The South African government secretly plotted to ensure safe passage out of the country for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an international warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the conflict in Darfur, was able to fly out of Pretoria on June 15 despite a court order blocking his departure.
South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper, revealing what it said was a secret meeting of top ministers to discuss protecting al-Bashir, said he was escorted to his airplane by South African President Jacob Zuma’s own police.
Photo: Reuters
The ICC had called on South Africa — which is a signatory to the court — to detain al-Bashir while he was in the country for an African Union summit.
However, security ministers agreed at a meeting before the Sudanese leader arrived that South Africa would “protect Bashir by any means necessary — even if it meant flouting court rulings and undermining the constitution,” the Sunday Times said, quoting a senior government source.
After the meeting, which was attended by the defense and police ministers and the director-general of Zuma’s office, al-Bashir was given the go-ahead to fly to South Africa and “promised maximum protection,” the source was quoted as saying.
Al-Bashir left on the final day of the summit in Johannesburg, even as the local High Court was still hearing arguments over an urgent application to force the authorities to detain him on the ICC warrant.
The Sunday Times said word had spread that al-Bashir had been tipped off that he must leave, “because the case did not bode well for him,” and he was escorted by members of the Presidential Protection Unit to his airplane at a military air base.
“When people were making noise on Sunday [June 14] that he must be arrested, we just told Bashir to relax, because there was no way he was going to be arrested,” a security service source told the newspaper.
The South African government has come under fire from the ICC, rights groups and several other governments over its failure to detain al-Bashir. A South African court on June 15 gave the government a week to explain why it defied its order barring Bashir from leaving.
Al-Bashir has evaded justice since his indictment in 2009 over the conflict in Darfur, which erupted in 2003 when black insurgents rose up against al-Bashir’s Arab-dominated government, protesting they were marginalized.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.