Region

ABU DHABI — An American teacher and mother of twins was stabbed to death in a shopping centre toilet in Abu Dhabi by a suspect in a Muslim veil, police said Wednesday.

It was unclear what the motive was for Monday's attack in the upmarket Boutik Mall on Al Reem Island, which is popular with expats.
Police said the 37-year-old victim, who worked at a nursery school in Abu Dhabi, was stabbed by a person wearing a black robe, black gloves and a niqab — a Muslim veil that conceals the face except for the eyes.
Her 11-year-old twins were taken into police care until their father arrived from abroad.
The US embassy in Abu Dhabi confirmed the death of an American citizen, saying it was working with "all appropriate authorities to seek further information".
Police released CCTV footage showing the suspect walking in and out of the mall, and shots of the knife used in the attack in a washroom following what they described as an "altercation".
"The victim was stabbed with a sharp object following an argument in the ladies toilets," the head of Abu Dhabi's police criminal investigations department, Colonel Rashid Bourscheid, was quoted by The National daily as saying.
“Police are still trying to determine the reasons for the attack and the identity of the suspect, who fled the scene," he said.
The National quoted an employee at a nearby restaurant who heard two women arguing in the toilet and one threatening: "Sit down or I'll kill you".
The American died after being taken to hospital. She was not named but the Gulf News daily identified her by the initials "A.B.R".
The United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is the largest, hosts millions of foreign workers and has built an image of a relatively liberal society among Gulf Arab nations.
In September, it joined a US-led coalition against the Islamic State jihadist group in Iraq and Syria.
The stabbing took place on the same day as a recording attributed to IS spokesman Abu Mohammed Al Adnani urged Muslims to attack Westerners by any means, even if only to "spit on their faces".
Violent crime is relatively rare in Abu Dhabi although there have been attacks on foreigners elsewhere in the region.
In Saudi Arabia on Saturday, an assailant stabbed and wounded a Canadian while he shopped at a mall in Dhahran on the Gulf coast.
Last month a Danish national was shot and wounded in the Saudi capital Riyadh — an attack that IS on Monday claimed was carried out by its supporters.

MOGADISHU — Four Somalis were killed when a car bomb hit a United Nations convoy near the capital's international airport on Wednesday, showing the threat still posed by insurgents despite their recent loss of territory.

Al Qaeda-aligned Somali Islamist group Al Shabab claimed responsibility.

The group, which wants to topple the Western-backed Mogadishu government and impose its version of Islamic law, damaged a UN vehicle but did not kill any UN staff, a spokesman for the UN's Somalia mission, Aleem Siddique, said.

Somali police said four Somalis were killed in the explosion, including a policeman and two bodyguards working for a contractor. Thirteen other people were wounded.

Attacks have intensified in recent weeks, showing the threat still posed by Al Shabab after African peacekeepers pushed them out of the capital in 2011. Officials say the Islamists still control tracts of countryside and settlements from where they have launched their guerrilla-style campaign.

GAZA — The United Nations has begun investigating Israeli attacks that hit UN facilities during last summer's Gaza war and how Palestinian fighters came to store weapons at several UN schools, officials said on Wednesday.

A team of UN investigators arrived in Gaza on Tuesday to conduct the inquiry, three months after the war ended. They had already met with Israeli representatives in Jerusalem. The investigation is expected to last three weeks.

"They are visiting the affected sites, they are conducting meetings and interviews with people who were involved," Robert Turner, the director of operations for the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza told reporters. "It is specifically to look at violations of neutrality of UN installations."

During the July-August conflict, Israeli artillery and tank shells hit at least six UN-run facilities, killing around 30 Palestinian civilians who were sheltering there, according to Palestinian officials. Israel said it believed militants were using the facilities as cover to fire rockets into Israel.

At the same time, several UN schools, all of them closed during the war, were found to have been used by Hamas militants to store rockets, prompting heavy criticism from Israel.

Both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that dominates Gaza, have said they will cooperate fully with the inquiry, which was established by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

However, Israel has said it will not cooperate with a separate inquiry being carried out by the UN's Human Rights Council, which is looking into possible war crimes, saying that it believes the council is biased against Israel.

Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said Ban's inquiry was "an authentic investigation with potential for us to improve our performance in the course of conflict and learn from our mistakes".

