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Student opens fire at Washington state school, killing classmate

By Dan Whitcomb

(Reuters) – A student carrying two guns opened fire at his high school near Spokane, Washington on Wednesday, killing one classmate and injuring three others before he was apprehended by a staff member, the local sheriff said.

The slain student was trying to convince the shooter, whose first gun had jammed, not to carry out the morning rampage when he was shot dead, Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich told reporters.

The gunman then fired on three other students in a second-floor hallway of Freeman High School in Rockford, Washington, Knezovich said. The surviving victims, who were in their mid-teens, were listed in stable condition, a local hospital said.

Knezovich declined to identify the suspect or discuss what may have motivated the gun violence in detail but said: “It sounds like a case of a bullying-type of situation.”

He said that a member of the staff at Freeman who he described as “very courageous” was able to capture the gunman before police officers arrived on scene to take him into custody. He was being held at Spokane County juvenile jail.

“Fortunately that one (gun) jammed. This would have been a lot worse if it didn’t,” Knezovich said. “These are senseless, tragic events that really don’t need to happen and I don’t really understand them.”

“But we need to figure out what’s gone wrong with our society that our children decide that they need to take weapons to deal with the issues that they’re facing,” he said.

A freshman who witnessed the shooting told local KREM-TV that the shooter, a classmate since elementary school, stalked the hallway with a pistol and second gun, appearing calm as he fired at his victims and the ceiling.

The girl said that the suspect was an “outgoing” boy who she would not have thought capable of such violence. But she said other students had told her that he had made an ominous post about his intentions on a social media account.

Following the shooting at the school of 327 students, some parents abandoned their cars stuck in traffic and walked up to a mile to reach their children, KHQ-TV reported.

“This morning’s shooting at Freeman High School is heartbreaking. All Washingtonians are thinking of the victims and their families,” Governor Jay Inslee said on Twitter.

The United States has had an average of 52 school shooting incidents a year since a gunman killed 26 young children and educators in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group founded in response to that massacre.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago, Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento and Derek Caney and Gina Cherulus in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

More than 50 arrested for looting in Miami during Irma: police

Local residents stand in the darkness as many areas of Miami still without electricity after Hurricane Irma strikes Florida, in Little Havana, Miami, Florida, September 11, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

By Zach Fagenson

MIAMI (Reuters) – Miami area police arrested more than 50 suspected looters during Hurricane Irma, including 26 people who were accused of breaking into a single Wal-Mart (WMT.N> store, authorities said on Tuesday.

City officials on Tuesday lifted a local 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew that had been in place since Sunday. As normality began to return, police commanders said officers will work 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, to discourage any more criminality.

“I said we would not tolerate criminal activity or looting or anybody who takes advantage of our residents,” Deputy Chief of Police Luis Cabrera said at a news conference. “I was not joking.”

The Wal-Mart incident took place on Saturday night at a store on the north side of the City of Miami, said Miami-Dade Police Department spokesman Alvaro Zabaleta.

Among others suspected of looting were six men arrested on Monday and accused of breaking into stores at the Midtown Miami shopping complex, near the fashionable Wynwood district, before making off with merchandise that included shoes, bags and laptops.

The looting attempts spanned the city, said Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado, from the well-heeled Brickell and downtown neighborhoods to the low-income Liberty City and Little Haiti areas. He said police will stay vigilant as the cleanup goes on.

Officers have also been busy trawling roads that can be perilous for motorists because power cuts shut off traffic lights at intersections and streets have accumulated shredded vegetation spread by the storm’s powerful winds.

“We have never experienced, not even with Hurricane Andrew, the amount of trees that are downed in the city,” Regalado told the news conference. Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992.

Since Irma began bearing down on the state late last week, authorities have been warning any would-be looters against taking advantage of the situation.

Rick Maglione, the police chief of Fort Lauderdale, about 30 miles (48 km) north of Miami, told residents to stay home during the storm and look after their loved ones. “Going to prison over a pair of sneakers is a fairly bad life choice,” Maglione said in a statement.

Miami police posted a photo on Facebook of several accused looters sitting in a jail cell under the caption: “Thinking about looting? Ask these guys how that turned out. #stayindoors.”

(Reporting by Zach Fagenson; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Dan Grebler)

American al Qaeda suspect to face trial on U.S. terrorism charges

By Brendan Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An American citizen will go to trial in federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday on charges that he supported al Qaeda and helped prepare a 2009 car bomb attack on a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, 31, has pleaded not guilty to charges that include conspiring to murder Americans and use a weapon of mass destruction, and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

Jurors were scheduled to hear opening arguments in the case Tuesday morning. U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan is presiding over the trial, which is expected to last two weeks.

U.S. prosecutors in 2015 accused Al Farekh, who was born in Texas, of conspiring to support al Qaeda by traveling with two fellow students from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada to Pakistan with the intention of fighting against American forces.

They also charged that Al Farekh helped prepare a vehicle-borne explosive device used in a Jan. 19, 2009 attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan. The base was not identified.

Prosecutors have said an accomplice detonated one device, while Al Farekh’s fingerprints were found on packing tape for the second device, which another accomplice carried but failed to detonate.

One of the other university students Al Farekh traveled with in 2007, Ferid Imam, has also been indicted, though his whereabouts are unknown.

Prosecutors said Imam provided training at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan in 2008 to three men later found guilty of plotting a bombing attack in the New York City subway system.

Authorities have said that before going to Pakistan, Farekh and Imam frequently watched videos promoting violent jihad, including online lectures by Anwar Al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born, Yemen-based militant preacher affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed in a U.S. drone attack in 2011.

(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Backed to the wall, Cambodia’s opposition urges world to help

Mu Sochua, Deputy President of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), listens during an interview with Reuters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia September 4, 2017.

By Matthew Tostevin

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) – Foreign donors must open their eyes to Cambodia’s “false democracy” and put more pressure on Prime Minister Hun Sen after the arrest for treason of his main rival, Kem Sokha, a top opposition figure said on Monday.

Mu Sochua, known internationally for campaigns against sex trafficking and for women’s rights, said the opposition had done as much as it could and would not call for demonstrations because it believed in non-violence.

Now the world had to save Cambodia, which has taken decades to recover from the Khmer Rouge genocide, she said.

“There isn’t true peace. There has always been a false democracy,” said Mu Sochua, 63, who is one of three deputies to Kem Sokha in the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP).

“The international community have been willing to close their eyes and play along with it. Right now all the red lines have been crossed,” she told Reuters in an interview in Phnom Penh.

Kem Sokha was arrested on Sunday and accused of plotting treason with the United States in an escalating crackdown on Hun Sen’s critics that has also targeted independent media and rights groups in the run-up to an election next year.

Kem Sokha’s lawyer had been allowed to visit him for the first time on Monday and he seemed to be OK, she said.

The opposition party was not calling for cuts in aid or trade, Mu Sochua said. But donors needed to make clear what they could do and convince Hun Sen that he would have no legitimacy from a flawed election.

“We are asking for the immediate and unconditional release of Mr Kem Sokha,” she said. “We hope the international community will come up to our expectations.”

She welcomed statements from both the United States and European Union, which have criticized the arrest of Kem Sokha and questioned whether next year’s elections can be fair.

HUN SEN DEFIANT

But Hun Sen, who has pulled in billions of dollars in Chinese loans and become one of Beijing’s closest regional allies, has only condemned foreign interference.

“We can’t allow any group to destroy the peace we hold in our hands by being the puppets of foreigners,” said Hun Sen, 65, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades.

Mu Sochua said the opposition wanted dialogue with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party under the auspices of countries that signed and guaranteed peace accords in Paris in 1991: the biggest world powers, Asian powers and Southeast Asian states.

“We have done everything possible,” she said. “When there is use of force by a corrupt judiciary we are very vulnerable. That’s why we’re saying ‘don’t defend the opposition, defend Cambodia’.”

Opposition party leaders met on Sunday to discuss the next steps after Kem Sokha’s arrest, but with few obvious options.

They would definitely not call for protests, Mu Sochua said. Replacing Kem Sokha would not happen either.

“That’s exactly in the scenario of Mr Hun Sen,” she said, raising the possibility of an election boycott if Kem Sokha were not released.

“That would be a last resort. We cannot pretend that we will go into something that will totally destroy the party and we cannot be part of the destruction of democracy in Cambodia,” she said.

Kem Sokha, 64, only became leader in February after his predecessor, Sam Rainsy, resigned in the face of a new law to ban any party whose leader has been found guilty of a crime.

Sam Rainsy lives in France to escape a defamation conviction.

