US sends Houthi-bound Iranian arms to Ukraine

Washington has given Ukraine small arms and ammunition that were seized while being sent from Iranian forces to Tehran-backed militants in Yemen, the US military said Tuesday. (AFP/File)
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Updated 09 April 2024
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US sends Houthi-bound Iranian arms to Ukraine

  • Weapons seized from ‘stateless’ boats carrying ‘lethal aid’ to militia, US Central Command says

AL-MUKALLA: The US has sent thousands of small arms seized from Iranian weapons shipments bound for Yemen’s Houthi militia to Ukraine to help fight the Russians, the US military said on Tuesday.

The US Central Command, or CENTCOM, said the US government on Thursday transferred more than 5,000 AK-47s, machine guns, sniper rifles, RPG-7 rocket launchers, and 500,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition to the Ukrainian army to restock its small arms arsenal.

“These weapons will help Ukraine defend against Russia’s invasion,” the US military said.

It added that the weapons were seized from four “stateless” boats intercepted between May 2021 and February 2023 while carrying arms from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Houthis in Yemen.

“CENTCOM is committed to working with our allies and partners to counter the flow of Iranian lethal aid in the region by all lawful means, including US and UN sanctions and through interdictions,” CENTCOM said, accusing Iran of attempting to undermine global and regional security, as well as the security of US forces, diplomats, and citizens in the region and those from allied countries.

“We will continue to do whatever we can to shed light on and stop Iran’s destabilizing activities.”

Rashed Al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Council, urged the US in February 2023 to transfer seized Iranian weapons to the Yemeni army to help combat the Houthis. 

The appeal came a week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the US was considering delivering confiscated Iranian weapons, including thousands of rifles, ammunition, and anti-tank missiles, to Ukraine.

“We demand that they be turned over to the legitimate government. They (the Americans) only provided samples of them with smugglers as courtroom proof,” Al-Alimi said.

Since November, the Houthis have fired ballistic missiles and drones at commercial and navy ships in the Red Sea, Bab Al-Mandab Strait and the Gulf of Aden, claiming that the strikes are intended to put pressure on Israel to relieve its siege of Gaza.

The US, the Yemeni government, and others in the region believe Iran provided the Houthis with the weapons and assisted the militia with military know-how and intelligence.

In response to the Houthi attacks, the US formed a coalition of naval task forces to protect the Red Sea, and launched strikes against Houthi targets in Yemeni areas under their control.

On Tuesday, US Central Command said that its forces had destroyed an air defense system preparing to launch two missiles as well as a ground control center in Yemen-controlled areas.

A drone fired by the Houthis toward international ships in the Red Sea was also intercepted. 

The Houthis on Sunday launched a ballistic missile at a US-led coalition ship escorting M/V Hope Island, which the US military described as “a Marshall Islands-flagged, UK-owned, Italian-operated cargo ship.”

“There were no injuries or damage reported by US, coalition, or commercial ships. This was the fifth observed missile launch against this coalition ship and M/V Hope Island,” CENTCOM said.

The Houthis said on Monday that a man had been injured and his home demolished in a US and UK strike in Al-Hawak district in the western province of Hodeidah.

Meanwhile, the Houthis freed Abu Zaid Al-Kumaim, head of the Yemeni Teachers Club, an umbrella organization that represents thousands of Yemeni teachers, after kidnapping and holding him for more than six months over salary payment demands.

The Houthis took Al-Kumaim from his home in Sanaa in October after he urged teachers to go on strike over demands that the Houthis pay the salaries of thousands of teachers.


Helmsman of cargo ship run aground in Norway ‘was likely asleep’

Updated 5 sec ago
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Helmsman of cargo ship run aground in Norway ‘was likely asleep’

OSLO: The helmsman of a huge container ship that ran aground in Norway just a stone’s throw away from a cabin as its owner slept was probably asleep as well at the time of the accident, Norwegian media reported on Friday.
“Only one person was on the bridge at the time. He was steering the vessel, but did not change course when entering the Trondheim fjord as he should have,” the news agency NTB reported.
“Police have received information from others who were on board that he was asleep,” police official Kjetil Bruland Sorensen told NTB.
The 135-meter NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s wooden cabin around dawn on Thursday.
Helberg discovered the unexpected visitor only when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone.

It’s a very bulky new neighbor but it will soon go away.

Johan Helberg

“The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television channel TV2.
His neighbor, Jostein Jorgensen, said he was roused at around 5 a.m. by the sound of a ship heading at full speed toward land and immediately ran to Helberg’s house.
None of the cargo’s 16 crew members were injured, and Norwegian police have opened an investigation.
“We are aware of the police stating that they have one suspect, and we continue to assist the police and authorities in their ongoing investigation,” the NCL shipping group said on Friday.
“We are also conducting internal inquiries but prefer not to speculate further,” it added.
Efforts to refloat the ship have failed so far, and the massive red and green container ship remained stuck, looming over the small cabin.


UN urges warring sides in South Sudan to ‘pull back from the brink’

Updated 5 min 5 sec ago
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UN urges warring sides in South Sudan to ‘pull back from the brink’

  • The human rights situation risks further deterioration as fighting intensifies, Volker Turk says

GENEVA: The UN rights chief has urged warring sides in South Sudan to pull back from the brink, warning that the human rights situation risks further deterioration as fighting intensifies.
“The escalating hostilities in South Sudan portend a real risk of further exacerbating the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation, and undermining the country’s fragile peace process,” said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.
“All parties must urgently pull back from the brink,” he added.
Since May 3, fighting has intensified, with OHCHR citing reports of indiscriminate aerial bombardment and river and ground offensives by the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces SSPDF on Sudan People’s Liberation Army positions in parts of Fangak in Jonglei State and in Tonga County in Upper Nile.
Clashes between South Sudan’s army and fighters backing the rival to President Salva Kiir have killed at least 75 civilians since February, the UN human rights chief said on Friday.
Dozens more have been injured and thousands forced to flee their homes, said the commissioner.
He expressed concern over arbitrary detentions and a rise in hate speech since February.

BACKGROUND

South Sudan, the world's youngest country after gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, was plunged into a violent civil war between 2013 and 2018 that claimed around 400,000 lives.

South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011, was plunged into a civil war between 2013 and 2018 that left around 400,000 dead and 4 million displaced.
A 2018 power-sharing agreement between the warring parties had allowed for a precarious calm.
But for several months, violent clashes have set President Kiir’s faction against supporters of his rival, Vice President Riek Machar, who was arrested in March.
Civilian-populated areas have been struck, including a medical facility operated by medical charity Doctors Without Borders or MSF,  Turk said.
According to a UN estimate in mid-April, around 125,000 people have been displaced since the escalation of tensions.
Turk said dozens of opposition politicians linked to the SPLM-IO had been arrested, including Machar, ministers, MPs and army officers, as had civilians.


Woman arrested after 12 injured in stabbing at Hamburg station

Updated 19 min 40 sec ago
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Woman arrested after 12 injured in stabbing at Hamburg station

  • Some of the injured sustained life-threatening injuries in the attack
  • Suspect is a 39-year-old woman who was thought to have acted alone

BERLIN: Germany police on Friday said they had arrested a woman after at least 12 people were injured in a knife attack at the main station in the northern city of Hamburg.
Some of the injured sustained life-threatening injuries in the stabbing, emergency services said, although the exact number remained unclear.
Around 6:30 p.m. (1600 GMT), Hamburg police said on X they were carrying out a major operation at the main train station in Germany’s second-largest city.
“A person injured several people with a knife at the main train station” and a suspect had been arrested, they said.
The suspect, police subsequently said, was a 39-year-old woman who was thought to have “acted alone.”
Investigations into the incident were “running at full speed,” police said, without giving an indication of a possible motive.
A spokesman for the Hamburg fire department told AFP that 12 people had been injured in the knife attack.
Among them were “six people with life-threatening injuries,” the spokesman said. German media however reported the number of people with very severe injuries was lower.
The attack took place around 6:00 p.m. in the middle of rush hour at the end of the working week, according to German media.
The suspect was thought to have carried out the attack “against passengers” at the station, a spokeswoman for the Hanover federal police directorate, which also covers Hamburg, told AFP.
Images of the scene showed access to the platforms at one end of the station blocked off by police and people being loaded into waiting ambulances.
Some of the victims in the attack were being treated onboard waiting trains in the station, Bild reported.
German rail operator Deutsche Bahn said on X that four platforms at the station had been closed.
The incident would lead to “delays and diversions in long-distance services,” Deutsche Bahn said in a post on X.
Germany has been rocked in recent months by a series of violent attacks with often jihadist or far-right extremist motivations that have put security at the top of the agenda.
The most recent, on Sunday, saw four people were injured in a stabbing at a bar in the city of Bielefeld.
The investigation into the attack had been handed over to federal prosecutors after the Syrian suspect in the attack told the police officers who arrested him that he had jihadist beliefs.
The question of security — and the immigrant origin of many of the attackers — was a major topic during Germany’s recent election campaign.
The vote at the end of February saw the conservative CDU/CSU top the polls and a record score of over 20 percent for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany.


