A citizen from Uzbekistan has been detained over the killing of Russian nuclear forces general Igor Kirillov, Russia’s investigative committee has said.
The committee says the suspect was recruited by Ukrainian intelligence services and was paid $100,000 (£79,000).
The senior general was killed on Tuesday by a bomb hidden in an electric scooter outside an apartment block in Moscow.
His assistant also died in the explosion.
Dashcam footage at the scene captured the moment the bomb detonated on the street as the two men walked out of the building about 4 miles (7km) southeast of the Kremlin.
The committee said that under interrogation, the suspect admitted he had been recruited by Kyiv, who supplied him with a homemade bomb after he arrived in the Russian capital.
He placed the device on an electric scooter, which he parked at the entrance to General Kirillov’s home, monitoring the scene via a surveillance camera installed in a hire car.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
A man arrested last week over the suspected murder of a missing Irish schoolboy has been found dead.
Irish police believe Kyran Durnin, who was reported missing in August, may have died in 2022 when he was six years old.
The man, who was in his 30s, was found dead in a house in Drogheda, County Louth today after he was released without charge last Friday.
Officers said the local coroner has been notified and a post-mortem examination will be arranged.
The outcome of the post-mortem examination will determine the course of the investigation, police said. It is understood from early indications that it is a personal tragedy.
Police searched two homes in Drogheda last week, which involved a forensic and intrusive examination of one of the properties.
The search aimed to find evidence that may reveal where Kyran is or what happened to him, police said.
A murder investigation was launched in October after Kyran’s disappearance. He was potentially missing for two years before authorities were alerted.
Last week, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said they had been “inundated” with information from the public.
“Certainly when we put out an appeal for information, right back on 14 October, we were inundated with information from the public. We’re really pleased to see that because that provided us with a lot of leads, a lot of inquiries for us to follow through,” he said.
“As this investigation opens out, we’ll start to learn more about where we are, who the suspects are, and then what we need to do to prove what happened to young Kyran.”
Now Bashar al Assad has gone, there is so much to see and film in Syria which was impossible to document before.
The extent, for example, of the regime’s involvement in the captagon trade, a speed-like amphetamine which flooded out of Syria and across the Middle East, was widely known but impossible to film, barring stashes discovered at customs or its prevalence across the Gulf party-scene.
Now Syria’s new guard, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), has taken over the villas and factories which belonged to the nation’s drug lords and are more than happy to show journalists how the captagon was produced and by whom.
We visit two locations, one a private villa near the Lebanese border and another, a captagon factory in a suburb outside Damascus. What hits you first is the smell. It’s tangy and metallic and sticks in your nostrils.
The guards at the villa, which looks like a stage set for Breaking Bad, say it gives them headaches. They’ve burnt the stash of captagon pills they discovered but they’ve kept the raw materials – barrels of caffeine, piled up sacks of what looks a bit like flour, and alcohol. They say they’ve been advised it might come in useful for medicines.
“In Idlib, as you know, we were separate,” says Abu Baker, an HTS soldier who’s happy to show me around. “Anyone who engaged in such activities would be kicked out of the city.
“But of course we knew about what was going on in the rest of Syria and with the regime. The regime was broke. The economy was dead. So they financed themselves with drug money.”
Image: Sky News’ international correspondent Diana Magnay inside a captagon ‘factory’
The villas in this neighbourhood belonged to officers from Syria’s 4th armoured division which was run by Assad’s notoriously thuggish brother, Maher. The one we’re in was owned by a man the HTS guards call Colonel Baseem.
“Baseem was the big guy here in this area and he instilled fear in everyone who lived here, everything was off limits,” says Abu Bilal, a farmer who lives next door.
He’d been ordered to leave his home when construction on the villa started and he’d only dared to return when the regime fell. “I was honestly shocked when I found out about the drugs here, about these scary operations that were destroying the country. We didn’t know anything about this drug.”
Syria’s neighbours had long warned of the pernicious effects on their home soil of the captagon it trafficked. Many of the regime drug lords were under US, EU and UK sanctions. Limiting Syria’s illicit captagon exports was to be a bargaining chip in Assad’s attempts at normalising relations with other Arab states.
It was, according to the World Bank, the most valuable sector of Syria’s war-shattered economy, worth between US$1.9bn (£1.5bn) and US$5.6bn (£4.4bn), with Syrian GDP valued at not much more – US$6.2bn (£4.9bn) in 2023.
