JAKARTA: Investigators tasked with analyzing the data recovered from a crashed Lion Air jet’s “black box” said on Monday that it had faced problems with its airspeed indicator during its previous four flights.
The incident which took place on October 29 resulted in the death of all 189 people on board.
The team from Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) said that they had arrived at the preliminary conclusions after sifting through details of the flight data recorder (FDR), or black box, which was found in the Java Sea, near Karawang, West Java, last week.
“We have started to examine the FDR and will continue to analyze it. We found the plane’s speed indicators was damaged on the previous four flights,” KNKT Chairman, Soerjanto Tjahjono, said during a press conference on Monday.
The KNKT added that the FDR's recordings were 69 hours from 19 flights and the last date of recording was from the date of the crash and corresponded with public data available on flight-tracking websites.
Tjahjono said that the KNKT has asked the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Boeing to take the necessary measures to deal with issues with the speed indicator. “It is to prevent a similar accident from happening again especially on the Boeing 737 Max, which has sold more than 200 units around the world,” Tjahjono said.
Anugrah Satria, one of the passengers on the flight from Denpasar to Jakarta on the night before the crash, said that it was obvious that the plane was experiencing some problems as the flight kept getting delayed. “We had to wait inside the aircraft for about 20 minutes with the air conditioner not working. It started to taxi onto the runway but was retracted into a parking mode,” Satria told Arab News.
He added that the seat belt sign was on the for the entire duration of the one and half hour flight.
“There was some unusual noise coming from the engine and I could hear it because I was sitting in the window seat of row 22 near the wings,” he said, adding that the plane’s landing in Jakarta was not smooth either and bounced slightly as the tires touched the runway.
The crashed aircraft was undertaking its JT610 flight from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, on the island of Bangka off Sumatra, on October 29.
As per reports, the pilots had requested to return to Jakarta, before losing contact with the air traffic controller, 13 minutes after it took off at 6.20am and after it had reached an altitude of 5,400 feet.
A search operation soon found the debris of the plane in the waters off Tanjung Pakis in Karawang, about 70 kilometers east of Jakarta.
At a meeting on Monday, to address the grieving families of the victims, Tjahjono said that the plane did not explode mid-air and was intact when it plunged into the sea, with its engine's turbines running at high speed.
Angry and distraught family members vented their frustration at the authorities for their lack of coordination and failure to provide information, with Muhammad Bambang Sukandar, the father of one of the victims, Pangky Pradana Sukandar, asking Rusdi Kirana, founder of Lion Air who was among the audience, to stand up. Kirana, who is also Indonesia’s ambassador to Malaysia, faced the angry audience, with his head slightly bowed and pressed his palms together without saying a word.
Another relative demanded that a detailed enquiry be conducted in the case which should continue even after the KNKT concludes its investigation or after the airline has compensated victims’ families. “This incident was caused by human error, whoever that is. It was pure negligence,” said another family member.
Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, Basarnas, said that it had extended the search operations by three days until Wednesday.
Basarnas' chief, Muhammad Syaugi, reassured family members that the agency would continue to look for the remains of the victims. “We are trying the best we can with all we have... we are not giving up. Hopefully with the remaining time we can search until the 10th day,” a visibly emotional Syaugi said, as he choked and struggled to hold back his tears.
The search operation is also looking to retrieve a second black box, which contains the voice cockpit recordings from the cockpit. The Basarnas, on its part, has handed over more than 17 additional body bags to the police’s forensic team, adding to the 138 previously collected from the crash site. The forensic team said it had identified at least 24 victims as of Monday afternoon.
Probe finds glitch in Lion Air’s airspeed indicator
Probe finds glitch in Lion Air’s airspeed indicator
- Plane had malfunctioned on previous four flights, investigators say
- Victims’ families to be taken to crash site on Tuesday, nine days after the incident
Algeria ‘seeking to humiliate France,’ interior minister says
- Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a ferocious seven-year war that is still the subject of trauma for both sides
NANTES, France: Algeria is trying to humiliate France, France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on Friday, after several Algerian influencers were arrested for inciting violence in a growing crisis between Paris and its former colony.
Four Algerian influencers supportive of Algerian authorities have been arrested in recent days over videos that are suspected of calling for violent acts in France.
Meanwhile, Algeria has also been holding on national security charges French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, a major figure in modern francophone literature, who was arrested at Algiers airport in November.
“Algeria is seeking to humiliate France,” Retailleau said on a visit to the western city of Nantes.
“Algeria is currently holding a great writer — Boualem Sansal — who is not only Algerian but also French. Can a great country, a great people, allow itself to keep in detention for the wrong reasons, someone who is old and sick?“
Turning to the influencers, he said it was “out of the question to give a free pass to these individuals who spread hatred and anti-Semitism.”
“I think we have reached an extremely worrying threshold with Algeria,” he said, adding France “cannot tolerate” an “unacceptable situation.”
“While keeping our cool ... we must now consider all the means we have at our disposal regarding Algeria,” he added.
One of those arrested is “Doualemn,” a 59-year-old influencer detained in the southern city of Montpellier after a video posted on TikTok.
He was deported on a plane to Algeria on Thursday afternoon, according to his lawyer, but was sent back to France the same evening as Algeria had banned him from its territory.
On Thursday, Lyon prosecutors said Sofia Benlemmane, a Franco-Algerian woman in her 50s, was also arrested.
Followed by more than 300,000 people, she is accused of spreading hate messages and threats against Internet users and opponents of the Algerian authorities, as well as insulting statements about France.
Arrested in Brest on Jan. 3, Youcef A., 25, known as “Zazou Youssef” on TikTok, will be tried on Feb. 24 on charges of justifying terrorism.
Placed in pretrial detention, he faces seven years in prison if convicted.
And “Imad Tintin,” 31, was taken into police custody on Saturday in Grenoble for a video, since removed, in which he called for “burning alive, killing and raping on French soil.”
He will be tried on March 5 for incitement to acts of terrorism.
Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a ferocious seven-year war that is still the subject of trauma for both sides.
US hits Russian oil with toughest sanctions yet in bid to give Ukraine, Trump leverage
- US sanctions seen costing Russia billions of dollars a month
- US official sees no danger of global crude oil shortage
WASHINGTON/NEW DELHI/LONDON: US President Joe Biden’s administration imposed its broadest package of sanctions so far targeting Russia’s oil and gas revenues on Friday, in an effort to give Kyiv and Donald Trump’s incoming team leverage to reach a deal for peace in Ukraine.
The move is meant to cut Russia’s revenues for continuing the war in Ukraine that has killed more than 12,300 civilians and reduced cities to rubble since Moscow invaded in February, 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X that the measures announced on Friday will “deliver a significant blow” to Moscow. “The less revenue Russia earns from oil ... the sooner peace will be restored,” Zelensky added.
Daleep Singh, a top White House economic and national security adviser, said in a statement that the measures were the “most significant sanctions yet on Russia’s energy sector, by far the largest source of revenue for (President Vladimir) Putin’s war.”
The US Treasury imposed sanctions on Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas, which explore for, produce and sell oil as well as 183 vessels that have shipped Russian oil, many of which are in the so-called shadow fleet of aging tankers operated by non-Western companies. The sanctions also include networks that trade the petroleum.
Many of those tankers have been used to ship oil to India and China as a price cap imposed by the Group of Seven countries in 2022 has shifted trade in Russian oil from Europe to Asia. Some tankers have shipped both Russian and Iranian oil.
The Treasury also rescinded a provision that had exempted the intermediation of energy payments from sanctions on Russian banks.
The sanctions should cost Russia billions of dollars per month if sufficiently enforced, another US official told reporters in a call.
“There is not a step in the production and distribution chain that’s untouched and that gives us greater confidence that evasion is going to be even more costly for Russia,” the official said.
Gazprom Neft said the sanctions were unjustified and illegitimate and it will continue to operate.
US ‘no longer constrained’ by tight oil supply
The measures allow a wind-down period until March 12 for sanctioned entities to finish energy transactions.
Still, sources in Russian oil trade and Indian refining said the sanctions will cause severe disruption of Russian oil exports to its major buyers India and China.
Global oil prices jumped more than 3 percent ahead of the Treasury announcement, with Brent crude nearing $80 a barrel, as a document mapping out the sanctions circulated among traders in Europe and Asia.
Geoffrey Pyatt, the US assistant secretary for energy resources at the State Department, said there were new volumes of oil expected to come online this year from the US, Guyana, Canada and Brazil and possibly out of the Middle East will fill in for any lost Russian supply.
“We see ourselves as no longer constrained by tight supply in global markets the way we were when the price cap mechanism was unveiled,” Pyatt told Reuters.
The sanctions are part of a broader effort, as the Biden administration has furnished Ukraine with $64 billion in military aid since the invasion, including $500 million this week for air defense missiles and support equipment for fighter jets.
Friday’s move followed US sanctions in November on banks including Gazprombank, Russia’s largest conduit to the global energy business, and earlier last year on dozens of tankers carrying Russian oil.
