Psychopathy Strikes

"The attacker had been talking about selling organs and body parts, but none of this makes sense." 

"The suspect is believed to suffer with serious psychological problems."

"She was living on the street, but had friends and family in the Paris area."

Unnamed French official

 

"She asked everyone she met to help her carry it. She seemed a little crazy."

"At one point she left the suitcase in front of a cafe, she came and went, went in and out, we wondered what was inside her [baggage] but we would never have thought of a body."

"Then she went to the bakery in front of the cafe to buy a croissant, she came back like it was nothing, she looked a little unsteady."

Witness

 

"It's unbearable. We've been living in this neighbourhood for years and we've just come here to give support to the family, in leaving a bouquet, because like many people, this breaks our hearts."

Neighbour

12-year-old Lola Daviet [@EvaVlaar/Twitter]

A young Algerian woman who arrived legally in France on a study visa in 2016 was given an August 2022 expulsion order to leave the country within 30 days, but did not. This woman, Dahbia B., 24 years of age and reportedly homeless, has been charged with the murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl, Lola Daviet. France is in shock, and critics of the government are furious, pointing to the tragic atrocity as just another example of the failed immigration policy practised by France.

Lola Daviet's school day was over and she had returned home to the apartment building where her father worked as a janitor. Her mother, Delphine was awaiting her daughter's return from school: "Lola knows that on Fridays you go straight home because we go to Béthune, the family village, a three-hour drive north of Paris". And when her daughter failed to return as scheduled, Delphine approached police for their help in the search for her daughter.

Her father decided to view the security footage and there he saw his daughter enter the foyer of the building where he worked and where his family had their apartment. Accompanying her was a young woman whom the parents were unfamiliar with. Several hours afterward the woman left the building alone, carrying two bags, the closed circuit video camera footage made clear were quite heavy.

A day later the young woman was arrested with French media identifying her as an Algerian national. She was brought before a judge two days later, accused of murdering a child under age 15, accused as well of rape, acts of torture and of concealing a body. Under questioning, the woman said she had led the child to her sister's flat in the same building. There, she forced Lola to shower before she was sexually abused.

One witness early in the investigation suggested that organ trafficking might be involved, although the suspect made no mention of that as a possible motive. Another suspect in the case, a 43-year-old man agreed under questioning that he had driven the suspect and her two suitcases along with a plastic box to his home where she stayed for two hours. Finally she was driven back with all the luggage to Lola's apartment building.

Lola's body was discovered in an abandoned plastic box outside the building. An autopsy revealed the girl died of asphyxiation. Numbers zero and one had been written on her feet in red ink. A motive for her killing remains elusive.

"The suspect had boasted about selling body parts. Evidence suggests that the girl was taken into the basement of the flat, where she was tortured, and raped, before being strangled and having her throat cut."

"The suspect is believed to suffer with serious psychological problems. She was living on the street, but had friends and family in the Paris area."

Investigating Source

A homeless woman has been charged with the murder, rape and torture of a 12-year-old Paris girl   Facebook / Delphine Daviet

  

Why?

"It accelerated, and it just plowed through the group of people, and we were in shock. Then it kind of hopped off the curb, and there was a lady that was stuck under the car, and when it hopped back on the curb, she was laying between the curb and the street, and she wasn't moving at all."
"There was another guy who was right next to her passenger window, banging on the door to get it to stop, and then the car accelerated again, and that guy flew off the car. Then it made a right onto Flamingo road, and that was the last we saw of the car."
Witness, Los Angeles resident Michal Jackson

  


Only someone in the venomous throes of dementia or a pathologically twisted mind could possibly deliberately place the lives of people -- men, women and children -- in danger, and nominate themselves to become the weapon that with malice aforethought would kill a human being, giving that human being no opportunity to react to save herself, then reprising the act once again, then yet again, maiming innocent people as a punishment for being in the right place at the wrong time.

A woman? A woman in her early twenties? A woman with a three-year-old child in the vehicle she was using as a weapon of mass destruction? Yes, to each of those questions.

Police say suspect Lakeisha Holloway had been living out of her car -- Reuters

And in the week leading to the season of joy and goodwill with Christmas on the cusp of thrilling young children who have enjoyed the preliminaries to the arrival of December 25: coloured lights and the music of the holiday, there is now one eleven-year-old boy in critical condition in hospital. Fully 36 people were injured, some of them critically, while one person is dead.

The woman who wrought such an mind-boggling atrocity was living a life of hopelessness. Living, as it happens, far from her home in Oregon, in the very car she used to destroy the lives of others. Perhaps when people find themselves in such a mentally precarious state, the bitterness that may overwhelm them places no value on anything, and in fact extends the vitriol of that bitterness to strangers.

