An ISIS militant believed to be behind an unsuccessful attempt to bomb an Etihad flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi last year has been sentenced to death in Iraq, according to a report by Australia's ABC news service.
Tarek Khayat, 48, a Lebanese national, was sentenced this week by the Alrasafah Central Criminal Court in Baghdad over his role as ISIS commander in Iraq, ABC said.
Khayat is believed to have directed two of his brothers — Khaled and Mahmoud — to bring down an Etihad Airways flight on July 15, 2017, using an explosive device hidden in a meat grinder.
Their plan was foiled when a fourth brother, Amer, was prevented from carrying the device on board as cabin baggage because his bag was too heavy. He boarded the flight without the bag and is now in custody in Lebanon. He denies any knowledge of the plot.
Khaled and Mahmoud were arrested by the Australian police in a series of raids across Sydney in July 2017 and are expected to go on trial at the New South Wales supreme court next year, according to ABC.
Khayat, who was wanted by Lebanese authorities for attempting to establish an ISIS affiliate in the country’s north in 2014 before he moved to Syria to join the extremist group, has 10 days to appeal his sentence and could be executed within 30 days after that if the appeal is rejected.
He was arrested in Iraq earlier this year alongside a relative with Australian citizenship named Ahmed Mehri, senior Australian officials told ABC.
Authorities believe both Khayat and Mehri had been in touch with ISIS supporters in Australia and had played a role in several domestic plots.
There was no word on Mehri's fate.
Iraq has arrested tens of thousands of suspected ISIS members and sympathisers on terrorism charges and is reported to have sentenced more than 3,000 to death since the government declared victory over the group in December last year after a three-year campaign backed by a US-led global coalition.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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