Hotelier stands trial over quake deaths
ANKARA, Turkey -- Parents of school volleyball team players who perished when their hotel crumbled in last year's powerful earthquake testified in the trial against the hotel's owner Thursday, with one father describing how hopes of finding his two children alive quickly turned to despair.
The hotel owner and 10 other people are standing trial accused of negligence over the deaths of 72 people, including members of the team who had traveled from the breakaway north of ethnically divided Cyprus to attend a competition.
A total of 39 students, their teachers and parents were staying in the Isias Grand Hotel in the city of Adiyaman when the region was hit by a 7.8 magnitude quake and an equally strong aftershock. Thirty-five of them died. A group of tourist guides were also guests at the hotel.
The trial, which opened on Wednesday, is the first relating to the Feb. 6 earthquake that hit Adiyaman and 10 other provinces in southern Turkey, leaving more than 50,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
The hotel's owner, Ahmet Bozkurt, family members and other defendants face between 32 months and more than 22 years in prison if found guilty of charges of "willful negligence."
Bozkurt has denied the charges against him, insisting there was no wrongdoing.
"The disaster of the century occurred," the state-run Anadolu Agency quoted him as saying in his defense. "My hotel was destroyed, just like 850,000 other constructions."
German kidnapper convicted in robberies
BERLIN -- A German man who served prison time for a high-profile 1996 kidnapping was convicted of robbery and attempted murder on Thursday for his role in a string of armed robberies in Germany in 2018 and 2019.
The Cologne state court sentenced Thomas Drach to 15 years in prison, German news agency dpa reported. It also ruled that he should be kept in preventive detention after serving the sentence.
The court found that Drach participated in three robberies of cash transporters in Cologne and Frankfurt and in two of those cases fired at the cash carriers, wounding them. His participation in another robbery, in Limburg, couldn't be proved.
Drach rejected the accusations during the trial, which opened nearly two years ago. The 63-year-old told the court before the verdict that he expected a "crystal-clear acquittal."
Drach was convicted and sentenced to 14½ years for extortionate kidnapping in 2001 for the abduction of cigarette heir Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who was held in a cellar for 33 days in 1996 until a multimillion-dollar ransom was paid.
Belarus law bans prosecution of leader
TALLINN, Estonia -- President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus signed a new law Thursday that gives him lifelong immunity from criminal prosecution and prevents opposition leaders living abroad from running in future presidential elections.
The law theoretically applies to any former president and members of his family. In reality, it only is relevant to the 69-year-old Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for almost 30 years.
The new measure appears aimed at further shoring up Lukashenko's power and eliminating potential challengers in the country's next presidential election, which is due to take place in 2025.
The law significantly tightens requirements for presidential candidates and makes it impossible to elect opposition leaders who fled to neighboring countries in recent years. Only citizens of Belarus who have permanently resided in the country for at least 20 years and have never had a residence permit in another country are eligible to run.
Belarus was rocked by mass protests during Lukashenko's controversial reelection in August 2020 for a sixth term, which the opposition and the West condemned as fraudulent. At that time, Belarusian authorities detained more than 35,000 people, many of whom were tortured in custody or left the country.
Lukashenko also has been accused of involvement in the illegal transfer of children from Russian-occupied towns in Ukraine to Belarus.
Captive migrants said freed in Mexico
MEXICO CITY -- Migrants from several countries abducted from a bus and held by armed men for days near Mexico's border with Texas were released by their captors, not rescued as initially reported by authorities, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday.
"They decided to let them go," López Obrador said during his morning press briefing. The 32 migrants -- authorities corrected the initial number of 31 after discovering there was a baby among the group that had not been included because it hadn't purchased a bus ticket -- were from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras and Mexico.
The president said that the migrants had been left in the parking lot of a shopping center in Rio Bravo, Tamaulipas, and that no arrests had been made.
Armed and masked men on Saturday stopped the bus on the highway that connects the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, Federal Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Wednesday. They were taken away aboard five vehicles.