JAKARTA, January 18 -- The Netherlands says it is "outraged" by the execution of one its citizens in Indonesia for drug trafficking. Ang Kiem Soei, 52, was arrested in 2003 after police at Jakarta airport found 13.4 kg of cocaine hidden in his hang glider. The Netherlands says he was the first Dutch national to be executed abroad and has warned it will damage relations. Five other convicts from Indonesia, Malawi, Nigeria, Vietnam and Brazil, were executed on Sunday. Convicted of drugs charges, they faced a firing squad in Central Java province shortly after midnight local time. Five were executed on the island of Nusa Kambangan and the other one, a Vietnamese woman, was executed in the small central Javanese town of Boyolali. The Netherlands has also recalled its ambassador, after Foreign Minister Bert Koenders called the execution of Dutch citizen Ang Kiem Soe, "an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity". Indonesia has some of the world's toughest drug laws. The country resumed executions in 2013 after an unofficial four-year moratorium. The country's Attorney General Muhammad Prasetyo said "hopefully, this will have a deterrent effect".
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JAKARTA, January 13 -- Indonesian divers have retrieved voice recorder, key to determining why plane crashed, from bottom of Java Sea. Indonesian divers have pulled out the cockpit voice recorder from the sunken wreckage of an AirAsia passenger jet, a key step towards determining the cause of the crash that killed all 162 people aboard. The cockpit voice recorder, which retains the last two hours of conversation between the pilots and air traffic controllers, was found close to where the flight data recorder was recovered from the bottom of the Java Sea on Monday. "Today we have completed searching for the main things that we have been looking for," Rear Admiral Widodo, the commander of the navy's western fleet, told reporters after handing over the cockpit voice recorder to investigators on Tuesday. "But the team will still try to find the body of the plane in case there are still bodies inside." Together the black boxes, which are actually orange, contain a wealth of data that will be crucial for investigators piecing together the sequence of events that led to the Airbus A320-200 plunging into the sea. Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen, reporting from Jakarta, said the voice recorder was found 20m from where the flight data recorder was located and will be sent to the Indonesian capital to be analysed. "First they have to download all the data and then analyse. There is a lot of information on these instruments. On the voice recorder there are around two hours of conversations. It will probably take a couple of months before we really know what had happened," Vaessen said. The Airbus A320-200 airliner lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather conditions on December 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. The Indonesian meteorological agency has said that stormy weather likely caused the crash, but a definitive answer is impossible without the black box, which should contain the pilots' final words as well as various flight data. PARIS, January 11 -- US President Barack Obama will not be attending an anti-terrorism unity rally in Paris to commemorate victims of the recent terrorist attacks in the French capital, Agence France-Presse reported, but did not specify why the American leader would miss the event. Speaking on Friday in Knoxville, Tennessee, Obama expressed his solidarity with people of France and said that the United States was ready to provide any possible assistance to France to help the country overcome the consequences of terrorist attacks in Paris. A day earlier, the US president paid a visit to the French Embassy in Washington, where he signed a book of condolences and spoke with French diplomats. A number of European leaders expressed their readiness to join the rally in protest against Islamist terrorists’ actions. Heads of state and government from Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland were among the politicians saying they would join the rally for the national unity on French President Francois Hollande’s invitation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will lead his country’s delegation at the march on Sunday, according to Saturday’s statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, European Parliament President Martin Schulz, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also announced their plans to come to the French capital. Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko pledged to attend as well. Hollande called the rally on Friday, three days after the terrorist attacks, which saw killed in Paris seventeen people, including 10 staff members of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, four hostages taken at a kosher supermarket, and three policemen. Several dozen people were injured. On Wednesday morning, masked gunmen targeted an office of the Paris-based satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, which had earlier published caricature images of the Prophet Muhammed. As a result of the shooting, 12 people were killed, including 10 staff members and two policemen. Another 11 people were wounded. This was the deadliest attack in France in half a century. On Friday, a gunman took hostages at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris killing four of them. The gunman, later identified as Amedy Coulibaly, was killed by security forces. HAMBURG, January 11 -- A German newspaper in the northern port city of Hamburg that reprinted caricatures of Prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was the target of an arson attack, according to police. The regional tabloid daily, the Hamburger Morgenpost, was attacked on Sunday after it had splashed threeCharlie Hebdo cartoons on its front page after the massacre at the Paris publication, running the headline "This much freedom must be possible!" "Rocks and then a burning object were thrown through the window," a police spokesman told AFP news agency. "Two rooms on lower floors were damaged but the fire was put out quickly". No one was hurt in the attack, which police said occurred at about 01:20 GMT. Two people were detained, while state security has opened an investigation, police said. German news agency DPA reported that the attack had occurred from a courtyard of the building and hit the newspaper's archive room where some records were destroyed. It quoted a police spokeswoman as saying that the editorial team should be able to continue work in the building as the damage was relatively minor. Connection to Paris attacks Whether there was a connection between the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the attack was the "key question", the police spokesman said, adding that it was "too soon" to know for certain. Police declined to provide further information about the suspects. No one at the Hamburger Morgenpost, known locally as the MOPO and which has a circulation of around 91,000, could immediately be reached for comment. "Thick smoke is still hanging in the air, the police are looking for clues," the newspaper said in its online edition. Two gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, killing a total of 12 people including the paper's editor, Stéphane Charbonnier. Both men were killed Friday in a standoff with police. Several German newspapers had published the Charlie Hebdo Muhammad cartoons on their front pages on Thursday in a gesture of solidarity with the French cartoonists and in defence of free speech.
Around 2,200 security personnel will guard the route of the march, which will run three kilometres from the historic Place de la Republique to Place de la Nation in the east of the capital, the interior minister said, with snipers stationed on rooftops. British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were set to join, as well as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the king and queen of Jordan. Public transport will be free to ease access into and throughout Paris and international train operator Thalys said it was also cutting fares to the French capital on Sunday. JAKARTA, January 10 -- Passenger jet's tail recovered from ocean floor after two weeks of efforts hampered by rains, rough seas and heavy silt. Indonesian search and rescue teams have raised the tail of an AirAsia passenger jet that crashed nearly two weeks ago, but have yet to locate the "black box" flight recorders. The search for the recorders of Flight QZ8501, which crashed on December 28, continues. Their recovery is essential to finding out the details of the incident that killed 162 people on board. The tail was hoisted on Saturday from a depth of about 30 metres using inflatable bags that were attached to the rear of the Airbus A320 aircraft and a crane to lift it onto a rescue ship. Intermittent underwater ping-like sounds were picked up on Friday about a kilometre from where the tail was located. However, it was unclear if they were coming from the recorders located in the back of the aircraft. It was possible the signals were coming from another source. No metal was detected at the ping location, and Nurcahyo Utomo, a National Commission for Transportation Safety investigator, said the sounds could not be confirmed. The discovery of the tail on the ocean floor earlier this week was a major breakthrough in the slow-moving search that has been hampered by seasonal rains, rough seas and heavy silt from river run-off. Bodies found The last contact the pilots had with air traffic control, about halfway into their two-hour journey, indicated they were entering stormy weather. They asked to climb from 32,000ft to 38,000ft to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied permission because of heavy air traffic above them. Four minutes later, the aircraft dropped off the radar. Four additional bodies were recovered on Friday - two of them still strapped in their seats on the ocean floor - bringing the total to 48. Officials hope many of the remaining corpses will be found inside the fuselage, which has not yet been located by divers. Several large objects have been spotted in the area by sonar. On Friday, Ignasius Jonan, Indonesia's transportation minister, cracked down on five airlines, temporarily suspending 61 flights because they were flying routes on days without permits. Earlier, all AirAsia flights from Surabaya to Singapore, the path Flight QZ8501 was on when it went down on December 28, were suspended after it was discovered that the low-cost carrier was not authorised to fly on Sundays. Jonan also sanctioned nine more officials for allowing the plane to fly without permits, bringing the total to 16. SEOUL, January 10 -- At least three people died and almost one hundred were injured as a big fire broke out on Saturday morning at an apartment building in the South Korean city of Uijeongbu, north of Seoul, local media reported. According to Yonhap news agency, eight of the 97 injured were in critical condition. Rescue crews were now evacuating people through the roof, the agency said. The fire is reported to have erupted from a car parked on the ground floor of the building, blocking off the front entrance and preventing residents from evacuating. The police are searching for the cause of the fire, while fire crews are battling to bring the blaze under control and rescue the remaining residents. PARIS, January 10 -- Hayat Boumeddiene, said to be armed and dangerous, remains at large, amid plans to hold unity march in French capital.'
