Tag: assassinations

Two Mexican candidates for mayor are shot dead in Mexico just hours apart – marking SEVEN political murders in the country this year ahead of election in June

Two mayoral candidates have been shot dead in the span of less than 24 hours in Mexico – marking the seventh political murders ahead of the June general elections.

Diego Pérez, who was running for office in the southern state of Chiapas, was found dead Thursday.

His body showed signs of torture and was left lying next to his wife and son, who were both wounded.

Pérez was the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s nominee for mayor of San Juan Cancuc.

‘We strongly call on the authorities to clarify these facts and punish those responsible,’ the Institutional Revolutionary Party said in a statement.

‘The government cannot continue denying reality: More than 110 acts of violence related to the electoral process demand that measures be taken to guarantee the safety of all and prevent organized crime from being the one who chooses on June 2, and not good citizens.’

Tomás Morales, who aspired to become the mayor of Chilapa, a municipality in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, was executed Wednesday night.

Keep reading

Widow, ex-prime minister and former police chief indicted in 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president

A judge in Haiti responsible for investigating the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise indicted his widow, Martine Moise, ex-prime minister Claude Joseph and the former chief of Haiti’s National Police, Leon Charles, among others, in a report released Monday.

The indictments are expected to further destabilize Haiti as it struggles with a surge in gang violence and recovers from a spate of violent protests demanding the resignation of current Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

Dozens of suspects were indicted in the 122-page report issued by Walther Wesser Voltaire, who is the fifth judge to lead the investigation after previous ones stepped down for various reasons, including fear of being killed.

Charles, who was police chief when Moise was killed and now serves as Haiti’s permanent representative to the Organization of the American States, faces the most serious charges: murder; attempted murder; possession and illegal carrying of weapons; conspiracy against the internal security of the state; and criminal association.

Keep reading

The Silence of the Damned

There is no effective health care system left in Gaza.

Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia.

Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia.

Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.”

Clinics, along with ambulances — 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank — have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016.

Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers. 

Israeli soldiers routinely enter hospitals to carry out forced evacuations — on Jan. 24, troops entered al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis and demanded doctors and displaced Palestinians leave — as well as round up detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical staff.

On Jan. 30, disguised as hospital workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept. 

Keep reading

Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“William Pepper was James Earl Ray’s lawyer in the trial for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and even after Ray’s conviction and death, Pepper continues to adamantly argue Ray’s innocence. This myth-shattering exposé is a revised, updated, and heavily expanded volume of Pepper’s original bestselling and critically acclaimed book Orders to Kill, with twenty-six years of additional research included.

The result reveals dramatic new details of the night of the murder, the trial, and why Ray was chosen to take the fall for an evil conspiracy—a government-sanctioned assassination of our nation’s greatest leader. The plan, according to Pepper, was for a team of United States Army Special Forces snipers to kill King, but just as they were taking aim, a backup civilian assassin pulled the trigger. “

String of US and Israeli Assassinations Further Inflame the Middle East

On December 25, 2023, Razi Mousavi, a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was assassinated by an Israeli airstrike in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Mousavi was close to former IRGC Quds force commander, Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in 2020 by US President Donald Trump in Baghdad. Israeli airstrikes in Syria earlier in December also killed two other Iranian generals.

On January 2, an Israeli drone strike assassinated Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut, Lebanon along with six others.

Al-Arouri was the deputy chief of the Hamas political bureau, and one of the founding members of Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. On October 31, Israeli forces destroyed al-Arouri’s house in Aroura near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

On January 3, at least 93 people were killed in twin bombings in Kerman, Iran, with 284 wounded, including children. The crowd there was gathered to mark the fourth anniversary of the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani. 

On January 4, ISIS claimed responsibility for the two explosions in a statement posted on its affiliate Telegram channels, and said two ISIS members had detonated explosive belts in the crowd in Kerman.

Experts pointed to the Islamic State branch based in neighboring Afghanistan, known as ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K. Tehran has alleged that ISIS-K has been behind many foiled plots in the last five years. Most of those arrested were Iranians, Central Asians, or Afghans from the Afghanistan-based affiliate’s network. 

On January 4, a US airstrike assassinated Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi in central Baghdad, Iraq. The Iraqi deputy commander was killed on Palestine Street, at the headquarters of an Iraqi military group, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, which has claimed several attacks on US forces.

