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Interpol bursts criminal networks, rescues 85 Europe-bound child slaves in Sudan

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Nearly 100 human trafficking victims have been rescued in a major police operation in Sudan, including dozens of children forced to work in illegal gold mines, Interpol said on Monday.

Operation Sawiyan involved 200 Sudanese police officers who rescued 94 people, including 85 minors, from criminal networks in and around the capital, Khartoum, in an Interpol-led week-long crackdown last month, the global police organization said.

They also arrested 14 suspected traffickers and seized 20,000 dollars which they believe included ransom money sent by a victim’s family to buy his freedom, the organization added.

Many of the victims were from other African countries and believed to have been traveling toward Europe when they fell into the hands of traffickers, said Tim Morris, Interpol’s executive director of police services.

“We believe that they were transiting through Sudan and then kidnapped en route and diverted into these forced labor activities,” Morris told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The victims came from Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Niger, Sudan and South Sudan, he said.

Read also: Mozambique to cage journalists with hefty foreign media license fees

Sudan is a source and transit country for African migrants hoping to reach Europe via Libya and the Mediterranean, according to the U.N. Organization for Migration (IOM).

The north African nation has one of the world’s highest rates of slavery – with about 465,000 people enslaved or one in 80 of its population – the 2018 Global Slavery Index found.

The operation was part of a series of Interpol raids on human trafficking in North Africa and the Sahel that are largely focused on migration routes, according to Morris.

Metro

Zambia: Minister confirms search for at least 25 miners after Seseli Mine mudslide 

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Zambian Mines Minister, Paul Kabuswe, said on Monday that a search was still on for at least 25 informal miners buried alive three days ago by a mudslide at an open-pit copper mine.

The soft ground is making the rescue workers, who included military personnel and others from large-scale mining companies, cautious, which has been slowing down the operation, according to Kabuswe.

“We must be mindful that we shouldn’t have an accident within another accident,” Kabuswe said.

According to the government, the Seseli Mine in Chingola, approximately 400 km (250 miles) northwest of the capital Lusaka, was flooded by heavy rains, trapping the miners in three different locations.

Zambia is Africa’s second-biggest producer of copper, which is in high demand for the transition to a low-carbon economy, and its government currently aims to boost the country’s copper production to 3 million tonnes a year by 2032, from around 850,000 metric tonnes last year. It has also witnessed a high degree of mining accidents

A week earlier, Canada’s First Quantum Minerals confirmed that two people died at its Zambian operations last week. The miner said a worker from its contracting partner, Reliant Drilling, died at First Quantum’s Kansanshi operations following a fall of ground due to an underground dewatering decline.

The number of trapped miners was not immediately known, but Kabuswe reported that 25 families had so far come forward to claim missing relatives who were employed at the mine as at the time of the accident.

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Metro

We are shocked at ex-President Lungu’s outbursts— Zambian Govt

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The Zambia government has expressed shock over the recent outburst by former President Edgar Lungu who accused incumbent President Hakainde Hichilema of doing everything possible to destroy democracy and install a dictatorship in the country.

While speaking at a press conference in Lusaka on Friday, Lungu had alleged that the Hichilema’s administration wanted to “kill democracy and subsequently introduce dictatorship in order to prolong their stay in power.”

He also alleged that all government institutions had been compromised and were being used to hound the opposition.

“All institutions of governance are heavily compromised, I want to repeat that all institutions of governance are highly compromised, you can not even talk about the Police, Registrar of Society, Judiciary, its a question of degree,” Lungu had said.

“Several opposition leaders have been arrested on trumped-up charges in order to silence them and are appearing in the courts of law. The interference can be seen from how they followed Harry Kalaba, Democratic Party, and now they have followed him to the Citizens First, Saboi Imboela’s National Democratic Congress has not been spared,” Lungu had added.

But in a response to the concerns raised by the ex-President, Chief Government spokesperson, Cornelius Mweetwa, said the federal government was surprised by the sentiments expressed by Lungu which it said amounted to advocating civil disobedience by the Zambian people.

In a statement on Saturday,
Mweetwa cautioned Lungu against over-stretching his luck but to “behave himself like a statesman.”

Mweetwa said that government was not happy that Lungu, who should enjoy a position of statesman, was reducing himself to below what was expected of him.

He also insisted that government had no intention of removing Lungu’s immunity as being peddled about in certain quarters.

“Sentiments by the former president that government wants to remove his immunity are unfounded. This is the resolve of president Hakainde Hichilema to ensure that there is unity and peace,” Mweetwa added.

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