A Sudanese court in Khartoum sentenced on Thursday, 18 years old pregnant Ethiopian refugee who was gang-raped
by six thugs in September, to one month jail and 880 USD fine. It
was learnt that the 7th accomplice filmed her while she was being raped
with his cellphone and posted it on social media called WhatsApp. The
girl is right now in the prison. She was three months pregnant while
she was gang-raped. Hala AlKarib, regional Head of a women's rights groups
called SIHA ( Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa) told Deutsche Welle Radio Amharic service that thevictim has been in prison for more
than a month and she could give birth at anytime. She was charged
with indecent acts and sentenced to one month on February 20, 2014. The woman was sentenced to a one-month jail term but this was suspended
because she is pregnant, her lawyer, Samia al-Hashmi, told the AFP news
agency and the court ordered instead her to pay another 5,000 Sudanese Pound (880
USD) fine. The young woman had also faced charges of adultery and prostitution, which could
have led to a penalty of death by stoning, but these were dropped after
she convinced the court she was divorced, reports SIHA. She has not been freed yet even though the fine was paid.
The rapists were seen in the clip showing a V sign and their middle
fingers while she was being raped to express their disrespect. Answering
how the Ethiopian pregnant woman was gang-raped, Ms Halla says the woman was house-hunting when she was lured
to an empty property and attacked in Omdurman, just across the River
Nile from Khartoum. When the victim was checking out the room, the broker phoned
his friends and then they raped and filmed the sexual scene. The crime was
committed in September but the 7th culprit shared the
video on social media a month ago and that is how she was caught by
the Sudanese police and put behind bars. The victim tried to report a
crime to a police officer she met on the street right after the crime but she
couldn't succeed due to language barrier as she speaks only broken
Arabic. Halla said the refugee girl came to the Sudan recently,
adding that the victim might come to the country searching for a
better life.” According to Sudanese law a raped woman will be
charged with adultery. If both the victim and the rapists are
unmarried, they shall be stoned. Ironically however, the men who raped the girl got 100 slashes and then released since of all them are singles.
SIHA underscores that such miscarriage of justice in Sudan makes women and men
victims of rape not to report the crime and in the meantime encourage
rapists to get away with their crime. It says she now faces deportation.
The group's regional director Hala Elkarib condemned the conviction, saying it would prevent women from reporting sexual abuse.
"The levelling of immigration charges against the victim
further denies her protection by the state and protracts the punishment
and emotional stress against her whilst she has been subjected to the
most brutal of crimes," she said. The Sudanese government is holding
the Ethiopian girl in prison for allegedly entering the country
illegally. The girl is in her 9th
month pregnancy. Sudanese law is based on Sharia and women have been punished for wearing trousers or not covering their hair.
One of the passengers filmed the hijacking drama inside the Ethiopian Airline flagship with his/her cellphone just Filmed Aboard Hijacked Plane at Rome Airport. In this age of technology and social media, everybody can be a journalist. The co-pilot of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner locked the pilot out of
the cockpit, commandeered the plane and headed for Geneva.
ADDIS
ABABA, Ethiopia – Airline passengers en route to Italy were
rerouted to Switzerland on Monday morning in a peaceful but puzzling
hijacking episode, carried out by the plane's own co-pilot.
Hailemedhin Abera
Ethiopian
Airlines flight ET702 was headed from Ethiopia's capital city of
Addis Ababa to Rome when the captain took a bathroom break. The first
officer then locked himself inside the cockpit, reported the
hijacking to airport transponders, and aimed his Boeing 767 toward
Geneva. Reports indicate that the passengers were blissfully unaware
of the situation until they touched down. They were heavily searched
upon exiting the aircraft, after which the airline began efforts to
get all 193 passengers – mostly Italian nationals – to their
final destinations.
The following open letter is from
award winning Ethiopian Journalist Woubushet Taye who has been sentenced to 14 years jail term with trumped up terrorism charges and being incarcerated at the notorious Zeway Prison. He penned the letter in Amharic ( Ethiopian official language ) for one of the few remaining critical Ethiopian newspapers called Ethio Mehdar. Article 19, the International Rights Watchdog, translated the Amharic version of Woubshet's letter into English and published it on its website. As you go through it; Woubshet is still optimistic and has no grudges against his captors. His modesty and humbleness is beyond me considering the an imaginable horror he has to go through on daily basis. Here is the full English version of Woubshet's humble letter which should trigger an outrage from every human being around the globe against TPLF-led regime in Ethiopia.
