World

Six people were shot and killed Sunday in California, with 12 more injured in the latest mass casualty event to spark calls in the United States for new actions to combat gun violence.

The shooting occurred Sunday morning in the California capital city of Sacramento around 2:00 AM after a “large fight” broke out in its downtown area, Police Chief Kathy Lester said at a press conference.

Officers on patrol nearby heard the gunshots and saw people running, she said.

Upon arriving at the scene, “they encountered a large crowd and multiple gunshot victims.” 

Despite attempts at resuscitation, six victims were pronounced dead at the scene — three men and three women, all adults, Lester said. 

Twelve others were hit by gunfire and are being treated in local hospitals.

At a press conference Sunday morning, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg described some of the hospitalized as “seriously and critically injured.”

He also called on anyone with information to contact authorities or submit evidence via a scannable QR code.

Lester said Sunday evening there were “multiple shooters” and a “stolen handgun” had been recovered at the scene.

She added that investigators had already received multiple videos and tips from members of the public, but were urgently seeking more information.

A video posted online Sunday appeared to show people scuffling in the street, then starting to run as gunfire can be heard. 

AFP could not verify the footage, and it was not known if there was a direct relation, but local police said they were aware of the video.

“It was just horrific,” said community activist Berry Accius, who arrived minutes after the shooting.

“Just as soon as I walked up you saw a chaotic scene, police all over the place, victims with blood all over their bodies, folks screaming, folks crying, people going, ‘Where is my brother?’ Mothers crying and trying to identify who their child was,” he told local broadcaster KXTV.

The shooting happened in the downtown area, just blocks from the state capitol and close to the venue where the NBA’s Sacramento Kings play.

– ‘We must act’ –

“America once again mourns for another community devastated by gun violence,” said US President Joe Biden in a statement Sunday night.

“We must do more than mourn; we must act,” stated Biden, who reiterated his call for Congress to pass legislation to strengthen restrictions on guns.

Mayor Steinberg said it was difficult to find the right words to describe the tragedy.

“The numbers of dead and wounded are difficult to comprehend,” he said, adding that he was waiting for more information about the incident. 

“Rising gun violence is the scourge of our city, state and nation, and I support all actions to reduce it,” he said.

The mass casualty shooting is the latest in the United States, where firearms are involved in approximately 40,000 deaths a year, including suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.

California Governor Gavin Newsom described gun violence as a “crisis” for the United States.

“We cannot continue to let gun violence be the new normal,” he said in a post on Twitter.

Lax gun laws and a constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms have repeatedly stymied attempts to clamp down on the number of weapons in circulation, despite greater controls being favored by the majority of Americans.

Three-quarters of all homicides in the US are committed with guns, and the number of pistols, revolvers and other firearms sold continues to rise.

More than 23 million guns were sold in 2020 — a record — on top of 20 million in 2021, according to data compiled by website Small Arms Analytics.

That number does not include “ghost” guns, which are sold disassembled, lack serial numbers, and are highly prized in criminal circles.

In June 2021, 30 percent of American adults said they owned at least one gun, according to a Pew survey.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky called Russian troops “murderers, torturers, rapists, looters” on Monday after dozens of bodies were found near Kyiv, triggering global outrage and vows of tough new sanctions on Moscow.

Local authorities said they had been forced to dig communal graves to bury the dead accumulating in the streets, including some found with their hands bound behind their backs, in scenes that sent shockwaves through international capitals more than a month into Russia’s invasion.

Despite Russian denials of responsibility, condemnation was swift, with Western leaders, NATO and the UN all voicing horror at reports of civilian murders in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, and elsewhere.

Zelensky was unsparing in his nightly video message, warning “concentrated evil has come to our land”.

He described Russian troops as “murderers, torturers, rapists, looters, who call themselves the army and who deserve only death after what they did”, speaking in Ukrainian.

Switching to Russian, he continued: “I want every mother of every Russian soldier to see the bodies of the killed people in Bucha, in Irpin, in Hostomel.”

“I want all the leaders of the Russian Federation to see how their orders are being fulfilled.”

Zelensky said he had created a special body to investigate killings in areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn around the capital, as Moscow refocuses its energies on southeastern Ukraine.

The scale of the killings is still being pieced together, but Ukrainian prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said 410 civilian bodies had been recovered so far.

And Bucha’s mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP that 280 bodies were placed in mass graves because it was impossible to bury them in cemeteries within firing range.

Satellite imagery firm Maxar released pictures it said showed a mass grave located in the grounds of a church in the town.

Municipal worker Serhii Kaplychnyi told AFP that Russian troops initially refused to allow residents to bury the dead in Bucha.

“They said while it was cold to let them lie there.”

Eventually, they were able to retrieve the bodies, he said. “We dug a mass grave with a tractor and buried everyone.”

The UN said it was “highly concerned” by images emerging from the region, though it said it could not rule out that some of the dead were fighters or had died of natural causes.

– ‘Putin… will feel consequences’ –

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba accused Russia of a “deliberate massacre”, while Zelensky’s spokesman, Sergiy Nikiforov, said the killings in Bucha “looks exactly like war crimes”.

Russia’s defence ministry pushed back, saying “not a single local resident” in Bucha suffered violence. 

It accused Kyiv of bombarding its southern suburbs and falsifying images of corpses in “another production” for Western media.

Moscow’s deputy ambassador to the UN said Russia had requested a UN Security Council meeting on Monday “in light of heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha”.

AFP reporters in the town saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, strewn across a single street, and images of the deaths have drawn global shock and calls for new measures against Russia.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the killings “a punch to the gut”, while NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the violence — unseen in Europe for decades — was “horrific” and “absolutely unacceptable”.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said new sanctions would be decided “in the coming days.”

“(Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin and his supporters will feel the consequences,” he said, as his defence minister raised the possibility of an end to gas imports.

Other European officials, including Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, said the EU “must respond strongly with tougher sanctions”, while Zelensky said “there will definitely be a new package of sanctions against Russia”.

But the Ukrainian leader warned that the worst could be yet to come as Moscow refocuses its attention on the south and east of the country, in a bid to create a landlink between occupied Crimea and the Russian-backed separatist statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk.

“Russian troops still control the occupied areas of other regions, and after the expulsion of the occupiers, even worse things could be found there, even more deaths and tortures,” he said.

He also appeared in a taped message at the Grammys, urging people to “tell the truth about this war… support us in any way you can, any, but not silence”.

– ‘Something terrible is coming’ –

Europe’s worst conflict in decades, sparked by Russia’s invasion on February 24, has already killed 20,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates.

Nearly 4.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country, with almost 40,000 pouring into neighbouring countries in the last 24 hours alone, the UN refugee agency said.

In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, women, children and elderly people were boarding trains to flee the Donbas region.

“The rumour is that something terrible is coming,” said Svetlana, a volunteer organising the crowd on the station platform.

Russia has redoubled its efforts in Ukraine’s south and east, including carrying out several strikes Sunday on the strategic Black Sea port of Odessa, which Moscow said targeted an oil refinery and fuel depots.

“We were woken up by the first explosion, then we saw a flash in the sky, then another, then another. I lost count,” local resident Mykola, 22, told AFP.

In the eastern city of Kharkiv, seven people died and 34 were wounded after Russian forces struck a residential area on Sunday, local prosecutors said in a statement.

Britain’s defence ministry said recent Russian air activity had been focused on southeastern Ukraine, adding that heavy fighting was continuing in the devastated and besieged southern city of Mariupol.

“The city continues to be subject to intense, indiscriminate strikes,” the ministry said in an update on Twitter.

The UN’s top humanitarian envoy Martin Griffiths is expected in Kyiv soon after arriving in Moscow Sunday in an attempt to halt the fighting.

And peace talks are scheduled to resume by video on Monday, though Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said it was too early for a top-level meeting between Zelensky and Putin.

He said Kyiv had become “more realistic” in its approach to issues related to the neutral and non-nuclear status of Ukraine, but a draft agreement for submission to a summit meeting was not ready.

Ukraine has proposed abandoning its aspirations to join NATO and declaring official neutrality, if it obtains security guarantees from Western countries. 

It has proposed temporarily shelving the question of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and two breakaway territories in the Donbas that Russia has recognised as independent.

Medinsky said Russia’s position on Crimea and the Donbas “remains unchanged”.

burs-sah/reb

Right-wing former finance minister Rodrigo Chaves is set to be Costa Rica’s new president after his opponent Jose Maria Figueres conceded defeat on Sunday.

Chaves held a close to six percentage point lead in provisional results over Figueres, the centrist former president.

