South African court sentences rhino horn smuggler to 40 years

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- A South African court on Friday sentenced a Thai national to 40 years in prison for his part in a syndicate that smuggled dozens of rhino horns out of the country, the stiffest sentence ever handed down for such a crime in South Africa.

Two government ministers praised the court for sending a strong message that rhino horn smuggling would not be tolerated. But critics questioned why Chumlong Lemtongthai was convicted while charges were dropped against a South African farmer accused of involvement in the crime.

South Africa, home to about 90% of Africa's rhinoceroses, has faced an alarming rise in poaching with 488 of the animals illegally killed this year by Oct. 30, compared with 13 in 2007. According to the Department of Environmental Affairs, 2.4% of South Africa's rhinos were poached last year, with the rate increasing this year, posing a serious threat of extinction to rhinos.

The previous harshest sentence, 29 years, was handed down for poaching in August to two foreigners, Gearson Cosa, 35, and Ali Nkuna, 25, convicted of killing a rhino cow and her calf in the Kruger National Park, where around half the incidences of rhino poaching in South Africa occur.

Study: Pot legalization in U.S. states could hurt Mexican cartels

MEXICO CITY -- This may not weigh heavily on the minds of voters in Seattle, but if Washington and two other U.S. states decide to legalize marijuana in next week's election, the effect on drug traffickers in Mexico could be enormous.

Such is the suggestion of a new study by a Mexican think tank.

"It could be the biggest structural blow that [Mexican] drug trafficking has experienced in a generation," Alejandro Hope, security expert with the Mexican Competitiveness Institute, said in presenting the report.

Producing and distributing marijuana inside the U.S. would supply a less expensive and better quality drug to the millions of American who smoke it, Hope said. Demand for Mexican pot would decline, cutting into cartels' profits by 22% to 30%, the study calculates.

The consequences would be most dramatic, Hope added, for the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, which is based in western Mexico and controls most of the marijuana production.

It is estimated that around one-third of Mexican drug gangs' income is from marijuana, surpassed only and narrowly by cocaine.

Arrest in Mexican reporter's killing met with doubt

MEXICO CITY -- Veracruz state authorities announced an arrest in the killing of a well-known reporter, but the slain woman's colleagues and friends greeted the news with skepticism and scorn.

Regina Martinez, a veteran reporter for the muckraking national newsmagazine Proceso, was killed in her home in the Veracruz capital, Xalapa, about six months ago. She was one of more than half a dozen journalists and former journalists who have been slain or gone missing in Veracruz in the last two years. Local reporters --  many of whom have fled to Mexico City in fear of their lives --  blame drug traffickers and corrupt authorities.

Late Tuesday, the Veracruz state prosecutor announced the arrest of a two-bit thief, Jose Antonio Hernandez, and said he had confessed to beating Martinez to death. The motive was robbery, prosecutor Amadeo Flores Espinosa said, and a second suspect remains at large.

With that, the authorities in Veracruz declared the case solved. But many of those close to Martinez, along with press freedom advocates, were not buying it.

Scotland Yard may move its famous headquarters

This post has been corrected. See the note below for details.

LONDON -– Scotland Yard wants to pull up stakes.

One of the world’s most famous police forces unveiled plans Tuesday to sell off its iconic office tower with the revolving “New Scotland Yard” sign out front, a well-known landmark seen in countless cutaway movie shots and tourist photo albums. London’s crime-fighters are hoping to move into new digs in a smaller building around the corner, closer to government offices.

The reason for the proposed relocation is elementary: to save money.

Times are tough in Britain, which is undergoing its most brutal spending cuts in at least a generation, and the capital’s famous black-hatted bobbies have not been spared. The Yard -- also known as the Met, short for Metropolitan Police Service -- is trying to slash $800 million from its budget over the next 2 1/2  years.

That has meant looking at selling the family silver, or in this case, some of the force’s large property holdings -- stations, operation centers and the like. The current headquarters, which the Yard has occupied since 1967, costs nearly $18 million a year to maintain and is in need of an $80-million upgrade, making it an “expensive luxury,” Deputy Commissioner Craig Mackey told city officials Tuesday.

