Police storm cafe to end Sydney siege
Police storm cafe to end Sydney siege
SYDNEY — The deadly siege began in the most incongruous of ways, on a sunny morning inside a cheerful cafe in the heart of Australia’s largest city. An Iranian-born gunman burst in, took 17 people hostage, and forced some to hold a flag with an Islamic declaration of faith above the shop window’s festive inscription of “Merry Christmas.”
It ended after midnight with a barrage of gunfire that left two hostages and the gunman dead, four others wounded, and a nation that has long prided itself on its peace rocked to its core.
After waiting 16 hours, police stormed the Lindt Chocolat Cafe early Monday when they heard gunfire inside, said New South Wales state police Commissioner Andrew Scipione.
A loud bang rang out, several hostages ran from the building and police swooped in amid heavy gunfire, shouts and flashes. A police bomb disposal robot also was sent into the building, but no explosives were found.
“They made the call because they believed that at that time, if they didn’t enter, there would have been many more lives lost,” Scipione said.
Kerry, Netanyahu meet in Rome
ROME — Secretary of State John Kerry met Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the U.S. and Israel developed their responses to a draft U.N. resolution that would set a two-year timetable for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
Before departing for the talks in Rome, Netanyahu took a hard line and said he would not allow others to dictate conditions for negotiations that might compromise Israel’s security.
Marine charged in Filipino slaying
MANILA, Philippines — Philippine government prosecutors charged a U.S. Marine with murder Monday in the killing of a Filipino, saying the suspect acknowledged attacking the victim after he found out she was a transgender woman.
Prosecutor Emilie de los Santos said there was “probable cause” that Marine Pfc. Joseph Scott Pemberton, who has been detained since shortly after the October incident, killed Jennifer Laude, whose former name was Jeffrey, in the motel room where the victim’s body was found in Olongapo city, northwest of Manila. She had apparently been strangled and drowned in a toilet bowl.
Among the evidence submitted by de los Santos and other prosecutors were statements by Pemberton’s three Marine colleagues who went bar-hopping with him on Oct. 11 in Olongapo, a former liberty town when the U.S. Navy was at the vast Subic Naval base, now a bustling commercial Freeport and recreation hub.
Pemberton and some of his colleagues later picked up women at a disco bar and separately checked in at nearby motels, then returned to their ship after midnight. Witnesses saw Pemberton check in with Laude at a motel room, where he was seen leaving shortly before the discovery of the killing, prosecutors said in their statement to the court.
Camille Cosby breaks silence on husband
NEW YORK — Bill Cosby’s wife rejected sex assault allegations against her husband of a half-century on Monday, saying the man being accused by at least 15 women of drugging and having sex with them is “a man I do not know.”
In a statement issued Monday, Camille Cosby dismissed accusations that date back as far as the late 1960s.
She suggested that her husband, not the women, is the party being harmed.
“None of us will ever want to be in the position of attacking a victim,” she said. “But the question should be asked — who is the victim?”
Cosby is being sued for defamation by one alleged victim and for sexual battery by another woman who says he forced her to perform a sex act when she was 15. He has never been charged in connection with any of the accusations, and his lawyers deny many of the allegations. He settled with a Pennsylvania woman who in a 2005 lawsuit said Cosby drugged and molested her in 2004.
The Associated Press