the times | Thursday November 11 2021 39
World
Angela Merkel’s right-hand man is
considering a surprise run for the
leadership of her centre-right party,
according to reports.
Helge Braun, 49, head of Merkel’s
chancellery, is widely viewed as an
emollient backroom operator but his
public profile has grown as he be-
came one of the faces of the govern-
ment’s pandemic response.
Some politicians in the embattled
Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
believe Braun could be a centrist
Merkel’s man mulls leadership bid
Germany
Oliver Moody Berlin
spoken former professor and anaes-
thesiology specialist, once described
as the “master of puppets” behind the
Merkel administration, is popular
with parts of the CDU establishment.
Although it is doubtful that the
party’s conservative-leaning base
would necessarily embrace a figure
so closely associated with the Merkel
era, rumours that he might enter the
race seem to have rattled Merz.
One of his close supporters told
Bild: “The last thing the CDU needs
now is an anaesthetist ... This is the
old establishment’s desperate final
roll of the dice.”counterweight to Friedrich Merz, 66,
a conservative and early frontrunner.
Reeling from the worst general
election result in its history, the CDU
will let its 400,000 members pick the
next party leader for the first time.
A senior CDU source said the con-
test was likely to be a direct duel
between Merz, the strongest figure
on the party’s right wing, and Norbert
Röttgen, 56, a more centrist MP and
former environment minister who
describes himself as a moderniser.
Though Merz appears to have the
upper hand, Braun’s candidacy might
tilt the balance of power. The softlybrought his family to Italy five years
earlier while he studied medicine.
An Italian court entrusted the boy
to his father’s sister who lived close to
the Birans near Pavia, a decision con-
tested by his maternal family in
Israel, who claimed that he risked
losing his Jewish and Israeli identity if
he stayed in Italy.
On September 11 Biran’s maternal
grandfather, Peleg, defied the Italian
court by flying Biran to Tel Aviv,
where he is now appealing against an
order from an Israeli court to send
him back. Peleg, believed to be a
former Israeli military officer, alle-
gedly drove Biran into Switzerland in
a rented car and flew him to Israel
from Lugano airport on a private jet
costing €42,000, magistrates said.
He was assisted by Gabriel Abutbul
Alon, 51, an Israeli living in Cyprus, —
also the subject of the arrest warrant
— who magistrates described as a
likely employee of the US private mil-
itary company Blackwater.
The Italian daily newspaper Corri-
ere della Sera said yesterday that Alon
had been ejected from an Italian
court hearing earlier this year about
Biran’s fate, after posing as a lawyer.Ethiopian police have been accused
of ethnically motivated arrests as
rebels advance on the capital, having
captured several strategic towns.
Insurgents from the northern Ti-
gray region claim to have joined
forces with rebels from Oromia,
Ethiopia’s biggest state, on a march to
Addis Ababa. They announced an
alliance on Friday with eight other
factions bent on toppling the govern-
ment of Abiy Ahmed, who won the
Nobel peace prize in 2019.
Abiy’s government has urged citi-
zens to join the armed forces and reg-
ister their weapons. It has imposed a
state of emergency, giving the author-
ities power to arrest and detain with-
out a warrant anyone accused of aid-
ing terrorists.
The Ethiopian Human Rights
Commission said this week that
police appeared to be using the emer-
gency order to arrest people “based
on ethnicity”.
The state-appointed organisation
did not name any ethnic group but a
lawyer told The Times that thousands
Ethiopia seizes Tigrayan
civilians under new laws
of Tigrayans had been rounded up.
The group makes up 6 per cent of
Ethiopia’s 110 million people.
“The police are arresting them in
their homes after their neighbours in-
form on them, and in workplaces,
hotels and restaurants,” the lawyer
said.
“If you are in a taxi and people hear
you speaking Tigrinya, they will call
the police to arrest you. It is danger-
ous to go outside.”
Several Tigrayan residents of Addis
Ababa said friends and relatives had
been stopped by plain-clothes police
officers who overheard them speak-
ing their language in cafés and bars.
One said that relatives had been
arrested bringing a detained family
member food at a police station.
Another Tigrayan said that her
father, a retired public servant in his
eighties, was arrested at his home on
Saturday evening by police who ac-
cused him of storing weapons and for-
eign currency for the rebels.
“He’s never owned a gun in his life,”
she said, “so he laughed when they
said this, and when he laughed, they
struck him.”
Her father is diabetic and hashypertension. She said that on
Monday a non-Tigrayan relative
managed to bring him some medica-
tion at the police station but had not
been able to visit him since.
A third Tigrayan, who works at a
federal ministry, said that he was ar-
rested in July and held for more than
two weeks with about 70 other mem-
bers of his ethnic group. Several
neighbours and colleagues have been
swept up in the most recent rounds of
arrests. “Under the state of emer-
gency, they don’t have to release you,”
he said.
The police denied that the arrests
were based on ethnicity, saying that
those detained had “directly or indi-
rectly” backed the Tigray People’s
Liberation Front (TPLF), an outlawed
group that once dominated Ethiopia’s
politics but is now leading the rebels.
Fighting has been raging in north-
ern Ethiopia for a year. The conflict
began when rebels loyal to the TPLF
attacked a federal army base in Ti-
gray, prompting the government to
order a military offensive against the
region. Eritrean soldiers entered from
the north and fought alongside gov-
ernment troops.Ethiopia
Fred Harter Addis Ababa
An Israeli man accused of snatching
his grandson, six, and flying him to
Israel after the boy survived an
Italian cable car crash is facing an
international warrant for his arrest.
Shmuel Peleg, 58, and a second
Israeli man both face extradition
after an Italian magistrate alleged
that they staged the “meticulously”
organised abduction of Eitan Biran in
September on a private jet.
In a statement announcing the two
warrants yesterday, the magistrate’s
office in Pavia in northern Italy also
accused Peleg’s former wife of a sepa-
rate plot to bribe a woman to smuggle
the boy to Israel.
The extradition requests are the
latest twist in a tragedy that began on
May 23 when Biran was the lone sur-
vivor of a cable car crash at Lake
Maggiore in northern Italy. His
mother, father, brother, 2, and great-
grandparents were among the 14 pas-
sengers killed.
Biran suffered serious injuries but
was protected from the impact by his
father, Amit Biran, 30, who hadCable car boy’s grandfather
faces global arrest warrant
Italy
Tom Kington RomeHeight of achievement Rémi Ouvrard balances on a hot air balloon at 3,637m in Châtellerault, west France, setting a world
record after he clambered on to a chair fastened to the top. He was tethered to the chair with the help of a harness and rope
GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES