HONG KONG — Tens of thousands of protesters converged on Saturday on the satellite town in Hong Kong where an armed mob attacked some of them last weekend, defying a police order and confronting riot police officers, who fired tear gas to disperse the crowds.
The protest in the district, Yuen Long, is in response to an assault there by more than 100 men on demonstrators and others in a train station there on Sunday night. The attackers, who were wearing white T-shirts and carrying sticks and metal bars, injured at least 45 people.
As hundreds of demonstrators in black shirts arrived at the station where the attack occurred, Cary Lo, a 37-year-old compliance officer and community officer for the Democratic Party of Hong Kong, said they had gathered there because they believed there was safety in numbers.
“We have come here because we still support all the actions of the people here today: anti-extradition, anti-violence and the core values of Hong Kong,” he said. He held a yellow umbrella, a symbol of the pro-democracy protest movement.
As protesters tried to advance toward a police line, riot police officers fired canisters of tear gas at them, forcing them back. A leading pro-democracy lawmaker, Roy Kwong, said the tear gas was being fired near a home for the elderly.
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The authorities had warned that a march in Yuen Long would threaten public security and risk clashes between protesters and residents.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
“It’s an elderly home,” he shouted at the police. “If an elderly person dies, you need to be responsible.”
Another group of demonstrators was blocked by riot police officers as the crowd neared a low-rise village where gang members were thought to have fled after last Sunday’s mob attack.
Most businesses along the protest route and in Yuen Long’s otherwise bustling malls shut down as the demonstrators marched through the area. Many protesters gathered around the town’s police station, throwing “ghost money” — a type of fake money usually meant for the dead — at the building.
The Hong Kong police have been criticized for their slow response to the mob attack on Sunday, and they did not detain anyone in Yuen Long that night. They have since arrested 12 men in connection with the attack, including some accused of having connections with the gangs known as triads.
Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung, the No. 2 official in Hong Kong, apologized on Friday for the police response. But in an indication of divisions between the police and the government, some officers posted images online late Friday saying that Mr. Cheung did not speak for them, and that his words undermined their work. A letter from the Junior Police Officers’ Association “severely condemned” Mr. Cheung’s comments.
The authorities had warned that a march in Yuen Long would threaten public security and risk clashes between protesters and residents. To skirt the ban, some protesters suggested alternate reasons for going to Yuen Long: shopping, jogging, playing Pokemon Go or even, most sarcastically, holding a memorial for Li Peng, the recently deceased ex-premier of China who was loathed by many for his role in crushing the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
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Men armed with sticks and poles on Sunday outside a train station in Yuen Long.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Among those attending the protest was Leonard Cheng, the president of Lingnan University, who said he wanted “to know and understand the situation because many students are here.” He warned students away from violence, saying, “Please run if you see danger.”
Yuen Long, which sits near fish and shrimp farms across a bay from the mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen, has both old villages and urban new towns, which were built in the 1970s and ’80s to handle Hong Kong’s population growth. For many years, dating back to when Hong Kong was a British colony, the authorities have trodden carefully with the village residents.
Descendants of people who lived in the villages in the late 19th century, when Britain took over the area, are still given special land rights and representation in elected bodies — privileges seen as unfair by many in the wider population.
Eddie Chu, a pro-democracy lawmaker, warned protesters this week to avoid villages, graves and ancestral halls in the area. Any such incursion, he wrote on Facebook, would help justify the arguments of Junius Ho, a pro-establishment politician from the area. Mr. Ho was seen with men in white T-shirts on the night of the train station attack, and he later said that Yuen Long needed to be defended from protesters. Soon after the attack, the graves of Mr. Ho’s parents were vandalized.
The wave of protests sweeping Hong Kong began earlier this year, targeting a government proposal, since shelved, that would allow extraditions to mainland China. The demands have since grown to include broader democracy and an independent investigation into allegations that the police used excessive force against demonstrators.
Earlier this week, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense said the military, which has several thousand troops based in Hong Kong, could be called in if the police were unable to maintain order. Hong Kong officials have had the right to ask for military intervention ever since the territory was returned to Chinese rule, but they have repeatedly said that they have no plans to take such a drastic step.
