World News Roundup

INTERNATIONAL ARAB TIMES, SUNDAY, JANUARY 17, 2016

12

Conflict

Ukraine talks

US, Kremlinofficials meetMOSCOW, Jan 16, (AFP): Top US and Russian officials met Friday in Russia’s westernmost outpost to discuss the Ukraine crisis amid a fresh international drive to bolster a fragile truce in the east of the ex-Soviet coun-try.

US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and top Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov met near the city of Kaliningrad in Russia’s exclave border-ing European Union members Lithuania and Poland, a source

familiar with the situation told AFP.

“The meet-ing is closed to the media. The topic is Ukraine,” the source said.

The meet-ing took place in Rus-

sia because Surkov is subject to Western sanctions over the Kremlin’s role in the Ukraine crisis and is unable to travel to the EU, the source said.

US State Department spokes-man John Kirby confirmed the meeting, saying Nuland and Surkov had met to discuss “the need for the full implementation of the Minsk agreements,” a package of measures agreed by the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia in the Be-larusian capital last February.

Efforts“Assistant Secretary Nuland’s

meeting with presidential advi-sor Surkov is part of our contin-ued efforts to work with Russia to ensure full implementation of the Minsk agreements, in close coordination with the other Nor-mandy powers -- Ukraine, Ger-many, and France,” Kirby said in a statement.

No other details were imme-diately released.

The meeting came after Rus-sian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama discussed the Ukraine crisis by phone earlier this week.

The White House said the Russians needed to “live up to the commitments that they made in Minsk -- to end their support for separatists that are destabi-lising Ukraine right now.”

Putin for his part said the Ukrainian authorities must es-tablish “direct dialogue” with separatists in the east and agree constitutional amendments with them.

The meeting came amid an apparent international push to shore up the brittle truce amid sporadic fighting in eastern Ukraine.

A senior Ukrainian official told AFP that representatives of French President Francois Hol-lande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are expected to visit Moscow and Kiev in the coming days to hold talks on the crisis.

The negotiations -- to fol-low Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s phone talks with Merkel and Hollande this week -- will touch upon the fragile ceasefire, the completion of the withdrawal of heavy weapons, access for OSCE observers to rebel-controlled territory and the release of prisoners, the Kiev source said.

“This is an intensification of ef-forts that was planned at the end of last year,” the source said.

SecurePoroshenko on Thursday said

he wanted the EU and US to help secure the return of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and vowed to win back the separatist east this year.

Moscow did not immediately confirm the planned meetings.

More than 9,000 people have been killed and over 20,000 in-jured in the conflict in Ukraine since April 2014, according to the United Nations.

A series of truce agreements that started in September have helped to reduce the fighting in eastern Ukraine significantly, although sporadic clashes con-tinue on the front line.

The West and Kiev have ac-cused Russia of fuelling the sep-aratist insurgency in the east and sending regular troops across the border, claims that Moscow has repeatedly denied.

Nuland

A horse-drawn carriage drives with tourists in the snow covered Thuringian Forest during heavy snowfall in Oberhof, Germany, on Jan 15. Weather forecasts predict winter weather and snow for the next days in Germany. (AP)

France jails man caught with photo of Paris suspect

Bomber left Belgium for Syria in ’13BRUSSELS, Jan 16, (Agencies): A Belgian-Moroccan man who blew himself up during a police raid days after the Paris attacks had travelled in 2013 to Syria where he joined the Islamic State group, Bel-gian prosecutors said Friday.

Chakib Akrouh, a suspected gunman in the Paris attacks whose identity was released in Paris on Thursday, used a one-way ticket to fly from Brussels to Istanbul on Jan 4, 2013, the federal prosecutor’s office said.

“The investigation then indi-cated his presence in Syria from January 2013 when he joined the ranks of the Katibat al-Muhajer-een, then the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” it said in a state-ment, using another name for the Islamic State.

Paris prosecutor Francois Mo-lins said on Thursday that Akrouh, a 25-year-old Belgian-Moroccan dual national who was born in Bel-gium, was identified from DNA matched to his mother.

Akrouh had been holed up in an apartment in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis with the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abelhamid Abaaoud, who was also a Belgian of Moroccan origin.

Akrooh blew himself up when police raided the flat, while Abaaoud and a French woman, Hasna Aitboulahcen, who is thought to have been Abaaoud’s cousin, were also killed.

Prosecutors initially mistakenly said the woman had been the sui-cide bomber.

The Belgian prosecutor said a court in Belgium sentenced Ak-rouh to five years in jail in absen-tia last July over jihadist recruit-ment network sending fighters to Syria. Abaaoud was sentenced to 20 years in the same case, also in absentia.

The Belgian prosecutor’s of-fice said “an analysis of photo-graphs from the person seen at the side of Abdelhamid Abaaoud in the Paris metro on November 13, 2015 at 10:14 pm after the Paris attacks, allowed federal investiga-tors to make the link on December 17 2015 with with the so-named Chakib Akrouh.”

It added that “a DNA test from (Akrouh’s) mother was carried out on December 17, 2015 and the comparison with the DNA sample from the blast site in Saint Denis confirmed it was that of Chakib Akrouh.”

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A French court jailed a man for three years on Friday after police found a photo of key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam in his car and a stash of weapons at his home.

Mouez Dridi, a 41-year-old forklift truck driver, told the court in the southern French town of Valence he had the picture of Ab-deslam stuck to the sun-visor of his car so that he could identify the jihadist suspect if he saw him and denounce his actions.

Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French-man who was living in Belgium and who is thought to have played a key logistical role in the Novem-ber 13 attacks that killed 130 peo-

ple in Paris, is still on the run.Local police had flagged Dridi

to the French intelligence agency on December 10 after he was seen praying on a running track near Va-lence.

Investigators searching his home on Dec 10 found an arsenal of load-ed weapons: a sub-machine gun, a rifle, a Mauser pistol and “no less than 503 pieces of ammunition”, prosecutor Eric Sandjivy said.

Police also found a sword, a ma-chete and military clothing.

Dridi’s lawyer Sophie Turpin said her client had “no intention of using these weapons; he did not know how to use them”.

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A day after a court hearing that was shrouded in secrecy, a Danish court has jailed another person un-til Feb 9 in a case believed to be linked to the first suspect, reported-ly a 15-year-old girl with Muslim extremist sympathies.

Friday’s hearing in Holbaek, 65 kms (40 miles) west of Copenha-gen, also was held behind double closed doors, which means that no information can be made public. That is customary in terror-related cases in Denmark.

Local media say the new sus-pect was man who had been in Syria. Police in eastern Denmark confirmed that a person had been arrested Thursday but declined to disclose details, citing the investi-gation.

Danish media said the teenager was a Danish girl who recently converted to Islam. She was jailed Thursday until Feb 9.

Extremism

Walter and Paula Olsen, the parents of Ash-ley Olsen, 35, leave the church after her fu-neral service at the Santo Spirito basilica in Florence, Italy on Jan 15. Prosecutors say she was killed by a Senegalese man, Cheik Tidiane Diaw, she met at a disco, after a night of cocaine-fueled sex followed by a fight. At top (left), is Ashley’s boyfriend

Federico Fiorentini. (AP)

Cari Dragan

Serb police officers arrested: Five members of a special Bosnian Serb police unit have been arrested on suspicion of robbing a bank van of 617,00 marka ($344,000) using automatic rifles and an anti-tank missile launcher, officials said on Friday.

The heist occurred in September last year when heavily-armed robbers held up a vehicle belonging to the Bosnian branch of Italian Unicredit bank on a highway in Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic. One security guard was wounded.

Bosnia’s two autonomous regions, the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, have their own separate police forces, as well as a national police force.

Serb Republic prosecution official Darko Ilic said a “significant amount of money” had been seized during the arrests and that the suspects had bought luxury vehicles.

“I particularly regret that these young guys, whose careers were stainless when we admitted them into our ranks and trained them, have disgraced in such a way their unit and the whole police force,” Serb Republic Interior Minister Dragan Lukac told the news conference. (RTRS)

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5 people killed by gas blast: An explosion probably caused by a gas leak killed five people in a town in northwest-ern Italy early on Saturday, flattening a two-storey building and damaging several others, firefighters said.

Five bodies were recovered from the rubble of the residential building in Ar-nasco, a small town in the Liguria region, and a woman was taken to hospital in a serious condition, fire service spokesman Luca Cari said.

“It was a large blast because it brought down an entire two-storey building,” Cari said. “We haven’t yet completed the investigation into the cause of the explo-sion, but it’s compatible with a gas leak, and that’s the only hypothesis we have at this point.”

Europe

Municipal service trucks filled with snow removed from Moscow’s roads line up to be transported to a snow-melting station in Moscow, Russia, on Jan 15. Heavy snowfall and strong winds which began on Tuesday, hit the Russian capital, with the

temperature about -6 C (21 F). (AP)

Stockholm will notrecognise W. SaharaSTOCKHOLM, Jan 16, (AFP): Sweden has decided not to recog-nise Western Sahara as an indepen-dent state, foreign minister Margo Wallstrom announced Friday, a move likely to ease diplomatic ten-sions with Morocco which claims sovereignty over the mineral-rich territory.

The decision was announced after a period of internal consulta-tion which lasted several months and will disappoint the separat-ist Polisario Front which has been campaigning for independence for the territory since 1973.

“All our energy will be focused into supporting the UN process” of mediation between the two parties, Swedish Foreign Minister Margo Wallstrom said.

All of the building’s residents were accounted for but firefighters continued to dig through the debris in case any of them had visitors. Inspections were also being carried out at nearby buildings damaged by the blast, Cari said. (RTRS)

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Bosnia peace envoy threatened: An Austrian peace envoy in Bosnia has received death threats written on postcards that were distributed to the public by the

party of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, the envoy’s office said on Friday.

Dodik’s SNSD party, which holds power in Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic and has frequently locked horns with peace envoy Valentin Inzko,

distributed 10,000 postcards to the public ahead of the Jan. 9 anniversary of the Serb Republic’s founding.

The postcards carried caricatures of Inzko and foreign judges on Bosnia’s

constitutional court, which had declared the Jan. 9 holiday discriminatory. The public was invited to write messages on the postcards and send them to Inzko.

Dodik, who says Bosnia is doomed and the Serb Re-public destined for independence, has long called for the

departure of the peace envoy and other international officials tasked with monitor-ing Bosnia’s recovery from its 1992-95 war. Inzko has the power to sack state officials deemed to be violating the 1995 peace deal that ended the war. (RTRS)

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Family gathers for funeral: Friends and family of an American woman killed in her Florence apartment gathered Friday for a funeral and burial in her adopted Tuscan homeland as authorities prepared to present their case to a judge against the prime suspect in her slaying.

Friends carrying red, white and pink roses joined relatives of Ashley Olsen, 35, and her beloved beagle Scout for the funeral inside the Santo Spirito basilica. Olsen’s boyfriend, Federico Fiorentini, entered the basilica holding a bouquet of flowers and held Scout on his lap during the service.

Fiorentini, a local artist, discovered Olsen’s body Jan. 9 after he asked her landlord to let him into the apartment be-cause he hadn’t heard from her in several days. Prosecutors say she was killed a day earlier by a Senegalese man she met at a disco, after a night of cocaine-use and sex followed by a fight.

The suspect, Cheik Tidiane Diaw, acknowledged to investigators that he had pushed Olsen twice to the ground after she pushed him in an attempt to get him to leave her apartment. But he said he never strangled her and left her alive on her bed, according to his lawyer, Antonio Voce. (AP)

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New court to open in The Hague: A new EU-backed court to try war crimes allegedly committed by ethnic Albanian guerrillas during the bitter Kosovo conflict will open this year in The Hague, Dutch officials said Friday.

“The court will try serious crimes alleg-edly committed in 1999-2000 by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against ethnic minorities and political op-ponents,” the Dutch foreign ministry said in a statement.

Opening more than a decade and a half after the Kosovo war ended, the new tribunal will have international judges but will be part of the Kosovo judicial system. Those convicted will not serve their sen-tences in the Netherlands.

It will be housed in a former building belonging to the European police agency Europol, once a new extension has been built, and will be funded by the European Union.

The 1998-1999 war pitted ethnic Alba-nian guerrillas seeking independence for the southern Serbian province of Kosovo against Serbia’s forces, who withdrew from the territory after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign.

Pristina has been under intense interna-tional pressure to create the special court since a 2011 Council of Europe report on alleged crimes by KLA members. (AFP)

Dodik