Three journalists and a security guard were injured in northern Somalia on Friday, when unknown assailants using hand grenades launched what seemed to be a coordinated attack on three independent radio stations, officials and journalists said.
The attacks occurred in the evening when radio Galkaio, radio Mudug and radio Hobyo, all of them in Galkaio, were attacked minutes from each other, leaving journalists in the region shocked.
The attacks against the three radio stations looked coordinated and were related to one another, with an unidentified number of assailants hurling hand grenades at the stations, wounding four journalists and staff members, Colonel Abdulahi Weli, a Puntland police officer, said by telephone.
“We are investigating the incident because such attacks against the independent radio stations are new to the region,” he said.
Abdulkadir Ali Jumale, a radio journalist who was slightly injured, also confirmed the attack, saying he was shocked by it.
“I was getting out of radio Mudug after having conversation with my friends working there when two heavy explosions, seemingly [from] hand grenades, hit very close to me. The power of the explosion slammed me against the wall, leaving me unconscious for a few minutes,” he said.
“I was in the hospital when I [regained consciousness], and I saw my friend Mohamed Isa with injuries in his arm. A technician and a security guard were injured in the attack, which also targeted two other radio stations,” he said.
“We are really shocked with this attack against the independent media. Every journalist in the region is worried and started to fear for his safety. We don’t know who is targeting us,” said Nuh Muse, another journalist in Garowe, a nearby town.
“This will jeopardize the free flow of information in the region,” he added.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS