Six In The Morning Friday 2 April 2021

 

'Two bullets is enough'

Analysis of Tigray massacre video raises questions for Ethiopian Army

By Bethlehem Feleke, Eliza Mackintosh, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Katie Polglase and Nima Elbagir
Video by Barbara Arvanitidis and Mark Baron, CNN

Updated 1255 GMT (2055 HKT) April 2, 2021

Dawit was watching television at a relative's one-room apartment in Axum, a historic city in Ethiopia's war-torn, northern Tigray region, in early March when a news bulletin flashed up on the screen.

Graphic, unverified footage had surfaced of a mass killing near Dawit's hometown of Mahibere Dego, in a mountainous area of central Tigray. In the shaky video Ethiopian soldiers appeared to round up a group of young, unarmed men on a wind-swept, dusty ledge before shooting them at point-blank range -- picking them up by an arm or a leg and flinging or kicking their bodies off a rocky hillside like ragdolls.

The soldiers can be heard in the footage urging one another not to waste bullets, to use the minimum amount needed to kill and to make sure none of the group were left alive. They also appear to cheer each other on, praising the killings as heroic and hurling insults at the men in their captivity.

'An atmosphere of terror': the bloody rise of Mexico's top cartel

The Jalisco cartel’s violence has taken a horrific toll on the state and experts say it poses a threat to Mexico’s government

by Tom Phillips and Analy Nuño in Guadalajara with pictures by Emilio Espejel

It was mid-spring when residents of the wasteland behind Guadalajara’s international airport noticed a dog roaming their community with a strange object in its mouth: a human forearm.

Search teams in the ramshackle neighbourhood of La Piedrera entered a roofless red brick shack flanked by trees decked with bright orange mistletoe. Under several layers of dusky earth they made an even more grotesque discovery.

“There were 26 of them here. We found them wrapped in plastic sheets,” said Guadalupe Aguilar, a local human rights activist, as she stood beside the shallow grave. “And they’d thrown something on them – acid or something – because it hadn’t been long [since their murders] and the bodies were already in a real state of decay.”

Brussels riot police use horses and water cannon to disperse crowd gathered in response to April Fools’ joke

Male appears to be knocked down by police horse as ‘La Boum’ prank results in chaotic scenes and injuries

Andy Gregory

Riot police in Belgium have used horses and water cannon to disperse crowds of revellers gathered in defiance of coronavirus rules, apparently in response to a fake festival created as an April Fools’ joke.

In recent weeks, some 70,000 people had expressed an interest on Facebook in attending a festival dubbed “La Boum”, which according to The Brussels Times had advertised “eight stages, a hundred DJs and zero coronavirus rules”.

Despite the anonymous would-be organisers, police and the city’s mayor Philippe Close all making clear that the event was a prank, between 2,000 and 5,000 people made their way to one of Brussels’ largest parks, the Bois de la Cambre, on Thursday, according to police and local media estimates respectively.

Opinion: Naive optimism threatens Myanmar protest movement

The violence in Myanmar shows that the conflict between pro-democracy protesters and the military has reached an impasse. Protesters need to work on a new strategy, says DW's Rodion Ebbighausen.

Two narratives currently dominate social media in Myanmar: the sheer brutality and reprehensibility on part of the generals, and the protesters' willingness to struggle for the restoration of democracy. The link between these narratives is the idea that good will eventually triumph over evil.

Nobody doubts the courage and good intentions of the demonstrators, but the protest movement will not succeed if it continues to function on naive optimism.

US agrees to begin indirect talks on Iran’s nuclear programme

The US State Department on Friday said the US has agreed to talks next week with European, Russian and Chinese partners to identify issues involving its return to the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, nearly three years after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the deal.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price called the resumption of negotiations, scheduled for Tuesday in Austria, “a healthy step forward”. But Price added: “These remain early days, and we don’t anticipate an immediate breakthrough as there will be difficult discussions ahead.”

Agreement on the start of multiparty talks – being held to get Iran and the US over their differences on conditions for returning to the 2015 nuclear deal – came after talks Thursday brokered by other countries in the accord.

Families of victims seek justice over French air strike in Mali

France denies UN report that 19 unarmed civilians were killed in a January air strike on a remote Malian village.

By 

Amandla Thomas-Johnson

2 Apr 2021

Families of people killed in a French air strike on a wedding in a remote Malian village have called for the prosecution of the military personnel involved in an operation the United Nations has concluded could amount to a war crime.

Nineteen attendees of a wedding party in the village of Bounti were killed when French warplanes struck on January 3, according to a bombshell UN report on Tuesday, its first ever investigation into French military operations. Three suspected militia fighters were also killed.