14 kidnapped Central American migrants found in Mexico

 

MEXICO CITY -- As a group of mothers from Honduras, Guatemala and other countries travels across Mexico in search of missing relatives, the Mexican navy on Monday announced that it had freed 14 Central Americans kidnapped by suspected drug traffickers.

Thousands of migrants from Central America go missing every year as they attempt to reach the United States through Mexico. They are often kidnapped by Mexican gangsters, held for ransom, forced to work for cartels or on marijuana farms, or killed. Many turn up in hidden mass graves.

Naval marines acting on what they described as an anonymous tip over the weekend discovered 14 migrants being held against their will in a shack in the town of Altamira, in the violent border state of Tamaulipas (link in Spanish). The state has been the scene of several massacres of Central American and Mexican migrants.

The rescued men and women looked for the most part young and skinny, judging by a video released by the navy. They told authorities they had been kidnapped in different places in Tamaulipas and were from Central America, the navy said. The navy did not offer a breakdown of nationalities and said their "migratory status" would be corroborated. They stand a good chance of being deported.

Two men who apparently were holding the migrants were arrested, the navy said.

Monday's announcement from the navy gives hope to groups searching for the missing that more  victims may still be alive.

A caravan of mothers  this month embarked on a 19-day, 14-state journey through Mexico. All 40 or so mothers are looking for children, spouses or other relatives who vanished on their way north. Through the efforts of the organizers -- they've staged a caravan every of the last several years -- and other migrant-rights activists, a few missing relatives have been found and reunited with mothers.

Human rights groups say government neglect and refusal to recognize the problem of the missing result in  families left with the task of searching on their own, sometimes going state to state to offer DNA evidence when bodies turn up.

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-- Tracy Wilkinson

Photo: Central American migrants ride on top of a train in Veracruz state, one of the precarious ways in which they try to reach the U.S., in June 2011. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. returns more than 4,000 stolen antiquities to Mexico

MEXICO CITY -- U.S. officials Thursday returned more than 4,000 pieces of stolen and looted pre-Columbian art and artifacts to the Mexican government, the result of 11 investigations. 

The recovery of the items, which include statues, hatchets and pottery, came about in different ways, according to information from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

In a Montana case, Homeland Security special agents kept tabs on an art dealer who had paid members of the Tarahumara, a tribe in northwestern Mexico, to rob items from ancestral burial caves in Chihuahua’s Copper Canyon area. The idea was to consign the items in a local gallery.

In a 2009 undercover case, agents discovered a Fort Stockton, Texas, resident in possession of 200 artifacts that had gone missing a year earlier from a museum in the Mexican border state of Coahuila.

A couple of copper hatchets were discovered at San Diego International Airport, having arrived from Sweden. At the Chicago Port of Entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers happened upon a Nayarit figurine.

These far-flung discoveries will come as no surprise to Mexican officials and others who follow the widespread illicit trade in Mexican cultural artifacts.

Noah Charney, the founding director of the nonprofit Assn. for Research Into Crimes Against Art, or ARCA, noted last year that Mexico had reported more than 2 million art objects stolen between 1997 and 2010, according to figures from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology.

Charney wrote that the yearly average of stolen items in Mexico surpasses the yearly average in Italy -- the country with the most stolen art reported each year in Europe -- by a factor of five.

The comparison, he added, is probably somewhat flawed, since the Italian pieces tend to be more substantial works and Mexican antiquities “may include fragments or very low-value” items. But the problem is serious enough that the Mexican ambassador to France last year asked for UNESCO to consider strengthening its 1970 Convention on Protection of Cultural Property, which set international standards to help prevent the plunder of precious cultural items.

The return of the Mexican items occurred during a “repatriation ceremony” at the Mexican Consulate in the border city of El Paso.

Tensions over border issues have been running particularly high of late after a number of shootings of Mexicans by U.S. Border Patrol agents. In statements Thursday, officials emphasized the healthy partnership between the two countries, at least when it comes to hunting down and returning stolen art.

