Gambian on trial in Germany for murder of AFP
correspondent Germany is trying from Monday a Gambian accused of having been part of a death squad that murdered opponents of the former dictator Yahya Jammeh, including an AFP correspondent, in a trial eagerly awaited by rights defenders. The 46-year-old suspect, Bai Lowe, who was arrested in Hanover in March 2021, was appearing before the court in Celle (Lower Saxony) for crimes against humanity, murder and attempted murder committed between 2003 and 2006. He was at that time the driver of an armed forces unit tasked with assassinating critics of the regime of Yahya Jammeh, a dictator who remained in power in Banjul for 22 years. This unit was used, "among other things, to carry out illegal assassination orders. The aim was to intimidate the Gambian population and suppress the opposition," the German Federal Prosecutor's Office said > <. This trial is "the first to prosecute human rights violations committed in The Gambia during the Jammeh era on the basis of universal jurisdiction," said Human Rights Watch. The accused participated "in three liquidation orders in total", according to prosecutors. Among these crimes was the shooting of Gambian journalist Deyda Hydara, AFP correspondent, on 16 December 2004. Bai Lowe allegedly drove the journalist's killers, according to the indictment.
Everything (re)begins for Emmanuel Macron, placed in front of history
Re-elected to the Elysée in a historic election, Emmanuel Macron is facing on Monday a France just as politically fractured as during his first election in 2017. Historic, the feat that sees the outgoing be the first head of state re-elected outside cohabitation since the introduction of voting by direct universal suffrage in 1962. Historic, at least as much, the score of Marine Le Pen, who gains about eight points and makes the far right cross the bar of 40% of the vote for the first time. The electoral campaign, marked by Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, had shown a strong democratic weariness. This is found in the level of abstention on Sunday, estimated at 28%, more than five years ago (25.44%), and a record since the presidential election of 1969 (31%). In this context, the clear victory of the 44-year-old incumbent - more than 58% of the vote - "is a political feat of Emmanuel Macron quite personal", judged Sunday evening on LCI the political scientist Jérôme Jaffré, commenting "a very clear score that gives political game for the weeks to come, provided that the president knows how to draw all the lessons from such an election." His re-election comes after a five-year period punctuated by crises, from the "yellow vests" to Covid-19. It places the country in continuity with its broad economic, European and international guidelines.
Ukraine: US officials in Kiev for the first time since the beginning of the war
U.S. foreign and defense chiefs met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev on Sunday, exactly two months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sadly celebrated Orthodox Easter. "The Americans are in Kiev today. They are talking to the president right now," an adviser to Ukrainian President Oleksiy Arestovich said on YouTube in the evening. The visit to Kiev of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Minister Lloyd Austin is the first by American leaders since the conflict began on February 24. It comes after those of several European leaders in recent weeks. President Zelensky had announced on Saturday that they were coming to discuss US arms deliveries to Ukraine.
IN BRIEF
The first fully private space mission to visit the International Space Station, consisting of three businessmen and a former NASA astronaut, left the flying laboratory where they spent more than two weeks on the night of Sunday to Monday, direction Earth.
At least 168 people were killed Sunday in violence in Darfur, one of the heaviest tolls in the region of western Sudan ravaged by decades by war, reports an NGO.