World

NEW DELHI — Days of intense monsoon rains across northern India have left at least 29 people dead, rendering many areas inaccessible with bridges smashed and roads blocked, officials said on Monday.

Television footage showed flash floods and landslides triggered by torrential rain, washing away vehicles, demolishing buildings and ripping down bridges in the hilly state of Himachal Pradesh, the worst affected area.

“In the last two days, the death toll due to monsoon rains has risen to 20 in Himachal Pradesh,” said Omkar Sharma, a senior official heading disaster management in the state.

Nine more deaths were reported in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and the Himalayan regions of Uttarakhand and Kashmir, taking the toll of those killed since Saturday from a previously reported 15 to at least 29.

Himachal Pradesh’s Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu expressed “deep sorrow” at the deaths and said the government was “making all-out efforts” to tackle the situation, with more rain predicted.

Authorities were waiting for a break in the rains to send helicopter missions to rescue about 300 stranded people — including tourists — in Himachal Pradesh’s areas of Lahaul-Spiti and Kullu.

India’s meteorological department has forecast more rain across large parts of the country’s north in the coming days.

Schools in New Delhi were shut Monday after receiving the most rain in a single day in July in four decades, and the capital was on high alert as the Yamuna river was flowing close to danger levels, with many roads swamped.

Streets and neighbourhoods in Punjab state were also filled with knee-deep rainwater.

Official data shows monsoon rains across the country in the first week of July have already produced about 2 per cent more rainfall than normal.

The summer monsoon brings South Asia around 80 per cent of its annual rainfall, as well as death and destruction due to flooding and landslides.

The rainfall is hard to forecast and varies considerably, but scientists say climate change is making the monsoon stronger and more erratic.

PARIS — A man arrested in Paris during a memorial rally for his brother, who had died in police custody seven years ago, has been released from hospital on Sunday, amid calls for more protests.

The calls came with France still on edge after the police killing of a teen near Paris sparked the worst rioting in the country since 2005.

Youssouf Traore, 29, was detained by police on Saturday amid protests across the country that commemorated the death of his brother Adama Traore in 2016, many of them in defiance of police bans on gatherings.

According to a police source, Youssouf Traore was injured in the eye during his arrest at the Paris protest attended by some 2,000 people, and was taken to hospital after becoming sick at the police station.

Youssouf Traore appeared with a swollen right eye and torn T-shirt sleeve in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday, which has been verified by AFP, by the account "Truth for Adama".

According to the account, he suffered a fractured nose, head trauma with a black eye, and contusions to his chest, abdomen and lumbar.

The account's managers said a complaint will be lodged "to denounce this serious violence".

Youssouf Traore was arrested on charges of violence against a public official, having been accused of hitting a police officer at the start of the rally at Place de la Republique, according to a source close to the case.

The charges had been lifted due to his hospitalisation, the Paris prosecutor's office said, but could be reinstated later.

Pent-up frustrations 

The forceful arrest, filmed by several witnesses, showed him resisting and being tackled and held face down by several police officers, provoking condemnation by several left-wing politicians on social media.

A joint statement by left-leaning associations, unions and political parties had called for a rally Sunday afternoon in front of a central Paris police station to demand that he and another person detained with him be released.

At least 20 people including two lawmakers were seen by AFP journalists outside the station, which was protected by eight officers, around 2 pm (12:00 GMT).

France has been on edge since a police officer shot dead Nahel M., a 17-year-old with Algerian roots, during a traffic stop on June 27 in a Paris suburb.

The shooting rekindled long pent-up frustrations and accusations of systemic racism among France’s security forces and sparked nights of rioting, the worst urban unrest in the country since 2005.

More than 3,700 people were taken into police custody in connection with the protests since Nahel’s death, including at least 1,160 minors, according to official figures.

DOVER, United States — President Joe Biden left on Sunday for Britain to meet with King Charles III before continuing to Vilnius for a NATO summit, then a final stop in new NATO member Finland.

Biden departed Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and was due to arrive in key US ally Britain late Sunday.

On Monday, he meets with the British monarch at Windsor Castle, one of the royal residences, for the first time since Charles III's coronation. The US president did not attend the ceremony, sending First Lady Jill Biden instead.

Their talks are expected to focus on environmental issues, the White House said. Biden will also be meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at 10 Downing Street.

The main part of Biden’s Europe trip will be the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital on Tuesday and Wednesday, where the Western allies will discuss helping Ukraine to oust Russian occupation forces.

Ukraine is pressing for admission to the military alliance but Biden said in an interview aired on Sunday with CNN that this cannot happen until the war is over.

Bringing Ukraine in now would mean NATO is at war with Russia, Biden said.

