LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday that a lack of coordination between UK police and intelligence agencies is partly responsible for a surge in the number of migrants reaching the UK in small boats across the English Channel.
At an international meeting on boosting border security and tackling people-smuggling, Starmer expressed frustration at the difficulty of stopping thousands of people a year risking the dangerous sea crossing from France.
“We inherited this total fragmentation between our policing, our Border Force and our intelligence agencies,” Starmer said as officials from more than 40 countries met in London. “A fragmentation that made it crystal clear, when I looked at it, that there were gaps in our defense, an open invitation at our borders for the people smugglers to crack on.”
Starmer’s center-left government, elected nine months ago, is grappling with an issue that vexed its Conservative predecessors.
Despite law-enforcement cooperation with France and work with authorities in countries further up the route taken by migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, more than 6,600 migrants crossed the channel in the first three months of this year, the highest number on record.
The opposition Conservatives say the figure shows Labour should not have scrapped the previous government’s contentious – and never-implemented – plan to send asylum-seekers who arrive by boat on one-way trips to Rwanda.
Starmer called the Rwanda plan a “gimmick” and canceled it soon after he was elected in July. Britain paid Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds for the plan under a deal signed by the two countries in 2022, without any deportations taking place.
Monday’s meeting was addressed virtually by Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right government has opened centers in Albania to hold some asylum-seekers while their claims are processed – a project being closely watched by Starmer’s government.
Meloni said the plan was “criticized at first,” but had “gained increasing consensus, so much so that today, European Union is proposing to set up return hubs in third countries.”
The governments of Albania, Vietnam and Iraq, whose nationals account for a significant number of asylum-seekers in the UK, were also represented.
Starmer, who has said organized people-smugglers should be treated in the same way as terror gangs, has been criticized by refugee groups, and some Labour supporters, for his hard-line approach to irregular migration.
But he said “there’s nothing progressive or compassionate about turning a blind eye to this. Nothing progressive or compassionate about continuing that false hope which attracts people to make those journeys.
“This vile trade exploits the cracks between our institutions, pits nations against one another and profits from our inability at the political level to come together,” Starmer said.
“We’ve got to combine our resources, share intelligence and tactics, and tackle the problem upstream at every step of the people smuggling routes.”
UK’s Starmer blames a lack of joint action as he struggles to stop migrants crossing the Channel
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UK’s Starmer blames a lack of joint action as he struggles to stop migrants crossing the Channel
- Starmer expressed frustration at the difficulty of stopping thousands of people a year risking the dangerous sea crossing from France
Bondi Beach shooting suspect conducted firearms training with his father, Australian police say
MELBOURNE, Australia: A man accused of killing 15 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach conducted firearms training in an area of New South Wales state outside of Sydney with his father, according to Australian police documents released on Monday.
The documents, made public following Naveed Akram’s video court appearance from a Sydney hospital where he has been treated for an abdominal injury, said the two men recorded footage justifying the meticulously planned attack.
Officers wounded Akram at the scene of the Dec. 14 shooting and killed his father, 50-year-old Sajid Akram.
The state government confirmed Naveed Akram was transferred Monday from a hospital to a prison. Authorities identified neither facility.
The 24-year-old and his father began their attack by throwing four improvised explosive devices toward a crowd celebrating an annual Jewish event at Bondi Beach, but the devices failed to explode, the documents said.
Police described the devices as three aluminum pipe bombs and a tennis ball bomb containing an explosive, gunpowder and steel ball bearings. None detonated, but police described them as “viable” IEDs.
The pair had rented a room in the Sydney suburb of Campsie for three weeks before they left at 2:16 a.m. on the day of the attack. CCTV recorded them carrying what police allege were two shotguns, a rifle, five IEDs and two homemade Daesh group flags wrapped in blankets.
Police also released images of the gunmen shooting from a footbridge, providing them with an elevated vantage point and the protection of waist-high concrete walls.
The largest IED was found after the gunbattle near the footbridge in the trunk of the son’s car, which had been left draped with the flags.
Authorities have charged Akram with 59 offenses, including 15 counts of murder, 40 counts of causing harm with intent to murder in relation to the wounded survivors and one count of committing a terrorist act.
The antisemitic attack at the start of the eight-day Hanukkah celebration was Australia’s worst mass shooting since a lone gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania state in 1996.
The New South Wales government introduced draft laws to Parliament on Monday that Premier Chris Minns said would become the toughest in Australia.
The new restrictions would include making Australian citizenship a condition of qualifying for a firearms license. That would have excluded Sajid Akram, who was an Indian citizen with a permanent resident visa.
Sajid Akram also legally owned six rifles and shotguns. A new legal limit for recreational shooters would be a maximum of four guns.
Police said a video found on Naveed Akram’s phone shows him with his father expressing “their political and religious views and appear to summarise their justification for the Bondi terrorist attack.”
The men are seen in the video “condemning the acts of Zionists” while they also “adhere to a religiously motivated ideology linked to Islamic State,” police said, using another term for the Daesh Group.
Video shot in October shows them “firing shotguns and moving in a tactical manner” on grassland surrounded by trees, police said.
“There is evidence that the Accused and his father meticulously planned this terrorist attack for many months,” police allege.
An impromptu memorial that grew near the Bondi Pavilion after the massacre, as thousands of mourners brought flowers and heartfelt cards, was removed Monday as the beachfront returned to more normal activity. The Sydney Jewish Museum will preserve part of the memorial.
Victims’ funerals continued Monday with French national Dan Elkayam’s service held in the nearby suburb of Woollahra, at the heart of Sydney’s Jewish life. The 27-year-old moved from Paris to Sydney a year ago.
The health department said 12 people wounded in the attack remained in hospitals on Monday.
