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A major rescue operation is under way in the Mediterranean after as many as 700 migrants are feared to have drowned just outside Libyan waters, in what could prove to be the worst disaster yet involving migrants being smuggled to Europe.

Italian coastguards have retrieved 49 survivors so far and about 20 bodies, according to the interior ministry, after the boat went down overnight about 60 miles (96km) off the Libyan coast and 120 miles (193km) south of the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, told the Guardian that up to 700 may remain in the water, according to numbers supplied by a survivor. The accident happened after the migrants saw a merchant ship in the distance and scrambled to attract its attention, over-balancing the fishing boat in which they were travelling.

Barbara Molinario, a spokeswoman for UNHCR in Rome, said: “They wanted to be rescued. They saw another ship. They were trying to make themselves known to it.”

If confirmed, Sunday morning’s accident means that at least 1,500 migrants have died so far in 2015 while on route to Europe – at least 30 times higher than last year’s equivalent figure, which was itself a record. It comes just days after 400 others drowned last week in a similar incident.

The deaths prompted fresh calls for Europe to reinstate full-scale search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Last October, the EU opted not to replace the Italian-run operation Mare Nostrum, which saved about 100,000 lives last year, amid fears that it was encouraging smugglers and migrants to organise more trips to Europe.

Pope Francis, an outspoken advocate for greater European-wide participation in rescue efforts, reiterated his call for action during mass on Sunday after learning of the latest disaster.

“They are men and women like us – our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war,” he said from St Peter’s Square.

Save the Children, one of the primary aid agencies working with migrants arriving in Italy, called on EU leaders to hold crisis talks in the next 48 hours and to resume search-and-rescue operations.

“It is time to put humanity before politics and immediately restart the rescue,” the organisation said in a statement. “Europe cannot look the other way while thousands die on our shores.”

Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, called for an emergency meeting on Sunday at Palazzo Chigi with top government ministers, including the foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, to discuss the crisis. The EU commission for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, was due in Italy on Thursday.

But the huge rise in deaths in 2015, and the largely similar levels of arrivals in Italy, suggest the tactic has not worked. In Tripoli on Saturday, a smuggler told the Guardian he was not aware of Mare Nostrum in the first place, nor knew that it had finished.

“I’ve not heard of that. What is that – from 2009?” said the smuggler, who says his network organises 20 trips a week during the busy summer months. “Many people would go on the boats, even if they didn’t have any rescue operations.”

Migrants interviewed this week in Libya, the main launching pad for those seeking to reach Europe, say the demand will continue despite the deaths. Mohamed Abdallah, a 21-year-old from Darfur who fled war at home to find another war in Libya, said he could not stay in Libya, nor return to Sudan.

“There is a war in my country, there’s no security, no equality, no freedom,” Abdallah said. “But if I stay here, it’s just like my country … I need to go to Europe.”

In Misrata, a major Libyan port, coastguards told the Guardian that the smuggling trips would continue to rise because Libyan officials were woefully under-resourced.

In all of western Libya, the area where the people-smugglers operate, coastguards have just three operational boats. Another is broken, and four more are in Italy for repairs. Libyans say they have been told they will not be returned until after the conclusion of peace talks between the country’s two rival governments.

“There is a substantial increase this year,” said Captain Tawfik al-Skail, deputy head of the Misratan coastguard. “And come summer, with the better weather, if there isn’t immediate assistance and help from the EU, then there will be an overwhelming increase.”

Save the Children has been on the front lines in the migrant crisis, and said it was growing increasingly worried about an expected increase in children

making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean.

On Friday, it reported that nearly two dozen badly burned Eritreans had landed in Lampedusa that morning, the victims of a chemical fire in the Libyan factory where they were held before their departure.

According to witness accounts, five people, including a baby, died in the blast – which occurred after a gas canister exploded – and the rest of the victims were not taken to hospital by the smugglers holding them. Instead, the injured were put on a ship bound for Italy a few days later. The victims were airlifted to hospitals across Sicily on their arrival.

The story was confirmed by UNHCR, which also interviewed survivors.

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Ngwa Bertrand

19.Apr.2015

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LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — A man indicted in the United States for allegedly smuggling heroin, in a case that was the basis for the TV hit "Orange Is The New Black," has been elected a senator in Nigeria.

