💭 The body of Princeton University student Misrach Ewunetie was found on campus grounds after she had been missing for multiple days. The prosecutor says there are no obvious signs of injury and her death does not appear to be suspicious. NBC News’ Emilie Ikeda reports.
Ewunetie Family Raises Suspicions About Circumstances Of Death As County Prosecutor Says No ‘criminal Activity’
The belongings of Misrach Ewunetie ’24, including her phone, “were found with her body,” according to a new statement by Casey DeBlasio, a spokesperson for the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, shared with The Daily Princetonian on Monday.
The Office’s involvement in the investigation into Ewunetie’s death is “complete,” DeBlasio added in an email.
“As there is no evidence of any criminal activity associated with Ms. Ewunetie’s death, any further inquiries can be directed” to the University’s Department of Public Safety (DPS), she wrote to the ‘Prince.’
An autopsy was conducted on Friday by the Middlesex County Medical Examiner’s Office, according to DeBlasio. The cause and manner of death will not be reported until all test results, including toxicology results, are received.
“My understanding from the [Medical Examiner’s] Office is that it will be weeks,” DeBlasio added. She also noted that in her experience this timeline was “not unusual or longer than comparable cases.”
Ewunetie’s family still has questions surrounding the circumstances of her death, however. Her brother Universe told the U.S. Sun, “The area she was found makes us feel it was suspicious, some trees had to be cut when they were removing Misrach.”
“She was talking to me about a savings account she was going to open, her interview, buying clothes and shipping them to Cleveland, and volunteering at her student club organization,” he added, according to the Sun.
Ewunetie’s body was discovered by a University facilities worker behind tennis courts on south campus, according to the statement released by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday.
The ‘Prince’ reached out to Universe Ewunetie and did not hear back in time for publication. DPS also did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
A timeline of what is known of the situation, as well as a map of relevant locations, can be found below:
Thursday, Oct. 13
11:05 p.m.: Ewunetie volunteers to fill a vacant “Duty” spot at the Terrace Club, during a live music performance.
11:21 p.m.: Ewunetie arrives at Terrace, according to footage seen by the ‘Prince.’
Friday, Oct. 14
2:33 a.m.: Ewunetie leaves Terrace, according to footage seen by the ‘Prince.’
Around 3 a.m.: Ewunetie is last seen near Scully Hall by a suitemate, brushing her teeth before bed, according to her brother Universe in an interview with ABC News.
Around 4:30 a.m.: Ewunetie’s roommate returns to their dorm and Misrach is not there, according to her brother Universe in an interview with ABC News.
Saturday, Oct. 15
Ewunetie misses an appointment for her American citizenship application, and her family is informed that she was a no-show, according to the U.S. Sun.
Sunday, Oct. 16
Around 3:27 a.m: Ewunetie’s phone pings in the Penns Neck neighborhood, according to her brother Universe in the U.S. Sun and ABC News.
Evening: Ewunetie is reported missing by her family to DPS when her family asks for a wellness check.
Monday, Oct. 17
9:19 p.m.: A TigerAlert is sent to the campus community stating that Ewunetie has been reported missing and asking for information on her whereabouts.
Wednesday, Oct. 19
10:50 a.m: A message is sent to all undergraduates announcing an increased law enforcement presence on campus.
3:31 p.m.: An email from Vice President for Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun states that the search for Ewunetie is still ongoing.
5:13 p.m.: The ‘Prince’ notes increased police activity near the boathouse on Lake Carnegie.
Thursday, Oct. 20
Around 1 p.m.: Ewunetie’s body is found behind the tennis courts on the south end of campus by a facilities employee.
Around 3 p.m.: NBC News first reports that Ewunetie’s body has been found on campus.
3:11 p.m.: The ‘Prince’ notes police activity in the parking lot next to the tennis courts.
3:39 p.m.: The Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office releases a statement announcing the discovery of Ewunetie’s body. There are “no obvious signs of injury and her death does not appear suspicious or criminal in nature.”
4 p.m.: An email from VP Calhoun is sent to all undergraduates sharing the news of Ewunetie’s death.
At least 22 young people were found dead at a makeshift nightclub in a township in South Africa’s southern city of East London on Sunday. Police Minister Bheki Cele was at the scene. By late morning, the police had confirmed 22 deaths, but some feared that the toll would rise.
South African authorities are investigating the deaths as the cause of the deaths is still unclear. Brig. Tembinkosi Kinana, a police spokesman, said the police had received a call about 4 a.m. reporting deaths at the Enyobeni tavern.
Drinking is permitted in South African township pubs, commonly known as sheebens or taverns which are sometimes even located in family homes, where safety regulations are rarely enforced.
According to the state broadcaster SABC report, the deaths resulted from a possible stampede inside a popular tavern, but the details shared were too little to find the exact cause of death. Senior officials from the provincial government rushed to the scene, where at least six mortuary vehicles were lined up the residential street waiting to collect the bodies, an AFP correspondent reported
The bodies will be transported to state mortuaries where relatives are expected to help identify both male and female victims, said Siyanda Manana, a spokesperson for the Eastern Cape provincial health department.
😢 More Human Sacrifice? 23 Africans in Melilla, Spain – 22/22 South Africans in East London, South Africa
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 6, 2022
💭A Nobel Peace Prize should not shield the prime minister from sanctions for war crimes and rights abuses.
👉 Courtesy: Bloomberg
Could Joe Biden become the first American president to sanction a Nobel Peace Prize winner for war crimes and human-rights abuses? As the U.S. steps up efforts to end Ethiopia’s bloody civil war, it must reckon with credible reports that the government of the 2019 laureate Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed instigated the conflict and covered up gross abuses.
Biden’s envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, arrives in Addis Ababa today to advocate peace talks between the Ethiopian government and rebels in the northern region of Tigray. Now in its second year, the war has claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions. It is in a stalemate, with Abiy at a slight advantage: His federal forces have regained territory lost in early November but are unable to make headway into Tigray. The rebel leadership claims to have made a strategic retreat and has indicated a willingness to hold peace talks.
Abiy has ramped up air strikes, using drones acquired from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which have killed scores of Tigrayans. A land offensive would be much bloodier, for both sides. But the prime minister will likely want a thrust deep into Tigray before agreeing to any meaningful parleys. For one thing, this would give him the upper hand in any negotiations. For another, having portrayed himself as a military leader — in the time-honored fashion, he visited the frontlines dressed in fatigues — he needs something that at least looks like a victory.
Feltman’s first order of business should be to restrain Abiy. The prime minister has thus far been immune to persuasion and to punitive economic measures, such as the suspension of European aid and the blocking of duty-free access to the U.S. market. But these, in effect, punish all Ethiopians for the actions of their leaders.
More targeted measures are called for. Biden has threatened to use sanctions to end the fighting, but has only imposed them on the third party to the conflict — the government of neighboring Eritrea, which entered the civil war on Abiy’s side. It is time to call out and sanction Ethiopians, on both the Tigrayan and government sides, who have enabled or committed crimes and abuses.
Despite the hurdles put up by the government, human rights agencies and humanitarian groups have been tabulating offenses by all combatants. Even as officials in Addis Ababa talk up war crimes ascribed to the rebels, they have suppressed information of wrongdoing — including mass rape and the recruitment of child fighters — by government forces and allied militias. Fislan Abdi, the minister Abiy tasked to document abuses, told the Washington Post last week that she was told to sweep inconvenient facts under the carpet. She resigned.
That brings up the question of Abiy’s culpability. His government claims the rebels sparked the civil war when they attacked a military base, but it is now becoming clear that the prime minister had been preparing an assault on the northern region long before then. As the New York Times has reported, Abiy plotted with the Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki against the Tigrayans even as the two leaders negotiated an end to decades of enmity between their countries in 2018 — the deal that won Abiy his Nobel.
The prime minister was apparently counting on the Peace Prize to draw attention away from the preparations that he and Isais were making for war against their common enemy: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Although the Tigrayans are a minority in multiethnic Ethiopia, the TPLF ran the government for the best part of three decades before Abiy’s accession to power. The Eritreans blame the TPLF for the war between the countries. Abiy is from the Oromo, the largest ethnic group, which was long denied a fair share of power by the Tigrayans.
Since he became prime minister, Abiy has systematically marginalized Tigrayans in the central government. The civil war has provided cover for crimes by government officials and forces. In the most recent example, says Human Rights Watch, thousands of Tigrayans repatriated from Saudi Arabia have been subjected to abuses ranging from arbitrary detention to forcible disappearance.
Abiy is hardly the first Nobel laureate to have brought dishonor to the prize. But, for obvious reasons, American presidents are leery about deploying sanctions against those who have been ennobled as peacemakers.
George W. Bush considered sanctioning Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, joint winner in 1994, but eventually thought better of it. For all his recklessness, Donald Trump could not bring himself to sanction Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, winner in 1991, for her government’s gruesome treatment of the Rohingya minority, and targeted only the country’s military commanders. (Ironically, those same commanders would go on to overthrow the civilian government and imprison Suu Kyi.)
Biden might do well to follow Trump’s example and target senior Ethiopian officials while giving Abiy a Nobel pass. Still, if the prime minister doesn’t take heed, he may well find himself in an ignoble category all of his own.
“The poor souls who died in the Channel deserve the dignity of being described as who they were. Human beings. Men, women, children. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons. They loved and were loved. In other words they were just like us. An unconscionable tragedy.””
Instead, they are speaking Amharic — Ethiopia’s administrative language and the native tongue of the Amhara people. Gundarta, who produced a translation of the speech in the videos, stated that the soldiers’ accents indicate that they are mostly native Amharic speakers from the Amhara Region, though some may be second language speakers from the Oromia Region.
CHANNEL TRAGEDY At least 33 migrants drown in deadliest ever incident on the Channel after inflatable dinghy flips over during crossing
A massive rescue operation is currently underway in French waters after the boat sank off the northern port of Calais, with at least three helicopters and three boats deployed to take part in the search.
Tonight, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin confirmed 33 people died in the deadliest single disaster on the intensively-used route.
The French authorities said patrol vessels found corpses and people unconscious in the water after a fisherman sounded the alarm about the incident.
Following the sinking, Dunkirk prosecutors opened a criminal investigation for “manslaughter” and “assistance with illegal immigration in an organised gang”.
Mr Darmanin said four suspected traffickers “directly linked” to the tragedy have been arrested.
He told reporters: “1,500 people have been arrested since the start of January, and four of them today. We suspect that they were directly linked to this particular crossing.”
It follows claims that people smugglers had organised the passage of the overcrowded boat, charging thousands to those on board to get to Britain.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 29, 2016
Forty Children Drown as Shipwrecks Claim up to 700 – Again, Mostly Eritreans / Ethiopians
Do we witness such tragedies occurring at the Aegean sea? Do we hear reports Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis or Pakistanis dying on sea in such a tragic way? No! No way! It’s Africans they are drowning out, it’s Christians they are murdering. The ‘EurArabians’ are working hard filtering out Africans and Christians to accelerate the ‘Only Muslim’ takeover of Europe. Remember, it was on this very day, 29 May 1453 that the Orthodox Christian capital, Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks.
I talked to a nice danish lady the other day, who told me that she stopped eating fish from the Mediterranean sea.
A week of shipwrecks and death in the Mediterraneanculminated Sunday with harrowing testimony from migrant survivors who said another 500 people including 40 children had drowned, bringing the number of feared dead to 700.
Brought to safety in the Italian ports of Taranto and Pozzallo , survivors told the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) and Save the Children how their boat sank on Thursday morning after a high-seas drama which saw one woman decapitated.
“We’ll never know the exact number, we’ll never know their identity, but survivors tell that over 500 human beings died,” Carlotta Sami, UNHRC spokeswoman, said on Twitter.
With some 100 people missing after a boat sank Wednesday, and 45 bodies recovered from a wreck that happened Friday, the UNHCR said it feared up to 700 people had drowned in the Mediterranean this week.
Giovanna Di Benedetto, Save the Children’s spokesperson in Sicily, told AFP it was impossible to verify the numbers involved but survivors of Thursday’s wreck spoke of around 1,100 people setting out from Libya on Wednesday in two fishing boats and a dinghy.
“The first boat, carrying some 500 people, was reportedly towing the second, which was carrying another 500. But the second boat began to sink. Some people tried to swim to the first boat, others held onto the rope linking the vessels,” she said.
According to the survivors, the first boat’s Sudanese captain cut the rope, which snapped back and decapitated a woman. The second boat quickly sank, taking those packed tightly into the hold down with it.
The Sudanese was arrested on his arrival in Pozzallo along with three other suspected people traffickers, Italian media reports said.
“We tried everything to stop the water, to bail it out of the boat,” a Nigerian girl told cultural mediators, according to La Stampa daily.
“We used our hands, plastic glasses. For two hours we fought against the water but it was useless. It began to flood the boat, and those below deck had no chance. Woman, men, children, many children, were trapped, and drowned,” she said.
Those who survived told mediators the dead included “around 40 children, including many newborns”, La Repubblica daily said.
“I saw my mother and 11-year old sister die,” Kidane from Eritrea, 13, told the aid organisations. “There were bodies everywhere”.
A bout of good weather as summer arrives has kicked off a fresh stream of boats attempting to make the perilous crossing from Libya to Italy.
Italian news agency Ansa said some 70 dinghies and 10 boats had set off over the past week.
Migrants interviewed by La Repubblica in Sicily told the daily a new “head trafficker” called Osama had taken control of departures from Libya’s beaches and was offering “cut-price” deals of 400 euros for the boat journey to lure in new customers.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 16, 2015
Muslims who were among migrants trying to get from Libya to Italy in a boat this week threw 12 fellow passengers overboard — killing them — because the 12 were Christians, Italian police said Thursday.
Italian authorities have arrested 15 people on suspicion of murdering the Christians at sea, police in Palermo, Sicily, said.
The original group of 105 people left Libya on Tuesday in a rubber boat. Sometime during the trip north across the Mediterranean Sea, the alleged assailants — Muslims from the Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal — threw the 12 overboard, police said.
Other people on the voyage told police that they themselves were spared “because they strongly opposed the drowning attempt and formed a human chain,” Palermo police said.
The boat was intercepted by an Italian navy vessel, which transferred the passengers to a Panamanian-flagged ship. That ship docked in Palermo on Wednesday, after which the arrests were made, police said.
The 12 who died were from Nigeria and Ghana, police said.
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