分类： world

After 52 days of behind-bars detention on charges tied to social media posts about the US-Israeli military campaign targeting Iran, award-winning Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has been cleared of all counts and released from custody in Kuwait.

The 41-year-old, who holds dual Kuwaiti-American citizenship and was born in the United States, was taken into custody on March 2 during a trip to Kuwait to visit extended family. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the arrest was triggered by a string of social media posts Shihab-Eldin shared about the ongoing regional conflict. Among these posts was footage of a U.S. fighter jet crashing at an American airbase located within Kuwait; the press freedom advocacy group stressed that all material the journalist shared was already publicly available.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher, international legal counsel representing Shihab-Eldin’s family, confirmed the acquittal in an official statement, saying, “We are relieved that, after 52 days in detention, Ahmed has been found innocent on all charges. Our focus now is upon ensuring the liberty and safety of our client.”

The CPJ echoed this relief in an update posted to the social platform X, noting that while full details surrounding the case were still being collected, Shihab-Eldin’s international legal team had formally confirmed the full acquittal and his impending release.

A veteran journalist with an extensive career, Shihab-Eldin has contributed reporting to a roster of major global media outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera English, and PBS. His work, which focuses heavily on human rights and regional affairs, has earned him high-profile industry honors, including a British Journalism Award and an Amnesty International Human Rights Defender Award.

Beyond Shihab-Eldin’s individual case, the CPJ has framed his detention as part of a growing, region-wide crackdown on digital free speech that has unfolded alongside the escalation of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Like other Gulf nations, Kuwait has rolled out increasingly strict limits on online expression amid rising regional tensions, moving to restrict public discussion of attacks on the country’s critical infrastructure.

On the same day Shihab-Eldin was arrested, Kuwait’s Ministry of Interior published a public statement advising citizens and residents against “photographing or publish any clips or information related to missiles or relevant locations,” warning that multiple people had already been taken into custody on charges of spreading false information. Weeks after that initial announcement, Kuwait’s legislature introduced sweeping new legislation that carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence for anyone found guilty of “disseminating news, publishes statements, or spreads false rumours related to military entities” with the intent to erode public trust in state military institutions.

Data from the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) underscores the scale of this crackdown: the rights organization reports that dozens of people across the region have been arbitrarily detained since the outbreak of the war, all for the act of “peacefully expressing their opinions on social media.” The GCHR added that most of these detainees are held in unacknowledged state security facilities for days at a time, and are systematically denied access to both family visits and legal representation, in violation of international human rights standards.

Forty years after she was born into the decades-long Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, seasoned Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in that same region by invading Israeli forces while on assignment, leaving a deep gap in local journalism and a nation mourning a fearless storyteller who dedicated her life to amplifying marginalized voices.

Khalil, 42, was targeted and killed last Wednesday while traveling to al-Tayri to cover an earlier Israeli strike on the southern Lebanese town. According to Lebanon’s health ministry, an initial Israeli strike hit a vehicle ahead of Khalil and freelance photographer Zeinab Faraj, forcing the pair to seek shelter in a nearby residential building. A second Israeli strike then directly hit the structure. Rescuers managed to pull out Faraj, who suffered a severe head injury, but came under Israeli gunfire when they attempted to reach Khalil. Her body was recovered hours later, pulled from the rubble of the destroyed home.

Born in 1984 in al-Baisariyah, a village in Lebanon’s southern Saida district, Khalil grew up steeped in the realities of conflict and occupation. Her hometown had just been retaken from Israeli control shortly before her birth, and she spent her childhood looking out at nearby occupied villages while Lebanon was mired in civil war. Her early exposure to the struggles of southern Lebanese communities shaped her lifelong commitment to on-the-ground, people-centered reporting. As a young girl, she secretly read the now-defunct Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, where she first learned about ordinary people’s struggles, detained activists, forcibly disappeared citizens, and the human cost of Lebanon’s civil war. She went on to study Arabic literature in Saida, and without her parents’ knowledge, traveled to Beirut to become involved in communist activism — a step that launched her professional writing career, starting with early features for al-Hasnaa magazine. In one notable early piece, she profiled how queer people navigated and celebrated love in Lebanon’s conservative society for a Valentine’s Day special issue, she recalled in a January 2025 interview with Beirut-based outlet The Public Source.