Homeland Security Investigations Assistant Director Janice Ayala touted the “teamwork and cooperation” between the countries, while Mexican Consul General Jacob Prado thanked U.S. officials for returning items “which are a part of the cultural heritage and the historical memory of the people of Mexico.”

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-- Richard Fausset

 

Suspect in Libya consulate attack killed in Cairo, reports say

CAIRO -- A gunman reportedly linked to the militant attack last month on the U.S. mission in Libya was killed in a shootout with police in Cairo on Wednesday, according Egyptian state TV and independent news media.  

The Egypt Independent newspaper reported that the man, whom security officials identified only as Hazem, was described as a terrorist. The newspaper and the state TV website said the heavily armed suspect was killed after a long gun battle with police in the Nasr City section of Cairo.

The reports could not be independently confirmed, and there were conflicting reports over the incident.

“Security authorities said they had acquired information implicating the man of involvement in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi,” the newspaper reported. The attack on the consulate in September killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

State TV and the Egypt Independent reported that the suspect died in an apartment during the gunfight and a fire. Police reportedly seized bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition from the scene.

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Rogue French trader loses appeal, faces prison, colossal damages 

-- Jeffrey Fleishman and Reem Abdellatif 

Rogue French trader loses appeal, faces prison, colossal damages

This post has been updated. See the notes below.

PARIS -- A French appeals court Wednesday upheld the conviction of former bank trader Jerome Kerviel for committing one of the biggest financial frauds in history.

Kerviel, 35, was ordered to spend three years in prison and to pay back his former employer, French bank Societe Generale, a whopping $6.4 billion in damages to cover its costs from his trades.

During a four-week hearing in June, Kerviel, described by the public prosecutor as a "perverse manipulator," had asked the Paris appeal court to overturn his conviction in October 2010 for breach of trust, forgery and entering false data. On Wednesday, the court rejected his appeal.

The former trader did not profit personally from making unauthorized bets on the futures markets to the tune of nearly $65 billion, and he is not believed to have the means to pay the damages. He has always maintained that his bosses knew what he was doing and that they turned a blind eye to his trading as long as he was making money.

However, the appeals court threw out his defense and decided Kerviel was "the sole creator, inventor and user of a fraudulent system that caused these damages to Societe Generale."

Egypt freezes assets of ex-presidential candidate and Mubarak ally

CAIRO — The Egyptian government on Sunday froze the financial assets of former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafik and his three daughters as authorities move to try the retired general over his alleged business dealings with the sons of deposed leader Hosni Mubarak.

Shafik, who was Mubarak's last prime minister, is wanted for graft and is expected to face trial on Dec. 2. Immediately after losing the presidential race to Mohamed Morsi in June, Shafik left Egypt for the United Arab Emirates. He has not returned home and authorities have announced he may be tried in absentia. 

Last month, Egyptian authorities called for Shafik’s arrest in a case involving Mubarak's sons, Gamal and Alaa, and four retired generals. The charges center on Shafik's role as chairman in the state’s housing association in the 1990s, when he allegedly sold publicly owned lands below market value to Mubarak's sons. Judge Osama Alsaeedy referred Shafik to criminal court on charges of squandering public funds.

Shafik, a staunch Mubarak ally who failed to calm the uprising that brought down the regime last year, has also been ordered to face trial on charges along with 10 other former officials who were accused of corruption in Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation. The government did not disclose the amount of Shafik’s assets that have been frozen.

The former pilot and aviation minister spoke from Dubai in September on a television interview to deny the accusations. He said the charges were "politically motivated" and that he would not return to Egypt until investigations were completed and his innocence was proven.

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— Reem Abdellatif

Photo: Then-presidential candidate Ahmed Shafik speaks to the media during a news conference at his office in Cairo on May 26. Credit: Khalil Hamra, file / Associated Press.

Guantanamo terrorism convictions proving vulnerable on appeal

Salim Hamdan has been home in his native Yemen for nearly four years since completing his sentence at Guantanamo Bay for providing "material support to terrorism" -- six years of domestic service to Osama bin Laden as gardener, bodyguard and driver.

