Police say a toddler’s body that washed up on the Norwegian coast on New Year’s Day is that of a boy who died along with his family as they attempted to cross the Channel.
The child has been identified as Artin Irannezhad, who was 15 months old when he drowned with his parents and two older siblings.
Rasoul Iran-Nejad and his wife Shiva Mohammed Panahi, both 35, drowned along with their three children, including Anita, who was nine, and six-year-old Armin.
The body of Artin, who was wearing a blue overall and life jacket, was not found at the time and drifted across the North Sea to Norway.
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His remains washed up in the municipality of Karmoey in the southwest of the country – more than two months after the tragedy.
Police were able to confirm the toddler’s identity by matching his DNA with a relative close enough in lineage who happens to live in Norway.
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Camilla Tjelle Waage, head of investigations at the sheriff’s office in Karmoey, confirmed: “The boy who was found is Artin Irannezhad.
“He is of Iranian origin and disappeared during a shipwreck in the English Channel off the coast of France on 27 October.
“Both parents died, as well as Artin’s two older siblings who were found dead after the shipwreck. The rest of the family have been notified.”
She added: “This story is tragic, but at least it’s good to be able to give the relatives an answer.”
Choman Manish said he spoke to them most days at their makeshift home in a camp on the outskirts of Dunkirk, France.
The 37-year-old Kurd, from Iraq, told Sky News they were a “beautiful friendly family”.
Mr Manish said: “I’m really so sad because I know this family. I advised them, please don’t go by boat, it’s not good and a really bad situation if you stay in the water.
“I said, it will be bad for you. They told me God is big. I know God is big, but what can I do?
“I told them many times, but they never accepted my word… they trusted in God, they think God will protect them.”
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‘I said please don’t go by boat’ before fatal trip
Fifteen people were rescued following the sinking.
Thousands of migrants attempt to cross into Europe each year by land and sea from North Africa, the Middle East and beyond in search of a better life.
They often taking huge risks and pay large amounts to people smugglers.
The hospital has seen three close attacks recently, including one which landed outside the emergency department, blocking its entrance and injuring casualties who had just been tended to by ER staff.
“They were injured twice,” says one doctor. “Once from bombs on their home, and then this as they were about to leave.”
The medics believe the nearby attacks are intended to scare them to leave or abandon the hospital.
Dr Abdul Nasser, who is a general surgeon at the hospital (which we are not naming for safety reasons), tells us how he fears the attacks, which are coming ever closer, are a deliberate tactic.
“As soon as the doctors leave then no one will stay in my city,” Dr Nasser says. “And once people leave, it is very difficult to come back.”
He goes on to urge his medical staff to stay in position and keep on working. “Soldiers can’t leave the battle… so likewise doctors, nurses, must stay in the hospitals. I don’t want anyone to leave. We must stay.”
Dr Nasser is a veteran of three previous wars. He tells us: “This is the worst and it will go on for a long time.”
He goes on: “I never left before. I never left the hospital in the previous wars.”
“Yes, I’m scared,” he admits. “But I try to be positive and carry on with my life and just do what I have to do.”
The hospital has taken in about 1,500 war wounded in the past fortnight.
They are no longer operating as they did pre-war but are one of the key emergency centres for casualties, some of whom are evacuated from the frontlines right up against the border.
A family of five are the latest to be brought in from the border village of Alma al Chaab. The youngest, nine-year-old Mariam, is writhing in pain when we arrive with Dr Nasser to see her.
She was sitting with her mother and siblings when a rocket hit the house.
“Everything just fell on me,” she says. Her left leg is bandaged up to the hip.
“She has a double fracture and it’s pinned,” Dr Nasser tells us. “Her arm is broken and she has several wounds.”
Her elder brother is standing nearby. He’s still in his blood-stained clothes – dusty and spattered with large stains of blood.
He is 19 and still reeling from what’s happened. “It’s a big shock. Nothing like this has ever happened to us before,” he says.
The casualties that are most overwhelming to deal with are women and children, the medics tell us.
“It is hard to cope with children’s pain,” says Dr Taoube. “Very, very hard. I hope you never see this. I hope other doctors never have to deal with this. It is very hard.”
Dr Hussam Telleih adds: “We don’t feel safe, the patients don’t feel safe… they [the Israelis] are saying there’s rockets or bombs in or around the hospital from Hezbollah but this isn’t true… we deny all these things.”
Many of the cities and communities in the southern area have emptied out – with the Lebanese government estimating about a million people are on the move and out of their homes – the largest displacement in the country’s history.
But there are still many civilians who can’t or won’t leave their homes.
“Why should I leave?” says Mohammad Halawi. “It’s kind of like collective punishment. They claim they target specific people but they’re killing everyone.”
His neighbour was a Hezbollah supporter but he knew very little else about him. He and his family of eight, including children, were all killed in the attack. More than a dozen other homes have been destroyed.
His nephew’s young wife Anwar died – leaving behind two toddlers. Her husband was at work, so he survived. Several other members of the family have been left injured.
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Mother killed and house destroyed in Lebanon
The war wounded in the hospital are stabilised as quickly as possible and emergency surgery is carried out if needed.
But patients are then evacuated to other areas considered to be relatively safer, like Beirut.
Finding a safe location in Lebanon is becoming increasingly challenging, though.
“They don’t have hearts, or morals or any humanity,” another injured man in the hospital tells us, his head bound with a bandage.
“If they were hitting military targets, we’d just keep quiet,” said Oussama Najdi who came from Deir Kanoun. “But they hit our house – and we don’t even have one small gun between us.”
