practices.

“He’s not the only one, but he’s one of the worst that I’ve seen,” Ellison said. “When people can’t pay back, they’re out of their house, and they’re out of their money. I can’t think of anything more financially devastating to a family than that.”

Banken did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in Hennepin County district court, follows a ProPublica and Sahan Journal investigation in 2022 that identified a rising market in Minnesota for contract-for-deed home sales, particularly in the Somali community. Many buyers in the East African Muslim community avoid paying or profiting from interest because of their religious principles, and investors have been offering them deals as an “interest free” way to purchase a house.

But buyers told the Sahan Journal and ProPublica that they signed contracts they didn’t understand and would not be able to pay off. The lawsuit said Banken used inflated home prices, abnormally high down payments and six-figure balloon payments due at the end of short contracts to push buyers into default and to ultimately retain ownership of the property.

The ProPublica-Sahan Journal story featured Abdinoor Igal, a long-haul trucker who bought a home from Banken in suburban Lakeville in 2022 and is described in the lawsuit as “purchaser 2.” Officials confirmed that Igal was purchaser 2, and Igal said he has spoken with the attorney general’s office several times.

Igal said he walked away from his house this past winter after making about $170,000 in payments. He slept in his truck for months after sending his wife and children to live in Kenya. He said the lawsuit was news he’d been waiting to hear.

“I’m really excited,” he said. “I can’t even believe how I’m feeling.”

The attorney general’s actions follow a push at the state Legislature to rewrite Minnesota’s contract-for-deed law. The bill would outlaw the kind of property “churning” that Banken is accused of in the lawsuit, and it provides a number of new protections and ways to recoup losses from a contract-for-deed deal gone wrong. It is currently included in an omnibus bill awaiting final approval at the Legislature.

The lawsuit alleges that Banken has sold hundreds of homes in contracts-for-deed deals in the last six years. It also reveals new details about his practices. The name of one of Banken’s six limited liability corporations, Slow Flip LLC, is actually a useful term for the predatory practice, the lawsuit alleges: Buyers submit exorbitant down payments and agree to large monthly installments that they will eventually default on, and then Banken takes the home back and “flips” it to a new purchaser.

According to one email from Banken’s business to a real estate agent, the ideal buyers are described as people with “low credit scores” or a “recent bankruptcy/foreclosure.” Banken also allegedly insisted that buyers enter contracts using their business names to create the false impression in court that he was evicting commercial tenants rather than families from their primary residence. None of Banken’s contracts disclosed the true total cost of the homes or the balloon payments, both in violation of federal Truth In Lending Act requirements, according to the lawsuit.

The contracts, according to the lawsuit, contained monthly interest payments in excess of the market rate, and the down payment, monthly payments and total price of the home went up if the purchaser was Muslim. Ellison said this was particularly galling, given that Banken markets his business as helpful to a community that has been shut out of the traditional home purchasing market.

“He’s not helping,” Ellison said. “What he’s really helping himself to is their money that they probably have mopped floors and pushed brooms for. … He’s setting people up to fail. His conduct is predatory, deceptive. And we hope to bring a stop to it.”

Ellison said buyers should reach out to his office if they feel they’re in a predatory contract-for-deed and that there may be options for restitution in the future.

Igal said that while he is excited to hear that there may be consequences for Banken, defaults and evictions are ongoing, affecting some of his former neighbors. And he is still struggling to put his family’s lives back together.

“My kids, the smallest one, 4 years, she called me and asked me, ‘Daddy, when am I coming?’ And I told her I’m making some money, but I don’t know when,” he said. “It’s not something I can describe.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Lussenhop.

"Let's be serious. NATO cannot be an a la carte military alliance, it cannot be a military alliance that works depending on the humor of the president of the U.S." day to day, Borrell said after Trump suggested that under his administration the United States might not defend NATO allies that failed to spend enough on defense.

Borrell added that he would not keep commenting on "any silly idea" emerging from the U.S. presidential election campaign.

Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 race, sent a chill through European allies when he said at a campaign rally on February 10 he would "encourage" Russia to attack any NATO country that does not meet financial obligations.

U.S. President Joe Biden called Trump's comments "appalling and dangerous" in a statement on February 11, joining several European defense and foreign ministers responding over the weekend.

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The reactions continued on February 12, with Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren saying Trump's comment was "exactly what Putin loves to hear."

Ollongren called the comment "worrying" and said it was not the first time that Trump has made a comment along these lines.

While in office, Trump -- who was defeated by Biden in the 2020 election -- often expressed doubts about the need for NATO and repeatedly threatened to pull out of the alliance if members did not pay what he considered their fair share for their defense.

Ollongren rebuffed Trump, stressing that NATO's strength is in its unity.

"If we're not united, it makes us weaker. And we know that that is what Putin is looking for," he told Reuters on February 12.

The principle of collective defense -- the idea that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all and would trigger collective self-defense action -- is enshrined in Article 5 of NATO's founding treaty. It is considered the hallmark of the NATO alliance.

Ollongren also noted that most NATO allies were close to or had reached the target budget spending on defense of 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2024. NATO allies agreed to the goal in 2014.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner also reacted to Trump’s comment. Speaking in London on February 12, Lindner said the transatlantic partnership will continue.

"Regardless of who is in the White House, we have an overriding interest in continuing to cooperate across the Atlantic, economically, politically, and also in matters of security," he said.

Lindner said Britain and Germany shared similar challenges when it came to strengthening free-trade capabilities.

The dialogue "is of particular importance" after Trump's statements, Lindner said before going into a meeting with British counterpart Jeremy Hunt.

"We are facing major challenges as European members of NATO," Lindner said, adding that Europe's peace and free-trade order had been put at risk by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier echoed other EU leaders, saying the statements "are irresponsible and even play into Russia's hands."

Meanwhile, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on February 12 discussed ramping up security cooperation in Europe with the leaders of Germany and France as fears grow that Trump's possible return to the White House might threaten Western solidarity against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Tusk said the philosophy at the heart of relations between the European Union and NATO was based on "one for all, all for one."

Speaking in Paris, he said Poland was "ready to fight for this security." Later in Berlin, Tusk hailed a "clear declaration that we are ready to cooperate" on Europe's defense.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Pham Cong Hung Nhan, 43, was detained by the Ba Ria City Police Investigation Agency on charges of “insulting the national flag” under Article 351 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, according to the People’s Public Security online newspaper. 

The violation is punishable by up to three years in jail and community service. Nhan lives in southern Vietnam’s Ba Ria-Vung Tau province.

Authorities allege that on Dec. 9, 2023, Nhan left a sack of recyclables he had gathered to sell in front of a house while he went to buy some coffee, only to find the sack gone when he returned. 

In anger, he pulled down a flag and flagpole from in front of the house and took it to his shelter in an empty lot.

Later that evening, the report said, Nhan used his mobile phone to record himself putting the flag into his wood burning stove while he cooked dinner, and posted the nearly four-minute video to his Facebook account the following day.

The report cited Nhan as testifying that he had been shunned by his family members because he was homeless and forced to earn a living by collecting recyclable garbage to sell, and felt “authorities had failed to protect him.”

The newspaper said Nhan used his Facebook account to post and share stories, photos and videos with “content insulting the national flag, distorting and defaming the honor and dignity of the founding fathers and leaders of the Party and State, distorting the truth of the revolutionary history, and defaming the people’s government and socialist regime in Vietnam.”

The Facebook account Hung Van Pham Cong, which allegedly belongs to Nhan, has more than 4,000 followers and contains a number of posts praising the flag of the former Republic of Vietnam while criticizing the current regime. The account also contains several defaced photos of Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and late President Ho Chi Minh.

While the video of the burning flag was reposted to the account several times in the following days, it garnered few interactions.

Proof of intent

Speaking to RFA Vietnamese on Wednesday, Nguyen Van Dai, who worked as an attorney in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi for several years, said that a conviction in Nhan’s case depends on whether the item in the video was indeed the national flag.

The second factor, he said, is whether authorities can prove intent.

“If a person did it out of anger, accidentally, or for some other reason, and had no intention to disrespect the national flag of Vietnam, then they did not commit the offense,” he said.

Dai noted that international human rights law and the judiciaries of most democratic countries, do not consider the desecration of a national flag to be a criminal offense, but rather a form of freedom of expression.

In recent years, Vietnamese authorities have arrested and convicted several people on charges of “insulting the national flag.”

In 2021, human rights activist Huynh Thuc Vy was sentenced to 33 months in prison for spraying paint on Vietnam’s flag. She is now serving her jail term at Gia Trung Prison in Gia Lai province.

A year earlier, the Quang Binh Provincial People’s Court sentenced three youths to a total of 15 months in prison and six months of probation for using a machete to cut down 34 flagpoles flying the national flag and the flag of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

U.S. and British forces have hit Iran-backed Huthi rebel military targets in Yemen -- -- an action immediately condemned by Tehran -- sparking fears around the world of a growing conflict in the Middle East as fighting rages in the Gaza Strip.

U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement that the move was meant to show that the United States and its allies “will not tolerate” the Iran-backed rebel group’s increasing number of attacks in the Red Sea, which have threatened freedom of navigation and endangered U.S. personnel and civilian navigation.

The rebels said that the air strikes, which occurred in an area already shaken by Israel's war with Hamas, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, totaled 73 and killed at least five people.

"Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces -- together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands -- successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Huthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways," Biden said in a statement.

“These strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Huthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea -- including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history,” Biden said of the international mission that also involved Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Biden approved the strikes after a Huthi attack on January 9. U.S. and British naval forces repelled that attack, shooting down drones and missiles fired by the Huthis from Yemen toward the southern Red Sea.

Kirby said the United States does not want war with Yemen or a conflict of any kind but will not hesitate to take further action.

"Everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night," he said.

The UN Security Council called an emergency meeting for later on January 12 over the strikes. The session was requested by Russia and will take place after a meeting to discuss the situation in Gaza.

Huthi rebels have stepped up attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since Israel launched its war on Hamas over the group's surprise cross-border attack on October 7 that killed some 1,200 Israelis and saw dozens more taken hostage.

The Huthis have claimed their targeting of navigation in the Red Sea is meant to show the group's support for the Palestinians and Hamas.

Thousands of the rebels held protests in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, where they chanted “We aren’t discouraged. Let it be a major world war!”

The White House said Huthi acts of piracy have affected more than 50 countries and forced more than 2,000 ships to make detours of thousands of kilometers to avoid the Red Sea. It said crews from more than 20 countries were either taken hostage or threatened by Huthi piracy.

Kirby said a "battle damage assessment" to determine how much the Huthi capabilities had been degraded was ongoing.

Britain said sites including airfields had been hit. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who is still hospitalized following complications from prostate cancer surgery, said earlier the strikes were aimed at Huthi drones, ballistic, and cruise missiles, as well as coastal radar and air surveillance capabilities.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the strikes were "necessary and proportionate."

"Despite the repeated warnings from the international community, the Huthis have continued to carry out attacks in the Red Sea," Sunak said in a statement.

Iran immediately condemned the attacks saying they would bring further turbulence to the Middle East.

"We strongly condemn the military attacks carried out this morning by the United States and the United Kingdom on several cities in Yemen," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kannani said in a post on Telegram.

"These arbitrary actions are a clear violation of Yemen's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and a violation of international laws and regulations. These attacks will only contribute to insecurity and instability in the region," he added.

A Huthi spokesman said the attacks were unjustified and the rebels will keep targeting ships heading toward Israel.

The Huthis, whose slogan is "Death to America, Death to Israel, curse the Jews and victory to Islam," are part of what has been described as the Iran-backed axis of resistance that also includes anti-Israel and anti-Western militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Huthi rebels have fought Yemen's government for decades. In 2014, they took the capital, Sanaa.

While Iran has supplied them with weapons and aid, the Huthis say they are not Tehran's puppets and their main goal is to topple Yemen's "corrupt" leadership.

With reporting by Reuters and dpa

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Accused of passing on naval secrets to Chinese agents for cash, Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, 22, and Wenheng Zhao, 26 were arrested on Wednesday in separate cases.

Wei, a petty officer 2nd class aboard the amphibious ship USS Essex, currently stationed in San Diego, was arrested and charged with espionage – specifically, providing defense information to aid a foreign government.

Zhao, who worked at the U.S. Naval Base in Port Hueneme, California, has an active U.S. security clearance and was charged with conspiracy and receipt of a bribe by a public official.

Wei’s indictment alleges that in June 2022, he sent a Chinese intelligence officer approximately 30 technical and mechanical manuals.

The manuals detailed the operations of multiple systems aboard the Essex and similar ships, including power, steering, aircraft and deck elevators, as well as damage and casualty controls.

The indictment alleges that Wei was paid U.S.$5,000.

Zhao’s indictment alleges he passed on sensitive U.S. military information to an individual posing as a maritime economic researcher – actually a Chinese intelligence officer.

Zhao, who held a U.S. security clearance, beginning in August 2021 and continuing through at least May 2023, allegedly recorded military information, photographs and videos, before transmitting to the “maritime economic researcher.”

The Chinese intelligence officer paid Zhao approximately $14,866, the indictment alleges.

Both men pleaded not guilty in federal courts in San Diego and Los Angeles, according to reports. They are being held until their detention hearings, which will take place on August 8 in the same cities.

“Through the alleged crimes committed by these defendants, sensitive military information ended up in the hands of the People's Republic of China,” Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, said on August 3 at a press conference in San Diego.

“The charges demonstrate [China’s] determination to obtain information that is critical to our national defense by any means so it can be used to their advantage,” said Olsen. 

“The alleged conduct also represents a violation of the solemn obligation of members of our military to defend our country to safeguard our secrets and to protect their fellow service members.”

Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said, “These arrests are a reminder of the relentless, aggressive efforts of the People’s Republic of China to undermine our democracy and threaten those who defend it.

“The PRC compromised enlisted personnel to secure sensitive military information that could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security. The FBI and our partners remain vigilant in our determination to combat espionage, and encourage past and present government officials to report any suspicious interactions with suspected foreign intelligence officers.”

China has yet to comment.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.

Accused of passing on naval secrets to Chinese agents for cash, Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, 22, and Wenheng Zhao, 26 were arrested on Wednesday in separate cases.

Wei, a petty officer 2nd class aboard the amphibious ship USS Essex, currently stationed in San Diego, was arrested and charged with espionage – specifically, providing defense information to aid a foreign government.

Zhao, who worked at the U.S. Naval Base in Port Hueneme, California, has an active U.S. security clearance and was charged with conspiracy and receipt of a bribe by a public official.

Wei’s indictment alleges that in June 2022, he sent a Chinese intelligence officer approximately 30 technical and mechanical manuals.

The manuals detailed the operations of multiple systems aboard the Essex and similar ships, including power, steering, aircraft and deck elevators, as well as damage and casualty controls.

The indictment alleges that Wei was paid U.S.$5,000.

Zhao’s indictment alleges he passed on sensitive U.S. military information to an individual posing as a maritime economic researcher – actually a Chinese intelligence officer.

Zhao, who held a U.S. security clearance, beginning in August 2021 and continuing through at least May 2023, allegedly recorded military information, photographs and videos, before transmitting to the “maritime economic researcher.”

The Chinese intelligence officer paid Zhao approximately $14,866, the indictment alleges.

Both men pleaded not guilty in federal courts in San Diego and Los Angeles, according to reports. They are being held until their detention hearings, which will take place on August 8 in the same cities.

“Through the alleged crimes committed by these defendants, sensitive military information ended up in the hands of the People's Republic of China,” Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, said on August 3 at a press conference in San Diego.

“The charges demonstrate [China’s] determination to obtain information that is critical to our national defense by any means so it can be used to their advantage,” said Olsen. 

“The alleged conduct also represents a violation of the solemn obligation of members of our military to defend our country to safeguard our secrets and to protect their fellow service members.”

Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said, “These arrests are a reminder of the relentless, aggressive efforts of the People’s Republic of China to undermine our democracy and threaten those who defend it.

“The PRC compromised enlisted personnel to secure sensitive military information that could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security. The FBI and our partners remain vigilant in our determination to combat espionage, and encourage past and present government officials to report any suspicious interactions with suspected foreign intelligence officers.”

China has yet to comment.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.

Accused of passing on naval secrets to Chinese agents for cash, Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, 22, and Wenheng Zhao, 26 were arrested on Wednesday in separate cases.

