Prison Break at infamous Brazilian jail!

Reports says about a dozen inmates at an overcrowded Brazilian prison have tunnelled to freedom, and another group made a failed attempt to scale the wall.

A department spokesman said the high-security prisoners broke out of the infamous Pedrinhas prison in the northeastern city of Sao Luis de Maranhao, site of numerous attempts to escape conditions renowned as hellish.

Brazilian television reported from the site that at least 10 prisoners were believed to have escaped through the tunnel, but authorities could not confirm the figure.

The G1 web news portal showed images from the tunnel exit and a pile of earth which appeared to have escaped the authorities' notice ahead of the inmates' dawn exit.

It was unclear how many prisoners had escaped.

"There was no visit or inspection on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, allowing them to get on with digging out their tunnel," said Sebastiao Uchia, Maranhao secretary of state for justice told G1 before handing in his own resignation.

How come there were no checks for three days? Someone has to be held to account

Tunnelling is an age-old means of jailbreaking, and in Pedrinhas around 20 prisoners took advantage of the commotion caused by the first escape to break out of their cells and converge on the front gate.

There, some tried to jump a wall topped with barbed wire which they attacked with cutters before elite police nabbed them, Globo News reported.

Escape attempts have been on the rise in recent weeks in Brazil, which has 274 people in prison per 100,000 residents, according to the International Centre of Penitentiary Studies, causing facilities to burst at the seams.

Last week, 36 prisoners escaped from Pedrinhas after a stealing a dumper truck and using it to breach the rear wall of the facility. Just one was recaptured.

This month alone has now seen three escapes from the same facility.

On Monday, police arrested a prison director accused of taking bribes to look the other way.

Pedrinhas, with a capacity of 1,700 prisoners but currently crammed with 2,500, has been the scene of repeated riots and killings of inmates.

At least 15 have been killed this year, following on from 60 last year - three were decapitated and grisly footage was posted online.

Five prisoners were killed and 25 wounded in a riot at a prison in Cascavel in the southern state of Parana, where inmates took two guards hostage.

Kanye Responds to Wheelchair Incident: "I'm a Married, Christian Man"!

Following media publications  that reported he told a fan in a wheelchair to "stand up" at one of his concerts. Kanye West responded saying "I'm a married, Christian man... pick another target."

What I want you to do is I want you to run the video everyone's talking about where I so-called screamed at somebody and everything. I want you to run that, right, since this is such big media-press-news and everything that obviously they trying to demonize me for. It's like, "Welcome to today's news, ladies and gentlemen." We've got Americans getting killed on TV, kids getting killed every weekend in Chicago, unarmed people getting killed by police officers…

…It makes you just want to reflect on what are the things that are a little bit more sensationalized than others. ... Because they've got this thing where they want the masses—people who've never heard my albums—to somehow read a headline that reads negative, and think that I'm a bad person or something. I'm not judging, I'm just going to tell you who I am. I'm a married, Christian man.

Well......you heard him there, pick another target...'lol'...

Ebola Health Team Massacred in Guinean Village!

Three days after three Ebola health officials went missing in Guinea, eight of them, five health workers and three journalist were reportedly found dead in a village latrine in the Nzerekore region. 

A spokesman for Guinea's government, Damantang Camara, told Reuters, "Three of them had their throats slit." The health team went missing Tuesday after villagers threw rocks at them.

According to the Washington Post, a group of young people attacked the team when they were trying to distribute information about Ebola. 

The government sent a delegation to the village to try to find the team, when they suspected they would have been kidnapped, but the BBC reported that the delegation had trouble gaining access because a bridge was destroyed.

Throughout West Africa and in Guinea, specifically, some villagers have reacted negatively to health workers because they doubt Ebola is real.

BBC Journalists Attacked While Investigating Servicemen Deaths in Russia!

The British Broadcasting Corp. said unidentified men attacked a team of its journalists and destroyed their camera as it was investigating reports of Russian servicemen being killed near the border with Ukraine.

The public-funded broadcaster said its staff were badly beaten by at least three assailants in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan on Tuesday. After four hours of questioning at a local police station afterward, the journalists discovered that their recording equipment, which had been in their vehicle at the police station, had been electronically wiped, the BBC said in a statement.

"The attack on our staff, and the destruction of their equipment and recordings, were clearly part of a coordinated attempt to stop accredited news journalists reporting a legitimate news story," the BBC said.

