Police fired tear gas at protesters who’d set up a camp at the University of South Florida to condemn Israel’s war on Gaza. Several students were reportedly arrested as the camp was dismantled.
Published On 1 May 2024
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Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, was sentenced on Tuesday to four months in prison after pleading guilty to violating US money-laundering laws at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
The sentence was imposed by United States District Judge Richard Jones in Seattle, who rejected prosecutors’ request that the 47-year-old Zhao serve a three-year term.
Once considered the most powerful person in the cryptocurrency industry, Zhao, known as “CZ,” is the second major crypto boss to be sentenced to prison after Sam Bankman-Fried. In March, Bankman-Fried received 25 years behind bars for stealing eight billion dollars from customers of his now-bankrupt FTX exchange.
Zhao pleaded guilty in November to one count of failing to take required anti-money-laundering measures and stepped down as Binance agreed to pay $4.3bn to settle related allegations.
US officials said Zhao deliberately looked the other way as people conducted transactions that supported child sex abuse, the illegal drug trade and “terrorism”.
“I failed here,” Zhao said before US District Judge Richard A Jones issued the sentence. “I deeply regret my failure, and I am sorry.”
“I believe the first step of taking responsibility is to fully recognise the mistakes. Here I failed to implement an adequate anti-money-laundering program … I realise now the seriousness of that mistake”, he said.
Prosecutors had told the judge a tough sentence would send a clear signal to other would-be criminals.
“We are not suggesting that Mr. Zhao is Sam Bankman-Fried or that he is a monster,” prosecutor Kevin Mosley said. But Zhao’s conduct, he said, “wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t a regulatory ‘oops.’”
The three-year prison term prosecutors sought was more than twice the guideline range for the crime. If he did not receive time in custody for the offence, no one would, rendering the law toothless, they argued.
Zhao had been free on a $175m bond, and agreed not to appeal any sentence within federal guidelines. Zhao also paid $50m to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Binance allowed more than 1.5 million virtual currency trades, totalling nearly $900m, that violated US sanctions, including ones involving Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, al-Qaeda and Iran.
“He made a business decision that violating US law was the best way to attract users, build his company, and line his pockets,” the US Department of Justice wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed last week.
Zhao’s lawyers insisted he should receive no prison time at all, citing his willingness to come from the United Arab Emirates, where he and his family live, to the US to plead guilty, despite the UAE’s lack of an extradition treaty with the US.
No one has ever been sentenced to prison time for similar violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, defence lawyers Mark Bartlett and William Burck told the judge Tuesday, and Zhao began making changes to make Binance a model of compliance with banking transparency regulations before stepping down.
“There is no excuse for my failure to establish the necessary compliance controls at Binance,” Zhao wrote in a letter to the court. “I wish I could change that part of Binance’s story. But under my direction, Binance has now implemented the most stringent anti-money laundering controls of any non-US exchange, and those controls have been in place since 2022.”
Prosecutors said no one had ever violated the Bank Secrecy Act to the extent Zhao did.
“He says in hindsight he should have done a better job,” Justice Department lawyer Kevin Mosley told the court. “This wasn’t a mistake. When Mr Zhao violated the BSA he was well aware of the requirements.”
Zhao knew that Binance was required to institute anti-money-laundering protocols, but instead directed the company to disguise customers’ locations in the US to avoid complying with US law, prosecutors said.
Several other crypto moguls are also in the crosshairs of US authorities after the collapse of cryptocurrency prices in 2022 exposed fraud and misconduct across the industry.
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German police were accused of using excessive force as they broke up a pro-Palestinian protest camp outside the Bundestag parliament building in Berlin, where several demonstrators were reportedly arrested.
Published On 29 Apr 2024
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It’s the latest attack on security forces in a region where tensions have long simmered between locals and the state.
Armed assailants have ambushed and killed three police officers in southern Chile before setting their car on fire, authorities said, the latest attack on police to revive security concerns in the South American country.
In a statement on X on Saturday, President Gabriel Boric called the attack in Arauco province’s Canete municipality “cowardly” and declared three days of national mourning to honour the officers, identified as Sergeant Carlos Cisterna, Corporal Sergio Arevalo and Corporal Misael Vidal.
