Tuesday, August 9, 2016 The Wall Street Journal

His Afghan lawyer said the trial had been fair and comprehensive.

Mr. Karimullah’s family couldn’t be reached for comment. Court documents show the family accepted a $10,000 payment on his behalf in exchange for forgiveness.

ENLARGE

American lawyer Kimberly Motley said she took on Mr. Langdon’s case pro bono in 2013 because she had successfully represented around 15 foreigners at the prison.

Mr. Langdon’s sentence had earlier been commuted to 20 years.

“Defending Rob was the right thing to do because I believe in justness,” Ms Motley said. “Rob was not given a fair trial, but Afghanistan’s legal system is a work in progress.”

Ms. Motley said she successfully lobbied the government to pass a law in June to specifically allow the government to release Mr. Langdon. The new law allows the government to release foreign detainees if there are good relations with the other country and reciprocity. The Afghan government had no comment on the new law.

A U.S. military spokesman said they played no role in his release.

John Allen, the chief executive of Four Horsemen International, said he and Mr. Langdon had fought together to defend military convoys and he had been an excellent employee until the days that led up to the shooting.

Mr. Langdon had resigned days before the shooting over a dispute about a friend’s employment offer and was set to leave the country when a U.S. colleague called for help and he rushed to the scene, both men said. Mr. Allen said Mr. Langdon, who declined to comment on their conversation, sounded desperate in the moments before he fled to the airport.

“Rob said to me the exact words: ‘Brother I really f—up,’ ” Mr. Allen said. “I talked him down, maybe an eight-minute conversation…and he was crying bad. Then I started crying because it’s my battle buddy.”

—Ehsanullah Amiri 

Write to Jessica Donati at Jessica.Donati@wsj.com

Copyright 2016. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

#
00573705

Aug. 8, 2016 5:38 a.m. ET

MANILA—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s public naming of people allegedly involved in the illegal drugs trade threatens to ruin the reputations of those accused and roll back basic legal rights of the country’s citizens, critics of the newly elected leader said.

Mr. Duterte’s police chief, Ronald Dela Rosa, said Monday that more than 150 officials, judges, policemen and soldiers who Mr. Duterte accused of criminality can’t yet be charged because there is insufficient evidence against them. Investigations into those on the president’s list are under way, Mr. Dela Rosa said.

Mr. Dela Rosa’s statement fueled criticism that Mr. Duterte acted without regard for due process when making his accusations during a televised speech on Sunday.

“The president has ruined the reputation of these people,” Harry Roque, a congressman and former lawyer, said of the individuals concerned—many of whom have said that they are innocent and demanded proof of their alleged wrongdoing.

“We have a system: If you have evidence, you file a complaint,” Mr. Roque said. The point of Sunday’s exercise wasn’t to secure convictions, he added, “otherwise they would have filed this in court.” The public shaming of individuals was a short cut meant as a deterrent against officials with links to the drugs trade, he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Duterte couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Monday, and the Department of Justice didn’t respond to questions.

Mr. Duterte used the speech Sunday to name 158 people he said were responsible for abetting the illegal drug trade, ordering them to surrender to their superiors within 24 hours or be hunted down.

About 50 of the people on the list had surrendered to police in Manila on Monday, with many apparently determined to clear their names.

“If you go back to your old ways, I will kill you,” Mr. Dela Rosa told some of them, echoing similar threats made regularly by Mr. Duterte himself.

The naming-and-shaming comes against the backdrop of a violent national campaign against suspected drug offenders—an approach Mr. Duterte promised during his recent election campaign. Local media have counted more than 500 drug-related deaths since Mr. Duterte took office on June 30, with many shot by police officers for allegedly resisting arrest, or killed by suspected vigilantes.

Mr. Dela Rosa said the president’s accusations were based on intelligence and not on hearsay, but the list of alleged culprits contained at least one error: One of the judges ordered to surrender to the Supreme Court by Monday’s deadline has been dead for eight years, according to Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, who wrote to Mr. Duterte on Monday to express concerns about his methods.

ENLARGE

Ms. Sereno instructed the judges on the list not to surrender unless they are shown a warrant. It was premature to accuse judges of crimes without first communicating with the Supreme Court, she said.

Mr. Duterte said Sunday that he would take full responsibility for any false accusations.

The president’s list mirrored those of drug suspects being drafted around the country by village officials and passed on to local police, said Jose Luis Gascon, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of the Philippines.