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The factory produced chocolate and crisps above ground, narcotics below. Pills were stashed inside electrical switching systems, even plastic fruit. They carpeted the floors. Huge piles of captagon pills, worth anything from $2 to $20 each, depending on where they were sold.
“I fled the war to Egypt in 2014,” says factory owner Mohammad al Toot, who has just returned to Syria after a decade away.
“I found out while I was there that Amer Khayti took over my factory under the power of Maher Al Assad the terrorist, and alongside Bashar Al Assad and their gangs. They turned my food production facility into a drug operation. I went to the relevant authorities to claim my factory back but no one helped me.”
The 4th division may be gone but the captagon trade involves numerous different actors. Syria’s transition to narco state was relatively quick. Transitioning back out may not happen so fast.
A gangster who ran an amphetamine lab and trafficked heroin and cocaine has been jailed for more than 13 years.
Colin Wright, 38, was captured in Spain earlier this year and extradited back to the UK to face justice following a National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation.
Wright was said to be the head of the Scottish arm of an organised crime group (OCG).
The NCA reported he was “actively involved” in the supply of cocaine and heroin in both Scotland and England, and created an amphetamine lab in his former hometown of Motherwell in North Lanarkshire.
Image: Authorities outside Wright’s home in Spain following his arrest. Pic: NCA
Wright was snared as part of Operation Venetic, which has seen hundreds of arrests following the infiltration of encrypted communications platform EncroChat.
The NCA said he is the final member of that OCG to be sentenced, with six others also serving jail terms for their illegal activities.
Wright worked alongside Terence Earle, 50, who was jailed for 16-and-a-half years in April 2023, and Earle’s cousin Stephen Earle, 52, who was jailed for 11 years and four months in August.
Image: Wright, left, and Terence Earle in St Helens in March 2020. Pic: NCA
Wright used the EncroChat handle ‘Jack-Nicklaus’ to communicate with the younger Earle. He also sourced drugs, assessed supply routes and found customers.
In March 2020, as the nation entered its first COVID lockdown, a criminal associate delivered boxes of alpha-phenylacetoacetamide (APAA), part of the amphetamine production process, to Wright.
Over the next few days the OCG began preparing the lab, but despite messages between them saying the “farm” was ready, they struggled to obtain the necessary solvents for the production process.
Terence Earle and Wright also exchanged photos of the liquid being treated, to check what colour it should be.
Image: Wright outside his former home in Motherwell. Pic: NCA
Wright helped ship at least 20kg of cocaine and 10kg of heroin, with the former moved from Merseyside to Motherwell and the latter in the opposite direction.
The lab was also capable of producing 1,000kg of amphetamine.
Wright travelled abroad in August 2020 and remained in Spain to avoid capture after NCA officers apprehended fellow OCG members in March 2021.
Wright was arrested by the Spanish National Police in Torre-Pacheco, Murcia, in March and was extradited back to the UK in October.
The NCA said a number of high value items were seized from his Spanish address.
Image: High value items seized following Wright’s arrest. Pic: NCA
Wright pleaded guilty to five drugs charges at Liverpool Crown Court last month and was sentenced to 13 years and four months in jail on Monday.
The charges included conspiracy to supply class A drugs in Scotland and England, as well as produce class B drugs in Scotland.
Cat McHugh, NCA branch commander, said: “Wright’s case shows that criminals who seek refuge abroad are never immune from law enforcement’s reach as the NCA has the international scope to find them, bring them back to the UK and put them before the courts.
“His sentencing means that we have completely dismantled this organised crime group, who posed a grave danger to communities in Scotland and Merseyside, with the drugs they trafficked helping to fuel violence and exploitation in these areas.”
At least 54 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes in different parts of Gaza on Sunday, including two schools, according to health officials in the besieged enclave.
An airstrike in the southern city of Khan Younis hit a school, killing at least 16 people including several children, according to Nasser Hospital where bodies were taken. There was no immediate statement from the Israeli military.
Footage verified by Sky News shows multiple ambulances at the scene of the attack as well as the top of a building ablaze.
In the north, an airstrike hit the Khalil Aweida school in the town of Beit Hanoun and killed at least 15 people, according to nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital where casualties were taken.
The dead included two parents and their daughter, and a father and his son, the hospital was quoted saying by the Associated Press.