Compelling the mentally deranged to cause boundless grief, suffering and pain to others. The ripple effect of one woman dead, 36 people injured, some of whom may not completely recover their former bodily functions will reach out to others around them who care for their welfare and who will despair with them that they just happened to be on the alluring, vibrant, colourfull Las Vegas Strip on December 20, 2015.

Reuters -- Las Vegas police at the scene of the crash 

 

A Merciless Solution

"A soldier stood the kid up and killed him."
Witness, Arcelia, Mexico

"We have encouraged the government of Mexico to investigate and we understand that several Mexican entities are investigating this incident. But as in all cases where security forces use lethal force, we think it's imperative that there is a credible review of the circumstances undertaken in response to them and the appropriate civilian authorities should conduct those investigations."
Jeff Rathke, spokesman, U.S. State Department

In this Sept. 15, 2014 photo, a photograph of Erika Gomez Gonzalez, left, hangs on the wall of her mother's home in Arcelia, Mexico. Gomez's mother, who did not want to give her name for fear of reprisals, says she witnessed her daughter's death when army soldiers fired first at an armed group at a warehouse on June 30 in the town of San Pedro Limon, Mexico. She said one man died in the initial shootout, when the rest of the gunmen surrendered on the promise they would not be hurt. She recalled that her daughter, who was face down in the ground with a bullet in her leg, was rolled over while she was still alive and shot more than half a dozen times in the chest. The mother said she arrived to the warehouse the day before the shooting, in an attempt to take her daughter home, but gang members wouldn't let her. (AP Photo/Eduardo Castillo)

"Anything that needs to be made known, if something happened that differs from the version we have, will of course be made public."
Osorio Chong, top security official

"It is our responsibility to clarify with precision whether the acts (of the soldiers) were carried out according to the law and with absolute respect to human rights."
Mexican Attorney General's Office

"If the testimony is true, we are facing one of the most serious massacres in Mexico. It's extremely important that we keep pressure on the officials so that hopefully soon they produce the records that should be scrutinized by the public in Mexico."
Jose Miguel Vivanco, director, Human Rights Watch for the Americas

Fifteen-year-old Erika Gomez Gonzalez whose mother describes her as having been involved with the 'wrong crowd', accuses Mexican soldiers of shooting and killing her daughter after a confrontation with what appears to have been a youthful drug gang with which her daughter was involved. Mexico, without an iota of a doubt has a dreadful problem with drug traffickers and cartels.
The carnage involved in criminal gangs wreaking havoc on society is well enough known.

The number of fatalities in Mexico related to the illegal drug trade is abhorrent, and in many instances the police themselves are known to be involved, taking their cut of the immensely illegal, lucrative trade. It is even recognized that the Islamist terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas are involved in the drug cartels to benefit themselves financially.

It is obvious that a strong government response had to result from the deadly situation. And it would seem that policing agents in Mexico have in some instances patterned themselves after the deadly no-holds-barred techniques of the drug runners they are sworn to bring under control by the nature of their public office in upholding the law. By so doing, they replicate the brutalities of the gangsters.

Erika Gonzalez's mother described her daughter lying face down on the ground, with a bullet wound in her chest. Another suspected gang member also injured in the initial attack when the army fired at the armed group at a warehouse near San Pedro Limon lay nearby. The group had surrendered and were disarmed.The witness stated that the army had fired at the armed group of youth at the warehouse when one gunman died and another along with her daughter were wounded.

The gunmen surrendered, with the promise they would not come to harm. As Erika Gonzalez lay on the ground face down, soldiers rolled her on her back and shot her over a half-dozen times in the chest. The other gang member was killed as well. The rest of the gang members were interrogated, taken inside the warehouse one after the other. From where she stood the girl's mother, in army custody, heard gunshots and the dying moans of the rest.

FILE - In this July 3, 2014 file photo, bullet holes and blood stain a wall above where bodies were found in an unfinished warehouse that was the site of a shootout between Mexican soldiers and alleged criminals on the outskirts of the village of San Pedro Limon in Mexico state, Mexico. The Mexican government has maintained that 22 people killed on the early morning of June 30 died in a fierce shootout with security forces, a version that came into question because government troops suffered only one wounded, and physical evidence at the scene pointed toward more selective killings. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)The Associated Press

Associated Press reporters went to the warehouse several days afterward to look around and take photographs. There was no sign of sustained fighting. But there were five areas along the inside walls of the warehouse showered with the same pattern: several closely placed bullet marks, covered with a mass of spattered blood. Evidence that some of those who were killed having stood against the wall, were shot at chest level.

According to the state of Mexico prosecutors' office in response to the AP report, there was "no evidence at all of possible executions". Ballistic evidence was found of "crossfire with a proportionate interchange of gunshots", according to the prosecutor's office. This version was contradicted by relatives of three other gang members and a doctor who considered the wounds he saw on Erika's body consistent with the mother's account.

All gang members were in their teens or early 20s. Now they are all, twenty-two of them, dead.

Sole Israeli national on downed Malaysian airliner was son of Christian evangelist

By Cnaan LiphshizJuly 28, 2014 11:51am - JTA, The Global Jewish News Source

Ithamar Avnon, the sole Israeli national aboard the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, pictured in Jerusalem in 2008. (Shai Penn Eisenman)

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A few hours before he departed Amsterdam for Australia on July 17, Ithamar Avnon was praying for peace with his parents at their home in the Netherlands.
That evening, pro-Russian separatists shot down Avnon’s flight, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew. Avnon, 26, was the sole Israeli national on board.

The son of a Dutchwoman and an Israeli who became a Christian evangelist, Avnon loved peace because of how well he and his family knew war.

His father, Dov, served for three years in the Israel Defense Forces before moving to the Netherlands in the 1970s. His older brother, Jonathan, was an Israeli paratrooper. Following his brother’s lead, Avnon voluntarily joined the paratroopers and fought with that unit in the 2009 Cast Lead operation in Gaza.

Friends and family say that Avnon, who was born in the Netherlands in 1988, was a fun-loving man with a penchant for buffoonery who was looking forward to completing his international business degree at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia.

“Ithamar liked horsing around, he wasn’t a stern guy,” his mother, Jeannet, told JTA. “I never thought Ithamar would join the army, but he was inspired to do it by his brother. Ithamar completed the training and got that red beret.”

One of his former commanders, Shlomi Biton, said Avnon — Ito, to his friends — was a forgetful soldier who would often lose pieces of gear, including that red beret, just moments after receiving it. Avnon got away with it because of how well-liked he was by his peers and commanders.

“I really loved Ithamar,” Biton wrote on a Facebook page in Avnon’s memory. “I wanted to be the one to give Ithamar the beret — and then another one after he lost the first one, which was typical.”
Dov Avnon moved to Holland after meeting Dutch Christians in Eilat in the 1970s. Even as an ex-Jewish Christian living in Holland, Dov Avnon and his wife raised their children with a love of the Jewish state.

After Avnon’s death, Dov wrote on Facebook: “I am happy that he grew up with the bible and the faith that Christ died for him on the cross.”

Avnon had been in the Netherlands to attend the wedding of his sister, Ruth, who learned of the flight’s demise on the radio.

“I knew immediately that it was my little brother’s flight and it felt as though I was sinking and the world around me was falling apart,” Ruth Avnon said.

In their home near Utrecht, Avnon’s parents were waiting last week for a Dutch forensics team to finish identifying the remains of the dead in the hope of recovering their son’s body.

Though the final remains found at the crash site arrived in Holland last week, the search is ongoing. Full identification of the victims could take months and it’s not yet clear whether all the bodies have been recovered. Dov has little hope of recovering his son’s remains, since he was sitting close to the engine.

“It’s a strange sort of mourning because we have no body,” Jeannet said. “I’m afraid that when and if a body is recovered, we would need to mourn all over again.”

Avnon had a knack for comedy and impersonations and had a face he would make by puckering his lips. “We called it the Berrie face,” Jeannet said.

His thespian skills also helped him at work, according to Nata Sapuga, Avnon’s former boss at a recycling company. During a business trip to India, Avnon got an upset stomach and had to run to the bathroom every few minutes while working at a business fair.

“He would tell visitors to his booth, ‘Excuse me, sir, but I just figured out that I need to exchange a few urgent words with my biggest buyer, who just passed by,’” Spuga recalled.

Holland lost 194 of its citizens on board MH17, prompting the government to declare a day of mourning — the first in a century. The national outpouring of grief has provided some consolation to Avnon’s parents.

“We are consoled by the feeling of a community, by the respect the Netherlands is showing to all victims,” Jeannet said. “It dulls the pain, as did the powerful speech of our foreign minister, Frans Timmermans, at the United Nations.”

In that speech, Timmermans condemned pro-Russian separatists for delaying access to the bodies and urged delegates to imagine they were parents of the victims “and then two or three days later see some thug steal their wedding ring from their remains.”

Western leaders also criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of supplying the separatists with the weapons used to bring down the plane and for failing to expedite the return of the bodies. Dov Avnon wrote Putin a scathing letter, accusing him of harboring “people who have lost all humanity.”