“Today the entire country is in mourning. There is heartbreak, sorrow, anger. But these emotions do not paralyse us, they force us, they mobilise us,” Boric wrote. “We will find the whereabouts of the perpetrators of this terrible crime.”
Authorities said the officers responded to three false emergency calls and were attacked in their vehicle with heavy-calibre weapons. They burned inside the armoured patrol vehicle on a road near the city of Concepcion, some 400km (about 250 miles) south of the capital, Santiago.
It remains unclear who carried out the assault but a long-simmering conflict between the Mapuche Indigenous community and landowners and forestry companies in the region has intensified in recent years. The conflict forced the government to impose a state of emergency and deploy the military to provide security.
In Chile, about one in 10 citizens identify as Mapuche, the tribe that resisted Spanish conquest centuries ago and was defeated only in the late 1800s after Chile won its independence.
Large forestry companies and farm owners control large tracts of land originally belonging to the Mapuche, many of whom now live in rural poverty.
Boric, who travelled to the area on Saturday with a large contingent, including top military and congressional officials and the president of the Supreme Court, offered condolences to the victims’ families, promising the killers would be found and brought to justice.
“There will be no impunity,” he said after firefighters dousing the burning police car made the grisly discovery.
In Santiago, hundreds of people gathered outside the presidential palace to protest against the killings, which coincided with National Police Day, celebrating the 97th anniversary of the establishment of the Carabineros, Chile’s military police force. It was the second such fatal attack on the force this month.
Ricardo Yanez, the Carabineros’s general director, told reporters the officers had been dispatched in response to fake distress calls from the rural road, where they were met with a barrage of gunfire.
“This was not coincidental, it was not random,” he said of the ambush.
The spate of bloodshed has tested Boric, who came to power in 2022 promising to ease tensions in the region, where armed Mapuche activists have been stealing timber and attacking forestry companies that they claim invaded their ancestral lands.
Boric’s administration has touted its success in reducing Chile’s national homicide rate by 6 percent, according to government figures from 2023 published earlier this week.
“This attack goes against all the enormous strides that have been made,” said Interior Minister Carolina Toha, a centre-left former mayor of Santiago.
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A deranged woman-hating maniac wanted for more than a half-dozen random attacks on women in the Big Apple is finally in custody, police and sources said Tuesday.
Daquan Armstead, 31, was picked up by cops shortly after midnight and charged with third-degree assault and harassment in eight unprovoked attacks on women over the past month, the sources said.
That includes an April 17 attack on a 27-year-old administrator at New York University, who was slugged in the face while walking through Washington Square Park around 10:30 a.m., according to police.
The NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating, although details weren’t released.
Armstead is also being charged in seven other attacks this year.
The violent spree began on Feb. 12, when police said Armstead allegedly walked up to a 30-year-old woman on Elizabeth Street around 11:50 a.m. and punched her without warning, then fled.
On March 24 he allegedly attacked a 30-year-old woman on Delancy Street at around 2 a.m., hitting the victim in the back of the head as she turned. He then ran from the scene.
The following day Armstead is charged with punching a 36-year-old woman in the back as she walked along Chrystie and Rivington streets around 10:15 a.m., police said.
On April 2, he allegedly slugged another woman after he asked the 38-year-old victim for $1 and she replied that she had no cash — so he punched her in the back of the head.
Police said he is also accused of attacking two women in separate incidents on Delancey Street on April 5 — a 25-year-old who was slugged on the right side of her head around 12:25 p.m. and a 44-year-old who was punched in the face just five minutes later, according to cops.
In the last alleged attack before the assault on the NYU administrator, police said Armstead punched a 24-year-old woman on Stanton Street after she also refused when he asked her for $1 shortly before 10 a.m.
Records show his prior busts date to a 2021 misdemeanor asault case.
He is expected to be arraigned on the new charges later on Tuesday.
Police have also been investigating a series of other attacks on woman that have not been linked to Armstead, including a 23-year-old woman slugged outside Union Square McDonald’s last month.
Among the other recent victims was Halley Kate, an influencer with 1.1 million followers on TikTok, who posted a video last week saying she was assaulted so viciously that she blacked out.
Skiboky Stora, 40, a criminal with an extensive criminal record, was busted in that case.
In another random attack, a 57-year-old Brooklyn school bus aide was slugged by an unhinged man — a brutal attack that broke her jaw and knocked out several teeth — in Crown Heights, cops said.
