标签： Africa

Mogadishu, Somalia — A 42-year-old Minnesota man identified as a core conspirator in one of the largest public fraud schemes in U.S. Midwest history has been apprehended by authorities after years as a fugitive, U.S. federal law enforcement officials confirmed Friday.

Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh, a resident of Burnsville, Minnesota, was taken into custody on Thursday in Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced in an official media statement. As of the latest update, court records have not listed any legal representation for Eidleh, and he has not yet appeared before a judicial officer to enter a plea to the charges against him.

Eidleh is among more than 40 individuals indicted back in 2022 for their alleged roles in a coordinated, multi-million dollar scam targeting a U.S. federal child nutrition program launched to support vulnerable communities during the COVID-19 public health crisis. At the center of the scheme was Feeding Our Future, a Minnesota-based non-profit that publicly claimed it would use federal funding to distribute millions of free meals to food-insecure children across the state when pandemic school closures disrupted access to regular school nutrition services.

Court filings lay out damning allegations that only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars allocated to the organization actually went toward feeding children in need. Prosecutors say the vast majority of the funds were illegally siphoned off through a network of dummy shell companies, then laundered to fund personal luxuries for the conspirators: high-end residential and commercial real estate purchases, luxury vehicles, and extravagant international vacations.

As a former employee of Feeding Our Future, Eidleh is accused of taking on a central coordinating role in the fraud. Court documents allege he helped create dozens of fake program meal sites, falsified daily attendance and meal distribution records that claimed the sites were serving thousands of children every day, and set up the fraudulent shell companies that were listed as official meal vendors for the non-existent sites. The grand jury indictment brings six separate types of charges against him, totaling 31 counts: conspiracy to commit wire fraud, substantive wire fraud violations, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, substantive bribery charges, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and substantive money laundering charges.

Colin M. McDonald, Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, emphasized the severity of the alleged crimes in public comments following the capture. “Eidleh was a central figure in one of the largest fraud schemes in Minnesota history,” McDonald said. “He not only stole taxpayer dollars, but he also robbed vulnerable children of critical resources they desperately needed. Rather than answer for his crimes in the United States, he fled to Somalia in a futile attempt to evade justice.”

The high-profile fraud case has already spilled over into national political discourse. Former U.S. President Donald Trump cited the case as a key justification when he announced a sweeping immigration crackdown targeting the state of Minnesota in late 2023, framing the scam as evidence of weak border security and lax enforcement that enabled large-scale public corruption.

In a move that has reignited debates over constitutional rights and political freedom in East Africa, Tanzania’s ruling administration announced a nationwide ban on all political gatherings Friday, stepping in ahead of planned mass protests centered on disputed 2024 election results and the ongoing detention of a prominent opposition leader.

Internal Affairs Minister Patrobas Katambi issued an official order to Police Inspector General Camillus Wambura, directing authorities to halt the processing and issuance of new permits for all political activities across the country, ending a two-year period of relaxed restrictions on opposition organizing.

This latest policy shift reverses a 2023 executive order from President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who lifted a strict six-year ban on opposition rallies implemented by her predecessor, the late John Magufuli. The new ban comes as young Tanzanian activists prepare to launch nationwide demonstrations on July 7, where they intend to challenge Hassan’s re-election in last year’s general vote and advocate for a complete rewrite of the country’s constitution.

The 2024 general election, which resulted in a landslide victory for Hassan’s ruling party, has been mired in controversy from the start. Tanzania’s largest main opposition party boycotted the contest entirely in protest of systemic unfairness, while the presidential candidate representing the country’s second-largest opposition bloc was blocked from appearing on the ballot ahead of voting.

This year will mark the first post-election protests held in Tanzania since 2025, an unprecedented moment of public pushback against the administration’s election outcome. Beyond challenging the election results, protesters are demanding two key changes: the immediate release of opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who faces high-profile treason charges stemming from his calls for political reform ahead of the 2024 vote, and official accountability for the post-election violence that left at least 518 people dead, according to a previously released post-election inquiry.

Law enforcement has already taken preemptive action, arresting multiple individuals tied to the protest organizing effort, which has been coordinated largely through social media platforms to avoid government interference. Even so, opposition and civil society leaders have pushed back aggressively against the new ban, framing it as an unconstitutional overreach of executive power.

Boniface Mwabukusi, president of the Tanzania Law Society, emphasized that the government has no legal standing to restrict public meetings that are explicitly permitted under Tanzanian law. “We will convene to determine the legal measures we will take, both domestically and internationally, against anyone who attempts to enforce this unlawful and invalid directive in violation of the Constitution and the laws of the country,” Mwabukusi said in a statement following the ban announcement.

Opposition parties have echoed this criticism, uniformly describing the ban as a politically motivated effort to silence dissent ahead of the planned protests. Rugemeleza Nshala, chief legal counsel for the leading opposition party Chadema, said the order was a deliberate attempt to “muzzle political freedom.” He confirmed that Chadema is currently drafting both domestic and international legal challenges to overturn the ban. Rashid Ali, shadow minister for defense, internal affairs and security for the second major opposition party ACT Wazalendo, added that the directive is just the latest in a series of government actions that violate the country’s founding constitution.

The controversy comes amid already strained relations between Tanzania and Western governments: the United States recently imposed sanctions on the country’s national police chief over documented human rights violations connected to post-election crackdowns, adding a layer of international tension to the growing domestic political crisis.

In a sudden policy shift that reverses recent democratic reforms, Tanzania’s national government has implemented an indefinite suspension on all political rallies across the country, framing the ban as a critical security measure ahead of a major international event.