Under its Article 5, NATO is committed to defending any member that comes under attack. “It’s a commitment that we’ve all made no matter what. If the war is going on, then we’re all in war. We’re at war with Russia, if that were the case,” Biden said.

Biden hopes to use the summit to pressure Turkey into dropping opposition to Sweden’s all-but-cleared NATO membership bid. Entry requires unanimous consent from all the other members.

In the interview with CNN, Biden also suggested he was eyeing the idea of supplying Turkey and Greece with new or upgraded US-made fighter aircraft as an enticement for Turkey to let Sweden join NATO.

“And so, what I’m trying to, quite frankly, put together is a little bit of a consortium here where we’re strengthening NATO in terms of the military capacity of both Greece as well as Turkey and allow Sweden to come in,” Biden said.

“But it’s in play. It’s not done.”

While in Vilnius, Biden will also deliver a major foreign policy speech at the city’s university.

His trip comes in the wake of a controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions, which most NATO member countries have banned but which the United States continues to use and says will help Ukraine destroy heavily dug-in Russian forces.

Biden’s final stop before returning to Washington on Thursday will be Finland, which ended its historic neutrality to enter NATO in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine.

Biden will be the first US president to visit Helsinki since Donald Trump went five years ago to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

MEXICO CITY  — A regional correspondent for leading Mexican newspaper La Jornada was found dead on Saturday, a day after he went missing in the western state of Nayarit, the daily said.

“A body found in the village of Huachines... in the municipality of Tepic was identified as Luis Martin Sanchez Iniguez, 59 years old, correspondent for La Jornada,” the Mexico City newspaper said on its website.

The journalist’s wife, Cecilia Lopez, told investigators that she had been unaware of his whereabouts since Wednesday night, when she was in another town visiting relatives, the newspaper reported, citing local authorities.

Sanchez Iniguez’s body was found on Saturday morning in a rural area near Tepic, the capital of Nayarit. Some unconfirmed local media reports said he was found wrapped in plastic bags and had a message on his chest.

Sanchez was at home Wednesday night and spoke to his wife on the phone.

Lopez also reportedly told investigators that she found the clothes her husband was wearing the last day she saw him in their home, and in his wallet were all his belongings except for his La Jornada correspondent’s card.

The family also reported that “his computer, cell phone, a hard drive and his sandals are missing,” the newspaper added.

La Jornada correspondents have been targeted and murdered in the past, including Miroslava Breach, killed in Chihuahua in March 2017, and Javier Valdez, who was also a contributor to AFP, murdered in Sinaloa in May of the same year.

Mexico is considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. Since 2000, more than 150 journalists have been murdered in the country, according to Reporters Without Borders.

According to the government, in 2022 there were 13 murders of reporters. Most crimes against journalists remain unpunished.

PARIS — More than 1,000 people defied a ban and on Saturday gathered in central Paris for a memorial rally, with dozens of marches planned throughout France to denounce police brutality and racial profiling.

Seven years after the death of Adama Traore, his sister had planned to lead a commemorative march north of Paris in Persan and Beaumont-sur-Oise.

But with tensions running high following the riots that were sparked by the June 27 police killing of 17-year-old Nahel M. of Algerian origin at a traffic stop near Paris, a court ruled the chance of public disturbance was too high to allow the march to proceed.

In a video posted on Twitter, Assa Traore, Adama's older sister, denounced the decision.

"The government has decided to add fuel to the fire" and "not to respect the death of my little brother", she said.

She instead attended a rally on Saturday afternoon in central Paris's Place de la Republique to tell "the whole world that our dead have the right to exist, even in death".

"We are marching for the youth to denounce police violence. They want to hide our deaths," she said at the rally.

"They authorise marches by neo-Nazis but they don't allow us to march. France cannot give us moral lessons. Its police is racist and violent," she said.

The Paris rally had also been banned on the ground that it could disrupt public order, but more than 1,000 people attended nonetheless, including several lawmakers.

"Public liberties are losing ground little by little," said Sandrine Rousseau, a lawmaker from the EELV Green party. 

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the outspoken head of the radical leftist France Unbowed party, castigated the government on Twitter.

"From prohibition to repression... the leader is taking France to a regime we have already seen. Danger. Danger," he tweeted, referring to the World War II regime of Vichy leader Philippe Petain who collaborated with the Nazis.

Around 30 similar demonstrations against police violence were scheduled across France this weekend. Marches were held Saturday in the western city of Saint-Nazaire and Strasbourg in the east.

Several trade unions, political parties and associations had called on supporters to join the march for Traore as France reels from allegations of institutionalised racism in its police ranks following Nahel M’s shooting.