Franz Jeudy, 33 — who has a history of sucker-punch attacks and mental illness — was hit with misdemeanor assault charges in that attack, according to a criminal complaint..
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President Joe Biden expected to swiftly sign bill that lets intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance without seeking warrant.
The United States Senate has voted to approve the reauthorisation of a controversial surveillance programme widely used by US intelligence agencies abroad, but criticised by civil liberties organisations.
Senators voted 60-34 shortly after midnight to pass the bill, and the White House said President Joe Biden will “swiftly sign the bill into law”.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, enables US intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance without seeking a judicial warrant.
In particular, it allows them to sweep up communications, including phone calls and emails, of non-Americans anywhere outside of US territory. That includes communications from US citizens to foreigners targeted for monitoring.
Its reauthorisation secures what supporters call a key element of US foreign intelligence gathering.
“Democrats and Republicans came together and did the right thing for our country’s safety,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
“We all know one thing: letting FISA expire would be dangerous. It’s an important part of our national security, to stop acts of terror, drug trafficking and violent extreme extremism.”
Though the spy programme was technically set to expire at midnight, Biden’s administration had said it expected its authority to collect intelligence and to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an opinion earlier this month from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which receives surveillance applications.
FISA has attracted criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who argue it violates Americans’ constitutional right to privacy.
The bill was blocked three times in the past five months by House Republicans bucking their party, before passing last week by a 273-147 vote when its duration was shortened from five years to two years.
Although the right to privacy is enshrined in the US Constitution, foreign nationals’ data gathered by the programme often includes communications with Americans, and can be mined by domestic law enforcement bodies such as the FBI without a warrant. That has alarmed many.
Recent revelations that the FBI used this power to hunt for information about Black Lives Matter protesters, congressional campaign donors and US lawmakers have raised further doubts about the programme’s integrity.
In the past year, US officials have revealed a series of abuses and mistakes by FBI analysts in improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the US, including a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests of 2020 and the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
But members on both the House and Senate intelligence committees as well as the US Department of Justice said requiring a warrant would handicap officials from quickly responding to national security threats.
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French prosecutors say no explosives found on suspect or at the Iranian consular office in Paris.
French police have arrested a man who threatened to blow himself up at Iran’s embassy in Paris.
Police found no explosives at the embassy or on the suspect who was detained there on Friday, French prosecutors said, after the embassy’s consular office reported a man had entered with ammunition.
Police arrested the suspect, born in 1963 in Iran, when he exited of his own accord after appearing to have “threatened violent action” inside, the Agence France-Presse news agency quoted the Paris prosecutor’s office as saying.
But “no explosive materials have been observed at this stage,” either on him, in his car or in the building, prosecutors said.
A police source told the Reuters news agency the man was seen about 11am (09:00 GMT) entering the consular office, carrying what appeared to be a grenade and explosive vest. Police cordoned off the area.
The man later left the office and was then arrested, the police source said.
The TV channel BFM said he had been carrying replica grenades.
A police source said it was the same man who had been suspected of attempted arson near the Iranian embassy in an incident in September.
Le Parisien newspaper said on its website that, according to several witnesses, the man had dragged flags on the floor of the consulate and said he wanted to avenge the death of his brother.
An AFP journalist said the whole neighbourhood around the consulate in the capital’s 16th district had been closed off and a heavy police presence was in place.
Paris transport company RATP wrote on the social media platform X that traffic had been suspended on two metro lines that pass through stops close to the consulate.
Iran’s embassy and consulate in the French capital share the same building but have two different entrances on separate streets.
The incident came with tensions running high in the Middle East; however, there was no suggestion of any link.
Earlier on Friday, explosions echoed over the Iranian city of Isfahan in what sources described as an Israeli attack. Tehran played down the incident and indicated it had no plans for retaliation, a response that appeared aimed at averting a regional war.
Meanwhile, countries around the world and the United Nations have called for de-escalation as tensions in the region rise.
The United States embassy in Paris asked Americans to avoid the area around the Iranian embassy, following similar recommendations by French police.
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Police say five suspects arrested, three more being sought over theft of 6,600 gold bars at Toronto airport last year.