A 19-year-old US tourist has confessed to the murder of an Italian policeman, Italian media said on Saturday.
The tourist was travelling with an 18-year-old friend, who has also been arrested for alleged involvement in the killing.
Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, was stabbed to death in central Rome in the early hours of Friday morning, just weeks after returning from his honeymoon.
He was called to the scene after reports of a robbery.
Italian media initially said the murder suspects were North African.
What happened?
The young men were allegedly in the Trastevere area trying to buy drugs.
They are said to have stolen a rucksack from a drug dealer who had sold them fake product, according to Italian news agency Ansa.
They reportedly offered to bring it back to him, if he paid them $100 (£124; €111).
As they waited, they were approached by Rega and a colleague as part of a plain-clothed operation because the police had been tipped off about the bag exchange, Ansa reported.
A brawl ensued, during which Rega was stabbed multiple times. He was taken to hospital but died of his injuries.
The two Americans were picked up at a hotel by police on Friday morning.
Vice-Brigadier Rega had been married only 43 days and had returned from his honeymoon just this week.
"Mario was a lovely lad," Sandro Ottaviani, commander of Rome's Piazza Farnese Carabinieri station, was quoted as saying by Ansa.
"He never held back at work and he was a figurehead for the whole district. He always helped everyone. He did voluntary work, accompanying sick people to Lourdes and Loreto. Every Tuesday he went to Termini train station to feed the needy."
His funeral will be held on Monday, in the same church in which he was married.
The killing shocked Italy and prompted tributes from across the country.
LONDON — For the first time in Britain's tortuous Brexit saga, the true believers are running the show.
Boris Johnson became prime minister this week with a sweeping purge of the Cabinet and bringing in his own cast of Brexit hard-liners.
No sooner had he swept into No. 10 Downing St., Johnson started getting the band back together. His inner circle now bears a striking resemblance to the team that led the original 2016 Brexit referendum campaign to leave the European Union.
Some of these "euroskeptic" crusaders flanked Johnson in Parliament on Wednesday, cheering him on as he gave his first speech to the House of Commons.
Boris Johnson holds up a Cornish pasty — a traditional savory British pastry — during the launch of the Brexit campaign in Truro on May 11, 2016.Darren Staples / Reuters file
"Our mission is to deliver Brexit," the prime minister said in his trademark blustering style, which supporters say masks a sharp intellect. Leaving the E.U., Johnson promised, would help make "this country the greatest place on Earth."
So the Brexiteers finally own Brexit, taking the helm of the revolution they started three years ago. But will they fare any better than Theresa May, the former prime minister whose efforts ended in failure and humiliation?
Johnson will face many of the same intractable obstacles she did, and some commentators believe he will struggle to leave the E.U. on the current divorce date of Oct. 31. With that in mind, one theory is that the prime minister has built his team to trigger and win an early general election as soon as this fall.
"I think that strategy is entirely conceivable because it's hard to see what else he can do," said Anand Menon, director of The U.K. in a Changing Europe, a London-based think tank.
For years, Johnson and his allies criticized May, who repeatedly failed to persuade British lawmakers to support the plan she negotiated with Europe. As the Brexiteers often reminded her, she was a convert, campaigning in the 2016 referendum to remain in Europe, only switching sides later on.
July 24, 201901:00
During the race to replace her, Johnson said he was willing to take the United Kingdom out of Europe without a deal, a commitment many experts decry as reckless in that it could lead to economic catastrophe, and shortages of food, medicine and basic supplies.
Johnson caused uproar across the political spectrum by suggesting he could force through this "no-deal" Brexit by temporarily suspending Parliament — a radical departure from democratic norms.
Once in power, he orchestrated what was one of the most brutal Cabinet reshuffles in decades, with 17 out of 30 ministers either being fired or jumping before they were pushed.
"This wasn't just a change of personnel, this was a regime change," Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said. "The way it was done and the extent of the culling really was intended to make it clear to the public that there's a new kid in town who is going to do things very differently."
Nick Boles, who quit as Conservative lawmaker in April, went further, telling the BBC on Thursday that, "what this establishes beyond all doubt is that the Conservative Party has now been fully taken over, top to bottom, by the hard right."
Dominic Raab at the Foreign and Commonwealth building in London on WednesdayDan Kitwood / Getty Images
Johnson's new foreign secretary is Dominic Raab, who resigned as May's Brexit chief last year because he said her deal was too soft. He's perhaps better known for once calling feminists "obnoxious bigots."
The new interior minister is Priti Patel, another staunch Brexiteer, who at one time wanted to bring back the death penalty — an outlier opinion in Britain, which abolished capital punishment in 1965. She was forced to resign from a previous government role in 2017 after holding undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials while saying she was on vacation.
Michael Gove, who campaigned alongside Johnson in 2016, is in charge of "no-deal" preparation at the Cabinet Office. And Dominic Cummings, the cerebral, eccentric director of the Brexit campaign, who was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a recent TV dramatization, is Johnson's de facto chief of staff.
The only "remainer" given a top job is the new chancellor of the exchequer, Sajid Javid, whose job it is to run the economy. But he now supports leaving the E.U., too.
The Cabinet has been praised for its racial diversity. Patel and Javid both have parents who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s, from Uganda and Pakistan respectively.
There are plenty in Johnson's team who did vote to remain in the referendum, but most were given minor roles.
They have less than 100 days to negotiate a new Brexit deal. May's plan took 18 months to thrash out, and European officials have said repeatedly it's their final offer.
If Johnson were to persuade the Europeans to change their minds, perhaps deploying the charisma his supporters adore, his next problem would be the British Parliament, which has so far blocked every course of action available.
Johnson's Conservatives are in a fragile position, governing with a majority of just three in the House of Commons. Perhaps not the best time, some have suggested, to fire more than a dozen moderates from his Cabinet, some of whom have already pledged to thwart Johnson's stated willingness for "no-deal."
Boris Johnson and members of his government during his first Cabinet meeting as prime minister on Thursday. Aaron Chown / AFP - Getty Images
By purging so many members of May's team, Johnson "may be making a rod for his own back," Meg Russell, a politics professor at University College London, said. "They will now have the freedom to vote against his policy."
"The hard-Brexit supporters are at one end of an ideological spectrum," Russell added. "But the people who he's fired are more centrist, and it's much, much easier for those people to join forces with the opposition."
These realities have led some to wonder whether Johnson is in fact not really focused on Brexit, but instead is preparing to call an early election.
Johnson knows he faces two major obstacles: European officials who say they won't budge on May's deal, and British lawmakers who won't let him leave without one.
Casting himself as a man "standing up for the British people" against these "twin evils" might be a potent electoral message, Phil Syrpis, a professor of E.U. law at Bristol University, said in a series of tweets.
This may well be nonsense (it was ever thus...); but PM Johnson seems to have a plan. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but it will be difficult to stop. 1/
Through this prism, Johnson's assembled band of Brexit devotees perhaps begins to make more sense.
In an election, they might prove effective at swallowing up millions of votes from those who voted to leave Europe three years ago. That would also effectively neutralize the Brexit Party, lead by Donald Trump favorite Nigel Farage, which has threatened to outflank the Conservatives from the right.
It might also steal a march on the opposition Labour Party, which is often criticized as having a confusing policy on Brexit, and other pro-E.U. parties who might split one another's votes.
The winner of any election would have almost no time to do anything before the Brexit deadline. It's far from certain that the 27 remaining E.U. leaders would grant Britain yet another extension, following 11th hour postponements in March and April.
"God knows what an election would do to the Brexit timetable," Menon, who is also a professor at Kings College London, said.
GLENTIES, Ireland (Reuters) - The question of the unification of Ireland and British-ruled Northern Ireland will inevitably arise if Britain leaves the European Union without a divorce deal on Oct. 31, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said.
FILE PHOTO: Ireland's Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar arrives to take part in a European Union leaders summit, in Brussels, Belgium July 2, 2019. Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Pool via REUTERS
He also warned that a so-called hard Brexit could undermine Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom.
His comments on Friday prompted a sharp rebuke from Northern Ireland’s largest pro-British party, the Democratic Unionist Party, whose member of parliament Ian Paisley said the Irish government’s language was “unhelpful and unnecessarily aggressive.”
