Tag Archives: Murder

Iraq makes arrests over reports of Sunni executed in Falluja

A military vehicle of the Iraqi security forces is seen next to an Iraqi flag in Falluja

By Isabel Coles and Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq said on Monday it had made arrests as it investigates allegations that Shi’ite militiamen helping the army retake Falluja had executed dozens of Sunni Muslim men fleeing the city held by Islamic State.

Iraqi authorities “are following up on the violations and a number of arrests have been made,” government spokesman Saad al-Hadithi said after a regional governor said 49 Sunni men had been executed after surrendering to a Shi’ite faction.

Sohaib al-Rawi, governor of Anbar province where Falluja is located, said on Sunday that 643 men had gone missing between June 3 and June 5, and “all the surviving detainees were subjected to severe and collective torture by various means.”

The participation of militias in the battle of Falluja, just west of Baghdad, alongside the Iraqi army had already raised fears of sectarian killings.

Iraq’s Defense Minister Khalid al-Obeidi said four military personnel were arrested after video footage showed them abusing people displaced from Falluja. He pledged on Twitter to prosecute any serviceman involved in such acts.

“Harassment of IDPs (internally displaced persons) is a betrayal of the sacrifices of our brave forces’ liberation operations to expel Daesh (Islamic State) from Iraq,” he said.

Falluja is a historic bastion of the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces that toppled Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, and the Shi’ite-led governments that followed.

In the north of the country, troops fought with Islamic State militants in the village of Haj Ali for the second day in a row, an Iraqi officer taking part said.

Haj Ali is near the Qayyara, a town under Islamic State control which has an airfield that Baghdad’s forces seek to use as a staging ground for a future offensive on Mosul, about 60 km (40 miles) north.

STRICT ORDERS

“Strict orders were issued to protect the civilians,” government spokesman Hadithi said, adding that these instructions were also given to the Hashid Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Forces, the coalition of mostly Shi’ite militias backed by Iran which are involved in the fighting.

The United Nations said last week it knew of “extremely distressing, credible reports” of men and boys being abused by armed groups working with security forces after fleeing Falluja.

Iraqi authorities routinely separate males aged over 15 from their families when they manage to escape Falluja, to screen them to ensure they do not pose a security risk and check if they may have been involved in war crimes.

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said screening was legitimate but should not be done by paramilitary groups.

“The country must avoid further divisions or violence along sectarian lines, lest it implode completely,” he said on Monday.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State said the Baghdad government was aware of the abuses.

“We know that the prime minister has come out and said that he believes that these abuses have happened and that he … has demanded accountability of any perpetrators,” Colonel Chris Garver said. “We think that is the right course of action.”

The Iraqi army launched the offensive on Falluja on May 23, with air support from the U.S.-led coalition. The United Nations has said up to 90,000 people are trapped in the city with little food or water.

Repeated phone calls to three spokesmen of the Popular Mobilisation Forces were not answered. Last week, one of them, Kareem Nuri, said past accusations of human rights violations were “politically motivated and baseless”.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Cambodian Khmer Rouge says Westerners ‘burnt to ashes’

A Buddhist monk stands next to a glass case containing 5,000 human skulls belonging to Khmer Rouge victims as people gather to mark the 41st anniversary of the start of

By Prak Chan Thul

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) – The first member of Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge regime jailed for the 1970s “Killing Fields” atrocities admitted on Thursday brutally murdering four unidentified Westerners and burning their bodies with piles of tyres.

Kaing Guek Eav, alias “Duch”, is testifying at an international tribunal’s long-running second case against the deputies of late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, whose four-year reign of terror in pursuit of a peasant utopia killed at least 1.8 million Cambodians.

Duch said “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea had personally instructed him to execute four Westerners, including two Americans, at a school that was turned into a torture center, where more than 14,000 people were killed.

He said the foreigners were killed because they had trespassed into Cambodian waters. The identity of the foreigners remains unknown.

“They were interrogated and smashed per instruction,” Duch told the court.

“They had to be burnt to ashes so there is no evidence that foreigners were smashed by us.”

Most of the Khmer Rouge victims died of starvation, torture, exhaustion or disease in labor camps, or were bludgeoned to death during mass executions carried out across the country.

The majority of Cambodians alive now were born after the bloody era and are enjoying a peace and growth and embracing the capitalism the Khmer Rouge had deplored.

Nuon Chea and former head of state Khieu Samphan are on trial at the U.N.-backed court for war crimes and genocide. Now in their 80s and in declining health, they were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 for crimes against humanity.

Their complex case was divided into two to ensure justice was delivered while they were still alive. Two of their co-defendants, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith, are dead.

Pol Pot died in 1998.

Though other aging cadres have been indicted, there is little optimism a decade-old tribunal fraught with delays, political interference and funding problems can bring justice and closure to Cambodia.

Duch, 73, was jailed for life in 2010 for crimes against humanity. Earlier this week, he reiterated he was only acting on instructions from the Khmer Rouge’s upper echelons and from Nuon Chea to execute prisoners.

“No form of punishment on earth would be fair for what they did to the four foreigners and millions of Cambodians and their family members,” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

The Documentation Center, which has conducted research into the killings by the Khmer Rouge, lists 79 foreigners among those killed at the Tuol Sleng torture center, most of them Vietnamese and Thai but including four Americans, three French, two Australians, one Briton and one New Zealander.

Some of them were known to have strayed into Cambodian waters while sailing through the Gulf of Thailand.

(Editing by Martin Petty and Robert Birsel)

After Deadly Tel Aviv attack, Israel suspends Palestinian permits

An injured man is taken into emergency room following a shooting attack that took place in the center of Tel Aviv

By Luke Baker and Jad Sleiman

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Israeli military on Thursday revoked permits for 83,000 Palestinians to visit Israel and said it would send hundreds more troops to the occupied West Bank after a Palestinian gun attack that killed four Israelis in Tel Aviv.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assault by two gunmen on Wednesday in a trendy shopping and dining market near Israel’s Defence Ministry, but Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups were quick to praise it.

The assailants came from near Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They dressed in suits and ties and posed as customers at a restaurant, ordering a drink and a chocolate brownie before pulling out automatic weapons and opening fire, sending diners fleeing in panic.

Two women and two men were killed and six others were wounded. The attack followed a lull in recent weeks after what had been near-daily stabbings and shootings on Israeli streets. It was the deadliest single incident since an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue in November 2014 that killed five.

The Tel Aviv gunmen, cousins in their 20s who security experts said appeared to have entered Israel without permits, were quickly apprehended. One of them was shot and wounded.

“It is clear that they spent time planning and training and choosing their target,” Barak Ben-Zur, former head of research at Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency, told reporters.

“They got some support, although we don’t know for sure who their supporters are,” he said, adding that they appeared to have used improvised automatic weapons smuggled into Israel.

The attack, as families were enjoying a warm evening out at the tree-lined Sarona market, took place a few hundred yards from the imposing Defence Ministry in the center of Tel Aviv, a city that has seen far less violence than Jerusalem.

After consultations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the military said it was rescinding some 83,000 permits issued to Palestinians from the West Bank to visit relatives in Israel during the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

At an emergency meeting, Israel’s security cabinet discussed punitive measures against attackers, including destroying their homes more quickly, and efforts to bolster the number of security guards in public places, an official said.

The army announced that two battalions would be deployed in the West Bank to reinforce troops stationed in the area, where the military maintains a network of checkpoints and often carries out raids to arrest suspected militants. Israeli battalions are comprised of around 300 troops.

Such measures, including restrictions on access to Jerusalem’s Aqsa Mosque compound, the holy site in the heart of the Old City that Jews refer to as Temple Mount, have in the past lead to increased tension with the Palestinians.

After the attack, fireworks were set off in parts of the West Bank and in some refugee camps people sang, chanted and waved flags in celebration, locals said.

Hamas spokesman Hussam Badran called it “the first prophecy of Ramadan” and said the location of the attack, close to the Defence Ministry, “indicated the failure of all measures by the occupation” to end the uprising.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a statement saying he rejected “all operations that target civilians regardless of the source and their justification”.

