Region

CAIRO — An Egyptian appeals court reduced the jail terms on Sunday for 23 young activists convicted of violating a law banning protests without a permit, judicial sources said.

The arrest of the activists in June while they demonstrated against the law which tightly restricts protests was condemned by rights groups as a reflection of an increasingly repressive political climate in Egypt.

Mass protests led to the ousting of autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and were used to express discontent with Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was toppled by the army last year.

Human rights groups have called the charges against the activists baseless and decried the case as an example of "show-trials" based on scant evidence and intended to warn citizens against defying government policies.

"Though expected in the light of harsh and unfair sentences in similar cases, we are shocked and dismayed at how political and human rights activists are being punished in Egypt for peacefully expressing their views," said Khaled Mansour, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights where one of the defendants, Yara Sallam, worked.

Sallam, a 28-year-old lawyer, was not participating in the demonstration according to eyewitnesses, but was rounded up nearby and put on trial.

Sanaa Abdel Fattah, a 20-year-old university student and the sister of leading activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, was also among those arrested. On Sunday, their sentences were reduced from three years to two.

Security forces killed hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators last year at two Cairo protest camps seeking Morsi’s reinstatement. Islamist supporters continue to protest in small numbers and many thousands have been arrested.

Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who as army chief oversaw Morsi’s ouster, was elected president in May and has pledged to revive the economy and combat an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai.

Sisi has made less specific promises about upholding the rights and freedoms that many Egyptians took to the streets to demand four years ago. The security crackdown has expanded to include liberal and secular activists, including some of the leading figures of the 2011 uprising.

The court also cancelled a fine of 10,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,400) levied against each of the defendants and reduced the period of police surveillance following their release to two years from three.

The ruling can still be appealed in the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest legal authority.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A far-right Israeli group that agitates against Arabs in the name of religion and national security is forcing Israel into a legal and political balancing act as it tries to contain sectarian violence.

Among their activities, Lehava activists yelling "Death to the Arabs" picketed the wedding in August of a Muslim to a Jewish woman who converted to Islam. Now three members have been charged with an arson attack on a cross-faith school in Jerusalem last month.

Communal tension has been rising following last summer's Gaza war, in which more than 2,000 Palestinians died, and feuding over access to Jerusalem's holiest site. This has spilled over into Palestinian street attacks on Jews, including the killing of four rabbis and a Druze policeman at a synagogue.

Illustrating the risk of sectarian violence, a Palestinian youth was burned to death in July by Israeli assailants in alleged revenge for the killing of three Jewish settlers by fighters in the West Bank.

The authorities are under pressure to deal with anyone encouraging Jewish retaliation against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Efforts to tackle Lehava, however, may be complicated by guarantees of free speech and sympathy for the group among a minority of Israelis.

Lehava, whose name means "flame" but is also a Hebrew acronym for "Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land", denies wrongdoing and says it is the target of a political witch-hunt.

Israeli forces rounded up 21 Lehava members, including its leader Benzion Gopshtein, after the attack on the school where Jewish and Arab children study together. The raids suggest a crackdown on Lehava, and maybe a ban, is in the works.

The three men charged with the arson attack have yet to enter a plea, while Gopshtein argues he is being targeted for what he says, not what he does.

"I'm being investigated for public comments I made about co-existence, even though I never advocated violence," he told Reuters after being released from police custody. Lehava's policy was to stay within the law, he said, but he declined to condemn the school attack.

Gopshtein, who put the number of Lehava members at 5,000, said the authorities "are bothered that we have such broad support, which is why they're carrying out arrests".

An Israeli official described the Lehava arrests as part of a drive to stamp out hate speech. Among those facing charges are eight Palestinians from East Jerusalem accused of encouraging attacks on Israelis over social media. But the official said securing convictions against Lehava activists on possible charges of inciting racist attacks would be harder.

“Their public statements have been less unequivocal,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is a complex matter, especially as we do not want to intrude on legal rights to freedom of expression.”