In April 2006, just months before Al-Akhbar newspaper published its first issue, Khalil joined the newly launched outlet, where she would remain for nearly 20 years. Only weeks after she joined, Israel launched its 33-day 2006 war on Lebanon, a turning point that shifted her focus from planned coverage of women’s and cultural issues to documenting the experiences of people displaced and targeted by Israeli strikes. This focus on public interest storytelling, particularly for communities in southern Lebanon, became the throughline of her entire career. For most of her professional life, she was based in Tyre (known locally as Sour), where she investigated corruption and highlighted social injustices without sparing powerful figures — even when that put her own safety at risk. “Going after corruption cases and social issues in the area, sparing no one – not even my family – led to confrontations,” she once said. “I was threatened, assaulted, and intimidated. The pressure to break me was relentless, but I didn’t yield.” Though Al-Akhbar has a longstanding editorial alignment with Hezbollah and its resistance against Israeli occupation, Khalil repeatedly emphasized she reported without imposed limitations, pointing to the outlet’s 2011 decision to publish WikiLeaks documents referencing parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, despite a request from then-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to withhold the material. Over time, she became the newspaper’s lead field correspondent for all of southern Lebanon, covering areas including Sour, Bint Jbeil and Nabatieh.

Khalil was well aware of the risk Israeli forces posed to Lebanese journalists, having already mourned one of her own colleagues killed in Israeli shelling: in 2010, she wrote the obituary for Assaf Abu Rahhal, recalling the moment a Lebanese soldier handed her Abu Rahhal’s blood-stained identification, the only personal effect that remained of him. “It was all that remained of Assaf. I will never forget that day,” she wrote.

Throughout her career, Khalil remained unwavering in her commitment to left-wing politics and resistance against Israeli occupation. In recent years, she taught herself video editing to produce on-the-ground reporting, though she refused to appear on camera herself, saying: “For me, it was simple: I’m here to tell the stories of the people, not to become the story myself.” When the 2023-2024 Israel-Lebanon conflict broke out — after Hezbollah launched attacks on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians under assault in Gaza — Khalil spent months documenting evidence of Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure across southern Lebanon. Following a February 2024 ceasefire, she continued to report on near-daily Israeli violations of the truce. She survived multiple close calls, the most recent in November 2024, when Israeli forces opened fire to force her and her colleagues to retreat from the border. Friends and colleagues said she never bowed to Israeli restrictions on her movement, refusing to stay out of areas Israeli forces sought to bar journalists from entering. After that 2024 close call, she said people had repeatedly urged her to limit her travel for safety, but her beliefs and upbringing taught her to stand “in the face of oppression.” “My alignment with the people of the south, my presence among them since the July 2006 war, has always been the right choice. They have always lived up to that faith placed in them,” she said. “They will grow stronger, more steadfast, and more committed to this unwavering compass, toward truth, and toward Palestine.”

In the days after her killing, tributes poured in from across Lebanon and the global journalistic community, with friends and colleagues remembering her generosity, courage and pioneering spirit. “Amal was present in every home. Every home in Lebanon has lost her,” her brother Ali Khalil said tearfully. “Amal resembles the south in all its details – its sweet breeze, its valleys, its mountains, and its old houses. She resembles all of that.” For younger Lebanese journalists, Khalil was a beloved mentor who freely shared her decades of knowledge and connections even with professional competitors. “She was so generous even if we were competitors. She never hesitated in sharing a contact, a key – and she had all the keys in the south. She knew it like the palm of her hand and she shared this love and dedication with everyone who needed it,” Hussein Chaabane, a Lebanese investigative and legal journalist, told Middle East Eye.

