Five Egyptian diplomats kidnapped in Tripoli in retaliation for Egypt’s arrest of a Libyan militia chief on Saturday pleaded for Cairo to free him to secure their release.
Gunmen snatched four diplomatic staff from their homes in the Libyan capital on Saturday, including Egypt’s cultural attache, and kidnapped another on Friday, forcing Cairo to evacuate its embassy and its Benghazi consulate.
The kidnappings underlined Libya’s persistent chaos two years after former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s fall, with heavily armed former rebels and Islamist militants who fought in the uprising still challenging state authority.
Branding themselves Libyan revolutionaries, the kidnappers contacted al-Arabiya television channel to demand that Libyan militia chief Shaban Hadia be released in 24 hours and put one of the Egyptian diplomats on the line.
“The kidnappers have demands and we ask these demands are met and the defendant Abu Hadia be released,” a man called Shirbini from the Egyptian Cultural Center told the channel.
“We won’t free the diplomats unless the sheikh is freed within 24 hours,” one of the kidnappers said, without giving details of what would happen after that deadline.
Hadia is a commander in the Islamist-leaning Operations Room for Libya Revolutionaries, one of the many militias that fought Qaddafi in the 2011 NATO-backed uprising, but which have since refused to disarm and accept Tripoli’s authority.
The Operations Room, whose fighters were nominally hired by the Libyan government to secure Tripoli, was accused of abducting Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan in Tripoli in October last year.
The group denied it was involved in the Egyptian kidnappings, but on Friday said there would be a strong response if Hadia was not released.
Libyan officials said they were in contact with the kidnappers and an Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman confirmed Hadia was under investigation in Egypt.
“If there is no charge at the end of it then he will be released,” he told al-Arabiya.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS