Andal Ampatuan Jr, the mayor of Datu Unsayalso, who is also the son of a provincial governor on the Philippines island of Maguindanao, has been charged with multiple murders in connection with the cold-blooded massacre of 57 unarmed civilians by a large group of armed men Monday 24 November. The massacre has sent shock waves through the Philippines, with the president’s office saying she is enraged at what is a “limited clan political rivalry.” The area has been subject to violence in the past linked to Muslim secessionist groups, but President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s spokesperson says the massacre is not linked to those groups.
Adolf Storms, age 90, has been charged with the murder of 58 people in the final days of the second world war, in northern Germany. A court in Duisberg, western Germany, has brought the charges against the man, a former SS member, who is accused of taking a group of forced labourers to the woods and shooting them 29 March 1945. Storms was found by a student in Vienna who was researching massacres of forced labour workers. The court has not yet decided if it will open proceedings. Die Welt, in a July article about John Demjanjuk, who was brought back to Germany from the US to stand trial as an accessory in the deaths of 27,000 Nazi prisoners during the war, said that Germans have little appetite for more war trials.
Links to other sites: CNN, Independent
Forty-five people were killed in Mardin province in Turkey when gunmen with hand grenades and rifles broke into a house where a wedding was being celebrated and they opened fire. Police say the motive of the masked gunmen is unclear, but some local media are speculating that it was a blood feud and others that one of the guests was a member of a militia. BBC
The International Herald Tribune reports that, despite its massive problems which include a powerful drug-running trade and the violent deaths of the country’s top general and president, Guinea-Bissau is coloured by a tentative optimism, with the two men who have led it through misery for years both gone. (Ed. note: when the two were killed Geneva-based fellow journalist El Hadji Gorgui Wade Ndoye wrote a moving plea to members of the Foreign Press Association, asking that we not slip into the old trap of writing about Africa only as a continent where dictators and generals are toppled: he edits Continent Premier, an online magazine in French that focuses on African issues)