Lebanese filmmaker Bachir Abou Zeid framed Khalil as far more than a conventional journalist, saying her devotion to her people and her land guided all her work. “Amal was not a journalist in the conventional sense of the profession. Her love for the land and for her people outweighed everything,” he said, calling her “a journalist of resistance” who was targeted specifically for her unflinching reporting. “The killing of Amal was the killing of a woman of resistance. Israel killed her because she was a journalist of resistance, not simply because she was a journalist.” Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has labeled her killing a war crime, saying Lebanon will use all available international channels to hold those responsible accountable. Chaabane said Khalil’s death leaves an enormous void in Lebanese journalism, one that surviving colleagues must work to fill. “Amal never accepted what the Israelis tried to impose as limitations; she pushed their limits,” he said. “Her death will leave a vacuum, a huge one, which we need to fill.”

An explosive new investigation published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Thursday has uncovered systemic large-scale looting of civilian property from homes and commercial establishments across southern Lebanon by Israeli soldiers, with the open approval and inaction of senior and junior military commanders. Multiple on-the-record testimonies from active-duty soldiers and officers paint a picture of rampant, unregulated theft that has become routine during Israel’s ongoing ground incursion into southern Lebanon, with stolen items ranging from everyday household goods such as televisions, sofas, carpets and paintings to motorbikes, cigarettes and construction tools. What makes the practice even more brazen, witnesses say, is that soldiers make no effort to conceal the stolen goods as they withdraw from occupied areas, openly loading pilfered property onto military vehicles in full view of command staff. One soldier described the scale of the looting as staggering, telling the outlet: “It’s on a crazy scale. Anyone who takes something – televisions, cigarettes, tools, whatever – immediately puts it in their vehicle or leaves it to the side. It’s not hidden. Everyone sees it and understands.” Testimonies uniformly confirm that military commanders have consistently failed to impose meaningful disciplinary action to halt the practice, despite having full knowledge of the ongoing theft. Many units see commanders completely ignore the looting, while others only issue token verbal condemnation without any follow-up penalties. One insider stated, “In our unit, they don’t even comment or get angry. The battalion and brigade commanders know everything.” Another witness recalled a single incident where a commander publicly yelled at soldiers found transporting looted goods in a military jeep and ordered them to throw the items away, but no further disciplinary or criminal action was pursued against the personnel involved. “Commanders speak against it and say it’s serious, but they don’t do anything,” another soldier summarized. In a formal statement provided to Haaretz, the Israeli military claimed it treats looting “with utmost severity” and maintains a strict ban on the practice, asserting that disciplinary and criminal proceedings are initiated when violations are confirmed. The army also noted that military police carry out routine inspections at the Israel-Lebanon border to intercept stolen property. But Haaretz’s reporting contradicts these official claims: the investigation found that many border checkpoints intended to catch looted goods at exit points from southern Lebanon have already been dismantled, while other planned checkpoints were never constructed at all. Soldiers told the outlet that this deliberate lack of enforcement is what has allowed the looting crisis to balloon to its current size. One soldier explained, “When there is no punishment, the message is obvious.” This latest revelation of widespread looting adds to a growing list of war crime accusations leveled against Israeli forces operating in Lebanon and Gaza since October 2023. Previous allegations include the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, extrajudicial killings of non-combatants, and trespass on civilian property for recreational purposes. Just last week, viral footage emerged showing Israeli soldiers demolishing an occupied civilian home in southern Lebanon “in memory” of a fallen comrade, while a separate photograph showed a soldier preparing food inside an abandoned Lebanese civilian residence – both incidents drew widespread international condemnation. The current round of full-scale Israeli military operations in Lebanon began on March 2 this year, ending more than 12 months of intermittent violations of a November 2024 ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hezbollah. Since launching the expanded ground invasion, Israeli forces have pushed several kilometers inside Lebanese territory, establishing a self-declared “buffer zone” that extends roughly 10 kilometers into southern Lebanon. Israeli troops currently remain deployed across this zone, barring Lebanese civilians from returning to their native villages and ancestral homes. Even after the announcement of a U.S.-brokered 10-day truce last week, Israeli forces have continued to carry out airstrikes across southern Lebanon and systematically demolish civilian residential structures, according to on-the-ground reports.