One of only seven Guantanamo captives to be sentenced for alleged war crimes by the Pentagon's military commissions, Hamdan had his conviction vacated this week by a unanimous federal appeals court panel on grounds that the assistance he provided the late Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan wasn't defined as a war crime until five years after his 2001 capture.

Hamdan is already at liberty and moving on with his life, his pro bono attorney reported Thursday after informing his client by telephone that his appeal was successful. The 40-year-old taxi driver with a fourth-grade education was pleased to be cleansed of the "war criminal" label but doesn't plan to pursue an uphill battle for compensation, said the attorney, Harry Schneider of Seattle.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government was still reviewing the ruling and would have no comment.

The ruling will serve as binding precedent in the appeals of other Guantanamo detainees convicted for war crimes ex post facto, Schneider predicted. The next likely beneficiary of the tribunal's overreaching prosecutions, defense attorneys say, could be defiant Al Qaeda propagandist Ali Hamza Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence at the U.S. military prison in southern Cuba.

Within hours of the decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Australian convict David Hicks' lawyer announced that he would seek to have his client's guilty plea revoked and conditions of his release to Australia stricken. Attorney Stephen Kenny also said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Co. that he would pursue compensation for Hicks and an investigation of whether the Canberra government aided and abetted his wrongful imprisonment.

A kangaroo skinner who trained at an Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan before fleeing the October 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Hicks was arrested trying to cross into Pakistan and held at Guantanamo for six years. He was released to his homeland as part of his plea deal, which prohibits him from appealing his case or disclosing details of his experience for monetary gain.

Bahlul, a Yemeni like Hamdan, also was convicted at his uncontested 2008 trial of solicitation of murder in a recruiting video he produced for Al Qaeda. David Glazier, an international law professor at Loyola Law School, said legal scholars began speculating that the solicitation charge might be ruled beyond the commissions' jurisdiction after the same Washington appeals court that threw out material support as a legal charge canceled oral arguments in the Bahlul appeal just before it issued the Hamdan decision.

"There's been some discussion in the blogosphere about whether or not this means the end of conspiracy as well," said Glazier, who was a career Navy surface warfare officer before earning his law degree.

Only one of the seven Guantanamo convictions has involved crimes recognized as a violation of the international law of war: the murder, attempted murder and spying charges against Canadian Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was recently transferred to Canadian custody to serve out the six years left on his term.

Prosecutors at the military commissions have relied on material support and conspiracy to get convictions or plea bargains in the few completed cases, but Glazier argues that those "inchoate offenses" aren't considered war crimes under international law. Only after Congress passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act did the Guantanamo tribunal have jurisdiction to try suspects for those crimes, said the appeals court panel, which is made up entirely of Republican appointees.

J. Wells Dixon, senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided legal representation to hundreds of the nearly 800 men detained at Guantanamo since 2002, predicted that "conspiracy is the next military commissions charge on the chopping block."

"The Hamdan decision is significant because it is an illustration of the inherent problems in creating a second-rate system of justice that we make up as we go along," he said of the commissions, the original version of which was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2006, prompting a hurried redo, the Military Commissions Act, three months later.

Five "high-value detainees" facing death penalty trials for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have been in the Guantanamo courtroom this week, bringing pretrial motions and theatrics to the forum.

In the first prosecution on charges widely accepted as war crimes, Army Col. James Pohl, the presiding judge, has been inundated with peripheral considerations, such as whether self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should be allowed to wear a camouflage hunter's vest in the courtroom to project a warrior image.

Pohl has also had to rule on whether mold and rodent infestation at the defense attorneys work space on the remote base compromises their ability to prepare for trial, and whether any mention of mistreatment during CIA interrogations risks revealing national security secrets.

"Regardless of the underlying conduct and the quality of evidence the government presents at trial, there is no certainty that those convictions will stand" federal civilian court review, Dixon said. "For the Obama administration to continue to pursue military commissions charges is a real gamble."

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Follow Carol J. Williams at www.twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

Photo: Artist's sketch shows alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, right, speaking with a member of his legal team during a hearing at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Credit: Janet Hamlin