A man was sentenced to death for killing an Indian immigrant during a shooting rampage four days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Frank Silva Roque was convicted of murder last week in the death of Mesa gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, whom prosecutors said was targeted because Roque thought the victim was Arab. Sodhi wore a turban and beard as part of his Sikh faith.
Sodhi's brother, Lakhwinder Singh Sodhi, said the jury that sentenced Roque on Thursday had done right by the victim's family.
"This jury came with a verdict of the truth," Lakhwinder Sodhi said. "We showed a whole world this is the country of justice."
Sodhi's death on Sept. 15, 2001, touched off protests in India and prompted India's prime minister to call US President George W. Bush. About 3,000 people also attended a memorial service for Sodhi at the Phoenix Civic Plaza shortly after he was killed.
During Roque's trial, defense attorneys argued that their client suffered from a mental illness and that the terrorist attacks triggered an episode of insanity.
The attorneys used a guilty-but-insane defense, which, if successful, could have spared Roque prison time and instead forced him into a mental hospital. Prosecutors argued that Roque was motivated by anger and racial hatred.
"I'm pleased to see they [jurors] were able to see through the guise of mental illness," said prosecutor Vince Imbordino.
Roque was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder, drive-by shooting and endangerment in the shooting spree that followed Sodhi's murder outside his gas station.
Roque shot at another gas station where the clerk was a man of Lebanese descent, and shot at the home of an Afghan family. They weren't injured.
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