Rescued passenger speaks out after Pakistan train hijacking and hostage taking
The banned Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) attacked the train, which was traveling from the provincial capital, Quetta, to the northern city of Peshawar, according to a government spokesperson.
Hundreds of passengers were taken hostage. Pakistani authorities on Wednesday said insurgents have killed some of the hostages, as a standoff continued with the separatists wearing explosive-laden vests.
Passenger Noor Muhammad described how militants made him get off the train and get down, 'or they would shoot.'
By late Wednesday, security forces had rescued 190 of the 450 passengers who were initially on the train, according to three senior security officials.
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New Statesman
3 days ago
- New Statesman
The rebuilding of Tommy Robinson
Photo by Benjamin Cremel/ AFP It's never occurred to me to feel nostalgic or grateful for Tommy Robinson's English Defence League. The EDL was self-evidently drawn from a school, or squadron, of politics we're rightly inoculated against, one born of the bottle and the baggie, in which protester and hooligan form one brawling silhouette. And then there was the documented plot to blow up mosques brewed up by an EDL member, the correspondence between EDL activists and the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, and the convictions handed round after 100-man post-match pile-ups. Nope, I've always thought, I'm pretty content to see the back of them. So it's refreshing to see its reputation disinfected, laundered and aired by Robinson courtesy of the YouTube channel Triggernometry. The interview is one of a series Robinson has given to sympathetic listeners in recent days and weeks, from the former GB News hack Dan Wootton to someone called Liam Tuffs (the latter is a 'close friend of Tommy Robinson' and runs a 'no-holds-barred podcast channel'.) Robinson's appearance is the same on each: intense, suntanned and scowling. But Triggernometry is by far his biggest coup. Released on Monday (10 August), the video has already achieved 1.3 million views, and is one of the channel's most popular in its seven years online (not far behind Stephen Fry, a previous guest). If he ever truly went away, Tommy is back. And speaking here, Robinson attempts to give the EDL credit for prompting police action on the Pakistani grooming gangs in the early 2010s. Of course, this does look past the work of Sara Rowbotham, the NHS worker who raised dozens of referrals about sexual grooming in Rochdale while Robinson was keeping his good works to the terraces. And, when discussing police cover-ups of the same, he doesn't mention Margaret Oliver, the policewoman and whistleblower who has helped to expose the incompetence of her colleagues at Greater Manchester Police. But this is typical of an interview that benefits Robinson far more than it does politics or the public record. Watching Triggernometry is a strange experience. You can get past the two hosts, neither of them naturals, the anuran Konstantin Kisin, and the mostly mute and uncomfortable-looking Francis Foster. But more bizarrely, the videos are broken up by Kisin's presenting of paid sponsorship for various products tailored for a mainstream-questioning audience: VPNs, medical hypnosis treatments and saffron supplements (apparently it's the best thing for a good night's sleep). But, you must keep reminding yourself, this is the mainstream now. Kisin and Foster are – at a considerable push – our Robin Day or Russell Harty. With their help, Robinson is reaching a far larger audience, and with far less scrutiny, than his Lacoste-shirted, air-chopping younger self did with Jeremy Paxman in 2011. The chummy Triggernometry conversation with Robinson amounts to a stream of euphemism. The tone is established with the seventh word of Kisin's introduction, 'mate'. From then, Robinson is barely interrupted or opposed. A football hooligan firm is remembered as 'young men finding their identity'. Robinson's own brawling is only nudged and winked at by our hosts, a juvenile folly like scrumping or knock knock run. ('Five hundred years ago, the country would be desperate for people like you,' says Kisin at one point. 'You're a warrior.') The conversation is framed by Robinson alone. He roams freely through his twisted woodland of self-justifying anecdotes, spinning and yarning. Kisin and Foster follow patiently a few paces behind. It's left to Robinson to bring up his own criminal convictions. Thinking back to 2014, he remembers having 'a refreshing moment in jail at the time, thinking about my life, where's it heading, what's going on'. From a timeline of Robinson's convictions, this would appear to be an 18-month stretch for mortgage fraud which he called 'a complete stitch-up' at the time, so it was good he hunkered down for some soul-searching while inside. At other moments, HMP Belmarsh sounds rather like Robben Island: 'If you worry about consequence, you're never going to bring about change,' Robinson says, reflecting on another conviction for entering America on a false passport in the early 2010s. Alongside reputation management, the interview allows Robinson to relive freely the autobiography he has traded off since the late 2000s. The Luton of his birth is to be found just off the M1, and somewhere between Sodom and Gomorrah, a place of gang rapes, ethnic apartheid and chronic, stirring violence. (Writing for the New Statesman last summer, Robinson's working-class contemporary in Luton, Thomas Peak, questioned several aspects of Robinson's account.) The EDL was formed as a defensive measure, as Robinson watched the escalating outrage perpetrated by Muslim gangs. His textual study of the Koran (begun, pace this account, during another spell in solitary) has convinced Robinson that doctrinal Islam is the cause of these tensions and is incompatible with Western democracy. Though he closes the interview by distancing himself from those calling for mass remigration, at one point Robinson says 'well over a million' Muslims 'need to leave'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It's fierce stuff, and the comments beneath the video are full of support for this 'hero'. But forget his account of Luton – even Robinson's campaigning life is being contested, and looks very different when described by critical familiars. In a new memoir, the semi-retired alt-right activist Lauren Southern alleges Robinson spent his supporters' money on himself, with 'tens of thousands of these donations being pulled out of ATMs to pay for hookers, blow, and new flat-screen TVs', and that in 2018 Robinson flew her to Romania to introduce her to Andrew Tate, who later sexually assaulted her, accusations Robinson described as 'insanity'. Tommy Robinson's nature was already a matter of criminal record. As were his shapeshifting powers: he's previously been Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Andrew McMaster, Paul Harris and Wayne King. This reappearance in public life in the guise of the vindicated prophet is a depressing reassertion of various political continuities, some as old as the financial crash. Starmer's England stinks of 2013. The sick and helpless are being reclassified as welfare queens (they only need help to wash below the waist after all). Islam has been re-identified as the enemy within. Populism leads the polls, and far-right protesters line the streets. Their leader and their parasite, the great England-hating patriot, is back with them. But the decision to front Robinson on a channel like this is evidence of a more novel phenomenon: marketing 'broken Britain' to an American audience. Almost a year ago, Robinson appeared on the Jordan Peterson Podcast, achieving 2.7 million views. Peterson had spoken sympathetically of Robinson's imprisonment as early as 2018. Steve Bannon has called him a 'hero' on his podcast (in front of his guest, a silent Liz Truss). On 2 January this year, while he was still in prison (this time on a case relating to contempt of court) Elon Musk's pinned tweet read 'Free Tommy Robinson!' A man who trades on his humble Irish-immigrant roots has become a transatlantic media starlet. As have the Triggernometry hosts. Triggernometry's very first video in 2018 featured the lads in a high-minded back-and-forth with the Financial Times foreign affairs writer Gideon Rachman. During the Tommy Robinson interview, Konstantin Kisin reads out some advertising copy for gold and silver investments with Wyoming-based Augusta Precious Metals, directed at 'helping Americans move wealth… into self-directed IRAs'. This is political broadcasting in 2025. England is simmering, and the whole world is watching the men boiling the pot. At the close of the interview, Robinson was given time to advertise his forthcoming rally on 13 September, at which he expects 'half a million to a million people'. Given the unsteady scenes outside migrant hotels across the country, should a fraction of that turn out, England can expect to see the menace of the EDL resurrected along with their leader. But perhaps don't expect as much brawling: after all, he's got mates in the media now. [See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels] Related
Spectator
3 days ago
- Spectator
The hypocrisy of Tulip Siddiq
The corruption trial of Tulip Siddiq formally commenced in Bangladesh on Wednesday. Among other allegations linked to £3.9 billion worth of embezzlement, the Bangladeshi-origin Labour MP has been accused by the Anti-Corruption Commission of securing luxury property for her family in Dhaka, using her relationship with the country's former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted and fled the country last August following mass protests against her rule. Prior to her election as the Labour MP for Hampstead in 2015, Siddiq, the granddaughter of Bangladesh's founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, had been a spokesperson of her aunt Hasina's Awami League in the UK even joining the former Bangladeshi prime minister on a trip to sign an arms deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Even so, Siddiq has maintained that her family links, which are now the focus of the corruption allegations that she denies, have actually 'caused problems' for her, not least because the Bengali diaspora keeps asking for favours. She has claimed that having heritage rooted in Bangladesh, which she now describes as a 'foreign country', has been a challenge, given the 'racist' attitudes around her. Siddiq has frequently spoken about the rise of populism and financial inequality in the West, while her family has been subjugating the masses and overseeing the concentration of capital among the richest in Bangladesh. Regardless of whether the corruption trial in Dhaka is well-founded, or politically motivated as she insists, Siddiq's case illustrates the hypocrisy of the South Asian elite that come from privileged backgrounds but prefer to lecture on the inequalities in the West. The families of the feudal leaders of all three major Pakistani political parties, for instance, have been raised or educated in the same West that they avow hostility against. Imran Khan's British sons are currently campaigning for his release in the same US that their imprisoned father has long accused of plotting against him and his country. Oxford-educated chairman of Pakistan's historically left People's Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, talks about 'Islamophobia' in the West, but has never spoken out against the spate of forced conversions of under-aged Hindu girls under his party's rule in Sindh province. Bilawal's cousin, the academic and author Fatima Bhutto, who studied and spends much of her time in the 'racist' West that she accuses of being responsible for the genocide and apartheid in Gaza, rarely has much to say about the Ahmadis or Baloch whose persecution her grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, laid the foundation of. Like the Pakistani left, the Indian left too is dominated by the elite that prefer to focus on the ailments of the West. London-born Shashi Tharoor, a member of the traditionally left Indian National Congress, who has written and spoken extensively on the evils of British colonialism, even arguing that the UK owes India reparations, has recently been leading delegations defending the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party's security policy in the region which ascertains India's stranglehold over Kashmir. Tharoor describes the ongoing US tariff negotiations as being akin to 'colonialism', and continues to find time to denounce the British Raj while being officially tasked with defending India's hegemonic geopolitical strategy, which includes dictation and intervention even in South Asian states beyond Pakistan. These self-proclaimed left-leaning convictions of the South Asian elite are not only duplicitous but more often than not unravel as soon as there is any personal cost to be paid, as evidenced by just how quickly Tulip Siddiq abandoned the Bangladeshi origin that had for a long time used earned her points inside the Labour party. Similarly, Siddiq's fellow Labour MP, Rushanara Ali, the first British Bangladeshi elected to parliament, vociferously deploys 'pro-Palestine' rhetoric, but abstained from the Gaza ceasefire vote in 2023 in line with the party whip. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr speaks of the racism he faced in British schools, and undertakes queer activism in the West, but doesn't mention Islamisation, and the correlated queerphobia, initiated by his grandfather whom he is named after, owing to his political ambitions in Pakistan. The disappearing pronouns from the bios of many amid the reversal of gender ideology in Western policymaking, and the lowered decibels in 'pro-Palestine' activism at US campuses during the ongoing crackdown, underlines how the South Asian-origin left in the West is devoid of actual conviction. Indeed, much of the South Asian left's narrative-building is a parroting of the western left, which entails trashing their own states and its majority community, while rigidly embracing their minority identities that might check the diversity eye test. Zohran Mamdani's success in winning the Democratic nomination for this year's New York City mayor election, founded on a scathing critique of everyone but the community he most identified with, is illustrative of the support the left offers to members of the minority community that can showcase the least introspection. Perhaps the case that best highlights the absolute abandonment of self-reflection on the left is Rushanara Ali evicting her tenant while serving as the homelessness minister. She had to resign from the post last week. If the left is to survive its ongoing global crisis, it needs to start backing candidates that go beyond mimicking the so-called postcolonial discourse that focuses solely on the West, and exhibit a willingness to offer similar scrutiny for the minorities they identify with, as they would with the majority. This is especially true for those hailing from South Asia, where religious majoritarianism is on the rise, and where the advent of colonialism long preceded the Brits.
The Independent
08-08-2025
- The Independent
Why mobile services have been cut in this province in Pakistan
Pakistani authorities have suspended cellular and mobile internet services for three weeks in the restive Balochistan province. The decision followed a suicide attack in Kech district that killed three paramilitary personnel and injured others. The suspension aims to contain a raging insurgency, with authorities stating insurgents use mobile services for coordination. The outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, a significant insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the recent attack. Balochistan has a long history of insurgency, with separatists targeting the military and Chinese interests in the mineral-rich region.