Boumeddiene, 26, described as "armed and dangerous", remained on the loose, police said. Boumeddiene has never been convicted of a crime, officials said, but judicial records obtained by Associated Press news agency say she was known to French internal security services, and once posed for a photo in her Islamic veil and holding a crossbow. The records show that she was also once interrogated by French officials about her reaction to assaults committed by al-Qaeda. "I don't have any opinion," she answered, according to the records, but immediately added that innocent people were being killed by the Americans and needed to be defended, and that information provided by the media was suspect. In the deadliest attack in France in decades, 17 people lost their lives in three days of violence that began with an an assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday and ended with Friday's dual hostage-taking at a print works outside Paris and a Jewish supermarket in the city. French security forces killed Said and Cherif Kouachi, the brothers behind the 12 magazine killings, after they took refuge in the print works. Police also killed Coulibaly, an associate of the one of the Kouachi brothers, after he planted explosives at the supermarket in a siege that claimed the lives of four hostages. AQAP claims attack Earlier, al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo killings, saying the shooting was an operation to teach the French the limits of freedom of expression. Abu Hareth al-Nezari, a senior member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), made the claim in an audio recording published online late on Friday. "Some French were not polite with the prophets and that was the reason why a few of the believers, who loved Allah and his prophet and loved martyrdom, went to them to teach them how to behave and how to be polite with the prophets and to teach them that the freedom of expression has limits and boundaries," Nezari says in the recording. He also warned France it would not enjoy security unless it stopped what he called a "war" on Islam. PARIS, January 9 -- A gunman and at least four of hostages he had taken at a kosher grocery store in east Paris have been killed following a police raid at the site. Police said that the gunman in Porte de Vincennes had threatened to kill the hostages if police launched an assault on two brothers who had been holding a hostage northeast of the capital. The Kouachi brothers were suspected to be behind the attack on a satirical magazine earlier this week an d were killed in a simultaneous police operation in Dammartin-en-Goele. The supermarket attacker is suspected of being the same gunman who killed a policewoman in a shooting in Montrouge in southern Paris on Thursday. Police had released the names of two suspects Amedy Coulibaly and his girlfriend Hayat Boumeddiene, who they say are wanted. A lockdown was in place in schools close to the siege site. French President Francois Hollande had earlier held a meeting with Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Friday amid the police operations. PARIS, January 9 -- At least one person was injured when a gunman opened fire at a kosher grocery store in eastern Paris on Friday and took at least five people hostage. The attacker was suspected of being the same gunman who killed a policewoman in a shooting in Montrouge in southern Paris on Thursday. A police source told AFP the suspect was linked to two brothers who massacred 12 people at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. Sources close to the investigation said shooting had erupted at Porte de Vincennes in the east of Paris on Friday afternoon. "It is the Montrouge shooter," said one of the sources, adding at least one person was reported injured. A helicopter hovered above as police swarmed to the area, asking people to remain at home. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was on his way to the scene. |
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