Two dead after car drives into crowd in Germany
Two people have been killed after a vehicle drove into a pedestrian area in the city of Mannheim, western Germany.
Five people were seriously injured and another five suffered minor injuries in the incident, investigators said.
Authorities arrested a "lone" suspect, a 40-year-old German man who resided in the neighbouring state, who prosecutors say has "concrete indications of mental illness".
Mannheim Police issued a request that people avoid the area, but said that there is no further danger to the public.
The incident occurred at around 12:15 local time (11:15 GMT), Mannheim Police said.
Images from the scene showed police investigating a car, a small black Ford, which had sustained heavy damage to its front.
The state interior minister Thomas Strobl said the man, from the neighbouring state of Rhineland-Palatinate, used the vehicle "as a weapon".
"This act is one of several crimes in the recent past in which a car was misused as a weapon," Mr Strobl said, but added that there is no evidence to suggest the incident is connected to the Easter carnival taking place in the city.
Prosecutors said the suspect is in hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but is stable after medical treatment.
He is being investigated for two counts of murder and several of attempted murder, Mannheim chief public prosecutor Romeo Schluessler told reporters.
Mannheim's mayor described the incident as "abhorrent and "inhumane".
"Our thoughts are with the dead and injured, their families and friends," Mayor Christian Specht said.
Olaf Scholz, Germany's outgoing chancellor, thanked the emergency services and wished "strength" for eyewitnesses in Mannheim to "process what they have experienced".
"We mourn with the relatives of the victims of a senseless act of violence and fear for those injured," he said in a social media post.
The incident comes at a time of heightened security as outdoor carnivals linked to Easter celebrations are held across Germany.
There was a parade through the Mannheim city centre on Sunday, with major events scheduled for Tuesday.
A market has now been closed and a street carnival in the city centre will not take place. Carnival events in the nearby suburbs of Feudenheim, Neckarau and Sandhofen have also been cancelled.
Germany has endured a number of violent attacks over the last year, which have left several people dead and hundreds injured.
Nine months ago, also in Mannheim and only a few blocks away from where Monday's attack is believed to have taken place, an Afghan man stabbed several people, killing a policeman.
Then, in August, another knife attack left eight people injured and three dead in Solingen. The Syrian man who was charged with the crime was suspected of links with the Islamic State terrorist group.
In December a man rammed a car into a crowd at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, leaving six dead and 299 injured. A 50-year-old Saudi psychiatrist was arrested.
In January, a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker attacked a group of small children in a park in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, killing a two-year-old child and a passer-by who tried to help the boy.
And in February, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a crowd, injuring more than two dozen people. A mother and child later died from their injuries.
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Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
State withheld records in Rio Arriba sheriff death investigation
The New Mexico Department of Public Safety took 42 days — far beyond the 15 days allowed by state statute — to release information this week about the mysterious April death of Rio Arriba County Sheriff Billy Merrifield. Forensic pathologists reported May 15 that Merrifield's Easter morning death was due to the toxic effects of fentanyl and alcohol. Other questions remained unanswered, including whether the sheriff knowingly consumed fentanyl and where he may have obtained it. In the days after Merrifield was found dead in his patrol car April 20, The New Mexican filed a public records request for related police reports and other information. At first, the Department of Public Safety refused to release additional records. Next, it described the request as burdensome, buying the agency more time. After additional complaints from The New Mexican, it released a batch of investigative reports Thursday evening — 42 days after receiving the request. Those records — 105 pages of reports, photos and other documents — show the agency's investigators have not yet determined how Merrifield ingested the fatal dose of fentanyl that caused his death, along with alcohol. The recent secrecy over Merrifield's death reflects a pattern of slow-walked disclosure of public records like state police reports and lapel camera footage, shielding public information on homicides, crashes, police shootings around the state and other public safety-related incidents. The department's initial decision to withhold police reports from the investigation — as well as documents in another unrelated case — appears to have potentially run afoul of state public records laws and a Supreme Court ruling in recent years. Department of Public Safety spokesperson Herman Lovato declined to respond to some questions about the matter in an email Friday, but he wrote each request through the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act 'is addressed individually' by department staff. 'If it involves an active or ongoing investigation, records that are complete will be produced if not subject to an exception, even on an active or ongoing investigation,' Lovato wrote. 