Wei, a petty officer 2nd class aboard the amphibious ship USS Essex, currently stationed in San Diego, was arrested and charged with espionage – specifically, providing defense information to aid a foreign government.

Zhao, who worked at the U.S. Naval Base in Port Hueneme, California, has an active U.S. security clearance and was charged with conspiracy and receipt of a bribe by a public official.

Wei’s indictment alleges that in June 2022, he sent a Chinese intelligence officer approximately 30 technical and mechanical manuals.

The manuals detailed the operations of multiple systems aboard the Essex and similar ships, including power, steering, aircraft and deck elevators, as well as damage and casualty controls.

The indictment alleges that Wei was paid U.S.$5,000.

Zhao’s indictment alleges he passed on sensitive U.S. military information to an individual posing as a maritime economic researcher – actually a Chinese intelligence officer.

Zhao, who held a U.S. security clearance, beginning in August 2021 and continuing through at least May 2023, allegedly recorded military information, photographs and videos, before transmitting to the “maritime economic researcher.”

The Chinese intelligence officer paid Zhao approximately $14,866, the indictment alleges.

Both men pleaded not guilty in federal courts in San Diego and Los Angeles, according to reports. They are being held until their detention hearings, which will take place on August 8 in the same cities.

“Through the alleged crimes committed by these defendants, sensitive military information ended up in the hands of the People's Republic of China,” Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, said on August 3 at a press conference in San Diego.

“The charges demonstrate [China’s] determination to obtain information that is critical to our national defense by any means so it can be used to their advantage,” said Olsen. 

“The alleged conduct also represents a violation of the solemn obligation of members of our military to defend our country to safeguard our secrets and to protect their fellow service members.”

Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said, “These arrests are a reminder of the relentless, aggressive efforts of the People’s Republic of China to undermine our democracy and threaten those who defend it.

“The PRC compromised enlisted personnel to secure sensitive military information that could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security. The FBI and our partners remain vigilant in our determination to combat espionage, and encourage past and present government officials to report any suspicious interactions with suspected foreign intelligence officers.”

China has yet to comment.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.

Accused of passing on naval secrets to Chinese agents for cash, Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, 22, and Wenheng Zhao, 26 were arrested on Wednesday in separate cases.

Wei, a petty officer 2nd class aboard the amphibious ship USS Essex, currently stationed in San Diego, was arrested and charged with espionage – specifically, providing defense information to aid a foreign government.

Zhao, who worked at the U.S. Naval Base in Port Hueneme, California, has an active U.S. security clearance and was charged with conspiracy and receipt of a bribe by a public official.

Wei’s indictment alleges that in June 2022, he sent a Chinese intelligence officer approximately 30 technical and mechanical manuals.

The manuals detailed the operations of multiple systems aboard the Essex and similar ships, including power, steering, aircraft and deck elevators, as well as damage and casualty controls.

The indictment alleges that Wei was paid U.S.$5,000.

Zhao’s indictment alleges he passed on sensitive U.S. military information to an individual posing as a maritime economic researcher – actually a Chinese intelligence officer.

Zhao, who held a U.S. security clearance, beginning in August 2021 and continuing through at least May 2023, allegedly recorded military information, photographs and videos, before transmitting to the “maritime economic researcher.”

The Chinese intelligence officer paid Zhao approximately $14,866, the indictment alleges.

Both men pleaded not guilty in federal courts in San Diego and Los Angeles, according to reports. They are being held until their detention hearings, which will take place on August 8 in the same cities.

“Through the alleged crimes committed by these defendants, sensitive military information ended up in the hands of the People's Republic of China,” Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, said on August 3 at a press conference in San Diego.

“The charges demonstrate [China’s] determination to obtain information that is critical to our national defense by any means so it can be used to their advantage,” said Olsen. 

“The alleged conduct also represents a violation of the solemn obligation of members of our military to defend our country to safeguard our secrets and to protect their fellow service members.”

Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said, “These arrests are a reminder of the relentless, aggressive efforts of the People’s Republic of China to undermine our democracy and threaten those who defend it.

“The PRC compromised enlisted personnel to secure sensitive military information that could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security. The FBI and our partners remain vigilant in our determination to combat espionage, and encourage past and present government officials to report any suspicious interactions with suspected foreign intelligence officers.”

China has yet to comment.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.

On the final day of the Supreme Court’s term, we speak with David Dayen,
executive editor of The American Prospect, about recent revelations detailing many of the Supreme Court conservative justices’ close relationships to Republican megadonors, and how allegations of financial impropriety further delegitimize the court’s standing as an objective legal authority. “These are lifetime appointments,” says Dayen. “This is what arrogance looks like.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On Tuesday, June 20, plainclothes security officers arrested el-Heni, a prominent columnist and political commentator for the daily online radio show Émission Impossible on the independent radio station IFM, according to news reports and a local journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ.

A judge ordered that el-Heni be held in custody ahead of his trial on a charge of insulting President Kais Saied. Authorities brought el-Heni to the Fifth Central Division for Combating Information and Communication Technology Crimes, and as of Wednesday evening he was held pending trial at the Bouchoucha detention center in Tunis, the local journalist told CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.  

If convicted of insulting the president, el-Heni could face up to five years in prison.

“The arrest of journalist Zied el-Heni on criminal insult charges is another clear example of President Kais Saied’s intolerance of the free press in Tunisia,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Tunisian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release el-Heni and ensure that members of the press can discuss newsworthy topics without fear of spending years behind bars.”

Authorities did not allow el-Heni’s lawyer to attend his questioning in detention, and they denied him medication for a heart condition and high blood pressure, according to the journalist who spoke to CPJ.

The judge ordered el-Heni’s arrest in response to a broadcast on Émission Impossible in which el-Heni made mocking statements about Article 67 of the Algerian penal code, which imposes criminal penalties for committing an “evil act” against the president, according to the BBC.

Last month, Tunisian authorities increased the prison sentence for journalist Khalifa Guesmi from one to five years, on charges of disclosing national security information.

CPJ emailed the Tunisian Ministry of Interior for comment on el-Heni’s case but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Saturday, April 29, police detained Yılmaz, an editor for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, and Müftüoğlu, co-chair of the local media advocacy group Dicle Fırat Journalists Association, in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır in connection with an investigation by prosecutors in Ankara, the capital, according to multiple news reports.

Ankara prosecutors alleged that Yılmaz and Müftüoğlu have ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group and political party that Turkey classifies as a terrorist group.

Separately, on April 29, police detained six female journalists in Istanbul’s Kadıköy neighborhood for publicly reading a statement protesting the arrests and prosecution of journalists in Ankara and Diyarbakır, according to reports and tweets by advocacy organizations.

On May 1, Istanbul police attacked and briefly detained at least two journalists as they covered Labor Day marches and protests, according to news reports.

Turkish authorities have arrested and charged several members of the Kurdish media over recent months with similar allegations of PKK connections, ahead of the country’s May 14 presidential election.

“The detainment of journalists Sedat Yılmaz and Dicle Müftüoğlu, on top of the arrests in Diyarbakır and the allegations of violence toward these journalists and others who showed solidarity with them in Istanbul, are signs of distress from a government that’s worried about the upcoming elections,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The authorities must immediately release the journalists in custody and seriously investigate claims of police brutality.”

After the detainment in Diyarbakır, police drove Yılmaz and Müftüoğlu to Ankara. While they were being transported, the journalists alleged that their hands were tied behind their backs for 15 hours, they were deprived of food for 24 hours, insulted by the police officers, and Yılmaz was kicked in the head by one of the officers, resulting in hearing loss, according to multiple news reports. The pair are still detained, and Yılmaz’s lawyer has filed a criminal complaint concerning his client’s injuries and treatment.

The six female journalists were released on April 29 without charge, and later filed legal complaints against the police. They are: 

1. Eylem Nazlıer, a reporter for the leftist daily Evrensel. She reported that police officers slapped her face multiple times and punched her head once as her hands were cuffed behind her back. 
2. Pınar Gayıp, a reporter for the leftist Etkin News Agency (ETHA)
3. Serpil Ünal, a reporter for the leftist news website Mücadele Birliği 
4. Esra Soybir, a reporter for the leftist news website Direnişteyiz
5. Yadigar Aygün, a reporter for the leftist news website Gazete Karınca  
6. Zeynep Kuray, a freelance reporter who covers social events and protests

Gayıp and the other journalists also reported wounds to their wrists from the plastic cuffs that were tightened too tightly, according to those reports. The journalists were taken to a hospital for medical treatment before the police station, as is legally required.

On April 25, authorities in Diyarbakır detained at least nine journalists and a media lawyer for alleged ties to PKK. As of April 29, five have been released: 

• Media lawyer Resul Temur
• Osman Akın, news editor for the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam
• Kadir Bayram, a camera operator for PIYA production company
• Salih Keleş and Mehmet Yalçın, two journalists whose outlets CPJ could not immediately confirm. 

CPJ’s emails to the chief prosecutors’ offices of Ankara and Istanbul didn’t receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

At around 4 p.m. on April 19, five unidentified men abducted Wazir, a reporter for the privately owned Pashto-language broadcaster Khyber News and head of the National Press Club Bannu journalists association, from a market in the city of Bannu, in northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to news reports, a statement by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a nongovernmental organization, and a person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.  

Two men forced Wazir into a vehicle where others were present, drove him 40 minutes to an unidentified location, and then handcuffed and locked him in a dark bathroom, that person said. The journalist’s captors gave him electric shocks while he remained handcuffed until he agreed to record a video praising pro-government militants, according to the person who spoke to CPJ and an article by Dawn quoting Wazir.

After about 30 hours in captivity, the men blindfolded Wazir and released him in Bannu district on the evening of April 20. He sustained painful injuries to his hands and feet where he was electrocuted, that person told CPJ.

“We are deeply disturbed by the brazen abduction of Pakistani journalist Gohar Wazir in apparent retaliation for his reporting on human rights issues and militancy in tribal areas,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Pakistan authorities must swiftly and impartially investigate Wazir’s abduction and allegations that he was electrocuted in captivity and take serious steps to end a dangerous pattern of impunity related to violence against journalists.”

Wazir filed a complaint at the Bannu City Police Station and received treatment at a local hospital, where he was tested for heart palpitations and prescribed painkillers and sleep medication, the person familiar with his case told CPJ.

That person said they believed Wazir was targeted by pro-government militants in retaliation for his extensive reporting on human rights issues affecting Pashtun people and militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Wazir’s captors warned him to stop such work at the risk of his and his family’s safety, citing his reporting on local tribes resisting the construction of a gas pipeline in the Bannu district, the person said.

In the video he was forced to record, Wazir was made to praise the militants for allegedly supporting peace and stability in the country and criticize protests against security forces following a March explosion in the Bannu district, which the journalist had reported on his Facebook pages and for Khyber News, the person told CPJ. 

As of May 2, police had not filed a first information report opening a formal investigation into the incident, the person said, adding that they believed the market’s security footage should allow police to identify the suspects.

CPJ called and messaged Yaseen Kamal, the station house officer of the Bannu City Police Station, and Imran Aslam, the deputy superintendent of the Bannu city police, but received no replies.

Previously, Pakistan security officials detained Wazir from May 27 to 29, 2019, after he reported on demonstrations of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, which promotes the rights of the Pashtun people, and interviewed PTM leader Mohsin Dawar.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen arrives for a second day of testimony before a grand jury on March 15, 2023, in New York.

Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

The NLD said in a statement that it had permanently banned Yangon Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein and three other members of the Central Committee – Sandar Min, Toe Lwin, and Win Myint Aung – for bolstering “false evidence” of bribery against Suu Kyi and using the party’s name to back “sham” polls it claims the junta will use to justify its grip on power.

The party won Myanmar’s 2020 general election in a landslide, receiving more than 82% of public support. But the military staged a coup in February 2021 after accusing the NLD of election fraud – claims it has yet to provide evidence of more than two years later.

Bo Bo Oo, who prior to the military takeover represented Yangon’s Dala township as an NLD lawmaker in the National Assembly, said the decision demonstrates the party’s ironclad opposition to military rule.

“The NLD has proved with this statement that it is going to stand firmly against the sham election that the terrorist military junta is preparing to hold because the people who have been expelled are believed to have approached and cooperated with the military on its upcoming election in the hope of getting whatever position of power they can,” he said.

The NLD’s announcement follows Phyo Min Thein’s testimony last year as a witness for the prosecution that Suu Kyi accepted 11.4 kilograms (402 ounces) of gold and cash payments from him totaling U.S.$600,000. 

Suu Kyi, 77, had dismissed the claims as “absurd,” but in April a military court found her guilty of violating the country’s Anti-corruption Law and sentenced her to five years in jail.

It was the first of 11 corruption cases brought by the junta against the Nobel laureate, who served as Myanmar’s state counsellor from 2016 up until the military’s February 2021 coup.

In December, a junta court sentenced Suu Kyi to another seven years in prison on five counts of alleged corruption, bringing the total number of years she must serve in detention to 33.

Suu Kyi was arrested with former President Win Myint in Naypyidaw shortly after the military seized power. She had already spent 15 of 21 years under house arrest following her detention by the military State Peace and Development Council government in 1989 until her release in 2010.

The NLD’s announcement on Friday also followed reports that Suu Kyi refused requests by Sandar Min and Toe Lwin to visit her at Naypyidaw Prison in November.

Attempts by RFA to reach NLD representatives for comment on the decision to expel the four party leaders went unanswered, as did attempts to reach the banned members.

According to the NLD's Human Rights Documentation Team, in the two years since the coup authorities have killed 84 party members, including three former lawmakers, and arrested at least 1,232 others.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The was charged with “abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to violate the State’s interests and legitimate rights and interests of organizations and individuals” under Article 331, state media reported. 

International human rights organizations have said Article 331 and other vaguely written and arbitrarily applied laws are tools for the government to silence dissenting voices and restrict freedom of speech.

The, born in 1963, completed a two-year jail term for the same charge in July 2020, the state media report said. 

Authorities did not specify what the illegal content on his Facebook account was, but his most recent post was about U.S. President Joe Biden visiting Ukraine on Tuesday. 

Other posts on the account were information, images, and videos about Vietnam, a police summons issued to  Le Thi Binh – The’s younger sister, to discuss her livestream videos, Vietnam’s VinFast electric cars, and a recent RFA report about an ex-con former fortune-teller who was ordained as a Catholic priest under seemingly shady circumstances. 

The indictment for The’s previous violation in 2019 said that he contacted and exchanged information “with inside and outside reactionary forces on social media platforms” in hopes of inciting them to join demonstrations and topple the Vietnamese government.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

At around 11 a.m. on Monday, January 23, plainclothes police officers detained Kha, a correspondent for the privately owned broadcaster Deepto TV and privately owned newspaper Dainik Projonmo Ekattor, according to multiple news reports and Supriya Rani Kha, the journalist’s wife, who spoke with CPJ by phone. Kha was detained after reporting on a land dispute in the Khalishakhali area of the southwestern Satkhira district.

Police arrested Kha and two others, alleging they were involved in an attempted bomb blast in coordination with landless people in the area, and authorities initially denied that Kha was in custody, according to those sources.

When the journalist appeared in court the following day, he was unable to stand properly and told his wife that police severely beat him, electrocuted him, and threatened to kill him if he continued reporting on landless people, Supriya Rani Kha told CPJ.

During that hearing, the court ordered Kha to be held in the Satkhira jail while his case is investigated. Supriya Rani Kha said that police have not provided copies of the first information reports in Kha’s case, which would show the specific allegations against him.

“Bangladeshi authorities’ arrest and alleged maltreatment of journalist Raghunath Kha constitute only the latest attack on press freedom in the country, where law enforcement continues to retaliate against journalists with raging impunity,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Kha, drop all cases against him, and conduct a swift investigation into claims that police physically abused him.”

Authorities did not produce Kha in court until about 5 p.m. on Tuesday, his wife said, in apparent violation of Bangladesh’s code of criminal procedure, which provides that police must present an arrested person before a magistrate within 24 hours.

Supriya Rani Kha told CPJ that she believes authorities targeted her husband in retaliation for his reporting highlighting the struggles of landless people in their conflict with land grabbers allegedly supported by police.

In recent months, Satkhira Police Superintendent Kazi Moniruzzaman repeatedly threatened Kha with arrest and legal retaliation in retaliation for his reporting, his wife said, adding that the journalist submitted a written complaint sometime about those threats to Moinul Haque, the deputy inspector-general of the Khulna division police, which oversees the Satkhira branch of the force.

No action was taken against Moniruzzaman, Supriya Rani Kha told CPJ. CPJ emailed Moniruzzaman and Haque and sent them requests for comment via messaging app, but did not receive any replies.

CPJ has previously documented similar allegations of alleged police abuse of detained journalists in Bangladesh. Journalist Shahidul Alam, who was awarded CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2020, told CPJ that police officers beat him in custody. Cartoonist Kabir Kishore told CPJ that authorities beat him and electrocuted his colleague Mushtaq Ahmed, who died in jail.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Nov. 22, a junta court sentenced Hkamti township resident Aye Thiri, 27, under Section 50 (j) of the Counter-Terrorism Act for providing 5,000 Kyats to the PDF via the Kpay money transfer system.

“It was unfair that she was arrested for donating money,” a family member told RFA Burmese.

“I want to appeal, but the appeal would not be successful, it would just cost money. I don’t know what to do. I just want her to be released,” they said, adding that the family are worried because Aye Thiri is in poor health and was unconscious at times during her arrest.

She was seized by police and soldiers at her home on Feb. 21, this year and was held at Hkamti district police station until her court appearance.

The Counter-Terrorism Law enacted in 2014 was amended by the State Administration Council on Aug. 1, 2021.

The post-coup amendment states that those who provide financial support to a terrorist organization can be sentenced to a minimum of three years and a maximum of life in prison and a fine.

On March 29, this year a court sentenced 19-year-old Saung Hnin Phyu from Dawei township, in Tanintharyi region, also accusing her of supporting PDFs via Kpay.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The armed man is wearing a jacket with a Myanmar military badge on its sleeve. He pokes the barrel of his assault rifle at his prisoner’s head before repositioning himself, seemingly to make sure a cell phone set up to record the scene captures both his profile and the torture to come.

The phone was found on Nov. 6 in Moe Bye township in Kayah state by members of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF), an armed ethnic group fighting the military junta for control of the country, and shared with an RFA Burmese reporter.

In the video retrieved from the phone, the man in the military jacket sets aside his rifle and picks up a stiff rod that he uses to repeatedly strike the victim, asking in Burmese if the man is a member of the People’s Defense Force, a group of militias fighting the military for control of the country.

"Are you part of the PDF?" the man asks. "Did PDF and KNDF come to your village?”

The victim seems to struggle to understand, an indication that he may speak Karenni, Kayan or another local dialect. He shifts and stiffens as he senses another strike is coming, his gasps growing more plaintive as the abuse continues.

RFA hasn’t identified either the perpetrator or the victim and is unable to independently verify the authenticity of the video.

Maui, a KNDF secretary, said in an interview that the phone was discovered after a firefight with military forces, but that it was apparently shot in September. The KNDF said the man in the video was a resident of Kayah and not a member of its forces.

Calls seeking comment from junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun went unanswered on Wednesday.

Myanmar’s junta has waged a brutal counterinsurgency campaign since it ousted a democratically elected government in early 2021. It now faces resistance on a number of fronts, from ethnic areas along the country’s borders and pro-democracy PDFs that are tied to the shadow National Unity Government in its interior.

In the 20 months since the coup, the military has struggled to maintain control against the rebel forces arrayed against it. Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), said authorities in Myanmar have killed at least 2,311 civilians and arrested nearly 15,600 others since the coup — mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests.

The Institute for Strategy and Policy (ISP Myanmar) said in a report last spring that at least 5,646 civilians in the country had been killed between the Feb. 1, 2021, coup and early May.

Maui said an insignia on the gun indicates that the torturer in the video is a soldier from the Light Infantry Battalion-1, under Myanmar’s 66th Infantry Division. Maui told RFA have been tortured by junta soldiers since the 66th launched an offensive against KNDF forces several weeks ago.

“The junta troops always arrest and interrogate some villagers who do not run away and remain in their own homes when they arrive,” he said. “They torture and kill if they are not pleased. This is what they always do.”

The brutal interrogation was shared with RFA in seven videos that run for a total of about 17 minutes, all in the single, sunlit room. The man in the military jacket smokes in one sequence and pauses to eat something in another. He alternately seems bored, frustrated and indifferent as he uses the rod to strike and choke his cowering victim.

At one point, he appears to stab the other man with a small knife.

A picture of the phone, a Samsung Galaxy A12, was shared with RFA, but not the phone itself. KNDF also shared photographs of a decapitated man it says it retrieved from the same phone. RFA is not publishing those pictures.

This summer, RFA obtained evidence of atrocities from a soldier’s abandoned cell phone in the Sagaing region, which has been the setting of a number of conflicts between People’s Defense Forces militias and Myanmar soldiers.  

The phone contained photographs of two soldiers standing behind five blindfolded and bleeding victims, and a video of the men bragging about the number of people they had killed. The phone was discovered by a villager in the Ayadaw township where the military had been conducting raids.

In response, military leaders said they would investigate, but there is no evidence they have done so.

The videos share a shamelessness in the brutality they depict. Maui said military forces are deliberately torturing civilians.

“If the people are scared, they will stop supporting the resistance groups. Our revolution is based on the support of our people,” he said. “Our resistance groups will never back off [because of the] atrocities. I believe that the people will support us even more because of their inhumane acts.”

The Kayah video ends with the tortured man lying on his back as his torturer, now with a machete in his hand, plays an audio of a Buddhist monk.

The videos do not show what happened to the captive.

“I’ve filmed you,” the armed man says, noting his victim is about the same age as his father. “I feel sorry for you only after I’ve tortured you.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

The five Tibetans, identified as Chugdhar, Ghelo, Tsedo, Bhamo and Kori, lit incense and prayed for the long life of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in Sertar county (in Chinese Seda), in China’s northwestern Sichuan province on Aug. 24.

Police arrested them shortly after, although the sources said the religious activities did not violate any law. RFA was unable to identify any charges.

“The arrested Tibetans were appointed by the local Tibetans in their area to lead religious activities,” a Tibetan living in exile, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA’s Tibetan Service.  

“But amidst growing religious clampdown by the Chinese government in Serta and Golog, Tibetans are not even allowed to hang prayer flags in front of their own house. They also deny Tibetans from performing Sang-sol (an incense burning ritual), because they say it is harmful to the environment,” the source said.

Chugdhar died in a prison in the Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture where the other four remain in detention, another Tibetan living in exile, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told RFA.

“Chugdhar was 52 years old and he is survived by his parents. Chinese police kept denying that they tortured him to death,” the second source said.

“The police even have offered his family 100,000 yuan [more than U.S. $14,000] and agreed to pay an additional 10,000 yearly if they would just take Chugdhar’s body with them. But it was just a trick played by the Chinese police to make them take the body because his family never received any of the money they were promised,” the second source said.

Chugdhar’s official cause of death is suspicious, the first source said.

“Chugdhar was a healthy person, but he was brutally tortured in prison until he died. His family was summoned by Chinese authorities on Aug. 26, and they informed him that his death was sudden. They told the family to collect his body from the prison,” the first source said.

 “When Chugdhar’s father and other family members went to get his body, the Chinese police forced them to sign a document which states the Chinese police have nothing to do with his death,” the first source said. 

The other four Tibetans were first detained in a prison in Sertar county for a week and then moved to a prison in Kardze on Aug. 31, according to the first source.

“They are still undergoing trial but their families fear that they will be convicted soon. Their family members are also not allowed to meet them at all,” the first source said. “These Tibetans are innocent because they were only performing religious activities.” 

Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on Tibet and on Tibetan-populated regions of western China, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity, and subjecting Tibetans to imprisonment, torture and extrajudicial killings.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok for RFA Tibetan.

Twitter account Dalit Times tweeted the clip and wrote, “An old video of Indra Meghwal, a 9-year-old boy from Jalore, Rajasthan, dancing in the classroom is going viral.” (Archived link)

राजस्थान के जालौन के 9 वर्षीय बच्चे इंद्र मेघवाल का कक्षा में झूमते नाचते का पुराना वीडियो वायरल हो रहा है। pic.twitter.com/GuXTWbRxCL

— Dalit Times | दलित टाइम्स (@DalitTime) August 14, 2022

Users @NeerajM95532018, @AsianDigest, @NagmaniEr, and @HimanshuKadela were among many who tweeted the clip.