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said while the group was happy to cooperate with both investigations, Israel should be compelled to submit to the Human Rights Council's inquiry.

"Israel's selective process to deal with a committee and boycott another is unacceptable and it damages the reputation of the United Nations before anything else," he said.

DOHA — A US couple flew out of Doha on Wednesday after a three-day holdup since a Qatari appeals court cleared them of wrongdoing in their adopted daughter’s death.

“Wheels are up,” their representative Eric Volz, who is accompanying Matthew and Grace Huang on the plane, said on Twitter, posting a picture of the couple smiling on the aircraft.

American Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith, who had escorted them through immigration, also Tweeted: “Matt and Grace Huang are wheels up from Qatar. Emotional. These are the moments all diplomats live for.”

Their flight was en route for Los Angeles.

A Doha appeals court on Sunday acquitted the pair of parental neglect in the death of eight-year-old Gloria, who had been adopted from an orphanage in Ghana, and said they were free to leave.

But they were prevented from doing so when they first arrived at the airport later that day.

In a statement late Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the US embassy in Doha had now been told that “no further appeal will be filed” and that the Huangs will finally be permitted to go.

“The United States applauds this decision, and we look forward to seeing the Huangs reunited with their children at home.”

The pair, who are of Asian descent, were arrested in January 2013.

They were initially accused of starving Gloria to death to sell her organs, but later jailed for three years for parental neglect.

A forensic pathologist told the court in October that Gloria’s body showed signs that she had not eaten for days.

“I found no signs of food in her stomach and the whole intestine, and I found no other reasons for death,” said the expert, Anees Mahmud.

The court had, however, cited a statement by Gloria’s brother Immanuel who testified that the parents had provided food for their children.

The couple insisted that Gloria died of an eating disorder rooted in a troubled early childhood.

They were released in November 2013 pending an appeal, but the court at the time denied their request to leave Qatar to join their other two adopted children in the United States.

Adoption and multiracial families are rare in Qatar, a conservative Arab emirate, and the family’s supporters maintain that the authorities there misunderstood the Huangs’ situation.

The public prosecutor had originally pushed for the death penalty for the couple.

The Huangs moved to Qatar in 2012 for Matthew, an engineer, to work on infrastructure projects linked to the 2022 football World Cup.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli political leaders agreed Wednesday to hold a snap election next March, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambling on a return to power after his ruling coalition collapsed.

Parliament's spokesman said the vote would be held on March 17, after Netanyahu tore apart his fractious coalition government by firing two centrist ministers and calling for the early polls.

With Israeli-Palestinian tensions running high, polls show Netanyahu's Likud and other rightwing parties are likely to increase their share of the vote from the previous election held just last year.

Another win for the Israeli right would leave little hope for Middle East peace talks, after the last round of negotiations collapsed with no progress and following a spate of violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Netanyahu appealed to voters to grant Likud a "clear mandate", expressing frustration at nearly two years of coalition politics.

"Against the serious challenges facing the state of Israel — security, economic and regional — there is a need for a large and experienced ruling party," he told a meeting of Likud lawmakers.

"Anyone who wants to give a clear mandate to a prime minister from Likud needs to give many seats to the party," he said.

The procedure to adopt a law to dissolve the legislature began Wednesday, with lawmakers at the 120-member Knesset passing a preliminary reading of the bill.

The law will need to gain approval another three times at parliament before the Knesset is dissolved. It is unclear how long that will take but there is little doubt the bill will be approved.

The last general election was in January 2013, and the next poll had not been officially due until November 2017.

Cracks in Netanyahu's right-leaning coalition emerged over the 2015 budget and a contentious bill aimed at enshrining Israel's status as the Jewish state in law, a move critics say would institutionalise discrimination against minorities including Arabs.

The crisis came to a head on Tuesday, when Netanyahu fired two key ministers: Finance Minister Yair Lapid, who heads the Yesh Atid party, and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads HaTnuah.

The two parties combined account for 25 of the government's 68 seats.

Hardliners on the rise 

Netanyahu accused them of "acting against the government from within" and hatching a plot to overthrow him.

"It's called a putsch," he said in a televised address shortly after firing them.

According to the latest polls, Netanyahu's Likud is expected to win 22 to 24 seats in parliament, compared with the 18 it now holds.

