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ISIL confirms death of leader ; names successor

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The ISIL (ISIS) group has confirmed the death of its leader, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, and named Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Qurashi as his replacement.

The group said on Thursday that its leader had been killed in “direct clashes” with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group in Idlib province in rebel-held northwestern Syria.

The announcement was made by an ISIL spokesman in a recorded message on its channels on the Telegram messaging app, without specifying when he was killed.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in April that Turkish intelligence forces had killed the leader in Syria.

“The suspected leader of Daesh, codename Abu Hussein al-Qurashi, has been neutralised in an operation carried out… by the MIT [National Intelligence Organisation] in Syria,” Erdogan said at the time, using the Arabic acronym for ISIL.

Turkish media released images of a fenced-off building in the middle of a field where it said he was hiding in Syria’s Afrin region.

Afrin lies in Aleppo province – neighbouring Idlib – in an area controlled by Turkish-backed rebels.

However, the ISIL spokesman claimed on Thursday that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which controls parts of Idlib province, had killed the group’s chief and handed his body to Turkey.

ISIL accuses HTS – which has not claimed any operation targeting the ISIL leader – of working in Ankara’s interests.

The United States and other Western governments have blacklisted HTS as a “terrorist” group.

Turkey’s Anadolu state news agency said at the time that the MIT conducted a four-hour operation during which it located the ISIL leader.

The ISIL leader set off his suicide vest when he realised he was about to be captured, Anadolu said, adding that no Turkish operatives were killed or injured.

After a meteoric rise in Iraq and Syria in 2014 that saw it conquer vast swathes of territory, ISIL saw its self-proclaimed “caliphate” collapse under a wave of offensives.

The group’s rule was marked by beheadings and mass shootings.

It was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but sleeper cells still carry out attacks in both countries.

Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Qurashi is the group’s fifth leader since its inception.

In November last year, ISIL said its previous leader, Abu Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, had been killed.

His predecessor, Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi, was killed in February last year in a United States raid in Idlib province.

The group’s first leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed, also in Idlib, in October 2019.

(Aljazeera)

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Pakistan police arrest 149 including 2 Lankans in ‘scam call centre’ raid

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Pakistan police have arrested 149 people in a raid on a scam call centre, the country’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) said on Thursday.

The agency told the BBC it acted after a tip-off about the network, which was operating in the city of Faisalabad.

It said the centre was involved in Ponzi schemes and tricked people into handing over vast sums of money in the name of fake investments.

Those arrested included 78 Pakistanis, 48 Chinese nationals, eight Nigerians, four Filipinos, two Sri Lankans, six Bangladeshis, two Myanmar nationals and one Zimbabwean national.
Eighteen of the 149 were women, the agency added.

A copy of a police report said victims of the alleged scam would initially receive a small return on their first investments, before being persuaded to hand over larger sums of money.

“The charged individuals ran WhatsApp groups where they lured ordinary people by assigning small investment tasks like subscribing to different TikTok and YouTube channels,” the agency said.

“Later, they shifted them to Telegram links for further online tasks requiring larger investments.”

Pakistani citizen Muhammad Sajid told BBC Urdu that he was added to a Telegram channel with tens of thousands of members and was impressed by the company’s work. He said he gave them more than 3.138 million rupees ($36,600) in various instalments.

The raid, which took place on Tuesday, saw authorities seize hundreds of computers, servers, cryptocurrency exchanges and foreign SIM cards from the site.

On Wednesday, 149 suspects appeared in court, 87 of whom were handed over to the NCCIA on a five-day physical remand.

A further 62 suspects have been transferred to the district jail on judicial remand until 23 July.

The agency said the raid was at the residence of Malik Tehseen Awan, the former head of Faisalabad’s power grid, who has not been arrested.

(BBC News)

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Original Birkin bag shatters record with £7m sale

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The original Birkin bag, which set the template for arguably the most coveted accessory in fashion history, has been bought for €8.6m (£7.4m; $10.1m), becoming the most valuable handbag ever sold at auction.

