THE Thailand immigration police chief has met officials from the Saudi embassy in Bangkok as Saudi Arabia tried to distance itself from accusations that it attempted to block a young woman’s effort to flee her family and seek asylum abroad.
Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun arrived in Bangkok from Kuwait late on Saturday after slipping away from her family, who she accused of abuse. The 18-year-old was stopped by officials in Thailand who confiscated her passport.
Her urgent pleas for help over Twitter from an airport hotel room garnered tens of thousands of followers and the attention of the UN’s refugee agency.
Public pressure prompted Thai officials to return her passport and let her temporarily stay in Thailand.
The teenager alleged several times that Saudi officials were involved in seizing her passport, but the embassy in Thailand repeatedly said it was only monitoring her situation.
The statement, which described the case as a “family affair”, said the kingdom did not demand her deportation to Saudi Arabia.
IN Germany a local leader of the Alternative for Germany party has been attacked and injured in the city of Bremen.
Bremen police said they believe the attack on Frank Magnitz, an MP in Germany’s national parliament who leads the party’s local branch and is associated with the right wing of the party, was politically motivated.
Magnitz was beaten over the head with an unidentified object by at least three men wearing dark clothing and hoods or hats, who then fled, police said.
The party, known by its German acronym AfD, distributed a photo of Magnitz lying on a hospital trolley, showing a bloody, gaping wound on his head and his right eye bruised and swollen.
AfD is represented in all of Germany’s 16 state parliaments. It entered the national parliament in 2017 and is currently the biggest opposition party there. It views the country’s established political parties with contempt.
MEANWHILE, in China, a 49-year-old man has injured 20 children with a hammer at a primary school in the capital Beijing.
Three children have serious but non-life-threatening injuries, Xicheng district government said on its social media account.
The suspect, surnamed Jia, was apprehended at the scene.
Jia, from northern Heilongjiang province, was employed through a labour service company to carry out maintenance work at the school.
His contract was set to expire this month and had not been renewed. As an expression of his dissatisfaction, Xicheng district said, Jia wielded a hammer that he normally used for work to injure students during a class.
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