Tag Archives: arrests

Fights, disturbances shut down malls across U.S.

Lights on Police Vehicle

By Brendan O’Brien and Ian Simpson

(Reuters) – Fights, disturbances and false reports of gunfire caused chaotic scenes and shut down several malls across the United States on Monday during the typically busy post-Christmas shopping day.

Eight to 10 people suffered minor injuries during a melee in the food court at The Mills at Jersey Gardens in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the mayor there said on Twitter.

Panic followed when someone shouted “gun,” after a chair hit the ground, causing a loud noise in the mall’s food court, Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage tweeted.

Photos and video clips posted on social media showed heavily armed police officers responding to the incident as shoppers raced to exits and alarms rang out inside the mall.

Similar disturbances unfolded across the United States on Monday at malls that were packed with shoppers returning gifts, using gift cards they received over the holiday weekend and searching for clearance deals.

Many involved calls of shots being fired and youths fighting. It was unclear if the incidents were connected.

A large fight between teenagers broke out in the food court at the Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Police fielded several unconfirmed reports of shots fired, said a Facebook post by the Fayetteville Police Department, which also said the mall was evacuated.

The Hulen Mall in Fort Worth, Texas, was on lockdown, Fort Worth police said on Twitter. The CBS website there reported that police said officers responded to reports of gunshots but arrived to find that several fights had broken out involving 100-150 people. There were no injuries, police said.

At least one fight shut down the Fox Valley Mall in Aurora, Illinois, late on Monday, and police were called to quell the disturbance, the Chicago Daily Herald reported, citing managers of businesses in the building.

Online videos showed uniformed personnel directing mall patrons out of the building and customers fleeing down an escalator. Police and mall management could not be reached for comment.

The Town Center Aurora in Aurora, Colorado, was also closed early after multiple skirmishes were reported inside the mall, the Aurora Police Department said on Twitter.

In Monroeville, Pennsylvania, police arrested four youths after fights broke out at the Monroeville Mall, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Police put the Arizona Mills mall in Tempe, Arizona, on lockdown after reports of shots fired inside the shopping center. Two people, including a juvenile, were arrested after two fights broke out at the mall, an ABC affiliate reported.

Police arrested one juvenile at the Beachwood Place mall in Beachwood, Ohio, where a large disturbance occurred, an ABC affiliate in Cleveland reported.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee and Ian Simpson in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Paul Tait)

Former Flint officials criminally charged in water crisis

The Flint Water Plant tower is seen in Flint, Michigan, U.S.

By Steve Friess

FLINT, Mich. (Reuters) – Michigan prosecutors on Tuesday charged four former government officials with criminal conspiracy to violate safety rules in connection with the Flint water crisis, which exposed residents to dangerous levels of lead, the state’s attorney general said.

Former state-appointed emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose and former city employees Howard Croft, a public works superintendent, and Daugherty Johnson, a utilities manager, were the latest to be charged in the case, Attorney General Bill Schuette said.

He told a news conference in Flint that the defendants conspired to operate the city’s water treatment plant when it was not safe to do so.

“The tragedy that we know of as the Flint water crisis did not occur by accident,” Schuette said. “Flint was a casualty of arrogance, disdain and failure of management, an absence of accountability.”

Asked whether the investigation would lead to charges against higher-placed state officials, Schuette reiterated that no one was off the table.

Some critics have called for high-ranking state officials, including Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, to be charged. Snyder has said he believed he had not done anything criminally wrong.

Court documents did not list attorneys for the four men. An attorney who had previously represented Earley could not immediately be reached for comment.

Michigan has been at the center of a public health crisis since last year, when tests found high amounts of lead in blood samples taken from children in Flint, a predominantly black city of about 100,000.

Flint’s water contamination was linked to an April 2014 decision by a state-appointed emergency manager to switch the city’s water source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in an attempt to cut costs.

The more corrosive river water caused lead to leach from city pipes into the drinking water. The city switched back to the previous water system in October 2015.

The initial change in the city’s water source was made while Earley, 65, was emergency manager.

At hearings in Washington last March on the crisis, lawmakers criticized Earley for failing to ask enough questions about the safety protocols in place at the time of the switch. In his testimony, Earley blamed city and federal officials for the problems, and said the decision to switch was made before his tenure.

“A broad net is certainly being cast,” said Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, a water engineer who first raised the issue of Flint’s lead contamination.

Lead can be toxic, and children are especially vulnerable. The crisis has prompted lawsuits by parents who say their children have shown dangerously high levels of lead in their blood.