Incitement to violence on racial or religious grounds carries a 5-year prison sentence in Israel, 20 per cent of whose citizens are Arabs. When felonies are committed as a result of such incitement, hate-crime legislation empowers judges to double the standard penalties.

Hard core views

Lehava’s core cause is discouraging romances between Jews and gentiles, saying it is campaigning to preserve Judaism.

While such relationships are rare in Israel, the group has disseminated names and pictures of Arabs suspected of courting Jewish women, and critics accuse it of using vigilantes to threaten the men with violence.

Lehava has also urged Israeli businesses not to employ Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, branding them as “tomorrow’s terrorists”.

Gopshtein was a disciple of the late Meir Kahane, a US-born rabbi who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Gopshtein, 45, said he had previously had run-ins with the police for disorderly conduct while active with Kahane’s movement Kach, which was banned from Israeli politics as racist in 1988.

Asked whether Lehava might similarly be outlawed, the Israeli official said: “That possibility will be examined.”

Mainstream Israeli leaders have condemned the arson attack and other racist incidents. The arrests were led by a police taskforce set up last year to tackle violent far-right Jews.

Tamar Hermann, a sociologist and pollster with the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), said state action against Lehava had only followed repeated complaints by left-leaning petitions and media commentators.

Such pressure on police, Herman added, may be offset by the growing ranks of Israelis who sympathise with Lehava. An IDI poll to be published next month found 21 per cent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as “religious nationalists”, she said, while about 31 per cent hold “hard-core” views against gentiles.

“The rise of extreme religiosity that we are seeing in the Middle East, and even in Europe and the United States, is happening in Israel, too, and I don’t see it as merely a counter-reaction to Arab hostility,” Hermann said.

Menachem Landow, a retired official of the Shin Bet security agency, argued against banning Lehava, saying its ideology “would simply morph and find a new legal home”.

“The trouble-makers here are generally from a certain sector of Israeli society, dislocated young men from pious backgrounds, who simply hate Arabs as part of a race theory and are looking for a framework in which to act on that hatred,” he said.

“They have to be tackled individually,” Landow added, noting police had used these tactics against Israeli football fans whose anti-Arab taunts have at times escalated into race riots.

BENGHAZI — A fire caused by fighting at one of Libya's main export terminals has destroyed more than two days of the country's oil production, officials said on Sunday, as clashes escalated between factions battling for control of the OPEC member nation.

A missile hit an oil storage tank last week at the port of Es Sider during fighting between forces allied to Libya's two competing governments and the resulting blaze has destroyed 800,000 barrels of crude, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) said.

In an apparent response to the attack on Es Sider, forces loyal to Libya's recognised government — now based in the east after being forced to flee Tripoli in the summer — staged air strikes on targets in the western city of Misrata on Sunday.

The raids were the first such attacks on a city allied to the militia group that seized Tripoli, and whose forces have been trying to take the eastern oil ports from the internationally recognised government, officials and residents said.

Libya has been engulfed in fighting between the two sides, each with its own government and parliament and each anxious to secure a share of Africa's largest oil reserves.

The internationally recognised Prime Minister Abdullah Al Thinni has been forced to run a rump state in the east since the Libya Dawn group took control of Tripoli in August, setting up a rival government and parliament.

Es Sider and the adjacent Ras Lanuf terminal have been closed since a force allied to Libya Dawn moved east from the capital two weeks ago in an attempt to seize the facilities.

An NOC spokesman said three oil storage tanks at Es Sider were still on fire on Sunday, while firefighters had managed to extinguish the blaze at three other tanks.

Libya's total oil production stands at 385,000 barrels per day, the NOC said.

NOC added that natural gas exports from its Mellitah joint venture with Italian energy giant Eni have fallen to 60 per cent of the western port's capacity.

NOC says fighting and the shutdown of gas fields linked to Es Sider have forced it to use some of Mellitah's output for domestic consumption.