Asked at a politics forum if the Irish government intended to begin to publicly plan for a united Ireland, Varadkar said it did not at present as it would be seen as provocative by pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland.
“But in the event of a hard Brexit, those questions do arise,” he said.
“If Britain takes Northern Ireland out of the European Union against the wishes of the majority of people in Northern Ireland – takes away their European citizenship and undermines the Good Friday Agreement - in doing so, those questions will arise, whether we like it or not,” Varadkar said at the MacGill Summer School conference in the northwest of Ireland.
“We are going to have to be ready for that.”
In the 2016 referendum, 56 percent in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU.
Over 3,600 people died in three decades of violence between Irish nationalists seeking a united Ireland and the British security forces and pro-British “unionists”.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the violence, foresees the holding of referendums on both sides of the border on uniting the island if London and Dublin see public support for that. The British government says it does not believe there is sufficient support now.
Varadkar also suggested voters in Scotland, where 62 percent voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, might make a new push for independence.
“Ironically one of the things that could really undermine the union - the United Kingdom union - is a hard Brexit, both for Northern Ireland and for Scotland. But that is a problem that they are going to have to face,” Varadkar said.
Reporting by Conor Humphries; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Janet Lawrence
At least two people were killed and 16 injured, including three American and other athletes at the world swimming championships, after an internal balcony at a South Korean nightclub collapsed Saturday.
USA Water Polo told the Associated Press that Kaleigh Gilchrist, a female water polo player, suffered a deep left leg laceration that required immediate surgery at a hospital. The other two injured Americans are also water polo players and suffered minor injuries.
Gilchrist, 27, is from Newport Beach, Calif.
“This is an awful tragedy,” said Christopher Ramsey, CEO of USA Water Polo. “Players from our men's and women's teams were celebrating the women's world championship victory when the collapse occurred at a public club. Our hearts go out to the victims of the crash and their families.”
“This is an awful tragedy. ... Our hearts go out to the victims of the crash and their families.”
— Christopher Ramsey, CEO of USA Water Polo
Kaleigh Gilchrist, 27, a water polo player for Team USA, suffered a severe leg injury when a balcony collapsed in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday, officials say. (Team USA photo)
The collapse occurred next to the athletes' village in the southern South Korean city of Gwangju. Hundreds of people were at the club at the time.
Officials said two South Korean men died while 16 others were injured. Among the injured are 10 foreigners, including eight participating in the swimming championships in the city.
Rescue workers walk to inspect a collapsed internal balcony at a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Members of the U.S. national water polo team were in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday when an internal balcony collapsed, killing at least one person. (Associated Press)
Among those athletes were the three Americans, plus two New Zealanders, one Dutch, one Italian and one Brazilian, authorities said. Most suffered minor injuries.
One of the nightclub's co-owners was detained by police. Three other club officials were summoned by the authorities to investigate whether the collapsed balcony was an unauthorized structure.
A collapsed internal balcony is seen at a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Members of the U.S. national water polo team were in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday when an internal balcony collapsed, killing at least two people. (Associated Press)
Members of the New Zealand men's and women's water polo teams were also at the nightclub. Matt Small, the men’s team captain, said the scene was chaotic and his team tried to help people.
“(It was) business as usual and then it literally collapsed beneath our feet,” Small told New Zealand Radio Sport. “None of the boys are hurt or injured though — so that's good. But everyone's a bit shaken up at the moment.”
Police stand at the door to a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. (Associated Press)
“We did what we could but we couldn't really do too much. Some of them were pretty dire cases,” he said. “We were more so just concerned about everyone else, we were trying to do a number count and make sure all the boys were there.”
Joseph Edu and Paul Barka of Nigeria’s bomb disposal squad.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—A 14-year-old girl in a black veil walked onto the road, raised her hands and made a plea to the soldiers nearby. She had been strapped to a suicide bomb and didn’t want to die.
It was explosives specialist Randy Iljeseni’s turn to defuse the girl, one in an army of child bombers deployed across northeast Nigeria by jihadist group Boko Haram. He grabbed a pair of fabric scissors, mouthed a brief prayer and slowed his breathing. He began to slice into her bomb-strapped belt. Some of his closest friends had died this way.
“You must do it gently. Most of them you first cut with scissors,” said Mr. Iljeseni, a tall and wiry 35-year-old with an intense stare, recalling the episode. “If this thing explodes, you will be gone.”
On the sharpest edges of the global war on terror, behind the multibillion-dollar endowments of jet fighters, armored cars and drone feeds, lurks a U.S.-aided program that is low in technology but high in effectiveness: bomb squad training.
From the Sahara to East Asia, hundreds of small bomb-disposal units are taking on the hair-raising assignment of disabling improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The devices may be buried in roads, cars or public buildings. In a gruesome turn, they are often strapped to children—mostly girls—by jihadist terrorist groups.
Binta Umma and Maimuna Musa tell the story of their survival.
The bomb squads’ work is especially intense in northern Nigeria and the Lake Chad basin, where the Islamist group Boko Haram is leading the way in the use of child bombers. Its insurgency, which first flared exactly a decade ago, has left tens of thousands of people dead and forced millions from their homes.
A few years ago, there were only a few dozen men and women like Mr. Iljeseni trained to do this work in Nigeria. Now there are hundreds.
The bomb squads receive some of their training from a traveling boot camp of U.S. ordnance experts schooled on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. They aren’t imparting a skill as much as a state of mind: a mix of courage and composure that can be sparked in a classroom but only truly learned in the live-or-die moments before the puzzle of a live bomb.
This year, U.S. Army trainers will travel to 22 countries to conduct 52 courses. More than half will take place in the Lake Chad region.
“It’s low-cost, big return—it helps us save a lot of lives,” said Lt. Col. Armando Hernandez, who served with the Explosives Ordnance Division across the Middle East and Africa and now helps oversee training operations from a base in Italy. “We don’t just teach them to understand the bomb, but to go after them aggressively.”
Last year, 57 children died in northern Nigeria after being strapped with explosives by Boko Haram, according to data from the United Nations. About 67% of them were girls.
In Boko Haram’s evolving strategy, children as young as 10 are helping to construct the bombs as well. They stuff nails and ball bearings as shrapnel into vests for other children to wear, and then euphoric crowds cheer on the bomb carriers, say survivors of Boko Haram camps. Clerics frame the mission in religious terms.
“We must always achieve 100%” in defusing bombs to survive, said Ntul Silvanus, commander of the Explosives Ordnance Disposal unit in the state of Borno. He has personally defused five bombs in the last three months.
Ntul Sylvanus in his office in Maiduguri.
The practice of suicide bombing has turned daily shopping errands in the city of Maiduguri, the largest in Nigeria’s northeast, into hourslong expeditions, with airport-like security at the entrances to vegetable markets. Security guards in the commercial center struggle to remember how many times they’ve hit the floor after the clap of a suicide bomb.
Mr. Iljeseni has defused dozens of human-borne explosives. He compares his work to crossing a river.
“Or, or. It is these two simple words,” he says. “Or you come out alive, or you come out dead.”
The bomb doctor
Mr. Iljeseni was working as a beat cop when he joined Nigeria’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in the mid-2000s, a few weeks after his father’s funeral. He was looking for a sense of purpose.
The country was in a period of relative peace, and most of Mr. Iljeseni’s new job meant accompanying construction crews as they triggered controlled demolitions to pave roads through the countryside.
By 2010, Boko Haram, a reclusive group camped in the forest, was gathering force. It began to hit government buildings, churches and mosques with crude fertilizer bombs in its quest to carve out an Islamist state.
Within four years, Boko Haram’s insurgency had expanded from northeast Nigeria into three neighboring countries. Its members torched villages, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing.
Members of Nigeria’s bomb disposal squad.
Mr. Iljeseni’s team began to encounter far more female bombers than male. The women’s long veils could easily conceal explosive devices. They were less conspicuous than young men in the marketplaces and mosques where large groups of civilians gathered.
The terror group also held thousands of children it had kidnapped—more than 10,000 boys, by the estimation of Nigerian officials, and a similar abundance of girls. The kidnapping of 276 high-school students from the town of Chibok in April 2014 prompted global outrage.