In the wake of the United States’ imposition of a naval blockade against Iranian ports, hard-line political and media voices within Iran have drawn up aggressive proposals to counter the move, including seizing international vessels in the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz and pushing Yemen’s Houthi movement to shut down the equally vital Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

These calls came just hours after former US President Donald Trump made a Wednesday announcement of a unilateral extension to a ceasefire on offensive operations targeting Iran. On that same day, Tehran-based conservative newspaper Kayhan dedicated its front page to the provocative headline “The response to the US naval blockade is to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait,” and ran a full editorial written by its editor-in-chief Hossein Shariatmadari, a political figure long known to have close ties to Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

In his editorial, Shariatmadari argued that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s elite paramilitary force, should maintain a continuous blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supplies pass daily. He further called for Iran to seize cargo from international shipping to collect what he framed as rightful compensation for war damages caused by the US and Israel.

“Given the inaction of the UN Security Council and the United Nations’ clear dependence on arrogant global powers, it is our legal right to collect the compensation we demand through seized assets,” Shariatmadari wrote. He added, “We should seize US-owned vessels currently located in the Strait of Hormuz, and confiscate US-owned oil and goods transported even on non-US flagged vessels as compensation for our losses.”

Hard-line principlist lawmaker Seyyed Mahmoud Nabavyan echoed Shariatmadari’s aggressive tone, dismissing any suggestion that the US naval blockade could be addressed through ongoing diplomatic negotiations. “Talking with the Washington is pure harm,” Nabavyan stated, adding, “Lifting the naval blockade is our undeniable right, and we will achieve that by force regardless. This matter has no connection to negotiations.”

Concurrent with these statements, the IRGC confirmed it had intercepted three vessels traversing the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, seizing two of the craft that were attempting to pass through the strategic waterway.

Beyond geopolitical tensions with the US and Israel, a separate controversy has been roiling domestic discourse around BBC Persian in recent months, with growing criticism that the outlet’s coverage unfairly favors supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed former Shah. Critics claim the BBC Persian television channel and its digital platforms have given outsize visibility to monarchist opposition voices, who have publicly backed US and Israeli military action against the Iranian government.

The wave of criticism reached a new peak last week after independent media researcher Mazdak Azar published the results of a study analyzing BBC Persian’s coverage of January’s anti-government protests in Iran, which were violently suppressed by Iranian security forces. Azar examined roughly 4,500 user-generated videos of the protests shared on Persian-language social media platforms, finding that only 17 percent of these clips included pro-Pahlavi slogans. By comparison, nearly 30 percent of protest-focused videos broadcast by BBC Persian featured such pro-monarchist messaging.

Azar noted that his study is limited to social media content, but stressed that many of BBC Persian’s television news and analytical programs have framed Pahlavi as a leading public figure behind the nationwide protest movement. This alleged amplification of Pahlavi aligns with a previous report from Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which revealed that after the 12-day war in June 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government sponsored a covert campaign that used fake Persian-language social media accounts to inflate perceptions of Pahlavi’s popularity among the general Iranian public.

In another development tied to the recent conflict, the targeted assassinations of two senior Iranian establishment figures—Ali Larijani and Kamal Kharrazi—have sparked widespread speculation about Israel’s strategic motives for the killings. Larijani was a central leader in Iran’s national security apparatus and previously led the country’s nuclear negotiations with world powers. Kharrazi served as Iran’s foreign minister between 1997 and 2005, and remained an influential senior foreign policy advisor to the former supreme leader long after leaving cabinet.

Iranian reformist newspaper Etemad published a report highlighting the two men’s longstanding roles in past Iran-US negotiations and their potential influence on any future diplomatic talks. The outlet argued Israel likely targeted the pair, who it described as “diplomatic strategists,” to weaken Iran’s negotiating position and reduce the likelihood of any future nuclear or security agreement between Tehran and Washington.

“Beyond their formal institutional positions, the two men were symbols of ‘wise conservatism’ and ‘strategic realism’ for Iran,” Etemad wrote. The paper described Larijani as a unique “bridge” capable of translating the Iranian government’s policy positions into language more accessible to Western governments, while Kharrazi acted as a “compass” for Iranian foreign policy—a trusted advisor whose backing was critical for any major diplomatic push toward new negotiations. Etemad concluded that the assassinations were deliberately intended to eliminate the core “think tank” that would guide any future Iran-US talks.

