In Germany, a suspect in killing of a police officer is convicted
A suspect accused of killing a police officer and injuring five others in a stabbing last year was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported.
The man, identified as Sulaiman A. to uphold German privacy rules, was convicted by the Stuttgart higher regional court on four counts of attempted murder, according to German news agency dpa.
In the May 2024 attack, Sulaiman stabbed five members of Pax Europa — a group “against Islamization” — at a gathering they organized in Mannheim. Rouven Laur, an officer who intervened in the event, was also fatally stabbed before the attacker was shot by another officer. All six individuals were hospitalized, and Laur died of his injuries days later.
The Stuttgart court said that Sulaiman won’t be eligible for Germany’s normal release after serving 15 years. The 25-year-old male was born in Afghanistan but has resided in Germany since 2014, despite his asylum application reportedly having been rejected, the dpa said.
The attack is among a wave of violence in Germany, including an Afghan asylum seeker who drove into a union rally in Munich, knife attacks in Solingen by a Syrian asylum seeker and a stabbing by a man from Afghanistan in Aschaffenburg.
Having taken place before the EU Parliament elections in June 2024, the attack sparked a nationwide debate over the deportation of foreign criminals. In August 2024, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz began to push for more deportations, announcing that the German government would allow for the deportation of serious criminals back to Afghanistan. This began with sending 28 convicted criminals back to Afghanistan — the first since the Taliban took control in 2021— and Germany continues to fortalize its immigration policies.
In Hong Kong, critically endangered birds find sanctuary
The critically endangered yellow-crested cockatoo — one of the rarest birds in the world — is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, with at most 2,000 mature individuals in the wild. Endemic to Indonesia and East Timor, these birds were in demand as pets in the 20th century, which resulted in massive imports — many to Hong Kong, where 10% of the species’ wild population resides.
Conservationists in Hong Kong have recently begun installing artificial nest boxes that mimic yellow-crested cockatoos’ living spaces in an effort to save the bird population. Astrid Andersson, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Hong Kong who has been studying these birds since 2016, led the project and told The Associated Press that a pair of birds has already settled in a nest box her team fixed onto a tree on campus.
Growing sales of these birds in Hong Kong is another concern for the species’s longevity. Though the city bans commercial trading of wild-caught cockatoos, captive-bred sales registered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora are allowed. Hoping it will be used in the market one day, Andersson developed a forensic test to detect whether birds in the pet trade are wild-caught or captive.
“The population that we have here now is one of the largest remaining in the world,” Andersson told National Geographic. “They’re real characters, very resilient and very adaptable, so it’s an interesting situation where they are thriving somewhere completely alien.”
In the United Kingdom, three suspected Russian spies arrested
British police arrested three people — two men in their 40s and a woman in her mid-30s — suspected of spying for Russia on Thursday.
The trio, arrested in Essex at two separate addresses, were accused of violating Section 3 of the 2023 National Security Act, which introduced modernized anti-espionage laws in the United Kingdom.
Officers searched the two locations, and the suspects have since been released on bail with conditions despite the pending investigation, according to the Metropolitan Police.
In recent years, London authorities have accused people of being allied with Russia and conspiring against Britain. This includes a group of six Bulgarians who were convicted in March for contributing to spy operations on behalf of Russia and a group of five people found guilty in July of arson in a London warehouse committed on behalf of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group.
Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, said on Thursday that two of the young men convicted for the Wagner attack “are facing potentially lengthy custodial sentences.” He also confirmed that this week’s arrests “are in no way connected to that investigation,” The Times reported.
“We’re seeing an increasing number of who we would describe as proxies being recruited by foreign intelligence services,” Murphy said. “Anyone who might be contacted by and tempted into carrying out criminal activity on behalf of a foreign state here in the U.K. should think again. This kind of activity will be investigated and anyone found to be involved can expect to be prosecuted and there are potentially very serious consequences.”
Contact Eva Mundo at [email protected].