Buruji Kashamu was little known before he returned home in 2003 from Britain, where he beat a U.S. extradition order, to become a major financier of President Goodluck Jonathan's party.

Election results posted late Wednesday identified Kashamu as senator-elect in southwest Ogun state. Opponents are challenging his victory in court, saying ballots were rigged.

Kashamu's spokesman, Austin Oniyokor, said it was important to clarify there is not "any order for extradition by any court whether in Nigeria, or the U.K. or the U.S. or anywhere."

Kashamu, 56, has said the 1998 indictment by a grand jury in the Northern District of Illinois for conspiracy to import and distribute heroin in the United States is a case of mistaken identity. He has said Chicago prosecutors really want the dead brother he closely resembles.

A British court refused a U.S. extradition request in 2003 over uncertainty about Kashamu's identity, freeing him after five years in jail. He was found carrying $230,000 when he was arrested.

Kashamu said that court found the United States had withheld evidence that a chief conspirator had failed to identify him in a photo lineup. U.S. court papers only say that Kashamu was identified by two conspirators.

Last year, Chicago Judge Richard Posner refused a motion to dismiss Kashamu's case. The September 2014 decision from the Court of Appeal 7th Circuit quoted the U.S. Justice Department as saying that "the prospects for extradition have recently improved" but noted that "Given Kashamu's prominence ... the probability of extradition may actually be low."

It said that if Kashamu was the ringleader of the drug gang, he could face a sentence as heavy as life imprisonment and suggested that if he is innocent he should fly to Chicago to prove it in court.

A dozen people long ago pleaded guilty in the case including American Piper Kerman, whose memoir about her jail time was adapted for the Netflix hit "Orange Is The New Black." Kerman's book never identified Kashamu by name, but there is a West African drug kingpin whom she calls "Alhaji" — meaning one who has completed the haj or pilgrimage to Mecca.

Kashamu said in a statement to the AP that he already has been exonerated by the British court.

"I have never lived in or visited the United States of America and have never been involved in any narcotics or criminal activities in the United States of America," he said. "I am a free citizen of Nigeria, an employer of labor and a politician with legitimate sources of income. I do not have anything to hide. I am neither afraid of anyone nor am I running away from the law."

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has chastised President Jonathan for his perceived protection of Kashamu and warned that "drug barons ... will buy candidates, parties and eventually buy power or be in power themselves."

Kashamu has said that Obasanjo did not call him a drug baron while he spent some $20 million ensuring their party's success at 2011 elections.

Kashamu is suing Obasanjo for libel for stating that he is a fugitive from U.S. justice. He had won a court order halting publication of Obasanjo's autobiography but a judge this week rescinded it, saying Kashamu had misled the court.

President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, a former military dictator, has promised to fight corruption. That has alarmed many politicians in a country where corruption is endemic.

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Ngwa Bertrand

19.Apr.2015

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Ngwa Bertrand

17.Apr.2015

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Italian police on Thursday said 12 African migrants had died after being thrown overboard by fellow passengers in the latest high-seas tragedy in the Mediterranean, as another 41 boat migrants were feared drowned in a separate incident.

Police in Palermo, Sicily, said they had arrested 15 Muslim migrants suspected of attacking Christian passengers after a religious row on a boat headed for Italy, which is struggling to cope with a huge spike in illegal migrants arriving on its shores.

The 12 victims were all Nigerians and Ghanaians while the 15 suspects came from Senegal, Mali and Ivory Coast. They were charged with “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate,” according to a police statement.

Distraught survivors, who set off from Libya on Tuesday before being rescued by an Italian vessel on Wednesday, told a “dreadful” story of “forcefully resisting attempts to drown them, forming a veritable human chain in some cases,” police said.

In another drama, 41 migrants were missing feared drowned on after their dinghy sank en route to Italy, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said, mere days after 400 migrants are believed to have died in another shipwreck off the coast of Libya.

The four survivors in Thursday’s shipwreck, who came from Nigeria, Ghana and Niger, said their boat sank after setting sail from Libya with 45 people on board.

Their vessel was spotted by a plane, which alerted the Italian coastguard, but by the time a navy ship arrived to help them only four passengers were found alive.

The latest deaths bring the number of migrants killed while trying to cross the Mediterranean this year up to 900, the IOM said, up from 96 between January and April last year.

The agency said some 10,000 people had been rescued off Italy since Friday alone, with recent good weather prompting a spike in the number of boat migrants attempting the risky crossing, many of them fleeing conflict and poverty in Africa and the Middle East.

