标签： Europe

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — In a historic first for the International Criminal Court, embattled chief prosecutor Karim Khan has been suspended from official duties, following a vote by the court’s governing oversight body to open formal disciplinary proceedings against the British barrister. The 56-year-old has been entangled in a sexual misconduct scandal stretching back more than two years, stemming from accusations made by a female former member of his staff. Khan has repeatedly and firmly denied all claims of wrongdoing against him.

The final determination of whether Khan will retain his position as the ICC’s top prosecutor now rests with the Assembly of States Parties, the 125-member governing body that oversees the international tribunal. The body will convene a special plenary session to cast a binding vote on Khan’s future. No date for the special session has been finalized, but assembly officials confirmed it will be called as quickly as logistically possible. To remove Khan from office, a majority of 63 member states would need to vote in favor of dismissal, the only outcome the body has the authority to enact.

The Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, the executive committee that manages the oversight body’s day-to-day operations, announced its suspension decision in an official public statement Monday night. The Bureau noted its action was informed by multiple authoritative sources: an investigative report compiled by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the full body of underlying evidence collected during the probe, legal guidance from an independent ad hoc panel of judicial experts, and formal written submissions from all involved parties. The statement explicitly emphasized that Khan’s temporary suspension ahead of the full assembly vote does not amount to a prejudgment of the final outcome, nor does it confirm the allegations are true.

According to an authenticated copy of the OIOS investigation reviewed by the Associated Press, the U.N. probe uncovered evidence that Khan engaged in repeated nonconsensual sexual contact with the complainant, with incidents alleged to have occurred in his ICC office, his private residence, and during official overseas work trips. An independent Associated Press investigation earlier detailed how Khan first encountered the woman working in a separate ICC department, then arranged to transfer her to a role on his personal staff, after which she became a regular attendee of official international trips with him.

Whistleblower documents cited in the AP inquiry outline specific alleged incidents: on one overseas work trip, Khan is accused of asking the complainant to rest with him on a hotel bed before sexually touching her. Other claims include instances of Khan locking the door of his ICC office and reaching into the complainant’s pocket without consent, as well as repeated unwanted invitations for her to join him on a personal vacation.

However, the independent three-judge panel appointed by the Bureau to conduct a legal review of the OIOS findings concluded that the investigation’s conclusions were not sufficiently conclusive to support immediate disciplinary action. Court documents previously made public have also noted that the panel did not rule out the possibility of Khan resuming his duties if the final assembly vote clears him of wrongdoing.

Khan first voluntarily stepped back from his responsibilities as chief prosecutor in May 2025, after the investigation was launched, and has not performed official duties since. The entire process is unprecedented in the ICC’s history, requiring the Assembly of States Parties to draft and adopt new ad hoc procedural rules multiple times to address the unique situation. When reached for comment by reporters on Monday, Khan’s legal team said a formal public statement would be released on Tuesday.

A joint investigation by Spanish and British law enforcement has resulted in the arrest of a pair of British suspects with ties to Edinburgh, who stand accused of orchestrating a targeted gangland shooting that left a man with permanent life-altering injuries on Spain’s Murcia coast. The attack, which took place in November 2024 outside the victim’s home in the San Javier district of Santiago de la Ribera, saw the male and female suspects shoot the victim four times in the back at close range as he stood on his doorstep, according to official allegations from Spanish authorities.

After the shooting, the victim was rushed to a local hospital for emergency care, where he underwent months of intensive medical treatment. While he ultimately survived the attack, the injuries he sustained have permanently altered his quality of life, investigators confirmed.

Spain’s Civil Guard, one of the country’s two national law enforcement agencies, has linked the arrested couple to a powerful organised criminal group involved in drug trafficking and a pattern of violent criminal activity across the region. Witness accounts collected immediately after the attack described the shooter fleeing the scene on foot before escaping in a pre-positioned waiting vehicle.

Just one hour after the shooting, investigators located the suspected getaway vehicle burned to a shell on a rural road connecting San Javier and Los Narejos. Forensic analysis confirmed the torched car was stolen, fitted with counterfeit license plates, and matched the description provided by eyewitnesses.

The following day, law enforcement executed a second search in the Mazarrón region, where they seized another high-end British vehicle also registered with false plates. Inside the abandoned vehicle, investigators uncovered critical evidence: a silenced handgun that ballistics tests later confirmed was the weapon used in the attempted murder, along with unused ammunition, a black balaclava, and a pair of disposable gloves used by the suspects to avoid leaving evidence at the crime scene.

Forensic experts matched DNA samples collected from the seized clothing and accessories to the two suspects, cracking the case and allowing investigators to name the pair months after the attack. Investigators also recovered fired shell casings from the attack scene, which helped confirm the weapon used in the shooting.

The 12-month cross-border investigation, codenamed Operation Esbroya 24, brought together Spanish law enforcement and UK police agencies to track down the suspects. The first arrest came in April 2025, when officers took the male suspect into custody at Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández International Airport as he prepared to board a commercial flight bound for Edinburgh. Two weeks later, in May 2025, the female suspect was arrested at the same airport moments after she entered Spain from an international flight.

Official charges allege the couple travelled specifically to the Murcia region in southeast Spain to locate the victim and carry out the pre-planned killing at his residence. Spanish Civil Guard officials confirmed that the investigation into the attack and broader connections to the organised criminal network remains ongoing, with further arrests possible as detectives continue to uncover new details about the case.

During the opening days of his week-long apostolic visit to Spain, Pope Leo XIV delivered a clear mandate to the country’s Catholic leadership on Monday, demanding meaningful reparations for survivors of clergy sexual abuse and a transparent reckoning with a decades-long crisis that has shaken the institution’s credibility. The address came ahead of a planned meeting between the pontiff and a cohort of abuse survivors, a gathering that has already sparked friction between survivor advocacy groups and church officials.

In his remarks to the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Pope Leo emphasized that the entire global Catholic community must uphold an unwavering commitment to preventing future abuse and building a culture centered on care for vulnerable people. For generations, Spain’s top church leaders downplayed the true scale of clergy abuse across the country’s parishes and institutions, until independent investigative reporting by major Spanish news outlets exposed a widespread pattern of abuse and deliberate cover-ups that stretched across decades.

“In the face of this terrible scourge, the ecclesial community is called to respond through listening, truth, justice, and reparations,” Pope Leo told the assembled bishops. “Every person who has been wounded must be able to find sincere listening, warm welcome, meaningful protection, and tangible paths toward healing.”

The pontiff’s call aligns with a historic step Spain took earlier this year, when the national government launched a landmark reparations program for survivors of clerical abuse whose cases are too old to pursue through criminal prosecution. The program is a joint effort between the Spanish state and the Catholic Church, and it stands out from similar reparations initiatives in other countries: unlike other mechanisms that are led primarily by church bodies, Spain’s framework gives the government final authority over compensation payouts. While the program has drawn praise from some quarters for breaking new ground in addressing historical abuse, it has also faced skepticism from survivors and advocacy groups, and it is not legally binding. Survivors have one full year to submit claims for compensation under the program.

Even ahead of Pope Leo’s scheduled meeting with survivors, multiple survivor organizations have pushed back against the planning process, saying they were excluded from preparations and left unaware of details about the encounter. In response, a small group of protesters held a demonstration outside the Vatican’s embassy in Madrid to voice their discontent.

Juan Cuatrecasas, a spokesperson for leading survivor group Robbed Childhood, criticized the selection of meeting attendees, saying that the small group of survivors participating does not represent the broader community of people harmed by clergy abuse. “Our associations are pleased that a group of victims from the reparation plan can be heard by the pope, but they do not represent all the victims, and deep down they are being used by the church, by the bishops conference, to clean up the image of a Spanish church that has never been able to live up to its victims,” Cuatrecasas said.

The clergy abuse crisis is not unique to Spain: more than 30 years after the scandal first broke into public view across Western countries, ongoing revelations of abuse and cover-ups have continued to roil Catholic dioceses around the globe, severely eroding public trust in the institution.

In addition to his address on abuse reparations, Pope Leo reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s long-held position defending the seal of confession, the rule requiring priests to keep all conversations during the sacrament completely confidential. The defense comes as lawmakers across Europe and other regions have pushed for new rules that would require priests to report any abuse disclosed during confession to civil authorities.

Independent public investigations into clergy abuse around the world have repeatedly identified the confessional seal as a major barrier to exposing and preventing abuse, with many reports calling for the rule to be eliminated. Investigations have documented cases where abusers solicited sexual acts from minors during confession, then relied on the seal to prevent the abuse from being reported to authorities.

Speaking to Spain’s national parliament on the same day he addressed the bishops, Pope Leo framed the protection of confessional secrecy as a fundamental issue of religious freedom. “To protect it legally, as is done in a similar way in some professions, means preserving a sacred space of inner freedom, where the believer can open his or her soul to God without fear of external pressures,” he said.

Another point of controversy emerged during the visit when a group of former members of Opus Dei, the influential conservative Catholic movement founded in Spain that remains powerful within the country’s church, revealed they had been denied a meeting with Pope Leo. The group had requested an audience to raise allegations of psychological and institutional abuse they say they experienced while part of the movement.

In a public letter dated May 24, the eight former members emphasized their request was not motivated by anger or a desire for revenge. “We do not speak out of bitterness, nor do we seek any kind of revenge; rather, we speak out of a sense of responsibility and moral duty as those who have firsthand knowledge of a reality that has caused grave harm to the church and suffering to many people,” the letter read.

Gareth Gore, an author who met with Pope Francis at the Vatican in March to discuss his 2024 book detailing abuse allegations against Opus Dei — claims the movement has repeatedly dismissed as baseless — confirmed that the pontiff’s office received the former members’ letter but could not schedule the meeting on such short notice. Sources close to the Vatican suggest the decision to decline the request was also motivated by a desire to avoid perceptions that Pope Leo is interfering in ongoing investigations into Opus Dei in both Spain and Argentina.

Last year, Argentine prosecutors concluded there was sufficient evidence to launch a formal criminal investigation into top Opus Dei leaders in South America, charging the officials with human trafficking and labor exploitation involving 45 women. Opus Dei’s Argentine branch has forcefully denied all wrongdoing.

In a coordinated overnight campaign designed to ramp up economic pressure on Moscow amid the ongoing full-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces have carried out multiple drone strikes targeting key oil and energy infrastructure across Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, officials from both sides confirmed on Monday. The cross-border attacks marked one of the largest mutually exchanged drone barrages in recent weeks of the war.

Russia’s defense ministry announced that its air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 310 Ukrainian drones launched throughout the night, with targets spread across the Moscow region, western and southwestern areas of Russia, the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, and the maritime zones of the Black and Azov Seas. In a reciprocal strike, Russia launched 155 drones at Ukrainian territory; Ukraine’s Air Force reported that its air defense units successfully neutralized 124 of these incoming unmanned aerial vehicles through a combination of shootdowns and electronic jamming.

Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed that one of its primary targets was the Grushovaya oil transshipment base located near Novorossiysk in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region. This facility ranks among the largest oil and petroleum product transshipment hubs in southern Russia, playing a critical role in Russia’s domestic and export energy logistics. Regional Russian authorities verified that a drone attack triggered a large blaze at the site, though they confirmed no fatalities or injuries were reported in the incident. While officials declined to disclose the full scale of damage to the infrastructure, they confirmed that more than 130 emergency response workers and 39 pieces of fire-fighting equipment were deployed to contain and extinguish the fire.

A second key target inside Russia was the Krasny Yar linear production and dispatching station in the Volgograd region, which also sustained a direct hit that sparked an outbreak of fire. Andrei Bocharov, the governor of Volgograd region, confirmed the attack and stated that no personnel had been injured, though he offered no additional details about the facility’s core operations or the extent of damage to the site.

Beyond Russian territory, Ukrainian forces carried out two coordinated strikes on energy facilities in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula on Sunday night. First, drones hit the Semykolodezkaya oil base, which Ukrainian military officials stated is used to store fuel reserves exclusively for Russian military operations in the region. A second strike targeted an oil depot near the Crimean coastal city of Feodosia, according to the General Staff’s official statement posted to Telegram. Both strikes resulted in large fires at the target sites.

In a separate attack in Crimea, a Ukrainian drone hit a passenger train traveling on the Moscow-Simferopol route early Monday, Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed head of the occupied region, confirmed. The strike left the train’s driver with injuries and killed the driver’s assistant, Aksyonov said, adding that all passengers on board remained unharmed. Following the attack, all passenger rail traffic across Crimea was suspended indefinitely to allow for security and repair work. Russian rail operator Grand Service Express announced that passengers had been safely evacuated and replacement bus service had been arranged for travelers to complete their journeys.