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Spanish floods’ death toll climbs to 205; shock turns to anger, frustration

CHIVA, SPAIN — The death toll from historic flash floods in Spain climbed to least 205 people Friday, with many more believed to be missing, as the initial shock gave way to anger, frustration and a wave of solidarity.

Spanish emergency authorities said 202 of the victims were in the Valencia region, and officials warned that more rain was expected in the next days.

The damage from the storm Tuesday and Wednesday recalled the aftermath of a tsunami, with survivors left to pick up the pieces as they mourned loved ones lost in Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory.

Many streets were still blocked by piled-up vehicles and debris, in some cases trapping residents in their homes. Some places still don’t have electricity, running water or stable telephone connections.

“The situation is unbelievable. It’s a disaster and there is very little help,” said Emilio Cuartero, a resident of Masanasa, on the outskirts of Valencia. “We need machinery, cranes, so that the sites can be accessed. We need a lot of help. And bread and water.”

In Chiva, residents were busy Friday clearing debris from mud-filled streets. The Valencian town received more rain in eight hours on Tuesday than it had in the preceding 20 months, and water overflowed a gully that crosses the town, tearing up roads and walls of houses.

Mayor Amparo Fort told RNE radio, “Entire houses have disappeared. We don’t know if there were people inside or not.”

So far 205 bodies have been recovered — 202 in Valencia, two in the Castilla La Mancha region and one more in Andalusia. Members of the security forces and soldiers are busy searching for an unknown number of missing people, many feared to still be trapped in wrecked vehicles or flooded garages.

“I have been there all my life, all my memories are there, my parents lived there … and now in one night it is all gone,” Chiva resident Juan Vicente Perez told The Associated Press near the place he lost his home. “If we had waited five more minutes, we would not be here in this world.”

Before-and-after satellite images of the city of Valencia illustrated the scale of the catastrophe, showing the transformation of the Mediterranean metropolis into a landscape inundated with muddy waters. The V-33 highway was completely covered in the brown of a thick layer of mud.

The tragedy has unleashed a wave of local solidarity. Residents in communities such as Paiporta — where at least 62 people died — and Catarroja have been walking kilometers in sticky mud to Valencia to get supplies, passing neighbors from unaffected areas who are bringing water, essential products and shovels or brooms to help remove the mud. The number of people coming to help is so high that the authorities have asked them not to drive there because they block the roads needed by the emergency services.

In addition to the contributions of volunteers, associations such as the Red Cross and town councils are distributing food.

And as authorities repeat over and over, more storms are expected. The Spanish weather agency issued alerts for strong rains in Tarragona and Catalonia, as well as part of the Balearic Islands.

Meanwhile, flood survivors and volunteers are engaged in the titanic task of clearing an omnipresent layer of dense mud. The storm cut power and water services on Tuesday night, but about 85% of 155,000 affected customers had their power back on by Friday, the utility said in a statement.

“This is a disaster. There are a lot of elderly people who don’t have medicine. There are children who don’t have food. We don’t have milk, we don’t have water. We have no access to anything,” a resident of Alfafar, one of the most affected towns in south Valencia, told state television station TVE. “No one even came to warn us on the first day.”

Juan Ramon Adsuara, the mayor of Alfafar, said the aid isn’t nearly enough for residents trapped in an “extreme situation.”

“There are people living with corpses at home. It’s very sad. We are organizing ourselves, but we are running out of everything,” he told reporters. “We go with vans to Valencia, we buy, and we come back, but here we are totally forgotten.”

Rushing water turned narrow streets into death traps and spawned rivers that tore through homes and businesses, leaving many uninhabitable. Some shops have been looted, and the authorities have arrested 50 people.

Social networks have channeled the needs of those affected. Some posted images of missing people in the hope of getting information about their whereabouts, while others launched initiatives such as Suport Mutu — or Mutual Support — which connects requests for help with people who are offering it. Others organized collections of basic goods throughout the country or launched fundraisers.
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Hungary’s Orban says Georgia’s election was fair despite EU criticism

US and EU officials are calling for an investigation into recent elections in Georgia that resulted in the Pro-Russian Georgian Dream party winning a fourth term as the country’s ruling party. But that didn’t stop Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban from congratulating the party during a visit to the Georgian capital Tbilisi. Ani Chkhikvadze has the story.
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Jitters in Europe ahead of US elections

Europe is bracing for former President Donald Trump’s potential return to power — even as his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, remains a mostly unknown quantity. Many Europeans believe much is at stake in the nail-biting U.S. elections: from NATO and the transatlantic alliance to Russia’s war on Ukraine, trade relations and the future of their own democracies. Lisa Bryant reports from Paris. 
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Moscow says it destroyed 83 Ukrainian drones

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its defenses shot down 83 Ukrainian drones over six regions early on November 1.

“36 drones were shot down over the Kursk region, 20 over the Bryansk region, 12 over Crimea, eight over the Voronezh region, four over the Oryol region, and three over the Belgorod region,” the ministry said in a statement on its Telegram channel.

Separately, Aleksandr Bogomaz, the governor of Bryansk, said one person was wounded when a Ukrainian drone crashed into an apartment building in the city of Bryansk.

In the Stavropol region, a drone fell on an oil depot in the city of Svetlograd, regional Governor Vladimir Vladimirov said on Telegram. In Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa, a Russian missile struck a fire station, wounding two firefighters, regional Governor Oleh Kiper reported.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s air force said its defenses shot down 31 Russian drones and one missile.   
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Ukraine doubles down on psychological campaign against North Korean troops

Washington — As North Korean troops prepare to join Russian forces in the war on Ukraine, Kyiv is stepping up a psychological warfare campaign to target the North Korean soldiers, a high-ranking Ukraine official said.

The effort is liable to get a boost from a team of South Korean military observers that Seoul’s defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, said this week will be going to Ukraine to watch and analyze the North Korean troops on the battlefield.

Last week, the Ukrainian military intelligence service-run project “I Want to Live” released a Korean-language video message on YouTube and X. The project also posted a Korean-language text message on Telegram.

The messages urged North Korean soldiers to surrender, arguing that they do not have to “meaninglessly die on the land of another country.” It also offered to provide food, shelters and medical services.

Andrii Kovalenko, the head of the Center for Combating Disinformation under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told VOA Ukrainian on Wednesday that “in the future, additional videos featuring North Koreans will be published.”

“The North Koreans will undergo training in modern warfare and then be used in actual combat,” Kovalenko said. “We (the Center for Combating Disinformation) are actively involved in identifying the individuals who have arrived and the units they are joining, as well as gathering evidence of their presence in Russia, their likely participation in combat against the Ukrainian army, and their presence in temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine.”

Influence campaign

Ukraine has been running similar psychological operations toward the Russian soldiers since the beginning of the Russian invasion, U.S. experts said.

“Ukraine has been doing that with the Russians early on in the war,” Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, told VOA Korean on the phone Thursday. “They got a lot of Russians to defect, and I suspect they will try to do the same things with the North Koreans.”

Bennett added that drones can also be used for sending messages in leaflets and in audio form to North Korean soldiers in the war zone.

David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel who served on the Combined Forces Command of the U.S and South Korea, said this could be “a great opportunity” to learn how to employ psychological tactics on North Korean forces in the time of war.

“Bombing and gunfire doesn’t happen 24/7,” he told VOA Korean by phone on Wednesday. “Military operations are also characterized by large amounts of boredom and inactivity, where soldiers are waiting for something to happen, and this is the time when loudspeakers and leaflets can really have an effect, because those messages give them something to think about.”

Earlier this week, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed in a phone call “to intensify the intelligence and expertise exchange” and “to develop an action strategy and a list of countermeasures,” according to a statement released by the Ukrainian presidential office.

Some experts in South Korea said the team of South Korean military observers headed to Ukraine will likely include psychological warfare strategists who can offer advice to the Ukrainian officials.

Cho Han-bum, a senior research fellow at the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification, said psychological warfare could be a real threat to the North Korean army.

“In the case of North Korean soldiers, they now have been mobilized for a war without any justification,” he told VOA Korean by phone on Tuesday. “It is hardly likely that they have a strong will or high morale.”

South Korea’s role

Cho said the South Korean government can help Ukraine develop psychological tactics against North Korean soldiers, since the country “has the know-how of a long-term psychological war with North Korea.”

Ban Kil-joo is a senior research professor at Korea University’s Ilmin International Relations Institute. He told VOA Korean in a phone interview Tuesday that psychological warfare could help weaken the military cohesiveness between Russia and North Korea.

“The Ukrainians don’t know much about North Korea, don’t understand the North Korean culture, as we do,” Ban said. “We can provide indirect support in a more social sense, rather than military or operational support.”

Ban added that it is important for the South Korean team to be “well-integrated with the Ukrainian forces through its supporting role,” to achieve the desired political and operational effect of a psychological campaign.

Other experts, however, are not convinced that psychological warfare will be effective to persuade North Korean soldiers to surrender.

Mykola Polishchuk, a Ukrainian author who wrote the book Northern Korea in Simple Words, said Ukraine’s counterpropaganda will not work with North Korean soldiers.

“As for North Koreans, they are not particularly politicized,” Polishchuk told VOA Ukrainian. “These individuals have little interest in politics.”

Robert Rapson, a former charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul from 2018 to 2021, told VOA Korean that South Korea should carefully make a decision about whether to be engaged in Ukraine’s psychological warfare.

“If the ROK [Republic of Korea] does decide to deploy technical personnel to Ukraine to solely monitor and help advise the Ukraine military on matters related to North Korean troops deployed to the region, they would need to ensure they do not acquire, inadvertently or otherwise, status as combatants,” he said. “There are, of course, clear risks to ROK personnel whether they’re combatants or not.”

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has deepened military ties with North Korea. North Korea has exported dozens of ballistic missiles and more than 18,000 containers of munitions and munitions-related material to Russia since the invasion, according to the U.S. State Department.

In June, the two countries signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement mandating immediate military assistance if either of them is attacked by a third country.

VOA Korean’s Kim Hyungjin contributed to this report.  
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Mystery surrounds detention of Wagner Group operative in Chad  

A shadowy Russian political operator with close ties to the notorious Wagner Group and its late founder Yevgeny Prigozhin is detained in Chad on unexplained charges, adding a fresh chapter to his long career of mystery and intrigue.  

Russian officials and state-controlled media maintain that Maxim Shugaley, who was detained on September 19 along with two other Russians, is an innocent sociologist who was in Chad to deliver humanitarian aid and participate in a pro-Russian event in the capital, N’Djamena.    

But years of reporting on his exploits in countries as far-flung as Afghanistan and Libya present a picture of a master propagandist who has worked behind the scenes to advance the Kremlin’s interests with some of the world’s least reputable regimes. 

Shugaley, president of the St. Petersburg-based Foundation for National Values Protection, or FNZC, was arrested at N’Djamena’s airport “without explanation,” according to an account this week in the Russian news agency RIA Novosty. 

The report quoted the press attache at Russia’s mission in Chad saying the three Russians are being well-treated and that she looks forward to their early release. But it offered no explanation of why they were detained and little on why they were there. 

However the Russian daily Kommersant and a Paris-based weekly Jeune Afrique reported in late September and early October that Chadian military intelligence was behind Shugaley’s arrest, and said he was accused of espionage and influence activities on behalf of the Wagner Group.   

Kommersant said Shugaley maintains his innocence and “had no knowledge of Wagner activities in N’Djamena” — this despite his reputed role in directing communications and hybrid warfare activities by the Kremlin-financed mercenary, which according to the U.S. State Department plotted to overthrow the government of Chad last year. 

The Russian newspaper cited people close to Shugaley as saying that the “sociologist’s mission” in Chad was “strictly humanitarian.” It added that a suitcase in his possession at the time of his arrest “was full of souvenirs and cookies to be handed over at the pro-Russian rally in N’Djamena.”