(Additional reporting by Laila Kearney in New York and Timothy McLaughlin in Chicago.; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Worldwide cyber-crime network hit in coordinated raids

Logo of the Cybercrime Intelligence Unit of Germany's Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) Federal Crime Office is pictured during a media day in Wiesbaden, Germany,

BERLIN (Reuters) – One of the world’s biggest networks of hijacked computers, which is suspected of being used to attack online banking customers, has been taken down following police swoops in 10 countries, German police said on Thursday.

In an internationally coordinated campaign, authorities carried out the raids on Wednesday, seized servers and website domains and arrested suspected leaders of a criminal organization, said police and prosecutors in northern Germany.

Officials said they had seized 39 servers and several hundred thousand domains, depriving criminals of control of more than 50,000 computers in Germany alone. These hijacked computers were used to form a “botnet” to knock out other websites.

Two people who are believed to have been the administrators of the botnet infrastructure known as “AVALANCHE” were arrested in Ukraine, investigators said. Another person was arrested in Berlin, officials added.

The strike came in the same week that hackers tried to create the world’s biggest botnet, or an army of zombie computers, by infecting the routers of 900,000 Deutsche Telekom with malicious software.

The attack failed but froze the routers, causing outages in homes, businesses and government offices across Germany on Sunday and Monday, Deutsche Telekom executives said.

Police said criminals had used the “AVALANCHE” botnet targeted in Wednesday’s international raids since 2009 to send phishing and spam emails. More than a million emails were sent per week with malicious attachments or links.

When users opened the attachment or clicked on the link, their infected computers became part of the botnet.

Investigators said the suspects had operated the commandeered network and made it available to other criminal groups, who had used it to send spam and phishing mails, defraud online banking user and to spread ransomware, a form of online extortion scheme.

Officials estimated worldwide damages at upward of several hundred million euros.

Authorities have identified 16 suspected leaders of the organization from 10 different countries.

A court in Verden, northern Germany, has issued arrest warrants for seven people on suspicion of forming a criminal organization, commercial computer fraud and other criminal offences.

The raids came after more than four years of intensive investigation by specialists in 41 countries.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Alison Williams)

Israel arrests 13 on suspicion of arson over mass wildfires

Firefighters work as a wildfire burns in the village of Beit Meir near Jerusalem

By Maayan Lubell

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli police arrested 13 people on Friday on suspicion of arson, authorities said, after massive wildfires tore through central and northern Israel, a conflagration that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded as “terrorism”.

Firefighters kept battling the flames in wooded hills around Jerusalem and in northern areas on Friday, with support from Palestinian firemen and emergency teams from Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Italy, Russia and Turkey.

Netanyahu said he had also accepted offers of help from Egypt and Jordan.

Unseasonably dry weather and easterly winds helped kindle the fires, which erupted on Tuesday and now stretch across half the country.

Arson appeared to be behind some of the blazes, Netanyahu said. “A price will be paid for this arson-terrorism,” he told reporters on Friday. He said the arson was carried out by “elements with great hostility toward Israel.”

A resident stands next to burnt cars from Thursday's fire in the northern city of Haifa, Israel

A resident stands next to burnt cars from Thursday’s fire in the northern city of Haifa, Israel November 25, 2016. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

“We cannot tell yet if this is organized, but we can see a number of cells operating,” Netanyahu said.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said a dozen people had been detained either while attempting to set fires or fleeing the area, but he provided no further details. Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan told reporters 13 people were arrested.

Erdan said those arrested were “minorities”, an allusion to either Arab Israeli citizens or Palestinians. “The highest likelihood is that the motive is nationalistic,” Erdan told Army Radio. Police, however, stopped short of declaring any motive.

The fires are the biggest in the country since 2010, when 44 people were killed in a killed in a massive blaze in the north. Investigators concluded that fire was caused by negligence.

ACCUSATIONS

Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of a far-right party, said on Thursday the fires could not have been started by Jews and on Friday blamed them on “nationalist terrorists”, a reference in Israel to Palestinians.

“There is no coincidental ‘wave of fires’,” he wrote on Twitter. “There is a nationalist terrorist wave by fire terrorists meant to murder civilians and cause fright.”

A living room burnt in Thursday's fire is pictured in the northern city of Haifa, Israel

A living room burnt in Thursday’s fire is pictured in the northern city of Haifa, Israel, November 25, 2016. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

There has been no official response from Palestinian leaders. But Ayman Odeh, a leading Israeli Arab politician from Haifa, rejected the suggestion Arabs were responsible for arson attacks and accused the Israeli government of taking advantage of the situation to incite against the Arab minority.

Nearly a third of the residents of Haifa, a coastal city of around 250,000 people, including a large Arab population, spent the night in shelters and nearby towns and villages after being ordered to leave on Thursday in the face of walls of flame.

Smoke billowed over the city on Friday morning as firefighters worked to douse the remaining fires. City officials said the situation was under control but that at least 700 homes had been badly damaged or destroyed.

About 80,000 evacuees from Haifa were allowed to return to their homes on Friday as firefighters curbed the flames.

Israel’s chief of police said on Thursday people may have decided to start fires after seeing the trouble they were causing. “We’re in an area where if someone sees on the news there is an opportunity, he can take advantage of the opportunity,” said Roni Alsheich.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said forces had arrested a Palestinian man caught trying to set a fire near the Israeli settlement of Kochav Yaakov in the occupied West Bank. Footage aired on Israeli television showed three people setting a fire in an open area near the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

Police said one man from the Bedouin village of Rahat in southern Israel had been arrested for incitement after he posted a message on his Facebook page calling on others to start fires.

Palestinians seek an independent state in territories including the West Bank that Israel took in a 1967 war. The last round of peace talks collapsed in 2014.

(Reporting by Maayan Lubell; editing by Luke Baker and Mark Heinrich)

Turkey issues detention warrants for 137 more academics over failed coup

A Turkish special forces police officer guards the entrance of the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey,

NKARA (Reuters) – Turkish authorities issued arrest warrants for 137 academics on Wednesday over suspected links to the cleric who Ankara says orchestrated an attempted coup, CNN Turk reported, widening a crackdown that has worried rights groups and Western allies.

Turkey has formally arrested more than 37,000 people and has already sacked or suspended 100,000 civil servants, judges, prosecutors, police and others in an unprecedented purge.

The government says it is rooting out supporters of Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999, from the state apparatus and other key positions.

Gulen has denied Ankara’s charges and denounced the July failed coup by rogue members of the military.

Among the latest suspects, 31 of them have already been detained and another 22 are believed to have fled abroad, CNN Turk said, citing the Ankara Prosecutor’s Office. The prosecutor’s office could not be reached for comment.

Over the weekend, Turkey dismissed more than 10,000 civil servants over alleged links to Gulen. Thousands of academics, teachers and health workers were among those removed through a new emergency rule decree published late on Saturday.

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay; Editing by David Dolan and Richard Balmforth)

Police arrest 141 in crackdown on North Dakota pipeline protesters

A line of police move towards a roadblock and encampment of Native American and environmental protesters near an oil pipeline construction site, near the town of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S.

By Timothy Mclaughlin

(Reuters) – Police arrested 141 Native Americans and other protesters in North Dakota in a tense standoff that spilled into Friday morning between law enforcement and demonstrators seeking to halt construction of a disputed oil pipeline.

Police in riot gear used pepper spray and armored vehicles in an effort to disperse an estimated 330 protesters and clear a camp on private property in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, according to photos and statements released by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department.

Some protesters responded by throwing rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at police, attaching themselves to vehicles and starting fires, police said.

“It was a very active and tense evening as law enforcement worked through the evening to clear protesters,” the department said.

A female protester fired three rounds at the police line before she was arrested, the department said.

In another shooting incident, a man was taken into custody after a man was shot in the hand. That “situation involved a private individual who was run off the road by protesters,” the department said in a Facebook post.

The 1,172-mile (1,885-km) pipeline, being built by a group of companies led by Energy Transfer Partners LP, would offer the fastest and most direct route to bring Bakken shale oil from North Dakota to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

Supporters say it would be safer and more cost-effective than transporting the oil by road or rail.

But the pipeline has drawn the ire of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists who say it threatens the water supply and sacred tribal sites. They have been protesting for several months, and dozens have been arrested.

A line of police move towards a roadblock and encampment of Native American and environmental protesters near an oil pipeline construction site, near the town of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S.

A line of police move towards a roadblock and encampment of Native American and environmental protesters near an oil pipeline construction site, near the town of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. October 27, 2016. REUTERS/Rob Wilson

In all, 141 people were arrested on various charges including conspiracy to endanger by fire or explosion, engaging in a riot and maintaining a public nuisance, the sheriff’s department said.

Native American protesters had occupied the site since Monday, saying they were the land’s rightful owners under an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government.

Video posted on social media showed dozens of police and two armored vehicles slowly approaching one group of protesters.

Reuters was unable to confirm the authenticity of the video,  which showed a helicopter overhead as some protesters said police had used bean-bag guns in an effort to chase them out of the camp.

North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple said police were successful in clearing the camp.

“Private property is not the place to carry out a peaceful protest,” he said.

Members of the Standing Rock Sioux asked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday to oppose the pipeline. She has not taken a public position on the issue.

(Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago and Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici in Washington; Editing by Peter Cooney and Nick Macfie)

India arrests 70 call-center workers accused of duping U.S. citizens

Police escort men who they said were arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of tricking American citizens into sending them money by posing as U.S. tax officials, at a court in Thane, on the outskirts of Mumbai, India,

By Devidutta Tripathy

MUMBAI (Reuters) – Police in India said they arrested 70 call-centre workers on Wednesday on suspicion of tricking American citizens into sending them money by posing as U.S. tax officials.

A total of 772 workers were detained earlier on Wednesday in raids on nine call centers in a Mumbai suburb, a senior police official told Reuters. Seventy were placed under formal arrest, 630 were released pending questioning over the coming days, and 72 were freed without further investigation.

“The motive was earning money,” said Parag Manere, a deputy commissioner of police. “They were running an illegal process, posing themselves as officers of the (U.S.) Internal Revenue Service.”

The police official did not identify the company where the call center workers were employed, or any of the main players involved in the alleged scam. He also declined comment on whether Mumbai police were investigating in conjunction with U.S. authorities, or comment on what prompted the inquiry.

Manere said the alleged scammers asked Americans to buy prepaid cash cards in order to settle outstanding tax debts and also used the threat of arrest against people who did not pay up.

Last year, a Pennsylvania man who helped coordinate a fraud in which India-based callers preyed on vulnerable Americans by pretending to be U.S. government agents was sentenced to 14-1/2 years in prison.

India is home to a vast number of back office operations for North American and European companies. Thousands of call centers in India provide back office services to these firms, processing everything from utility payments to credit card bills.

While such business arrangements help Western companies cut costs, there have been frequent allegations of security breaches and improper trading of consumers’ account details and other commercial information for profit.

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Euan Rocha and Mark Heinrich)

Cleveland activists wary of city plans to process thousands of arrests

Students Iris Harris and Domonique Dumas with their mentor Kevin Sarran display their Griffin scout robot that will be used by police during a demonstration of police capabilities near the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland,

By Kim Palmer

CLEVELAND (Reuters) – Police in Cleveland say they aim to avoid mass arrests at the protests planned for next week’s Republican National Convention, but preparations by the city’s courts to process up to 1,000 people a day have some civil rights activists worried.

Thousands of people from across the country are expected in the city to protest the expected presidential nomination of New York businessman Donald Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and restrict immigration from countries with large Muslim populations if elected.

Supporters and opponents of Trump have clashed at several of his campaign events.

Police have vowed to honor protesters’ rights of free expression, which are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and avoid mass arrests.

“We don’t want anybody to trample on anybody else’s rights,” Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams told a news conference on Tuesday.

But memories of recent heavier-handed approaches are fresh in the heavily Democratic, majority black Ohio city of 388,000 people.

“I don’t want to be a naysayer here and rule out the possibility that everything is going to be hunky-dory … but knowing how the Cleveland Police Department has handled situations in the past, I just don’t have confidence that it’s going to work,” said Terry Gilbert, an attorney who has handled criminal and civil rights cases in the city for more than four decades.

“Until I see the actual situation next week, I’m going to be worried,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert pointed to the May 2015 arrests of 71 people following the acquittal of a police officer who fired 137 shots following a high-speed 2012 car chase, killing a black man and woman.

The arrested protesters were held for more than 36 hours over the Memorial Day weekend, and four alleged in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union that police intentionally kept them in custody longer to prevent the protest from reforming.

‘WE ARE READY’

Cleveland paid $250,000 to secure 200 extra rooms in the Cuyahoga County jail, according to the Republican National Committee budget.

Cleveland Municipal Court officials said they would be ready to process a large volume of people quickly, with staff scheduled to work in two 10-hour shifts keeping the court operating from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. each day.

“We are ready,” said Ed Ferenc, a spokesman for the court. “We’ll have staff here till 1 a.m. If we have to do a docket at 10:30 at night, we’ll do it.”

The United States has seen hundreds of protests over the past two years following a series of high-profile police killings of black men. The vast majority of the protests have been peaceful, although they have been punctuated with bursts of rioting, arson and looting.

The ACLU plans to be out in force to ensure that people are not arrested for legal protests, said Christine Link, the group’s executive director in Ohio.

“Let’s not equate a lot of protesters with violence,” Link said. She noted the group would be keeping careful watch on the whereabouts of anyone arrested to ensure they are charged and released quickly.

At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, hundreds of protesters were swept up and pushed into pens on the Hudson River.

With temperatures expected to reach 90 degrees F (32 C) most days, the health of detainees will be a concern, she said.

“What we’re worried about is that they’re not saying where they are booking people, they are being vague about it and that’s not good,” Link said. “That’s an attempt to hide the cheese.”

(Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Peter Cooney)