World

A prominent Kremlin critic faced possible jail time on Tuesday after Russian police stopped his foreign-bound plane as it taxied down a runway and yanked him off the flight.

It marked the latest move in what Kremlin opponents have described as a campaign of arrests and intimidation against President Vladimir Putin’s foes ahead of parliamentary elections in September, and came days after Russia’s ally Belarus diverted a plane and arrested a wanted dissident onboard.

Political activist Andrei Pivovarov was pulled off a Warsaw-bound plane in Saint Petersburg late on Monday.

Pivovarov, the former executive director of the recently disbanded Open Russia group, said on Twitter the plane was taxiing toward take-off when it turned back and police boarded, ordering him off.

Police searched his Saint Petersburg apartment overnight and a criminal probe was launched against the 39-year-old activist for cooperating with an “undesirable organisation,” Pivovarov’s team said on Facebook.

Pivovarov faces up to six years in prison if convicted.

On Tuesday, he was moved to the southern city of Krasnodar where the criminal probe was launched.

The Krasnodar branch of the Investigative Committee, which probes major cases, said in a statement that Pivovarov had in August 2020 published materials in support of an “undesirable organisation.” 

The statement also accused the activist of attempting to flee from investigators on Monday. Pivovarov said he was going on vacation when he was detained.

Open Russia, founded by self-exiled Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, announced last week it was shutting down to shield its members from prosecution.

– ‘Unusual action’ – 

It was designated an “undesirable” organisation in Russia in 2017 in line with a law targeting foreign-funded groups accused of political meddling.

Pivovarov’s removal from the plane came after authorities in Belarus on May 23 diverted an EU airliner to Minsk to arrest a dissident on board, provoking an international outcry.

Polish airline LOT, which operated Pivovarov’s flight, said the plane was taxiing when Russian air traffic control ordered the crew to return to the parking position. 

“The pilot had to comply with this order as he was under Russian jurisdiction,” Polish news agency PAP quoted the company as saying.

Poland said it was looking into the issue.

“This is an unusual action because if the Russians wanted to detain this person they could have done so before boarding. The question is why it was done exactly at that moment,” Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk told state broadcaster TVP.

“The standards of the civilised world do not apply there.”

Police also conducted searches Tuesday morning at the country house outside Moscow of former opposition lawmaker Dmitry Gudkov and the homes of his allies, he said.

“I don’t know what the formal reason (for the searches) is. The real one is clear,” he said on messaging app Telegram. 

Dmitry’s father Gennady Gudkov, who is also a former lawmaker and lives outside Russia, said police searched the homes of several other relatives.

“A beautiful morning in Putin’s Russia,” Gennady Gudkov tweeted. 

Putin’s leading domestic opponent, Alexei Navalny, was sentenced earlier this year to two-and-a-half years in a penal colony on old fraud charges that he says are politically motivated, and authorities are gearing up to outlaw his political network.

A fire aboard a cargo ship off Sri Lanka carrying hundreds of tonnes of chemicals, plastics and cosmetics was finally extinguished Tuesday after a 13-day international operation, the navy said.

In Sri Lanka’s worst marine ecological disaster, huge volumes of microplastic granules from the ship’s containers have inundated beaches, forcing a fishing ban and a major clean-up involving thousands of troops.

Experts from Dutch salvage company SMIT boarded the MV X-Press Pearl and reported massive flooding of the engine rooms.

The Singapore-registered vessel caught fire on May 20 when it was about to enter the Colombo port.

Navy spokesman Captain Indika de Silva said the stern of the 186-metre (610-feet) long container carrier had gone down by about a metre because of the flooding.

“It is not unusual for the vessel to trim by aft (tilt to the rear) when water sprayed on deck settles in the engine room,” Silva told AFP.

He said the spraying of water was stopped to prevent further flooding, but some areas of the ship were still too hot to carry out a complete examination of the vessel.

However, navy divers were carrying out examinations under the water line to ensure that there were no cracks in the hull to undermine the integrity of the ship, which is also carrying 278 tonnes of bunker oil and 50 tonnes of gasoil.

Sri Lanka’s navy was joined by India’s coastguard and tugs brought in by SMIT to battle the flames which destroyed most of the nearly 1,500 containers the vessel was carrying.

The three-month-old ship had 25 tonnes of nitric acid and other chemicals as well as 28 containers of plastic raw material, much of which fell into the sea.

Marine Environment Protection Authority chief Dharshani Lahandapura said they were still assessing the ecological damage, but believed it was the “worst ever in my lifetime”.

The MEPA chief said the crew apparently knew of a nitric acid leak on May 11, long before the vessel entered Sri Lankan water en route to Malaysia and Singapore.

Sri Lanka began a criminal investigation Monday into the fire and the marine pollution.

Police spokesman Ajith Rohana said the captain and chief engineer, both Russian nationals, had been questioned for 14 hours since Monday. The third officer, an Indian national, was also questioned at length, he said.

“We are seeking advice from the attorney general on the next steps,” Rohana said, adding that the 25-member crew who were evacuated from the vessel on May 25 were still in quarantine.

The ship was heading to Colombo from Gujarat, India. It had previously visited Qatar and Dubai from where the containers of nitric acid had been loaded.

Sri Lankan authorities suspect the acid leak triggered the fire.

A Sri Lankan court Tuesday ordered the passports to be impounded of the three senior crewmen pending further investigations.

The leader of Western Sahara’s independence movement, whose presence in Spain has angered Morocco, on Tuesday denied allegations of torture and genocide while being questioned by a Spanish judge.

Brahim Ghali, who heads the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, testified by video conference from a hospital in northern Spain where he is recovering from a severe case of Covid-19.

The accusations against Ghali “are totally false” and are “politically motivated to target the credibility of the Sahrawi people,” his lawyer Manuel Olle told reporters after the closed-door hearing of Spain’s National Court.

Asked if Morocco was behind the lawsuits against Ghali, he said: “If I think about it, I would probably say what you just said.”

Ghali, who is also the president of the Sahrawi Democratic Arab Republic, a self-declared state since 1976, is facing two investigations in Spain.

Once his inquiries are completed, the presiding judge will have to decide whether to charge the Polisario leader or dismiss the lawsuits against him.

During the hearing, the judge refused to impose any precautionary measures — such as seizing Ghali’s passport — arguing there was no flight risk.

Ghali was severely ill when he arrived at a hospital in the northern Spanish town of Logrono in mid-April, with his presence in Spain triggering a major diplomatic spat between Rabat and Madrid.

Last month, Spain was caught off guard when as many as 10,000 people surged into its tiny North African enclave of Ceuta as Moroccan border guards looked the other way, in what was widely seen as a punitive political gesture.

The Polisario Front has long fought for the independence of Western Sahara, a desert region bigger than Britain which was a Spanish colony until 1975. 

Morocco controls 80 percent of the territory, while the rest — an area bordering Mauritania that is almost totally landlocked — is run by the Polisario Front. 

– ‘War criminal’ –

One of the investigations relates to allegations of torture at Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, a town in western Algeria.

The accusations were made in 2020 by Sahrawi activist Fadel Breika, who also holds Spanish nationality. 

While a Spanish court initially rejected the complaint, earlier this year it agreed to reopen the case.

The second investigation relates to allegations of genocide, murder, terrorism, torture and disappearances made in 2007 by the Sahrawi Association for the Defence of Human Rights (ASADEDH), which is based in Spain.

Rabat has already warned the Spanish government that allowing Ghali to “go home, bypass Spanish justice and ignore the victims” would further worsen ties.

In 2016, Ghali was summoned for questioning in relation to the second complaint when he was due to attend a conference in Spain in support of the Sahrawi people. He eventually cancelled his trip.

Rabat considers Ghali to be a “war criminal”, and Morocco’s foreign ministry said Monday that his presence in Spain was a “test” for bilateral ties, warning the crisis would “not be resolved with a single court hearing”.

And it reiterated demands for a “transparent investigation” into Ghali’s arrival in Spain on what it said was a forged passport. 

– ‘Attack the borders’ –

In response, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it was “unacceptable” for Morocco to “attack Spain’s borders” by letting migrants into Ceuta due to “differences in foreign policy”.