The Biden administration believes that November’s sanctions helped drive Russia’s rouble to its weakest level since the beginning of the invasion and pushed the Russian central bank to raise its policy rate to a record level of over 20 percent.
“We expect our direct targeting of the energy sector will aggravate these pressures on the Russian economy that have already pushed up inflation to almost 10 percent and reinforce a bleak economic outlook for 2025 and beyond,” one of the officials said.
Reversal would involve congress
One of the Biden officials said it was “entirely” up to the President-elect Trump, a Republican, who takes office on Jan. 20, when and on what terms he might lift sanctions imposed during the Biden era.
But to do so he would have to notify Congress and give it the ability to take a vote of disapproval, he said. Many Republican members of Congress had urged Biden to impose Friday’s sanctions.
“Trump’s people can’t just come in and quietly lift everything that Biden just did. Congress would have to be involved,” said Jeremy Paner, a partner at the law firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed.
The return of Trump has sparked hope of a diplomatic resolution to end Moscow’s invasion but also fears in Kyiv that a quick peace could come at a high price for Ukraine.
Advisers to Trump have floated proposals that would effectively cede large parts of Ukraine to Russia for the foreseeable future.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new sanctions.
The military aid and oil sanctions “provide the next administration a considerable boost to their and Ukraine’s leverage in brokering a just and durable peace,” one of the officials said.
Oil tanker in Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ adrift off German coast
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock criticized Russia’s use of “dilapidated oil tankers” and labelled it a threat to European security.
She spoke after the 274-meter-long Eventin, carrying almost 100,000 tons of oil, was reported adrift and “unable to manoeuver” in the Baltic Sea.
An emergency tug intercepted the Eventin in waters off the island of Ruegen to stabilize the ship, which was carrying around “99,000 tons of oil.”
No oil leaks were detected by several surveillance aircraft overflights, but two more tug boats were on their way to the ship, the command said in a later statement.
A four-person team of emergency towing specialists would soon be winched onto the deck from a federal police helicopter to coordinate the operation, it added.
The sea was rough with 2.5-meter-high (8 feet) waves and strengthening wind gusts, the command also said, adding that no decision had yet been taken on whether and when to tow the ship to a port.
Although the tanker was navigating under the Panamanian flag, the German foreign ministry linked it to Russia’s sanctions-busting “shadow fleet.”
Baerbock said said that “by ruthlessly deploying a fleet of rusty tankers, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is not only circumventing the sanctions, but is also willingly accepting that tourism on the Baltic Sea will come to a standstill” in the event of an accident.
Following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Western countries have hit Russia’s oil industry with an embargo and banned the provision of services to ships carrying oil by sea.
In response, Russia has relied on tankers with opaque ownership or without proper insurance to continue lucrative oil exports.
The number of ships in the “shadow fleet” has exploded since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to US think tank the Atlantic Council.
In addition to direct action against Russia’s oil industry, Western countries have moved to sanction individual ships thought to be in the shadow fleet.
The European Union has so far sanctioned over 70 ships thought to be ferrying Russian oil.
The United States and Britain on Friday moved to impose restrictions on some further 180 ships in the shadow fleet.
Trump gets no-penalty sentence in his hush money case, while calling it ‘despicable’
NEW YORK: President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday to no punishment in his historic hush money case, a judgment that lets him return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.
With Trump appearing by video from his Florida estate, the sentence quietly capped an extraordinary trial rife with moments unthinkable in the US only a few years ago.
It was the first criminal prosecution and first conviction of a former US president and major presidential candidate. The New York case became the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and possibly the only one that ever will. And the sentencing came 10 days before his inauguration for his second term.
In roughly six minutes of remarks to the court, a calm but insistent Trump called the case “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.” He maintained that he did not commit any crime.
“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election, and, obviously, that didn’t work,” the Republican president-elect said by video, with US flags in the background. Beside him at his Mar-a-Lago property was defense lawyer Todd Blanche, whom Trump has tapped to serve as the second-highest ranking Justice Department official in his incoming administration.
After the roughly half-hour proceeding, Trump said in a post on his social media network that the hearing had been a “despicable charade.” He reiterated that he would appeal his conviction.
Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan could have sentenced the 78-year-old to up to four years in prison. Instead, Merchan chose a sentence that sidestepped thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case but assured that Trump will become the first president to take office with a felony conviction on his record.
Trump’s no-penalty sentence, called an unconditional discharge, is rare for felony convictions. The judge said that he had to respect Trump’s upcoming legal protections as president, while also giving due consideration to the jury’s decision.
“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those protections, one power they do not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict,” said Merchan, who had indicated ahead of time that he planned the no-penalty sentence.
