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Syrian man pleads guilty to deadly knife rampage at German festival

Update Syrian man pleads guilty to deadly knife rampage at German festival
Syrian defendant Issa Al H. bends over as he sits next to judicial officers in the dock in the courtroom in Duesseldorf, western Germany, on May 27, 2025, at the start of his trial over a deadly knife attack that killed three people in August 2024 in Solingen, western Germany, during a summer city festival. (AFP)
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Updated 27 May 2025

Syrian man pleads guilty to deadly knife rampage at German festival

Syrian man pleads guilty to deadly knife rampage at German festival
  • Issa Al Hasan, 27, made the confession at the start of his trial
  • “Three people died at my hands. I seriously injured others,” Hasan said of the attack in August in the western city of Solingen

DUSSELDORF, Germany: A Syrian man suspected of belonging to the Daesh group pleaded guilty Tuesday to killing three people and wounding 10 more in a stabbing spree at a German summer festival last year.

Issa Al Hasan, 27, made the confession at the start of his trial, which was held under tight security at the higher regional court in Duesseldorf.

In a statement read out by his lawyer, Hasan, sitting under police guard behind a protective glass screen, admitted having “committed a grave crime.”

“Three people died at my hands. I seriously injured others,” Hasan said of the attack in August in the western city of Solingen.

“Some of them survived only by luck. They could have died, too,” he said in the statement.

“I deserve and expect a life sentence.”

The stabbing spree at the mid-summer street festival was one of a string of attacks that shocked Germany and stoked security fears.

Hasan was an asylum seeker from Syria who had been slated for deportation.

German authorities’ failure to remove him from the country fired a bitter debate over immigration in the run-up to national elections in February this year.

Hasan faces charges including three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and membership of a foreign terror organization.

Prosecutors say he set out to harm “nonbelievers” at the “festival for diversity” in the center of the western city of Solingen.

Hasan allegedly saw his targets “as representatives of Western society” and sought “to take revenge against them for the military actions of Western states.”

A member of Daesh whom Hasan had contacted that month allegedly encouraged him to go ahead with the plan and promised him that the group would claim it and use it for propaganda purposes.

The group later said via its Amaq outlet on the Telegram messaging app that an Daesh “soldier” had carried out the attack in “revenge” for Muslims “in Palestine and everywhere.”

Prosecutors say Hasan had filmed videos in which he pledged allegiance to Daesh and forwarded them on to his Daesh contact just before he committed the attack.

In the statement read out by his lawyer, Hasan recanted his alleged motivation for carrying out the attack.

“I killed and injured innocent people, not unbelievers,” he said.

“Christians, Jews and Muslims, we all are cousins, not enemies.”

The Solingen stabbing spree was one in a series of attacks attributed to asylum seekers and migrants that pushed immigration to the top of the political agenda in Germany.

In May 2024, a man with a knife attacked people at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, mortally wounding a police officer who intervened.

The Afghan suspect in the stabbing went on trial in February and is also alleged to be sympathetic to the Daesh group.

In December, a Saudi man was arrested after a car rammed into a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing six people and wounding hundreds.

And in January, a man with a kitchen knife attacked a group of kindergarten children in Aschaffenburg, killing a two-year-old boy and a man who tried to intervene.

A 28-year-old Afghan man was arrested at the scene of the attack, which came during campaigning for elections on February 23.

Just 10 days before the vote, an Afghan man was arrested on suspicion of plowing a car through a street rally in Munich, killing a two-year-old girl and her mother and injuring dozens.

The center-right CDU/CSU, which demanded tough curbs on immigration in the wake of the attacks, came first in the election with 28.5 percent of the vote.

The biggest gains however were made by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which saw its share of the vote more than double to over 20 percent.


One dead, dozens injured as quake hits Turkiye Marmaris

Updated 16 sec ago

One dead, dozens injured as quake hits Turkiye Marmaris

One dead, dozens injured as quake hits Turkiye Marmaris
  • A 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Marmaris area of southwestern Turkiye early on Tuesday, killing one teenager and injuring dozens of people, the interior minister said
ANKARA: A 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Marmaris area of southwestern Turkiye early on Tuesday, killing one teenager and injuring dozens of people, the interior minister said.
A 14-year-old girl died following a panic attack and some 70 people were hurt in the province of Mugla as they rushed to find safety, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X.
There were no initial reports of buildings destroyed, he said.
The quake struck at 2:17 am (2317 GMT on Monday) some 10 kilometers (six miles) off the coast of Marmaris, the AFAD disaster agency said.
“In Fethiye, a 14-year-old girl named Afranur Gunlu was taken to the hospital due to a panic attack but, unfortunately, despite all interventions, she passed away,” Yerlikaya said.