Single UK Special Forces officer rejected 1,585 Afghan resettlement applications

Updated 23 May 2025
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Single UK Special Forces officer rejected 1,585 Afghan resettlement applications

  • UKSF member blocked numerous former Triples soldiers and their families from being resettled despite threats from Taliban
  • Some may have been eyewitnesses to alleged war crimes in Afghanistan; more than 600 cases since overturned

LONDON: A court has been told a UK Special Forces officer personally rejected 1,585 applications from Afghans for resettlement in Britain.

The applications were all from people with credible links to UKSF personnel, the Ministry of Defense told the court, amid an ongoing investigation into alleged war crimes by the Special Air Service in Afghanistan.

The BBC revealed last week that the individual in question may have rejected applications from people with eye-witness testimony relating to the allegations.

Numerous former Afghan special forces soldiers, known as Triples due to their regiment numbers, served alongside UK forces until the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021. 

Thousands of them and their relatives have subsequently struggled to obtain permission to travel to the UK.

The public inquiry into the conduct of UKSF soldiers in Afghanistan, meanwhile, lacks the power to compel former Triples soldiers to testify unless they are in the UK.

In October 2022 Natalie Moore, the head of the Ministry of Defense’s Afghan resettlement team, voiced concern that UKSF involved in applications for resettlement were giving the “appearance of an unpublished mass rejection policy.”

In January last year, former Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer told senior government officials there was a “significant conflict of interest that should be obvious to all” in the processing of resettlement applications by UKSF personnel.

“Decision-making power,” Mercer claimed, over “potential witnesses to the inquiry,” was “deeply inappropriate.”

Mercer also noted that a number of former Triples soldiers had been killed by the Taliban after being left to wait in Afghanistan, including one whose application was rejected having “previously confronted UKSF leadership about EJKs (extrajudicial killings) in Afghanistan.”

The MoD initially denied UKSF personnel had a veto over the applications of former Triples soldiers, who having been armed, trained and funded by the UK, were deemed at risk of reprisals if left in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of coalition forces.

However, more than 2,000 applications deemed credible by caseworkers have been rejected by the UKSF. The MoD subsequently announced a review of the applications over fears the process was not “robust.”

An additional 2,500 rejected applications were placed under review this week by the government. So far, more than 600 of the 1,585 rejections attributed to the single UKSF officer have been overturned.

The revelations about the UKSF member who rejected the 1,585 applications were made at a judicial review hearing brought by former Triples soldiers over the conflict of interest in resettlement decision-making, which also heard the MoD had launched two investigations into UKSF practices.

One investigation, known as Operation X, said that it “did not obtain any evidence of hidden motives on the part of the UKSF liaison officer.”

It added it found “no evidence of automatic/instant/mass rejections,” but failed to provide evidence in its conclusion, instead suggesting the decisions were made as a result of “slack and unprofessional verification processes” by the UKSF officer and “lax procedures followed by the officer in not following up on all lines of enquiry before issuing rejections.”

Tom de la Mare KC, representing the Afghan Triple soldier who brought the case, accused the MoD of failing to disclose evidence of blanket application rejections, and of “providing misleading responses to requests for information,” the BBC said.

Cathryn McGahey KC, acting for the MoD, said “there might have been a better way of doing (the applications process), but that doesn’t make it unlawful.”

Daniel Carey, partner at law firm DPG, acting for the former Triples soldier, told the BBC: “My client spent years asking the MoD to rectify the blanket refusals of Triples personnel and has seen many killed and harmed by the Taliban in that time.

“He is pleased that the MoD have agreed to inform everyone of the decisions in their cases and to tell the persons affected whether their cases are under review or not, but it should not have required litigation to achieve basic fairness.”


Harvard sues Trump over block on foreign students

Updated 23 May 2025
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Harvard sues Trump over block on foreign students

  • “It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights,” said the lawsuit

NEW YORK: Harvard sued the Trump administration on Friday over its move to block the prestigious university from enrolling and hosting foreign students in a broadening dispute, a court filing showed.


“It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” said the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts federal court.