NIAMEY, Niger: Niger’s military regime on Sunday announced it was putting uranium produced by Somair — a subsidiary of French giant Orano before the regime nationalized it in June — on the international market.
Uranium mining in Niger is at the center of a standoff between the junta that took power in 2023 and Orano, which is 90-percent owned by the French government and has operated mines in Niger for decades.
The news was announced on state television Tele Sahel in a report Sunday evening citing comments by head of the junta General Abdourahamane Tiani.
Tiani, the report said, had claimed “Niger’s legitimate right to dispose of its natural riches to sell them to whoever wants to buy them, under the rules of the market, in complete independence.”
Russian Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilev said in July that Moscow wanted to mine uranium in Niger.
Since the junta took power in a 2023 coup, Niger has turned to Russia, which commands the world’s largest arsenal of atomic weapons, for help in fighting the west African country’s jihadist insurgency.
At the same time it has turned its back on former colonial power France, which it accused of supporting separatist groups.
In 2024, Niger removed Orano’s operational control of its three main mines in the country: Somair, Cominak and Imouraren, which has one of the largest uranium deposits in the world.
Orano officially retains a 60 percent stake in the subsidiaries, and has undertaken various arbitration procedures to try to win back operational control.
Niger in 2022 accounted for about a quarter of the natural uranium supplied to European nuclear power plants, according to data from the atomic organization Euratom.
Niger says putting its uranium on international market
https://arab.news/g6pus
Niger says putting its uranium on international market
- Uranium mining in Niger is at the center of a standoff between the junta that took power in 2023 and Orano, which is 90-percent owned by the French government and has operated mines in Niger for decades
Mass shooting at a South African bar leaves 11 dead, including 3 children
- Another 14 people were wounded and taken to the hospital
- The children killed were a 3-year-old boy, a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl
CAPE TOWN: A mass shooting carried out Saturday by multiple suspects in an unlicensed bar near the South African capital left at least 11 people dead, police said. The victims included three children aged 3, 12 and 16.
Another 14 people were wounded and taken to the hospital, according to a statement from the South African Police Services. Police didn’t give details on the ages of those who were injured or their conditions.
The shooting happened at a bar inside a hostel in the Saulsville township west of the administrative capital of Pretoria in the early hours of Saturday. Ten of the victims died at the scene and the 11th died at the hospital, police said.
The children killed were a 3-year-old boy, a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl. Police said they were searching for three male suspects.
“We are told that at least three unknown gunmen entered this hostel where a group of people were drinking and they started randomly shooting,” police spokesperson Brig. Athlenda Mathe told national broadcaster SABC. She said the motive for the killings was not clear. The shootings happened at around 4.15 a.m., she said, but police were only alerted at 6 a.m.
South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and recorded more than 26,000 homicides in 2024 — an average of more than 70 a day. Firearms are by far the leading cause of death in homicides.
The country of 62 million people has relatively strict gun ownership laws, but many killings are committed with illegal guns, authorities say.
There have been several mass shootings at bars — sometimes called shebeens or taverns in South Africa — in recent years, including one that killed 16 people in the Johannesburg township of Soweto in 2022. On the same day, four people were killed in a mass shooting at a bar in another province.
Mathe said that mass shootings at unlicensed bars were becoming a serious problem and police had shut down more than 11,000 illegal taverns between April and September this year and arrested more than 18,000 people for involvement in illegal liquor sales.
Recent mass killings in South Africa have not been confined to bars, however. Police said 18 people were killed, 15 of them women, in mass shootings minutes apart at two houses on the same road in a rural part of Eastern Cape province in September last year.
Seven men were arrested for those shootings and face multiple charges of murder, while police recovered three AK-style assault rifles they believe were used in the shootings.
