The transfer of sovereignty to Iraq's interim government on June 30 will include control of prisons and could lead to the handover of former president Saddam Hussein for trial by Iraqis, Britain's UN ambassador said. \nThe control of prisons has become a highly sensitive issue following revelations of physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. \nBritish ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said on Thursday: "It's totally consistent with the transfer of all sovereignty to this government that actually they will control the prisons." \nAsked whether that meant custody of Saddam would then be turned over to the interim government, the ambassador indicated it did. \n"I think we've always said that at some stage, and as soon as possible, Saddam Hussein should be handed over to the Iraqis for trial by Iraqis. And the sooner we can do that the better," Jones Parry said. \nSome UN Security Council members have expressed concern that prisoners aren't mentioned in the US-British draft resolution on the transfer of sovereignty currently being debated. China said it wanted the transfer of control spelled out in the draft because of the Abu Ghraib scandal. \nLast month, Iraqi war-crimes tribunal head Salem Chalabi said that Saddam would not be handed over to Iraqi authorities before June 30 and no trial would start before next year. \nChalabi said the US "has indicated that it is willing to hand over individuals in custody -- when indicted -- to the special Iraqi court dealing with those cases, if that court is ready to take them." \nChalabi said that it was "unlikely" that the tribunal would be ready to assume custody of the defendants before June 30. \nSaddam has been held in an undisclosed location since his capture by US forces and is being interrogated by the CIA and the FBI. The US has said it intends to hand him over to Iraqis for trial.
LOST AT SEA: Survivors of a sunken Cambodian ship said they floated for two days in open waters, while a UN official said that traffickers might continue undeterred Chinese survivors from a boat that sank near a Cambodian island, killing three people and leaving eight missing, said they embarked on what they believed would be a short-term fishing job and ended up without food and water aboard the vessel, and their belongings were taken away. Cambodian authorities said on Friday they rescued 21 people one day after the boat small wooden fishing vessel sank near Koh Tang, a Cambodian island close to the maritime border with Vietnam. Nine more people were rescued by the Vietnamese and three bodies were recovered by Cambodia, leaving eight people still missing, Preah Sihanouk provincial
TACIT APPROVAL: While the mainland sticks to its ‘zero COVID’ policy, the Chinese leadership appears to back Hong Kong’s shift to home health monitoring Hong Kong wants to ease COVID-19 rules like mandatory hotel quarantine that have made travel difficult for nearly three years, Chief Executive John Lee (李家超) said yesterday, as mainland Chinese officials signaled their approval. The number of infections in Hong Kong has fallen to about 6,000 a day, creating room to reconsider the measures that have crimped the territory’s competitiveness, Lee told reporters at a weekly briefing. Hotel quarantine will be replaced with seven days of home health monitoring, the South China Morning Post reported, though it said the change would not be announced until all the details have been determined. The
UNREST: Images posted online showed women removing their headscarves in defiance of religious law, with some even setting them on fire or symbolically cutting their hair Protests spread to 15 cities across Iran overnight over the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the country’s “morality police,” state media reported yesterday, adding that four police officers were injured and one “police assistant” died from injuries on Tuesday in the southern city of Shiraz. In the fifth night of street rallies, police used tear gas and made arrests to disperse crowds of up to 1,000 people, the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) said. Demonstrators blockaded streets, hurled stones at security forces, set fire to police vehicles and garbage bins, and chanted anti-government slogans, it added. “On Tuesday evening,
Ukraine is now deploying captured Russian tanks to solidify its gains in the northeast amid an ongoing counteroffensive, a Washington-based think tank said yesterday, as Kyiv vowed to push further into territories occupied by Moscow. The Institute for the Study of War, citing a Russian claim, said that Ukraine had been using left-behind Russian T-72 tanks as it tries to push into the Russian-occupied region of Luhansk. “The initial panic of the counteroffensive led Russian troops to abandon higher-quality equipment in working order, rather than the more damaged equipment left behind by Russian forces retreating from Kyiv in April, further indicating
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