Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

TERRORISM

Swedish woman freed in Pakistan terror probe

Safia Benaouda, the 19-year-old Swedish woman arrested in Pakistan earlier in September in the company of former Guantanamo inmate Mehdi Ghezali, is reported to have been released, according to local media.

Published: 25 September 2009 10:39 CEST

Benaouda, who is the daughter of Helena Benaouda, the head of the Muslim Council of Sweden, was released with her two and half year old son on Friday morning from the Islamabad prison in which they have been held for the past four weeks, according to local media sources.

“They have confirmed that a woman and a small child have been handed over to the Swedish embassy today and there are no suspicions held against them,” the Pakistani journalist Naveed Siddiqui, working for GEO News, said after talking to the Pakistani interior ministry.

The Swedish foreign ministry was unable to confirm the release on Friday morning.

“We have not received any information about this from the Swedish embassy,” Karin Nylund at the ministry told news agency TT.

Neither sources elsewhere within the ministry nor even the Benaouda’s mother were able to confirm the reports, which by 1pm on Friday had received wide coverage in the Swedish media.

“I have received so many contradictory reports and am now waiting for confirmation from the foreign ministry,” Helena Benaouda told TT.

Naveed Siddiqui however was able to add that the authorities have confirmed that a further eleven prisoners are set to be released, implying that Swedish national Mehdi Ghezali and Benaouda’s 28-year-old partner Munir Awad, could be among them.

He also claimed that the Pakistani authorities had detained a further Swede in connection to the terror probe, a 28-year-old man, but this has neither been confirmed by Swedish authorities.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

CRIME

Surgeon fined for trying to sell Paris terror attack victim’s x-ray

A Paris court on Wednesday convicted a surgeon for trying to sell an X-Ray image of a wounded arm of a woman who survived the 2015 terror attacks in the French capital.

Published: 30 November 2022 14:18 CET
Surgeon fined for trying to sell Paris terror attack victim's x-ray

Found guilty of violating medical secrecy, renowned orthopaedic surgeon Emmanuel Masmejean must pay the victim €5,000 or face two months in jail, judges ordered.

Masmejean, who works at the Georges-Pompidou hospital in western Paris, posted the image of a young woman’s forearm penetrated by a Kalashnikov bullet on marketplace Opensea in late 2021.

The site allows its roughly 20 million users to trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – certificates of ownership of an artwork that are stored on a “blockchain” similar to the technology used to secure cryptocurrencies.

In the file’s description, the surgeon wrote that the young woman he had operated on had “lost her boyfriend in the attack” on the Bataclan concert hall, the focus of the November 2015 gun and bomb assault in which jihadists killed 130 people.

The X-Ray image never sold for the asking price of $2,776, and was removed from Opensea after being revealed by investigative website Mediapart in January.

Masmejean claimed at a September court hearing that he had been carrying out an “experiment” by putting a “striking and historic medical image” online – while acknowledging that it had been “idiocy, a mistake, a blunder”.

The court did not find him guilty of two further charges of abuse of personal data and illegally revealing harmful personal information.

Nor was he barred from practicing as prosecutors had urged, with the lead judge saying it would be “disproportionate and inappropriate” to inflict such a “social death” on the doctor.

The victim’s lawyer Elodie Abraham complained of a “politically correct” judgement.

“It doesn’t bother anyone that there’s been such a flagrant breach of medical secrecy. It’s not a good message for doctors,” Abraham said.

Neither Masmejean, who has been suspended from his hospital job, nor the victim were present for Wednesday’s ruling.

The surgeon may yet face professional consequences after appearing before the French medical association in September, his lawyer Ivan Terel said.

SHOW COMMENTS