Mohamed El Hejazi, spokesman for armed forces loyal to Prime Minister Thinni, said his air force had attacked Misrata's port, an air force academy near the airport and Libya's biggest steel plant, which is located in the city.

Ismail Shukri, spokesman for forces allied to Libya Dawn, confirmed that air strikes had taken place but said they caused no damage.

“The airport at Misrata is still working normally. A flight has just taken off,” he said.

Misrata, 200km east of Tripoli, is linked to Libya Dawn and home to a major seaport and free trade zone. The city had so far escaped the fighting that has threatened to break up Libya.

Since Muammar Qadhafi was ousted in 2011, Libya has failed to attain stability. Former rebel brigades which once fought side by side have now turned on each other, aligning themselves with rival political factions in a scramble for control.

DUBAI — A sniper killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander who was training Iraqi troops and Shiite militia fighting Islamic State (IS) militants in the Iraqi city of Samarra, official Iranian media reported on Sunday.

Brigadier General Hamid Taqavi, a veteran of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, was killed by snipers hiding behind a power transformer in Samarra, an embattled city north of Baghdad and home to holy Shiite shrines, they said, quoting a Revolutionary Guards' statement.

Several people with him were wounded in the rain of sniper fire, they said.

"Taqavi became a martyr while fulfilling his duty as a military adviser in the fight against Daesh (IS) revisionist terrorists, a glorious end to a long valuable service to advance the cause of [Iran's 1979] Islamic revolution," said the official defence ministry site.

It said the general had fought "enemies on various fronts".

Unspecified numbers of Iranian advisors and combatants are defending holy Shiite sites in Iraq and Syria against raids by Sunni jihadists. Iran sent reinforcements to Iraq to help stave off an advance on Baghdad by IS militants this year at the request of Iraqi government and Shiite leaders.

BEIRUT — The Islamic State (IS) militant group has killed 1,878 people in Syria during the past six months, the majority of them civilians, a British-based Syrian monitoring organisation said on Sunday.

IS also killed 120 of its own members, most of them foreign fighters trying to return home, in the last two months, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The militant group has taken vast parts of Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate in territory under its control in June. Since then it has fought the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other insurgents and Kurdish forces.

Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian monitoring group, told Reuters that IS killed 1,175 civilians, including eight women and four children.

He said 930 of the civilians were members of the Sheitaat, a Sunni Muslim tribe from eastern Syria, which fought Islamic State for control of two oil fields in August.

Reuters cannot independently verify the figures but IS has publicised beheadings and stoning of many people in areas it controls in Syria and Iraq. These are for actions it sees as violating its reading of Islamic law, such as adultery, homosexuality, stealing and blasphemy.

The group, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, has also released videos of executions of captured enemy fighters, activists and journalists.

It beheaded two US journalists, and one American and two British aid workers this year in attempts to put pressure on a US-led international coalition, which has been bombing its fighters in Syria since September.

Abdulrahman, who gathers information from all sides of the Syrian conflict, said that IS had also executed 502 soldiers fighting for President Bashar Assad and 81 anti-Assad insurgents.

He said that 116 foreign fighters who had joined IS but later wanted to return home, were executed in the Syrian provinces of Deir Al Zor, Raqqa and Hassakeh since November. Four other IS fighters were killed on other charges, Abdulrahman said.

The overwhelming number of the group’s victims have been from the Syrian population.

More than 200,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, which started when Assad’s forces cracked down on peaceful pro-democracy protests in 2011.

DUBAI — Iran is to expand what it calls “smart filtering” of the Internet, a policy of censoring undesirable content on websites without banning them completely, as it used to, the government said on Friday.

The Islamic Republic has some of the strictest controls on Internet access in the world, but its blocks on US-based social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are routinely bypassed by tech-savvy Iranians using virtual private networks (VPNs).

Under the new scheme, Tehran could lift its blanket ban on those sites and, instead, filter their content.

The policy appears to follow President Hassan Rouhani’s push to loosen some social restrictions, but it was not clear if it would mean more or less Internet freedom. Iranians on Twitter expressed concern that, as part of the new policy, the government would try to block VPN access to such sites.

“Presently, the smart filtering plan is implemented only on one social network in its pilot study phase and this process will continue gradually until the plan is implemented on all networks,” Communications Minister Mahmoud Vaezi said, according to official news agency IRNA.

He appeared to be referring to Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, which is already being filtered, but not blocked.

Instagram was initially available uncensored in Iran but some user accounts were subsequently blocked, notably @RichkidsofTehran, a page full of photos of young, rich Iranians flaunting their wealth.

In a cat-and-mouse game, another account dedicated to the same pursuits quickly appeared under the name @RichkidsofTeh.

“Implementing the smart filtering plan, we are trying to block the criminal and unethical contents of the Internet sites, while the public will be able to use the general contents of those sites,” Vaezi told a news conference.

The policy would be fully in place by June 2015, he said.

Iranian authorities are not only concerned about what might be considered morally dubious content, which in Iran could be anything from pornography to realtively innocuous images of women not wearing the mandatory Islamic dress, but also material that might be politically damaging.

Social media were widely used in the anti-government protests of 2009 to organise and spread news about a movement that was eventually crushed by security forces.

Under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran floated the idea of replacing the Internet with a national intranet that would not be connected to the worldwide web and would be controlled by Iranian authorities, a plan that appears to have fizzled out.

SANAA — Security officials and tribal leaders in Yemen say 12 people have been killed in clashes between tribesmen and Shiite rebels north of the capital Sanaa.

They say Shiite Houthi rebels went to the Arhab district late Saturday to search the home of a tribal chief whom the rebels suspected of being allied with the Sunni Islamist Al Slah Party, with which the rebels are at war. Clashes erupted when locals resisted the search, leaving nine rebels and three tribesmen dead.

The officials and tribal leaders say the rebels later destroyed the house, which was believed to be empty. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief reporters.

The Houthis swept down from their northern stronghold and captured the capital Sanaa in September.

ANKARA — Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday warned that the government would take action against any further violence in the southeast after three people were killed in fresh clashes between two rival Kurdish groups.

"We will stand firm... against whoever dares to erode our unity through provocative actions," Davutoglu told his ruling party supporters in the southern province of Hatay bordering Syria.

Three people were killed Saturday in the town of Cizre in the southeast in clashes between rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Sunni Muslim Huda-Par group.

Huda-Par is known to be the political extension of Turkish Hizbollah and has long abhorred the PKK — which has fought Turkish security forces in a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish self-rule.

The motive for the clashes was not clear but a security source told AFP at the weekend that tensions were running high between the two groups since Friday night when the Huda-Par attacked Kurdish rebels' tents in the town.

The rivalry between the PKK and the Huda-Par turned fierce in October when Islamic State insurgents were fighting Kurdish forces in the Syrian town of Kobani just across the Turkish border.

Turkey's limited support against IS fighters infuriated Turkey's Kurds, who took to the streets on October 6 and 7, when dozens of people were killed in street fighting.

The trouble has cast a shadow over the fragile peace process between the Turkish state and the PKK, which is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.

The Turkish government has since repeated its commitment to the peace process.

"God willing, we will lead the [Kurdish] solution process to success under any circumstances," Davutoglu said Sunday in a televised speech to cheering crowds.

"We have taken and will continue to take any kind of measure against provocations," he said.

"Turks and Kurds are brothers and whoever discriminates is treacherous."

GAZA CITY — Hamas on Sunday prevented dozens of children orphaned during its 50-day war with Israel from entering Israeli territory in a pre-arranged trip, organisers and officials said.

The weeklong visit was planned for 37 children whose parents were killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip in July and August this year. It was organised by an Israeli kibbutz group and local Arab-Israeli officials.