Hezbollah al-Nujaba falls under the command of the Iraqi army, and had played a vital role in the defeat of ISIS in Iraq. The group immediately condemned the assassination of al-Saidi, and said the US-Iraqi military agreement had been violated.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed that US forces carried out an airstrike in Baghdad, killing a military commander, but excused the killing because al-Saidi was backed by Iran. 

Iraqis in the streets promised revenge against the US after the assassination. “No American soldier shall stay in Iraq!” one man yelled, firing his gun into the air.

Besides the 2,500 US troops in Iraq, which were invited to Iraq initially, there are 900 US troops in Syria illegally occupying the most productive oil wells in the northeast.

Now that the US-supported genocide on Gaza has killed well over 20,000 Palestinians, local groups in Iraq and Syria have been attacking US troops there in an effort to drive them out.

US officials have ordered about 120 attacks since October 17, usually using drones or rockets against groups in Iraq. The Pentagon acknowledged they had killed a number of “militants”.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, had said last year he backed the need for US troops in Iraq, but condemned the US attack in Iraq, which killed an Iraqi service member and injured 18 other people, including civilians.

Keep reading

Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“The New York Times Bestseller. about the search for the assassins of JFK. “Garrison’s book presents the most powerful detailed case yet made that President Kennedy’s assassination was the product of a conspiracy, and that the plotters and key operators came not from the Mob, but the CIA.”—Norman Mailer

More than fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his murder continues to haunt the American psyche and stands as a turning point in our nation’s history.

The Warren Commission rushed out its report in 1964, but questions continue to linger: Was there a conspiracy? Was there a coup at the highest levels of government?

On March 1, 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison shocked the world by arresting local businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy to murder the president. His alleged co-conspirator, David Ferrie, had been found dead a few days before. Garrison charged that elements of the United States government, in particular the CIA, were behind the crime. From the beginning, his probe was virulently attacked in the media and violently denounced from Washington. His office was infiltrated and sabotaged, and witnesses disappeared and died strangely. Eventually, Shaw was acquitted after the briefest of jury deliberation and the only prosecution ever brought for the murder of President Kennedy was over.

On the Trail of the Assassins—the primary source material for Oliver Stone’s hit film JFK—is Garrison’s own account of his investigations into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy, and his prosecution of Clay Shaw in the trial that followed.”

SECRET INDIAN MEMO ORDERED “CONCRETE MEASURES” AGAINST HARDEEP SINGH NIJJAR TWO MONTHS BEFORE HIS ASSASSINATION IN CANADA

THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT instructed its consulates in North America to launch a “sophisticated crackdown scheme” against Sikh diaspora organizations in Western countries, according to a secret memorandum issued in April 2023 by India’s Ministry of External Affairs. The memo, which was obtained by The Intercept, lists several Sikh dissidents under investigation by India’s intelligence agencies, including the Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

“Concrete measures shall be adopted to hold the suspects accountable,” the memo says. Nijjar was murdered in Vancouver in June, two months after being named as a target in the document, a killing the Canadian government said was ordered by Indian intelligence.

The memo addresses India’s growing concerns about its reputation due to activism from Sikh dissident organizations and portrays its political enemies as extremist or even terrorist organizations. Titled “Action Points on Khalistan Extremism,” using the name Sikh activists use for a separatist state, the document lists several Sikh activist organizations it blames for engaging in “anti-India propaganda,” as well as acts of “arson and vandalization” targeting Indian interests in North America.

The document instructs officials at its consulates to cooperate with Indian intelligence agencies to confront the groups Sikhs for Justice, Babbar Khalsa International, Sikh Youth of America, Sikh Coordination Committee East Coast, World Sikh Parliament, and Shiromani Akali Dal Amritsar America. It suggests that Nijjar and several other “suspects” are affiliated with one of these groups, Babbar Khalsa International. Babbar Khalsa International is proscribed as a terrorist organization in the U.S. and Canada, but the other organizations named in the document are considered legal in both countries.

A leader of one of another of the listed groups, Sikhs for Justice, was the target of an Indian assassination plot, according to federal prosecutors in the U.S. The indictment, unsealed last week, accused Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, of working with Indian officials to kill Sikhs for Justice general counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen based in New York.

The leaked April memo from India’s Ministry of External Affairs does not explicitly order the killings of Sikh activists. Instead, it calls on Indian consular officials operating in the U.S. and Canada to work in cooperation with India’s Research and Analysis Wing, a foreign intelligence agency; the National Investigation Agency, a counterterror police force; and the Intelligence Bureau, an internal security agency akin to the FBI. Aside from Nijjar, a number of people accused in the document of having ties with BKI are believed to be based in Pakistan or currently incarcerated in India.

The Indian government did not respond to a request for comment. While the U.S. and Canada have both now charged India with orchestrating assassinations against Sikhs in the West, the secret document obtained by The Intercept is the first public evidence showing that the Indian government was targeting these specific Sikh diaspora organizations and dissidents.

Those involved in Sikh diaspora advocacy said that the Indian government frequently characterizes any political activity by Sikh separatist organizations as militant or extremist in nature.

“The Indian government and media consistently aim to manufacture a narrative that describes any type of political advocacy for Khalistan or Sikh sovereignty as ‘Sikh extremism’ as a pretext to justify a repressive security-based response,” said Prabjot Singh, an activist and editor of the Panth-Punjab Project, a digital platform focusing on Sikh politics and sociopolitical issues. “It’s important to recognize that this is a strategy that India employs in Punjab to justify crackdowns on Sikh political organizing, while misusing diplomatic resources abroad to try and enlist other countries as partners in this effort.”

Keep reading

Recommended reading…

One of the best resources on the JFK assassination. Get it HERE

“The explosive search for the truth about who killed JFK, “the final word until 2039-when government files on the case can be unlocked.” (Kirkus)

Will we ever know the truth about the Kennedy assassination? In Crossfire, Jim Marrs demonstrates that the facts are all there-they just need to be pieced together. Offering a wealth of evidence, including rare photos, documents, and interviews, Marrs, a veteran Texas journalist, reveals the telltale signs of the conspiracy: early government manipulation of the famous Zapruder film, falsification of evidence, the intimidation of witnesses after the assassination, the theft of Oswald’s identity during the countdown to the tragedy, and much more.

Meticulously researched and brimming with new information, Crossfire is sure to remain the most comprehensive account of this epochal American crime.”

FACEBOOK APPROVED AN ISRAELI AD CALLING FOR ASSASSINATION OF PRO-PALESTINE ACTIVIST

A SERIES OF advertisements dehumanizing and calling for violence against Palestinians, intended to test Facebook’s content moderation standards, were all approved by the social network, according to materials shared with The Intercept.

The submitted ads, in both Hebrew and Arabic, included flagrant violations of policies for Facebook and its parent company Meta. Some contained violent content directly calling for the murder of Palestinian civilians, like ads demanding a “holocaust for the Palestinians” and to wipe out “Gazan women and children and the elderly.” Other posts, like those describing kids from Gaza as “future terrorists” and a reference to “Arab pigs,” contained dehumanizing language.

“The approval of these ads is just the latest in a series of Meta’s failures towards the Palestinian people,” Nadim Nashif, founder of the Palestinian social media research and advocacy group 7amleh, which submitted the test ads, told The Intercept. “Throughout this crisis, we have seen a continued pattern of Meta’s clear bias and discrimination against Palestinians.”

7amleh’s idea to test Facebook’s machine-learning censorship apparatus arose last month, when Nashif discovered an ad on his Facebook feed explicitly calling for the assassination of American activist Paul Larudee, a co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement. Facebook’s automatic translation of the text ad read: “It’s time to assassinate Paul Larudi [sic], the anti-Semitic and ‘human rights’ terrorist from the United States.” Nashif reported the ad to Facebook, and it was taken down.

The ad had been placed by Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli group founded by former Israel Defense Force and intelligence officers to combat “anti-Israeli organizations” whose funding comes from purportedly antisemitic sources, according to its website. (Neither Larudee nor Ad Kan immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Calling for the assassination of a political activist is a violation of Facebook’s advertising rules. That the post sponsored by Ad Kan appeared on the platform indicates Facebook approved it despite those rules. The ad likely passed through filtering by Facebook’s automated process, based on machine-learning, that allows its global advertising business to operate at a rapid clip.

Keep reading