Foreign News
US brings back El Salvador deportee to face charges
Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.
He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.
El Salvador agreed to release Mr Ábrego García after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.
The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.
In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Mr Ábrego García was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.
Bondi said the grand jury had found that Mr Ábrego García had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.
The allegations, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.
The indictment additionally alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.
The Trump administration had previously alleged Mr Ábrego García was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.
Bondi also accused Mr Ábrego García of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.
He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.
For now, Mr Ábrego García remains in federal custody.
Mr Ábrego García’s lawyers have previously argued that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.
Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the charges “preposterous” and the events an “abuse of power” at a Friday news conference.
“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Mr Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”
He added: “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump called Mr Ábrego García a “bad guy” and said the Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to US soil to face trial.
Mr Ábrego García entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.
But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country
On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.
Mr Ábrego García was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions.
While government lawyers initially said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”, the Trump administration refused to order his return.
Whether or not the government had to “facilitate” his return to his home in the US state of Maryland became the subject of a weeks-long legal and political battle.
After Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded to see Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador, he was released to a different prison in that country.
On Friday, Van Hollen reiterated that “this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all”.
“The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, said on social media on Friday that if the administration “request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse”.
Mr Ábrego García is expected to make an initial appearance at a Tennessee court on Friday, where US will request he be held in pretrial custody “because he poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight”, according to the detention motion.
[BBC]
A newly married couple were killed when a gas cylinder exploded at a house in Islamabad where they were sleeping after their wedding party, police have said.
A further six people – including wedding guests and family members – who were staying there also died in the blast. More than a dozen people were injured.
The explosion took place at 07:00 local time (02:00 GMT) on Sunday, causing the roof to collapse.
Parts of the walls were blown away, leaving piles of bricks, large concrete slabs and furniture strewn across the floor. Injured people were trapped under the rubble and had to be carried out on stretchers by rescue workers.
(BBC)
Rescue workers are racing to find dozens of people still missing following a landslide at a landfill site in the central Philippines that occurred earlier this week, an official has said.
Mayor Nestor Archival said on Saturday that signs of life had been detected at the site in Cebu City, two days after the incident.
Four people have been confirmed dead so far, Archival said, while 12 others have been taken to hospital.
Conditions for emergency services working at the site were challenging, the mayor added, with unstable debris posing a hazard and crew waiting for better equipment to arrive.
The privately-owned Binaliw landfill collapsed on Thursday while 110 workers were on site, officials said.
Archival said in a Facebook post on Saturday morning: “Authorities confirmed the presence of detected signs of life in specific areas, requiring continued careful excavation and the deployment of a more advanced 50-ton crane.”
Relatives of those missing have been waiting anxiously for any news of their whereabouts. More than 30 people, all workers at the landfill, are thought to be missing.
“We are just hoping that we can get someone alive… We are racing against time, that’s why our deployment is 24/7,” Cebu City councillor Dave Tumulak, chairman of the city’s disaster council, told news agency AFP.
Jerahmey Espinoza, whose husband is missing, told news agency Reuters at the site on Saturday: “They haven’t seen him or located him ever since the disaster happened. We’re still hopeful that he’s alive.”
The cause of the collapse remains unclear, but Cebu City councillor Joel Garganera previously said it was likely the result of poor waste management practices.
Operators had been cutting into the mountain, digging the soil out and then piling garbage to form another mountain of waste, Garganera told local newspaper The Freeman on Friday.
The Binaliw landfill covers an area of about 15 hectares (37 acres).
Landfills are common in major Philippine cities like Cebu, which is the trading centre and transportation gateway of the Visayas, the archipelago nation’s central islands.
[BBC]
US President Donald Trump has asked for at least $100bn (£75bn) in oil industry spending for Venezuela, but received a lukewarm response at the White House as one executive warned the South American country was currently “uninvestable”.
Bosses of the biggest US oil firms who attended the meeting acknowledged that Venezuela, sitting on vast energy reserves, represented an enticing opportunity.
But they said significant changes would be needed to make the region an attractive investment. No major financial commitments were immediately forthcoming.
Trump has said he will unleash the South American nation’s oil after US forces seized its leader Nicolas Maduro in a 3 January raid on its capital.
“One of the things the United States gets out of this will be even lower energy prices,” Trump said in Friday’s meeting at the White House.
But the oil bosses present expressed caution.
Exxon’s chief executive Darren Woods said: “We have had our assets seized there twice and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen and what is currently the state.”
“Today it’s uninvestable.”
Venezuela has had a complicated relationship with international oil firms since oil was discovered in its territory more than 100 years ago.
Chevron is the last remaining major American oil firm still operating in the country.
A handful of companies from other countries, including Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s Eni, both of which were represented at the White House meeting, are also active.
Trump said his administration would decide which firms would be allowed to operate.
“You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela,” he said.
The White House has said it is working to “selectively” roll back US sanctions that have restricted sales of Venezuelan oil.
Officials say they have been coordinating with interim authorities in the country, which is currently led by Maduro’s former second-in-command, Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez.
But they have also made clear they intend to exert control over the sales, as a way to maintain leverage over Rodríguez’s government.
The US this week has seized several oil tankers carrying sanctioned crude. American officials have said they are working to set up a sales process, which would deposit money raised into US-controlled accounts.
“We are open for business,” Trump said.
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to prohibit US courts from seizing revenue that the US collects from Venezuelan oil and holds in American Treasury accounts.
Any court attempt to access those funds would interfere with US foreign relations and international goodwill, the executive order states.
“President Trump is preventing the seizure of Venezuelan oil revenue that could undermine critical US efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet about the order.
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