“At least the people on the president’s list were asked to report within 24 hours—they have a chance to proclaim their innocence,” said Mr. Gascon, whereas individuals on the lists of alleged local offenders often get no such opportunity. “We’re hearing cases of people on those lists claiming not to be guilty and then being found in a ditch with a bullet in their head,” he said.

A police spokesman said that its officers have strictly followed the rules of engagement while prosecuting the president’s antidrug push.

Mr. Duterte’s anticrime drive is popular with the Filipino public; last month 84% of people said they trusted him in a survey by Social Weather Stations, a local polling service.

Even so, his actions on Sunday drew widespread criticism.

“The president has his own approach, and it appears he loves this naming-and-shaming strategy,” said Mr. Gascon, pointing also to the naming of five allegedly corrupt police generals last month. “We support the anticrime effort. But naming and shaming cannot be a substitution for probable-cause procedures.”

Write to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com

Copyright 2016. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

#
00573706

Aug. 8, 2016 8:14 p.m. ET

CHANDIGARH, India—Just after midnight, Indian forces patrolling the country’s frontier with Pakistan closed in on a group of armed smugglers.

A firefight erupted. When the shooting stopped, two men were dead. Three others were apprehended and their cargo, 33 pounds of heroin, confiscated.

Nearly half of India’s heroin seizures, like this one in June, are made here in Punjab, a northern state that has become a conduit for drugs from the terror-funding opium fields of Afghanistan to markets across Asia, Europe and elsewhere, authorities say.

Illegal narcotics and their legacy of addiction, disease and social upheaval in Punjab were recently the subject of a controversial movie that set off a debate ahead of upcoming state elections.

But Indian antinarcotics and intelligence officials say the damage goes much further. Overlapping groups of drug traffickers, criminals and Islamist fighters in Pakistan, they say, are ferrying anti-India Muslim extremists, counterfeit currency and weapons across the border. Authorities suspect the sale of heroin also helps finance jihadist attacks.

“Once you’ve figured a way in through the border, it becomes a conveyor belt,” a senior Punjab police official said. “You can push drugs or terrorists or anything else.”

The India-Pakistan border isn’t an easy frontier to carry out illegal activity. Barbed-wire fencing runs along much of the 1,800-mile stretch—the product of decades of rivalry that goes back to India’s partition at the end of British rule—and is patrolled round the clock by heavily armed Indian guards.

Earlier this year, six Pakistani militants breached a major Indian air base close to the Pakistan border in Punjab, killing seven people. Investigators say they are looking into whether they entered India with the help of smugglers—and the possible role of an Indian police officer.

The problem isn’t new. Prime Minister Narendra Modi used one of his first monthly radio addresses in 2014 to underline the drug trade’s impact on security.

“Have you ever thought about our soldiers—a soldier who is so dear to his mother, the treasured son of mother India—the brave son of the soil who is hit by a bullet probably funded by the money spent on purchasing drugs?” he said.

But authorities say recent cases point to increasingly regular contact between smugglers and militants. Investigations into a 2014 case have outlined an extensive network that appears to range across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kuwait. Police that year arrested a 26-year-old constable named Khurshid Alam while he was allegedly delivering 22 pounds of heroin, wrapped in cloth bags labeled “Dawat Basmati Rice,” to two men.

According to police documents and interviews with two officers involved in the case, Mr. Alam said his supplier was a senior commander of Hizbul Mujahideen,an Islamist extremist group fighting for the separation of Kashmir, a disputed region both India and Pakistan claim. Mr. Alam said the militant, Fayyaz Ahmed Khan, was a relative by marriage.

Indian police said they believe Mr. Khan is based in the Pakistani city of Abottabad, where U.S. Special Forces killed former al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in 2011. Indian security officials say his group is among the terror organizations that receive support from Pakistan’s military, something Pakistan denies.

Mr. Alam and his family told police Mr. Khan was also regularly involved in getting militants and weapons into India, police said. Mr. Alam’s lawyer confirmed he had made such allegations to the authorities. Mr. Khan couldn’t be located to comment.

Mr. Alam, whose trial is ongoing, has pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking charges. His lawyer, Vikas Gautam, said his client denied being a drug courier and denied being apprehended while in possession of narcotics.