On Wednesday, Dov was at the ceremony in Eindhoven Airport, where the first bodies were returned. Organizers had placed a flag for every nation that lost civilians in the crash, including Israel.

“I know that flag is especially for Ithamar,” Dov Avnon said. “I am proud to be an Israeli and a Dutch citizen and grateful for this treatment.”

Childhood, Interrupted

It was a truly ghastly murder. A mother of three children, at home recuperating after surgery, with her 15-year-old daughter remaining home from school to help look after her mother. And then agreeing to go out briefly shopping with her father to buy a cake and flowers for wife/mother in recognition of their 17th wedding anniversary. When father and daughter returned, the girl found her mother in a pool of blood, seemingly stabbed to death.

Police seemed puzzled, no clues appeared to exist. Clearly the father was innocent, since he was out of the house in the company of the daughter. There is another daughter, younger, and an even younger son. Suddenly without their mother. Wrestling with the unthinkable, that someone murdered their mother. The father protectively draws them toward him, to comfort those he loves.
Bhupinderpal Gill and son, Ottawa Sun

Hearing and reading the news, the public is shocked. The January murder represented the first murder in Ottawa of the new year. In Ottawa, the Sikh community hardly knew what to think, that a member of their tight-knit group was a victim of a savage murder. And then rumours began to circulate within that community.

Months later, Gurpreet Ronald, 34, who works at OC Transpo as did the murdered woman, Jagtar Gill, 43, was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder. Police warn that they are not finished arresting, not just yet, and several days later Bhupinderpal Gill, Jagtar's 38-year-old husband who also worked for the public transit facility is also arrested on the very same charge.

That rumour that was in circulation was that Gurpreet Ronald, the mother of two young girls, was having an affair with Bhupinderpal Gill. When his family asked him about this, he denied that anything like that had ever occurred. The children of the murdered woman and the children of the woman arrested for her murder were playmates. The two families, living in close proximity, were friends.

Police discovered an abandoned, bloody metal bar in a field not far from the two family homes. They speculate from the autopsy and the appearance of the dead woman's body that she had been beaten before her throat and wrists were slit inside her living room on January 29. Now there are five children whose lives have been completely upturned from normalcy to nightmare.

The two children of the woman who will now stand trial on a first-degree murder charge will have to live with the knowledge that their mother killed another human being, an act that deprived them of her presence, although they will have the loving ministration of their devoted father trying to fill the tragic gap in their lives.

The three children of Jagtar Gill, aged 15, ten and eight, will be living a life where the memory of their mother having been brutally murdered will always linger in a desolate reality of dreadful proportions, magnified by the knowledge that it was their father whom police are charging for having planned the murder, carried out by a family friend.

In this tragic human tragedy justice will seem a cruel paradox.

Eminent Saudi Cleric: Female Genital Mutilation a 'Noble Act'

Sheikh Mohamad Alarefe recently tweeted his sentiments favoring mutilating women to close to 8 million of his followers on Twitter.

Tue, February 4, 2014

From the video below.

 

Sheikh Mohamad Alarefe is a popular Saudi Arabian Islamic theologian and a professor at the King Saud University. A recent “tweet” to his almost 8 million followers on his Twitter account stated: “Circumcision [FGM] is a noble act to do to women. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. Some religious scholars have issued fatwas that it’s not allowed because many that perform the circumcision cut too much and they cause damage to the woman.” 

 

An initial response fired back. One woman said succinctly: “God will take you, scums ... It is a duty to cut off your organs so we can get rid of your stupidity.”

Yet, a careful search by the Clarion Project showed almost no other replies from his many millions of followers. Whereas Arefe’s last 10 tweets garnered between 616 and 2009 “retweets,” this particular tweet praising FGM was only retweeted 11 times.

An even more careful search by the Clarion team showed that Alarefe had, in fact, deleted the tweet.

Alarefe’s tweet precedes the 10^th anniversary of International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation to be marked this week on Thursday, February 6. According to data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 120 to 140 million women have been subject to this horrific and harmful practice. FGM is internationally recognized as a violation of human rights.

FGM is a brutal procedure involves the cutting out of all or part of the external female genitalia, oftentimes used as a rite of passage or a precursor to marriage. The practice is normally carried out on young girls just before or after the onset of puberty, but is also performed on newborn babies and older girls. Most cutting is done by a village lay person with improvised equipment and unsterile conditions.

The procedure serves no medical purpose and is known to cause complications such as severe bleeding, problems urinating, cysts, infections (including HIV/AIDS), pain and difficulty during sexual relations, infertility as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.  

The UN passed a resolution calling for the elimination of FGM in December 2012 and the practice is outlawed in many countries. Still, the practice continues – save for pockets of change around the world (see Clarion Project’s featured videos Handful of Ash: The Film That Changed FGM in Kurdistan and Kenyan Girls Fight Back: "I Will Never Be Cut').

The UN estimates that every year, three million girls are at risk of being cut. Translated into real time, that means that every five minutes – perhaps the amount of time taken to read this article – 30 girls have been mutilated somewhere in the world.

Read, print or download Clarion Project’s Fact Sheet on FGM

Condemning the Defenceless

"I'm actually proud because I think we have given children a huge understanding of the anatomy of a giraffe that they wouldn't have had from watching a giraffe in a photo."
Tobias Stenbaek Bro, Copenhagen Zoo

KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP/Getty Images    Marius, an 18-month-old giraffe, was put down with a bolt gun early on Sunday, zoo spokesman Tobias Stenbaek Bro confirmed. 

 

The enlightened Danes. The zoo's decision allowed Danish parents to treat their children to a very special viewing event. Not the least bit bizarre, nor even macabre, since children's minds are open to curiosity being assuaged in the most peculiar ways, in any event. Residents of Copenhagen were treated to a very special occasion, one that gave parents the opportunity to expose their children to life in the raw, explained as a display of scientific knowledge about animals.

Mind, if those same children visiting the city's zoo were all that curious about giraffes, how they move, what they look like in the flesh, what their habits are, they could have watched any of the then-existing eight giraffes resident in the zoo. What need of mere photos? Evidently what began this little drama, seen as heartbreaking by many animal lovers, is Copenhagen zoo's commitment to 'animal welfare'.

The zoo is a member of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria. Their pledge among the Amsterdam-based EAZA organization with its 347 members is vigilance to the responsibility of managing healthy biodiversity. Because among its membership are many large zoos in the capitals of Europe, the EAZA has a great reputation in the conservation of global biodiversity, and its commitment to championing high standards of care and breeding for animals.

That commitment was recently on display. The Copenhagen zoo had advertised its intention to slaughter a healthy two-year old giraffe in an expression of dedication to care and breeding of animals. Because, simply put, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria has valuable standards and they are not to be lightly held.

Most 'responsible' zoos, stated Stenbaek Bro, have membership in this hugely respected organization. And so, in obedience to the philosophical values of the EAZA, the zoo forged ahead with its show-and-tell program. They destroyed the life of the young giraffe named Marius, despite that he was healthy. And as its visitors viewed the process, they skinned and dismembered the young giraffe's corpse, and fed the parts to the zoo's lions.

A healthy young giraffe named Marius lies on the ground after being shot dead at Copenhagen zoo on February 9, 2014 despite an online petition to save it (Scanpix Denmark/AFP, Kasper Palsnov)

Completely merciful, the killing procedure, with the use of a bolt pistol. Before the zoo proceeded with its plans a 20,000-signature petition was presented to its authorizing body. Copenhagen Zoo's scientific director, Bengt Holst, stated the zoo had turned away an offer from Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Britain, another member of EAZA. They refused; Marius' older brother lives there; the park's space should be used to host a "genetically more valuable giraffe".

Rasmus Flindt Pedersen / AP Photo    The carcass of Marius, a male giraffe, is eaten by lions after he was put down in Copenhagen Zoo on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2014. 

 

A private individual had offered to buy the young giraffe for 500,000 euros ($680,000). In all good conscience, however, the zoo was unable to accept the offer for private ownership of two-year-old Marius, because of its commitment to the conservation of global biodiversity. Other zoos also had attempted to intervene to spare the life of Marius.

Stenbaek Bro explained that the philosophy that lies behind EAZA membership is a general agreement that its member zoos understand they don't own the animals in their care. They govern them. And as such the animals cannot be sold to any entity not a part of the organization, nor any that do not engage with the same set of rules.

Now that this is clear, one puzzling little omission raises its querulous head. If the concern relates to Marius' future as a sire, the problem would be readily enough solved with a veterinarian castrating the young male, eliminating the problem if gene-diversification identified as so critical by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria.

Who decided that Marius must die because giraffes with similar genes existed in abundance in the group's breeding program.

If the message to children was animal anatomy and human arrogance, the lesson will not have been lost. Children, quick to emulate their elders, will now feel it is perfectly suitable and appropriate to decide which animals may live and which should be destroyed. Will this teach them compassion and personal responsibility?

Unfit

There is just no end, it seems, of these dreadful trials where the most odious child abuse is revealed to the public. It is almost impossible to fathom that a man would act out violently toward his seven-week-old baby. So consistently and so violently as to create a future for the child that is utterly bereft of normalcy. Inflicting upon the child blindness, delayed intelligence and an utterly bleak future. That child, now three years of age, is blind, cannot speak other than the most basic sounds.

This is 'Jay' as a baby. He is now three years old.

The little boy, whose full name is understandably withheld is unable to stand or walk without assistance. As a baby he suffered catastrophic brain injury. It is his father who is now on trial in Toronto. He has pleaded not guilty to aggravated assault and an additional two offences with respect to the injuries sustained by the child. And one count of assault against his former common-law wife, the baby's mother.

Joao (John) Rosa is now 23 years of age. When his child was born he was 19, the child's mother 18 years of age. The child's mother's family disapproved of her choice of a partner in life, and she was estranged from them. There were no neglect charges lodged against the mother. When they moved in together, they had a little two-bedroom apartment, and the young woman worked, while John Rosa did not.

John Rosa in 361 University Ave. court Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013. (Pam Davies sketch)

Her common-law partner was a lay-about. She worked until the baby was born. While he did nothing other than play video games and hang out with his pals. When the baby was born they lived on welfare. While she became a housewife and caring mother, he indulged himself however he wished. While controlling everything she did; whom she could see, how she should dress, and she obeyed.

They had arguments, and he began to be violent with her. He would fling her about. Once he punched her in the stomach, tried to choke her and kicked her where she had stitches from the delivery of their child. He also began banging the baby about discreetly, when she wasn't around, although noticing a bruise or two she queried him and he denied, denied.

One day the baby was unresponsive. She fed the baby through a dropper, bathed it, but the baby hardly responded. His father had developed a habit of tossing the 7-week-old baby into the air, terrifying the infant, but when the mother demanded he cease, he simply laughed. She explained he wasn't yet old enough for that kind of treatment, to little avail.

The baby failed to wake for his usual night-time feeding and in the morning he was feverish. She informed her partner they would have to take the baby to hospital. He simply continued palling about with his friends, finally came up to the apartment, demanded dinner, and had a shower. And then acquiesced to driving the baby to Sick Children's Hospital.

Where doctors examining the baby found him with seven broken ribs, four broken leg bones, bleeding in his eyes and brain. And a skull fracture "almost from ear to ear", in the description of the trial prosecutor. Feverish work on the part of the medical staff saved the baby from imminent death.
Six weeks later, on his release from hospital he was given over to the care of a child-welfare agency.

Now three years of age, he lives with a foster mother who is also a nurse. His mother has supervised visits. She is expecting another baby, this one with a new boyfriend.

Kenya: Four Year Old Boy Confronts Terrorists, and Escapes Alive
by Ari Soffer   -- Arutz Sheva 7 - 24 September 2013

As Kenyan security forces continue to battle Somalian Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, more stories have emerged, shedding light on the horrific events of the assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, which have killed at least 62 people and left more than 170 wounded.

Gunmen - and, it is emerging, at least one female terrorist - stormed the mall, hurling grenades and firing indiscriminately with AK 47s as the building was packed with both locals and tourists enjoying the end of the weekend.

Chillingly, eyewitnesses have told of how the gunmen selected many of their victims deliberately - forcing people to prove whether or not they were Muslims by reciting Islamic prayers or by answering questions from the Qoran. They then executed those found to be non-Muslims, and allowed Muslim shoppers to escape.

Other escapees said that the terrorists mutilated the bodies of their dead victims, chopping off hands and even burning their faces to mask their identities.

But there are also stories of remarkable bravery.

One such story is that of four year-old Elliot Prior from Berkshire in Great Britain who, in an astonishing show of courage, confronted and even chastised one of the gunmen - and escaped with his life.

According to the Daily Mail, Elliot had been hiding with his sister Amelie and their mother Amber under a table in a grocery store, with Amber sheltering her children under her own body for an hour and a half, when they were discovered by the terrorists, one of whom shot her in the thigh. 

But when the terrorists asked if there were any children still alive in the store, Amber stood up and answered in the affirmative, in the hope that they would be spared.

It was at that point that little Elliot confronted the terrorists, telling them that they were "bad men."

Bizarrely, upon learning that Amber was of French origin, the gunmen began to plead with her for forgiveness, insisting that Islam "is not a bad religion" and urging her to convert.

"He told me I had to change my religion to Islam and said 'do you forgive us? Do you forgive us?'," she told The Independent newspaper.

"Naturally, I was going to say whatever they wanted and they let us go."

Then, in an act which stood in stark contrast to the brutal massacre they had just committed, the terrorists handed the brother and sister chocolate bars before they fled with two other children, including a 12-year-old boy who initially refused to leave his dead mother behind.

Kenyan security forces are still battling terrorists as they move to clear the mall, amid claims that at least some of the attackers are citizens of western countries, including two Americans and a British woman.

In an interview with PBS Newshour, Kenya's foreign minister Amina Mohamed said that "two or three" of the attackers were American, and that another was a British woman who had "done this many times before."

That has raised speculation in the UK of the potential involvement of Samantha Lewthwaite, a British convert to Islam and the widow of one of "7/7 bombers" who attacked London's transportation system in July 2005.

Lewthwaite, also known as "The White Widow," has been on the run in Africa for two years after she was accused of plotting to bomb tourist sites in Kenya, and has evaded capture on a number of occasions, mocking her pursuers on social media.

Mohamed claimed that the Americans were 18 or 19 years old, of Somali or Arab origin, and lived "in Minnesota and one other place".

Tags: terrorism ,Al Qaeda ,Kenya ,Nairobi ,Al Shabaab ,Nairobi attack

More on this topic

• India: Nairobi Attack Brings Back Bitter Memories
• Dozens of MKs Join Calls to End Terrorist Prisoner Releases
• Kenya's Foreign Minister Blames Al-Qaeda for Terror Attack
• French Man Jailed for Threatening Toulouse Jewish School
• Kenyan Troops Take Control of Attacked Mall
• Terror Victim Families Demand End to Terrorist Releases

Yemen: Eight Year-Old Girl Dies on her Wedding Night

Outrage as child bride dies from internal injuries after being married off to a man more than five times her age.

By Ari Soffer -- Arutz Sheva 7

First Publish: 9/9/2013, 9:04 PM

(Illustration) Yemeni girls in a refugee camp

Reuters

 

A girl of eight years old has died after suffering internal injuries on the night of her arranged marriage - to a man more than five times her age.

The young girl, named only as Rawan, died in the tribal region of Hardh in northwestern Yemen, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Watan.

According to Gulf News, she died after suffering a tear to her genitals and due to severe bleeding.
There have been calls to arrest her family and husband, who was reportedly 40 years old, as activists demand an end to the practice of child marriages in the Middle East's poorest country.

Even some of those more sympathetic to prevailing cultural norms in the region voiced their disgust, with one blogger lamenting:

"Her family and her groom could have waited for some time before having this marriage. It was not fair at all and the marriage should not have happened even if some tribes believe that it is a good custom."

The issue of Yemeni child brides has gained growing prominence in recent years, amid international calls to end the practice. In July, the plight of one child bride-to-be made headlines after she recorded her dramatic escape from her family, along with a heartbreaking account of the struggle she and many girls like her regularly face.

According to the United Nations, one in nine girls in developing countries is married, often forcibly, by the age of 15. UN estimates state that if current trends continue, there will be approximately 14.2 million child brides by 2020.

Yemen is one of the worst offenders, where child marriages are seen as completely normal, the result of a combination of poverty, Islamic conservatism and a highly patriarchal society.

Tragically, though perhaps unsurprisingly, Yemen also has one of the highest rates of death at childbirth in the world.

Tags: Yemen ,Child abuse ,child brides

‘Vicious’ python kills two sleeping children, aged 5 and 7, after escaping from N.B. pet store

Tristin Hopper | 13/08/05 | Last Updated: 13/08/05

Google Streetview   The snake apparently escaped Reptile Ocean, an urban zoo in Campbellton.

Two children are dead in Campbellton, New Brunswick after they were strangled to death by an escaped python while on a sleepover in an apartment over Reptile Ocean, an exotic pet retailer.
Both victims, aged 5 and 7, were reportedly brothers and on a sleepover with the son of Reptile Ocean’s owner, Jean-Claude Savoie.



As soon as he heard about the tragedy, Tim Thomas, a former Reptile Ocean employee, said he called Mr. Savoie’s next-door neighbour and “best friend,” Mandy Trecartin, to find out what had happened.
“She told me straight up, it was her two children that died; I didn’t know what to say, I was in shock,” he said, adding that he last saw the two children on Sunday night.

The snake is an African rock python and is between 14 to 16 feet long, according to Mr. Thomas. Native to sub-saharan Africa, the species is non-venomous, but is known to devour whole antelopes in the wild.

Open since 1995, Reptile Ocean used to be a small zoo before it shifted its operations purely to retail and incorporated the property’s upstairs animal enclosures into an apartment for Mr. Savoie.
The snake occupied one enclosure, while the other two were used for crocodiles.

“How he got loose, I don’t know, because ever since Jean-Claude got full custody of his child, every cage had two locks on it, and one of them was a master lock and the keys to that were hung up in the laundry room,” said Mr. Thomas.