As Merchan pronounced the sentence, Trump sat upright, lips pursed, frowning slightly. He tilted his head to the side as the judge wished him “godspeed in your second term in office.”
Before the hearing, a handful of Trump supporters and critics gathered outside. One group held a banner that read, “Trump is guilty.” The other held one that said, “Stop partisan conspiracy” and “Stop political witch hunt.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a Democrat.
The norm-smashing case saw the former and incoming president charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, put on trial for almost two months and convicted by a jury on every count. Yet the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations — didn’t hurt him with voters, who elected him in November to a second term.
“The American voters got a chance to see and decide for themselves whether this was the kind of case that should’ve been brought. And they decided,” Blanche said Friday.
Prosecutors said that they supported a no-penalty sentence, but they chided Trump’s attacks on the legal system throughout the case.
“The once and future president of the United States has engaged in a coordinated campaign to undermine its legitimacy,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.
Afterward, Trump was expected to return to the business of planning for his new administration. He was set later Friday to host conservative House Republicans as they gathered to discuss GOP priorities.
The specific charges in the hush money case were about checks and ledgers. But the underlying accusations were seamy and deeply entangled with Trump’s political rise.
Trump was charged with fudging his business’ records to veil a $130,000 payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Trump’s 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she maintains the two had a decade earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them and that he did nothing wrong.
Prosecutors said Daniels was paid off — through Trump’s personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen — as part of a wider effort to keep voters from hearing about Trump’s alleged extramarital escapades.
Trump denies the alleged encounters occurred. His lawyers said he wanted to squelch the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while prosecutors said Cohen’s reimbursements for paying Daniels were deceptively logged as legal expenses, Trump says that’s simply what they were.
Trump’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to forestall a trial, and later to get the conviction overturned, the case dismissed or at least the sentencing postponed.
Trump attorneys have leaned heavily into assertions of presidential immunity from prosecution, and they got a boost in July from a Supreme Court decision that affords former commanders-in-chief considerable immunity.
Trump was a private citizen and presidential candidate when Daniels was paid in 2016. He was president when the reimbursements to Cohen were made and recorded the following year.
Merchan, a Democrat, repeatedly postponed the sentencing, initially set for July. But last week, he set Friday’s date, citing a need for “finality.”
Trump’s lawyers then launched a flurry of last-minute efforts to block the sentencing. Their last hope vanished Thursday night with a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that declined to delay the sentencing.
Meanwhile, the other criminal cases that once loomed over Trump have ended or stalled ahead of trial.
After Trump’s election, special counsel Jack Smith closed out the federal prosecutions over Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. A state-level Georgia election interference case is locked in uncertainty after prosecutorFaniWillis was removed from it.
Serbia to talk with Putin after US sanctions target energy company
- Petroleum Industry of Serbia (NIS), majority-owned by Russia’s Gazprom Neft and its parent company, Gazprom, is the only supplier of gas to Serbia
- NIS was among the raft of companies hit by the latest round of US sanctions targeting the Kremlin on Friday
BELGRADE: Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said Friday he would hold talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after Washington announced sweeping sanctions against a range of energy companies, including a Serbian firm.
Petroleum Industry of Serbia (NIS), majority-owned by Russia’s Gazprom Neft and its parent company, Gazprom, is the only supplier of gas to Serbia and the majority owner of both gas pipelines that transport gas from Russia to households and industries in Serbia.
NIS was among the raft of companies hit by the latest round of US sanctions targeting the Kremlin on Friday.
Following the announcement, Vucic told a news conference he would speak with Putin “first over the phone, and then explore other ways of communication.”
Vucic said he would also be holding talks with US and Chinese representatives soon.
“We will respond responsibly, seriously, and diligently, and although we will act carefully, we will not rush into making wrong decisions,” Vucic added.
“We will ask the incoming administration to reconsider this decision once more and see if we can obtain some allowances regarding the decisions that have already been made.”
Serbia has maintained a close relationship with Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine and refuses to impose sanctions, unlike the EU which it hopes to join.
Vucic had stated earlier that if sanctions were implemented, it would be a severe blow to Serbia, which heavily relies on Russian gas and is currently negotiating a new contract, as the current one expires in March 2025.
Gazprom Neft owns 50 percent of NIS, Gazprom 6.15 percent and 29.9 percent is owned by the Republic of Serbia, according to NIS’s website.
Friday’s announcement comes just 10 days before US President Biden is due to step down, and puts President-elect Donald Trump in an awkward position, given his stated desire to end the Ukraine war on day one of his presidency.