“Costa Rica has voted and the people have spoken. Since we are democrats we respect that decision,” said Figueres, 67, who congratulated Chaves and wished him well.

His concession came moments after the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) revealed Chaves led by 52.9 percent compared to 47.1 percent for Figueres with 89 percent of votes counted.

Unemployment and an economic crisis dominated the campaign between two scandal-tainted candidates relieved not to have their past indiscretions take center stage.

Economist Chaves, 60, was once demoted for sexual harassment, while Figueres was previously investigated for corruption.

But with 23 percent of the population living in poverty and unemployment soaring to 14 percent alongside a series of corruption scandals, Costa Ricans seemed more focused on the economy as they elected the successor to President Carlos Alvarado.

Voting was carried out “in peace and tranquility,” said TSE spokesman Gustavo Ramon.

Chaves will take over from the unpopular Alvarado next month with the major challenge of reigniting an economy in crisis.

Costa Rica has been described as the “happiest” country in Latin America and praised for its political stability, environmental policies and eco-tourism, but the vital tourism industry was hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Alongside Peru, it suffered the largest fall in employment figures in the region between 2019 and 2020.

“Costa Rican society was not poor, they made it poor. Costa Rican society was not unequal, they made it unequal,” said Chaves, who voted in mid-morning at a school in the capital’s city center.

“The country has never before been in an emergency like the one we are going through,” added Figueres, who cast his vote at a school on the outskirts of San Jose.

– ‘We’re very poor’ –

Voters were very clear about what concerned them the most: the economy and employment.

“The next president has to change everything because we’re very poor. There is no work here, there is nothing,” said Ana Briceno, 64, a travel agent in San Jose.

“In the last years with Carlos Alvarado the situation has been very difficult … so I think the future president must focus on the economy,” said Cristina Aguilar, 32.

Chaves was a surprise qualifier for Sunday’s run-off, having polled fourth ahead of February’s first round.

Representing the newly formed right-wing Social Democratic Progress Party, Chaves had led the most recent opinion polls, with more than 41 percent support, compared to 38 percent for Figueres.

“We have spoken about progression and rejecting regression,” he said in a press conference.

Figueres was previously president from 1994 to 1998.

His father Jose abolished the army in 1948 when he was president.

“We have options to generate employment, which is what is most lacking, and to grow the economy,” he said.

Figueres topped the first round of voting among a crowded field of 25 contenders with 27.3 percent, ahead of Chaves who had 16.8 percent.

But they were a long way from the 40 percent needed to win outright.

– ‘Misinterpreted’ jokes – 

Both men have reached this final stage of the election despite the specter of past scandals.

Chaves, who spent six months as finance minister in the outgoing government, was investigated over sexual harassment complaints brought by multiple women while he was a senior official at the World Bank, where he worked for 30 years.

He was demoted, though not fired, and has dismissed his behavior as jokes that were “misinterpreted due to cultural differences.”

Figueres, who represents the centrist National Liberation Party (PLN), was investigated for allegedly taking $900,000 from French engineering firm Alcatel, which has admitted to bribing officials.

The ex-president, who worked abroad at the time as executive director of the World Economic Forum (WEF), refused to give evidence in the case in 2004 and returned to Costa Rica only in 2011 when the investigation expired.

Chaves’s four-year term will begin on May 8.

Sri Lanka’s president was set to appoint a new cabinet Monday as security forces braced for possible violence with more protests expected against worsening shortages of food, fuel and medicines.

Twenty-six ministers in the cabinet — all members except President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his elder brother Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa — submitted letters of resignation at a late-night meeting on Sunday.

The move clears the way for the president to appoint a new cabinet on Monday — possibly including some of those who quit — as the ruling political clan seeks to shore up its position in the face of the economic crisis.

The country is in the grip of an unprecedented shortage of food, fuel and other essentials — along with record inflation and crippling power cuts with no sign of an end to the economic woes.

The situation is acknowledged by the government as the worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948, and it has announced it will seek a bailout from the IMF.

Troops and police were placed on a high state of alert as a 36-hour curfew ended at dawn Monday despite intelligence reports warning of more unrest, a top security official told AFP.

“Indications are that we can expect more demonstrations,” he said, reiterating that the military has been empowered to detain suspects under a state of emergency declared on Friday.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa imposed the emergency a day after a crowd attempted to storm his home in the capital Colombo.

Throughout Sunday evening, hundreds of people staged noisy but peaceful demonstrations in towns across the island of 22 million denouncing Rajapaksa’s handling of the crisis.

