Man arrested over 'potentially hazardous materials' in Aberdeen
A 33-year-old man has been arrested following the discovery of potentially hazardous materials in Aberdeen.Police had executed a warrant at a property on Cadenhead Place, in the Kittybrewster area of the city, at about 08:30. Emergency services attended and chemical items were recovered.Police said there was no risk to the wider public and added that inquiries were ongoing.
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The Sun
11 minutes ago
- The Sun
Brit couple charged on suspicion of importing £1m of cannabis from Thailand after returning from holiday in Bangkok
A COUPLE have been charged with smuggling £1million of cannabis from Thailand. Sian Warren, 34, and Daniel McDonald, 36, were stopped when they returned to Heathrow. 3 3 3 National Crime Agency officers found four cases packed with more than 51kg of cannabis. The pair were charged with importing Class B drugs and appeared the following day at Uxbridge magistrates' court. They have been bailed under curfew ahead of a plea hearing on June 26 at Isleworth crown court. The couple left Salford for a dream holiday to Bangkok last month. Sian works as an administrator for Daniel's dad's building business. Her dad, Tony, said: 'Sian's not brought anything back, definitely not. 'She had her own suitcase with clothes in it.' Thailand into either Europe or the UK. Cameron Bradford, 21, from Knebworth, Herts, was detained at Munich Airport on April 21 as she tried to collect her luggage after cops discovered it was packed with drugs after arriving from Thailand. And Brit Bella May Culley, 18, sparked a massive international search operation in early May after she was reported missing while holidaying in Thailand. However, it was later revealed that the teen, from Billingham, County Durham, had been arrested 4,000 miles away on drug offences in Georgia. She was allegedly carrying 30 pounds (14kg) of cannabis into the ex-Soviet nation.
Sky News
26 minutes ago
- Sky News
Rhianan Rudd: How mother's boyfriend played 'significant' role in radicalising youngest UK girl to face terror charges
Rhianan Rudd, who took her own life at the age of 16, was the youngest girl in the UK to be charged with terrorist offences. The inquest into her death, which concluded today, revealed shocking details about her radicalisation by two American white supremacists, one of whom was her mother's boyfriend, who the coroner said "played a material role in her radicalisation". Rhianan gouged a swastika into her forehead, downloaded a bomb-making manual and told her mother she planned to blow up a synagogue. Investigated by anti-terrorism police and MI5, charges against her were later dropped, but five month later on 19 May 2022, she was found dead in her shower in a children's home in Nottinghamshire. Hours earlier she had posted on Instagram: "I'm delving into madness." The evidence heard in Chesterfield Coroner's Court from police, social services and even an MI5 operative, raised questions over the state's part in her death - and whether, despite her obvious radicalisation, this vulnerable, autistic girl should have been treated with more care by the authorities. Judge Alexia Durran said: "I'm not satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, Rhianan intended to take her own life. Rhianan's death... was the result of a self-inflicted act but it is not possible to ascertain her intention. "Rhianan was known, to family and professionals, to be vulnerable, to have autistic traits and have a history of self-harm." The coroner added: "I find she was highly affected by her arrest and was concerned about being sent to prison." It was not known what Rhianan was told by her legal team when the charges were dropped but this may have had a "psychological impact" on her, the coroner said. In an interview released at the verdict, Rhianan's mother Emily Carter said her daughter "should never have been charged", that she was failed by those investigating her, including MI5 and counter terrorism police, as well as being let down by mental health services and those caring for her at the home. This was the most complex of cases, set at a time when our security services are seeing a growing number of children being arrested and charged for terrorist offences, while parents often seem oblivious to the radicalising material they are consuming online in their bedrooms. Ms Durham's ruling reflected this complexity, finding that while there were some failings the actions of the police and MI5 were "reasonable and proportionate". The coroner concluded today that she was satisfied that missed opportunities in her case were "not systemic". Judge Alexia Durran said: "In the circumstances I do not consider I should make a prevention of future deaths report." At the same she was unequivocal about the "significant" role played by two extremists in radicalising her. It was her mother's former boyfriend, an American she'd befriended though a US pen-pal prison scheme, who first introduced Rhianan to far-right ideology. Dax Mallaburn had been part of a white supremacist prison gang in the US and subsequently came to the UK to live with Rhianan's mother in September 2017, a year after she'd been to visit him in the US. In the autumn of 