Citing diplomatic sources, Spain’s El Pais newspaper said Ghali was “critically ill” when he arrived on a medicalised Algerian government plane on April 18, bearing a diplomatic passport.

It said he was admitted to the hospital under a false name for “security reasons”.

The UN refers to Western Sahara as a “non-self-governing territory”. Morocco is willing to offer it autonomy within Morocco but not independence.

After 16 years of war, Rabat and the Polisario signed a ceasefire in 1991, but a UN-backed referendum on self-determination has been repeatedly postponed.

Hostilities resumed last November when the Polisario declared the ceasefire to be over after Morocco sent troops into a UN-patrolled buffer zone to reopen a key road.

China on Tuesday denied an Australian academic’s claims that he had been tortured in custody during his two-year detention on espionage charges.

The trial of Chinese-born Australian Yang Jun began behind closed doors Thursday, but the court decided to delay a verdict and a sentence.

The 56-year-old, who also goes by his pen name Yang Hengjun, has told supporters he was tortured while at a secret detention site and fears forced confessions may be used against him.

“The first six months… was a really bad period. They tortured me,” Yang said in a message seen by AFP.

But China denied the claim, saying his trial was handled in accordance with Chinese laws and that Yang’s legal rights were protected.

“Yang Jun was not arbitrarily detained or tortured to extract a confession,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular briefing Tuesday.

“Such practices are expressly prohibited by Chinese law.”

Canberra has voiced deep concerns over a lack of transparency after its ambassador was denied access to the hearing.

Yang, who has been held since 2019, is one of two high-profile Australians detained in China on spying allegations as tensions escalate between Canberra and Beijing.

Another Australian, TV anchor Cheng Lei, has been held since August accused of “supplying state secrets overseas”.

Relations between Canberra and Beijing have deteriorated sharply in recent years, with disputes over everything from telecoms giant Huawei to the origins of Covid-19.

Australia and New Zealand on Monday also expressed grave concerns over human rights abuses in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region, as well as China’s island-building spree in the South China Sea that affects freedom of navigation.

China’s foreign ministry said it “firmly opposes” the joint statement issued by Scott Morrison and Jacinda Ardern, chiding the leaders for “irresponsible remarks on China’s internal affairs.”

China has also imposed tariffs on Australian exports worth billions of dollars and cut off diplomatic channels between the two nations.

World leaders must make a “new commitment” to a more equal distribution of coronavirus vaccines to bring the pandemic under control, the heads of four major global organizations said on Tuesday.

Their joint rallying cry comes as concerns rise that vaccine inequality between wealthy and poor nations is further complicating and prolonging a pandemic that has killed more than 3.5 million people globally.

Writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, the heads of the World Health Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization blamed the gap in vaccination programs for the emergence of virus variants that have fueled fresh outbreaks in the developing world.

“It has become abundantly clear that there will be no broad-based recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic without an end to the health crisis. Access to vaccination is key to both,” they said.

“Ending the pandemic is possible — and requires global action now.”

The joint op-ed was penned by IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Bank president David Malpas, and WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

They called on the Group of Seven wealthy democracies to agree on a “stepped-up coordinated strategy, backed by new financing, to vaccinate the world” at their next meeting in the United Kingdom later this month.

The officials recommended the G7 agrees to fund a $50 billion plan already put forward by the IMF to accelerate the end of the pandemic.

The WHO had already decried vaccine inequality as “grotesque” in March and its chief Tedros last month asked vaccine-wealthy nations to refrain from giving shots to children and adolescents and instead donate those doses to other nations.

UN-backed program Covax is meant to share vaccines with the poorest nations.

But wealthy countries effectively elbowed out Covax in the early stages of procurement, striking their own deals with drug manufacturers and taking the overwhelming share of the more than 1.8 billion doses of vaccine that have already been injected worldwide.

The G7 member countries, which met in central London under tight coronavirus restrictions last month, committed to financially support Covax.

But there was no immediate announcement on fresh funding to improve access to vaccines, despite repeated calls for the group to do more to help poorer countries.

A decade of war in Syria has left nearly half a million people dead, a war monitor said Tuesday, in a new toll that includes 100,000 recently confirmed deaths.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the conflict has claimed 494,438 lives since it erupted in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

The previous tally, issued by the Observatory in March this year, stood at more than 388,000 dead.

The war monitor has since confirmed an additional 105,015 deaths following months of documentation efforts supported by its network of sources on the ground. 

“The overwhelming majority of these deaths occurred between the end of 2012 and November 2015,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, referring to the latest additions. 

Of the recently confirmed fatalities, more than 42,000 are civilians, most of them killed under torture in Syrian regime prisons, according to the monitor. 

Abdel Rahman said that a lull in the fighting allowed his organisation to investigate reports of deaths that had not been included in the overall tally for lack of documentation.

“It provided us with a window to document tens of thousands of cases for which we lacked evidence,” he said.

With government forces having reconquered large swathes of Syria and a ceasefire still holding along the main front line in Idlib region in the northwest, violence levels are at their lowest since the start of the conflict.

– Prison deaths –

The new figures published by the Observatory bring the total civilian death toll to 159,774, with attacks by Syrian government forces and allied militia accounting for the majority of deaths. 

The Observatory also documented a total of at least 57,567 deaths in government prisons and detention centres since 2011, up from the 16,000 confirmed deaths it reported in March. 

It also reported 168,326 deaths among Syrian soldiers and allied militia, with troops accounting for more than half of the tally. 

The conflict has killed 68,393 jihadists, most members of the Islamic State group or of organisations linked to Al-Qaeda, as well as 79,844 other rebels. 

A deal brokered by Turkey and Russia in March 2020 froze a government offensive on the rebel-controlled Idlib enclave which many feared would have caused human suffering on a scale yet unseen in the conflict.

The attention on both sides has since turned to battling the Covid-19 pandemic and 2020 saw the lowest number of conflict-related deaths since the start of the war with 10,000, according to the Observatory.

Today the Damascus government controls more than two thirds of the country after a string of Russia-backed victories since 2015.

President Bashar al-Assad, in power since 2000, was re-elected in May for a fourth seven-year term.

The war has forced more than half the country’s pre-war population to flee their homes.

Covid-19 variants are to be known by letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigmatising nations where they were first detected, the World Health Organization announced Monday.

The new system applies to variants of concern — the most troubling of which four are in circulation — and the second-level variants of interest being tracked.

“They will not replace existing scientific names, but are aimed to help in public discussion,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead.

Under the new system, the variants of concern take on the following names: the hitherto so-called British variant B.1.1.7 becomes Alpha; the B.1.351 first discovered in South Africa becomes Beta, while the Brazilian P.1 becomes Gamma.

The so-called Indian variant B.1.617 is split into sub-lineages, of which the B.1.617.2 variant of concern becomes Delta.

The B.1.617.1 variant of interest is called Kappa.

Besides these names, there are two other scientific names in use for each mutation, while different geographic names have been used to describe the same variant.

For example, within Britain, what other countries have been referring to as the British variant is often called the Kent variant — the county in southeast England where it was first discovered.

The lineage names such as B.1.1.7.2 will still continue to be used in scientific circles, for the mutation information that their name conveys.

– ‘Stigmatising and discriminatory’

“While they have their advantages, these scientific names can be difficult to say and recall, and are prone to misreporting,” the WHO said in a statement.

“As a result, people often resort to calling variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatising and discriminatory.

“To avoid this and to simplify public communications, WHO encourages national authorities, media outlets and others to adopt these new labels.”

Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden signed a hate crimes law aimed at protecting Asian Americans who have suffered a surge in attacks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

US anti-extremism groups say the number of attacks and hate crimes against Asian Americans has exploded since the beginning of the crisis.

They lay some of the blame with former president Donald Trump, who repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus”.

The WHO has been trying to come up with simplified new nomenclature for the variants for several months.

The Greek alphabet contains 24 letters but there is no plan yet as to where to go next if they are exhausted.

Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta and Iota have already been ascribed to variants of interest.