Citing a source familiar with the case, Central African Republic-based Corbeau news Centrafrique reported that Shugaley and his companions were arrested for trying to “infiltrate the Chadian security services.”  

Whatever the truth of those reports, they are not out of character with previous accounts of Shugaley’s career and his own postings on Telegram — the Wagner Group’s favored messaging app — where he runs his own channel with almost 18,000 subscribers. 

In 2019, the FNZC organization that Shugaley heads was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for serving in a covert operation to manipulate African politics in favor of the Kremlin by “sponsoring phony election monitoring missions,” and promoting “disinformation operations.”   

The Wall Street Journal profiled Shugaley in 2021 as a “spy” and a “shadowy figure” pursuing the Kremlin’s strategic goals across Africa.   

His latest post on Telegram, dated August 23, laments the death of Prigozhin, killed in a suspicious helicopter crash a year earlier. Shugaley calls the Wagner founder a “Russian hero” who is “very much needed now in the Kursk Oblast.” The post coincided with Ukraine’s military intrusion into Russia’s Kursk region. 

In earlier posts dating back to May of this year, Shugaley reported he was in Chad to observe the presidential elections, which he describes as successful, “despite the U.S. destabilizing efforts.” 

In June, Shugaley said in a Telegram post that he was in Chad “for the second time in less than two months” to prepare the introduction of a Russian House in N’Djamena, which he said was a “natural development” given the Chadians “anti-French sentiments and mistrust of the U.S. actions in the region.” 

In April 2023, The Washington Post reported that leaked U.S. intelligence documents showed the Wagner Group was trying to recruit “Chadian rebels and establish a training site for 300 fighters in the neighboring Central African Republic as part of an evolving plot to topple the Chadian government.”  

The European Union sanctioned Shugaley in February 2023 for operating “as the public relations arm” of the Wagner Group. 

Shugaley’s role “includes directing propaganda and disinformation campaigns in favor of the Wagner Group, particularly to improve the reputation of Wagner and support its deployment, as well as interfering in a covert manner on behalf of the Wagner group in the various countries where the group is active,” the EU said.  

In May 2019, Shugaley and his interpreter Samer Sueifan were jailed for 18 months in Libya on charges of espionage and election interference.  

Libyan officials said the mission of the two was to “recruit Libyans to gather information and to train them on how to influence any future Libyan elections.”      

Shugaley credited Prigozhin for his freedom in interviews with Russian media and in social media posts, saying that under his order, Wagner troops stormed the prison in Tripoli in December 2020 to free him. Prigozhin later commissioned an action movie lauding Shugaley and Wagner. His company, Concord, paid a $250,000 bonus to Shugaley and Sueifan.    

Shugaley is a common figure in Central Africa Republic, a territory where Wagner mercenaries have been deeply embedded in the security system since 2018.  

In February, the U.S. State Department issued a report titled, “The Wagner Group Atrocities in Africa: Lies and Truth,” which documented violations committed by the group in CAR, Libya, Sudan, and Mali.      

The State Department said, “In CAR, Wagner forces used indiscriminate killing, abductions, and rape to gain control of a key mining area near the city of Bambari, with survivors describing the attacks in detail.”    

A BBC documentary in 2019 reported that “at least six candidates were offered money by Russians in the lead-up to the 2018 presidential elections in Madagascar.”   

The BBC reported that Shugaley was among those “offering money” to various actors to sway the votes in favor of a Kremlin-backed candidate.    

According to the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, after the death of Prigozhin, Shugaley partnered with the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was released from a U.S. jail in 2022 in a prisoner swap for the American basketball star Brittney Griner.  

The group said Shugaley assisted Bout in winning a seat in the regional assembly of the city of Ulyanovsk in September 2023 as part of an ultra-nationalist party.    

”In updates posted on the Telegram channel, Shugaley has reported on discussing plans with Bout to export military utility vehicles and aircraft to Africa,” the report said.  
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Germany closes 3 Iranian consulates following Iran’s execution of German Iranian national

Germany will close three Iranian consulates in response to Iran’s announcement of the execution of Jamshid Sharmahd, a German Iranian national and a U.S. resident, earlier this week.

“We have repeatedly and unequivocally made it clear to Tehran that the execution of a German citizen will have serious consequences,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Thursday in announcing the closure of the consulates in Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg.

Germany will allow Iran’s embassy in Berlin to remain open. And Germany will “continue to maintain our diplomatic channels and our embassy in Tehran,” Baerbock said.

“The fact that this assassination took place in the light of the latest developments in the Middle East shows that [Iran’s] dictatorial, unjust regime … does not act according to normal diplomatic logic,” she said. “It is not without reason that our diplomatic relations are already at an all-time low.”

Sharmahd, 69, was accused of a role in the deadly bombing of a mosque in Shiraz in 2008. He was convicted of the capital offense of “corruption on Earth,” a term Iranian authorities use to refer to a broad range of offenses, including those related to Islamic morals.

His family has denied the charges against him.

In an exclusive interview with VOA’s Persian Service, Sharmahd’s daughter Ghazaleh Sharmahd warned that her father’s execution on Monday would not silence the movement for justice.

“They made a huge mistake, thinking that by killing my father and the people of Iran, these movements would end. But they were wrong — killing only makes these movements stronger, more intense and more energized. … The Islamic Republic made a huge mistake,” she said.

Ghazaleh Sharmahd also said she is seeking the truth of her father’s death. She told VOA that the Islamic Republic informed the U.S. and Germany about her father’s death.

“They accept the words of terrorists and send me their condolences?” she said. “They have a duty to investigate what really happened.”

VOA’s Persian Service contributed to this report. Some information came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Turkish winemaking booms in face of Islamist policies

Turkey is seeing a boom in winemaking, with hundreds of new producers emerging over the last few years. The trend runs counter the Islamist, conservative policies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that have included restrictions and taxes on alcohol. Dorian Jones reports from Manisa, Turkey.
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Accused of interference in Georgia, Russia pumps up anti-US propaganda 

Tbilisi and Moscow have exchanged harsh rhetoric about the results of the October 26 parliamentary elections in Georgia that brought thousands to the streets protesting the victory of the ruling Georgian Dream party.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, who is aligned with the pro-Western opposition, accused Russia of running a “special operation” to “falsify” the election results in favor of the ruling party, which is widely seen as increasingly pro-Kremlin and authoritarian.

In response, Russia denied involvement and framed the United States and European Union as destabilizing powers. In doing so, Moscow’s network of officials and state-owned outlets engaged in disinformation and conspiracy theories, going so far as to allege on a state-controlled news agency that the U.S. and Ukraine were secretly deploying snipers to shoot at protesters in Tbilisi to escalate the situation.

Zourabichvili also told Reuters that Russian “methodology and the support of most probably Russian FSB [Federal Security Service] types is shown in this election.”

“The propaganda that was used ahead of the election … was a direct duplication, a copy-paste, of Russian clips and videos used at the time of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s election,” said Zourabichvili, whose position as president is largely ceremonial.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russian interference in the election and accused Zourabichvili of “attempting to destabilize the situation.”

Peskov had earlier alleged it was the European countries that “tried to influence the outcome of this vote.”

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called Zourabichvili a “puppet president” who “refused to accept the election and went against the Constitution by calling for a coup.”

“The standard practice in such cases is removal from office and arrest,” Medvedev wrote on X.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the U.S. of engaging in “neo-colonialism” after U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller warned the Georgian government could face “consequences” if it did not “walk back its anti-democratic actions and return to its Euro-Atlantic path.”

Russian state media went further, spreading a conspiracy theory that the West was seeking to foment violence in Georgia.

“In their attempts to knock off balance the internal political situation in Georgia following the October 26 election and set off another color revolution, Westerners stop at nothing,” the Russian state-owned Sputnik news agency said, quoting unnamed “sources in the region.”

“Ukraine-trained snipers are arriving in the republic to organize provocations during mass protests,” Russia’s state-owned Tass news agency reported Monday, citing a “regional official familiar with the matter.”

The term “color revolution” was widely adopted after the 2004-05 Orange Revolution in Ukraine was sparked by a corruption-ridden presidential runoff that saw the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, emerge victorious.

Russia typically uses the term when accusing the West of orchestrating movements to destabilize or overthrow Kremlin-preferred governments.

In the months leading up to Georgia’s parliamentary poll, Russian state media ran reports alleging the U.S. was seeking to foment a color revolution or “a Ukraine-style coup.”

In July, Russia’s state-run Sputnik news agency cited an anonymous Russian intelligence official who claimed U.S. authorities were planning a “sacred sacrifice” from among the protest participants.

The disinformation narrative in Sputnik’s report reflects a well-worn Kremlin conspiracy theory going back to the 2013-14 pro-Europe rallies in Ukraine, when the Russians claimed that American-trained Georgian “mercenaries” were responsible for shooting protesters in Kyiv during the 2014 demonstrations at the city’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, widely known as the Maidan or Independence Square.

Russian state media and top officials, including Putin, falsely claimed that the U.S. organized protests in Ukraine to propagate a coup.

That narrative included a conspiracy theory that Victoria Nuland, an American diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, had ordered “American specialists” to lead the “snipers, who shot people at the Maidan.”

Amid ongoing protests in Georgia, the U.S. and the EU have joined calls from international and local observers to investigate alleged election-related violations.

On Thursday, Georgian authorities launched an investigation into election-fraud allegations.

The EU and U.S. have repeatedly warned Georgia about what they call its “democratic backsliding,” even freezing financial support to the country’s government, focusing instead on supporting civil society initiatives.

In June, Georgian Dream officials signed into law a bill that required nongovernmental agencies receiving at least 20% of their funding from abroad to label themselves as foreign agents “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.”

In response, Brussels paused Georgia’s accession process to the EU, saying the foreign agent law is incompatible with EU membership.

Georgia’s opposition has nicknamed Tbilisi’s new foreign agent law the “Russian law,” a reference to similar legislation enacted in Russia in 2012 that has been used to silence civil society and independent media.

The EU also warned it may freeze visa-free travel with Georgia if it finds the parliamentary poll neither free nor fair.
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Hundreds in Turkey protest arrest, ouster of opposition mayor

ISTANBUL — Hundreds gathered Thursday in Istanbul to protest the arrest and removal from office of a mayor from Turkey’s main opposition party for his alleged links to a banned Kurdish militant group.

Ahmet Ozer, mayor of Istanbul’s Esenyurt district and a member of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, was detained on Wednesday by anti-terrorist police over his alleged connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Turkey’s government on Thursday replaced Ozer with Istanbul’s deputy governor, a move the CHP’s leader, Ozgur Ozel and other politicians described as a “coup.”

The mayor’s arrest comes as Turkey is debating a tentative peace process to end a 40-year conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state that has led to tens of thousands of deaths.

Demonstrators filled a square in Esenyurt after the government banned a rally outside the municipality building. Some carried banners that read: “(We want) an elected mayor not an appointed mayor” and called for the resignation of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

“In our view, this (government), which acts against the law and violates the constitution, has carried out a political coup. We will never accept it,” said Tulay Hatimogullari, the leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party, whose supporters joined the rally in a show of solidarity.

Ozel, whose CHP made significant gains in local elections earlier this year, called for early elections.

Ozer, 64, is a former academic originally from Van in eastern Turkey. He was elected mayor of Esenyurt, a western suburb in Istanbul’s European side, in March local elections.

The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said an investigation found Ozer had maintained contacts with PKK figures for more than 10 years, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency.

Politicians and members of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish movement have frequently been targeted over alleged links to the PKK, which is considered a terror organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union.

Legislators have been stripped of their parliamentary seats and mayors removed from office. Several lawmakers as well as thousands of party members have been jailed on terror-related charges since 2016.

Other opposition parties have been largely unscathed but the CHP metropolitan mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, is currently appealing a prison sentence and political ban imposed by a court in December 2022 for “insulting” members of Turkey’s election board in 2019.

Imamoglu accused Erdogan’s government of “plotting a dirty game” to snatch Esenyurt municipality away from the opposition “by declaring [Ozer] a terrorist for fictitious reasons.”
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Moroccan authorities detain human rights activist who accused government of ‘blackmailing’ France

RABAT, Morocco — A Moroccan economist known for his work defending human rights was detained after criticizing the government in remarks posted on social media during a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to the North African kingdom. 

Prosecutors apprehended Fouad Abdelmoumni in Casablanca on Wednesday and announced he was under investigation on suspicion of disseminating false information and accusing others of crimes on social media, Morocco’s state news agency reported. If charged and convicted, he could face up to five years in prison under cybercrime statutes. 

“This arbitrary arrest is part of a series of harassments targeting Abdelmoumni, as a measure aimed at retaliating against his bold positions in expressing his opinions and defending human rights,” the Moroccan Association in Support of Political Prisoners said in a statement Wednesday. “This arrest represents a further escalation in the authorities’ policy of repression against human rights and political activists in the country.” 

Abdelmoumni, a former political prisoner, is the group’s coordinator. 

While Macron toured Rabat with Moroccan leaders including King Mohammed VI, the activist alleged in a post that Morocco was attempting to “blackmail” France using methods including espionage and withholding cooperation on managing illegal immigration. 

Abdelmoumni is yet to be officially arraigned. When he appears in court on Friday, he will likely be charged with crimes related to the post, one of his attorneys, Souad Brahma, said. 

In Morocco, authorities can hold people under investigation for 48 hours without charging them. 

Brahma said Abdelmoumni was arrested for expressing his opinion and called his detention a violation of his right to freedom of expression. She said she was denied a chance to visit him on Thursday despite receiving authorization from the court. Officials have not responded to allegations that the arrest was politically motivated. 

Macron throughout his visit referred to opening a new chapter in relations between France and Morocco after years of strain. 

The causes of friction included the 2021 “Pegasus Affair,” in which Amnesty International and the Paris-based nonprofit group Forbidden Stories published a report alleging that Moroccan authorities had used the Israeli software Pegasus to infiltrate the electronic devices of human rights activists including Abdelmoumni and politicians all the way up to Macron. 

Morocco strenuously denied the allegations and sued, claiming defamation. 

Abdelmoumni, 66, has been prominent in defending human rights since he was imprisoned and tortured alongside other left-wing activists during King Hassan II’s era of repression known as the “Years of Lead.” He has publicly supported pro-democracy efforts in the country, including during the Arab Spring and Morocco’s 2017 “Hirak” movement. 

After the investigation into Pegasus software, Abdelmoumni was among the activists profiled in a 2022 Human Rights Watch report on Morocco’s targeting of critics. 

The report said an anonymous person distributed a video of him and his then-partner-now-wife having sex, likely shot from a hidden camera inside his home’s air conditioner. In Morocco, non-marital sex is a crime and information about their relationship later appeared in pro-government media as part of an effort that Abdelmoumni said was designed to intimidate him. 

This week, he participated in a vigil demanding justice for a Moroccan nationalist who was “disappeared” in France in 1965, and appeared at a courthouse where Morocco’s ex-human rights minister was facing trial. He was going to a meeting of the Moroccan Association for the Support of Political Prisoners when he was apprehended. 

Macron’s political party helped push through a 2023 resolution in the European Union’s Parliament condemning human rights abuses in Morocco. But the two countries have recently deepened political and economic ties. This week, they announced economic agreements and lucrative contracts on projects ranging from transportation to desalination infrastructure, and Macron reiterated his support for Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara. 

During his three-day visit, Macron did not mention human rights in speeches at a business forum, to the country’s French community or at the country’s parliament.
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