Missing Students Were Slain, Mexico Says

MEXICO CITY – The 43 teacher trainees missing since a Sept. 26 incident in the southern state of Guerrero involving gangsters and corrupt cops are dead, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said Friday, citing statements from three suspects in custody.

Patricio Reyes, Jhonatan Osorio and Agustin Garcia confessed to having killed the students and burned their bodies, the attorney general told a press conference.

More than 70 people, including police and public officials, have been arrested in connection with the events that took place the night of Sept. 26 in Iguala, Guerrero, when municipal police fired gunshots at students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a nearby teacher-training facility.

Six people died that night, 25 were wounded and 43 Ayotzinapa students were detained and then handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops were allegedly acting on orders from Iguala’s then-mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who were tracked down Monday after weeks on the run.

“I have no doubt there was a massive homicide there,” Murillo said Friday as he presented a reconstruction of the crime that included a video filmed at the dump in Cocula, a town near Iguala, where the killers disposed of the students’ bodies.

“The burned them, clothes and all,” the attorney general said.

“Some of the students were dead or unconscious” before being set ablaze, Murillo said, apparently suggesting that others were burned alive.

For the purposes of the investigation, the students will continue to be classified as missing until the remains are definitively identified by specialists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, he said.

Reyes, Osorio and Garcia told investigators they took the 43 students to the Cocula dump and set them on fire, Murillo said.

After watching the bonfire burn for more than 14 hours, the killers collected the ashes and bones in eight garbage bags and then tossed the bags into a nearby river, the attorney general said.

Authorities managed to recover one of the bags intact and its contents will be analyzed to confirm the suspects’ account, he said.

Though accustomed to horrific violence after eight years of a murky, many-sided drug war that has claimed some 130,000 lives, Mexicans have been shocked and outraged by the case of the Ayotzinapa students.

Iran - Children rights activist released from prison

Atena Farghdani released from Prison

Posted on: 7th November, 2014

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HRANA News Agency – Atena Farghdani, Artist and Children’s Rights Activist who was arrested from 23 August, 2014 is released from prison.

According to the report of Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), on 23 August, 2014, Atena Farghdani was arrested by security forces.

After 2.5 month from her arrest, she was released on bail.

Previously, there has been an exhibition for Atena’s artworks and and she has been teaching painting at the Society for Protecting the Children Right.

Turkey - Protester sprayed with mace

Shelling Kills 11 Children on the Outskirts of Damascus

Shelling Kills 11 Children on the Outskirts of Damascus

BEIRUT – At least 11 children were killed Wednesday in shelling near a school in the Al Qabun area on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, or SOHR, reported.

The NGO said the death toll could rise since an unknown number of people were injured and were listed in critical condition.

The Observatory did not specify whether the shelling was conducted by Syrian government forces or by the opposition.

Meanwhile, the official Syrian news agency Sana reported that two civilians were killed in a mortar attack launched by “terrorists” in the town of Harasta, northeast of Damascus.

SANA, citing a police source in Damascus, stated that a woman was injured in a rocket attack in the capital’s Rukendin neighborhood.

More than 200,000 people have been killed since the conflict began in Syria in March 2011, according to latest data issued by UN.

Israeli killed in East Jerusalem car attack

A Palestinian rammed his car into a crowded train platform in east Jerusalem on Wednesday, in the second attack of its kind in two weeks, killing one person and fuelling concerns of another Palestinian uprising.

Israeli security forces identified the assailant as Ibrahim Akari from East Jerusalem. 

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, which it termed as the “the heroic running-over operation.”

“We praise this heroic operation,” said Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum. “We call for more such ... operations.”

Video: moment Palestinian rams van into Jerusalem pedestrians

(AFP)

Israel's Minister of Public Security Yitzhak Ahronovich said civilians and police officers were among the wounded. He praised the police officer who neutralized the Palestinian attacker, saying that “a terrorist who attacks civilians deserves to be killed.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the attack saying it was a “terrorist act” that “only raises tensions” in the tinderbox region.

Speaking ahead of a meeting with Jordan's foreign minister in Paris, Kerry told reporters: “That is not just a terrorist act and an ... atrocity, but it only makes matters worse. It only raises tensions.”

The attack was almost identical to one two weeks ago, also committed by a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, that killed two people, a baby girl and a young woman from Ecuador, at a train platform near the scene of Wednesday's attack.

Palestinian protesters and Israeli police have been clashing almost daily in east Jerusalem in recent months.

Pro-Kurdish politician stabbed in Turkish capital

A Turkish politician was stabbed repeatedly in the capital Ankara on Tuesday, in an attack that his pro-Kurdish party blamed on a government-led ‘lynch campaign’ against it.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu condemned the stabbing of Ahmet Karatas, a member of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and denied the government had done anything tomake him a target. He said a suspect had been detained and had confessed.

Mutual recriminations are running high because of what Kurds see as Turkey’s failure to protect their ethnic kin just across the border in Syria. Dozens of people were killed last month in unrest in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast.

Politician Ahmet Karatas was knifed in the neck and leg, a party official told Reuters.

An HDP statement said he had been stabbed some seven times in the attack at the party’s offices in Ankara.

Karatas was being treated in intensive care in hospital.

Kurds accuse the Turkish army of standing by and just watching as Islamic State fighters besiege the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, just across the border. While Ankara has refused to intervene militarily, it allowed Iraqi Kurdish fighters to cross into Kobani with arms and ammunition from Turkey last week.

The HDP accused the government and media of turning its leader and representatives into targets with anti-Kurdish statements and reports in recent days.

“We warn the government once more in the face of this dangerous development and call on it to abandon this sustained lynch campaign,” it said.

Davutoglu rejected the accusation. “During the Kobani incidents, the HDP with its statements turned not only the government but all our citizens in the east and the whole of Turkey into targets. We never turned anyone into a target,” he told reporters.

The government and the HDP have accused each other of fuelling the recent unrest and damaging a peace processlaunched by Ankara and Kurdish militants to end three decades of conflict in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.

U of A student assaulted on campus

TUCSON - The University of Arizona Police Department is investigating an assault on a female student that occurred on campus Sunday afternoon.

According to UAPD, the woman was walking in the area of 1100 East Lowell when an unknown male grabbed her from behind and punched her, knocking her to the ground.

The victim then punched the suspect in the face and stomach until he ran off.

The suspect is described as a white male, in his 20s to 30s, muscular build, with short spiky brown hair and wearing blue jeans.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is asked to call 911 or 621-8477 (TIPS).