Tag: detention

China detains South Africans for ‘propaganda videos’

A total of 20 people sent to China by a religiously inspired charity have been detained, most of them British or South African, the organisation said, adding some had been accused of watching “propaganda videos”.

Gift of the Givers, a disaster relief charity based in Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, said 20 of its associates were detained Friday at Ordos airport in China’s Inner Mongolia region.

It said 10 were South Africans, nine British, and one an Indian national.

“No reasons were given for the arrest. The Chinese, now trying to find reasons for the detention suggested that some members were linked to a terror group,” it added.

As of Tuesday 11 had been released, it added on a Facebook page. “The other nine are being held without charge at a detention centre on the accusation that they were watching propaganda videos.”

The public security ministry in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for comment by AFP.

Gift of the Givers describes itself on its website as being inspired by Muhammed Saffer Effendi al Jerrahi, a master of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam.

The group, which has provided medical equipment and training in multiple countries in Asia and Africa, says its staff are “facilitators of Almighty God’s Aid… distributing it from Him to all of mankind. This is made possible only by His Grace and Permission.”

“God Almighty Exists,” it adds. “This is a Gracious God to Whom belong the Most Beautiful Attributes.”

Chinese regulations passed in 2000 ban foreigners from all missionary activity including “distributing religious propaganda materials.”

The ruling Communist party, suspicious of overseas groups, has in recent months tightened controls on foreign charities working in the country.

State-run media have accused some foreign groups of attempting to foment revolution and overthrow the party.

Police too have cracked down on foreign missionaries in China, detaining a Canadian Christian couple near the North Korean border last year.

Beijing also blames what it calls Islamist terrorists for ongoing violence in the mainly Muslim far western region of Xinjiang.

The South Africans were originally detained “with no access to communication or legal representation” and included several doctors, Gift of the Givers said.

The group’s planned 47-day tour of China had gone “horribly wrong”, it added.

A spokeswoman for the British embassy in Beijing said Wednesday that 11 British citizens had been held in northern China, two of whom held South African dual nationality.

Officials were seeking “further clarifications” on the detentions, spokeswoman Natasha Simpson added.

South African foreign affairs ministry spokesman Nelson Kgwete told local television that the government had been informed “about the arrest of 10 South African citizens in China” and the embassy was providing consular assistance.

Source: AFP

Israel tells Africans to leave or face prison

Israel is telling black Africans they must leave now or face an indefinite stay in prison.

Israeli authorities are sending letters to the first of 45,000 Eritrean and Sudanese refugees, informing them they have 30 days to accept Israel’s offer of $3,500 in cash and a one-way ticket home or to an unnamed third country in Africa, or face incarceration at Saharonim prison.

Israeli leaders have proclaimed that their tough approach — building a fence along its border, denying work permits for illegal migrants, forcing them into a detention center in the desert — may ultimately save lives by dissuading migrants from attempting a perilous journey. Critics of the Israeli policy counter that a country built by refugees should be more accepting of those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.

But these days, even liberal Europe is considering a more muscular approach. The European Union began a push Monday for U.N. authorization to deploy military force in the Mediterranean to stop migrant smuggling ships.

The new measures to press the Africans to leave Israel comes at a time of heightened fears among the refugees, who were stunned last month by a widely circulated video allegedly showing three Eritreans who left Israel killed by Islamic State militants in Libya. Friends and relatives said they had traveled there in a bid to reach Europe.

“We saw the video, but we thought maybe it wasn’t true, maybe it was just a hoax,” said Aman Beyene, an Eritrean asylum seeker who has spent 14 months at an Israeli detention center.

“Then we spoke to an Eritrean boy who had witnessed the killings, and we knew it was true,” Beyene said.

The 38-year-old Eritrean accountant sat at a picnic table in the dirt parking lot of the Holot detention facility, a compound of single-story cement-block dormitories housing 2,000 Africans, surrounded by a fence spooled with razor wire in the Negev desert.

Beyene spoke slowly as he recalled watching the video showing a man thought to be his friend Tesfay Kidane, 29, dressed in an orange jumpsuit beheaded on a beach in Libya by Muslim extremists. He said Kidane felt despondent being cooped at the Holot facility, so he accepted the Israelis’ offer to be flown to a third country — likely Uganda or Rwanda — and from there made his way to Libya, where he was kidnapped by the Islamic State.

Though the detainees at Holot are free to leave the compound during the day, the nearest city is an hour’s bus ride away and the men are forbidden to work. If they fail to return by nightfall, they are sent to a prison across the street.

Interviews with Eritreans and Sudanese at Holot suggest that many are still dreaming of reaching Europe through the chaos of Libya — despite knowing that more than 1,800 Africans have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea this year and others have been taken captive by the Islamic State.

“Being beheaded by ISIS or sinking on a boat is scary,” said Mutasim Ali, 28, who arrived in Israel in 2009 from the Darfur region in Sudan and has spent the past year detained in the detention center. “But you can’t really stay here, wasting your life, doing nothing.”

He pointed to the men like him who spend their days milling about in circles, staring at their mobile phones, waiting for the next meal.

Before Israel began cracking down on African migrants a few years ago, the Africans were highly visible in bustling cities, working in kitchens and doing menial labor. There are still neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv filled with Africans. Many Israelis complained they were being “invaded.”

Source: Washington Post

Did Gray intentionally injure himself?

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.

The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe.

Gray was found unconscious in the wagon when it arrived at a police station on April 12. The 25-year-old had suffered a spinal injury and died a week later, touching off waves of protests across Baltimore, capped by a riot Monday in which hundreds of angry residents torched buildings, looted stores and pelted police officers with rocks.

Meanwhile City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby says Freddie Gray received his critical injuries in Baltimore police custody and has charged all six officers involved in his death.

The state medical examiner’s office turned over Gray’s autopsy on Friday morning, a day after the police turned over their investigation into Gray’s death.

Source: Washington Post