"Swiss
authorities say the hijacker of an Ethiopian Airlines flight forced
to land at Geneva's international airport was the plane's co-pilot." Abc News
"An Ethiopian government spokesman told Reuters he believes the hijacker boarded the plane on a scheduled stop in Khartoum, Sudan's capital." VOA
To begin with ET702 didn't land in Khartoum and since when co-pilots are boarding in Stop-over? Redwan Hussien, TPLF's die-hard cadre makes his "career" and masters a laughing stock. AP photo shows rope purportedly used by co-pilot aboard Ethiopian flight to escape out of plane; obviously the propagandist has no clue what's going at the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines. These days, even those who considered by many as the most privileged in society want to leave Ethiopia and seek asylum somewhere.
The
airline says flight ET-702 from Addis Ababa to Rome was "forced
to proceed" to Geneva, where it landed early on Monday (local
time).
Airport
spokesman Bertrand Staempfli told reporters the co-pilot took control
of the plane when the pilot went to the toilet.
"He
said he felt threatened in his country and wants to seek asylum in
Switzerland," he said.
After
the plane landed the co-pilot left through the window on a rope and
surrendered to police.
Police
say the man was not armed, and there was no risk to crew or
passengers at any time.
State-run
Ethiopian television said there had been 193 passengers on board the
Boeing aircraft, including 140 Italian nationals.
The
brief drama caused the closure of the airport and cancellation of
some short-haul flights. Some incoming flights were diverted to other
airports.
Hundreds
of passengers booked on disrupted flights scrambled to change their
tickets.
A
flight tracking app for mobile devices showed the flight circling
over the Swiss city several times before landing.
Ethiopian
nationals and the Horn of Africa country's flag carrier have been
involved in several hijackings in the past.
In
1993, an Ethiopian used a gun hidden in his hat to hijack a German
passenger jet bound for New York. He was later sentenced to 20 years
in a US prison.
Two
years later, police in Greece overpowered an Ethiopian hijacker who
held a knife to the throat of an Olympic Airways stewardess and
demanded political asylum.
At
least 50 people were killed when a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines
passenger jet crashed in the Indian Ocean in 1996.
In
2001, a dozen Ethiopian students hijacked a plane carrying around 60
people and flew to Sudan.
Reports
from Manus Island indicate a major protest and breakout has taken
place on Manus Island late this afternoon. The most recent reports
indicate that the riot squad has been mobilized and that the
perimeter fence has been breached.
Protests
have been building all day, but escalated after a meeting (around 2pm
Manus time) was held to answer asylum seekers’ questions about
resettlement.
Shockingly,
the asylum seekers were told that they “will not be resettled in
PNG” and if they wanted to go somewhere else, they will need to
arrange that themselves.
There
had been protests throughout the day, but around 4pm Manus Island
time, events escalated and the G4S riot squad went into Oscar
compound.
A
couple of hours later, fences were knocked down and the whole
detention center was locked down as the protests spread to all the
compounds. There were reports of a fire being set in one compound and
tents have been destroyed.
It
seems the perimeter fence of one compound, perhaps Oscar, has now
been breached and a major protest is underway.
There
are reports of asylum seekers being injured by G4S guards. Some
asylum seekers have been taken to the police station.
There
have been daily protests on Manus Island involving hundreds of asylum
seekers since 25 January as frustrations have increased over delays
in processing and uncertainty about their future.
Today’s
announcement that there would be no resettlement in PNG confirms
earlier reports that resettlement was never a part of the PNG deal
and the PNG government has never had plans to resettle refugees.
Meaza Ashenafi, whose civic organization EWELA (Ethiopian Women's Lawyers Association) has been incapacitated by TPLF mafia, is vindicated at 2014's Sundance International Film Festival with a film entitled Difret which becomes Winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Dramatic. Difret ( which literally means in Amharic courage) is a film based on a true story and revolves around an Ethiopian young girl who was abducted for forced marriage and killed her husband in self-defense and then represented by a lawyer in this case Meaza Ahenafi.
Born of an illiterate mother and a civil servant father in Assosa,a small town near the Sudan border, she received her LLB degree from Addis Ababa University and was qualified as a lawyer in 1986. Meaza established Ethiopia's leading women's legal aid, education and policy-reform organization in 1995
Here we go again with TPLF's paranoia extending thousands of miles away as if what's doing isn't enough at home which it is good at it; SPYING. TPLF-led rulers of Ethiopia are spending billions of Tax payers' and donors' money in a country which has the lowest internet penetration (1%) even in Sub-Saharan African standards, on digital censorship and spying on everybody they deem to be their perceived or/and virtual enemy. At this moment, Ethiopians are suffering from lack of basic services (water, fuel, power, including internet networking) while TPLF and co are on this ridiculous project which should have been directed to improve the lives of millions of citizens. The following detailed research was made by foreign nationals who have no business or other interests as far as Ethiopia concerned; they are concerned international citizens who are trying to show their solidarity to Ethiopian people whose voice is being muffled and silenced by the regime alarmingly.
Mesay
Mekonnen was at his desk, at a news service based in Northern
Virginia, when gibberish suddenly exploded across his computer screen
one day in December. A sophisticated cyberattack was underway.
But
this wasn’t the Chinese army or the Russian mafia at work.
Instead,
a nonprofit research lab has fingered government hackers in a much
less technically advanced nation, Ethiopia, as the likely culprits,
saying they apparently used commercial spyware, essentially bought
off the shelf. This burgeoning
industry is making surveillance capabilities that once were the
exclusive province of the most elite spy agencies, such as National
Security Agency, available to governments worldwide.
The
targets of such attacks often are political activists, human rights
workers and journalists, who have learned that the Internet allows
authoritarian governments to surveil and intimidate them even after
they have fled to supposed safety.
That
includes the United States, where laws prohibit unauthorized hacking
but rarely succeed in stopping intrusions. The trade in spyware
itself is almost entirely unregulated, to the great frustration of
critics.
“We’re
finding this in repressive countries, and we’re finding that it’s
being abused,” said Bill Marczak, a research fellow for Citizen Lab
at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, which
released a report Wednesday. “This spyware has proliferated around
the world . . . without any debate.”
Citizen
Lab says the spyware used against Mekonnen and one other
Ethiopian journalist appears to have been made by Hacking Team, an
Italian company with a regional sales office in Annapolis. Its
products are capable of stealing documents from hard drives, snooping
on video chats, reading e-mails, snatching contact lists, and
remotely flipping on cameras and microphones so that they can quietly
spy on a computer’s unwitting user.
Some
of the targets of recent cyberattacks are U.S. citizens, say
officials at Ethiopia Satellite Television’s office in Alexandria,
where Mekonnen works. Others have lived in the United States or other
Western countries for years.
“To
invade the privacy of American citizens and legal residents,
violating the sovereignty of the United States and European
countries, is mind-boggling,” said Neamin Zeleke, managing director
for the news service, which beams reports to Ethiopia, providing a
rare alternative to official information sources there.
Citizen
Lab researchers say they have found evidence of Hacking Team
software, which the company says it sells only to governments, being
used in a dozen countries, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Sudan,
Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan.
The
Ethiopian government, commenting through a spokesman at the embassy
in Washington, denied using spyware. “The Ethiopian government did
not use and has no reason at all to use any spyware or other products
provided by Hacking Team or any other vendor inside or outside of
Ethiopia,” Wahide Baley, head of public policy and communications,
said in a statement e-mailed to The Washington Post.
Hacking
Team declined to comment on whether Ethiopia was a customer, saying
it never publicly confirms or denies whether a country is a client
because that information could jeopardize legitimate investigations.
The company also said it does not sell its products to countries that
have been blacklisted by the United States, the United Nations and
some other international groups.
Neamin Zeleke, Managing director-ESAT
“You’ve
necessarily got a conflict between the issues around law enforcement
and the issues around privacy. Reasonable people come down on both
sides of that,” said Eric Rabe, a U.S.-based senior counsel to
Hacking Team. “There is a serious risk if you could not provide the
tools that HT provides.”
The
FBI, which investigates computer crimes, declined to comment on the
Citizen Lab report.
Allegations
of abuse
Technology
developed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
has provided the foundation for a multibillion-dollar industry with
its own annual conferences, where firms based in the most developed
countries offer surveillance products to governments that don’t yet
have the ability to produce their own.
