ANNAPOLIS, Md.: Adnan Syed, speaking a year after he was released from prison when a judge vacated his conviction in the murder of his ex-girlfriend, emphasized his innocence again Tuesday, as he faces another stage in a long and complex legal odyssey in Maryland’s Supreme Court after a lower court reinstated his conviction in March.
Syed, who gave a presentation lasting more than an hour that was streamed online by news outlets, called on Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown to investigate what he alleged to be prosecutorial misconduct in his case, which was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial.”
“We have a tremendous amount of respect for Mr. Brown,” Syed said, as his mother and younger brother sat nearby on a couch in the family’s home. “He has a long history of standing up for Maryland families, and we’re just asking that he please stand up for our family as well.”
Jennifer Donelan, a spokeswoman for Brown, said the attorney general did not have the authority to investigate allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
“We are prevented from commenting any further because, as you are aware, we are in the midst of ongoing litigation involving this case,” Donelan said in an email.
Syed spoke for more than an hour with journalists in his family’s home in Windsor Mill. Maryland’s Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in his appeal on Oct. 5.
The Supreme Court is considering whether a lower court violated the rights of Young Lee, whose sister Hae Min Lee was killed in 1999 when she was in high school with Syed in a Baltimore suburb.
The Lee family is appealing a judge’s decision to vacate Syed’s conviction, saying the family received insufficient notice about the vacatur hearing, which was scheduled on a Friday for the following Monday. Maryland’s intermediate appellate court largely affirmed their arguments, reinstated Syed’s conviction and called for a new vacatur hearing.
Attorneys for the Lee family declined to comment Tuesday.
Syed, 42, noted that the judge’s decision to quickly schedule the hearing could have been out of respect for his family, which had suffered during the two decades of his incarceration.
“They have no idea if it’s Monday, am I going to be alive on Tuesday,” Syed said. “Am I going to be alive on Wednesday? And for years this has hurt them so much that my mom would stay awake at night.”
Syed, whose presentation included 93 slides summarizing the many twists and turns his case has taken over more than two decades, pointed to multiple criticisms that have been raised about the case.
For example, he highlighted failures to bring to light testimony by an alibi witness who said she saw Syed in a library that could have changed the outcome of his trial. Syed alleged that prosecutors weren’t truthful in statements about the witness.
Syed also noted unreliable cellphone data used during his court case to corroborate his whereabouts on the day of the crime. The notice on the records specifically advised that the billing locations for incoming calls “would not be considered reliable information for location.”
Syed also stressed the failure by prosecutors to disclose alternative suspects to defense attorneys during his trial in what’s known as a Brady violation, which was cited by a Baltimore judge last year when she vacated his conviction.
While Syed has remained free since his release last year, he could potentially be sent back to prison — a point he noted on Tuesday.
“If that court makes a decision that I have to return to prison, I’m going to be there,” Syed said.
Syed, who was 17 at the time of Lee’s death, has been working as an associate for Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative. After a mistrial, a jury convicted Syed in 2000.
Syed, who has always maintained his innocence, emphasized it again Tuesday.
“We’ve fought so hard for all these years to try to prove that I was innocent, but also to get justice for Hae and justice for her family,” Syed said.
Adnan Syed calls for investigation into prosecutorial misconduct on protracted legal case
https://arab.news/7nt94
Adnan Syed calls for investigation into prosecutorial misconduct on protracted legal case
- The Supreme Court is considering whether a lower court violated the rights of Young Lee, whose sister Hae Min Lee was killed in 1999 when she was in high school with Syed in a Baltimore suburb
Britain plans at least six new weapons factories in defense review
- The 1.5 billion-pound ($2.0 billion) investment will be included in the Strategic Defense Review, a 10-year plan for military equipment and services
MANCHESTER, England: Britain will build at least six new factories producing weapons and explosives as part of a major review of its defense capabilities, the government said on Saturday.
The 1.5 billion-pound ($2.0 billion) investment will be included in the Strategic Defense Review, a 10-year plan for military equipment and services. The SDR is expected to be published on Monday.
The Ministry of Defense added that it planned to procure up to 7,000 long-range weapons built in Britain. Together, the measures announced on Saturday will create around 1,800 jobs, the MoD said.
“The hard-fought lessons from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine show a military is only as strong as the industry that stands behind them,” Defense Secretary John Healey said in a statement.
“We are strengthening the UK’s industrial base to better deter our adversaries and make the UK secure at home and strong abroad.”
The extra investment will mean Britain will spend around 6 billion pounds on munitions in the current parliament, the MoD said.
Earlier on Saturday, the MoD said it would spend an extra 1.5 billion pounds to tackle the poor state of housing for the country’s armed forces.
Paris Holocaust memorial, synagogues hit with paint
- “I am deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community,” Retailleau said
- No arrests have been made
PARIS: France’s Holocaust memorial, two synagogues and a restaurant in central Paris were vandalized with green paint overnight, according to police sources on Saturday, prompting condemnation from government and city officials.
“I am deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community,” French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X.
No arrests have been made.
Retailleau last week called for “visible and dissuasive” security measures at Jewish-linked sites amid concerns over possible anti-Semitic acts.
In a separate message seen by AFP, the interior minister on Friday had again ordered heightened surveillance ahead of the upcoming Jewish Shavuot holiday.
The French Jewish community, one of the largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials since the Gaza war erupted on October 7, 2023.
“Anti-Semitic acts account for more than 60 percent of anti-religious acts, and the Jewish community is particularly vulnerable,” Retailleau said in the message seen by AFP.
Paris authorities would be lodging a complaint over the paint incident, said the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
“I condemn these acts of intimidation in the strongest possible terms. Anti-Semitism has no place in our city or in our Republic,” she said.
In May 2024, red hand graffiti was painted beneath the wall at the memorial in central Paris honoring individuals who saved Jews from persecution during the 1940-44 Nazi occupation of France.
US judge prevents Trump from invalidating 5,000 Venezuelans’ legal documents
- The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued
- TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster
NEW YORK: A federal judge prevented the Trump administration from invalidating work permits and other documents granting lawful status to about 5,000 Venezuelans, a subset of the nearly 350,000 whose temporary legal protections the US Supreme Court last week allowed to be terminated.
US District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco in a Friday night ruling concluded that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem likely exceeded her authority when she in February invalidated those documents while more broadly ending the temporary protected status granted to the Venezuelans.
The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued that prevented the administration as part of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda from terminating deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program.
But the high court stated specifically it was not preventing any Venezuelans from still challenging Noem’s related decision to invalidate documents they were issued pursuant to that program that allowed them to work and live in the United States.
Such documents were issued after the US Department of Homeland Security in the final days of Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure extended the TPS program for the Venezuelans by 18 months to October 2026, an action Noem then moved to reverse.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
Lawyers for several Venezuelans and the advocacy group National TPS Alliance asked Chen to recognize the continuing validity of those documents, saying without them thousands of migrants could lose their jobs or be deported.
Chen in siding with them said nothing in the statute that authorized the Temporary Protected Status program allowed Noem to invalidate the documents.
Chen, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, noted the administration estimated only about 5,000 of the 350,000 Venezuelans held such documents. “This smaller number cuts against any contention that the continued presence of these TPS holders who were granted TPS-related documents by the Secretary would be a toll on the national or local economies or a threat to national security,” Chen wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Chen ruled hours after the US Supreme Court in a different case allowed Trump’s administration to end the temporary immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants under a different Biden-era program.
India’s military chief admits jets downed in recent clashes with Pakistan
- Islamabad previously claimed to have shot down 6 Indian jets in early May
- Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart, says expert
NEW DELHI: India’s military chief Gen. Anil Chauhan has confirmed for the first time that the Indian Air Force lost jets in clashes with Pakistan in May.
Earlier this month, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said his country shot down six Indian jets, an assertion that Delhi had refrained from commenting on.
Chauhan, chief of defense staff of the Indian Armed Forces, is the first Indian official to make the most direct admission over the fate of the country’s fighter jets during the conflict that erupted on May 7.
“What is important is that, not the jet being downed, but why they were being downed,” Chauhan told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Saturday, while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
“The good part is that we are able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it and then implement it again after two days and fly all our jets again, targeting at long range.”
Pakistan’s claims of shooting down six Indian combat aircraft were “absolutely incorrect,” Chauhan said, without specifying how many jets India lost.
India and Pakistan recently saw their worst clashes in half a century, during which both sides traded air, drone and missile strikes, as well as artillery and small arms fire along their shared border.
It was triggered by a gruesome attack on tourists near the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian Kashmir on April 22, in which 26 people — 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen — were killed.
Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor for National Security Studies at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, said that the Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart.
“Initially, Indians were surprised. Maybe they underestimated the capacity of the Pakistani Air Force,” Karnad told Arab News on Saturday.
“I think what was surprising was that India did not use the airborne early warning (and) control system, the NETRA, which Pakistan has used very well,” he said. “I’m not sure how much the Indian Air Force expected this kind of tactical innovation. So, this is something that the Indian Air Force realized very quickly.”
According to Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, a retired officer of the Indian Air Force, Pakistan benefited from its Chinese-made weapons during the early May conflict.
“This brings us to the lessons which underscore that India was not fighting Pakistan on one front but two countries: Pakistan and China,” Kak told Arab News.
“Every single superior technology, capability, operationally and tactically, or in strategic terms, are made available to Pakistan. That must concern us: What kind of force structure we must have and what kind of capabilities we must build against the combo.”
Death toll rises to 17 in Indonesia quarry collapse as search continues
- The victims were trapped in the rubble when the Gunung Kuda quarry in Cirebon district collapsed
- By Saturday afternoon, rescuers had retrieved 16 bodies
CIREBON, Indonesia: The death toll from the collapse of a stone quarry in Indonesia’s West Java province has risen to at least 17, with eight people still missing, officials said Saturday.
The victims were trapped in the rubble when the Gunung Kuda quarry in Cirebon district collapsed on Friday. A dozen survivors were found by rescuers.
By Saturday afternoon, rescuers had retrieved 16 bodies, while one of the survivors died in the hospital, said local police chief Sumarni. She said rescuers are searching for eight people still believed to be trapped
“The search operation has been hampered by bad weather, unstable soil and rugged terrain,” said Sumarni who goes by a single name like many Indonesians.
She said the cause of the collapse is still under investigation, and police have been questioning six people, including the owner of the quarry.
Local television reports showed emergency personnel, along with police, soldiers and volunteers, digging desperately in the quarry in a steep limestone cliff, supported by five excavators, early Saturday.
West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi said in a video statement on Instagram that he visited the quarry before he was elected in February and considered it dangerous.
“It did not meet the safety standard elements for its workers,” Mulyadi said, adding that at that time, “I didn’t have any capacity to stop it.”
On Friday, Mulyadi said that he had ordered the quarry shut, as well as four other similar sites in West Java.
Illegal or informal resource extraction operations are common in Indonesia, providing a tenuous livelihood to those who labor in conditions with a high risk of injury or death.
Landslides, flooding and tunnel collapses are just some of the hazards associated with them. Much of the processing of sand, rocks or gold ore also involves the use of highly toxic mercury and cyanide by workers using little or no protection.
Last year, a landslide triggered by torrential rains struck an unauthorized gold mining operation on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, killing at least 15 people.
