World Echo

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Sunday that the man suspected of shooting top Russian military intelligence officer Vladimir Alexeyev in Moscow has been detained in Dubai and handed over to Russia. Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev, deputy head of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence arm, was shot several times in an apartment block in Moscow on Friday, investigators said. He underwent surgery after the shooting, Russian media said. The FSB said a Russian citizen named Lyubomir Korba was detained in Dubai on suspicion of carrying out the shooting. Read: Russia calls in reserves after shock Ukraine incursion Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Ukraine of being behind the assassination attempt, which he said was designed to sabotage peace talks. Ukraine said it had nothing to do with the shooting. Alexeyev, 64, was placed under US sanctions over Russian cyber interference in the 2016 US presidential election. The EU imposed sanctions on him over t...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday that a woman had died in northern Bangladesh in January after contracting the deadly Nipah virus infection. The case in Bangladesh, where Nipah cases are reported almost every year, follows two Nipah virus cases identified in neighbouring India, which have already prompted stepped-up airport screenings across Asia. The patient in Bangladesh, aged between 40-50 years, developed symptoms consistent with Nipah virus on January 21, including fever and headache, followed by hypersalivation, disorientation and convulsion, the WHO added. She died a week later and was confirmed to be infected with the virus a day later. Read: Health experts say Nipah virus poses no immediate threat to Pakistan The person had no travel history but had a history of consuming raw date palm sap. All 35 people who had contact with the patient are being monitored and have tested negative for the virus, and no further cases have been detected to date, the WHO sai...

A US government advisory body has urged Washington to press Indian authorities to hold those responsible for attacks on religious minorities accountable, citing what it described as a recent escalation in violence by Hindu nationalist mobs targeting Christians and Muslims. In a statement issued this week, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said attacks against Christians had intensified over the past two months, with January witnessing multiple incidents across several Indian states. USCIRF Chair Vicky Hartzler highlighted an incident in Odisha in which Pastor Bipin Bihari Naik was allegedly assaulted by a Hindu mob while conducting Sunday prayers inside a house. According to the commission, the mob accused the pastor of forced religious conversions, dragged him outside and forced him to eat cow dung. “Such attacks further justify USCIRF’s call for the US Department of State to designate India a Country of Particular Concern,” Hartzler said, referring to a de...

Russia launched a "massive" air attack on Ukrainian energy facilities overnight on Saturday, targeting electricity generation and distribution, Kyiv said. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the overnight attack involved more than 400 drones and some 40 missiles of various types, targeting the grid, generation facilities and distribution substations. Nearly four years into the war that began with Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbour, Ukraine's battered energy sector is crumbling under the Russian strikes, accumulated wartime damage and bitterly cold winter weather. "Russia chooses strikes over diplomacy," Zelenskiy "Every day, Russia could choose real diplomacy, but it chooses new strikes," Zelenskiy posted on X. "It is crucial that everyone who supports the trilateral negotiations responds to this. Moscow must be deprived of the ability to use the cold as leverage against Ukraine." Moscow did not immediately comment on the attack...

Some UAE companies have pulled out of a major defence show taking place in Saudi Arabia, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters, the latest sign that a rift between the two Gulf oil powers is seeping into business interests. The World Defence Show is set to take place in the Saudi capital Riyadh from February 8-12. It was not immediately clear if all the UAE participants involved in the country pavilion had withdrawn. There was no immediate comment by the UAE foreign ministry or the Saudi government media office on the matter. Trickle-down effect Once the twin pillars of regional security, the two Gulf heavyweights have seen their interests diverge on everything from oil quotas to geopolitics. Their disagreements came out into the open in December when an advance by a UAE-backed southern Yemeni separatist group brought it too close to Saudi borders for comfort and quickly escalated to a Saudi-led coalition strike on a UAE-linked weapons shipment...

The United States on Friday announced new sanctions to curb Iran's oil exports, including targeting 14 vessels, moments after the adversaries wrapped up a day of indirect talks in Oman. US State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Iran uses oil revenue to "fund destabilising activities around the world and step up its repression inside Iran." Trump is "committed to driving down the Iranian regime's illicit oil and petrochemical exports under the administration's maximum pressure campaign," Pigott said in a statement. The state department said it would order a block of any transactions with 14 vessels said to transport Iranian oil, including ships flagged from Turkey, India and the United Arab Emirates. It also announced sanctions on 15 entities and two people. Since Trump's first administration, the United States has imposed sanctions to force all other countries to stop buying Iranian oil. Iran's foreign minister met indirectly in Oman on ...