Alex Crawford reports from southern Lebanon with cameraman Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham and Lebanon producers Jihad Jneid and Sami Zein.
It has only been a week since the army reclaimed pockets of Khartoum North – the once bustling north-eastern wing of Sudan’s tri-city capital, locally known as Khartoum Bahri.
The hum of warplanes and crack of gunfire still punctuate life here. But the gunfire is now outgoing, and the warplanes are searching for enemy targets that have been pushed further back.
A year-and-a-half long siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is now over for some. But the scars still mark the streets, the homes and the few families still in them.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled Khartoum Bahri to safer states within Sudan, neighbouring countries and beyond.
There was a haunting emptiness when we arrived in Halfaya – an old tight-knit neighbourhood where families live for generations, expanding to only move across the narrow dirt roads.
Today, overgrown vines reach into the shattered windows of cars abandoned in the yards of their owners.
Inside, the homes are overturned, looted and destroyed by bullets and missiles.
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All that was left behind – photo albums, pencil cases, clothes and books – mean everything to a select few. Many left hoping it would only be a short while before they could return.
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But not everyone could leave.
“We don’t have a single penny to leave with. We didn’t have anything and never expected this,” Faiza Ishaq tells us in front of her home.
“I don’t have any family here – all my people left. I’m just with my two children and husband.”
Other than a handful of remaining neighbours, we are the first civilians Faiza has seen in close to 18 months of war.
She collapsed into sobs on my shoulder soon after we happily hugged each other hello. In a moment, her new sense of relief was overshadowed by months of deep horror and grief.
“Since they came a year and a half ago, I developed a tremor in my whole body. My hands shake so much I can’t eat without spilling food,” says Faiza, visibly trembling.
“We have been living in such terror – they can jump the wall at 2am. They hurl insults at us and threaten to take my 12-year-old daughter.”
The crisis in Sudan – explained
Tensions had been building for months before fighting between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) erupted in the capital Khartoum on 15 April last year.
Clashes have continued into this year between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in a fight for political power that has killed thousands of people.
They had been in a fragile partnership after staging a coup in October 2021, which derailed a transition from the rule of Islamist autocrat Omar al Bashir. He was ousted in 2019.
The ongoing conflict has unleashed waves of ethnic violence, created the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, and pushed at least one area in Darfur into famine.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled to Egypt, Chad, and South Sudan, with smaller numbers crossing into Ethiopia and the Central African Republic.
The main players in the power struggle include General Abdel Fattah al Burhan, head of the army and leader of Sudan’s ruling council since 2019 – and his former deputy on the council, RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
The RSF says it is fighting to rid Sudan of remnants of Bashir’s regime. The army says it is trying to protect the state against “criminal” rebels. Both sides in the conflict have used gold, Sudan’s most valuable and widely smuggled resource, to support their war effort.
Witnesses say the RSF and its allies have committed extensive abuses, including ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence and looting. Residents have accused the army of killing civilians in indiscriminate shelling and air strikes. Both sides have largely denied the accusations against them.
More than 17 months of war has inflicted massive damage on infrastructure, forced more than 10 million people from their homes and left half the population facing crisis levels of hunger.
She says their neighbours were killed by the RSF while fighting to protect their two sisters from rape. Her utmost fear was that her young daughter would be next in line.
“They would say to me ‘give me your daughter to marry or we’ll take her’. When they would come to the house, I locked her in the bathroom.”
The little food and support they could find under siege came from around the corner. Her neighbour Sumaya has turned her house into a community kitchen.
With the markets emptied, the chicken coup in the corner of her yard and grains bought with donations raised from Sudanese people abroad were used to feed as many remaining families as possible in the harshest of conditions.
“The fear and trauma have made us sick. We were never like this – we are finished,” says Sumaya.
“We have all lost weight and feel weak because they could knock the door at any moment. If someone knocked on the door without saying my name I felt gripped by fear.”
As we stood there and spoke in the heat of the day, one of the community volunteers, Firas, had to go and lie down.
He has malaria for the fourth time since the war started. Even in the wake of this military gain, movement and medical treatment in the capital is severely limited.
“I faint two to three times in a month from a lack of nutrition,” says Firas.
He has survived army airstrikes, RSF harassment and the dangerous work on electrical cables he has had to risk to keep the power on in the neighbourhood.
“It really was kill or be killed. We told our families that if we die, just forgive us.”
The remains of Diego Maradona are to be reburied in a new location after the plans were approved by a court in Argentina.
It comes after the football legend was laid to rest in a private cemetery following his death in November 2020.
However, the star’s children announced last year they wanted to move Maradona’s remains to a public mausoleum so that fans could pay their respects in person.
A court in San Isidro, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, authorised the proposals at a hearing on Wednesday for “humanitarian and emotional reasons”.
The court added that Maradona‘s five children should decide when the removal would happen.
Maradona’s remains are currently buried at the Jardin de Bella Vista cemetery, which is about 31 miles northwest of the capital.
Under the plans, the star’s body will be moved to a new mausoleum named the M10 Memorial in Buenos Aires‘s upscale neighbourhood of Puerto Madero.
Dalma Maradona, one of the star’s daughters, said: “We always knew that his place was with people but we also understood that all the security guarantees were a priority.
“What we want is for those who love him to be able to go and show him their love, leave him some daisies.”
The star, who helped win the World Cup for his country in 1986 and led Napoli to Italy’s league title in 1987, died at the age of 60.
Eight people, including doctors and nurses, are due to stand trial for their alleged responsibility in his death from heart failure.