标签： Europe

LONDON – A coordinated investigation led by London’s counterterrorism policing unit is underway after a string of suspicious arson attempts targeting sites associated with London’s Jewish community and Iranian opposition groups across the city’s northwest districts.

The most recent incident unfolded on Friday evening in Hendon, a residential neighborhood just a short distance from Golders Green, one of London’s most prominent Jewish population centers. Law enforcement officials confirmed that witnesses observed a male suspect drop a canvas bag holding three flammable liquid-filled bottles outside a former Jewish community facility. The suspect attempted to ignite the cache before fleeing the scene; the material failed to fully catch fire, and no injuries were reported. As of Saturday, no suspects have been taken into custody.

This attempted attack is the latest in a series of arson incidents targeting relevant sites that have shaken the capital in recent weeks. On March 23, four vehicles belonging to a Jewish charity ambulance service were destroyed in a deliberate fire in Golders Green, four people have already been charged in connection with that attack. Just two days before the Hendon incident, two separate arson attempts were recorded across northwest London: one targeted a local synagogue, while the second saw an ignited container thrown into the headquarters of a Persian-language media organization based in Wembley. Three suspects – two adult men and one teenage boy – have been charged with arson over that incident. No people have been hurt in any of the five linked events.

While detectives have not formally connected the Friday Hendon attack to the earlier incidents, counterterrorism officials have taken lead of the ongoing probe due to clear thematic and operational similarities across all events. Originally, investigating officers had not classified any of the attacks as confirmed terrorist acts, but the pattern of targeting has drawn significant attention from national security officials.

A key line of ongoing inquiry centers on whether the attacks have any connection to the Iranian government. British authorities have repeatedly publicly accused Iran of leveraging criminal proxy networks to carry out covert attacks on European soil, specifically targeting Jewish community institutions and Iranian opposition media outlets operating in exile. The UK’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 previously disclosed that it foiled more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots against targets in the country in the 12-month period ending last October.

Metropolitan Police have not released a detailed description of the Hendon suspect as of Saturday, and have appealed to any members of the public who witnessed suspicious activity in the area Friday night to come forward with information to aid the investigation.

BEIRUT, PARIS – A deadly ambush targeting United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon has claimed the life of a French service member and wounded three more, triggering an urgent diplomatic response from French leadership just one day after a fragile 10-day ceasefire took hold along the Lebanon-Israel border.

French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed the fatal attack in a social media statement Saturday morning, noting that all preliminary evidence points to Hezbollah bearing responsibility for the strike on the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) patrol. The fallen soldier was identified as Staff Sergeant Florian Montorio, a 17th Parachute Engineer Regiment member based in the southwestern French city of Montauban. Macron added that the three injured service members have already been evacuated for medical care.

“In this moment of grief, the entire nation bows in respect for our fallen comrade, and extends its unwavering support to Montorio’s family, as well as all French military personnel deployed to advance peace in Lebanon,” Macron wrote.

This death marks the second French peacekeeper fatality in less than a month. In mid-March, a drone strike on a Kurdish military base in Iraq’s Erbil region killed Chief Warrant Officer Arnaud Frion and left six other French service members wounded.

French Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin later clarified details of the Saturday incident, confirming the ambush unfolded in the Deir Kifa region of southern Lebanon. The patrol was carrying out a critical operational mission: clearing a secure path to a UNIFIL outpost that had been cut off from supply and reinforcement for several days, amid escalating cross-border clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces that have roiled the region for months.

Montorio was ambushed at close range by fighters from an armed group, Vautrin explained in a post on the social platform X. “He was struck immediately by a direct round from a light weapon. His comrades pulled him to cover under active enemy fire, but were unable to resuscitate him,” she wrote.

Within hours of the attack, President Macron held separate urgent calls with Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to deliver France’s formal demands. According to a readout from Macron’s office, the French leader called on Lebanese officials to launch a full, transparent investigation into the strike, rapidly identify the perpetrators and bring them to prosecution, and take all necessary measures to protect UNIFIL personnel, who operate under international mandate to maintain stability in the region and are never legitimate targets.

Macron used the diplomatic exchange to reaffirm two core French priorities for the region: that all parties must fully comply with the newly implemented ceasefire, and that France remains deeply committed to upholding Lebanon’s full sovereignty, a pillar of broader stability across the Middle East that benefits all Lebanese citizens.

The ceasefire that went into effect Friday was negotiated without input from Hezbollah, leaving international observers uncertain whether the group would respect the truce. Saturday’s fatal attack, which comes just 24 hours after the truce was supposed to take hold, has already raised new concerns about the durability of the pause in fighting.

An 85-year-old French widow who endured a traumatic 16-day detention by U.S. immigration authorities has safely returned to her home country, where her family is now prioritizing her recovery and emotional healing. Marie-Thérèse Ross, who had married a retired American military veteran decades after he was stationed in France, was held by federal immigration officials for overstaying her 90-day visitor visa, a detention that has sparked diplomatic criticism from French officials.

Speaking publicly outside Orvault, the western French town that has long been Ross’s home, her son Hervé Goix told reporters Friday that the family’s sole immediate focus is protecting Ross as she processes the harrowing experience. “To preserve her health and her rest, and for her to be able to rebuild herself,” Goix said, speaking alongside Ross’s three other children. “We are particularly relieved today to see our mother again, to have her back. She has necessarily gone through a difficult ordeal.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot confirmed Ross’s repatriation on Friday, issuing a sharp rebuke of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over their handling of the case. Without going into further detail, Barrot said ICE’s treatment of Ross “was not in line” with French standards for detainee care, and “not acceptable to us.”

Court documents trace the origins of the incident back to a bitter family estate dispute following Ross’s husband’s death. The retired soldier, who first met Ross when he was posted to France in the 1960s, married her last June, and she moved to the U.S. to join him. When he died of natural causes in January, a conflict over his estate erupted between Ross and her stepson — a U.S. federal employee. An Alabama judge later found the stepson had intervened to push for Ross’s immigration detention.

According to U.S. Department of Homeland Security records, ICE agents took Ross into custody at her Alabama home on April 1. Detention records show agents arrested the elderly widow while she was wearing only a nightgown, and she was not allowed to bring her phone, passport, or any form of personal identification with her. She was transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, where she remained for 16 days while French diplomatic officials lobbied for her release, raising repeated concerns about her health and well-being. Goix told the Associated Press that Ross had already begun the application process for a U.S. green card when she was detained.

“the essential thing is that she is truly safe, that she regains her comfort, that she is surrounded by her children and grandchildren,” Goix added of the family’s priorities for Ross in the coming weeks.

Orvault mayor Sébastien Arrouët, who spoke with Ross shortly after her return, told French reporters that the 85-year-old is overjoyed to be home. “she is delighted, she is happy, she is relieved,” Arrouët said. “Put yourselves in her place, in a country she knows a little bit, it all happened to her so suddenly. We don’t realize the psychological violence. She needs to process all this, and the most important thing is that she is back with us.”

CAIRO – Tensions around the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz have exploded into a fresh escalation just days after a tentative de-escalation, as Iran rolled back its decision to reopen the waterway and opened fire on passing commercial vessels Saturday. The sudden reversal comes in direct response to the United States’ refusal to lift its sweeping naval blockade of Iranian ports, a move that has thrown fragile ceasefire talks into jeopardy and reignited fears of a widening regional conflict that could upend global energy markets.

When Russian troops withdrew from Kherson in late 2022 after Ukraine reclaimed the strategic southern Ukrainian city, Alina Dotsenko, director of the Kherson Art Museum, returned to her workplace to a devastating scene: nearly all of the institution’s collections had been stripped and carted away.

“ I stepped inside to find every storage unit gutted, every shelf bare. My legs couldn’t hold me, and I just slid down the wall, crying like a child,” Dotsenko recalled in an interview with the Associated Press.

Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Kherson Art Museum housed more than 14,000 artworks spanning global creative traditions from North American pieces to Japanese art. Multiple sources, including Dotsenko and citizen footage captured after the liberation, confirm that retreating Russian forces loaded the majority of the collection onto military trucks and transported it to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. To date, the whereabouts of nearly 10,000 missing artifacts remain unknown.

Today, this act of cultural plunder is back in the international spotlight as Russia pushes to rejoin global cultural circles, just months ahead of the 2024 Venice Biennale — one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art events. For the first time since 2022, event organizers have cleared Russian representatives to participate, a move Ukraine has sharply condemned. Kyiv argues the biennale “must not become a platform to whitewash the war crimes Russia commits daily against the Ukrainian people and our cultural heritage.”

Unlike most cases of cultural looting across Ukraine, the Kherson Art Museum theft is uniquely well-documented, thanks to pre-war preparation by Dotsenko herself. Years before the invasion, the director launched a full-scale project to photograph every item in the museum’s collection, building a comprehensive digital archive. When Russian forces occupied Kherson, Dotsenko hid the archive’s hard drives in secret, and retrieved them intact after liberation.

This detailed record has turned the Kherson case into a top priority for Ukrainian prosecutors and Interpol, who are using the catalog to trace missing works and build legal cases against those responsible for the looting. Unfortunately, this level of documentation is extremely rare across the country.

Across Ukraine’s occupied and war-torn regions, most pre-war cultural collections lack complete, accessible digital records. Russian occupying forces have deliberately seized or destroyed original inventory logs and collection documentation, making it nearly impossible to meet the strict evidentiary requirements for international legal claims to recover lost artifacts.

The experience of the Donetsk Regional Art Museum reflects this widespread challenge. Halyna Chumak, the museum’s former director, fled Russian-controlled Donetsk in 2014, shortly after Moscow first seized parts of eastern Ukraine. She was only able to smuggle out a fraction of the museum’s collection catalogs, documenting just over 1,000 of the institution’s 15,000 total works. Over the course of a year, Chumak carried the fragile documents through multiple armed checkpoints, leaving most behind to avoid attracting suspicion from pro-Russian search teams.

A decade later, a team led by Ukrainian entrepreneur Oleksandr Velychko is working to digitize these surviving catalogs, a painstaking process that took more than three months to process just 400 works. Once complete, the digitized database will be turned over to Ukrainian authorities to serve as partial legal evidence for future ownership claims.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Office currently has 23 open criminal cases focused on cultural heritage crimes, covering 174 separate incidents of looting, destruction, and damage to cultural sites. Anna Sosonska, deputy head of the office’s war crimes unit, explained that the Kherson case stands out from the rest almost entirely because of Dotsenko’s surviving archive.

“Russian forces almost always take inventory books and all original collection documentation from museums they occupy,” Sosonska explained in an interview. Without these records, prosecutors must rely on open-source intelligence, tracing looted artifacts through social media posts, auction house listings, and other online traces — a slow, labor-intensive process that can rarely reconstruct entire stolen collections. Still, Sosonska emphasized that cultural heritage crimes fall under international humanitarian law and carry no statute of limitations, meaning investigations will continue long after active fighting ends.

The full scale of Ukraine’s cultural losses remains impossible to calculate accurately. As of March 2024, Ukraine’s Culture Ministry confirms Russia has destroyed or damaged more than 1,700 designated cultural heritage sites and 2,503 cultural infrastructure facilities, including high-profile targets like the Mariupol Drama Theatre. More than 2.1 million museum objects are still held in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, and more than 35,000 items have been confirmed looted from territories Kyiv has retaken since 2022.

Moscow has moved to formalize its control over stolen cultural property. In 2023, the Russian government amended national legislation to add 77 Ukrainian museums from occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions to Russia’s official national cultural catalog. Critics call this move a deliberate attempt to cement illegal ownership and block the eventual return of looted works to Ukraine.

Tetiana Berezhna, appointed Ukraine’s Culture Minister in October 2023, has made widespread digitization of all Ukrainian cultural collections a core priority for her ministry. “If we had fully digitalized all collections before the invasion, we would know exactly how many objects were stolen and exactly what they look like,” she noted.

There are small signs of progress on accountability for these crimes. In March 2024, a Polish court approved the extradition of Russian national Oleksandr Butiahin to Ukraine, where he faces charges for conducting illegal archaeological excavations in occupied Crimea and smuggling ancient artifacts out of the site that Ukraine recognizes as its sovereign cultural heritage. Butiahin was arrested in Poland in 2023 at Ukraine’s request, and the ruling is still subject to appeal. If extradited and convicted, this would mark the first time a Russian national faces prosecution in Ukraine for crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage in occupied territory.

For Dotsenko, who has dedicated 50 years of her life to the Kherson Art Museum, the fight to recover the collection is deeply personal. She recently spoke to the AP at a Kyiv exhibition featuring high-quality reproductions of the stolen paintings, many of which have not been seen by the public since 2022. “While these works remain in captivity, all of us hold out hope that this will be resolved in favor of the Kherson Art Museum,” she said. “I did not spend 50 years of my life building this collection for nothing.”

The Russian Culture Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Associated Press on the allegations of looted Ukrainian art. In past statements, Russian-installed officials in occupied Ukrainian territories have described the removal of cultural artifacts as “protective measures” to save works from damage during fighting. Kirill Stremousov, the former Russian-installed deputy administrator of occupied Kherson who died shortly before the city’s liberation, claimed looted statues would “definitely return” to Kherson once active fighting ended.