Parties were then banned from even having links to convicted criminals, prompting the CNRP to go around old posters with paint brushes to obliterate Sam Rainsy’s picture. Party officials are not allowed to mention his name.

“Maybe when Mr Kem Sokha is convicted we can’t mention his name either, but then who’s next?” Mu Sochua said.

“In the minds of the Cambodian people, we know who is our leader in our hearts.”

(Additional reporting by Prak Chan Thul; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Moroccan teenager admits killing two in Finland knife rampage: lawyer

The initial remand hearing of Abderrahman Mechkah (lying in a hospital bed, attending the court session via video), 18 year-old Moroccan man suspected of killing two people and attempting to kill eight others with terrorist intent in Turku, on Friday, August 19, is held at Southwest Finland District Court in Turku, Finland, August 22, 2017. LEHTIKUVA /Martti Kainulainen via REUTERS

HELSINKI (Reuters) – A teenage Moroccan asylum seeker admitted on Tuesday killing two people and wounding eight in a knife attack in the Finnish city of Turku, his lawyer said.

In a closed-door court hearing, 18-year-old Abderrahman Mechkah confessed to carrying out Friday’s attack but did not admit to having terrorist motive, lawyer Kaarle Gummerus said.

“(My client) admits manslaughter and injuries… But what the investigator has brought up this far may not be enough to classify this as a terrorist crime,” Gummerus told Reuters.

Mechkah appeared in court via video link from hospital, where he is being treated after being shot in the leg by police following the stabbings.

The court ordered Mechkah, who has yet to be charged with any offense, to be detained in prison pending trial.

Three other Moroccan men detained over possible links to the attack are due in court later on Tuesday. A fifth Moroccan who had also been under arrest was released, the court said.

The investigation is the first into suspected terrorism-related crimes in Finland’s history.

Gummerus said it was “impossible to take a final stance at the moment” on the issue of whether the stabbings were terrorism-related.

Investigators have not made clear what role the three other Moroccans, who deny involvement in the attack, are suspected of playing.

Police said they had issued an international arrest warrant for a fifth Moroccan national.

(Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl; editing by John Stonestreet)

Texas man charged with trying to blow up Confederate statue

By Alex Dobuzinskis and Gina Cherelus

(Reuters) – Authorities in Houston charged a 25-year-old man on Monday with trying to blow up a Confederate statue, federal prosecutors said, following demonstrations and fierce debate in the United States about race and the legacy of America’s Civil War.

Word of the arrest of Andrew Schneck came just hours after the University of Texas at Austin said it moved statues tied to the Confederacy at its campus because they had become “symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

White nationalists rallied earlier this month against proposals to take down a similar statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one woman was killed when a man crashed his car into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters.

The violence triggered the biggest domestic crisis yet for President Donald Trump, who provoked anger across the political spectrum for not immediately condemning white nationalists and for praising “very fine people” on both sides of the fight.

On Saturday night, a park ranger spotted Schneck kneeling in bushes in front of the General Dowling Monument in Houston’s Hermann Park, Federal prosecutors said in a statement.

In Schneck’s possession were a timer, wires, duct tape and two types of explosive including nitroglycerin, according to the prosecutors who described it as one of the world’s most powerful explosives. The items could have been used to make a viable explosive device, the prosecutors’ statement said.

If convicted of trying to maliciously damage or destroy property receiving federal financial assistance, Schneck faces up to 40 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

“It’s an evolving situation and the investigation is continuing,” Schneck’s attorney, Philip Hilder, said by phone. “So far I have not seen any evidence and it would be premature to comment at this time.”

A growing number of U.S. political leaders have called for the removal of statues honoring the Confederacy. Civil rights activists charge they promote racism while advocates of the statues contend they are a reminder of their heritage.

The city of West Palm Beach near Miami became the latest community on Monday to prepare to remove a Confederate symbol. The monument in a public cemetery belongs to the Daughters of the Confederacy, and it will be stored for the organization after its removal, Mayor Jeri Muoio told reporters.

Among the four statues removed overnight at the University at Austin was one of General Robert E. Lee, who led the pro-slavery Confederacy’s army during the Civil War.

Fenves said the statue of Lee and two others will be placed in the school’s Briscoe Center for American History and made available for scholarly study.

The school’s president, Greg Fenves, said in a statement that the monuments had to go following the “horrific displays of hatred” in Virginia that shocked and saddened the nation.

There are about 700 monuments to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, with the majority of them erected early in the 20th century amid a backlash among segregationists against the civil rights movement.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Andrea Ricci)

German critic of Turkey’s Erdogan arrested in Spain

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan greets his supporters in Trabzon, Turkey, August 8, 2017. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Palace/Handout via REUTERS

BERLIN (Reuters) – German-Turkish author Dogan Akhanli was arrested in Spain on Saturday after Turkey issued an Interpol warrant for the writer, a critic of the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Der Spiegel magazine reported.

The arrest of the German national was part of a “targeted hunt against critics of the Turkish government living abroad in Europe,” Akhanli’s lawyer Ilias Uyar told the magazine.

Ties between Ankara and Berlin have been increasingly strained in the aftermath of last year’s failed coup in Turkey as Turkish authorities have sacked or suspended 150,000 people and detained more than 50,000, including other German nationals.

Spanish police arrested Akhanli on Saturday in the city of Granada, Der Spiegel reported. Any country can issue an Interpol “red notice”, but extradition by Spain would only follow if Ankara could convince Spanish courts it had a real case against him.

Akhanli, detained in the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey for opposition activities, including running a leftist newspaper, fled Turkey in 1991 and has lived and worked in the German city of Cologne since 1995.

On Friday, Erdogan urged the three million or so people of Turkish background living in Germany to “teach a lesson” to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in September’s general election by voting against her. That drew stinging rebukes from across the German political spectrum.

Calls to the German foreign ministry regarding the arrest of Akhanli were not immediately returned.

(Reporting By Thomas Escritt; Editing by Andrew Bolton)

Turkey hunts more coup suspects, detains 30 for suspected PKK links

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish police have launched operations to track down 33 former staff of a national scientific research agency who are alleged to have been involved in last year’s failed coup attempt, the state-run Anadolu news agency said on Tuesday.

Anadolu said the suspects were alleged to have used ByLock, an encrypted messaging app which the government says was used by the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom it accuses of orchestrating the abortive putsch in July 2016.

Gulen has denied involvement in the coup attempt.

Anadolu said police carried out operations in six provinces to find the 33 suspects from Turkey’s scientific research council TUBITAK.

Since the coup attempt some 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended from jobs in the civil service and private sector and more than 50,000 have been detained for alleged links to the putsch.

The crackdown has alarmed rights groups and some of Turkey’s Western allies, who fear the government is using the coup as a pretext to quash dissent.

Security sources also said 30 people suspected of being linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were arrested on Tuesday in operations in the southeastern province of Sirnak.

The PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union, and United States, has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state, and the government has ramped up operations targeting the militants since the collapse of a ceasefire in 2015.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Venezuela jails opposition leaders in new crackdown on opponents

By Corina Pons and Alexandra Ulmer

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela jailed two leading critics of President Nicolas Maduro on Tuesday in a fresh blow to the opposition after the election of a new political body with sweeping powers to strengthen the hand of the leftist government.

The United States imposed sanctions on Maduro on Monday, calling him a “dictator” for Sunday’s election of a constituent assembly that the opposition boycotted and denounced as an affront to democracy.

In a statement announcing the jailing of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez and veteran politician Antonio Ledezma, the pro-government Supreme Court said they were planning to flee the country and had violated terms of their house arrest by making political statements and speaking to media.

But government opponents called the abrupt removal of the men from their homes by security forces in nighttime raids a sign of Maduro’s determination to silence rivals. It was a view shared by U.S. President Donald Trump, who issued a statement condemning “the actions of the Maduro dictatorship.”

“Mr. Lopez and Mr. Ledezma are political prisoners being held illegally by the regime,” it said, calling “for the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners.”

About 120 people have been killed in more than four months of anti-government street protests, including at least 10 during Sunday’s vote.

Maduro says the constituent assembly was designed to restore peace to Venezuela. Lopez and Ledezma had called for protests against Sunday’s vote. In addition to rewriting the constitution, the legislative superbody will have the power to dissolve the opposition-led congress, eliminating any institutional check on Maduro’s powers.

Lopez had been held more than three years in a military jail until last month, when he was unexpectedly released in what was seen as a potential breakthrough in the country’s political standoff.

Attempts to get the opposition and the government to reach a negotiated deal subsequently floundered, however, and allies said Lopez, 46, may have been jailed again because he rejected government proposals.