During the past eight months of violence, Israel’s government has repeatedly criticized Palestinian factions for inciting attacks or not doing enough to quell them.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization after Abbas’s Fatah, described the killings as “a natural response to field executions conducted by the Zionist occupation”.

The group called it a challenge to Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new defense minister, who must decide how to respond to the violence, possibly with tighter security across the West Bank. Lieberman said he would act, but didn’t say how.

The United Nations’ special coordinator for the Middle East, Nickolay Mladenov, condemned the shootings and expressed alarm at the failure of Palestinian groups to speak out against the violence. The European Union did the same.

Netanyahu visited the scene minutes after arriving back from a two-day visit to Moscow. He described the attacks as “cold-blooded murder” and vowed retaliation.

“We will locate anyone who cooperated with this attack and we will act firmly and intelligently to fight terrorism,” Netanyahu said.

(Writing by Luke Baker, additional reporting by Dan Williams and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; editing by Dominic Evans)

Human Rights Watch accuses Congo Republic peacekeepers

A Democratic Republic of Congo soldier from the African peacekeeping forces stands near closed shops in Bangui

By Joe Bavier

ABIDJAN (Reuters) – Human Rights Watch on Tuesday accused soldiers from the Republic of Congo of killing 18 people, including women and children, while serving as United Nations and African Union peacekeepers in Central African Republic.

A Congolese defense ministry official, contacted in Brazzaville, said an investigation was underway and rejected claims it had ignored the allegations.

Central African Republic descended into chaos in March 2013 when predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power, triggering reprisals by “anti-balaka” Christian militias.

The New York-based rights group said Congolese soldiers tortured two anti-balaka leaders to death in December 2013, publicly executed another two suspected anti-balaka in February 2014, and beat two civilians to death in June 2015.

HRW also said a mass grave found near a base once occupied by Congolese troops in the town of Boali was found to contain the remains of 12 people identified as having been detained by the peacekeepers on March 24, 2014.

“The discovery of 12 bodies is damning evidence of an appalling crime by Congolese peacekeepers, who had been sent to protect people, not prey on them,” said HRW Africa researcher Lewis Mudge.

The United Nations took over peacekeeping responsibilities from the A.U. in Central African Republic in September 2014 and has since come under fire for rights violations alleged to have been committed by its soldiers. The HRW said the U.N. force had insisted the Congolese troops implicated in the alleged killings in Boali be sent home and replaced by new units.

“Simply rotating troops out of the Central African Republic with no further consequences sends the message that peacekeepers can get away with murder,” Mudge said.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said U.N. human rights officials investigated the allegations and handed their findings over to local authorities.

ALLEGED ABUSES

At least 13 people, including five women, one of whom was six months pregnant, and two children, were arrested at the home of a local anti-balaka leader after a clash that resulted in the death of a Congolese soldier, HRW said.

That night witnesses interviewed by HRW heard screams and two rounds of gunfire from the Congolese base. The peacekeepers later warned local residents to avoid a nearby area, claiming it had been mined, HRW said.

A local charity excavated the site in February and the victims were identified by their clothing.

Human Rights Watch said it had over the past two years repeatedly contacted Congolese authorities, including President Denis Sassou Nguesso, calling upon them to launch credible investigations and punish those responsible for the abuse.

However, it said no action had been taken.

“Congo is cooperating with the United Nations to verify the allegations against its troops,” Congo Defence Ministry spokesman Romain Oba said, rejecting the accusation it had failed to act. “We are waiting for the results.”

Dujarric said the United Nations would “continue to follow up … with the African Union and Republic of Congo authorities, as it has been doing over the course of the last two years.”

He added that it was the duty of local authorities to secure the mass grave site. African Union and Central African officials were not immediately available for comment.

Neither the U.N. nor countries hosting U.N. missions have the authority to prosecute foreign peacekeepers. Punishment is the responsibility of troop contributing countries, but critics claim they often fail to pursue allegations.

(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations and Christian Elion in Brazzaville; Editing by Tim Cocks and Richard Balmforth)

Mexican security forces committed crimes against humanity

File photo of a police detective standing guard at a crime scene in Monterrey

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican security forces have committed crimes against humanity, with mass disappearances and extrajudicial killings rife during the country’s decade-long drug war, according to a report released by rights groups on Monday.