Home Affairs Minister Patrobas Katambi announced the directive to parliament, confirming that the suspension will remain in place until further notice. He explained that security officials have uncovered credible threats, including individuals found stockpiling weapons and plotting coordinated criminal activity that could disrupt public order. Beyond these immediate security concerns, Katambi noted that Tanzania is preparing to host an upcoming international trade fair expected to draw delegates and visitors from across the globe. “We should focus on building our economy,” Katambi said, adding, “During this period, we will not tolerate anyone who engages in any form of disorder.”

The decision marks a sharp reversal of the liberalizing reforms rolled out by President Samia Suluhu Hassan just two years ago. When she took office following the death of predecessor John Magufuli, Hassan moved quickly to undo a six-year ban on political gatherings that Magufuli first imposed in 2016. At the time of lifting the ban in 2023, Hassan affirmed that all political parties held a constitutional right to host rallies, while urging participants to engage in civil discourse rather than personal insults. Magufuli’s original ban had been widely interpreted as a deliberate tactic to suppress opposition power, with the former president arguing that gatherings wasted public resources and diverted attention from national economic development goals.

Opposition groups have immediately rejected the new suspension, branding it unconstitutional and a deliberate power grab by the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party. The main opposition bloc ACT Wazalendo has announced it will challenge the government’s directive in court, accusing CCM of weaponizing state institutions to stifle dissent ahead of growing calls for accountability.

Veteran Chadema opposition figure Joseph Selasini connected the new ban to the rising popularity of opposition rallies that have drawn massive crowds demanding justice for victims of post-election violence last year. Following the controversial October 2025 general election, widespread protests broke out across the country after the two leading opposition presidential candidates were blocked from contesting the poll. A formal commission of inquiry established by President Samia to investigate the unrest confirmed that 517 people died from unnatural causes during the violence, including 197 people who were shot and killed by security forces. The scale of the bloodshed shocked many observers, as Tanzania had maintained a reputation for political stability and peaceful consensus for nearly 60 years.

Calls for democratic reform and official accountability for the post-election violence had been growing in recent months, with opposition groups organizing repeated public gatherings to pressure the government. As of publication, the ruling CCM party has not issued any public response to the opposition’s accusations of suppression, nor has it released additional comment on the government’s suspension decision.

JERUSALEM — On Friday, Israel made public a vast collection of long-classified government documents that lay bare the internal deliberations and high-stakes decision-making behind one of the most legendary operations in Israeli military history: the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue mission, whose 50th anniversary will be marked on July 3. The declassification comes at a deeply resonant moment for Israel, which is still navigating the fallout from the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas-led militants that killed approximately 1,200 people and abducted 251 hostages to the Gaza Strip, casting a new shadow over decades of Israeli policy on hostage crises.

The operation itself remains a defining feat of military daring: On June 27, 1976, militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and West Germany’s Revolutionäre Zellen hijacked an Air France flight traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris, diverting it to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they received backing from then-Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s government. The hijackers held 106 passengers, the vast majority of whom were Israeli or Jewish, threatening to execute them unless dozens of imprisoned militants were released by multiple countries. In a mission that took under an hour to complete, 29 Israeli commandos flew more than 2,500 miles over hostile territory to storm the airport, rescuing all but three hostages killed in crossfire. All seven hijackers and roughly 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed in the operation, and only one Israeli commando died: Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The operation’s low casualty count and audacious scope cemented its place as a foundational myth of Israeli military prowess.

Longstanding popular narrative has framed Entebbe as a turning point where Israel rejected negotiation with hostage-takers in favor of a bold military strike. The newly released files from the Israel State Archives upend that simplified telling, revealing that Israeli leaders under then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin pursued a deliberate two-pronged strategy, only greenlighting the raid when diplomatic efforts showed no signs of progress. For the first six days of the crisis, Rabin’s ad hoc national crisis team took a hard line, refusing any negotiations with the hijackers. But as the militants’ execution deadline drew near and pressure mounted from the hostages’ families, the cabinet shifted position, opening the door to conditional talks.

“The zero hour is approaching … We believe that a supreme effort must be made and break the ultimatum,” Rabin’s crisis team wrote in one newly released memo, which authorized negotiations on portions of the hijackers’ demands. While pushing forward France-brokered talks with Amin’s government, Israeli military planners simultaneously worked in secret: they built full-scale mockups of the Entebbe terminal to practice the raid, mapped flight routes through African airspace controlled by hostile states, and prepared transport planes for the overnight strike.

Only when negotiations stalled did leaders give the final order for the mission. Even before the release of these files, much was already known about the broad outlines of the Entebbe operation, but the new documents provide granular, unprecedented insight into the weight of the choices facing the Israeli cabinet. For decades, Israel has maintained a formal policy of occasionally exchanging imprisoned Palestinian detainees for hostages held by militant groups, a practice that has drawn repeated criticism from those who argue it incentivizes future kidnappings. The Entebbe documents confirm Rabin’s administration was willing to test diplomacy before turning to force, contradicting the popular framing of the operation as an outright rejection of negotiation.

The operation drew international condemnation at the time from Idi Amin and the Organization of African Unity, the predecessor to the modern African Union, which argued the raid violated Ugandan national sovereignty at a time when diplomatic efforts were still ongoing. For Israel, the mission stood as a rare high-profile victory after the trauma of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, where all nine Israeli hostages were killed during a failed German-led rescue attempt. Even in the immediate aftermath of the operation’s success, however, Rabin warned against overstating its impact on the long-term fight against terrorism, a prescient observation that carries new weight today amid the ongoing Gaza hostage crisis.

“Let us not deceive ourselves,” Rabin wrote in one personal memo included in the declassified files. “It was an extraordinary operation and achievement. However, the problem is not over. Terrorism continues to operate. What other problems terrorism will pose to us and what lessons we must learn from this matter, it is too early to say. We have finished one battle, but the war continues.”