Warlord Harold Keke, accused in the deaths of 50 villagers and hostages, has surrendered to an Australian-led peacekeepers trying to end a civil war in the Solomon Islands, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday.
Downer said that Keke was under arrest and would face a murder investigation.
Last week in talks with a senior Australian diplomat, Keke allegedly admitted that six local missionaries kidnapped by his forces this year had been killed.
Officials say Keke's forces have razed about 15 villages, killed people, and taken hostages for four years. Keke is allegedly responsible for the deaths of up to 50 people this year, and last year boasted of killing a government minister.
"The Guadalcanal militant leader Harold Keke surrendered ... on the Weather Coast of the island of Guadalcanal earlier today," Downer told Australia's Parliament. "A full investigation of crimes including murder allegedly committed by Harold Keke and his group can now proceed."
Keke's surrender sends a "very clear message to other militants" that they now could also hand in their weapons before a three-week gun amnesty ends on Aug. 21, Downer said
Downer said Keke was now on his way to the capital Honiara on an Australian navy ship HMAS Manoora. Keke would be kept in protective custody by the intervention force and receive all the rights accorded under Solomon Islands law. His arrest was made on an outstanding warrant for robbery.
The Australian-led force of 2,000 troops and 300 police arrived in the Solomon Islands in late July to help end widespread lawlessness and corruption that has paralyzed and nearly bankrupted the South Pacific nation in the aftermath of a coup in 2000.
Although a peace deal was brokered late in 2000 and elections restored democracy, Keke had refused to sign the pact.
"For the first time in a long time the Weather Coast can return to peace and stability free from the fear of executions and the village burnings," New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff said. "It is of huge symbolic importance that the rule of law can be restored and Keke and his lieutenants face appropriate charges."
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza was on a plane heading for New Zealand when news broke of Keke's capture.
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,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the