Hacking
Team, which Reporters Without Borders has named on its list of
“Corporate Enemies” of a free press, touted on its Web site that
its “Remote Control System” spyware allows users to “take
control of your targets and monitor them regardless of encryption and
mobility. It doesn’t matter if you are after an Android phone or a
Windows computer: you can monitor all the devices.”
Hacking
Team software has been used against Mamfakinch,
an award-winning Moroccan news organization, and Ahmed
Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates who
was imprisoned after signing an online political petition, Citizen
Lab reported. Another research group, Arsenal Consulting, has said
Hacking
Team software was used against an American woman who was critical
of a secretive Turkish organization that is building schools in the
United States.
Such
discoveries have sparked calls for international regulation of
Hacking Team and other makers of spyware, which typically costs in
the hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to experts.
By
selling spyware, “they are participating in human rights
violations,” said Eva
Galperin, who tracks spyware use for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco. “By
dictator standards, this is pretty cheap. This is pocket change.”
Rabe,
the Hacking Team official, said that the company does not itself
deploy spyware against targets and that, when it learns of
allegations of human rights abuses by its customers, it investigates
those cases and sometimes withdraws licenses. He declined to describe
any such cases or name the countries involved.
Ethiopian
Satellite Television, typically known by the acronym ESAT, started in
2010 and operates on donations from members of the expatriate
community. The news service mainly employs journalists who left
Ethiopia in the face of government harassment, torture or criminal
charges. Though avowedly independent, ESAT is viewed as close to
Ethiopia’s opposition forces, which have few other ways of reaching
potential supporters.
Despite
the nation’s close relationship with the U.S. government —
especially in dealing with unrest and Islamist extremism in
neighboring Somalia — the State Department has repeatedly detailed
human rights abuses by the Ethiopian government against political
activists and journalists. There has been little improvement,
observers say, since the 2012 death of the nation’s longtime ruler,
Meles
Zenawi.
“The
media environment in Ethiopia is one of the most repressive in
Africa,” said Felix Horne, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“There are frequent cases of people who have spoken to journalists
being arrested. There’s very little in the way of free flow of
information in the country. The repressive anti-terrorism law is used
to stifle dissent. There are a number of journalists in prison for
long terms for doing nothing but practicing what journalists do.”
Taking
the bait
Mekonnen
was wary as soon as he received a document, through a Skype chat with
a person he did not know, on Dec. 20. But the file bore the familiar
icon of a Microsoft Word file and carried a name, in Ethiopia’s
Amharic language, suggesting that it was a text about the ambitions
of a well-known political group there. The sender even used the ESAT
logo as his profile image, suggesting the communication was from a
friend, or at least a fan.
When
the screen filled with a chaotic series of characters, Mekonnen knew
he had been fooled — in hacker jargon, he had taken “the bait”
— yet it wasn’t clear what exactly was happening to his computer,
or why.
That
same day, an ESAT employee in Belgium also had received mysterious
documents over Skype chats. Noticing that the files were of an
unusual type, he chose not to open them on his work computer.
Instead, the ESAT employee uploaded one of the files to a Web site,
VirusTotal, that scans suspicious software for signs of their origins
and capabilities.
That
Web site also has a system to alert researchers when certain types of
malicious software are discovered. Marczak, the Citizen Lab
researcher, who had been tracking the spread of spyware from Hacking
Team and other manufacturers, soon got an e-mail from VirusTotal
reporting that a suspicious file had been found, carrying telltale
coding.
Marczak,
a doctoral student in computer science at the University of
California at Berkeley, had worked with members of the Ethiopian
community before, during an attempted hacking incident last April.
When he received the alert from VirusTotal, he got in touch with
ESAT’s offices in Alexandria and began looking for signs of Hacking
Team software on the news service’s computers. He was eventually
joined in the detective work by three other researchers affiliated
with Citizen Lab, Claudio Guarnieri, Morgan Marquis-Boire and John
Scott-Railton. They did not detect an active version of the spyware
on Mekonnen’s computer, suggesting it had failed to activate
properly or was removed by the hackers who deployed it. But when
Citizen Lab analyzed the file itself — still embedded in Mekonnen’s
Skype account — its coding tracked closely to other Hacking Team
spyware, Marczak said.