A police probe into the two men to whom Mr. Alam was allegedly delivering the drugs led investigators to an India-born man called “Ali,” who they said appears, based on intercepted telephone calls, to be running a large drug-trafficking operation from a jail cell in Kuwait.

Mr. Ali’s conversations are brief, Indian officials said, and are intercepted only rarely when they happen to be routed through India. But the calls indicate he is coordinating the movement of Afghan heroin through a chain of couriers and peddlers, some of them militants.

Police said they have yet to contact Kuwaiti authorities because they are unsure of Ali’s real identity.

“It’s easy for them to communicate across borders, but not for us to investigate,” one official said. “Drugs or terrorism or whatever, we are bound by the bureaucracy and the politics.”

Smugglers have found ways to break through the heavily armed border. In February, security forces shot dead four men—two Indian, two Pakistan—who were using a long plastic pipe to push 22 pounds of heroin, wrapped into numerous small packets, through gaps in the wire of the border fence.

In May 2015, two Pakistani men filled a waterproof bag with 43 pounds of heroin and a revolver and swam the Ravi River, which straddles the border. They were arrested on the Indian side. The following month, an Indian farmer was caught transporting 110 pounds of heroin in hollowed-out logs.

The senior Punjab police official said smugglers who once moved gold in the 1960s have shifted to heroin, which is much more lucrative. They have been aided in recent years by online mapping and instant-messaging services like WhatsApp, the official said.

Corrupt Indian officials and politicians also help facilitate the smugglers. Kiren Rijiju, minister of state in the Home Ministry, told Parliament that 68 members of various security forces have been arrested since 2014 for alleged involvement in drug trafficking.

Write to Niharika Mandhana at niharika.mandhana@wsj.com

Copyright 2016. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

#
00573707
New School Year Brings Test for Integrating Refugees in Germany
Hundreds of thousands expected to start classes with basic language skills
By Andrea Thomas
The Wall Street Journal. Online Edition. Thursday, August 17, y. -=-

Aug. 8, 2016 5:09 p.m. ET

BERLIN—Chancellor Angela Merkel’s confidence that Germany can handle the challenges of integrating refugees faces a test when the summer vacation ends and many young migrants enter classrooms for the first time.

Around a third of the million or so newly arrived asylum seekers are potentially school-age. Many of them have just completed their basic German-language instruction and are due to begin regular schooling this fall.

The scale of the challenge worries teachers, local governments, and others who say Ms. Merkel’s “we can do it” mantra is heading for a reality check.

The sheer number of new pupils means the 16 state governments, which are responsible for education, need 20,000 more teachers and more and bigger classrooms, teachers unions say.

ENLARGE

A recent spate of violent attacks in Germany, including two by Islamists, has increased public fears that the task of integrating all of the newcomers successfully, in the labor force as well as schools, could prove more difficult than Ms. Merkel acknowledges.

Bavaria’s state governor Horst Seehofer, whose party is also a junior partner in Ms. Merkel’s coalition, has repeatedly challenged her “we can do it” slogan.

“With the best will, I can’t adopt this phrase as my own,” Mr. Seehofer said on July 30. “The problem is simply too big for that and the approaches so far at solving it are simply unsatisfactory.”

He called for the government to focus more strongly on the security risks posed by young asylum seekers who might be recruited by Islamic State.

Already, many teachers who have encountered young refugees and migrants have found the experience sobering. Young refugees from the Middle East and South Asia often suffer from language issues, illiteracy and trauma.

“I have some pupils who have been out of school for three or four years while they were fleeing their home country,” said Guido Siegel, who teaches teenage refugees in Berlin. “They have problems and learn very slowly.”

ENLARGE

When migrant children arrive, they initially attend transition classes aimed at teaching them German. After 12 to 18 months, they attend regular classes with German children.

The 16 states reckon they will spend €2.3 billion ($2.55 billion) this year alone on transition courses for the roughly 350,000 school-age children who entered the country since last year.

But teachers and parents say it isn’t enough, and that migrant children will need special support beyond that.

“We have got 15-year-olds or 16-year-olds. They learn German in the transition class for a year but then can’t manage the jump to regular classes,” said Gabi Audehm, a teacher who advises schools in the eastern Berlin district of Treptow on migrant children.

Even before the refugee wave, Germany had a mixed record at integrating immigrants. In 2013, unemployment among young people with an immigrant background was 15%, twice the level for native Germans.