The 232-page report, published by the Open Society Justice Initiative and five other human rights organizations, warned that the International Criminal Court could eventually take up a case against Mexico’s security forces unless crimes were prosecuted domestically.

“We have concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe there are both state and non-state actors who have committed crimes against humanity in Mexico,” the report said.

Mexico’s drug war has resulted in the most violent period in the country’s modern history, with more than 150,000 people killed since 2006.

Consistent human rights abuses — including those committed by members of the Zetas drug cartel— satisfied the definition of crimes against humanity, the report said.

The authors recommended that Mexico accept an international commission to investigate human rights abuses.

A series of shootings of suspected drug cartel members by security forces, with unusually high and one-sided casualty rates, have tarnished Mexico’s human rights record.

“Resorting to criminal actions in the fight against crime continues to be a contradiction, one that tragically undermines the rule of law,” the report stated.

The unresolved 2014 kidnapping and apparent killing of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college was one of the most high-profile cases to have damaged Mexico’s reputation.

The report was based on documents and interviews over a nine-year period from 2006 to 2015.

It cited mass graves and thousands of disappearances, in addition to killings such as the shooting by the army of 22 suspected gang members in Tlatlaya in central Mexico, and similar incidents, as evidence of criminality in the government’s war against the country’s drug cartels.

Eric Witte, one of the report’s authors, recommended that the government look at the U.N. Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) as an example for inviting an international investigative commission to bring cases in Mexican courts.

Evidence gathered by CICIG against former Guatemalan President Otto Perez played a key role in his resignation and eventual arrest last year.

The report criticised Mexico’s weak justice system. If atrocities continued without measures being taken to end impunity, the International Criminal Court could step in, said Witte, a former advisor at the Hague-based court.

“Unfortunately, Mexico might be one atrocity away from an international commission becoming politically viable,” Witte, who leads national trials of grave crimes for the Open Society Justice Initiative, told Reuters.

(Reporting by Natalie Schachar, Lizbeth Diaz and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Zambia police arrest four suspects for ritual murders that sparked riots

Zambia ritual murders

LUSAKA (Reuters) – Zambia police said on Tuesday four suspects have been arrested in connection with a string of grisly ritual murders in the southern African nation’s capital that triggered anti-foreign riots targeting mostly Rwandan migrants in April.

The arrested suspects are two army soldiers, a civilian employee of the Zambian Air Force and a traditional doctor, police said. They were to appear in court Tuesday afternoon charged with seven counts of murder.

“All the murders which the accused have been charged with were committed in a similar manner by crushing the left side of the head, removing body parts and later dumping the deceased near their homes,” police said in a statement.

Police said in April that the victims had ears, hearts and genitals removed, raising suspicion of ritual killings.

Human body parts are sometimes used in traditional remedies and concoctions in southern Africa. The practice is linked to witchcraft beliefs.

Zambia hosts thousands of refugees from neighboring countries, especially Rwanda and Burundi, but relations between the communities are usually peaceful.

(Reporting by Chris Mfula; Writing by Ed Stoddard; Editing by James Macharia)

Mexican army accused of withholding evidence in Murders

Relatives hold up posters during a rally in support of missing students from Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s army is withholding key evidence from international investigators in the case of 43 trainee teachers abducted and apparently massacred in late 2014, hampering their efforts to reach the truth, the experts told Reuters.

More than 18 months after the incident and just one week before the team of experts’ window to investigate closes, the army has still not handed over an undisclosed number of photographs and video taken by a military intelligence officer as police clashed with the students on Sept. 26, 2014, the five investigators said.

When Reuters requested the original photographs of police rounding up a group of the students from the military, via a freedom of information request, the army responded that the evidence was “inexistent.”

The investigators have also not been allowed to question the soldiers on duty that night at Battalion 27, based in Iguala in the restive southwestern state of Guerrero.

“Access to Battalion 27 and its members is fundamental to the investigation … The state needs to explain,” said James Cavallaro, president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which commissioned the panel of experts.

Testimony given by soldiers to the attorney general’s office shows the army was aware of the clashes and did not intervene.

“We have repeatedly asked the attorney general’s office to get (the military) to give us photographs, videos and documents which have been referred to in their own testimony,” said Francisco Cox, a Chilean member of the independent panel of five experts commissioned by the IACHR.

“We made a list of people who needed to testify. Some haven’t and there are others who ought to testify again,” he added. “They have made declarations and the fundamental issues still haven’t been answered.”

The panel members say the testimony the soldiers have given so far to the attorney general’s office is flawed and incomplete, because the questioning was too basic and they see some discrepancies.

Mexico’s defense ministry, which is in charge of the army, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Previously, the army has said there is no reason its soldiers should be interviewed by the team of international experts.

“I can’t permit them to treat soldiers as criminals or interrogate them and make it seem as though they had something to do with it,” Salvador Cienfuegos, who is Mexico’s defense minister and the head of the army, said in October.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment, but a source told Reuters the investigation would remain open and they have not called soldiers to give evidence again because they are preoccupied dealing with other parts of the case.

IMPUNITY

The case has drawn fresh attention to police abuses and impunity in Mexico. Drug cartels often have local security forces in their pockets, government purges of police ranks have shown.

The trainee teachers studied at a rural college in the restive state of Guerrero. About 100 were attacked in the town of Iguala on Sept 26, 2014 after they hijacked five buses to transport them to a march commemorating a massacre back in the 1960s.

Forty-three disappeared and are believed to have been murdered. But just one of them has been identified from a charred bone and the team of international experts rejected a government assertion that the 43 were burned in a pyre at a garbage dump.

The Mexican government said in January 2015 it believed that corrupt police working with a local drug gang murdered the students, citing testimony given by detained suspects. But relatives of the disappeared rejected that account, and accused the government of trying to close the case early.

No-one has yet stood trial over the case.

The government has said the gang mistook the youths for rival gang members, and that police handed them over to Guerreros Unidos henchmen, who then burned them to ashes at a garbage dump in the town of Cocula, in the hills near Iguala.

President Enrique Pena Nieto agreed with the IACHR in late 2014 to allow the international experts to investigate the case and promised them access to all the information they needed.

The experts, who examined the site, say the government’s garbage dump fire account is scientifically impossible given the heat needed to reduce human remains to ash and charred bone fragments. The fate of the students, who were long seen by local authorities as troublemakers, is still unclear.

Families and lawyers of the disappeared students believe the army was involved in their abduction, though no evidence has been presented to support this.

“The army pitched in to form a cordon so the aggressors could act,” said Vidulfo Rosales, one of the lawyers representing families of the victims.

Since 2007, the army has been tasked with ensuring public security in some of the most violent corners of Mexico. However, lawmakers say there is no specific law that requires the army to intervene in such cases of unrest.

One military intelligence operative, Eduardo Mota, testified to the attorney general’s office in December 2014 that he snapped an undisclosed number of photographs as police threw tear gas at a group of the students in front of the local courthouse in Iguala and detained them. That group of students, which investigators number at about 17, was never seen again.

The army has not handed over the original photographs he testified to taking to the experts, who say they believe Mota also filmed video, citing standard army operating procedures. Mota could not be reached for comment.

Instead, officials later gave them a presentation that included a power-point containing four photographs from the night in question, one of the investigators said, but not the original files.

(Editing by Simon Gardner and Kieran Murray)

Arrest made in killing of University of Texas student

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – A 17-year-old boy has been arrested in connection with the killing of a University of Texas first-year dance student whose body was found on campus earlier this week, a local television station and Austin police said on Friday.

The arrest came the day after the victim was identified as Haruka Weiser, 18, of Oregon, who also was studying theater.

“A suspect is in custody,” the Austin Police Department said in a message on Twitter. Police did not provide details on the suspect, pending a news conference scheduled for Friday morning.

Austin television station KVUE, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, described the suspect as a 17-year-old boy and said firefighters provided an important tip that led helped police make the arrest.

Weiser was reported missing on Monday. Her body was found on Tuesday behind the university’s alumni center, near the main football stadium on the Austin campus, which is used by about 64,000 students, faculty and staff. Police have not released a cause of death.