The attack comes amid rising pressure on news media whose reporting has been at odds with the Kremlin's narrative of events in the region. Before the attack, BBC Moscow Correspondent Steven Rosenberg and two colleagues had interviewed the sister of a Russian serviceman who died in August after telling his family he was being sent to southeastern Ukraine, according to an article written by Mr. Rosenberg and published on the BBC website Thursday.

Moscow says its forces aren't involved in the conflict between pro-Russia rebels and government forces in eastern Ukraine. But officials in Moscow recently said some Russian volunteers, as well as army personnel on vacation, are fighting there.

Attacks on foreign journalists in Russia are rare, but beatings and killings of local reporters occur more frequently. Russian journalists investigating the presence of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine have faced attacks by unknown assailants recently.

Western and Ukrainian officials say Russian army units are fighting in eastern Ukraine. Russian journalists have published several investigations into the claims, which appear to show servicemen were there.

Lev Shlosberg, a local lawmaker and journalist in the western city of Pskov, was badly beaten in August after publishing a story about the funerals of paratroopers from a local regiment who were apparently killed in Ukraine. Television and newspaper reporters who went to the cemetery near Pskov were also attacked by unidentified men.

According to the BBC article on Thursday, as the BBC team was leaving the sister's village in southern Russia, their car was stopped by traffic police, who checked their trunk and identities, he wrote. After lunching in Astrakhan some 40 miles away, the journalists were confronted and attacked by at least three people.

The assailants knocked the cameraman to the ground and beat him, smashing the camera and taking it away in their car, Mr. Rosenberg wrote. The cameraman suffered a concussion, but all three are now safe and back in Moscow, a BBC spokesman said.

After four hours of questioning at a police station, the journalists discovered that their recording equipment, which was in their vehicle at the police station, had been wiped, the BBC said in a statement.

Russian police said it had opened a criminal case into the incident. Pyotr Rusanov, a spokesman for Astrakhan regional police, said a large police team was searching for the suspects and the camera. "We haven't managed to detain anyone yet. We're working on it," he said by telephone.

The BBC on Thursday submitted a complaint to the Russian Foreign Ministry about the attack, the BBC spokesman said. The Foreign Ministry didn't have an immediate comment.

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'Welcome to Hell Fire' Report Accuses Nigerian Security Personnels of Routinely Using Torture!

In a new report that documents horrifying acts of brutality which largely go unpunished, Amnesty International reveals that torture is routinely used by Nigeria's Police and soldiers. 

"We have seen various forms of torture being used, one of the most gruesome is nail extraction," Netsanet Belay, Amnesty's Africa Director, told DW.

Stating how he was beaten with iron bars, machetes and wooden rods but the worse part of what he experienced was being hung up by his feet for more than an hour, 33-year-old Onyekachi one of the many victims of Police brutality: "My hands were tied behind my back, together with my legs," he told DW.

During research carried out over seven years, the organization collected more than 500 statements from former detainees. Amnesty viewed evidence held by lawyers and sent its own observers into prisons - with horrifying results. 

The methods of torture used are many and various. Prisoners are beaten with whips, rifle butts or rubber batons, are forced to walk over broken glass or to sit on benches of nails. "Electric shocks, hanging people upside down and beating them," is also commonplace, Belay said.

Women were subjected to particularly brutal forms of sexual violence. "There were women who had fire extinguishers fired into their vaginas in order to extract information," 

The perpetrators often go unpunished, says Netsanet Belay, while the victims receive no compensation. 

"The Nigerian government systematically neglects to investigate allegations of torture. Particularly within the military we have not seen any evidence of prosecutions or investigations into such allegations." 

Stating further Belay says this culture of impunity must end, . "There is a pending bill in parliament that aims to criminalize torture that has been debated but not adopted." This bill is urgently needed "so the courts can hold the perpetrators to account."Belay said.

Mamman Lawal Yusufari, a Lawyer and head of the Faculty of Law at Bayero University in the northern state of Kano, who have worked for years to strengthen the legal rights of detainees and spends much time trying to get bail for detainees says the situation has worsened since the government imposed a state of emergency in several northern states in the battle against Islamist militant group Boko Haram. There, people are arrested on suspicion of being Boko Haram members "and taken to detention bases which are known as Guantanamo Bay. They keep them there without trial or proper investigation. Some of them die there. The situation is alarming," Yusufari said.

Torture is used as punishment, to extract money or in order to "solve" cases more quickly. Prisoners are forbidden to see their families. Few have the opportunity to consult a lawyer who can provide legal support. 

Thousands of people - estimates speak of up to 10,000 - have been arrested in the military operations against Boko Haram. Often all is needed is an unconfirmed allegation and people can disappear behind bars for years, says Amnesty International.

Minister for Police Affairs, Abdul Jelili Desiyan

On his part, Nigeria's Minister for Police Affairs, Abdul Jelili Desiyan allegedly denied the allegations, saying "Amnesty International has consistently in the course of this [Boko Haram] insurgency sought to tarnish the image of Nigeria and its armed forces."

10 People Killed As Cult Groups Clash In Rivers State!

According to reports, a bloody clash between two rival cult groups at Ibaa Town in Ahoada West Local Government Area of Rivers State, Southsouth Nigeria, has left 10 people dead and property worth millions of naira destroyed.

This was disclosed by the Police when the state new Commissioner of Police, CP Dan Bature, visited the troubled area to assess the situation and sympathise with the residents of the area.

The Police added that the cult groups, named Icelanders and Greenlanders, also injured  many residents of the area during the free for all.

The dead victims, according to the Police, have been deposited in a mortuary in the state while the injured residents have been admitted to a hospital for treatment.

The Police chief stated that some of the dead victims include two vigilante members and the Ibaa town crier. It was also claimed that five of the gangsters were arrested during the crisis which forced residents to flee their homes to avoid being killed.

According to Police reports, the gangsters unleashed terror on the town with guns and other lethal weapons before the police arrived the scene to dislodge them and restore order.

The Police claimed that a longstanding chieftancy tussle in the area and the lingering political differences among stakeholders triggered the mayhem.

During his condolence visit to Ibaa town to console the families of the victims, CP Bature said: “I sympatise with all of you ( residents)  over the unfortunate incident. I am in your midst to inform you  that the police in the  Rivers State command under my control will continue to provide maximum security to ensure all  residents of this state will continue to sleep with  their two eyes closed every day.”

The Police Commissioner also appealed to them not to take the laws in their hands. He assured them that the police have launched a manhunt for the gangsters who committed the crime.

Source: PM News

Sistema boss arrested in Russia on money-laundering charges!

One of Russia's richest men, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, has been reportedly placed under house arrest on accusations of money laundering.

Yevtushenkov, who is worth $9bn (£5.5bn) according to Forbes magazine Russia, was arrested late on Tuesday. 

Vladimir Yevtushenkov

The arrest brought accusations from the fallen oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, released from prison by Vladimir Putin last year, that the move was linked to Kremlin interest in Yevtushenkov's oil assets. Rosneft, the state-owned oil group, dismissed Khodorkovsky's comments as "absurd", on Wednesday morning.

The billionaire is the chairman and largest shareholder of Sistema, a conglomerate whose board members include the Labour peer Lord Mandelson.

Sistema controls Russia's largest mobile phone operator, MTS, the oil company Bashneft and other lucrative assets. The accusations relate to Yevtushenkov's acquisition of Bashneft, one of the few Russian oil producers that is not under state control.

Sistema said it considers the accusations baseless. Shares in Sistema collapsed by 28% in the first half hour of trading at Moscow's MICEX stock exchange on Wednesday.

"Such a dramatic turn of events comes as a surprise," said analysts at Sberbank. 

"The risk of a change in the shareholder structure of Bashneft escalates, a risk that now spreads to Sistema's other assets."

Timothy Ash, chief emerging markets analyst for Standard Bank in London, said the news could cause further difficulties for a Russian investment landscape that is already muddied by sanctions related to the Ukraine conflict.

"Clearly all this comes at a particularly inopportune time for Russian markets, given concern over developments in Ukraine, the imposition of western sanctions and also the weak underlying growth story in Russia."

Khodorkovsy, formerly the country's richest man, claimed in an interview with the business daily Vedomosti that Rosneft was behind Yevtushenkov's arrest. 

The former owner of the Yukos oil business spent more than a decade in jail after being convicted on economic charges that many believe were politically motivated.

Rosneft dismissed Khodorkovsky's allegations. "I don't understand why Rosneft has something to do with that. This is absurd," the RIA news agency quoted a Rosneft spokesman as saying on Wednesday.

Yevtushenkov's arrest has taken place against the backdrop of further pressure on the Russian economy. On Tuesday, the central bank said it was starting overnight rouble-dollar swap operations in order to make more dollars available to Russian banks, pushing the rouble higher in late trading on the Moscow exchange.

Russian banks and companies have experienced a shortage of dollars in recent weeks after several waves of western sanctions against Moscow, for its involvement in the Ukraine crisis, limited their access to foreign capital.

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