'If the records have not been completed because of an active or ongoing investigation, they may be temporarily withheld until completed.' He wrote the department's process 'aligns with New Mexico Supreme Court precedent and the requirements of IPRA.' However, the department's written reason for denying a recent request for state police reports tied to Merrifield's death did not appear consistent with the process Lovato described. In response to a request from The New Mexican seeking reports on Merrifield's death, a staff member at the department's records division wrote in early May, 'this is still a active/on going investigation and I was not given the approval to release the documents as they are still being [processed].' About two weeks later, the department's reasoning changed, with a different staffer writing the request for reports was 'overburdensome.' The records were finally released Thursday after The New Mexican submitted a complaint concerning an alleged violation of the Inspection of Public Records Act to the Department of Justice — and after sending emailed questions about the records request to officials that day. Advocate: Court ruling 'clear' Christine Barber, the executive director of New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said in an interview the department's initial denial of the request appeared to potentially violate a state Supreme Court ruling a few years ago on the specific topic of records in active law enforcement investigations. The ruling came as a result of a lawsuit brought by Andrew Jones against the Department of Public Safety, which had denied his request for records related to a state police investigation into the fatal shooting of his brother by Albuquerque police officers. Barber said the 2020 ruling was clear, holding that 'the status of a criminal investigation as 'ongoing' does not serve to exempt public records related to the investigation from inspection under [the Inspection of Public Records Act].' 'Sometimes government agencies need to be reminded of the law,' Barber said, noting past litigation between the Foundation for Open Government and the Department of Public Safety. In a 2007 settlement between the department, the foundation and several news publications — including The New Mexican — department officials agreed to provide records like incident reports within the 15-day timeline required by state law. An attorney for the government transparency group said at least one other journalist reported receiving a similar response recently when requesting the reports on Merrifield's death, but she added she did not recall other recent instances of state law enforcement agencies explicitly citing an open investigation as the reason for denying or delaying the production of records. The Department of Public Safety cited the Supreme Court's decision in a letter denying a different request from The New Mexican earlier this year for an incident report in a different death investigation. In the letter, staff acknowledged the court ruling stated exemptions to public records law 'cannot be interpreted so broadly as to withhold records simply due to the existence of an ongoing investigation.' The letter described exemptions that allow for redactions of parts of records, like names of potential subjects and informants, and ultimately stated the agency would withhold the entire report. 'Once the investigation is closed and no longer subject to these legal restrictions, certain records may become available for inspection,' the letter states. Weeks to fulfill requests While records are not usually withheld outright by the Department of Public Safety, it often takes several months to disclose reports from an investigation. In the past two years, The New Mexican has submitted at least 24 requests to the Department of Public Safety seeking reports or other documents such as the agency's written policies, lists of employees or financial data — not including requests for records like police lapel camera footage. The department provided the requested records in an average timeframe of more than two months per request. A little more than half of the requests for police reports or other documents were deemed 'broad' or 'burdensome' by the department's record staff, which allows for delays longer than 15 days. As of Friday, records have not been provided in response to two of the requests. Department of Justice spokesperson Lauren Rodriguez said attorneys from the division that investigate public records complaints had contacted the Department of Public Safety earlier this week regarding the complaint from The New Mexican. The investigators — after being assigned a complaint — usually contact the government agency in question to obtain more information, she said. They are trying to determine if there is actually noncompliance as well as whether the agency's staff knew their actions were out of compliance and whether they acted purposely in denying or delaying a records request. Apart from the complaint submitted against the Department of Public Safety by The New Mexican, the department has been the subject of one other records-related complaint so far this year to the Department of Justice, Rodriguez said. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's office did not respond to an email seeking comment on the Department of Public Safety's practices concerning the release of public records. Lujan Grisham stood behind the department when asked about the issue last year, with a spokesperson writing the governor 'defers to law enforcement authorities to determine when the release of information is appropriate based on the status of ongoing investigations, notification of next of kin, etc.'
Washington Post
6 hours ago
- Washington Post
A powerful, opaque al-Qaeda affiliate is rampaging across West Africa
TUMU, Ghana — In the space of just a few months, the al-Qaeda affiliate has overrun major cities in Burkina Faso and Mali, carried out the deadliest-ever attack on soldiers in Benin and expanded its hard-line Islamist rule across the region. No one knows when its fighters will strike next — or where they plan to stop. After years spent quietly gaining strength, Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is now the most well-armed militant force in West Africa and among the most powerful in the world, according to regional and Western officials, with as many as 6,000 fighters under its command. Local strategies employed to combat JNIM are accelerating its rise, officials and experts say, as atrocities by West African forces have allowed the group to claim the moral high ground and legitimize its growing authority. The United States has largely pulled back from — or been pushed out — of the fight, leaving in its wake a deepening security vacuum and mounting anxiety over JNIM's aims and capabilities. 'They're creating a proto-state that stretches like a belt from western Mali all the way to the borderlands of Benin. … It is a substantial — even exponential — expansion,' said Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, or ACLED, a nonprofit research group. JNIM, along with the rival Islamic State-Sahel Province, has turned the region into an epicenter of Islamist insurgency. The Institute for Economics & Peace's annual index last year found 51 percent of terrorism deaths worldwide were in the Sahel, a vast, tumultuous region south of the Sahara that spans the breadth of Africa. The chaos ravaging the region has helped military officers seize power in coups — vowing to break with the West and restore calm. But in most countries the security situation has only gotten worse. In 2024, Burkina Faso ranked as the nation most affected by terrorist violence for a second straight year, and Niger saw the largest increase in terrorism-related deaths globally. In a sign of JNIM's southward spread, Togo reported the most terrorist attacks it its history; Benin has reported nearly as many deaths in the first three months of this year than in all of 2024. Increasingly, experts say, JNIM's informant and supply chain networks are stretching into stable nations such as Ghana, Senegal and Guinea. Governments fear their fighters could soon follow. The Washington Post interviewed experts and officials in five countries to shed light on why the group is growing so fast — and what its end game might be. Reporters also traveled to the porous borderlands between Burkina Faso and Ghana, where tens of thousands have fled violence by JNIM and government forces, to speak to refugees about life under militant rule. They recounted how gun-toting JNIM members burst into mosques in Burkina Faso in recent years, announcing that strict Islamic laws would be implemented, schools would be closed and state institutions would be targeted. Violating the rules, the extremists made clear, would carry a price. Nearly 6,000 civilians have been killed by the group in the past five years, according to ACLED data. Refugees said that initially, they rejected the group outright. But their anger was redirected by the government's response: a militia-led wave of killing targeting the Fulanis, a semi-nomadic, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread out across West Africa. Skeptical locals became eager recruits. 'They were afraid, and they ran to them,' said Amadou Diallo, a 69-year-old Burkinabe refugee, describing his three daughters and their husbands who joined JNIM after militia members killed scores of their fellow Fulani. As the threat grows across West Africa, the region has largely fallen off the radar in Washington, according to interviews with four current and former U.S. officials. Like other officials in this story, they spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. American drones once flown from Niger — where U.S. troops were forced out last year by the country's military junta — have been moved out of West Africa, according to two former U.S. officials with knowledge of the situation. They added that plans to relocate the drones to Ivory Coast and Benin have been scrapped. There are now fewer than 200 troops in the region, mostly stationed in countries along the coast — down from about 1,400 as recently as 2023 — according to current and former officials. U.S. Africa Command (Africom) declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson pointed to recent remarks by Gen. Michael E. Langley, the head of Africom, who emphasized that the U.S. was focused on helping African nations build the 'self-reliance' to fight terrorism. But the vast majority of programs run through the Global Fragility Act — a multiyear initiative intended to bolster stability in vulnerable West African countries — have been shut down by the Trump administration. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment. 'JNIM is ascendant,' one of the former U.S. officials said. 'In a region where we used to monitor what was happening, we no longer have the tools.' JNIM, founded in Mali in 2017 as an umbrella organization combining four Islamist extremist groups, is headed by Iyad ag Ghali and Amadou Koufa, leaders of a 2012 uprising that saw separatists and Islamists take over much of the country's north. Ag Ghali belongs to the mostly Muslim Tuareg ethnic group, which has fought for decades to establish an independent state in northern Mali. Koufa is a Fulani preacher based in central Mali. The differences between the two men have given the group broad appeal — and contributed to uncertainty about its goals. The group operates on a 'franchise' model, experts say, tailoring its strategies to local customs and its recruiting to local grievances. But wherever its fighters go, they enforce a strict Salafist version of Islamic law. Ali Diallo, a 53-year-old herder from Burkina Faso's Boucle du Mouhoun region, was washing himself before prayers at his local mosque in 2023 when a group of bearded men wearing turbans forced him and other men inside and locked the door. 'I thought we were going to die,' Ali Diallo said, recalling that the men wore machine guns across their chests. 'But two men stood where the imam usually stood and started preaching. They said their fight was with the government and their goal was to spread Islam, not to kill us.' Shortly afterward, the extremists closed his children's school. 'We were angry,' said Asseta Diallo, his 19-year-old daughter. 'We just started sitting at home.' Strict dress codes were enforced in the community, with veils required for women and short pants for men. Naming and wedding ceremonies were banned. Loud music too. In its strongholds in central and southern Mali, experts say, the group has made agreements with communities that compel residents to adhere to JNIM's rules and pay zakat, or taxes, in exchange for not being attacked. In recent months, these local pacts have allowed JNIM to shift its focus, and move its manpower, to neighboring Burkina Faso and coastal nations such as Benin. 'These guys are smart, sophisticated and evolving,' said Corinne Dufka, a veteran Sahel analyst based in Washington. 'And now, there is a model for mainstreaming their political evolution.' Some of JNIM's senior figures, Dufka said, are looking to Ahmed al-Sharaa — the Syrian leader who has recast himself as a moderate after once being associated with al-Qaeda — as a potential model for their own trajectory. When Sharaa's rebel group overthrew the Assad regime last year, JNIM issued a statement of congratulations. And when Koufa was interviewed by a French journalist in October, he did not mention al-Qaeda, prompting speculation about a possible break with the group. Western and West African officials and experts estimate JNIM has between 5,000 and 6,000 combatants but say a lack of intelligence makes it difficult to arrive at a definitive figure. Fighters have long targeted symbols of foreign influence in the region, including attacks against French and U.N. forces, and more recently have threatened Russian mercenaries fighting alongside Malian troops. Aneliese Bernard, a former State Department adviser who now runs a private security firm working in West Africa, said the group has metastasized to such an extent that it now 'directly impacts [U.S.] national security.' And, she added, 'they are expanding undeterred into the countries we have long considered robust security partners.' Military officers have staged coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in response to the growing violence, promising an all-out war against the extremists. In Burkina Faso, President Ibrahim Traoré's strategy has hinged on arming more than 50,000 militia members, who have committed scores of atrocities, rights groups say. Each attack has become a recruiting opportunity for JNIM. In March, in the town of Solenzo, Burkina Faso, government militias killed dozens of mostly Fulani civilians and filmed the aftermath, according to rights groups. Videos shared by the perpetrators on social media showed the dead, including women and children, piled into trucks. In the days after the attack, JNIM released videos condemning the government. 'These miscreants want us to fight back and kill innocent women and kids … which will lead to a civil war,' said one JNIM leader in another video. 'Yet our fight is not to defend a country or an ethnicity, but religion instead.' The videos were part a wider propaganda blitz by the group during Ramadan in March. Fighters in brightly colored headscarves were filmed in action at training camps, or reading from the Quran, guns propped in front of them. Since 2019, the group has killed more than 5,800 civilians in the region, according to ACLED; about 9,600 civilians have been killed by regional militaries and government-allied militias. In areas where JNIM has achieved strong control, violent attacks against civilians tend to decline, analysts say When Amadou Diallo, the 69-year-old Burkinabe refugee, learned that his daughters and their husbands had joined JNIM, he said he was so distraught that he stopped sleeping. But then, he said, he thought of his three cousins who had been killed by government militias. Village elders had told Fulani residents to leave, that they could no longer protect them. 'The alternative was death,' he said. 'At least now I hope they are safe.' Long-haul truck driver Yakubu Janwi travels across the region, a dangerous job that gives him a window into JNIM's expanding influence. The group controls many of the major roads in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, he said; truck owners have cut deals with the militants to ensure drivers are not stopped. During one dispute over payment, he said, JNIM members seized his truck full of tea and left him wandering in the bush. He was rescued by another driver about 24 hours later, he said, but it took his boss a full year to get the vehicle back. The trucking agreements are just one strand in a complex web of illicit commerce that JNIM uses to finance its insurgency. Members are involved in gold mining in Burkina Faso and Mali, according to experts and a former member of the group. Others engineer massive cattle-rustling schemes, including in Ghana, run kidnapping networks or are involved in smuggling drugs and motorcycles. Analysts say an increasingly large share of JNIM's funding comes from the taxes levied on communities in Mali and Burkina Faso. Solidifying its base of operations has allowed the group to devote more resources to attacks in Benin, said Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow with the Clingendael Institute. An ambush last month in the far north of the country killed 54 soldiers, the military said. Soldiers were caught off guard, according to a Benin military official: 'It is hard to track their movement,' the official said. JNIM is now actively recruiting in Benin, according to the official and experts. In the country's far north, recruiters now openly present themselves to local leaders, as they did when they first moved into parts of Burkina Faso and Mali. The group's weapons come largely from the government forces it has defeated, according to a recent report by Conflict Armament Research. There have been so many of those defeats that JNIM has been able to amass a formidable arsenal of machine guns, drones and antiaircraft weaponry — and has demonstrated it can deploy them to deadly effect. Last month, JNIM took control of Djibo, a regional capital in northern Burkina Faso — killing scores of soldiers and civilians and holding the city from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fighters posed for pictures on the streets and in government offices, including under a photo of Traoré, and vowed they were coming for the young president. At a recent U.S.-led military training in Tamale, in northern Ghana — a stand-alone Africom exercise spared from the Trump administration's regional cuts — soldiers from Ghana, Benin and Ivory Coast said the images from Djibo circulated in their WhatsApp groups. JNIM is now top of mind across the region. 'They're more violent, more organized and have more means,' said a military official from Ivory Coast. 'They wanted to spread Islam at first, but now it seems like they want to get all the way to the sea.' That theory was echoed by a U.S. official, who said the group sees its expansion as a kind of 'manifest destiny,' and appears to be pushing for a route to the Atlantic, which would dramatically increase the reach of its smuggling networks. Ghana, a nation of 33 million still seen as a bright spot of stability and democracy in West Africa, has not been attacked yet by JNIM. But officials from neighboring countries have told their Ghanaian counterparts to be on guard. Already, regional officials and experts said, JNIM is using Ghana to restock its supplies and rest its fighters after assaults in Burkina Faso. Along the countries' shared border, which is marked by narrow, sandy footpaths and potholed roads, a group of Ghanaian immigration officers are doing their best to patrol but said they need more resources. Sixteen officers are tasked with guarding the 10-mile border. They can often hear the echo of gunshots on the other side. 'Burkinabes cross every day, and they tell us what is happening there,' said Gabriel Afful, one of the officers. Was he nervous about the future? Afful simply nodded. Blanco Ramos reported from Madrid. Ayamga Bawa Fatawu and Ahmed Jeeri contributed to this report.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Looted from Syria, sold on Facebook: antiquities smuggling surges after fall of Assad
They come by night. Armed with pickaxes, shovels and jackhammers, looters disturb the dead. Under the cover of darkness, men exhume graves buried more than 2,000 years ago in Syria's ancient city of Palmyra, searching for treasure. By day, the destruction caused by grave robbers is apparent. Three-metre-deep holes mar the landscape of Palmyra, where ancient burial crypts lure people with the promise of funerary gold and ancient artefacts that fetch thousands of dollars. 'These different layers are important, when people mix them together, it will be impossible for archaeologists to understand what they're looking at,' said Mohammed al-Fares, a resident of Palmyra and an activist with the NGO Heritage for Peace, as he stood in the remains of an ancient crypt exhumed by looters. He picked up a shattered piece of pottery that tomb raiders had left behind and placed it next to the rusted tailfin of a mortar bomb. Palmyra, which dates back to the third century BC, suffered heavy damage during the period of Islamic State control, when militants blew up parts of the ancient site in 2015, deeming its ruins apostate idols. Palmyra is not the only ancient site under threat. Experts and officials say the looting and trafficking of Syria's antiquities has surged to unprecedented levels since rebels overthrew the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December, putting the country's heritage further at risk. According to the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project (ATHAR), which investigates antiquities black markets online, nearly a third of the 1,500 Syrian cases it has documented since 2012 have occurred since December alone. 'When the [Assad] regime fell, we saw a huge spike on the ground. It was a complete breakdown of any constraints that might have existed in the regime periods that controlled looting,' said Amr al-Azm, a professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and co-director of the ATHAR project. The collapse of Syria's once-feared security apparatus, coupled with widespread poverty, has triggered a gold rush. Located in the heart of the fertile crescent where settled civilisation first emerged, Syria is awash with mosaics, statues and artefacts that fetch top dollar from collectors in the west. In one post on Facebook in December, a user offered a pile of ancient coins for sale. 'I have been holding them for 15 years, Free Syria,' the user wrote. Katie Paul, a co-director of the ATHAR project and the director of Tech Transparency Project, said: 'The last three to four months has been the biggest flood of antiquities trafficking I have ever seen, from any country, ever.' Paul, along with Azm, tracks the route of trafficked Middle Eastern antiquities online and has created a database of more than 26,000 screenshots, videos and pictures documenting trafficked antiquities dating back to 2012. 'This is the fastest we've ever seen artefacts being sold. Before for example, a mosaic being sold out of Raqqa took a year. Now, mosaics are being sold in two weeks,' said Paul. Syria's new government has urged looters to stop, offering finder's fees to those who turn in antiquities rather than sell them, and threatening offenders with up to 15 years in prison. But preoccupied with rebuilding a shattered country and struggling to assert control, Damascus has few resources to protect its archaeological heritage. Much of the looting is being carried out by individuals desperate for cash, hoping to find ancient coins or antiquities they can sell quickly. In Damascus, shops selling metal detectors have proliferated while ads on social media show users discovering hidden treasure with models such as the XTREM Hunter, which retails for just over $2,000 (£1,470). Others operate as part of sophisticated criminal networks. A local archaeological watchdog in the city of Salamiya, central Syria, filmed a video while walking through the bronze age-era settlement of Tall Shaykh Ali, where uniform 5-metre-deep holes dug by heavy machinery pockmarked the ground every few steps. 'They are doing this day and night. I am scared for my safety, so I don't approach them,' said a researcher with the watchdog in Salamiya, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal from criminal looting networks. Other cases show entire mosaics removed intact from sites, the work of experienced professionals. Once out of the ground, antiquities make their way online. Experts say Facebook has emerged as a key hub for the sale of stolen antiquities, with public and private groups offering everything from ancient coins, entire mosaics and heavy stone busts to the highest bidder. The ATHAR project provided the Guardian with dozens of screenshots and videos of Syrian antiquities, including mosaics and Palmyran busts, being sold on Facebook groups. A single Facebook search of 'antiquities for sale Syria' in Arabic yielded more than a dozen Facebook groups dedicated to the trading of cultural artefacts, many of them public. In a March video from a Facebook group, a man with a Syrian accent displays a mosaic depicting Zeus on a throne, using his mobile phone for scale. The mosaic is still in the ground in the video, but later surfaces in another photo, removed from the site. 'This is just one of the four mosaics we have,' the man brags. In other groups, looters have gone on Facebook Live from archaeological sites, asking users for advice where they should dig next and drumming up excitement from potential buyers who tune in. In 2020, Facebook banned the sale of historical antiquities on its platform and said it would remove any related content. However, according to Paul, the policy is rarely enforced despite continued sales on the platform being well documented. 'Trafficking of cultural property during conflict is a crime, here you have Facebook acting as a vehicle for the crime. Facebook knows this is an issue,' said Paul. She added that she was tracking dozens of antiquities trading groups on Facebook that have more than 100,000 members, the largest of which has approximately 900,000 members. A representative from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, declined to respond to the Guardian's request for a comment. The Facebook groups are used as a gateway for traffickers, connecting low-level looters in Syria to criminal networks that smuggle the artefacts out of the country into neighbouring Jordan and Turkey. From there, the pieces are shipped around the world to create fake bills of sale and provenance so they can be laundered into the grey market of antiquities. After 10 to 15 years they make their way into legal auction houses, where collectors and museums, primarily located in the US and Europe, snap them up. With 90% of Syria's population living in poverty, stopping desperate individuals from looting is a gargantuan task. Instead, experts have said that the responsibility for regulation should fall on the west, which is the primary buyer of the Middle East's cultural antiquities. 'How do we stop this? Stop the demand in the west,' Azm said. 'Until the security issue improves, you won't see an improvement. We focus on the supply side to abrogate the responsibility of the west.' In Palmyra, Fares is still coming to terms with how much his home town has changed since returning in December after years of displacement. Broken stones lie at the feet of the Roman-era Arch of Triumph and the carved faces of sarcophagi in the Tomb of the Three Brothers have been gouged out – all a product of IS iconoclasm. At night, he and other residents stand guard in the ancient city, determined not to let looters steal what remains of a place already plundered by 15 years of war.