Kai Maaz, from the German Institute for International Educational Research, said Germany should invest an additional €2.2 billion to €3 billion a year and hire 44,000 new teachers if it wants migrant children to integrate.

“If we don’t succeed in this, these young people will have the same problems as migrant children who have lived here longer,” he said. “Or worse.”

State governments say they can’t afford to hire enough new teachers and want Berlin to shoulder €10 billion a year of the extra costs. Berlin has offered far less, a total of €7 billion by 2018.

The populist Alternative for Germany party, which has lambasted Ms. Merkel’s migrant policies, says the arrival of so many refugee children is bad for native German pupils.

“A teacher doesn’t have unlimited attention or support to give,” said Lars Löwe, a teacher and senior party official in Germany’s relatively poor northeast. “ Of course, there is the risk that those [German] children who also have extra needs will lose out.”

Write to Andrea Thomas at andrea.thomas@wsj.com

Copyright 2016. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

#
00573708

Aug. 8, 2016 12:08 p.m. ET

BERLIN—Saudi authorities have offered Berlin help in investigating two attacks claimed by Islamic State in Germany last month, officials from both countries said on Monday.

Authorities here said the terror militia abroad had not only inspired the attacks but appeared to have helped execute them by instructing both perpetrators in how to maximize casualties. The investigation had shown that IS members abroad had helped the perpetrators and that at least one of them had a Saudi cellphone number, a German official said.

The findings, derived from a probe of the perpetrators’ electronic devices, suggest a more deliberate campaign by IS to attack Germany than authorities had expected in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, which left several people wounded but claimed no casualties except the two perpetrators.

The atrocities by two recently arrived asylum seekers have punctured a sense of calm in Germany, which had so far been spared the large-scale terror assaults seen in France and Belgium. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who presided over the arrival of well over a million refugees since the beginning of last year, has seen her popularity ratings plummet in the weeks following the attacks.

The German government welcomed Saudi Arabia’s offer to share intelligence on the attacks, which both took place in the southern German state of Bavaria.

“Cooperation with Saudi Arabia’s security authorities is of substantial value to us,” Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said on Monday.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Sawsan Chebli said “Germany and other Western countries have been working successfully with Saudi Arabia in the fight against terrorism. Information provided from the Saudi side has in the past decisively helped to prevent terror attacks in Germany.”

German investigators said the attackers who struck in Würzburg and Ansbachdays apart had conducted detailed and lengthy discussions with suspected members of Islamic State abroad, at least one of whom was using a Saudi cellphone number.

Saudi interior ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki said Saudi authorities were investigating information that one of the suspected foreign handlers was using a social media account linked to a Saudi cellphone.

Officials from both countries said this didn't necessarily mean the handler was physically located in Saudi Arabia at the time.

Before detonating a bomb concealed in a backpack in Ansbach on July 24, Syrian refugee Mohammad Daleel sent a photo to Saudi cellphone number showing the location of an outdoor concert to be held later, saying the place would be crowded, one person familiar with the investigations in Germany said.

The contact then told Daleel to kill all the people, this person said.

On the evening of the attack, Daleel was refused entry to the concert area because he didn’t have a ticket. He then walked toward a restaurant’s outdoor sitting area when his backpack exploded, killing Daleel and wounding 15 people.

Germany’s first attack claimed by Islamic State occurred a mere days earlier, on July 18, when refugee Riaz Khan Ahmadzai attacked four tourists in a commuter train with an ax and a knife. After fleeing and wounding a passersby, he was shot dead by police.

In the days before the attack Ahmadzai had discussed his plans with an IS contact who used a different number from Daleel’s handler, the person close to the investigation said. The person declined to say whether Ahmadzai’s contact was also using a Saudi number.

In these conversations, Ahmadzai and his contacts had discussed how to maximize casualties, the person said. The contact initially suggested Ahmadzai drive a car into a crowd, but the youngster declined, saying he didn’t have a driver’s license.

Saudis make up one of the largest groups of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to the Soufan Group, a New York-based consulting firm. But Islamic State has also attacked Saudi Arabia various times over the past year, killing dozens of people, most of them members of the country’s small Shiite minority.

Early last month, a suicide bomber struck near one of Islam’s holiest sites inMedina, killing four security guards. Around the same time, a second suicide bombing attacked a mosque in the eastern city Qatif, home to many Shiites.