Traore, who was 24 years old, died shortly after his arrest in 2016, sparking several nights of unrest that played out similarly to the week-long rioting that erupted across the country in the wake of the point-blank shooting of Nahel. 

The teenager’s death on June 27 rekindled long-standing accusations of systemic racism among security forces, and a UN committee urged France to ban racial profiling. 

The foreign ministry on Saturday disputed what it called “excessive” and “unfounded” remarks by the panel.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) — 18 independent experts — on Friday asked France to pass legislation defining and banning racial profiling and questioned “excessive use of force by law enforcement”.

“Any ethnic profiling by law enforcement is banned in France,” the ministry responded, adding that “the struggle against excesses in racial profiling has intensified”.

Far-right parties have linked the most intense and widespread riots France has seen since 2005 to mass migration, and have demanded curbs on new arrivals.

Campaign groups say Saturday’s “citizens marches” will be an opportunity for people to express their “grief and anger” at discriminatory police policies, especially in working-class neighbourhoods. 

More than 3,700 people have been taken into police custody in connection with the protests since Nahel’s death, including at least 1,160 minors, according to official figures.

VERSAILLES, France — A French policeman who sparked riots last week after killing a teenager has denied threatening to shoot the boy in the head before opening fire, legal documents seen by AFP showed on Thursday.

The 38-year-old officer, named as Florian M., told the IGPN internal police investigation service he did not say the words "you're going to get a bullet in the head", according to a transcript seen by AFP

The apparent threat was a key feature of a bystander's video of the shooting that contradicted the initial police account and sparked successive nights of rioting in which cars and public buildings were burnt, businesses looted and youths clashed with police.

Investigators believe they were uttered by a second officer at the scene, with digital checks on the video ongoing.

Florian M., a motorbike traffic officer, said he had pulled the trigger because he was afraid the driver of the car, 17-year-old Nahel, would drive off and "drag" his colleague with him.

The policeman, who has been charged with voluntary manslaughter, had his detention extended early Thursday by an appeals court in Versailles outside Paris.

Fallout from the June 27 shooting of Nahel continued to top news bulletins, with the collection for the police officer organised by far-right personality Jean Messiha reaching 1.6 million euros ($1.7 million) before he closed it on Wednesday.

Nahel's family have filed a criminal complaint for "fraud by a group, misuse of personal data and conspiracy in these crimes against Jean Messiha and everyone ... taking part in these offences", said Yassine Bouzrou, a lawyer for Nahel's mother.

'Bullet in the head' 

French President Emmanuel Macron has promised that his government will formulate a response to the riots in the country's deprived, multi-ethnic suburbs once events have been properly analysed.

"We will keep working" on answers, he said on a visit to southwestern city Pau, adding that "the first response is order, calm and harmony".

Just 20 people were arrested overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, the interior ministry said, reinforcing perceptions of life returning closer to normal.

The IGPN and its equivalent for the gendarmerie are investigating 10 alleged incidents of improper behaviour by officers during the violence which saw 45,000 officers deployed each night to restore order, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

One relates to a man struck in the head by a less-lethal “beanbag” munition believed to have been fired by police in eastern France as he drove to a petrol station on June 30. He is now in a coma.

A second focuses on the death in Mediterranean port city Marseille on Saturday of a 27-year-old delivery driver called Mohammed who may have been hit by a police rubber bullet known as a “flash-ball” as he rode his scooter.

His pregnant widow told reporters that he had been filming the riots at the time.

“Even the prosecutor told me he was not with the rioters,” she said, according to the Parisien newspaper.

A march has been called for him at 6pm on Thursday.

‘Deadly showdown’ 

The violence has propelled issues of unequal justice and policing, immigration and integration back to the top of the agenda in France after months of battle over Macron’s detested pension reform.

With the loss of manufacturing industries that once employed suburban populations, “France’s socioeconomic dynamics have created a ‘clientele’ for the police, mostly from former colonial populations, locked up with them in a deadly showdown with no way out,” police researcher Fabien Jobard told daily Le Monde.

But after days largely below the radar, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Rally and Macron’s two-time challenger for the presidency, told broadcaster France 2 that “poverty is not at the origin of these riots”.

Instead, the “problem of immigration” had “created in many people’s minds a kind of secession from French society”, she added.

Meanwhile, the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) Party has joined calls for “citizen marches” on Saturday against “discriminatory” police tactics and social policies.

The party was heckled for days by Macron’s centrists, conservatives and the far-right for failing to condemn rioting as soon as it began.

“None of us called for insurrection or setting fires,” LFI’s de-facto leader Jean-Luc Melenchon told investigative outfit Mediapart Wednesday, adding that “no-one is happy when cars are burning”.

Nevertheless, left-wingers should “never distance ourselves from the communities we represent, even when there are contradictions”. he added.