The black leather bag was made for singer Jane Birkin in 1985 after she spilled her belongings while sitting next to the boss of luxury fashion house Hermès on a flight.

She asked why they didn’t make bigger bags, so he sketched out the design for a new, more practical but still highly desirable item on the aeroplane’s sick bag.

The prototype he made was sold to a private collector from Japan at Sotheby’s in Paris on Thursday, far surpassing the €439,000 (£378,000; $513,000) previous record sale.

The auction house said there was an “electrifying” 10-minute bidding war between “nine determined collectors”.

Morgane Halimi, Sotheby’s global head of handbags and fashion, said the price was a “startling demonstration of the power of a legend and its capacity to ignite the passion and desire of collectors seeking exceptional items with unique provenance, to own its origin”.

She added: “The Birkin prototype is exactly that, the starting point of an extraordinary story that has given us a modern icon, the Birkin bag, the most coveted handbag in the world.”

The €8,582,500 total includes commission and fees. Sotheby’s did not publish a pre-auction estimate.

After creating the bag for the Anglo-French singer and actress, Hermès put the bag into commercial production, and it remains one of the most exclusive status symbols in fashion.

Some styles cost many tens of thousands of dollars and have waiting lists of years, with owners including celebrities like Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham and Jennifer Lopez.

The original has some unique features, such as Birkin’s initials on the front flap, a non-removable shoulder strap, the nail clippers she kept attached to the strap, and marks where she put stickers for causes she supported, such as Médecins du Monde and Unicef.

Birkin, who died in 2023 at the age of 76, owned the original bag for a decade and donated it to an auction to raise funds for an Aids charity in 1994.

It was later bought by Catherine Benier, who has a luxury boutique in Paris, who owned it for 25 years before selling it on Thursday.

Sotheby’s said the previous record price for a handbag was set by a White Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Diamond Retourne Kelly 28 in 2021.

(BBC News)

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ICC issues arrest warrants for Taliban leaders for persecuting women & girls

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The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for two of the Taliban’s top leaders, accusing them of persecuting women and girls in Afghanistan.

The Hague-based court said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani had committed a crime against humanity in their treatment of women and girls since seizing power in 2021.

In that time, they have implemented a series of restrictions, including on girls over 12 accessing education, and barring women from many jobs.

In response, the Taliban said it doesn’t recognise the ICC, calling the warrant “a clear act of hostility” and an “insult to the beliefs of Muslims around the world”.

There have also been restrictions on how far a woman can travel without a male chaperone, and decrees on them raising their voices in public.

In a statement, the ICC said that “while the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms”.

The United Nations has previously described the restrictions as being tantamount to “gender apartheid”.

The Taliban government has said it respects women’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Afghan culture and Islamic law.

Akhundzada became the supreme commander of the Taliban in 2016, and has been leader of the so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan since US-led forces left the country in August 2021. In the 1980s, he participated in Islamist groups fighting against the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan.

Haqqani was a close associate of Taliban founder Mullah Omar and served as a negotiator on behalf of the Taliban during discussions with US representatives in 2020.

The ICC investigates and brings to justice those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, intervening when national authorities cannot or will not prosecute.

However, it does not have its own police force and so relies on member states to carry out any arrests.

The prospect of warrants being issued for the two Taliban leaders was first raised in January, when the ICC’s top prosecutor, Karim Khan, alleged they were “criminally responsible for persecuting Afghan girls and women, as well as persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming with their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women”.

At the time, the Taliban’s foreign ministry responded to the threat of arrests, saying the ICC had turned a blind eye to what it described as “numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by foreign forces and their local allies”, referring to US-led forces present in the country before 2021.

Human Rights Watch welcomed the arrest warrants for the two Taliban leaders.

It called on the ICC “to extend the reach of justice to victims of other Taliban abuses, as well as victims of the Islamic State of Khorasan Province forces, former Afghan security forces and US personnel”.

“Addressing cycles of violence and impunity in Afghanistan requires that victims of all perpetrators have equal access to justice,” it said in a statement.

(BBC News)

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