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire
Updated 03 June 2025

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire
  • Russia will only agree a full ceasefire if Ukrainian troops pull back entirely from four regions — Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson

ISTANBUL: US President Donald Trump is “open” to meeting his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in Turkiye, the White House said, after the two sides failed on Monday to make headway toward an elusive ceasefire.
Delegations from both sides did, however, agree another large-scale prisoner exchange in their meeting in Istanbul, which in mid-May also hosted their first round of face-to-face talks.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump come together for a third round later this month in either Istanbul or Ankara.
Putin has so far refused such a meeting. But Zelensky has said he is willing, underlining that key issues can only be resolved at leaders-level.
Trump, who wants a swift end to the three-year war, is “open” to a three-way summit “if it comes to that, but he wants both of these leaders and both sides to come to the table together,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in Washington.
But despite Trump’s willingness to meet with Putin and Zelensky, no US representative took part in Monday’s talks in Istanbul, according to a State Department spokesperson.
Zelensky said that, “We are very much awaiting strong steps from the United States” and urged Trump to toughen sanctions on Russia to “push” it to agree to a full ceasefire.
In Monday’s meeting, Ukraine said that Moscow had rejected its call for an unconditional ceasefire. It offered instead a partial truce of two to three days in some areas of the frontline.
Russia will only agree a full ceasefire if Ukrainian troops pull back entirely from four regions — Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — according to its negotiating terms reported on by Russian state media. Russia currently only partly controls those regions.
Moscow has also demanded a ban on Kyiv joining NATO, limiting Ukraine’s military and ending Western military support.
Top negotiators from both sides agreed to swap all severely wounded soldiers and captured fighters under the age of 25.
Russia’s lead negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said it would involve “at least 1,000” on each side.
The two sides also agreed to hand over the bodies of 6,000 soldiers, Ukraine said after the talks.
“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.
Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.
“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” Medinsky said, adding that this was needed to collect the bodies of dead soldiers from the battlefield.
Zelensky hit back on social media: “I think ‘idiots’, because the whole point of a ceasefire is to stop people from becoming dead in the first place.”
Kyiv said it would study a document the Russian side handed its negotiators outlining its demands for both peace and a full ceasefire.
Zelensky said after the Istanbul talks concluded that any deal for lasting peace must not “reward” Putin, and has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to cover combat on air, sea and land.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who led his country’s delegation, called for a next meeting to take place before the end of June. He also said a Putin-Zelensky summit should be discussed.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said after the talks — inside a luxury hotel on the banks of the Bosphorus — that they were held “in a constructive atmosphere.”
“During the meeting, the parties decided to continue preparations for a possible meeting at the leader level,” Fidan said on social media.
Tens of thousands have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine destroyed and millions forced to flee their homes in Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
In the front-line town of Dobropillya in eastern Ukraine, 53-year-old Volodymyr told AFP he had no hope left for an end to the conflict.
“We thought that everything would stop. And now there is nothing to wait for. We have no home, nothing. We were almost killed by drones,” he said.
After months of setbacks for Kyiv’s military, Ukraine said it had carried out an audacious attack on Sunday, smuggling drones into Russia and then firing them at air bases, damaging around 40 strategic Russian bombers worth $7 billion in a major special operation.


US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon

US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon
Updated 03 June 2025

US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon

US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon

WASHINGTON: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday voiced optimism for a trade deal soon with India to avoid tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump.
“You should expect a deal between the United States and India in the not too distant future,” he told the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which promotes relations between the two countries, calling himself “very optimistic.”
Trump has set a delayed deadline of July 9 for countries to avoid sweeping tariffs, as he seeks to shake up the global economy to correct what he says is unfairness to the United States.
Lutnick, a strong advocate of tariffs, said he was a “great fan” of India — but voiced longstanding concern about the emerging economy’s use of tariffs.
On tariff negotiations with India, “bringing them down to a level that is reasonable and appropriate so we can be great trading partners with each other, I think is absolutely on the table,” Lutnick said.
“There were certain things that the Indian government did that generally rubbed the United States the wrong way. For instance, they generally buy military gear from Russia,” he said.
But he said that Trump believed in raising concerns and “the Indian government is addressing it specifically and directly.”


Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling

Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling
Updated 03 June 2025

Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling

Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling
  • For years, state leaders have dreamed of such a project but cost concerns, shifts in direction, competition and questions about economic feasibility have hindered progress

DEADHORSE, Alaska: President Donald Trump wants to double the amount of oil coursing through Alaska’s vast pipeline system and build a massive natural gas project as its “big, beautiful twin,” a top administration official said Monday while touring a prolific oil field near the Arctic Ocean.
The remarks by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright came as he and two other Trump Cabinet members — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin — visited Prudhoe Bay as part of a multiday trip aimed at highlighting Trump’s push to expand oil and gas drilling, mining and logging in the state that drew criticism from environmentalists.
During the trip, Burgum’s agency also announced plans to repeal Biden-era restrictions on future leasing and industrial development in portions of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that are designated as special for their wildlife, subsistence or other values.
The petroleum reserve is west of Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse, the industrial encampment near the starting point of the trans-Alaska pipeline system. The pipeline, which runs for 800 miles (nearly 1,300 kilometers), has been Alaska’s economic lifeline for nearly 50 years.
Government and industry representatives several Asian countries, including Japan, were expected to join a portion of the US officials’ trip, as Trump has focused renewed attention on the gas project proposal, which in its current iteration would provide gas to Alaska residents and ship liquefied natural gas overseas. Matsuo Takehiko, vice minister for International Affairs at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, was among those at Prudhoe Bay on Monday.
For years, state leaders have dreamed of such a project but cost concerns, shifts in direction, competition and questions about economic feasibility have hindered progress. US tariff talks with Asian countries have been seen as possible leverage for the Trump administration to secure investments in the proposed gas project.
Oil and natural gas are in significant demand worldwide, Wright told a group of officials and pipeline employees in safety hats and vests who gathered near the oil pipeline on a blustery day with 13-degree Fahrenheit (-10 Celsius) windchills. The pipeline stretched out over the snow-covered landscape.
“You have the big two right here,” he said. “Let’s double oil production, build the big, beautiful twin, and we will help energize the world and we will strengthen our country and strengthen our families.”
Oil flow through the trans-Alaska pipeline peaked at about 2 million barrels in the late 1980s. In 2011 — a year in which an average of about 583,000 barrels of oil a day flowed through the pipeline, then-Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, set a goal of boosting that number to 1 million barrels a day within a decade. It’s never come close in the years since: last year, throughput averaged about 465,000 barrels a day.
The Trump officials were joined Monday by a group that included US Sen. Dan Sullivan and Gov. Mike Dunleavy, both Republicans, who also took part in meetings Sunday in Anchorage and Utqiagvik.
In Utqiagvik, an Arctic community that experiences 24 hours of daylight at this time of year, many Alaska Native leaders support Trump’s push for more drilling in the petroleum reserve and to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development. They lauded the visit after lamenting that they felt ignored by former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Alaska political leaders have long complained about perceived federal overreach by the US government, which oversees about 60 percent of lands in Alaska. Sullivan, Dunleavy and Alaska’s senior US senator, Lisa Murkowski, often complained that Biden’s team was too restrictive in its approach to many resource development issues.
Murkowski, an at-times vocal critic of Trump, joined for the Sunday meeting in Anchorage, where she said Alaska leaders “want to partner with you. We want to be that equal at the table instead of an afterthought.”
Environmentalists criticized Interior’s planned rollback of restrictions in portions of the petroleum reserve. While Sullivan called the repeal a top priority, saying Congress intended to have development in the petroleum reserve, environmentalists maintain that the law balances allowances for oil drilling with a need to provide protections for sensitive areas and decried Interior’s plans as wrong-headed.
Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, called the Trump administration’s intense focus on oil and gas troubling, particularly in a state experiencing the real-time impacts of climate change. He called the continued pursuit of fossil fuel development “very frustrating and heartbreaking to see.”
The Interior Department said it will accept public comment on the planned repeal.
The three Trump officials also plan to speak at Dunleavy’s annual energy conference Tuesday in Anchorage.


Ukraine and Russia agree to swap dead and wounded troops but report no progress toward ending war

Ukraine and Russia agree to swap dead and wounded troops but report no progress toward ending war
Updated 03 June 2025

Ukraine and Russia agree to swap dead and wounded troops but report no progress toward ending war

Ukraine and Russia agree to swap dead and wounded troops but report no progress toward ending war
  • As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilization efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries

ISTANBUL: Representatives of Russia and Ukraine met Monday for their second round of direct peace talks in just over two weeks, but aside from agreeing to swap thousands of their dead and seriously wounded troops, they made no progress toward ending the 3-year-old war, officials said.
The talks unfolded a day after a string of stunning long-range attacks by both sides, with Ukraine launching a devastating drone assault on Russian air bases and Russia hurling its largest drone attack of the war against Ukraine.
At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.
Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who led the Ukrainian delegation, told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response. Ukraine proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30, he said.
After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured as a condition for a ceasefire.
As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilization efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The document also suggests that Ukraine stop any redeployment of forces and ban any military presence of third countries on its soil as conditions for halting hostilities.
The Russian document further proposes that Ukraine end martial law and hold elections, after which the two countries could sign a comprehensive peace treaty that would see Ukraine declare its neutral status, abandon its bid to join NATO, set limits on the size of its armed forces and recognize Russian as the country’s official language on par with Ukrainian.
Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow.
In other steps, the delegations agreed to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action and to set up a commission to exchange seriously wounded troops.
Kyiv officials said their surprise drone attack Sunday damaged or destroyed more than 40 warplanes at air bases deep inside Russia, including the remote Arctic, Siberian and Far East regions more than 7,000 kilometers (4,300 miles) from Ukraine.
The complex and unprecedented raid, which struck simultaneously in three time zones, took over a year and a half to prepare and was “a major slap in the face for Russia’s military power,” said Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the Ukrainian security service, who led its planning.
Zelensky called it a “brilliant operation” that would go down in history. The effort destroyed or heavily damaged nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia on Sunday fired the biggest number of drones — 472 — at Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s air force said, in an apparent effort to overwhelm air defenses. That was part of a recently escalating campaign of strikes in civilian areas of Ukraine.
Hopes low for peace prospects
US-led efforts to push the two sides into accepting a ceasefire have so far failed. Ukraine accepted the proposed truce, but the Kremlin effectively rejected it. Recent comments by senior officials in both countries indicate they remain far apart on the key conditions for stopping the war.
The previous talks on May 16 in the same Turkish city were the first direct peace negotiations since the early weeks of Moscow’s 2022 invasion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the fact that the two sides met again Monday was an achievement in itself amid the fierce fighting.
“The fact that the meeting took place despite yesterday’s incident is an important success in itself,” he said in a televised speech.
Zelensky said during a trip to Lithuania on Monday that a new release of prisoners of war was being prepared after the Istanbul meeting. The May 16 talks also led to a swap of prisoners, with 1,000 on both sides being exchanged.
During the talks, Zelensky said, the Ukrainian delegation handed over a list of nearly 400 abducted children. Russia responded by proposing to “work on up to 10 children.”
“That’s their idea of addressing humanitarian issues,” Zelensky said Monday during an online briefing with journalists.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2023 for Putin and the country’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Putin, said Kyiv had made a “show” out of the topic and that children would be returned if their parents or guardians could be located.
Zelensky also told journalists that the Russian side said it was ready for a two- to three-day ceasefire to collect bodies from the battlefield, not a full ceasefire.
“I think they’re idiots, because the whole point of a ceasefire is to prevent people from being killed in the first place. So you can see their mindset — it’s just a brief pause in the war for them,” he added.
The relentless fighting has frustrated US President Donald Trump’s goal of bringing about a quick end to the war. A week ago, he expressed impatience with Putin as Moscow pounded Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles for a third straight night. Trump said on social media that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
Ukraine upbeat after strikes on air bases
Ukraine was triumphant after targeting the distant Russian air bases. The official Russian response was muted, with the attack getting little coverage on state-controlled television. The Russia-1 television channel on Sunday evening spent a little over a minute on it with a brief Defense Ministry statement read out before images shifted to Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian positions.
Zelensky said the setbacks for the Kremlin would help force it to the negotiating table, even as its pursues a summer offensive on the battlefield.
“Russia must feel what its losses mean. That is what will push it toward diplomacy,” he said Monday in Vilnius, Lithuania, meeting with leaders from the Nordic nations and countries on NATO’s eastern flank.
Ukraine has occasionally struck air bases hosting Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers since early in the war, prompting Moscow to redeploy most of them to the regions farther from the front line.
Because Sunday’s drones were launched from trucks close to the bases in five Russian regions, military defenses had virtually no time to prepare for them.
Many Russian military bloggers chided the military for its failure to build protective shields for the bombers despite previous attacks, but the large size of the planes makes that challenging.
The attacks were “a big blow to Russian strategic air power” and exposed significant vulnerabilities in Moscow’s military capabilities, said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, called it “the most audacious attack of the war” and “a military and strategic game-changer.”
“Battered, beleaguered, tired and outnumbered, Ukrainians have, at minimal cost, in complete secrecy, and over vast distances, destroyed or damaged dozens, perhaps more, of Russia’s strategic bombers,” he said.
Front-line fighting and shelling grinds on
Fierce fighting has continued along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, and both sides have hit each other’s territory with deep strikes.
Russian forces shelled Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, killing three people and wounding 19 others, including two children, regional officials said Monday.
Also, a missile strike and shelling around the southern city of Zaporizhzhia killed five people and wounded nine others, officials said.