Police had previously told reporters they had a person of interest in the death – a man seen in surveillance video on a bicycle near where the body was found.

Weiser left the drama building on Sunday night, likely headed for her dormitory, but never made it there, police said.

Her death sent shock waves through the university community, which held a vigil for Weiser on Thursday that was attended by hundreds of students, and it prompted a campus security review.

Gregory Fenves, president of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement on Friday that increased police patrols will continue on campus.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Bill Trott)

U.S. violent crime rate rose in first half of 2015, FBI reports

The United States experienced a rise in the number of violent crimes during the first half of 2015, according to new statistics released by the FBI on Tuesday.

The bureau published its Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, which looks at crime in the United States in six-month windows. The most recent report, which covers the first six months of 2015, indicates that violent crime increased 1.7 percent when compared to the same six-month stretch of 2014.

Violent crimes include murders, rapes, non-negligent manslaughter, robberies and aggravated assaults, the bureau said in a news release. Each individual type of crime also increased from the totals reported in the first six months of 2014.

However, the FBI said property crimes like burglaries, larcenies and vehicle thefts, dipped 4.2 percent when compared to totals from the first half of 2014.

The preliminary data paints a partial picture of crime in the United States, but not a full one.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program, from which the new statistics were compiled, relies on approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country to voluntarily submit data to the FBI. The bureau said about 13,000 of those agencies submitted comparable data for the first halves of 2014 and 2015.

The FBI also didn’t release the number of crimes committed, only percent changes.

The statistics showed murder rose 6.2 percent, aggravated assaults went up 2.3 percent and there were 0.3 percent more robberies. The FBI has two different types of data for rape, as it changed the definition of the offense in 2013. The so-called “legacy definition” saw a 9.6 increase, the bureau said. The “revised definition,” which is broader and based on penetration, increased 1.1 percent.

Murders went up in cities of all sizes, including 17 percent in those with fewer than 10,000 people — despite just a 1.5 percent rise in violent crimes there.

When it comes to property crimes, the bureau said nationwide burglary rates fell 9.8 percent and larcenies dropped 3.2 percent, but motor vehicle thefts rose 1 percent.

The West was the only region in which violent crime and property crime increased, the bureau said, posting respective rises of 5.6 and 2.4 percent. The Northeast, meanwhile, was the only region to see declines in both categories, with an 8 percent drop in property crime and a 3.2 percent drop in violent offenses.

Data from the other two regions – the South and Midwest – mirrored national trends, with violent crime posting slight increases and property crimes declining.

The South saw a 1.6 percent increase in violent crime and a 6.4 percent drop in property crimes, according to the bureau, while the Midwest witnessed a 7 percent drop in property crimes and a 1.4 percent rise in violent crimes.

The FBI’s two most recent full-year crime reports, covering 2014 and 2013, both showed national declines in property and violent crimes from the previous year.

The FBI is expected to release its full report on 2015 crime data later this year.

Murder Rates in U.S. Rising

The murder rates in the United States are rising, with at lest 30 cities reporting violence on the rise.

Three cities, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Baltimore, are showing an increase of over 50% in the number of murders with Milwaukee leading the list with a 76% increase.

One woman had to flee Milwaukee after two of her five children were killed in shootings in a six month span.  Her 20-year-old daughter was shot and killed during a robbery at a birthday party being held at a Days Inn.  Then six months later her only son was shot and killed while sitting in a car.

She persuaded her family to flee the city but her remaining teen daughters only left after the 17-year-old daughter was shot while riding in a car.

“The violence was nothing like this before,” Holmes, 38, who grew up in Milwaukee, told the New York Times. “What’s changed is the streets and the laws and the parents. It’s become a mess and a struggle.”

The BBC said that some senior police officials say with media outlets and activist groups watching every move police make they are withdrawing more from situations and leaving criminals feeling they have more space to commit violent acts.

New Orleans police superintendent Michael Harrison told the New York Times that much of the increase is coming not from gang violence but rather killings involving people who know each other.

“That is not a situation that can be solved by policing,” Superintendent Harrison said. “It speaks to a culture of violence deeply ingrained into a community — a segment of the population where people are resolving their problems in a violent way.”