The
Citizen Lab team found that the spyware was designed to connect to a
remote server that used an encryption certificate issued by a group
listed as “HT srl,” an apparent reference to Hacking Team. The
certificate also mentioned “RCS,” which fits the acronym for the
company’s “Remote Control System” spyware.
The
researchers discovered a similar encryption certificate used by a
server whose IP address was registered to Giancarlo Russo, who is
Hacking Team’s chief operating officer. The phone number and
mailing address associated with that server’s IP address matched
the company’s headquarters in Milan, Citizen Lab said.
The
evidence of Ethiopia’s involvement was less definitive — as is
common when analysts attempt to learn the origin of a cyberattack —
though the Citizen Lab researchers express little doubt about who was
behind the attack. The document that Mekonnen downloaded, they noted,
had a title in Amharic that referred to Ethiopian politics, making
clear that the attackers had deep knowledge of that country.
In
addition, few governments have enough interest in Ethiopian politics
to deploy a sophisticated spyware attack against journalists covering
the country, Marczak said. “I can’t really think of any other
government that would like to spy on ESAT.”
The
biggest fear among journalists is that spies have accessed sensitive
contact lists on ESAT computers, which could help the government
track their sources back in Ehiopia
“This
is a really great danger for them,” Mekonnen said.
A Sudanese court in Khartoum sentenced on Thursday, 18 years old pregnant Ethiopian refugee who was gang-raped
by six thugs in September, to one month jail and 880 USD fine. It
was learnt that the 7th accomplice filmed her while she was being raped
with his cellphone and posted it on social media called WhatsApp. The
girl is right now in the prison. She was three months pregnant while
she was gang-raped. Hala AlKarib, regional Head of a women's rights groups
called SIHA ( Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa) told Deutsche Welle Radio Amharic service that the victim has been in prison for more
than a month and she could give birth at anytime. She was charged
with indecent acts and sentenced to one month on February 20, 2014. The woman was sentenced to a one-month jail term but this was suspended
because she is pregnant, her lawyer, Samia al-Hashmi, told the AFP news
agency and the court ordered instead her to pay another 5,000 Sudanese Pound (880
USD) fine. The young woman had also faced charges of adultery and prostitution, which could
have led to a penalty of death by stoning, but these were dropped after
she convinced the court she was divorced, reports SIHA. She has not been freed yet even though the fine was paid.
The rapists were seen in the clip showing a V sign and their middle
fingers while she was being raped to express their disrespect. Answering
how the Ethiopian pregnant woman was gang-raped, Ms Halla says the woman was house-hunting when she was lured
to an empty property and attacked in Omdurman, just across the River
Nile from Khartoum. When the victim was checking out the room, the broker phoned
his friends and then they raped and filmed the sexual scene. The crime was
committed in September but the 7th culprit shared the
video on social media a month ago and that is how she was caught by
the Sudanese police and put behind bars. The victim tried to report a
crime to a police officer she met on the street right after the crime but she
couldn't succeed due to language barrier as she speaks only broken
Arabic. Halla said the refugee girl came to the Sudan recently,
adding that the victim might come to the country searching for a
better life.” According to Sudanese law a raped woman will be
charged with adultery. If both the victim and the rapists are
unmarried, they shall be stoned. Ironically however, the men who raped the girl got 100 slashes and then released since of all them are singles. 
To begin with ET702 didn't land in Khartoum and since when co-pilots are boarding in Stop-over? Redwan Hussien, TPLF's die-hard cadre makes his "career" and masters a laughing stock. AP photo shows rope purportedly used by co-pilot aboard Ethiopian flight to escape out of plane; obviously the propagandist has no clue what's going at the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines. These days, even those who considered by many as the most privileged in society want to leave Ethiopia and seek asylum somewhere. 
Reports
from Manus Island indicate a major protest and breakout has taken
place on Manus Island late this afternoon. The most recent reports
indicate that the riot squad has been mobilized and that the
perimeter fence has been breached.
Citizen
Lab says the spyware used against Mekonnen and one other
Ethiopian journalist appears to have been made by Hacking Team, an
Italian company with a regional sales office in Annapolis. Its
products are capable of stealing documents from hard drives, snooping
on video chats, reading e-mails, snatching contact lists, and
remotely flipping on cameras and microphones so that they can quietly
spy on a computer’s unwitting user.