Image: A building on fire following the strike in Khan Younis
Image: The strike in Khan Younis is reported to have killed at least 16 people
Image: People flee the scene in Khan Younis
In Gaza City, at least 17 people including six women and five children were killed in three airstrikes that hit houses sheltering displaced people, according to Al Ahli Baptist Hospital.
“We woke up to the strike. I woke up with the rubble on top of me,” said Yahia al Yazji as he grieved the loss of his wife, who he said was three months pregnant, and daughter in the attack.
“I found my wife with her head and skull visible, and my daughter’s intestines were gone.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that it struck a “terrorist cell” in Gaza City and a “terrorist meeting point” from the air and on the ground in the Beit Hanoun area, killing dozens of militants and capturing others.
An airstrike in central Gazakilled Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed al Louh. The same strike, which hit a civil emergency centre in the Nuseirat market area, also killed five others, medics and journalists said.
The Israeli military claimed Mr al Louh was a member of the militant group Islamic Jihad, without providing evidence.
Israel’s 14-month war on Hamas in Gaza has killed nearly 45,000 people, Hamas-run local authorities have said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the military campaign on the besieged Palestinian enclave following the 7 October attack by Hamas last year which saw 1,200 people massacred in southern Israel and more than 250 taken hostage.
Nobody should ever have to die in a place like this, in this sorry bit of northern France where these two Kurdish migrants were shot. They died, surrounded by rubbish, on a patch of unloved scrubland between a road and a railway line.
The grass is still stained with their blood, and the blankets that wrapped them in their final moments now lie discarded. There are plastic boxes, food wrappers and empty Red Bull cans next to the point where each man died. It is a grim, desperately sad scene.
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0:58
Gunman fires at French migrant camp
Rehan and Ahmed are staring at it, their faces covered against the cold, their emotions running high. Both are Afghans who have come here to Dunkirk to complete their journeys to the United Kingdom.
Both tell me they dream of a better life, but both are bewildered by what happened. They had no idea that anyone else had been shot – they had heard that a killer was simply targeting migrants.
What these murders have done is to heighten tensions in migrant camps, known as jungles, that are already volatile and perilous.
“We do not go out any more on our own,” says Ahmed. “It is too dangerous. We go out in groups. We get food during the day so we do not have to walk around at night. Every night I hear pistols firing. We don’t know who the people are with the guns. And now we are very, very worried.”
Rehan is 27 years old. He left Afghanistan 13 years ago, intent on getting to Britain, and learning excellent English by watching years of YouTube videos. Now, half a lifetime later, he is on the brink of achieving his ambition.
“The jungle is a terrible place,” he tells me. “It is so violent, but I won’t change my mind. I will stay here until I get to Britain. Then I will have a better life.
“I am so sad for the people who have died here – they wanted the same thing as all of us. People say this is a safe country, but the jungle is very bad. We are all human and we all want a better life. We are scared in the jungle. It is no life. But we will keep trying to get to Britain. We will go.”
I ask another Afghan if he is nervous after the attacks, but he shakes his head. “Am I scared? No,” he says, half-smiling. “I am from Afghanistan. And that is a very dangerous place.”
A group of migrants comes to the spot where the killings happened. Flowers are laid. A man weeps.
Everyone looks edgy, but it is nervousness that is shared. There is a sense of camaraderie here, a feeling that, in an area where so many people come and go, sheer luck decided who happened to have been walking past when the shots rang out.
They all know it could have been their blood discolouring the grass.
A man convicted of participating in the January 6 Capitol riots has told Sky News he expects Donald Trump to set him free.
Speaking from his Washington jail cell, Gregory Purdy said he anticipates the president-elect will “exonerate and pardon” him.
Mr Trump has said he intends to pardon “many” of the rioters whom he describes as “hostages”.
More than 1,100 people have been charged in connection with the 2021 assault on the Capitol, in which crowds stormed the building in an effort to block the certification of Joe Biden‘s election win.
More than 500 people have been handed jail sentences. Five people died and 140 police officers were injured.
President Biden fuelled the debate around pardons when he gave one to his son, Hunter, spanning 10 years and including two convictions – one for illegal gun possession and another for tax evasion.
Supporters of January 6 prisoners gather outside a jail in Washington DC for a nightly vigil. They communicate with inmates on the phone from a street corner outside the facility.
Image: Guy Reffitt (right) was the first person to be convicted of January 6 offences
‘He will exonerate us’
We used the phone to speak to Gregory Purdy, who has been convicted of January 6 offences.
Asked about the prospect of a Trump pardon, he said: “He will exonerate and pardon us, I really do believe that will happen.”
“As far as Joe Biden pardoning his son, I don’t have a problem that he pardoned his son, what I have a problem with is he lied and said he wouldn’t,” he added.
Image: The scene of the riots at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Pic: Reuters
Nicole Reffitt has attended most of the 800-plus vigils outside the Washington prison. Her husband, Guy Reffitt, was the first person convicted of January 6 offences.
Prosecutors said the Texan father-of-three, a member of the “Three Percenters” anti-government militia, “lit the match” of an insurrection.
The court heard he was armed with a handgun at the Capitol and had an automatic rifle in his car. His son, Jackson, had reported concerns about his father to the FBI in the weeks before January 6.
Image: Nicole Reffitt
Nicole lives in a house a short drive from the facility where her husband is imprisoned. It accommodates relatives of Jan 6 prisoners, who travel from around the country to attend court and make prison visits.
She and her fellow occupants have labelled the property “eagle’s nest”, after the national bird of the United States. She rejects associations that have been made with Adolf Hitler’s “eagle’s nest”, his Bavarian retreat.
“You can do Hitler connotations with anything you want to,” she said. “Don’t drive a Volkswagen, how about that? The Nazis invented the Volkswagen.”
On the subject of a pardon, Nicole told Sky News: “Not everyone will ask for a pardon, many will ask for clemency… because there have been a lot of arguments made in court and those things have to stay on the record.”
When Joe Biden handed down the pardon to his son, Mr Trump reacted by posting on social media: “Does the pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice.”
On the implications for her husband and fellow inmates, Nicole Reffitt said: “When you look at someone being pardoned for 10 years, a decade of any criminal activity that might have taken place – yeah, I think it shines very brightly on Jan Sixers, when many of them have no criminal record ever and this is their only offence.”
It has taken South Koreans 12 nights of protests in the bitter cold to achieve their goal, for President Yoon Suk Yeol’s political career to take one step closer to the end.
There’s still a long road ahead to reach impeachment though.
Image: Yoon Suk Yeol declares martial law in a televised address earlier this month. Pic: AP
The Constitutional Court has up to six months to decide whether to impeach him. In the meantime, Yoon’s powers have been handed to Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who is now acting president.
Last Saturday’s attempt to get enough votes for impeachment failed. The ruling party boycotted the vote.
This time round the opposition gathered just enough votes for it to pass. But it was close. They needed 200 votes. They received 204.
So, Yoon’s ruling party, the People Power Party (PPP) still overwhelmingly voted against impeachment, even though many of its politicians condemned the attempt to impose martial law.
The PPP has made a calculated decision to oppose impeachment and aim to prevent another election, which they would surely lose.
This will not do them any favours with the South Korean public. President Yoon’s popularity has dropped from very bad to even worse. It is around 11%.
There is now a path forward to the next stage of the country’s political crisis, and it travels through the court.
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1:50
South Korea’s president impeached – what happens now?
In the meantime, a caretaker government will try to steady South Korea’s badly shaken political foundations.
But the damage has been severe.
The memory of troops on the street, helicopters in the sky and politicians standing up to special forces soldiers is now seared into the memory of its people, young and old.
Having wrestled their democracy back from the brink South Koreans are holding on tightly to it, bolstering it with demonstrations, celebrations and a whole-of-society movement.
How long they can keep this up while the country is mired in chaos is unclear.
South Korea’s parliament is set to vote again on whether to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol after his short-lived attempt to declare martial law earlier this month.
The country’s opposition parties plan to hold the vote at 4pm today (7am in the UK) and need two-thirds of the National Assembly to back the motion, meaning at least 200 MPs.
While the opposition commands 192 seats, a vote to impeach the president failed last Saturday when all but one MP from the ruling People Power Party (PPP) boycotted the vote.
Since then at least seven PPP MPs have said they would back removing Mr Yoon from office, with party leader Han Dong-hoon urging them to do so.
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0:55
Why wasn’t the South Korean president impeached?
President’s order ‘hurts peace’
PPP MP Ahn Cheol-soo said on Facebook he would support the motion “for the sake of swift stabilisation of people’s livelihood, economy and diplomacy”.
But PPP floor leader Kweon Seong-dong said the party’s stance is still to oppose the motion, with MPs set to meet early today to discuss how to vote.