Police in Canada have arrested multiple people accused of stealing thousands of gold bars worth more than 20 million Canadian dollars ($14m), in what authorities say was the largest gold heist in the country’s history.
Last year’s theft at a Toronto Pearson International Airport facility was orchestrated by a “well-organised group of criminals”, Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah told reporters on Wednesday.
“This particular theft has become the largest gold theft in Canadian history, and it’s one of the largest, for that matter, in North America.”
The shipment of 6,600 gold bars weighed 400kg (882 pounds) and came from a refinery in Switzerland. That cargo, along with 2.5 million Canadian dollars ($1.8m) in foreign bank notes, was stolen from an Air Canada facility on April 17, 2023.
On Wednesday, police named nine suspects in the heist and detailed the charges they face.
Five of the suspects were arrested in Canada and released on bail pending trial, police said.
One additional suspect, originally from Brampton, Ontario, was arrested in the state of Pennsylvania after being discovered with dozens of illegal firearms. That person remains in custody in the United States.
Canada-wide arrest warrants have been issued for the remaining three suspects.
The accused include two Air Canada employees and a jewellery store owner, as well as the alleged getaway driver.
According to authorities, the stolen gold was initially offloaded from a plane and then securely stored in a cargo holding facility.
Two and a half hours later, a man driving a truck arrived at the loading dock with a fraudulent air waybill to claim the cargo. The document he used to track the international shipments had been printed at the Air Canada cargo facility.
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s announcement, Air Canada said it had suspended one cargo division employee charged in the theft. The other, who worked in the same department at the time of the heist, had left the airline before the charges were announced.
“As this is now before the courts, we are limited in our ability to comment further,” Air Canada said in a statement.
Authorities said they believe some of the suspects were also involved in illegal firearms trafficking.
Police added that they seized 430,000 Canadian dollars ($312,000) believed to be profits from the sale of the gold, and six “crudely made” gold bracelets worth an estimated $89,000 Canadian dollars ($65,000).
They are still searching for the rest of the gold.
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Video captured the killing in Israel of Yaacub Touhi, a 50-year-old Palestinian who was a 20-year veteran of USAID. Touhi was shot ten times after an altercation near his home in Jaffa and Israeli media say an off-duty police officer has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
Published On 16 Apr 2024
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Sugnu, India – Ratan Kumar Singh, a 58-year-old high school teacher, never imagined he would be happy to see armed fighters, or “revolutionaries” as he called them. But on May 28 last year, Singh welcomed them to his town of Sugnu in Manipur, a state in India’s northeast corner bordering Myanmar.
For nearly three weeks, the small town had managed to dodge the ethnic violence between the Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribespeople that had engulfed the rest of the state since May 3. But that day, four people were killed in the area and 12 injured as bullets found their way from surrounding hilly regions and from a camp dominated by the Kuki-Zo community.
“Then they started burning our houses. Our reinforcements, including the police and our civilian volunteers, started firing back. It was only when the revolutionaries came that we succeeded in overcoming the other side,” Singh told Al Jazeera.
“We were never for gun violence … but when we saw the revolutionaries and other Meitei volunteers come on that day, we cried [out of happiness] because we knew we would be safe.”
The fighters who came to defend Sugnu were, like him, ethnically Meitei.
Eleven months on, the conflict has killed 219 people, injured 1,100, displaced 60,000 and divided the state into ethnic territories. Armed groups have been fighting battles using sophisticated weapons and explosives in rural parts for territorial control even as more than 60,000 armed forces of the federal government and the state have so far failed to bring a durable end to the violence.
Each episode of violence and killing has punctured the claims of bridging divides that prime minister and right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi made during an election rally two years ago when he was campaigning for re-election of his party’s chief minister, N Biren Singh, a Meitei.
“From ‘blockade state’, Manipur is paving the way for international trade. Our government has launched … campaigns to bridge the gaps between the Hill and the Valley,” he said during the rally.
Modi was referring to the historical discrimination felt by tribal communities, including the Kukis, who live on the hillsides and feel that the Meitei community is economically more prosperous than them and are in the majority in the smaller valleys and the capital, Imphal. Modi said Chief Minister Singh’s policies had fostered a more integrated relationship between the hill and valley communities.
