The UN, the EU and the US have urged Honduras to investigate the deaths of six young women in just four days, including a nurse who died in police custody.
The National Police of Honduras said Keyla Martinez, 26, was arrested on Saturday night last week for breaching the COVID-19 curfew in La Esperanza in the country’s west, and claimed officers found her in her cell hours later “trying to kill herself.”
The hospital she was brought to said she was dead on arrival, and prosecutors said an autopsy showed Martinez had died from hanging.
Photo: AFP
However, her mother, Norma Rodriguez, said she is “100 percent sure that my daughter was killed.”
“She was murdered in the cells of the National Police, where she should have been protected,” she said, as about 200 family members, friends and supporters of Martinez marched through downtown La Esperanza calling for justice.
The Anticorruption Coalition of civic groups has urged authorities to bring to justice those responsible for her death so that the crime, like “90 percent of murders of women” in Honduras, does not go unpunished.
Amnesty International on Tuesday called for a “prompt, exhaustive, independent and impartial investigation into Keyla’s death” and urged authorities to end “the excessive use of force against those mourning this human loss and demanding justice” in recent protests.
In a joint statement late on Thursday, the UN and the EU delegation in Honduras said they “urge the authorities to carry out actions aimed at clarifying these facts and all those linked to any form of gender violence, in a thorough, impartial, expeditious and transparent manner.”
They said violence against women and girls has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and listed the names of six, including Martinez, who had died a “violent death” in the previous four days.
The US embassy in Honduras said on Twitter it had spoken to the Honduran minister of the interior about the Hernandez case, and called for “prompt and exhaustive investigations in all these cases.”
Police said the officers on duty on the night of Martinez’s death were placed under investigation.
According to the National Autonomous University of Honduras’ Observatory on Violence, 6,045 women have been killed in the country in the past 16 years, 30 so far this year.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.