The latest impeachment motion alleges that Mr Yoon “committed rebellion that hurts peace” in South Korea “by staging a series of riots”, adding the mobilisation of military and police forces had threatened the National Assembly and the public.
Image: Opposition MPs need at least eight of the ruling PPP’s politicians to back the motion. Pic: AP
After declaring a state of emergency on 3 December, the president sent hundreds of troops and police officers to the parliament to try to impede a vote on the decree.
Martial law only lasted about six hours after parliament voted to block the order and people took to the streets in protest. The president later apologised for the incident.
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2:05
How six hours of martial law unfolded in South Korea
Yoon vows to ‘fight to the end’
Large demonstrations are also set to take place in Seoul ahead of the vote, marking the latest in a series of protests that have seen tens of thousands calling for the ousting and arrest of the president.
Some K-pop celebrities have said they plan to donate food and drinks for those participating in the rally, while others have used delivery apps to pre-order food and coffee for protesters.
Smaller groups of Mr Yoon’s conservative supporters – still in the thousands – are also expected to join counter-protests in Seoul. They argue the opposition-led impeachment motion is “unconstitutional” and “false propaganda”.
Mr Yoon has meanwhile defied calls to resign and vowed on Thursday to “fight to the end” to stop “forces and criminal groups” he said were “threatening the future of the Republic of Korea”.
He claimed the martial law order was necessary to overcome political deadlock, despite originally saying it was to “eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces”.
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0:21
7 December: Seoul crowds call for president to be arrested
If impeached, Mr Yoon’s presidential powers would be suspended until the Constitutional Court decides whether to restore them or remove him from office.
He has also separately been placed under criminal investigation for alleged insurrection over the martial law declaration.
Authorities have banned him and others – including former defence minister Kim Yong Hyun, under investigation on insurrection charges – from travelling overseas.
Officials said on Wednesday that Mr Kim, the first person arrested over the martial law decree, tried to take his own life while being held in detention. The country’s justice ministry has said he is in a stable condition.
An international charity which has rescued thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea says it will stop using its rescue boat because new Italian laws “have made it impossible to continue”.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) – also known as Doctors Without Borders – has been using the Geo Barents vessel since June 2021 on a succession of operations.
It was the biggest rescue the charity had carried out and our report prompted fresh debate about dangerous migration routes among politicians in the UK and across the EU.
Image: A young injured man pictured last year being lifted onto the vessel with a sling
Image: The lower decks of the Geo Barents packed with more than 600 people following a rescue in 2023
The Mediterranean Sea is considered the most dangerous migrant route in the world.
The charity said the Geo Barents had rescued a total of 12,675 people during 190 operations. It has also recovered 24 bodies and assisted in the delivery of a baby.
However, MSF said Italian law, updated last year, had now made it impossible to operate large rescue vessels.
The legislation restricts the rights of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in running rescue operations.
The rules include a requirement for boats to return to port as soon as a single rescue has been conducted, regardless of how many people were brought to safety.
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1:35
From 2023: ‘If someone needs help you have to help’
Charities have maintained that a vessel the size of Geo Barents, which can accommodate around 600 people, should not be mandated to return if it has only rescued a handful of people.
There has also been a long-running dispute between NGOs about which port they should use when bringing rescued migrants to Italy.
Rather than docking at the nearest port, NGO boats are routinely told to make long journeys to distant ports.
When Sky News was filming on the Geo Barents, we saw how the boat, packed to capacity with people, was told to go past a series of ports in order to get to Bari.
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1:53
From 2023: What is the Geo Barents rescue ship?
The Italian government has levied a succession of penalties on the Geo Barents for breaches of its rules, forcing the vessel to stay in port for 160 days. It has also fined MSF for ignoring the regulations.
Italian politicians have accused rescue charities of encouraging migrants to try to get to Italy, claiming that they feel emboldened to risk the journey because they expect to be rescued.
Giorgia Melonipromised a much tougher approach to irregular migration when she was elected prime minister two years ago, and has already reduced the rights of migrants arriving in the country.
She has also signed a deal that allows for migrants arriving in Italy to be transferred to Albania while their claims are being processed.
Ms Meloni said Italy was now “a model to follow” for other countries struggling with the political challenge of migration.
MSF said it would “be back as soon as possible” to carry out further search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean region, but said it was “untenable” to continue operating the Geo Barents.