The number of people trying to reach Italy in recent days has been “extraordinary”, IOM’s Giovanni Abbate said in the Sicilian port of Augusta, where more new arrivals were disembarking.

Driven by desperation and undertaking a perilous journey, he said it was not the first time disputes between migrants on packed boats had turned deadly, in reference to the 12 Christians allegedly thrown overboard.

“Terrible tensions can arise, anything can happen,” he said.

The IOM in a statement said it had received reports of “a fight between different groups — maybe for religious reasons ... on one of the boats rescued some days ago”.

Nigerian and Ghanaian survivors told police a group of Muslim passengers on the boat, which was carrying around 100 people, began threatening the Nigerians and Ghanaians after they declared themselves to be Christians.

“The threats then materialised and 12 people, all Nigerian and Ghanaian, are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean,” the police statement added.

Italy pleaded for more help Thursday from other European Union countries to rescue the migrants and share the burden of accommodating them.

Italy is not the final destination for most of those who risk their lives each year in search of a better life in Europe, but as their first port of call it is saddled with handling all asylum requests as well as saving those in danger drowning.

“Ninety per cent of the cost of the patrol and sea rescue operations are falling on our shoulders, and we have not had an adequate response from the EU,” Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian foreign minister, told the daily Corriere della Sera.

“Then there is the difficult issue of knowing where to send those rescued at sea — to the nearest port? To the country where their boat came from? The EU has to respond clearly to these questions,” Mr Gentiloni said.

The crisis is only expected to intensify, with the Red Cross predicting record numbers of boat migrants this year.

“The flow is unstoppable, and we, the international community, are failing to deliver on our commitments,” said Francesco Rocca, president of the Italian Red Cross.

Amnesty International said it had been raising the alarm “for months” and urged European leaders to take action.

“A season of death is now upon us,” said Gauri van Gulik, the rights group’s deputy Europe and Central Asia programme director.

“It is an appalling indictment of European governments’ lack of compassion that so little has been done when so many people remain at risk of dying off Europe’s southern shores.”

* Agence France-Presse

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Ngwa Bertrand

17.Apr.2015

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Three young hunters from the Kupe Muanenguba constituency in the South West region of Cameroon have discovered the wreckage of a plane carrying a US citizen Bill Fitzpatrick that mysteriously disappeared on June 23, 2014 over Western Bakossi territory. Cameroon Concord understands Bill Fitzpatrick's skeleton and the rubble of Cessna 172 one seat plane was found on Friday, April 10, 2015 in the locality of Eboko Bajo in Tombel Subdivision.

The three hunters reportedly used their phone cameras and filmed the remains of the late US citizen and handed it to local security officials who rushed to the scene and confirmed the information. At the time of writing this report, information filtered that the Delegate General for National Security has dispatched a team of Cameroon forensic experts to Tombel.

Bill Fitzpatrick, 59, was flying from Kano, Nigeria to Douala, Cameroon en route to Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Congo.

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Ngwa Bertrand

16.Apr.2015

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Cameroon Anglophone Lawyers have hinted that an All Anglophone Lawyers Conference is to hold soonest in Bamenda, the chief city in the North West region. Cameroon Concord gathered the conference is to develop strategies at safeguarding the Common Law and also to map out the way forward for the Southern Cameroons territory. Our senior intelligence officer in Yaoundé who contributed to this report observed that a major campaign has been launched to drum up support from all Common Law practitioners deep within Southern Cameroons and also in La Republique.

Cameroon Concord understands the CPDM crime syndicate has harsh a diabolic plot geared towards stifling the Common Law system in Cameroon. The Bamenda meeting will provide a rare opportunity for the Anglophone Lawyers to sound a note of caution to the government to respect the bi-jural nature of Cameroon or face severe consequences. Speaking to the media recently, Eta Bissong, former Bar Council President revealed that "The President of the General Assembly of the Bar and the President of the Bar Council do not speak for lawyers with a Common Law background".

Barrister Harmony Bobga was also quoted as saying, "The struggle of the Anglophone Lawyers is to preserve the Anglophone identity from completely being wiped out". A reliable source told this reporter that the Cameroon Anglophone Lawyers conference may take place between April 29 and May the 2nd.

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Ngwa Bertrand

15.Apr.2015

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