The viral clip has also been shared multiple times on Facebook.

Fact-Check

Several comments under the viral tweets suggested that the video was unrelated and that it did not feature Inder Meghwal. Some comments also suggested that the video in question was filmed in a government school in Taratara and not Jalore.

आप पतलकर हो , तो पहले वीडियो की छानबीन करो, ऐसे ही क्या वीडियो डालते हो , ये वीडियो तारातरा सरकारी स्कूल बाड़मेर का है

— GANESH SARAN BARMER (@ganeshsaran25) August 14, 2022

Upon a keyword search on Facebook, we found a post clarifying that the child seen in the video is a student of GUPS Gomrakh Dham, Taratara Math. The post also contained a screenshot of the video that was uploaded by a user named Tr Chela Ram Raika on July 30. The original upload had a caption in Hindi that read, “At the cultural program arranged on the occasion of No Bag Day on Saturday, Harish, a student of class two, confidently presented his dance recital.

The original uploader also re-shared the video in the context of the viral claims and clarified that the video was filmed at his school GUPS Gomrakh Dham. He requested users to not link this video with the Jalore incident.

We further looked up GUPS Gomrakh Dham on Facebook and found the video on their Facebook page as well. The video was uploaded on July 30. The original video is 2 minutes and 44 seconds long.

We called up the number provided on GUPS Gomrakh Dham’s Facebook page and spoke with a teacher who confirmed that the video was filmed at their school. “The child seen in the video is named Harish Bhil and he is in the second standard. He was performing at the cultural program that was hosted on the occasion of No Bag Day,” said the teacher.

Hence an unrelated video of a child dancing to a Rajasthani folk song is viral with the claim that the child seen in the video is Inder Meghwal. In reality, the viral video is of one Harish recorded in a school in Rajasthan’s Gomrakh Dham.

The post Video of a child dancing is not of the Dalit student allegedly assaulted by teacher in Rajasthan appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

The Phnom Tamao forest, located roughly 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Phnom Penh, is home to many rare and endangered species, and is the only forested eco-destination anywhere near the capital. It encompasses an area of more than 6,000 acres (2,450 hectares) and is home to the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center, established in 1995.

In April, media reported that the government had agreed to sell more than 1,200 acres (500 hectares) of the protected forest to Leng Navatra, a real estate company, and two other businesses said to be close to Hun Sen’s family. Later reports suggested the entire area had been earmarked by the government for development, excluding the 1,000 acres (400 hectares) that contain the wildlife center.

In a rare move this month, Hun Sen ordered an end to the clearance of the Tamao forest adjacent to the country’s largest zoo, following multiple appeals by environmental groups and members of the public.

The group of activists who were released on Tuesday said Hun Sen’s bodyguards assaulted them after they tried to inspect the area and ask local residents to sign petitions seeking clarification from local authorities regarding a fenced off 600 hectare (1482 acre) plot of cleared land that the prime minister had ordered to be replanted.

The bodyguards claimed that the activists and journalists were trespassing. They said they steered clear of off-limits areas and were on the way to a pagoda from which they could view the clearing.

Hun Vannak, one of the activists, told RFA’s Khmer Service that the bodyguards kicked him and hit him in the face. He said that a group of about 10 bodyguards forced the group into cars and took them to a nearby military camp. He said they were not told why they were being detained.

"We didn't dare to say anything because they took us to their camp,” Vannak said. “No one could help us. I felt we were with wild people, they didn't consider the law, they used only violence. They detained and assaulted us arbitrarily." 

Also among the group was Hy Chhay, a journalist for the local independent news outlet VOD who, according to Vannak, was slapped in the face by the bodyguards.

The group was transferred to a police facility in Takeo’s Bati district after which they were released.

RFA was unable to reach Bati district Police Chief Chhay Keomoni for comment on Tuesday.

The bodyguards violated the constitutional rights of the activists and journalists, Nop Vy, director of the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association, told RFA.

"I have observed that [authorities] respect only their orders, [not the law],” Nop Vy said. “It is wrong. Restrictions on the youths and journalists are contrary to Hun Sen's decision to replant the trees.”

The violence against the group must be investigated, according to Soeung Sengkaruna, spokesman for the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, a local 

rights group.

“This is a serious human rights violation,” he said. 

The activists told RFA they plan to file a complaint against the bodyguards. 

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Min Thu Aung, Banya Oo, Ye Htut Khaung and Zaw Win Htut — all students at Hpa-an University in Hpa-n, Kayin state — were arrested in March and charged with defamation of the state, organizing or helping a group to encourage the overthrow or destruction of the Myanmar military, and having contact with an unlawful organization, in this case an ethnic armed group fighting national forces. They each have been sentenced to 12 to 13 years in prison.

The four students were among 60 other political prisoners who were transferred from Hpa-An Prison to Tharrawaddy Prison in Bago region on July 9.

On instructions from the warden at Hpa-an Prison, the students were separated from the other prisoners when they arrived at the Bago detention center and placed in solitary confinement, a person close to one of the families told RFA.

The four have been beaten and locked up in solitary confinement nearly every day since July 10, the youths’ family members and those familiar with the situation said.

“They were not handcuffed when they were first beaten, though their ankles were shackled,” the person told RFA.

Human rights violations in prisons, such as the beatings the students have experienced, have gotten worse since the military overthrew the democratically elected government in a February 2020 coup, said a spokesman for the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Thai NGO.

“We have heard that political prisoners are being tortured intentionally and unjustly because they are political prisoners, and that they are being tortured in various ways,” he told RFA.

According to AAPP’s records, junta authorities have arrested 11,743 civilians for civil disobedience activities, of which 1,344 were sentenced to prison terms, since the coup took place.

When they were beaten while sitting without handcuffs, Banya Oo and Ye Htut Khaung tried to fight back, but were struck more forcefully, said the person close to one of the families of the detained students. They were then handcuffed, dragged away and locked in solitary cells.

“They were taken out of the cells every morning and were beaten again,” the person said, adding that the guards taunted them, asking if their revolution against the junta had succeeded and telling them to say “We must win,” while continuing the beatings.

The source said there were rumors that representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) may visit the detention center to investigate the alleged mistreatment of the students.

Prison guards removed the students from solitary confinement on July 18, though they are still suffering from injuries from the daily beatings and have not received medical treatment, he said.

Another RFA source, who did not want to be named for security reasons, said all four men had serious injuries, including broken noses and head wounds and that one was beaten until his teeth fell out.

RFA could not reach Prisons Department officials in Yangon or military junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment.

A statement issued by the ICRC in Myanmar on Monday said authorities must treat prisoners with dignity and humanity and ensure their health and safety. It also said the authorities had suspended ICRC access to prisons since March 2020 to check on detainees and provide humanitarian aid.

'These actions are crimes'

The torture of prisoners is a serious human rights violation because the students have already suffered from being sentenced to long jail terms, said the father of one of the students, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

“The kids have already been given punishments,” he said. “They haven’t broken any law or prison rules [since their arrests]. They didn’t even have any kind of prisoners’ rights and all these beatings are very serious violations of human rights.

“We feel that this kind of mistreatment has become more serious after the military coup,” he said. “There’s no rule of law at all. No matter what the law says, people would be arrested and unjustly sentenced by the courts once accusations were made against them.”

The students’ parents and relatives from Hpa-an requested permission to visit Tharrawaddy Prison, but prison authorities rejected their requests.

Tun Kyi, a senior member of the Former Political Prisoners Society, said prison authorities have a policy of torturing political prisoners.

“They are committing the most serious violation of human rights with the intention of subduing political prisoners so that they do not dare to rise up again,” he said. “They have laid out policies in various prisons, and then brutally oppressed and tortured the prisoners, often asking questions like, ‘Are you a revolutionary?’ and ‘Is your revolution making any headway?’ before hitting them.”

Hpa-an and Tharrawaddy prisons, along with Yangon’s Insein Prison, are among the worst detention centers of Myanmar’s more than 40 jails, Tun Kyi said.

A former prison warden, who did not want to be named out of concern for his safety, said the prison officials who mistreat detainees nowadays are former military officers.

A legal expert from Yangon, who did not want to be named for the same reason, said that physical beating of any detainee, including political prisoners, is a crime according to the regulations governing prisons.

“If you look at it as a lawyer, these actions are actually crimes because the jail manual states that prison wardens can give only 12 types of punishments,” he said. “No one else has the right to punish the prisoners. Among those 12 types of punishments that he can give, he is not allowed to beat prisoners.”

Those who torture political prisoners will be held to account at some point, said the AAPP spokesman, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

“Those who personally carry out the torture and all those who order it will have to pay restitution at some point,” he said. “This is a violation of both domestic and international law. Therefore, all those involved in the violations must surely pay restitution in the future.”

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The officer who spoke with RFA did not give the reason for the imprisonment of Ababekri Abdureshid, a lecturer at Xinjiang Normal University in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi).

“He was sentenced for 13 years in prison, I believe,” the security officer said, adding that Abdureshid’s family would know the reasons behind his arrest and imprisonment.

“We don’t know anything about this man’s case,” he said.

The scholar, who studied for a year as a visiting scholar in Germany in 2012, was apprehended in early 2018 after returning to Xinjiang, according to his friend and former colleague, Husenjan, who now lives in exile in Norway.

Husenjan said he heard through social media from sources in Xinjiang that Abdureshid had been sentenced.

“I got the news from a very close colleague of Ababekri Abdureshid that he was sentenced to over 10 years in prison,” Husenjan told RFA. “[He] published academic articles on Uyghur culture and literature in both regional and national magazines.”

Abdureshid, a university lecturer on philology, the study of languages, faced a difficult choice between staying in Germany or returning to Xinjiang. He decided to return home even though Uyghur higher education had been deteriorating, Husenjan said.

When RFA contacted officials at Xinjiang’s Education Bureau for information about Abdureshid’s incarceration, they suggested calling judicial authorities.

In an earlier report, RFA confirmed Abdureshid, who had been missing since 2018, was in captivity, although it was unknown whether he had been sentenced to prison.

Abdureshid was born in 1981 in Qaraqash (Moyu) county, Hotan (Hetian) prefecture, the second-largest county in Xinjiang by population with more than half a million Uyghurs. He was admitted to the Xinjiang University in 2006 to pursue a master’s degree in modern Uyghur literature.

From 2009 to 2012, Abdureshid studied for a doctorate at Minzu University of China in Beijing. During this time, he was a visiting scholar in Germany for a year.

While in Germany, Abdureshid once visited Turkey and met with colleagues there to exchange views on research topics, according to Husenjan, who added that the scholar’s connections to colleagues and friends in Germany and Turkey were a further reason for his detention by authorities in Xinjiang.

Officials at Xinjiang Normal University have consistently refused to comment on Abdureshid’s imprisonment when contacted by RFA.

But a Chinese judicial official in Korla (Kuerle), capital of Bayin’gholin Mongol (Bayinguoleng Menggu) Autonomous Prefecture, told RFA that the Chinese government had sent people who returned from studies in foreign countries to “re-education centers.”

After he had returned to Xinjiang, Abdureshid married and began working at the university in 2013. He was interrogated by Chinese police multiple times for refusing to drink alcohol.

Chinese authorities have arrested numerous Uyghur intellectuals, businessmen, and cultural and religious figures in Xinjiang as part of a campaign to control members of the mostly Muslim minority group and, purportedly, to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities.

More than 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are believed to have been held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in in the region.

The purges are among the abusive and repressive Chinese government policies that have been determined by the United States and some legislatures of Western countries as constituting genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs.

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur.

Nicky Liow Soon Hee, who faces 26 counts of money laundering according to the police, had been on the run since March 2021 when authorities smashed his syndicate and arrested more than 60 suspects, including some law enforcement officers, police said.

Nicky is alleged to be close to the United States-sanctioned Chinese triad leader Wan Kuok Koi (commonly known as Broken Tooth), the head of the 14K Triad, one of the largest Chinese organized crime gangs in the world.

“[Nicky] Liow Soon Hee also known as Nicky Liow was arrested at 11 a.m. at the Federal Police Commercial Crime Department office in Jalan Tun Razak after he turned up and surrendered to police,” Commercial Crime Director Kamarudin Md. Din said.

“Liow will be charged with 26 counts of money laundering under ... the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001,” he added.

Liow is scheduled to be produced at Shah Alam court in Selangor on Tuesday. He is staring at a prison sentence of 15 years and hefty fines, if convicted.

Last month, the Federal Police Commercial Crime Department obtained an arrest warrant for Liow after it filed charges against him at the Shah Alam Court for money laundering offenses under the instructions of the Attorney General’s Chambers, according to Kamarudin.

Liow’s Nicky Gang operated a telecommunication scam where it tricked victims, mostly in China, into handing over large sums of money, allowing the gang to allegedly amass millions of ringgit, police said. The syndicate would also target investors from China by promising them huge returns through investments in cryptocurrency, real estate and the foreign exchange market.

During a series of raids in March 2021 to take down the Nicky Gang, police arrested more than 50 people and seized 773,000 ringgit (U.S. $187,500) along with 35 vehicles valued at 8.86 million ringgit ($2.14 million) under provisions of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act of 2001.

Among those arrested were Liow’s two brothers, Liow Wei Kin and Liow Wei Loon, but they were later freed after prosecutors dropped charges against them.

A series of sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department on Wan Kuok Koi, the Macau underworld kingpin allowed the Royal Malaysia Police to establish links to the Nicky Gang, Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, then the police chief of Johor state, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, in an interview last April.

“It was crucial information as based on the tip of the iceberg. We were able to study the serious and extensive operations of the local syndicate, which has international connections,” Ayob told BenarNews. “It is very serious and we are very concerned what would have happened should we have failed to react accordingly and slam the brakes on their operation.”

He described Liow’s and Wan Kuok Koi’s relationship as close.

“Liow and Broken Tooth are as close as siblings,” Ayob said.

“They have known each other since 2018 and Broken Tooth … had since been providing Liow with patronage and security assurance under his 14K Triad.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By BenarNews.

Yusup Saqal, a well-known figure and charity organizer for Uyghur soccer in the town of Karamay (in Chinese, Kelamayi), was sentenced to 14 years behind bars in late 2018 on charges of “taking criminals under his wing,” Uyghur sources with knowledge of the situation said.

A Uyghur from Karamay who now lives in exile said authorities arrested Yusup, whose real name is Yusupjan Memtimin, in 2017.

In 2014, Yusup drove the wife and children of a detained Uyghur to the detention facility for a prearranged meeting. That incident was later pointed to as the reason for Yusup’s own arrest and detention, according to the Uyghur in exile.

When RFA contacted relevant Chinese authorities in Karamay to confirm the information, one Chinese official at Karamay’s political and legal bureau confirmed that Yusup been detained and sentenced.

“[He] was sentenced to 14 years in prison,” he said.

Yusup resigned from a government job in Karamay in the 1990s and started a wholesale business selling Korla pears and Turpan grapes grown in Xinjiang to other Chinese provinces, said Memetjan, a Uyghur from Karamay who now lives in Norway.

“He would donate to Uyghur soccer teams, and he donated to and organized soccer games in the Uyghur region,” he told RFA.

At one time, Yusup clashed with Chinese businessmen, and the police arrested him on suspicion of “intentionally destroying ethnic unity,” Memetjan said.

Yusup also was once summoned by China’s national security police in 2014 and interrogated about why he had given up drinking alcohol, said the first unnamed Uyghur source who lives in exile.

Abdureshid Niyaz, a Uyghur exile based in Turkey and the former editor of Karamay’s Oil Spring Magazine, said Yusup became a target of suspicion by Chinese authorities after he had embraced a more Islamic lifestyle.

“When I was arrested and interrogated by the Chinese police in 2002, they had asked me about Yusupjan,” Abdureshid Niyaz told RFA. “The Chinese police wanted to find ‘a problem’ with him.”

Abdureshid said that as a young public figure in the Uyghur society, Yusup offered help to other Uyghurs who came to Karamay in search of a job or a better life. He also tried to help more people who had lost relatives to China’s arbitrary detention campaign after it began in 2014.

Because of this, Yusup was regularly interrogated by the police, he said.

“I think the Chinese government sentenced him for 14 years in prison not because he committed any crime but because he was someone who could unite the people and bring cause for justice,” he said.

Yusup’s more than two decades of charity work toward developing Uyghur soccer was another reason why the Chinese had targeted him, Abdureshid said.

Wang Yang visits Xinjiang

RFA learned of Yusup’s sentence as a top Chinese Communist Party (CPP) official and Politburo member, Wang Yang, visited Xinjiang on an inspection tour from March 18 to 22.

Wang visited the major cities of Urumqi (Wulumuqi), Kashgar (Kashi) and Hotan (Hetian) as well as rural areas. He met with CPP and local government officials and presided over a forum on issues, China’s state-run media reported.

Wang noted that Xinjiang had not experienced any terrorist incidents in the past five years and applauded the region for reducing poverty. He reportedly said that it was his sense that the happiness, fulfillment and security among people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang continues to grow, the reports said.

“We must forge the material foundation of long-term political stability and refute smearing and slandering by enemy forces with the fact that all ethnic groups live happily,” Wang was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the U.S. government imposed new sanctions against Chinese officials over the repression of Uyghurs in China and elsewhere, prompting an angry response from Beijing, which has consistently denied committing right abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.

It was no coincidence that Wang’s visit came 11 days after Michelle Bachelet, the U.N.’s high commissioner of human rights, announced that she would visit China and the Xinjiang region in May, said Dolkun Isa, president of the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress.

“It appears Wang Yang was sent by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to order a total cleanup of East Turkestan by sanitizing any traces of China’s five-year long genocide and crimes against humanity, and by creating a Potemkin facade of Uyghurs living in peace and happiness under Chinese rule,” he told RFA, using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for the Xinjiang region.

Earlier this month, Bachelet told the Geneva-based Human Rights Council by videoconference that she had reached an agreement with the Chinese government for a visit “foreseen to take place in May,” including travel to Xinjiang.

“China will welcome High Commissioner Bachelet in May and present to her that Uyghurs have been treated well for the past five years and that genocide against Uyghurs was a lie concocted by the U.S.-led Western democracies,” Isa said.

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur and Alim Seytoff.

In three separate cases unveiled on Wednesday, government prosecutors allege several plots to undercut criticism of China on U.S. soil. The allegations include considering physically assaulting the congressional candidate; attempting to bribe U.S. tax officials in exchange for information about an advocate for democratic reform in China; and spying on members of the U.S.-based Chinese dissident community.

“This activity is antithetical to fundamental American values, and we will not tolerate it when it violates U.S. law,” Matthew Olsen, the assistant attorney general leading the DOJ’s National Security Division, said in a statement.

“The Department of Justice will defend the rights of Americans and those who come to live, work and study in the United States. We will not allow any foreign government to impede their freedom of speech, to deny them the protection of our laws or to threaten their safety or the safety of their families.”

The first case alleges that Chinese citizen Qiming Lin, 59, an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security, hired a private investigator in New York to disrupt the campaign of a Brooklyn resident and asked the investigator to physically attack him.

The New York Times identified the candidate as Yan Xiong, a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests who has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. After naturalizing as a U.S. citizen, Yan in 2015 participated in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Last year he announced his candidacy to represent Long Island, where he lived at the time, in Congress.

According to the DOJ statement, Lin told the investigator that the security ministry did not want Yan to be elected and asked him to find damaging information about the candidate. If none was available, Lin allegedly suggested manufacturing a scandal by attempting to hire a prostitute to seduce him and then taking clandestine pictures of the encounter.

In December, Lin asked the investigator to consider attacking Yan. The DOJ released a transcript of what it said was a voice message from the state security agent: “Beat him [chuckles], beat him until he cannot run for election. Heh, that’s the-the last resort. You-you think about it. Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right?”

If convicted, Lin, who remains at large, could face up to 10 years in prison.

The second case is against Shujun Wang, 73, of Queens, who has allegedly been spying on the Chinese diaspora for the security ministry since 2015. Once a visiting scholar and author, he contributed to the formation of a pro-democracy organization in Queens that honors two former Chinese Communist Party leaders who advocated reforms but were removed from power.

Wang allegedly collected information about activists, dissidents and human rights leaders and reported his findings to the Chinese government. He was able to gain their confidence and record information he learned in conversations with the victims, the DOJ said.

“The victims of Wang’s efforts included individuals and groups located in New York City and elsewhere that the PRC considers subversive, such as Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, advocates for Taiwanese independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists, both in the United States and abroad,” the DOJ said.

He also denied connections with the PRC government or security ministry during a 2017 interview in Queens, the statement said, but later admitted his crimes to an undercover law enforcement officer.

Authorities arrested Wang in New York on Wednesday. If convicted, he faces 20 years in prison.

The third case accuses Fan “Frank” Liu, 62, of Long Island, Matthew Ziburis, 49, of Oyster Bay, New York, and Chinese citizen Qiang “Jason” Sun, 40, with attempting to act as agents of the PRC by bribing tax officials for information about a pro-democracy activist living in the U.S.

Liu heads a New York-based media company and hired Ziburis, a former correctional officer, as a bodyguard. The two allegedly took instructions from Qiang Sun, who is based in China and works at an international technology company.

In another plot, Liu posed as an art dealer interested in buying the works of a dissident, while Ziburis bugged the dissident’s workspace and vehicle. Sun then could spy on the dissident over the internet.

Liu and Ziburis were also arrested Wednesday, and face three charges, two of which could result in sentences of up to five years each. One charge carries a potential 15-year sentence.

The DOJ has previously expressed concern over Chinese government attempts to disrupt activities by dissidents in various communities in the U.S. The Obama administration in 2015 warned China about its agents in the U.S. who attempted to harass Chinese residents.

Relations between Washington and Beijing are at a low point due to China’s close relationship with Russia and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. and its allies oppose.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Eugene Whong.

Two days later, Twitter user @AkshatK93411224 posted a clip of officials in uniform lathi-charging two Muslim men. The clip shows army men thrashing them and forcing them into a van. It has gained over 30,000 views. Viral posts claim that the video shows army men lathi-charging Mohammad Yunus Yunis, Ahmed Molana and Sadam who were arrested in Ajmer for spying for Pakistan. Several Twitter users have shared this clip.

अजमेर से पाकिस्तान के लिए जासूसी करने वाले मोहम्मद यूनुस,अहमद मौलाना,और सद्दाम को सेना ने ढङे मारे pic.twitter.com/qbYS70RlzN

— अक्षत कुमावत (@AkshatK93411224) February 20, 2022

Twitter user @iyogitasingh also posted it. It gained over 500 retweets. In the past, Alt News has documented that this account has shared misinformation.

अजमेर से पाकिस्तान के लिए जासूसी करने वाले मोहम्मद यूनुस,अहमद मौलाना,और सद्दाम को सेना ने ढङे मारे pic.twitter.com/UpwuxUiH64

— YOGITA SINGH (@iyogitasingh) February 21, 2022

Several Facebook users have shared the video as well.

Old video from MP

In the course of our research, we found that the clip dates back two years. It was posted by journalist Anurag Dwary who wrote that the clip is from April 2020 and was shot in Madhya Pradesh’s Ratlam district during the lockdown.

रतलाम में #lockdown #Lockdown21 का उल्लंघन कर सामूहिक रूप से नमाज पढ़ने पर पुलिस की कार्रवाई #Covid_19 #coronavirus #StayHome #lockdown @ndtvindia @shailendranrb @ajaiksaran @dharamtiwari @PoliceWaliPblic @sunilcredible pic.twitter.com/MdWvzk8LBR

— Anurag Dwary (@Anurag_Dwary) April 17, 2020

OneIndia Hindi reported that police arrested a few men from a mosque at Ratlam’s Omkala Road for not following COVID-19 protocol. Some men were arrested under IPC sections 188 [Disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant.], 269 [Negligent act likely to spread infection of disease danger­ous to life] and 270 [Malignant act likely to spread infection of disease danger­ous to life].

To sum it up, a 2020 clip of Muslim men being arrested in Ratlam for breaching COVID-19 protocol was shared with the false claim that the viral clip shows authorities arresting Muslim men in Rajasthan for spying fpr Pakistan.

The post Old video from MP falsely linked to Rajasthan man’s arrest for allegedly spying for Pak appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Archit Mehta.