The next year, a detachment of American trainers began rotating through Nigeria, passing on the hard lessons its soldiers had taken from Iraq. “With IEDs, there’s a million different ways they can be made, so we teach them the thinking,” said Katie van Dwy, a U.S. Army ordnance trainer who has made four trips to Lake Chad. “We learn a lot from [trainees]….They will come up with scenarios we would not have thought of.”
The Nigerians left with rudimentary tools, given to them by the U.S. military: ropes, carabiners, metal detectors and scissors. American officials worried that anything more high tech would eventually break down and not be repaired.
The more visceral training took place on the job. Mr. Iljeseni stood next to his superiors, sweating under the bright sun, as they destroyed live bombs. He unearthed IEDs buried next to highways or hidden in trash bins. He watched checkpoints for vehicle-borne bombs.
A poster outside Maiduguri’s bomb disposal squad base shows the most wanted Boko Haram members.
Often, his team showed up hours too late, meeting a scene of personal effects strewn around bodies lying under white sheets.
Once, Mr. Iljeseni caught a man acting nervously at the entrance to a crowded market in the city of Maiduguri. He yelled for civilians to flee. Then he told soldiers nearby: “If you see this man doing anything, shoot him to death or stone him to death.”
People ran from the marketplace. The bomb was on a timer, strapped to the jittery man pacing alone near the gate, surrounded from a distance. They waited. The bomb exploded, killing only the man wearing it.
Mr. Iljeseni cried for hours and for two weeks he couldn’t hear, he says: “I saw the masses of people they intended to kill. You can’t help but think about people losing their loved ones.”
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As Boko Haram ramped up suicide attacks, the bomb squad decided they needed more intelligence gathering, to better understand the bombers and their handlers. Mr. Iljeseni traveled to towns and villages classified by the military as “no-go areas,” posing as a trader in the markets and mosques.
Mr. Iljeseni’s EOD comrades began to share videos of defusing operations that went tragically wrong. The EOD team’s families—many of whom live hundreds of miles away from the war front—began weekly prayer sessions. His unit, a small crew of Christians and Muslims, prayed together.
Child-borne bombs
Boko Haram was soon using children to carry and make the bombs.
The most common devices needed to be detonated by the bomber with a trigger. Others were on a timer or even operated remotely—ensuring the bomb would still detonate if the carrier had a change of heart.
When Boko Haram strapped a vest packed with ball bearings and tied together with a rubber tube to 16-year-old Maimuna Musa, she was sure she would die. Ms. Musa had been kidnapped at 15 and forcibly married to a fighter. She was chosen after her husband was killed on the battlefield.
One thought preserved her: Maybe she could use her deployment to escape.
‘They told me I’d go to paradise,’ says Maimuna Musa.
After a week of daily lectures from clerics who said her mission would please God, Ms. Musa’s moment had arrived. A crowd gathered to watch and she knew what would come next. Weeks earlier, she had watched a group of men strap bombs to both a mother and the infant on her back. A voice commanded Ms. Musa to raise her hands and look up.
“They told me I’d go to paradise, but I thought I would go to hell,” she said, sketching an outline showing the way the bomb was swaddled across her waist. The front of the device had two wires, held in rubber tubes. When Ms. Musa reached the target, she was supposed to touch the wires together, detonating the bomb.
When she reached her target, she found men in uniform and surrendered. They called the bomb squad.
At 15, Binta Umma walked for two days to the town of Gwoza, her chest weighed down by an explosive vest, in a frantic search for an adult willing to remove the device. She stopped only to sleep under a tree, taking care not to breathe too deeply.
The next morning, a vigilante found her, pointed his shotgun at her, and called the bomb squad. A white Toyota pickup pulled up an hour later and Ms. Umma shouted: “It is a bomb. Please, save my life.”
Two officers approached, carrying metal tools. To examine the device, an officer asked her to carefully remove her veil; Ms. Umma pinched it between thumb and forefinger, slowly peeled it back, afraid the fabric would trigger the bomb.
“Don’t ever drop your hands,” one said.
Binta Umma walked for two days wearing a bomb and looking for help.