“Jean-Claude loved them kids and he would have never, ever put them in danger at all,” he added.
Global News reached Mr. Savoie by phone on Monday. In a five-minute interview posted to the network’s website he explained that the “vicious” snake, which was rarely handled, escaped through a ventilation system and fell through the ceiling of the children’s room.

Still in shock, he said he was baffled how the snake could have made its way through such a narrow pipe and said he discovered the children dead on Monday morning when he woke up to check on them.

“They were sleeping; they didn’t even open their eyes or nothing,” he said.

New Brunswick RCMP reported that they were called to the store’s Pleasant St. address just after 6:30 a.m. on Monday. The snake “is in RCMP possession,” according to a Monday statement by police.

Police did not confirm the names of the two children and said they have not determined whether any charges will be laid in connection with the deaths. ”That’s going to be part of the investigation,” said Cst. Jullie Rogers-Marsh with the New Brunswick RCMP.

The property, which is only one block away from Campbellton city hall, remained roped off as of Monday afternoon, according to neighbours. The bodies of the two boys are scheduled to undergo an autopsy on August 6.

“I can only assume the snake … constricted the one child, the other child I can only assume tried to help that child and got constricted into the whole mess,” said Bry Loyst, curator of Ontario’s Indian River Reptile Zoo, speaking to the National Post on Monday.

As Reptile Ocean’s Facebook page became barraged with criticism on Monday, an unknown page administrator replied that the incident was “a terrible accident without a meaning” and chastised commenters for jumping to conclusions.

“There is nobody to blame. The snake broke out of its enclosure. The enclosure locked. There was no negligence. This is a terrible accident,” reads a post written just after 5 p.m. local time.
By Monday evening, the page was shut down.

With Malice Aforethought

"How could anyone believe it to be normal for a child to scavenge around bins to access waste; and to steal food from the lunch boxes? What human being, with the slightest understanding of children, would not have been concerned enough to take action?
"He was literally wasting away. His starvation was so chronic his bones stopped growing. His starvation is unprecedented in this country."
Judge Laura Cox, London, England

This was a four year old child. A child who was subjected to "deliberate, escalating brutality". It seems inhumanly impossible for any sane adults, let alone the biological mother of a four year old child, and the child's step-father to so horribly maltreat and abuse a small, helpless child. It seems almost equally unbelievable that this child was not kept isolated, away from public eyes, but attended school.

West Midlands Police / The Associated Press

Yet the child's teachers at his school in Coventry, central England, appeared to see nothing amiss when the little boy attended classes covered with bruises, and with time his small frame becoming increasingly emaciated. His condition appeared to elicit no alarm from anyone. The little boy's condition simply become more aggravated, increasingly morbid, leading to his death.

Police at trial described the horrific abuse the child had suffered having turned him from a "bright-eyed boy" into "a broken bag of bones". A broken bag of bones of a helpless, vulnerable child whom no one could recognize as desperately needing rescue from impending death. No one intervened. His dire condition escaped everyone's notice.

How is that even remotely possible? At his death the little boy weighed 10.7 kilograms. The tragedy of the child's suffering is impossible to imagine. That such a helpless little human being could be subjected to such cruelty and torture and there was no one anywhere who took the trouble to investigate, to satisfy themselves that they were pursuing an obligation is beyond belief.

The school administration were admonished by the child's mother not to feed him. He suffered, she claimed, from an eating disorder. Why wouldn't the school administration insist on seeing medical documentation to validate that claim? Why would no one have taken it upon themselves to look into the matter? Why did no one care?

Magdelena Luczak and her partner Mariusz Krezolek are now each blaming the other for the child beatings, starvation and death. After his long period of degraded and deliberate neglect for his emotional and bodily needs, he was beaten and left alone in an unheated, cell-like room, there to die. The room's door handle had been removed, the keyhole blocked.

"The small hand and finger marks on the inside of that door provided a poignant image of his desperate attempts to escape" his tortured confinement, the judge noted in her sentencing remarks. For the atrocities committed on little Daniel Pelka, Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek have guaranteed themselves an honoured place on the devil's honour roll.

For the thirteen months of increasing violence they inflicted on that child, force-feeding him salt to make him vomit, holding him underwater until he fell into unconsciousness, killing him gradually and unspeakably horribly, causing him to suffer and be offered no compassion from any quarter, those two murderers were sentenced to 30 years in prison. It is not enough.

In horrible pain, while imprisoned during the last days of his life from a dreadful blow to his head, it still took him thirty hours to die. Thirty hours in which his mother and her partner chose to continue with their life as they normally would, choosing not to call an ambulance for the dying child.

They are living monsters.