For many Iranians, the most searing reminder of the war’s human cost is the death of seven-year-old Makan Nasiri, who was killed on the first day of the conflict in a US double-tap strike targeting the Shajarah Tayyiba school in Minab. Makan has become a national symbol of the dozens of children and school staff killed in the attack.

Due to the extreme intensity of the airstrike, only fragmented body parts were recovered from the rubble for most victims. Makan is the only victim whose remains were never found—all that was recovered from the site was one of his shoes and torn pieces of his favorite blue sweater. In an interview with Sharq daily, Makan’s mother described the 15 hours she and other families spent digging through the debris searching for surviving children.

“Many people were trapped under the rubble, but not a single child came out alive. We stayed there from 11:30 in the morning until 2:30 the next day. Everyone that was pulled out was already dead… most were in pieces,” she said.

Official casualty figures published by Sharq put the total death toll from the strike at 156 people, including 120 school students, 26 female teachers, seven visiting parents, one school bus driver, one local clinic worker, and a six-month-old unborn child. In recent days, Persian-language media outlets have widely shared a personal home video showing gentle moments from Makan’s life with his family, amplifying public grief across the country.

This piece is a compilation of reporting from Iranian press outlets, and has not been independently verified for accuracy by Middle East Eye, the original publisher of this press review.

As the annual spring climbing season on Mount Everest gets underway, a massive, unstable block of glacial ice has brought preparations to a standstill, threatening to spark repeated overcrowding issues that have plagued the world’s highest peak in recent years. The 100-foot (30-meter) serac sits just below Camp 1 on Nepal’s southern route, and the specialized team tasked with securing climbing paths, known as icefall doctors, has been unable to identify a safe detour around the obstruction.

The icefall doctors, employed by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) which manages route maintenance up to Camp 2 at 8,848.86 meters above sea level, arrived at Base Camp three weeks ago. In a typical April, the team would have already fixed ropes and ladders all the way to Camp 3, but the massive glacial chunk, located roughly 600 meters below Camp 1, has blocked all progress. Team representatives say there is no feasible artificial method to remove the block, leaving only one course of action: waiting for natural melting and collapse to clear the path.

“We haven’t found artificial ways to melt it so far, so we don’t have any options other than waiting for it melting and crumbling itself,” SPCC Base Camp coordinator Tshering Tenzing Sherpa confirmed in an interview with the BBC.

Veteran icefall doctor Ang Sarki Sherpa, who has worked on Everest routes for years, noted that the lower section of the serac is already weakening. The team first reached the obstruction on April 10, and subsequent observations show the crevasse beneath the block has continued melting, bringing the serac closer to collapse. After four days of scouting the surrounding terrain on both sides of the mountain, the team confirmed there is no safe alternate route to Camp 1 this season, and climbing directly over the unstable serac has been ruled out as too high-risk.

Nepal’s Department of Tourism is now evaluating contingency plans, including the possibility of helicopter airlifts for the rope-fixing team and their equipment directly to Camp 2, allowing work to proceed on higher sections of the route while the team waits for the obstruction to clear.

“We are thinking about airlifting the rope-fixing team and their logistics to Camp 2 by helicopter, so they can open the route above that altitude for now,” said Ram Krishna Lamichhane, the department’s director general. “We will wait for the ice to melt at the place where there is an obstruction and work there when everything is safe.”

The narrow window of favorable climbing conditions on Everest only lasts through the end of May. SPCC teams hold cautious optimism that the serac will collapse within days, allowing route fixing to Camp 2 to finish quickly and the first summit attempts to proceed within a week. Still, the weeks-long delay has stoked widespread concern among climbers about a repeat of the dangerous summit “traffic jams” that have led to deaths and injuries in past seasons.

Purnima Shrestha, a prominent Nepali climber and photographer who is currently acclimatizing at Base Camp ahead of her sixth Everest summit attempt, shared her perspective from the mountain. Normally during acclimatization, climbers rotate repeatedly between Base Camp, Camp 1, Camp 2, and Camp 3 to build tolerance to high altitude, but the route delay has already disrupted this process.

“I am not worried that the route won’t open because we still have time for that. But the window could be narrow – with lots of climbers having to make their attempts in a short period of time,” Shrestha explained. Even if the serac clears in the coming days, the reduced climbing window will force hundreds of permitted climbers to compress their summit attempts into a much shorter timeframe, increasing the risk of deadly overcrowding.

Despite ongoing geopolitical instability from the Iran war, which has driven up fuel costs and disrupted international travel, demand for Everest summits remains strong this year. Dambar Parajuli, president of the Expedition Operators’ Association, noted that there has been only a small drop in numbers linked to flight disruptions, with mountaineering far less affected than lower-altitude trekking.

To date, Nepal’s Department of Tourism has issued 367 climbing permits, with the majority going to Chinese climbers. This year, China has not issued permits for foreign climbers accessing Everest from the Tibetan side of the mountain, meaning nearly all summit attempts will follow the Nepali route. In 2025, more than 700 climbers and guides summited from Nepal, compared to just 100 from the Tibetan side.

After viral images of massive summit queues in 2019 sparked global criticism of overcrowding and lax regulation, Nepal implemented strict reforms to its permit system, including sharp increases in climbing fees. This spring, permit costs for foreign climbers have risen to $15,000, up from $11,000, while fees for Nepali climbers have doubled to $1,000, in a bid to reduce overcrowding and fund better route management. Even with the price hikes, however, the unexpected glacial obstruction has put the 2026 season at risk of the same overcrowding issues regulators sought to prevent.

Sri Lankan authorities have launched a full criminal investigation after a sophisticated cyber attack on the nation’s finance ministry computer systems resulted in the theft of $2.5 million, funds that had been allocated for a bilateral debt repayment to Australia, senior government officials confirmed this week.

The stolen sum was marked for a debt settlement scheduled for September 2025, and investigators have traced the unauthorized diversion of the funds to January of this year, though details of the breach have only recently come to light amid ongoing investigative work.

Addressing reporters on Thursday, Harshana Suriyapperuma, secretary of Sri Lanka’s finance ministry, laid out the sequence of events: “Even though Sri Lanka had made the due payments, the cyber criminals had intervened and diverted it to other bank accounts, instead of the intended recipient.”

In response to the breach, four senior officers from the nation’s Public Debt Management Office have been placed on suspension, and Sri Lankan authorities have requested support from international law enforcement agencies to track down the perpetrators and recover the stolen funds. While the full technical details of how hackers accessed the payment system remain unconfirmed, lead investigators believe the attackers altered email-based payment instructions embedded in the sovereign debt payment workflow.

The missing funds went undetected until officials from the Australian creditor reached out to notify Sri Lankan authorities that the scheduled payment had never arrived in their account. Deputy finance minister Anil Jayantha Fernando added that the full scale of the heist only came into focus when the same cyber criminals attempted to alter payment details for a separate upcoming debt payment due to India, triggering internal red flags over the modified bank account information.

This high-profile cyber attack comes as a major new setback for Sri Lanka, which is still in the slow process of recovering from a devastating 2022 economic collapse that pushed the nation to the brink of bankruptcy. During that crisis, Sri Lanka exhausted its foreign exchange reserves, defaulted on $46 billion in outstanding external debt, and was forced to ration critical imports including food, fuel, and pharmaceutical supplies. Widespread public anger over the shortages erupted into mass anti-government protests that forced the resignation and ousting of then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa in July 2022.

Matthew Duckworth, Australian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, confirmed this week that Canberra has been notified of the irregularities in the debt payment process. “Sri Lankan authorities are investigating the matter and are coordinating with Australian officials, who are assisting the investigation,” Duckworth stated in a post on the social platform X.

Notably, the breach comes just months after Sri Lanka’s central bank and finance ministry rolled out a national public awareness campaign in local newspapers, warning citizens and government stakeholders about the growing risk of cyber scams, according to reporting from Agence France-Presse. Investigators are currently conducting a full review of existing financial control mechanisms to identify gaps that allowed the heist to proceed undetected for months, while continuing efforts to trace and recover the stolen $2.5 million.