It appeared true at the time. In several parts of the hills, the civil society and the rebel groups of the Kuki-Zo community canvassed for Chief Minister Singh, and top politicians of the tribal community lined up for tickets from his party.
Chief Minister Singh swept the elections. In his second tenure beginning 2022, the BJP won five of the 10 state assembly seats from the Kuki-dominated hill constituencies. BJP legislators (MLAs) from these constituencies increased to seven after two of the Kuki MLAs who had won on Janata Dal United tickets defected to the governing party in September 2022. Two out of seven MLAs became ministers in his cabinet.
However, two years later, Modi and Singh’s claims bit dust, with Manipur witnessing unending ethnic violence between the Kuki and Meitei people, arguably, the longest-running ethnic conflict the country has witnessed in the 21st century.
Now, as the state prepares to vote in national elections on April 19 and April 26, those divisions have become entrenched, with a resurgence in armed groups formed along ethnic lines, as the first part of this series showed. It also revealed a presentation by the Assam Rifles that listed several factors that played a role in igniting the conflict: illegal immigrants from Myanmar, the demand for Kukiland, political authoritarianism and ambition of Chief Minister Singh and his war on drugs among others.
A joint force of Police, Forest & MR carried out a Poppy destruction drive at Tora Champhung Hill Range under Ukhrul district.
16 hectares of illicit poppy fields were destroyed, 20 huts burned, and other infrastructures such as pipeline connection, fertilizers, salt,… pic.twitter.com/8S2YE7MiZI
— N.Biren Singh (Modi Ka Parivar) (@NBirenSingh) November 15, 2023
The war on drugs first played a significant role in the political landscape and later in fuelling the conflict in Manipur. This concluding part of the series investigates how the drug trade and politics over it have roiled Manipur.
In 2018, still in his first term as chief minister, Singh announced his war on drugs.
“Thousands of hectares of land are used for poppy cultivation in areas near the international border with Myanmar,” he told the media.
Poor economic conditions, lack of job opportunities and easy availability of drugs had led to a high number of drug addicts in the state, he said.
He was not wrong. Manipur sits adjacent to the infamous “Golden Triangle”, an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines the region as one of the “biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world”. Heroin, opium and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine from the region are “feeding the whole of the Asia Pacific [region]”, the UN said.
The spillover of the trade into Manipur has an old history.
“The drug trade has caught up in Manipur in the last 15 years. [Recently,] the US, other Western countries and the United Nations [have] started going after Myanmar and the Golden Triangle,” Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh, a Meitei, who retired in 2017, told me.
He added, “As a result, the Golden Triangle extended towards the West [into Manipur]. It was accelerated by the armed groups who found easy money.”
He was referring to the array of armed rebel groups of different ethnicities, including the Kuki and Meitei fighters, that proliferate in Manipur and are involved in the drug trade across the porous borders with Myanmar.
By several accounts, the drug trade has seen a rise over the past two decades.
“During the ’90s and ’80s, there were only some hotspots in Manipur where drugs were sold. Now, it is found everywhere” across the state, said Maibam Jogesh, co-convenor of the 3.5 Collective, a coalition of 18 civil society groups campaigning against the drug and alcohol menace.
Jogesh, who also heads the Users Society for Effective Response – one of the oldest community organisations of drug abuse victims in the state – said their field workers had found poppy cultivation in the hills of Manipur as far back as 2006.
“In the last six to seven years, manufacturing units have come up in several parts of the state, even Imphal,” he added. The locally made, cruder version, called Thum Morok – the Meitei phrase for salt and chilli – came to replace the “Number 4″ heroin, which was produced in Myanmar.
In mid-December, “the cost of Thum Morok was 500 rupees per gramme [$6 per 0.03 ounces]. Compared to this, 20 years ago, you could buy Number 4 from Myanmar for 1,200 rupees per gramme [$14.40 per 0.03 ounces],” Jogesh added.
As a result, the number of drug users also increased.
Back in June 2023, Manipur police’s then-superintendent of Narcotics and Border Affairs and current police superintendent of the Bishnupur district, K Meghachandra, told me, “There is cultivation in the hills. Now in the valley, a lot of processing units have been established, particularly in the Thoubal and Bishnupur districts,” which adjoin the hill areas. “The processing units [of brown sugar] are mainly in the Muslim areas,” Meghachandra said. He added, “In Imphal, Meiteis are the transporters.”
According to the data he shared, of the 2,518 arrests made in drug cases since 2017, 873 were “Kuki-Chin” people, 1,083 were Muslims, 381 were Meiteis and 181 were “others”.
That month, sitting inside a shanty house in a corner of the Churachandpur district, which is dominated by the Kuki-Zo community, I met a few poppy cultivators.
“I switched to poppy cultivation in 2014 because in those days a kilo of chilli was 50 rupees to 60 rupees [$0.27 – $0.33 per pound]. I couldn’t depend on that. The cost of living is high and I have seven kids,” said one of the cultivators, who didn’t wish to be named.
Today, the drug economy accounts roughly for 700 billion rupees per year ($8.37bn), but only about 20 billion rupees to 25 billion rupees ($240m to $300m) of drugs are intercepted annually, which is less than 5 percent, said Himalay Singh.
The government does not officially put out such estimates, so Al Jazeera could not verify these numbers. But in February 2020, the authorities said, over two and a half years, the government had seized drugs worth more than 20 billion rupees ($240m) and busted five drugs manufacturing makeshift factories in Manipur.
For a tiny state with a population of about 2.72 million people and an annual economy of slightly more than 400 billion rupees ($4.78bn), this is a significant haul. According to an answer to an unstarred question in the Rajya Sabha, 1,728kg (3,909 pounds) of heroin was seized from across the country in 2021 and 2022, which going by the typical retail price of heroin as reported by the UNODC in 2021, was worth $213.24m.
Five months after the chief minister announced a war on drugs, his wife was accused of having connections to an alleged drug lord from the Kuki-Zo community. The claim came from no less than the additional superintendent of police in the Narcotics and Affairs of Border Bureau, Thounaojam Brinda, who later resigned.
In an explosive affidavit to the Manipur High Court, she accused the chief minister of pressuring her to drop the case against an alleged “drug kingpin”, BJP leader and former head of Autonomous District Council (ADC), Lhukhosei Zou.
Brinda, in the affidavit – which Al Jazeera accessed – said she had received a call from then vice president of the Manipur BJP, Asnikumar Moirangthem, a Meitei, on the morning after a raid at Zou’s quarters was reported to have yielded 4.595kg (10 pounds) of heroin powder and 280,200 Yaba (methamphetamine) tablets.
“He told me that the arrested ADC chairman turned out to be CM’s second wife Olice’s [SS Olish] right-hand man in Chandel and that Olice was furious about the arrest,” she wrote in the affidavit and added, “He told me that CM had ordered that the arrested ADC chairman be exchanged with his wife or son and to release him.”
Zou, who had jumped bail, was later acquitted of all charges. All those named by Brinda in her affidavit have denied their role in the drug trade before the courts and in public statements, and none have been convicted of any offences.
The Reporters’ Collective’s questions to the chief minister’s officers, S S Olish and Asnikumar Moirangthem, about the allegations remained unanswered.
In her affidavit, Brinda claimed the authorities caught a small fry while giving a pass to “high-profile drug lords with political connections and politicians themselves”.
The Kuki-dominated hills border Myanmar, and there are recorded cases of the border region being used as routes to funnel drugs just as in other hilly parts of Manipur and other states bordering Myanmar.
“A trade of this volume can only be run with political patronage. In Manipur, politicians, traders and insurgent groups are part of the trade,” a senior retired police officer familiar with intelligence operations in the region told me.
What is audacious is Manipur has one of the largest presence of paramilitary forces, the army and intelligence in the country.
When asked if suspicions over security personnel being involved in the drug trade could be true, Himalay Singh said, “I can’t rule out any individual.”
The retired police officer, too, said, “Moreh [an Indo-Myanmar border town] has been a critical point of smuggling, extortion or loot by security forces.”
Al Jazeera couldn’t verify this independently. But, back in 2022, a Manipur policeman and an Assam Rifles soldier were arrested in Guwahati with banned Yaba tablets worth 200 billion rupees ($2.4bn). According to news reports at the time, the consignment was being smuggled from Moreh.
While it is unclear if any disequilibrium in the drug trade could have led to the crisis, the first part of this series looked at the immediate causes of the conflict based on a presentation by the Assam Rifles on the Manipur conflict.
In fact, Moreh has come to be the most recent flashpoint in the conflict between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities with intermittent fighting taking place there since the end of December. This took a drastic turn on January 17 with a 20-hour gunfight ensuing between Kuki fighters and the Manipur police commandos.
In February, India scrapped the Indo–Myanmar Free Movement Regime (FMR) where residents within 16km (10 miles) of the border had been allowed to cross without a visa, using just a border pass, a move vehemently opposed by the local Kuki-Zo and Naga groups.
With accusations against him petering off, Biren in 2022 claimed again his war on drugs was going well. In January 2022, in a post on X, the chief minister said the government had destroyed 110 acres (about 45 hectares) of poppy cultivation in the hills.
A year later when the conflict began in May 2023, several Meitei civil society organisations gave the drug trade a communal colour by claiming that drug running was largely the business of the Kuki community. On social media, the Kuki community at large was targeted as “Narco Terrorists”. The trope caught on.
Meanwhile, the rift between his party’s elected representatives in the state assembly from the Kuki and Meitei communities came out in the open. The Kuki political leaders accused the chief minister of communalising the state and targeting their community by supporting new Meitei armed groups, Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun.
These were the same MLAs who, with the overt support of the Kuki armed groups, had backed Chief Minister Singh in 2022.
“They are part and parcel of tribal politics. If someone wants to fight elections, you need to have their blessing. After the candidates they sponsor get elected, they [the armed groups] get different contracts [from the government],” said a political observer in the state who declined to be named because of concerns for his safety.
As the ethnic conflict intensifies, both rebel groups and political leaders from the Kuki community, who once allied with the Meitei chief minister, are now visibly distancing themselves.
Unlike the 2019 general elections when it fielded a Kuki-Zo, this time the BJP does not have a candidate for the Outer Manipur seat, which covers the hill districts. But in its campaign for the Inner Manipur (valley) seat, it says its focus is on saving the “indigenous people of Manipur” by fencing the Indo-Myanmar border, ending the Free Movement Regime, the “identification of illegal immigrants”, among other issues that have played into the conflict so far.
Despite holding Biren Singh responsible for the ethnic conflict, Kuki leaders within the BJP have not yet resigned either from his cabinet or the party.
During this period, various Kuki-Zo civil society groups have emerged as prominent advocates for their community’s rights and demands. One of the key demands these groups have consistently rallied around since the onset of the conflict is the establishment of a separate administration, cleaved out of Manipur. This proposition was initially put forth by 10 Kuki-Zo MLAs, seven of whom belong to the BJP.
“Unfortunately, they [the Centre] have been trying to play it down and my reading is that they have been trying or are really buying into Biren [Singh]’s narrative,” said a Kuki-Zo legislator who didn’t wish to be named.
When asked if they planned to resign from the party, the MLA said, “If today I resign from the BJP, the party … will disqualify me from the assembly,” he said, adding, “The majoritarian government is interested in making most or some of the BJP’s members resign and conduct a by-election.”
Considering the anger against the Meitei community, and particularly against Biren Singh, it seems impossible for a candidate endorsed by the state chief minister to win a by-election in the Kuki-dominated hills.
But the MLA hinted otherwise. “Our people being tribals, if there is a by-election they will have a field day splitting people along party lines. That is what they wanted and that has been how politics has been played in India.”
In the upcoming elections, no Kuki-Zo candidates are contesting. All the candidates in the fray for the Outer Manipur seat are Naga with the BJP backing the Naga People’s Front candidate.
The layers of Manipur politics, the linkages between the political elite and their interests across ethnic divides, defy a simpler image of a clash between two communities.
Gun-toting men, young and old, now sit and guard their villages from the neighbouring Kuki and Meitei villages. Every few days, there are headlines on gunfire exchanges and deaths.
According to a retired police officer, who is familiar with intelligence gathering in India’s northeastern states, this kind of “low-grade violence is more dangerous”.
“These are indications that people are being recruited and trained,” he said. Asked what this conflict would spell for the illicit drug trade, he said, “In times of instability, trans-shipment and running becomes more active.”
“The Meiteis can’t go to the hills, and the Kukis can’t come to the valley. But the drugs can still go everywhere,” said Jogesh of the 3.5 Collective.
Angana Chakrabarti is an associate member of The Reporters’ Collective.
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