“They have kidnapped Leopoldo Lopez because he simply would not break under the pressures and false promises of the regime,” said Freddy Guevara, a legislator in the Popular Will party led by Lopez.

A U.S.-educated economist and former mayor in Caracas, Lopez is beloved by some in the opposition for his hard line anti-government stance and has become an international cause celebre.

The government sees him as an elitist coup-monger, and even some opposition sympathizers have criticized him for being hot-headed and authoritarian.

In a sign of heightening tensions, Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Munoz said Beatriz Ruiz and Jose Fernando Nunez, both recently appointed judges of an alternative Supreme Court by the opposition parliament, took refuge in Chile’s embassy in Caracas on Tuesday and may be granted political asylum.

The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, mulled possible additional measures aimed at influencing Maduro. Senator Ben Cardin, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Monday’s sanctions against the Venezuelan leader were not enough, and that punitive economic measures targeting the country’s vital oil sector may be in order.

The United States is Venezuela’s No. 1 crude importer. Actions targeting Venezuelan oil would likely heap more damage onto an economy already suffering from a deep recession, food shortages and the world’s highest inflation rate.

“Our objective needs to be to help the people of Venezuela through this extremely dangerous humanitarian crisis … and ultimately to get Venezuela back on a democratic path,” Cardin said.

AN ARREST FORETOLD

Lopez himself suspected he would be detained again, and had recorded a video alongside his wife Lilian Tintori in which he urged Venezuelans to keep fighting if he was put back behind bars.

“If you’re seeing this video it’s precisely because that’s what happened, they jailed me again, illegally and unjustly,” said Lopez, in the video shown on social media on Tuesday.

Blamed by many for rising poverty in Venezuela, Maduro has faced almost daily protests demanding freedom for jailed politicians, early elections to replace him and permitted entry of humanitarian aid such as food and medicines.

Lopez and Ledezma were both taken from their homes to Ramo Verde, a military jail in a slum area about an hour’s drive from the capital, according to lawyers and family.

Lopez was originally arrested for his role in leading street demonstrations against Maduro. Ledezma, a 62-year-old veteran politician, had been arrested on charges of plotting a coup.

Condemnation of Tuesday’s arrests also came from the United Nations human rights chief, the president of the European Parliament and other governments.

“We express our solidarity with Leopoldo Lopez, Antonio Ledezma and other political prisoners in Venezuela,” Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said on Twitter.

(Additional reporting by Brian Ellsworth, Eyanir Chinea, Diego Ore, Hugh Bronstein, Fabian Cambero and Andreina Aponte in Caracas, Tom Miles in Geneva, Sarah White in Madrid, Patricia Zengerle and Yeganeh Torbati in Washington D.C., Mitra Taj in Lima, Adriana Barrera in Mexico City and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer and Brian Ellsworth; Editing by W Simon and Tom Brown)

Australian counter-terrorism police arrest four in Sydney

Police stand on a street that has been blocked to the public after Australian counter-terrorism police arrested four people in raids late on Saturday across several Sydney suburbs in Australia, July 29, 2017. REUTERS/David Gray

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian counter-terrorism police arrested four people in raids late on Saturday across several Sydney suburbs aimed at disrupting plans for “terrorist attacks”.

“These operations are designed to disrupt and prevent plans to undertake terrorist attacks in Australia,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in an emailed statement.

Australian Federal Police said the raids by the Joint Counter Terrorism Team in four suburbs in different parts of the city “relate to an ongoing investigation.”

“Four men have been taken into custody and are assisting police with their enquiries,” the AFP said in a statement.

The police declined to provide more detail, saying “further information will be made available at the appropriate time.”

“The public should be reassured that our security and intelligence agencies are working tirelessly to keep us safe,” Turnbull said.

Australia, a close ally of the United States, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown militants returning from fighting in the Middle East, or their supporters, since 2014.

Authorities say they have thwarted a number of potential attacks since then, but there have been several “lone wolf” assaults, including a cafe siege in Sydney that left two hostages and the gunman dead.

About 100 people have left Australia for Syria to fight alongside organizations such as Islamic State, Australia’s immigration minister said last month.

Australian newspaper publisher News Ltd reported up to 40 riot squad officers were seen swooping on a house in the inner city suburb of Surry Hills.

(Reporting By Jane Wardell; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Stephen Powell)

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