Heavily-armed Australian troops arrived in the Solomon Islands yesterday as the body of the first peacekeeper killed during a mission to restore law and order in the Pacific nation was flown home.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Australian policeman Adam Dunning's murder by a sniper in the capital Honiara was most likely the work of disgruntled Solomon Island militia facing murder charges.
"We want to demonstrate to the people of the Solomon Islands that we're not going to buckle in the face of an evil assassination of this kind," Downer told reporters.
The 100 extra soldiers flew from the northern city of Townsville as a memorial service was held in Honiara for the 26-year-old Dunning.
Following the hastily organized service, Dunning's body was flown back to his hometown of Canberra for burial, after he became the first member of an Australian-led peacekeeping force to be killed in the Solomons.
Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison and Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty flew in overnight to see the situation first hand.
New Zealand's 37 peacekeeping soldiers in the regional force were ordered to wear body armor on all patrols after the death of Dunning, who was not wearing a bulletproof vest when he was hit twice in the back.
Downer suggested that after profiting from five years of chaos in the Pacific nation, militia or corrupt ex-officials may be unhappy at the roughly 4,000 arrests since the force arrived last year and pending criminal trials.
"Those two groups of people, people who have been arrested and charged on counts of corruption and those who have been arrested and charged for murders, other acts of violence, supporters of them, some people who support them could be behind this," Downer told national radio.
Downer said only a small number of people would be involved and that they lacked public support from ordinary Solomon Islanders.
Keelty echoed Downer's views, saying rebels or former members of the discredited police force could have been involved.
Asked if the culprits could have been disgruntled former police officers, he replied: "Well it could be that or it could be members of one of the former rebel groups. It is too early to speculate."
Corruption and violence by police allied with criminal gangs, both dominated by the Malaitan ethnic group that forms the major part of the capital's population, was a major factor in the country's decline into violence.
Keelty added there were concrete leads and indications that the weapon was a self-loading rifle typical of those used by rebels, and said there had been another incident in October in which shots were fired at a police vehicle.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS