Around the World briefs
By Associated Press
Nine are facing charges in what police in Canada say is the biggest gold theft in the country’s history
TORONTO | Police said nine people are facing charges in what authorities are calling the biggest gold theft in Canadian history from Toronto’s Pearson International airport a year ago.
Peel Regional Police said Wednesday that 6,600 gold bars worth more than $14.5 million, and $1.8 million in foreign currencies were stolen. The gold was melted down and used to purchase illegal firearms, police said.
Those charged include an Air Canada warehouse employee and a former Air Canada manager who gave police a tour of cargo of the facility after the theft. A jewelry store owner is also charged.
“This story is a sensational one and which probably, we jokingly say, belongs in a Netflix series,” Peel Regional Chief Nishan Duraiappah said.
Peel Regional Detective Sgt. Mike Mavity said the gold bars, weighing 923 pounds, and foreign currency, ordered from a refinery in Zurich, Switzerland, were transported in the haul of an Air Canada flight on April 17 last year.
He said that late afternoon a truck driver arrived at the airline’s cargo warehouse with a fraudulent bill that was provided to an airline warehouse attendant.
Mavity said a bill for seafood that was picked up the day before was used to pick up the gold. The duplicate bill was printed off at the Air Canada warehouse, he said.
“They needed people within Air Canada to facilitate this theft,” Mavity said in front of the truck police say was used in the theft.
Mavity said police are searching for the Air Canada manager who gave police a tour of the facility in the days after the theft. He said that manager left his job last summer and said they have an idea of where he is.
Mavity said some of the suspects were known to police and some were not. He said they seized six crudely made bracelets made of gold.
“I don’t think I ever imagined they would have to deal with the largest gold heist in Canadian history,” said Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, Ontario. “It’s almost out of an ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ movie or CSI.”
Air Canada employee Parmpal Sidhu, 54, from Brampton, Ontario, jewelry store owner Ali Raza, 37, from Toronto, Amit Jalota, 40, a Oakville, Ontario resident, Ammad Chaudhary, 43, from Georgetown, Ontario and Prasath Paramalingam, 35, from Brampton are among those that have been arrested. Mavity said they have been released on bail conditions and will be in court at a later date.
Mavity said the truck driver that allegedly picked up the gold, Durante King-Mclean, a 25-year-old from Brampton, is currently in custody in the U.S. on firearms and trafficking related charges.
Police are searching for former Air Canada manager Simran Preet Panesar, 31, from Brampton as well as Archit Grover, 36, from Brampton and Arsalan Chaudhary, 42, from Mississauga Ontario.
Peel Regional Deputy Chief Nick Milinovich said only CA$90,000 ($65,000) of the more than CA$20 million has been recovered.
U.S. ATF Special Agent, Eric DeGree, said King-Mclean, was arrested in Pennsylvania after a traffic stop and that led to the seizure of 65 illegal firearms that were allegedly destined to be smuggled into Canada. DeGree said he tried to flee after police discovered the firearms in his rental car.
Brinks, an American cash handling company, arrived at the airport cargo facility the night of April 17 to pick up the gold and were told the gold and currency was missing after a search.
Brinks sued Air Canada over the theft last year. According to the company’s filing last year, a thief walked away with the costly cargo after presenting a fake document at an Air Canada warehouse on April 17.
In a Nov. 8 statement of defense, Air Canada rejected “each and every allegation” in the Brink’s lawsuit, saying it fulfilled its carriage contracts and denying any improper or “careless” conduct.
The country’s largest airline also said Brink’s failed to note the value of the haul on the waybill — a document typically issued by a carrier with details of the shipment — and that if Brink’s did suffer losses, a multilateral treaty known as the Montreal Convention would cap Air Canada’s liability.
In Federal Court filings that claim breach of contract and millions of dollars in damages, Brinks said an “unidentified individual” gained access to the airline’s cargo warehouse and presented a “fraudulent” waybill shortly after an Air Canada flight from Zurich landed at Pearson.
The statement of the claim says the staff then handed over 400 kilograms of gold in the form of 24 bars plus nearly $2 million in cash to the thief, who promptly “absconded with the cargo.”
DeGree said dozens of firearms were seized, including two fully automatic weapons and five guns that were untraceable.
“I’m proud to say that we successfully put an international gun trafficking operation out of business. We kept 65 firearms off the streets of Canada and prevented them from being used in any number of crimes,” DeGree said.
Mavity said that “we believe they melted down the gold and with the profits they got from the gold they used to purchase illegal firearms.”
United Arab Emirates struggles to recover after heaviest recorded rainfall ever hits desert nation
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates | The United Arab Emirates tried to wring itself out Thursday after the heaviest recorded rainfall ever to hit the desert nation, with its main airport allowing more flights even as floodwater still covered portions of major highways and communities.
Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, allowed global carriers on Thursday morning to again fly into Terminal 1 at the airfield. And long-haul carrier Emirates, crucial to East-West travel, began allowing local passengers to arrive at Terminal 3, their base of operations.
However, Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths said in an interview with The Associated Press that the airfield needed at least another 24 hours to resume operations close to its usual schedule. Meanwhile, one desert community in Dubai saw floodwaters continue to rise Thursday to as much as 3 feet as civil defense officials struggled to pump out the water.
“We were looking at the radar thinking, ‘Goodness, if this hits, then it’s going to be cataclysmic,’” Griffiths said of the storm. “And indeed it was.”
The airport ended up needing 22 tankers with vacuum pumps to get water off its grounds. Griffiths acknowledged that taxiways flooded during the rains, though the airport’s runways remained free of water to safely operate. Online videos of a FlyDubai flight landing with its reverse thrust spraying out water caught the world’s attention.
“It looks dramatic, but it actually isn’t that dramatic,” Griffiths said.
Emirates, whose operations had been struggling since the storm Tuesday, had stopped travelers flying out of the UAE from checking into their flights as they tried to move out connecting passengers. Pilots and flight crews also had a hard time reaching the airport given the water on roadways.
But on Thursday, Emirates lifted that order to allow customers into the airport. That saw some 2,000 people come into Terminal 3, again sparking long lines, Griffiths said.
Others who arrived at the airport described hourslong waits to get their baggage, with some just giving up to head home or to whatever hotel would have them.
The UAE, a hereditarily ruled, autocratic nation on the Arabian Peninsula, typically sees little rainfall in its arid desert climate. However, a massive storm forecasters had been warning about for days blew through the country’s seven sheikhdoms.
By the end of Tuesday, more than 142 millimeters (5.59 inches) of rainfall had soaked Dubai over 24 hours. An average year sees 94.7 millimeters (3.73 inches) of rain at Dubai International Airport. Other areas of the country saw even more precipitation.
Meanwhile, intense floods also have struck neighboring Oman in recent days. Authorities on Thursday raised the death toll from those storms to at least 21 killed.
The UAE’s drainage systems quickly became overwhelmed Tuesday, flooding out neighborhoods, business districts and even portions of the 12-lane Sheikh Zayed Road highway running through Dubai.
The state-run WAM news agency called the rain “a historic weather event” that surpassed “anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949.”
In a message to the nation late Wednesday, Emirati leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, said authorities would “quickly work on studying the condition of infrastructure throughout the UAE and to limit the damage caused.”
On Thursday, people waded through oil-slicked floodwater to reach cars earlier abandoned, checking to see if their engines still ran. Tanker trucks with vacuums began reaching some areas outside of Dubai’s downtown core for the first time as well. Schools remain closed until next week.
Authorities have offered no overall damage or injury information from the floods, which killed at least one person.
However, at least one community saw the effects of the rainfall only get worse Thursday. Mudon, a development by the state-owned Dubai Properties, saw flooding in one neighborhood reach as much as 1 meter. Civil defense workers tried to pump the water out, but it was a struggle as people waded through the floodwater.
Residents of Mudon, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity given the UAE’s strict laws governing speech, described putting together the equivalent of nearly $2,000 to get a tanker to the community Wednesday. They alleged the developers did nothing to help prior to that, even as they called and emailed. They also said a nearby sewage processing facility failed, bringing more water into their homes.
“A lot of people were in denial of how bad it was,” one homeowner said as civil defense officials waded through the water, bringing bottled water on a raft.
Dubai Holding, a state-owned company that has Dubai Properties as an arm, did not respond to questions. It’s part of a wider nexus that U.S. diplomats have called “Dubai Inc.” — all properties overseen by the city-state’s ruling family.
The flooding sparked speculation that the UAE’s aggressive campaign of cloud seeding — flying small planes through clouds dispersing chemicals aimed at getting rain to fall — may have contributed to the deluge. But experts said the storm systems that produced the rain were forecast well in advance and that cloud seeding alone would not have caused such flooding.
Scientists also say climate change is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme storms, droughts, floods and wildfires around the world. Dubai hosted the United Nations’ COP28 climate talks just last year.
Abu Dhabi’s state-linked newspaper The National in an editorial Thursday described the heavy rains as a warning to countries in the wider Persian Gulf region to “climate-proof their futures.”
“The scale of this task is more daunting than it appears even at first glance, because such changes involve changing the urban environment of a region that for as long as it has been inhabited, has experienced little but heat and sand,” the newspaper said.
Colombia’s capital announces new measures to cut water consumption as dry weather persists
BOGOTA, Colombia | The mayor of Colombia’s capital on Monday announced new measures to reduce water consumption in the city of eight million people, where a drought associated with the El Niño weather pattern has already prompted officials to ration water in most neighborhoods and ask residents to change their showering habits.
In a statement aired by local media, Bogotá’s Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán said homes that use more than 22 cubic meters of water per month will have to pay additional fees. He also threatened to impose fines of up to $300 on people who wash their cars on the streets or conduct other activities that are deemed to be a waste of water.
The mayor said that city buses, which are usually washed every day, will now only be washed once per week. For public health reasons, the insides of the buses will still need to be cleaned on a daily basis.
“We have started to reduce water consumption, but there is still a long way to go to reach our goals,” Galán said.
Water rationing is rare in Bogotá, a city that is located in a humid patch of the northern Andes Mountains and is surrounded by cloud forests and emerald green fields.
But several months of dry weather, caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon have destabilized the city’s reservoirs and led to forest fires in January.
Bogotá’s main source of water, the Chingaza Reservoir System, is currently 15% full, its lowest level ever. Experts have warned that if rains do not return to the area, its reservoirs could run out of water in two months.
Faced with this situation, officials in Bogotá last week rolled out a water rationing system that divides the city into nine zones. Each zone is cut off from the water supply for 24 hours, on a rotating basis.
Galán said on Monday that since the rationing system began on Thursday the city’s water consumption has dropped to 16.01 cubic meters per second, from 17.84 cubic meters per second. But the mayor said that the city’s water consumption must fall to 15 cubic meters per second in order for reservoirs to recover.
Over the past few days, city officials have also urged residents to use less water, by limiting their showers to five minutes and turning off their taps while they brush their teeth.
The mayor also suggested that residents of the capital should stop showering on a daily basis, as is customary in Colombia, especially when they don’t have to leave their homes.
“We are not only going to reduce consumption through rationing, but also by changing our behavior,” Galán said.
North Korea is buying Chinese surveillance cameras in a push to tighten control, report says
SEOUL, South Korea | North Korea is putting surveillance cameras in schools and workplaces and collecting fingerprints, photographs and other biometric information from its citizens in a technology-driven push to monitor its population even more closely, a report said Tuesday.
The state’s growing use of digital surveillance tools, which combine equipment imported from China with domestically developed software, threatens to erase many of the small spaces North Koreans have left to engage in private business activities, access foreign media and secretly criticize their government, the researchers wrote.
But the isolated country’s digital ambitions have to contend with poor electricity supplies and low network connectivity. Those challenges, and a history of reliance on human methods of spying on its citizens, mean that digital surveillance isn’t yet as pervasive as in China, according to the report, published by the North Korea-focused website 38 North.
The study’s findings align with widely held views that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is stepping up efforts to tighten the state’s control of its citizens and promote loyalty to his regime.
These efforts were boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the North imposed stringent border controls that were maintained for three years before a cautious reopening in 2023.
New laws and recent reports of harsher punishments suggest that the government is cracking down on foreign influence and imported media, likely helped by fences and electronic monitoring systems installed on the border with China during the pandemic.
“Having seen that it’s possible to close the border this tightly, I think they are now keen to keep it that way,” said Martyn Williams, an analyst who co-authored the study with Natalia Slavney.
“In terms of broader surveillance across the country, the pandemic could have played a part, but I think a much bigger role has been played by the fast-reducing cost of surveillance equipment,” Williams said.
The report examined North Korean surveillance technologies through information gained from domestic and international media coverage and publicly announced research at North Korean universities and state organizations. The researchers also said they interviewed 40 North Korean escapees about the surveillance they experienced when they lived in the country and, through unspecified partners, surveyed 100 current North Korean residents in 2023 via phone, text messages and other forms of encrypted communication to ensure their safety.
State media reports show that video surveillance is becoming more common at schools, workplaces and airports. The cameras are mostly sourced from Chinese vendors and range from basic video feeds to more advanced models that include features like face recognition.
Experts have warned that China is exporting the technology that powers its AI-powered surveillance to countries around the world.
North Korean state media reports show that cameras now appear in most schools in the capital, Pyongyang, and other major cities, allowing school staff to remotely monitor what’s happening in classrooms by panning and zooming to focus on individual students or teachers.
Cameras are also widespread in factories, government buildings and other workplaces, both to improve security and to prevent theft, while facial recognition systems have been used to record visitors at Pyongyang’s Sunan airport since 2019.
North Korea has also been expanding its network of traffic cameras beyond Pyongyang since 2021, installing them at major roads heading into and out of the city, likely for the purpose of automatically recording license plates, the report said.
The government may not yet be fully able to utilize the data it collects, and it currently doesn’t have an intensive network of security cameras in streets and residential areas, possibly due to electricity shortages and the large number of security agents already monitoring public life in Pyongyang and elsewhere.
But North Korea does appear to be envisioning a future of more pervasive video surveillance — North Korean universities and research institutions for years have focused on developing technologies related to movement detection and facial and license plate recognition, according to the report.
Meanwhile, the state is also building detailed biometric profiles of its citizens. The latest version of North Korean national identification cards comes in a smartcard format and requires citizens to provide fingerprints, facial photographs and, at least according to one report, to take a blood test.
“For North Koreans, the spread of CCTV means even greater surveillance of their lives, especially if the cameras include automatic detection systems. If such cameras become more broadly used, citizens involved in illicit activities would be especially at risk as facial detection could track their movements throughout cities,” Williams and Slavney wrote.
“At present, North Koreans who get caught in activities such as smuggling or distributing illegally imported goods and foreign content can bribe local security services, but, unlike humans, security cameras cannot be bribed,” they said.
Williams said the government will push to expand its surveillance network beyond major cities as infrastructure improves. It still won’t be easy to make use of vast amounts of video data, he said, but North Korea can draw lessons from the surveillance state next door.
“Perhaps the biggest hurdle is the computing infrastructure to process all of this data in real time. Doing so on a national or even provincial level is not an easy task, if the network is to be truly pervasive and consist of multiple cameras,” Williams said. “The country would have to build a small data center and ensure a constant supply of power. I think it definitely can be inspired by China, which is a comparatively freer society in general but has a much more Orwellian digital surveillance network.”
—From AP reports