Kibbutz Movement spokesman Yoel Marshak told AFP that the trip was supposed to allow the Palestinian children, aged between 12 and 15, "to circulate and learn about Israeli children their age".

The group had been due to visit several Israeli kibbutzim close to the Gaza Strip and travel to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Marshak said.

"The Shin Bet [security service] had given the green light for the children and their five minders to enter Israel," he added.

But Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, said the trip was cancelled as the children would have "had to visit settlements and occupied towns".

The Islamist movement's interior ministry said the visit was forbidden in order to protect the children from "the politics of normalisation" with Israel.

An AFP photographer saw Hamas security officers turn the 37 orphans away from the Erez border crossing with Israel on Sunday.

Nearly 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the July-August war, mostly civilians, and 73 on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers.

In a separate incident at the Erez crossing, three Palestinians were slightly wounded by Israeli fire during clashes, the Gaza health ministry said.

Some 300 demonstrators had gathered near the crossing at the behest of political movements demanding to lift the blockade imposed by Israel on the coastal Palestinian enclave.

Some of the protesters began throwing stones at Israeli forces beyond the border, who eventually responded with live rounds, a military spokeswoman told AFP.

The Erez crossing was later closed from Gaza into Israel, but remained partially opened in the other direction, the Israeli and Palestinian sources said.

DUBAI — Police in Bahrain arrested the head of the banned Shiite opposition movement Al Wefaq on Sunday after he had been called in for questioning, his party said.

After Sheikh Ali Salman's party announced his arrest, clashes broke out between security forces and hundreds of Al Wefaq supporters gathered at his house in the Shiite village of Bilad Al Qadim near Manama, witnesses said.

Police used tear gas and birdshot to disperse the crowds protesting against Salman's arrest, the witnesses said. There was no immediate news of casualties.

Salman had been summoned to the criminal investigation department on Sunday morning and questioned about "violating certain aspects of the law", an interior ministry statement said earlier.

It provided no further details.

Al Wefaq's statement said Salman was arrested after a lengthy interrogation at the ministry by police.

His lawyer, Abdullah Al Shamlan, tweeted that Salman had been accused of "inciting hatred against the regime and calling for its overthrow by force".

He said he had not been allowed to attend his client's questioning.

Shamlan said Al Wefaq chief was also accused of "insulting the judiciary and the executive branch", of "sectarian incitement", of "spreading false news likely to cause panic and undermine security" and "participation in events detrimental to the economy".

Al Wefaq demanded the immediate release of its leader, calling his detention "a dangerous adventure that will complicate the political situation in Bahrain".

Security barricades 

It said he had been detained for more than 10 hours "for the sake of investigation for false accusations against him".

The party statement denounced the security forces for erecting barricades outside several Shiite villages, mainly on roads leading to the Al Wefaq headquarters in a Manama suburb.

Salman, 49, secured a new four-year term as Al Wefaq chief at its general congress on Friday.

The same day thousands of Shiites protested along a road linking two of their villages near Manama to call for the dismissal of parliament and the government.

In July, the justice ministry sued Al Wefaq, demanding that it rectify its "illegal status following the annulment of four general assemblies for lack of a quorum and the non-commitment to the public and transparency requirements for holding them".

The Manama administrative court slapped Al Wefaq with the ban on October 28 and gave it three months to hold an assembly to elect its leadership.

The ruling came after Al Wefaq announced it was boycotting a parliamentary election in November, the first in the Gulf state since Sunni authorities crushed Shiite-led pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Al Wefaq, which withdrew its lawmakers from parliament in protest, condemned the vote as a "farce".

It has called for an elected prime minister who is independent from the ruling royal family.

Bahrain, home base of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, is ruled by the Sunni Al Khalifa dynasty but the population is majority Shiite.

In 2011 the authorities crushed a month-long pro-democracy protest led by the opposition, but protests continue in Shiite villages outside the capital.

At least 89 people are estimated to have been killed in clashes with security forces, and hundreds have been arrested and put on trial since the uprising.