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Turkish authorities have reportedly arrested and jailed a 16-year-old teenager for defacing an election campaign poster featuring President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to media reports from various opposition-affiliated outlets, including BirGun, Cumhuriyet, and Halk TV, the youth, who resides in the southeastern town of Mersin, allegedly added a Hitler-style moustache to the poster near his home, accompanied by derogatory comments.

The arrest took place after the teenager was identified through CCTV footage. Following his apprehension, authorities interrogated him at his residence. While he admitted to drawing the moustache, he denied writing the insulting remarks. Nevertheless, after being brought before the public prosecutor, he was charged with “insulting the president” and subsequently sent to a nearby youth detention facility, as reported by Halk TV.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently secured another five-year term in the presidential election held on May 28, further extending his 20-year rule over Turkey. The country’s justice ministry has stated that “insulting the president” is one of the most prevalent offences in Turkey, with 16,753 convictions recorded last year.

It is worth noting that drawing attention to cases like this sheds light on the limitations on freedom of expression in Turkey, where criticising or mocking public figures can result in legal consequences. The incident involving the teenager adds to the ongoing discussions about the state of civil liberties in the country and the restrictions placed on dissenting voices.

Earlier, Pistorius met his counterpart Rajnath Singh, at a time when the South Asian nation is looking to boost domestic defence manufacturing as it aims to counter China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean.

“We talked about a concrete cooperation in military procurement. That could be six submarines from TKMS,” Pistorius said, referring to the firm’s marine arm. “That could be a lighthouse project.”

Thyssenkrupp’s marine arm is expected to sign the deal with the Indian company on Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter said.

In February, had reported that Thyssen­krupp would bid for the $5.2-billion project in a bid to replace the navy’s ageing submarine fleet, as Western military manufacturers attempt to wean New Delhi from its depen­dence on Russian gear.

German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung first reported that an MoU between Thyssenkrupp and India’s Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders would be signed on Wednesday, with the value of the agreement expected to be about 7 billion euros.

In March, India approved a budget of 560 billion rupees ($6.8 billion) for its navy, which has 16 conventional submarines, 11 of them more than two decades old, along with two indigenous nuclear-powered submarines.

“India’s skilled workforce and competitive costs along with Germany’s high technologies and investment can further strengthen ties,” Singh said in a statement that did not refer to the submarines, however.

Mazagon Dock did not immediately respond to a request for comment while Thyssenkrupp declined to comment.

Blinken’s three-day visit to the oil-rich kingdom will also focus on efforts to end conflicts in Sudan and Yemen, the joint battle against the Islamic State group (IS) and the Arab world’s relations with Israel.

His trip comes at a time of quickly shifting alliances in the Middle East, centred around a China-brokered rapprochement in March between regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia and Iran.

 

Another landmark change saw Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad invited back to the Arab League last month for the first time since the start of the 12-year civil war in which his government has been backed by Russia and Iran.

Biden met Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman late on Tuesday and the two men had “an open, candid discussion that covered the full range of regional and bilateral issues”, a US official said on condition of anonymity.

“The secretary raised human rights both generally and with regards to specific issues.”

The meeting, which lasted about an hour and 40 minutes, touched on topics including Saudi Arabia’s support for US evacuations from Sudan, the need for political dialogue in Yemen and the potential for the normalisation of relations with Israel.

Blinken landed in the Red Sea city of Jeddah on Tuesday evening and is expected to head to Riyadh Wednesday for a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting.

Energy prices

The visit is Blinken’s first since the kingdom restored diplomatic ties with Iran, which the West considers a pariah over its contested nuclear activities and involvement in regional conflicts.

The United States offered cautious support for the deal that was sealed in China, the rising power making inroads in the Middle East.

US-Saudi relations, centred for decades on energy and defence, were badly strained by the 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Washington was also upset when Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, refused to help bring down skyrocketing energy prices after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February last year.

Rights activists including Abdullah Al-Qahtani, a US citizen whose father, Mohammad Al-Qahtani, was jailed for 10 years after founding a civil rights group in Saudi Arabia and who remains unaccounted for, urged Blinken to raise their concerns.

“He has to bring up my dad’s situation. Is he alive? Is he being tortured? We don’t know,” Abdullah Al-Qahtani told a virtual news conference.

Prince Mohammed, 37, has steered an independent foreign policy course, also hosting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Monday.

Iran, the arch-enemy of the United States and Israel for decades, reopened its embassy in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday following a seven-year hiatus.

Still, US-Saudi strategic relations remain close, especially on defence: Washington has long provided the Sunni Arab giant security protection from Shiite Iran, and Riyadh buys cutting-edge US weaponry.

Israel relations

US and Saudi diplomats have cooperated closely on efforts to broker a lasting ceasefire in Sudan’s eight-week-old war, so far unsuccessfully, and Saudi help was crucial in evacuating thousands of foreigners from the war zone.

The two allies are also engaged in the ongoing battle against IS, the jihadist group that has lost all its territory in the Middle East but is increasingly active in parts of Africa.

They are also discussing efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has long provided military support to the government in a fight against Huthi rebels backed by Iran.

The United States also hopes that Saudi Arabia will eventually agree to normalise relations with Israel, which has already built ties with several other Arab countries under the Abraham Accords brokered by the Donald Trump administration.

On the eve of his Saudi trip, Blinken reiterated that “the United States has a real national security interest in promoting normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia”.

He said Washington has “no illusions” that this can be done quickly or easily, but stressed that “we remain committed to working toward that outcome”.

Saudi Arabia has so far maintained that Israel must first recognise an independent Palestinian state.

BALASORE: Indian authorities made fervent appeals to families on Tuesday to help identify 83 unclaimed bodies kept in hospitals and mortuaries after the death toll in the country’s deadliest rail crash in over two decades rose to 288.

The disaster struck on Friday, when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the tracks and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near the district of Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha.

Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, health director of Odisha, said that authorities were trying to source iced containers to help preserve the unclaimed bodies.

“Unless they are identified, a post-mortem cannot be done,” Mohapatra said, explaining that under Odisha state regulations no autopsy can be conducted on an unclaimed body until 96 hours have passed.

The state government revised the death toll upwards to 288, from 275 earlier, and said that 205 dead bodies have been identified and handed over. The remaining 83 will be preserved, Odisha Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena said.

At state capital Bhubaneswar’s biggest hospital — the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) — large television screens displayed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are scouring hospitals and mortuaries for friends and relatives.

A detailed list was made of distinguishing features for each body, but relatives could first view photographs, however gruesome, to identify missing loved ones, a senior police official said.

The trains had passengers from several states and officials from seven states were in Balasore to help people claim the bodies and take the dead home, the police official added.

Missing bodies

However, all the help proved inadequate for some families. Niranjan Patra was shocked when authorities informed him that the body of his aunt, Manju Mani Patra, who had travelled on the Coromandel Express, seemed to have been handed over to someone else.

Patra said his family identified her through the photographs of the deceased released by the government, but they were unable to find her body in any of the hospitals in Bhubaneswar.

“We don’t want the compensation, we want to perform her last rites. No one is able to tell us where her body is,” Patra said, standing at the help desk at Balasore railway station.

A forlorn Parbati Hembrum, from West Bengal’s Hooghly district, also stood near the help desk, looking for information on her son Gopal.

The 20-year-old had travelled in the Coromandel Express with three others from their village, but while the other three returned home, Gopal has not.

Tarapada Tudu, standing next to his relative Hembrum, said Gopal was admitted to Balasore hospital after the accident but when they looked for him there, the hospital said he was released the same day after being treated for minor injuries.

But, filled with dread over the lack of contact with Gopal, Tudu said he and Hembrum will travel to Bhubaneswar to look for him among the dead.

There were also incidents of double claims for dead bodies.

“In those cases, we are going for DNA sampling and matching. We have already preserved DNA of the dead bodies,” senior police official Prateek Singh told reporters.

A team from the federal Central Bureau of Investigation reached the site on Tuesday to start a probe into the cause of the disaster. A separate inquiry by the railway’s safety commission started on Monday.

A signal failure was the likely cause of the disaster, according to preliminary findings, which indicated the Coromandel Express, heading southbound to Chennai from Kolkata, moved off the main line and entered a loop track a side track used to park trains at 128kph (80mph), crashing into the stationary freight train.

That crash caused the engine and first four or five coaches of the Coromandel Express to jump the tracks, topple and hit the last two coaches of the Yeshwantpur-Howrah train heading in the opposite direction at 126kph on the second main track.

Pakistan and Iraq on Monday agreed to further enhance bilateral cooperation in various sectors and cement the brotherly ties between the two nations.

The development came during a meeting between Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari and Iraqi President Dr Abdul Latif Jamal in Baghdad today, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

During the meeting, the two leaders appreciated the trajectory of bilateral relations and agreed to expand mutually beneficial cooperation.

Pakistan and Iraq enjoy close and cordial relations based on mutual respect and shared values, read the statement.

Separately, the foreign minister called on Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani and conveyed best wishes to the leadership and the people of Iraq.

Speaking on the occasion, FM Bilawal expressed Pakistan’s resolve to enhance cooperation with Iraq in diverse fields and strengthen bilateral relations.

He also expressed good wishes for the Iraqi people and the government on behalf of the government and the people of Pakistan.

The foreign minister is undertaking this visit at the invitation of the deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Iraq Dr Fuad Hussein.