2019, Rhianan alleged that he had touched her inappropriately but later withdrew the allegation and, after a social services assessment, Mr Mallaburn returned to the family home. Ms Carter says: "In hindsight, he was a bad person but I never saw him talking Nazi stuff with her." Before Rhianan was arrested, Mr Mallaburn's relationship with her mother had broken down and he returned to the US and then Mexico. However, during COVID, Rhianan appeared to contact another far-right extremist, Christopher Cook, and began an online relationship with him. Cook, who was roughly 18 and living in Ohio, shared far-right texts with Rhianan along with a bomb-making manual, and during this time she became fixated with Adolf Hitler. Cook's lawyer, Peter Scranton, says he too was radicalised online, and he came up with a plan to blow up power stations in the US, for which he was eventually arrested in August 2020, and in February 2022 he pleaded guilty to terrorism offences. Cook, who was a misfit at school, suffering from "severe depression" according to his lawyer and was "essentially lashing out" as he tried to form a group to carry out his plan. Mr Scranton told Sky News, "It was white nationalism, and they had this idea, and I don't know why anyone would feel this way or how they thought it would work, that if they tore down the government and started over they could create a new United States of America that could look like the image that they would want - a white nationalist image." Downtown LA a scene of 'pandemonium' Day Of The Jackal author dead Mr Scranton says Cook told him he didn't radicalise Rhianan, and it was the former boyfriend, Dax Mallaburn, who'd initially got her into neo-Nazi ideology. However, the coroner found Cook was "a significant radicaliser of Rhianan" at a time when she was "isolated and unsupervised". Ms Carter says Rhianan was interested in German history because she was doing it at school and Cook was able to "pull her in", to racial hatred and antisemitism. She says she didn't know what was happening, despite having parental controls on Rhianan's devices. She said: "I could hear her talking to people on there and I'd say who are you talking to and she'd say - just someone from school - and in fact I found out it wasn't at all. "When this person she was talking to disappeared, that's when she sat down on my lap like a baby and cried. She told me this guy Chris had left her, and she was totally in love with him - then she came down and told me she had downloaded a bomb manual and I was like 'Oh my god, what have you been doing'." Ms Carter decided to contact Prevent - a national program in the UK designed to stop individuals from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism She says: "I thought putting her in a deradicalisation programme would be a fairly easy undo 'brain pick', But it wasn't until the police turned up that I thought 'hang on a minute this is a lot deeper than I actually thought it was at first'." Ms Carter and her lawyers have argued that the police were heavy-handed, that there should have been a psychological assessment before she was even questioned over terrorism offences. "There were 19 police officers to arrest a 5ft 1, 14-year-old girl who weighs seven stone. It was over the top," says Ms Carter. Once Rhianan was charged, the deradicalisation work under Prevent was put on hold. Ms Carter thinks this was a mistake. She says: "Leaving her with her own thoughts throughout the entire time of going through the police interviews and everything else - the deradicalisation would have changed the way she was seeing things - I believe she would have been able to handle it all so much better." The coroner described the police arrest and interview as "necessary and conducted appropriately" and that, while ceasing the Prevent intervention was an "unfortunate consequence" of the police investigation, it was "an appropriate step". During police interviews, Rhianan described being coerced and groomed, including sexually, and having sent explicit images of herself to Cook. Lawyers representing the family say police and MI5 knew she was the victim of child sexual exploitation but failed to refer her to the relevant body - the National Referral Mechanism. It was only after a social worker made the referral, that she was identified as a child victim and then the charges were dropped, by which time she had been subject to investigation and prosecution for 15 months. The coroner agreed that there was a "systems failure" due to a lack of training both within the police and the Derbyshire council who both had had "significant information" that she was a potential victim of modern slavery. However, she also said it "was impossible to know" whether this would have led to the CPS dropping their charges sooner, "nor that if had more than minimal impact on Rhianan's death". Ms Carter says if she'd been treated differently "she'd be troubled, but I do think she'd still be alive". Rhianan's family say the security services knew her vulnerabilities and that she had a tendency to self-harm, but they failed to take this into account. Ms Carter said: "I admit my mistakes and I want the organisations to admit their mistakes. There were failings and they need to admit them." This ruling however found that the state did not play a role in Rhianan's death under article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. For the most part, her vulnerabilities were known and taken into consideration. It does however show how extremists will exploit children with mental health problems, young people who are struggling with life who may be a danger to society, but also a risk to themselves. Counter Terrorism Policing said it offered "sincere condolences to Rhianan's family and loved ones for their terrible loss". Assistant Chief Constable Di Coulson, speaking on behalf of Counter Terrorism Policing in the East Midlands (CTPEM) and Derbyshire Constabulary, said: "This was a complex case involving a very vulnerable young person, who had been subjected to radicalisation. "Rhianan's tragic death was clearly devastating for her family. It was felt profoundly by the officers directly involved, but also across Counter Terrorism Policing as a whole. "Rhianan's case was a stark moment for our management of the growing numbers of children and young people in our casework - so often presenting vulnerability as well as risk and threat to the public. "Since Rhianan's death, we continue to work alongside our partners to evolve the way we approach cases involving children and, where feasible, attempt to rehabilitate and deradicalise, rather than investigate and convict. "We welcome the findings of the Chief Coroner today, and while we have already made substantial improvements to the way we manage these cases, we will carefully review the findings and make any further changes in order to improve our protection of the public against terrorism."
The Guardian
37 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Frederick Forsyth obituary
Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and 'bashed out' The Day of the Jackal, he 'never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist'. Forsyth, who has died aged 86, also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain's armed forces, but it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered. Forsyth's manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher's sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle – an event that everyone knew did not happen. The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal – an anonymous English assassin – almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader's sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim. It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers' of America Edgar award for best first novel, attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits – he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was 'pathetic at money'. The 1972 paperback edition of The Day of the Jackal was reprinted 33 times in 18 years and is still in print, but while readers were happy to be taken in by Forsyth's painstakingly researched details (about everything from faked passports to assembling a sniper's rifle), the critics and the crime-writing establishment were far from impressed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Spy and Suspense Stories, published in 1982, by which time Forsyth's sales were well into the millions, declared rather loftily that 'authenticity is to Forsyth what imagination is to many other writers', and the critic Julian Symons dismissed Forsyth as having 'no pretension to anything more than journalistic expertise'. It was a formula that readers clearly approved of, with the subsequent novels in that original three-book deal, The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974), being both bestsellers and successful films. Novellas, collections of short stories and more novels were to follow. These included The Fourth Protocol (1984), which had a cameo role for the British spy-in-exile Kim Philby and was also successfully filmed, with a screenplay by Forsyth and starring Michael Caine and a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and, against type, The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), a sequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Nothing, however, was to match the impact of The Day of the Jackal and when a Guardian journalist spotted a copy in a London flat used by the world's most wanted terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or 'Carlos', in 1975, the British press dubbed him Carlos the Jackal, with no need to explain the reference. Born in Ashford, Kent, Frederick was the son of Phyllis and Frederick Sr, shopkeepers at 4 North Street – his mother's dress business operated on the ground floor and his father sold furs on the first floor. He was educated at Tonbridge school, where supportive teachers and summer holidays abroad ensured that Frederick excelled at French, German and Russian. At the age of 16, he enrolled on an RAF flying scholarship course that brought him a pilot's licence by the age of 17 and eased his way into the RAF proper for his national service, where he obtained his pilot's 'wings' and flew Vampire jets as the youngest pilot in the service. However, when he failed in his ambition to be posted to a frontline squadron, he opted for a change of career and in 1958 entered journalism as a trainee with the Eastern Daily Press in their King's Lynn office. In the autumn of 1961 he set his sights on Fleet Street, and his fluency with languages (which now included Spanish) got him a job with Reuters press agency. In May 1962, he was posted to Reuters' office in Paris, where De Gaulle was the target of numerous assassination attempts by disaffected Algerians. The experience was not lost on Forsyth, but before he could put it to good use in The Day of the Jackal, there were other journalistic postings, a war to survive and a non-fiction book to write. The Reuters' office in East Berlin was a plum posting for any journalist in 1963 as the cold war turned distinctly chilly, despite the attentions of the East German security services. However, when he returned to Britain in 1965 for a job as a diplomatic correspondent with the BBC, it was Broadcasting House rather than East Berlin which he found to be 'a nest of vipers'. Forsyth's relationship with the BBC hierarchy was antagonistic from the start and deteriorated rapidly when he was sent to Nigeria in 1967 to cover the civil war then unravelling. Objecting to the unquestioning acceptance of Nigerian communiques that downplayed the situation, by both the Foreign Office and the BBC, Forsyth began to file stories putting the secessionist Biafran side of the story as well as the developing humanitarian crisis. He was recalled to London for an official BBC reprimand but returned to Nigeria as a freelance at his own expense to cover the increasingly bloody war and to write a Penguin special, The Biafra Story (1969). He returned to Britain for Christmas 1969, low on funds, his BBC career in tatters and with nowhere to live. On 2 January 1970, camped out in the flat of a friend, he began to write a novel on a battered portable typewriter. After 35 days The Day of the Jackal was finished, and fame and fortune followed. In 1973 he married Carrie (Carole) Cunningham, and they moved to Spain to avoid the rates of income tax likely to be introduced by an incoming Labour government. In 1974 they relocated to County Wicklow in Ireland, where writers and artists were treated gently when it came to tax, returning to Britain in 1980 once Margaret Thatcher was firmly established in Downing Street. By 1990, Forsyth had undergone an amicable divorce from Carrie, but a far less amicable separation from his investment broker and his life savings, and claimed to have lost more than £2m in a share fraud. To recoup his losses, Forsyth threw himself into writing fiction, producing another string of bestsellers, although none had the impact of his first three novels. He was appointed CBE in 1997 and received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2012. In 2016 he announced that he would write no more thrillers and that his memoir The Outsider (2015), which revealed that he had worked as an unpaid courier for MI6, or 'The Firm' as he called it, would be his swansong. He acquired a reputation as a rather pungent pundit, both on Radio 4 and in a column in the Daily Express, when it came to such topics as the 'offensive' European Union, the leadership of the Conservative party, the state of Britain's prisons and jihadist volunteers returning from Middle Eastern conflicts. He was an active campaigner on behalf of Sgt Alexander Blackman, 'Marine A', who was jailed for the murder of an injured Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011. Forsyth maintained that Blackman had been made a scapegoat by the army from the moment of his court martial. In 2017 the conviction was overturned. Often concerned with military charities, Forsyth wrote the lyrics to Fallen Soldier, a lament for military casualties in all wars recorded and released in 2016. Forsyth was not the first foreign correspondent to take up thriller-writing. Ian Fleming had led the way in the 1950s, with Alan Williams and Derek Lambert carrying the torch into the 1960s. The spectacular success of The Day of the Jackal did however encourage a new generation, among them the ITN reporter Gerald Seymour, whose debut novel, Harry's Game, was generously reviewed by Forsyth in the Sunday Express in 1975. Years later, Seymour remembered the impact of Forsyth's debut, The Day of the Jackal: 'That really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller.' Despite having declared Forsyth's retirement from fiction, his publisher Bantam announced the appearance of an 18th novel, The Fox, in 2018. Based on real-life cases of young British hackers, The Fox centres on an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger syndrome and the ability to access the computers of government security and defence systems. For Christmas 1973 Disney based the short film The Shepherd, a ghostly evocation of second world war airfields, on a 1975 short story by Forsyth. The following year The Day of the Jackal was reimagined by Ronan Bennett for a TV series with Eddie Redmayne taking the place of Fox. Later this year a sequel to The Odessa File, Revenge of Odessa, written with Tony Kent, is due to appear. Forsyth will be a subject of the BBC TV documentary series In My Own Words. In 1994 he married Sandy Molloy. She died last year. He is survived by his two sons, Stuart and Shane, from his first marriage. Frederick Forsyth, journalist and thriller writer, born 25 August 1938; died 9 June 2025
