Authorities on Wednesday raised to 15 the death toll from a gunfight the previous day inside a lockup near Panama City and fired top penitentiary officials amid an investigation into what touched off the country’s deadliest incident of prison violence.
Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo ordered the dismissal of prisons director Walter Hernandez and Hernandez’s No. 2, as well as other officials responsible for police guard at La Joyita prison and another one nearby.
“This is an unacceptable situation and we will make the necessary decisions,” Cortizo said.
The Panamanian Ministry of Government added in a report that nine wounded prisoners remained hospitalized, including one in a critical condition.
Tuesday’s gunfight took place between incarcerated members of the same gang at a cellblock housing more than 500 inmates. Pope Francis visited the prison in January, when he visited Panama for World Youth Day.
Cellphone videos that circulated on social media showed prisoners running and shooting. Police later seized various handguns and assault rifles that had been apparently smuggled in.
Authorities have acknowledged that such smuggling is a long-time problem and that weapons have been used in inmate disputes before — although experts said that this was the most serious incident of prison violence so far.
Although gangs have less of a presence in Panama than in other Central American nations such as El Salvador and Honduras, observers have said that groups have proliferated in the past few decades that are primarily dedicated to drug trafficking and are blamed for many of the country’s killings.
Cortizo, who took office on July 1, asked the interior and public security ministries to deliver a complete report on the prison violence in two weeks, along with a plan to keep contraband weapons out of cells.
“I want to have answers and actions that must be taken,” he said.
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
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
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS