Is heroin being smuggled on Pakistani       planes into Heathrow?

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionHeroin was found on two PIA flights to London (File photo)

Pakistan's national carrier says it is taking measures to ensure its planes are not used to carry drugs after heroin was found on two of its London-bound aircraft.

Aviation authorities are also investigating how the drugs might be making their way on to the planes of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).

What happened?

On 15 May, UK's Border Force officials impounded a PIA flight from Islamabadon arrival at London Heathrow airport and searched it for several hours.

The National Crime Agency later said that a quantity of heroin had been found hidden in different panels of the plane.

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionIncidents happened on flights headed to London's Heathrow airport

There were suggestions that the British authorities had acted on a tip-off from Pakistan.

No-one was charged. The pilot was allowed to return to Pakistan the next day, while the crew members were given their passports back a day later.

The episode caused considerable embarrassment to PIA, which was already reeling from a plane crash in that killed dozens of people in December and a number of near-misses subsequently, sparking allegations of corruption and mismanagement.

Then on 22 May, Pakistani officials at Islamabad airport seized more than 20kg (44lb) of heroin from another aircraft headed to Heathrow.

An investigation is continuing.

• The mysterious case of the drug-smuggling fishermen
• Why I bought my daughter heroin

What is Pakistan doing about it?

Investigations were launched to identify suspects within the PIA and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) with possible links to a drug trafficking ring that may have been using PIA to smuggle the drug abroad, Mashhood Tajwar, a PIA spokesman, told the BBC.

The investigation is being conducted by a team of officials from airport security, customs and the anti-narcotics force (ANF).

Mr Tajwar said pre-flight searches of aircrafts had been a part of standard operating procedures in the past, but surveillance had been stepped up since the May incident at Heathrow.

On Friday, a high-level meeting presided by the prime minister's adviser on aviation, Mehtab Ahmad Khan, finalised new security measures and a Central Operational Committee headed by the CAA chief was constituted to oversee their implementation.

On Monday, four aircraft expected to fly to foreign destinations were scheduled for checking, one of which - as mentioned above - was carrying drugs.

How surprising is this?

This is not the first time drugs have been found on PIA planes.

Last December, 17kg (37lb) of heroin was seized by officials at Karachi airport from a plane being readied for a flight to Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. The flight was delayed for over 11 hours as a result.

• WATCH: 'Cold turkey' only option for Karachi's addicts

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionPoppy crops are still found in large parts of Afghanistan

Pre-flight checks are part of routine procedure and sniffer dogs are regularly used to clear aircraft for operations, PIA officials say.

But the presence of heroin on some aircraft shows that officials responsible for such checks may either have been complacent or linked to drug mules among employees.

While poppy crops across Pakistan have largely been eliminated, it is still grown in large parts of southern Afghanistan where insurgent groups wield influence and officials have little power.

Analysts say poppy and heroin are among the main sources of income for these groups.

And since some of them are said to have the tacit support of Pakistani authorities, they are said to be able to enter the country and smuggle heroin into Pakistan for onward shipment to the West.

Such smuggling is further helped by large-scale movement of Afghan refugees across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, experts say.

How damaging is this for PIA?

Pakistan International Airlines has also courted controversy recently for other reasons.

In February its management was accused of trying to cover up an air safety breach when it boarded seven extra passengers on a flight from Karachi to Medina, Saudi Arabia. They were allowed to stand in the aisle during the flight.

In April, a passengers photographed the chief pilot of a London-bound flight taking a nap in the passenger compartment, leaving the controls in the hands of a first officer and a trainee pilot.

The pilot denied he had breached safety rules, but the PIA management said they were investigating the incident.

In early May, another pilot on a flight from Tokyo was accused of allowing an unauthorised foreign national into the cockpit. The passenger, a Chinese woman, remained there for two hours during the Tokyo-Beijing leg of the flight.

The incident was filmed by a journalist who was traveling on the same flight.

In 2013 a PIA pilot who admitted being over the legal alcohol limit to fly after being arrested in the cockpit was jailed for nine months in the UK.
SOURCE :- BBC

             The sex slaves of al-Shabab

When Salama Ali started investigating the disappearance of two younger brothers last year she made an awful discovery - not only were radicalised young Kenyan men leaving to join the al-Shabab militants in neighbouring Somalia, but women were being seized and trafficked by the group as sex slaves.

Salama's search for information about her brothers had to be carried out quietly and confidentially, as any hint of a connection with the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab can arouse the suspicion of the security forces.

So she met discreetly with other women in Mombasa and the surrounding area, sharing stories and seeking information about male relatives who had vanished.

"We discovered there were lots of us," Salama says.

But Salama also uncovered something very different - stories of women who had been taken to Somalia against their will.

The women were both young and old, from Christian and Muslim communities, from Mombasa and other parts of Kenya's coastal region. They were usually promised high-paid work in another town or abroad, and then kidnapped.

Last September Salama trained as a counsellor and set up a secret support group for returning women. Word spread and soon women began seeking her out and asking to join the group.

Some arrived with babies, she says, some with HIV, and some with mental illness caused by their experiences. All are terrified to speak openly, because of the risk of being mistakenly identified as an al-Shabab sympathiserIn a dark room with the curtains drawn, I meet this extraordinary group of women, who have a story that has never been told.

"Men used to come and have sex with me - I can't tell you the number," says one, shaking her head as she recounts her ordeal. "For those three years, every man was coming to sleep with me."

"They'd bring two or three men for each woman every night," says another. "We would be raped repeatedly."

Some women were forced to become the "wives" of al-Shabab militants, it appears, while others were held as slaves in a brothel.

---

Find out more

• In the UK you can watch the Sex Slaves of al-Shabab on Our World, on the BBC News Channel at 21:30 on Sunday 28 May, or on the BBC iPlayer (UK only)
• Viewers overseas can watch it on BBC World News - click here for transmission times
• On radio the programme can be heard on Assignment, on the BBC World Service, from Thursday 25 May - click here for transmission times

---

Al-Shabab is fighting to create a fundamentalist Islamic state in Somalia and has launched attacks on neighbouring countries, which have all sent troops to fight them as part of an African Union force.

Kenya has borne the brunt of al-Shabab's counter-attacks, and the Kenyan army is hunting fighters in the thick Boni Forest that straddles the border with Somalia.

Flying over it, you can see lines cut through it - narrow pathways that militants apparently use for transport. The BBC has spoken to more than 20 women and all talk of being held in a thick forest or transported through it. This is most likely to be Boni.One new member of Salama's group, Faith, has only recently escaped captivity.

She was 16 when she was approached by an elderly couple and offered a job in Malindi, further up the coast. Desperate for work, the next day she boarded a bus with 14 other passengers and all were given drugged water to drink."When we regained consciousness, there were two men inside the room," Faith says. "They blindfolded us with black scarves. They raped us in that room."

Drugged again, Faith woke up in a small clearing in a dark forest and was told she would be killed if she tried to escape.

Terrified, she spent the next three years alone cooking for a group of Somali men "with long long beards".

She had also become pregnant, as a result of being raped, and had to deliver her own child alone in the forest.

"My grandmother was a traditional midwife, so I had a little bit of knowledge," she says. "Everything I was doing in that forest was alone, so I just had to get out this baby alone."

Faith finally managed to escape with her daughter when a traditional healer foraging for medicinal roots in the forest came across her and showed her the way out. Her child, who grew up naked in the forest, now finds it hard to adapt to city life and struggles to fall asleep at night unless she is outside in her mother's arms.

Image captionFaith and her daughter

She grew accustomed to "living like we were animals in the forest", Faith says.

A number of the women who spoke to the BBC had given birth in captivity.

Sarah, the wife of a former al-Shabab fighter, says this is no coincidence. There is an organised programme to breed the next generation of fighters, she says, as it's hard to recruit people to live in camps in Somalia, and children are easy to indoctrinate.

"In my camp, there [were] women who are sent to come and recruit other women," Sarah says. "They want to multiply so they just want women to give birth."

Most of the 300 women in her camp were Kenyan, she says.

Salama also provides support to those who have lost family members, including Elizabeth, who last saw her sister two years ago, before she left for what she thought was a job in Saudi Arabia.

A month later, she called.

"She told us she was in a dangerous and bad place in Somalia, in an al-Shabab camp," says Elizabeth. The line broke - and her sister has not been heard from since.

The Kenyan government acknowledges there is a problem but Evans Achoki, the county commissioner in Mombasa, says it's hard to judge the scale of it, because the women won't come forward.

While there is an amnesty programme for fighters returning from Somalia, and some have been rehabilitated, there are also reports of men who have suddenly disappeared, or been shot dead.

"People fear the government," says Sureya Hersi of Sisters Without Borders, a network of Kenyan organisations working to counter radical extremism in Kenya's coastal region.

"Those who went there willingly and unwillingly are both looked at as guilty."

The names of all women in this story have been changed for their security

SOURCE :- BBC

      Americans should learn Russian to             influence Trump, Kerry says

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionRussia had difficult relations with John Kerry and the Obama team

Americans who want to influence the new US government should learn Russian, US ex-Secretary of State John Kerry says.

He was speaking at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

He strongly criticised President Donald Trump and his team, who are being investigated over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Russia's Foreign Ministry responded by saying the former US administration should have read the poems of Soviet propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova singled out a Mayakovsky poem which glorified Russian as the language of VI Lenin, who led the communist revolution in 1917.

Russia is marking the centenary of the revolution, which resulted in Cold War rivalry between the USSR and the US.

"I'm often asked what the secret is to have a real impact on government. Well, it's recently changed. I used to say, either run for office or get a degree from Harvard Kennedy School. With this White House I'd say, buy Rosetta Stone and learn Russian," Mr Kerry said on Wednesday.

Rosetta Stone is an online language-learning resource.

Russia: The scandal Trump can't shake

Putin wades into Trump-Russia row

Russian official says Jews backed Trump

In a Facebook post, Ms Zakharova said it was a mistake that Russia had not given the US state department under ex-President Barack Obama a collection of Mayakovsky poems.

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionMaria Zakharova admires a poet and artist who pioneered Socialist realism

She quoted a verse from Mayakovsky's long poem from 1927 called To Our Youth, which translates as:

"Even if I were an elderly black man I would learn Russian, without being despondent or lazy, just because Russian was Lenin's language."

The poem suggests that Russian can serve as a lingua franca binding the diverse nations of the Soviet Union in a new communist order.

Image copyrightALAMY

Image captionVladimir Mayakovsky (pictured) promoted the Soviet revolution of Bolshevik leader VI Lenin

Mayakovsky is still much-admired in Russia for his poetry and avant-garde Socialist realist posters.

He made searing criticisms of the US after touring North America in 1925, comparing its cultural diversity to the Tower of Babel.

"I don't know which Russian language textbooks should be bought for 'this' US administration, but for the 'last one' it would be best to get a little volume of Vladimir Vladimirovich [Mayakovsky], on the eve of the 1917 centenary," Ms Zakharova wrote.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has revived some elements of Soviet life, including pro-Kremlin youth movements and displays of military hardware.

In 2005 he called the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th Century.

SOURCE :- BBC

  Manchester attack: Police not sharing         information with US

Image copyrightNEW YORK TIMES

Image captionThe New York Times says this evidence was gathered at the scene of the attack

Police investigating the Manchester Arena bomb attack have stopped sharing information with the US after leaks to the media.

UK officials were outraged when photos appearing to show debris from the attack appeared in the New York Times.It came after the name of bomber Salman Abedi was leaked to US media just hours after the attack, which left 22 dead.Theresa May said she would tell Donald Trump at a Nato meeting that shared intelligence "must remain secure".Meanwhile, the Queen has been to the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital visiting some of the injured as well as members of the emergency services.While there she paid tribute to Manchester and the "extraordinary" way the city had responded to Monday's attack at an Ariana Grande concert, in which 116 people were also injured.Families' distress
In total eight men are now in custody following the bombing carried out by Manchester-born Abedi, a 22-year-old from a family of Libyan origin.The arrests have been "significant" while searches of premises have also yielded items "important to the investigation", Greater Manchester Police said.It has also emerged two people who had known Abedi at college made separate calls to a hotline to warn the police about his extremist views.A Whitehall source said Abedi was one of a "pool" of former subjects of interest whose risk remained "subject to review" by the security service and its partners.In other developments:

• A minute's silence was held at 11:00 BST in remembrance of those who lost their lives or were affected by the attack

• Two men were arrested following a search of an address in the Withington area of Greater Manchester on Thursday morning, taking the number of people held to eight

• Manchester City and Manchester United have jointly pledged £1m to an emergency fund set up to support the victims

• A possible suspicious package was declared safe after army bomb disposal experts were called to a street in Hulme, near Manchester city centre

• The Conservatives and Labour are to resume general election campaigning on Friday

Greater Manchester Police hope to resume normal intelligence relationships - a two-way flow of information - soon but is currently "furious", the BBC understands.Its chief constable Ian Hopkins said the recent leak had caused "much distress for families that are already suffering terribly with their loss.".The force - which is leading the investigation on the ground - gives its information to National Counter-Terrorism, which then shares it across government and - because of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement - with the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.