Another rightwing government would reduce the chances of resuming the Middle East peace process, observers say, after the last, US-backed negotiations collapsed amid recriminations in April, notably over the issue of Israel's settlement building on Palestinian territory.

Hardline ministers in Netanyahu's coalition have pushed to step up the construction of Jewish settler homes in the occupied West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem, drawing international condemnation and angering Palestinians who want that land for their future state.

Netanyahu has already indicated that he would like to renew his traditional ties with his party's "natural allies" the ultra-Orthodox, who were relegated to the opposition in the last election.

Jewish Home, a far-right national-religious party headed by Economy Minister Naftali Bennett which strongly backs settlement building, is expected to see the strongest gains in the vote, securing 16-17 seats compared with the 12 it won in 2013, according to the polls.

Centrist parties like Yesh Atid and HaTnuah are expected to see major losses. The left, including the once-dominant Labour Party, is also expected to fare poorly.

The vote call comes amid a fresh wave of violence that has set Israel on edge, including regular unrest in Jerusalem and a series of deadly "lone wolf" attacks by Palestinians on Israelis.

Commentators said relations with the Palestinians would feature in the election campaign, but that the vote would be decided more on personality than on real issues.

"The strains of the Arab-Israeli conflict are crucial," political scientist Avraham Diskin told AFP.

"But like in other countries the personality of this or that person" would ultimately decide the outcome, he said.

"There's a very good chance that Netanyahu will continue to be the prime minister."

BEIRUT — The death toll in Syria’s war was reported on Tuesday to have topped 200,000 as aid workers warned of a humanitarian crisis after the UN cut food aid to 1.7 million Syrian refugees.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said it had documented the deaths of at least 202,354 people in less than four years of conflict.

Most of those killed were combatants in a conflict that began with peaceful anti-government protests in March 2011 and later spiralled into a civil war.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said 63,074 civilians were among the dead, including more than 10,000 children.

The conflict has also displaced around half of Syria’s population, with more than three million people fleeing to neighbouring countries and beyond.

Many of the refugees are struggling to survive on foreign aid and their plight was expected to get worse after the UN’s World Food Programme said it was halting food aid in the region because of funding shortfalls.

“It’s going to be a devastating impact. This couldn’t come at a worse time,” said Ron Redman, regional spokesman for the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

“We’re doing everything we can... to keep their shelters at least warm and as dry as possible. But you can be warm and dry, but if you don’t have food, you’re in big trouble.”

The WFP said it needed $64 million (51 million euros) to fund its food voucher programme for December alone, and that “many donor commitments remain unfulfilled”.

The programme helps nearly two million refugees in the Middle East, with each receiving a card topped up with money every month allowing them to buy food equivalent to 2,100 calories per day.

Worst-hit in the region is Lebanon, where more than 800,000 of the 1.1 million Syrian refugees in the country were receiving WFP food voucher support.

In Jordan, some 450,000 refugees will get no money this month, though around 90,000 living in the UN’s Zaatari and Azraq camps will continue to receive assistance.

In Turkey and Egypt, there are sufficient funds to provide aid until December 13 but not beyond, said WFP’s Regional Emergency Coordinator Muhannad Hadi.

“It’s going to be a nightmare for refugees,” Hadi told AFP.

“Those people are depending on the WFP to feed them, most of them are totally dependent on us. They have no income.”

Many refugees struggle to make ends meet even with international aid, and in Lebanon and elsewhere they often live in squalid informal camps, exposed to the heat of summer and cold of winter.

Across the region, they also face increasing tension with host communities angry about the strain that the refugee influx has put on sparse local resources.

“We are suffering more-and-more, day-by-day. The world is ignoring our misery,” Abu Yaman, a Syrian refugee living in Ramtha in north Jordan, told AFP.

“The Jordanian government helps us, but Jordan is already a poor country and we can’t expect a lot from a country that was already suffering a financial crisis before hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrians,” added the 30-year-old, from the southern Syrian province of Daraa.

The announcement from WFP is the latest in a series of cuts made by agencies and NGOs assisting Syrian refugees.

They say funding pledges have not materialised, and “donor fatigue” is beginning to set in.

DOHA — Qatar will allow an American couple to fly home Wednesday, three days after being cleared of wrongdoing in the death of their adopted daughter, top US diplomat John Kerry said.

