Australia said yesterday it would appeal to Kabul against the death sentence handed down to one of its citizens for murdering an Afghan security guard.
Former soldier Robert William Langdon, 38, was last week condemned to death by Kabul’s appeals court for murder, the foreign affairs office said.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the government had always intervened when Australians were convicted of capital crimes overseas.
“And we will be doing so on the closest advice, the closest advice, of the Department of Foreign Affairs who [sic] have been following the case in Kabul,” he told Australian radio.
According to the Australian newspaper, Langdon shot his Afghan colleague, a man known as Karim, four times in the head and body last May as they traveled to a supply convoy that had been ambushed by the Taliban.
The newspaper said Karim, the Afghan leader of the expedition, reportedly refused to continue when they reached the Wardak provincial capital Maidan Shar, 40km southwest of Kabul, because the road ahead was too dangerous, prompting an argument.
Langdon, who was leading the foreign guards, told the court he pulled his pistol in self-defense after Karim reached for his own firearm.
“He reached across, and I am ex-military, so it was like bang-bang-bang-bang. I didn’t have time to think,” he said.
Langdon’s self-defense claim was undermined by an admission he had thrown a grenade into the truck holding Karim’s body and ordered other members of their party to fire into the air to fake a Taliban ambush in a cover-up attempt, the paper said.
The former soldier, who reportedly served in Australia’s army between 1989 and 2004, then tried to flee to Dubai, but was arrested at Kabul’s airport, it said.
The foreign office said the Australian government would make “high-level representations to Afghan authorities to oppose the imposition of the death penalty, and vigorously support any clemency bids in this case.”
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and