“Go home Gota, go home Gota” shouted protesters at Rajagiriya, near the national parliament, while at Negombo, near the main international airport, people shouted, “Gota fail, fail, fail”.

Sunday’s full-day curfew prevented larger protests that had been organised through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, all of which were blocked by the government.

The platforms were unlocked and the partial internet censorship ended after 15 hours as the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka ruled that the ban was illegal.

Activists said they will hold larger demonstrations in several key towns on Monday to force President Rajapaksa and his family to step down.

A junior coalition partner has announced it will quit the administration this week, a move that would weaken Rajapaksa’s majority in the legislature.

Many economists say Sri Lanka’s crisis has been exacerbated by government mismanagement, years of accumulated borrowing and ill-advised tax cuts.

The grieving of Bucha begins today, for those who can bear to face it.

There are bodies in mass graves yet to be claimed, bodies in the street waiting to be collected, bodies everywhere in the ruined Kyiv suburb left by Russian forces which retreated earlier this week.

Liuba, 62, leads her neighbour to the lip of a trench in the sodden clay behind a gold-domed church. But he cannot bring himself to peer inside the grave and search for his missing brother rumoured to lie inside.

57 people are here at this mass burial site, a city worker told AFP. But only a fraction of those are visible.

Some are heaped in black zipped body bags. Others in civilian clothing are only partly buried — a pale hand, a booted foot or the cusp of a forehead exposed to snow falling on the harrowed commuter town.

One body is bundled in a red and white bedsheet near a single pink women’s sandal.

Hands and feet reach out from the earth in improbable poses, suggesting a tangle of remains beneath the surface.

Liuba’s neighbour retreats to a fallen tree and collapses. Though he is held in comfort by a female companion, his anguish prevents him from coming closer.

“This wound will never heal,” says Liuba. “I would not wish it even on my worst enemy.”

– A necessary task – 

Nearby, along a thin grey road framed by shattered homes, four men pilot a white van from corpse to corpse.

AFP counted 20 along this single stretch. Some lie with legs tangled in bikes, others near a ruined car blemished with countless bullet marks.

All are in civilian clothing and one has his hands bound behind his back with a strip of white fabric, his hooded head in a crimson puddle.

Vitalii Shreka, 27, tries to cut the cloth but his pen knife fails. He unknots it instead and hauls the cadaver into a body bag the team zips tight.

One by one, the men inspect the dead for ID cards then stack them in the cargo bay. Shreka holds them steady with blue surgical gloves smeared in days-old blood.

One corpse is wearing a blue and yellow armband, a signal of solidarity with Ukraine. 

A worker throws a bike at two lumbering dogs stalking too close.

The team drive up the road but are forced to reverse. They have missed one more person: a black hooded figure, totally still, lost in the devastated scenery.

It is added to the growing pile in the van.

“It needs to be done,” says 44-year-old Vladyslav Minchenko, standing over a body next to a scattering of potatoes wrinkled by rain — relics from a final shopping trip.

“I did not understand this myself before, when I didn’t have to, but it’s necessary.”

Minchenko and his three colleagues estimate there are “more than 10” dead bodies already inside the van.

But still there is more work to do.

– ‘Let them lie there’ – 

Municipal worker Serhii Kaplychnyi says his team struggled to bury the dead during Russia’s short-lived occupation of Bucha, the focus of growing war crimes allegations against President Vladimir Putin.

“There are many people who died from their bullets and shrapnel,” he told AFP. “They would not allow us to bury them.”

“They said while it was cold to let them lie there.”

Eventually, he says, the Russians allowed his team to collect the bodies from the morgue. “We dug a mass grave with a tractor and buried everyone,” he recalls.

Outside the Bucha mayor’s office Kaplychnyi now coordinates a recovery effort in the town. 

There is a thin sheen of triumph. Military men give each other hard-gripping hugs, miniature Ukrainian flags are being handed out, aid convoys are creeping in.

But Kaplychnyi’s mind travels to the trauma of the past weeks. On one day his team recovered 10 people shot in the head: “Apparently a sniper was ‘having fun’.” 

Civilians also made efforts to bury their neighbours as best they could, in gardens and factories, too fearful to risk a proper funeral.

“There is an old disused sewer pit and they put them there too — covered them up so they’re still lying there,” he said.

“Now we will go and collect them.”