An appeals court in Doha acquitted Matthew and Grace Huang on Sunday of any parental neglect following the death of eight-year-old Gloria, who had been adopted from an orphanage in Ghana, and said they were free to leave.

But at the airport, the Huangs were prevented from leaving Doha.

In a statement late Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the US embassy in Qatar had now been told that "no further appeal will be filed”.

"At the opening of business on Wednesday December 3, the travel ban will be lifted and Mr and Mrs Huang will be free to travel," Kerry added.

"The United States applauds this decision, and we look forward to seeing the Huangs reunited with their children at home."

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington on Monday that US officials were working with Qatari counterparts to resolve the case.

The Huangs, who are of Asian descent, were arrested in January 2013.

They were initially accused of starving Gloria to death to sell her organs, but later jailed for three years for parental neglect.

They insist that Gloria died of an eating disorder rooted in a troubled early childhood.

They were released in November 2013 pending an appeal, but the court at the time denied their request to leave Qatar to join their other two adopted children in the United States.

Adoption and multiracial families are rare in Qatar, a conservative Arab emirate, and the family's supporters maintain Qatari authorities misunderstood the Huangs' situation.

The public prosecutor had originally pushed for the death penalty for the couple.

The Huangs moved to Qatar in 2012 for Matthew, an engineer, to work on infrastructure projects linked to the 2022 football World Cup.

BOSTON — Iranian hackers have infiltrated some of the world's top energy, transport and infrastructure companies over the past two years in a campaign that could allow them to eventually cause physical damage, according to US cyber security firm Cylance.

Aerospace firms, airports and airlines, universities, energy firms, hospitals, and telecommunications operators based in the United States, Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, France, England have been hit by the campaign, the research firm said, without naming individual companies.

A person familiar with the research said US energy firm Calpine Corp., state-controlled oil companies Saudi Aramco and Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), as well as flag carriers Qatar Airlines and Korean Air were among the specific targets.

The 87-page report comes as governments scramble to better understand Iran's cyber capabilities, which researchers say have grown rapidly as Tehran seeks to retaliate for Western cyber attacks on its nuclear programme.

"We believe that if the operation is left to continue unabated, it is only a matter of time before the team impacts the world's physical safety," Cylance said.

The California-based company said its researchers uncovered breaches affecting more than 50 entities and had evidence they were committed by the same Tehran-based group that was behind a previously reported 2013 cyber attack on a US Navy network.

A Pemex spokesman said the company had not detected any attacks from the Iranian groups but was constantly monitoring. Officials at the other companies were not immediately available to comment.

A diplomatic representative for Iran said Cylance's claim was groundless. "This is a baseless and unfounded allegation fabricated to tarnish the Iranian government image, particularly aimed at hampering current nuclear talks," said Hamid Babaei, spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations.

Reuters was unable to independently vet the research ahead of its publication. Cylance said it has reported the alleged hacking operation to some victims as well as to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). An FBI spokesman declined comment.

Cylance's research provides a new example of how governments may be using cyber technology as a tool for spying and staging attacks on rival states.

Russian and Chinese hackers have been blamed for a variety of corporate and government cyber attacks, while the United States and Israel are believed to have used a computer worm to slow development of Iran's nuclear programme.

Tehran has been investing heavily in its cyber capabilities since 2010, when its nuclear program was hit by the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to have been launched by the United States and Israel. Iran has said its nuclear programme is intended for the production of civilian electricity, and denies Western accusations it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb.

Cylance said the Iranian hacking group has so far focused its campaign — dubbed Operation Cleaver — on intelligence gathering, but that it likely has the ability to launch attacks.

It said researchers who succeeded in gaining access to some of the hackers' infrastructure found massive databases of user credentials and passwords, diagrams, and screenshots from organisations including energy, transportation, and aerospace companies, as well as universities.

It would not be the first time Saudi Aramco has been targeted by hackers. In 2012, some 30,000 computers at the oil company were infected by a virus known as Shamoon, in one of the most destructive such strikes conducted against a single business. Some US officials have said they believe Iran was behind that attack.

Cylance said its researchers also obtained hundreds of files apparently stolen by the Iranian group from the US Navy's Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). US government sources had confirmed that Iran was behind the 2013 NMCI breach, but did not provide further details.

A US defence official said on Monday it took about four months to "maneuver the [NMCI] network" to ensure that it was free of intruders. The official said that while the incident was officially characterised as a "serious intrusion”, no networks were damaged as a result of the breach.

Cylance said ten companies targeted in Operation Cleaver were US-based.

Cylance's report is the latest to show evidence of Iranian hacking of US interests. Cyber security firm FireEye Inc in May said that an Iranian hacking group was behind an series of attacks on US defense companies.

The cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners also reported in May that it had uncovered an unprecedented, three-year campaign in which Iranian hackers had created false social networking accounts and a bogus news website to spy on leaders in the United States, Israel and other countries.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court Tuesday condemned 188 people to death for a deadly attack on police after security forces dispersed sit-ins by supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, a judicial source said.

The accused, of whom 143 are behind bars, were found guilty of taking part in an August 14, 2013 attack on a police station in Kerdassa, a village on the outskirts of Cairo, killing 13 policemen.

The attack took place on the same day that security forces violently dismantled two massive pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo in an operation that cost at least 700 lives.

The death sentences, under Egyptian law, are subject to approval by the mufti, the country's highest Muslim religious authority. The verdict is to be confirmed or commuted on January 24.

Since the army deposed Morsi in July 2013, at least 1,400 of his supporters have been killed in a crackdown on pro-Morsi protests and hundreds sentenced to death in swift trials.

The UN rights office said Tuesday that Egypt must rein in its security forces and investigate human rights abuses against protesters.

The United Nations said it was deeply concerned by "the seriously damaging lack of accountability for human rights violations committed by security forces in the context of demonstrations".

CAIRO — The office of Egypt's public prosecutor said Tuesday it will appeal a court decision to drop a murder charge against ex-president Hosni Mubarak over the deaths of protesters during the 2011 uprising.

"The prosecutor general has decided to appeal," a statement said, after a Cairo court Saturday ordered the dropping of murder and corruption charges against Mubarak, who was forced to resign after three decades in power.

"The ruling was marred by a legal flaw," the statement said, adding that the decision to appeal was "not influenced by disputes among political groups".

Mubarak is serving a three-year sentence in a separate graft case.

Seven of Mubarak's security commanders, including feared ex-interior minister Habib Al Adly, were acquitted Saturday over the deaths of roughly 800 protesters during the 2011 revolt.

The court of cassation, the country's highest tribunal, can now either confirm Saturday's ruling or decide to cancel it, in which case it would consider the case itself.

An appeals court had previously overturned a life sentence for Mubarak in 2012 on a technicality, ordering the retrial that saw the charges dropped.

Mubarak's lawyer has said the 86-year-old could now see an early release from the military hospital where he is being held. He has already served two-thirds of his sentence if time held in preliminary detention since his arrest in 2011 is taken into account.

After Saturday's verdict, more than 1,000 protesters gathered at an entrance to Cairo's Tahrir Square — the epicentre of the anti-Mubarak revolt — chanting slogans against the government of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

Resulting clashes left two people dead and several wounded.

In remarks Tuesday, Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab denounced "those... who want to demolish the state and issue calls to demonstrate and occupy certain places, which is totally unacceptable”.

The court's ruling has come under fire from Mubarak opponents, critics and some leftist leaders, and sparked accusations that the authorities are interfering with the courts.

The government has denied any involvement, and Sisi ordered Sunday a review of the criminal code to prevent any legal irregularities.

In his first comment on the verdict, Sisi, Mubarak's intelligence chief, said Egypt was charting a new course.

"The new Egypt... is on a path to establish a modern democratic state based on justice, freedom, equality and a renunciation of corruption," he said.

Last year, the military overthrew Mubarak's Islamist successor, Mohamed Morsi, following mass protests.

A government crackdown targeting Morsi's supporters has since left at least 1,400 people dead and thousands imprisoned.

Dozens of Morsi supporters have also been sentenced to death or lengthy jail terms after speedy mass trials, which the United Nations says is "unprecedented" in recent history.

Critics accuse Sisi of being even more authoritarian than Mubarak by stifling dissent and counting on the support of a public exhausted by years of instability.

They say the judiciary, which includes many judges hostile to Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, has become one of the government's main instruments of quashing dissent.