She raised her arms. Staring at the sky, Ms. Umma felt tugs and jerks on the belt. Minutes went past. Her arms were numb.
She felt the vest loosen. Her knees buckled. Her defuser lowered the bomb into a plastic bag and handed her a
Coca-Cola.
“It was 50-50. I could live and I could die,” said Ms. Umma, who now works at a mosque in her hometown, checking female worshipers for weapons and suicide bombs.
Mr. Iljeseni’s unit views teenage boys as more of a risk than teenage girls. Boys have showed up at checkpoints in tears, asking for help removing the bombs strapped to them—then detonated their bombs once officers got close, Mr. Iljeseni said.
In 2017, his unit began using a new tool: a signal jammer. Boko Haram sometimes sent people to accompany young girls it didn’t trust to set off the bombs they were wearing. Those escorts then used a cellphone, or more often a rewired car key, to detonate the bomb at the right moment. The jammer prevents the signal from triggering the bomb.
“It is part of our life. We love the jammer,” Mr. Iljeseni says.
On one operation, he says, he was walking toward a young woman, maybe 16 years old, screaming, “They put a bomb on me.” Then he caught sight of an older woman nearby holding a car remote. Mr. Iljeseni hadn’t yet switched on his jammer.
He hit the ground, and the explosion passed over his head. When he got up he shot the older woman dead, as well as another young woman nearby, who also said she had a bomb.
A member of the bomb disposal squad wearing a protective suit.
This month, the United Nations said that Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa has recruited at least 8,000 children.
One 15-year-old, captured by Nigeria’s military, claimed to have made some 500 bombs since the age of 10. He said he was encouraged to innovate to make the bombs more difficult to defuse or remove. On some of them, he put padlocks.
Elsewhere, Islamic State’s “cubs” fighters have launched dozens of suicide attacks and been filmed executing prisoners in propaganda videos. The Islamic State franchise in Indonesia used children age 9 to 18 in May to carry out three bombings that left 25 dead. Somalia’s al Qaeda franchise al-Shabaab has ordered teachers in religious schools to provide hundreds of children as young as 8 for their ranks or face attack, according to rights group Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Iljeseni says the bombs carried by children in Nigeria are getting bigger, more powerful and tougher to detect. Boko Haram bomb makers are innovating new devices built into custom-made handbags. Detonators can be hidden inside books, making the bombers look like schoolchildren. Two months ago,another one of Mr. Iljeseni’s colleagues was killed.
“Ten years back, this insurgency was just starting. There’s no sleeping now,” says Mr. Iljeseni, as he flicked through pictures of his comrades and their operations on his phone.
Last month, two girls and a boy detonated explosive vests at a hall in the town of Konduga as locals gathered to watch a soccer match, killing 30 and injuring dozens more. An EOD specialist was able to remove a vest that failed to detonate from a fourth.
A member of the Nigeria’s bomb disposal squad screens civilians with a metal detector near the Maiduguri airport.
Several armed gunman in federal police cars entered one of Brazil’s busiest airports Thursday and made off with $40 million worth of gold and precious metals, taking two hostages with them during the heist.
Four suspects were captured on surveillance tape entering the Sao Paulo International Airport in Guarulhos in a black pickup truck that appeared to have the markings of Brazil’s federal police, Reuters reported.
The four men exited the vehicle, at least one armed with a rifle, and confronted airport employees. Security footage then shows the workers loading cargo into the vehicle.
A fake police truck that was used in robbery is transported on a flat-bed truck in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Thursday, July 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)
According to a police report, the thieves made off with about 1,650 pounds of gold and other precious metals worth $40 million. They also took with them two airport workers as hostages.
A spokeswoman for the airport confirmed the heist to Reuters but did not comment on a hostage situation. She said no one was hurt during the robbery.
Early reports suggested that there were as many as eight suspects and that they kidnapped a senior airport official Wednesday and held him for 12 hours to gain information about the valuable cargo which was set to ship to New York and Zurich, the Evening Standard reported.
Four children related to the official were also said to be kidnapped in an attempt to gather information.
A local broadcaster said that the cars used during the heist were found abandoned in a neighborhood about 12 miles from the airport. The suspects remain at large.
