News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

EgyptAir says plane carrying 66 has disappeared

Posted: 18 May 2016 10:23 PM PDT

An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 66 people disappeared from radar early this morning, the airline said.

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Cairo - An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 66 people disappeared from radar early Thursday morning, the airline said.

The plane most likely crashed into the sea, Ihab Raslan, a spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation authority, told SkyNews Arabia.

He said the plane was about to enter Egyptian airspace when it disappeared from radar.

The airline, however, said the Airbus A320 had vanished 16km after it entered Egyptian airspace.

EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2:45am local time when it was flying at 37,000 feet, the airline said.

Egyptian armed forces were searching for the plane, which was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, and 10 crew. The pilot had 6 000 flight hours. Earlier, the airline said 69 people were on board.

Airbus is aware of the disappearance, but “we have no official information at this stage of the certitude of an accident,” the company's spokesman Jacques Rocca said.

The Paris airport authority and the French civil aviation authority would not immediately comment.

Greece joined the search and rescue operation for the EgyptAir flight with two aircraft, one C-130 and one early warning aircraft, officials at the Hellenic National Defense General Staff said. They said one frigate was also heading to the area, and helicopters are on standby on the southern island of Karpathos for potential rescue or recovery operations.

An EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus in March. A man who admitted to the hijacking and is described by Cypriot authorities as “psychologically unstable” is in custody in Cyprus.

The incident renewed security concerns months after a Russian passenger plane was blown out of the sky over the Sinai Peninsula. The Russian plane crashed in Sinai on Oct. 31, killing all 224 people on board. Moscow said it was brought down by an explosive device, and a local branch of the extremist Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for planting it.

In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 1990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard, US investigators filed a final report that concluded its co-pilot switched off the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 767 downward.

But Egyptian officials rejected the notion of suicide altogether, insisting some mechanical reason caused the crash.

AP

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Rescued Chibok girl to meet Buhari

Posted: 18 May 2016 07:07 PM PDT

A schoolgirl rescued after two years of being held captive by Boko Haram will meet with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

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Abuja, Nigeria - A Nigerian schoolgirl rescued after two years of being held captive by Boko Haram militants will meet with President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday amid hopes that she can help shed light on the whereabouts of more than 200 other missing girls.

Soldiers working with a civilian vigilante group rescued the girl, named as Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki, on Tuesday near Damboa in the remote north-east with officials confirming she was one of 219 girls abducted from a secondary school in Chibok.

Read: First Chibok girl found wandering forest

An army spokesman said she was found with her four-month-old baby and a “suspected Boko Haram terrorist” called Mohammed Hayatu, who claimed to be the girl's husband, was also detained.

Her mother in an interview last year said Ali's father had died some months after her daughter was kidnapped with the stress taking a toll on his health.

Presidential spokesman Garba Shehu told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the girl is currently in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, but will be brought to the national capital, Abuja, to meet Buhari.

Ali's rescue should give a boost to Buhari, a former military ruler who made crushing the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency a pillar of his presidential campaign in 2015.

Boko Haram captured 276 girls from a school in Chibok, north-east Nigeria, in April 2014, as part of a seven-year-old insurgency to set up an Islamic state in the north which has killed some 15 000 people and displaced more than 2 million.

Some girls escaped in the melee but parents of the remaining missing girls accused former president Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria's then leader, of not doing enough to find their daughters whose disappearance sparked a global campaign #bringbackourgirls.

Jonathan lost office in an election in March 2015.

Ali's mother, Binta Ali Nkeki, last year spoke of her daughter's fear of Boko Haram but of her enjoyment of attending school and doing well at her studies.

Her mother told the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, a Nigerian non-profit organisation researching a book on the missing Chibok girls, that she was not sure of the age of Ali, the youngest of her 13 children although only three survived their early years.

“She always sewed her own clothes,” said her mother in the interview released to the Thomson Reuters Foundation by Aisha Oyebode of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation.

Binta said Ali's father died some months after his daughter was abducted.

“After Amina was kidnapped, only two (of our children) are left alive,” she said, adding that her other son and daughter both live in Lagos.

She said she constantly thought of her lost daughter who had always helped her around the house.

“(My son) said I should take it easy and stop crying,” she told the Foundation. “He reminded me that I am not the only parent who lost a child.”

THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION

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Six Chibok girls dead - reports

Posted: 18 May 2016 01:15 PM PDT

Six Nigerian schoolgirls out of 218 kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram in 2014 reportedly died while being held captive.

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Moscow - Six Nigerian schoolgirls out of 218 kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram in 2014 died while held captive, media reported Wednesday.

The fate of the 218 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in an attack on a boarding school in the Chibok region in April 2014 had remained unknown until a vigilante group found one of the girls alive in a forest near the border with Cameroon on Tuesday. According to former hostage Amina Ali Nkeki, six other girls died in captivity.

“She was saying all the Chibok girls are still there in the Sambisa except six of them that have already died,” Hosea Abana Tsambido, the chairman of the Chibok community in Nigeria's capital city Abuja, was quoted as saying by the BBC.

Boko Haram is a Nigeria-based extremist group which maintains ties with Islamic State, a terrorist group outlawed in the United States, Russia and many other countries. Last year, Boko Haram expanded its activities to Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

Sputnik-ANA

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Libyan forces retake checkpoint

Posted: 18 May 2016 01:00 PM PDT

Libyan military forces say they have recaptured one of the main checkpoints south of the city of Misrata from Islamic State.

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Tripoli - Libyan military forces said on Tuesday they recaptured one of the main checkpoints south of the city of Misrata from Islamic State, reversing some of the gains the militant group made earlier this month.

Seven members of the armed forces were killed and 19 were wounded, including three who died in a mine explosion as they took control of the checkpoint of Abu Grain, Misrata hospital spokesman Aziz Issa said.

Islamic State fighters had overrun the Abu Grain checkpoint, town and several nearby villages after carrying out coordinated suicide bomb attacks on May 5, 2016.

Abu Grain is about 140 kilometres (85 miles) west of Islamic State's Libyan stronghold of Sirte, on the main road leading south from the port city of Misrata.

The military has yet to take full control of the area, however.

“There are skirmishes from time to time against the militants,” said Mohamed al-Gasri, a spokesman for an operation room set up by Libya's UN-backed unity government. “We will keep making progress to clean Abu Grain town of those militants”.

The unity government arrived in Tripoli in late March. Western states hope it will replace two rival administrations that have competed for power in Libya since 2014 and unite the armed brigades that supported them to take on Islamic State.

The new government has moved to establish itself in western Libya with the backing of brigades from Misrata, which gained power due to its central role in the uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The new government's operations room says it is preparing an offensive to recapture Sirte, which has been controlled by Islamic State since last year.

The unity government, however, has so far struggled to win formal backing from factions in eastern Libya, where military forces also say they are preparing for an offensive against Sirte.

Islamic State controls a strip of coast about 250 km (155 mi) long around Sirte but it has struggled to hold ground elsewhere in the country.

Reuters

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First Chibok girl found wandering forest

Posted: 18 May 2016 11:33 AM PDT

Nigerian soldiers have found one of the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram from Chibok more than two years ago.

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Lagos - Nigerian soldiers have found one of the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram from Chibok, making her the first freed from the Islamic extremists since the mass kidnapping more than two years ago. Her uncle describes her as pregnant and traumatized but otherwise fine.

Amina Ali Nkeki is the first of the 219 Chibok girls to escape from her captors since their abduction grabbed worldwide attention more than two years ago.

She was found wandering in the forest, uncle Yakubu Nkeki told The Associated Press. He said the 19-year-old - she was 17 when she was abducted - was brought to Chibok Tuesday night for her identity to be verified and to be reunited with her mother. Her father died while she was held captive, he said.

Read: Video shows Nigeria Chibok girls ‘alive’

He said the soldiers then took the young woman away, apparently to a military camp in the town of Damboa.

Other Chibok girls may also have been rescued by soldiers hunting down Boko Haram in the remote northeastern Sambisa Forest on Tuesday night, said Chibok community leader Pogu Bitrus. He said he is working with officials to establish their identities.

Boko Haram Islamic extremists stormed and firebombed the Government Girls Secondary School at Chibok on April 14, 2014, and seized 276 girls who were preparing to write science exams. Dozens escaped in the first hours, but 219 remained missing.

The inability of Nigeria's government and military to rescue them led, in part, to the electoral defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan last year.

It's not known how many thousands of girls, boys and young women have been kidnapped by Boko Haram in a nearly 7-year-old insurgency that has killed some 20 000 people and spread across Nigeria's borders.

Nigeria's military has reported freeing thousands this year as they have forced the extremists from towns and into strongholds in the sprawling Sambisa Forest. Boko Haram has turned to soft targets using suicide bombers.

ANA-AP

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Ex-DRC warlord to get 25 years

Posted: 18 May 2016 08:00 AM PDT

War crimes prosecutors want former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba to be handed a lengthy prison term for a slew of rapes and murders committed over a decade ago.

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The Hague - War crimes prosecutors on Wednesday called for former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba to be sentenced “to at least 25 years” in prison for a slew of rapes and murders in the Central African Republic over a decade ago.

Bemba sat stony-faced at the end of three days of hearings at the International Criminal Court (ICC), as prosecution lawyers rejected his defence team's calls for a lesser jail term.

“The sentence recommended by the prosecution ... should not be less than 25 years of imprisonment,” chief ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told the court in The Hague.

Such a sentence would be justified by “the gravity of the offences committed by M. Bemba and his degree of culpability.”

After a lengthy trial which opened in November 2010, the judges in March found Bemba guilty of five charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The three judges agreed with the prosecution that Bemba had retained “effective command and control” over 1,500 men he sent into the Central African Republic CAR to quell an attempted coup against the then president.

His Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) carried out a brutal series of rapes and murders in a campaign of terror, which experts testified would have long-term traumatic effects on the CAR people for generations.

Bemba's defence team had called for a jail term not exceeding 12 to 14 years.

But another prosecutor, Jean-Jacques Badibanga, said such a sentence would have the “absurd consequences” of seeing a more lenient term applied by the ICC then in national courts trying people for murder and rape.

The judges will hand down their sentence at a later date.

The crimes in the CAR between October 2002 and March 2003 had been committed against “particularly defenceless victims” and “with particular cruelty,” the prosecutor told the court.

There “were no mitigating circumstances” which would allow the sentence to be reduced, he argued.

After the CAR conflict, Bemba, a wealthy businessman-turned-warlord, became one of four vice presidents in President Joseph Kabila's transitional government.

In 2006, he lost to Kabila in a presidential run-off. He fled the next year into what he called “forced exile” in Europe and was arrested in Brussels in 2008 and handed over to the ICC.

AFP

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Debt: KZN firm sues Mugabe's dairy farm

Posted: 18 May 2016 05:48 AM PDT

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's company has been take to court for failing to settle debt with a plastics firm.

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Harare - A South African plastics company in KwaZulu-Natal has taken President Robert Mugabe’s company, Alpha Omega Dairy, to the Harare High Court over a debt of more then R600 000 it says it is owed.

Blakey Investments says last year it produced plastic products for Mugabe’s dairy farm in the Mazowe district about 20 kilometres west of Harare.

Early this month, Blakey filed its case at the High Court, case HC3813/16, seeking an order to compel the Mugabe family business to pay the debt of $38 391.72 (R605 232.03), according to Harare daily, Newsday.

Alpha Omega Dairy has indicated it will defend the claim and says it intends to also challenge the debt. Blakey Investments said at around July 27 last year, it manufactured and supplied Alpha Omega Dairy with packaging items worth $2 500 (R39 411).

“On or around October 16, 2015, the plaintiff (Blakey Investments) further supplied the defendant (Alpha Omega Dairy) with further packaging materials worth $33 291.72 (R524 832.31) at the defendant’s special instance and request. The goods also incurred freight charges of $2 600 (R40 988), which the plaintiff paid for on behalf of the defendant.”

It claims despite demand, the Mugabe company failed to settle the debt of $38 391.72 (R605 232.03).

According to Blakey, Alpha Omega Dairy acknowledged the debt in February and said it would settle it, but then failed to pay up.

Mugabe acknowledged last year that the dairy was not making money. It is on land taken from Zimbabwe’s most successful white dairy farmer in 2004. The government paid for half of the farm and some of its top class equipment and cattle.

Independent Foreign Service

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Nigeria labour union to strike over fuel hike

Posted: 18 May 2016 03:00 AM PDT

A Nigerian labour union representing millions of workers said it would stage an indefinite general strike to protest against a 67% petrol prices increase.

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Abuja - A Nigerian labour union representing millions of workers said on Tuesday that it would stage an indefinite general strike to protest government plans to increase petrol prices by up to 67 percent, despite a court ruling against the action.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and another union announced last week that they would strike from Wednesday unless the government reversed its decision to scrap a costly fuel subsidy scheme and raise gasoline prices.

Ministers hope the move will help tackle the worst economic crisis in decades in Africa's biggest oil producer, brought on by the fall in crude prices, and fund fuel imports needed because Nigeria's refineries have been neglected for years.

The NLC said it would stage a strike starting at midnight, despite a ruling by the Nigerian Industrial Court just hours earlier that the strike action should not go ahead because of the risk of civil disorder.

“The government was not ready to accede to our demands, so we walked out of the meeting,” Chris Uyot, deputy general secretary of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), told Reuters.

Talks between the government, NLC and the other union that previously threatened to strike - the Trade Union Congress (TUC) - broke down late on Tuesday. The TUC said it would not join the strike.

The government issued a statement in which it said the NLC's decision was regrettable in light of the court's decision.

“Government, therefore, calls upon and advises all workers to respect the laws of the land and to desist from participating in an illegal strike action,” said David Babachir Lawal, a government secretary.

Acts of intimidation and harassment, including “preventing workers from carrying out their lawful duties” would be “met with appropriate response by the law enforcement agencies,” he said, adding that any civil servants who took part would not be paid.

A fall in oil prices has eaten into the foreign reserves of Nigeria, which relies on crude sales for around 70 percent of national income. The central bank has adopted a fixed exchange rate to protect further depletion of reserves.

On Tuesday, the vice president said President Muhammadu Buhari had been “left with no choice” but to raise prices. “What can we do if we don't have foreign currency? We have to import fuel,” said Yemi Osinbajo.

Nigeria tried to end fuel subsidies in 2012, doubling the price of gasoline overnight, but later reinstated some of the subsidy to end a wave of protest strikes held in defiance of another court ruling.

Reuters

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