#war-crimes

#war-crimes

Hundreds of civilians were killed and hundreds more injured on 26 April 1937 when planes from the German Condor Legion, operating alongside aircraft from fascist Italy, spent hours bombing Guernica on market day. Adolf Hitler had loaned the Luftwaffe unit to Gen Francisco Franco's nationalist forces to help them in their coup against the republican government, and to allow Nazi Germany's pilots to practise the blitzkrieg tactics they would later use in the second world war.

A Russian soldier, with his face blurred, poses in front of the bodies of three Ukrainian soldiers lying face down in a pool of blood, their hands clasped behind their heads. The image, shared by the Russian Rusich unit on its Telegram channel, is accompanied by an announcement for a contest: The first three people to submit a photo of prisoners who have clearly been erased from existence will receive a cryptocurrency reward.

Prosecutors in Azerbaijan are seeking life sentences for five Armenian defendants who previously held leading positions in the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Charges include war crimes and terrorism. In Azerbaijan, prosecutors have said on Thursday that they were seeking life sentences for five former leaders and officials of Nagorno-Karabakh. This comes two years after Azerbaijani forces retook full control of the region, which had been controlled by ethnic Armenians, who referred to the region as Artsakh. Most of the estimated 100,000 Armenians in the region fled after Azerbaijan's offensive in 2023 amid allegations of Azerbaijani troops conducting ethnic cleansing. The five Armenians were among at least 15 former government and military officials arrested upon Baku's seizure of the region. They stand trial for charges of war crimes, terrorism and forcible seizure of power.

Irina Cesic celebrated her first birthday on October 8, 1993. Four days later, she was killedby a sniper's bullet on the streets of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. "Since Irina had just learned to walk, my wife Stana was holding her by the hand," Irina's father, Samir Cesic, told RFE/RL. "We never understood why someone would shoot at a 50-60-centimeter target -- the height of a one-year-old girl -- instead of a much larger one, like my wife, who would have been easier to hit."

We have submitted documentation full of evidence that warrants further investigation, which we have suggested to the court. We firmly believe that it can lead to the identification of at least some of those responsible for these horrendous crimes,

Vanderbilt'svision of the trial for 22 of the surviving Nazi leaders-21 were in fact in the dock-by the United Sates, the USSR, Britain, and France telegraphs its anxieties across the 80 years from the trial's opening to today. At Nuremberg's first public session, on November 20, 1945, journalists heralded the opening of "the trial of the century." Nuremberg's message to the law and politics of the previous century was the way claiming to be "just following orders" shouldn't cancel individual responsibility for widespread atrocities.

In a report published this week, the commission said Russian forces, operating under a centralised command, had systematically used drones to intentionally target civilians and civilian objects and cause harm and destruction. The report was compiled by the UN's independent international commission of inquiry on Ukraine, an independent body that reports back to the UN. The latest report looked at three regions of Ukraine in particular Kherson, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk which are

German dentists have offered a belated acknowledgment of their profession's brutal practices under the Nazis, admitting broad systemic involvement in crimes at concentration camps, including sadistic tooth extractions, human experiments, forced sterilisations and murder. Their central professional organisation, the German Society for Dental, Oral and Orthodontic Medicine (DGZMK), held its first memorial ceremony exposing the atrocities committed by dentists during the Nazi era and paying tribute to the victims, at Berlin's Humboldt University on Wednesday.

Ed Gein, nicknamed "The Butcher of Plainfield," isn't the only person to have fashioned household items from the remains of his victims. Ilse Koch, once called "The Witch of Buchenwald," also allegedly hand-picked Jewish prisoners and turned their bodies into lampshades. While these allegations remain unproven in court, Koch's cruelty is still legendary, which is why she plays a small yet important role in the Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

As Syria turns the page after Bashar al-Assad's fall, the transitional government promises justice, truth, and rule of law.

When Vladimir Putin met with Donald Trump in Alaska in August, one prominent strand of social-media commentary had nothing to do with the possibility of a deal to end Russia's war against Ukraine (the meeting's ostensible purpose). Rather, it turned on the question of whether Putin-who faces an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, stemming from Russia's wartime actions-could conceivably be arrested when he stepped foot on U.S. soil.

"First of all, I think we want to acknowledge that there is a genocide going on in Palestine," she told RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland. "Every country has the right to self-determine, how to govern. "Hamas who I have condemned over and over, I have never been equivocal on it," she said. "They were elected by the people the last time there was an election. They are part of the civil society."

On Tuesday, Tribunal Judge Camilo Suarez ruled against seven former leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a now-defunct guerrilla group known as the FARC. They were found guilty of kidnapping more than 21,000 people. Most were abducted to secure ransom payments that helped fund the FARC's war machine. Hostages were tortured, sexually abused, chained to trees and led on forced marches through the jungle. Some died of tropical diseases.

The latest break between the two foremost military and political leaders risks igniting civil war again for the embattled nation. South Sudan has started holding a trial for First Vice President Riek Machar, who has been sacked by his decades-long rival, President Salva Kiir, and charged with murder, treason and crimes against humanity in relation to rebellion and an attack by a militia linked with ethnic tensions.

The children were sleeping when death came from the air. A military warplane dropped two 500lb (230kg) bombs on their boarding school, witnesses said. Imagine, if you can, the carnage and the horror. At least 18 died. Others suffered life-changing injuries. The ruling regime claims to be fighting terrorists. Yet more often than not, it is defenceless, blameless civilians who are killed, maimed and displaced. No, this isn't Gaza. It isn't Ukraine. It's Myanmar, where appalling atrocities, including crimes against humanity, often go unreported.

The face of a Syrian refugee is the enigmatic key to this slow-burning drama-thriller, the fiction feature debut of French film-maker Jonathan Millet; it is hard, blank, withdrawn, yet showing us an inexpressible agony, a suppressed, unprocessed trauma, complicated by what is evidently a new strategic wariness. The refugee is Hamid (played by Adam Bessa), a former literature professor from Aleppo who is now in Strasbourg in France in 2016,

For Nick Maynard, a British doctor who has volunteered in Gaza several times, the United Kingdom's silence in action is a form of the government's complicity in Israel's genocide against Palestinians. As a wave of early autumn rain poured over London on Thursday, he painted a harrowing picture of the injuries he witnessed Israel inflict on children, through aerial bombardment or gunfire, or by the deliberate restriction of life-saving infant formula and medicine.