Chinese President Xi Jinping’s marathon three-day visit to Moscow was hailed by the Kremlin as the dawn of a new age of “deeper” ties between the two countries, as Russia races to plug gaping holes left in its finances by Western energy sanctions.
But while Vladimir Putin insisted a new deal struck during the negotiations on Wednesday will ensure Russia can weather the consequences of its invasion of Ukraine, analysts and European lawmakers say he’s overestimating just how much Beijing can help him balance the books.
Prior to the full-blown invasion, Russia’s oil and gas sector accounted for almost half of its federal budget, but embargoes and restrictions imposed by Western countries have since created a multi-billion dollar deficit.
With the country’s ever-influential oligarchs estimated to be out of pocket to the tune of 20 percent of their wealth — and industry tycoon Oleg Deripaska warning the state could run out of money as soon as next year — Putin is seeking to reassure them he’s opened up a massive new market.
“Russian business is able to meet China’s growing demand for energy,” Putin declared Tuesday, ahead of an opulent state banquet.
But analysts and Ukrainian officials have been quick to point out that actually stepping up exports of oil and gas to China will be a technical challenge for Moscow, given most of its energy infrastructure runs to the West, not the East.
Putin on Wednesday announced a major new pipeline, Power-of-Siberia 2, that will carry 50 billion cubic meters of gas to China via Mongolia to fix that problem.
But “in reality, it’s pretty unclear what has actually been agreed,” said Jade McGlynn, a Russia expert at King’s College London. “When it comes to terms and pricing, Beijing drives a hard bargain at the best of times — right now they know Russia’s not got a strong hand.”
Details of the financing and construction of the project have not yet been revealed.
And with predictions of a financial downturn swirling, Beijing may not need more energy to power sluggish industries, McGlynn added.
Yuri Shafranik, a former energy minister under Boris Yeltsin who now heads Russia’s Union of Oil and Gas Producers, suggested China’s appetite for natural gas “will certainly increase” in the coming years, and pointed out that Beijing would not have signed a pipeline agreement if it didn’t need the resources.
But, if the Kremlin was hoping to replace Europe as a reliable customer, it may end up disappointed, said Nathalie Loiseau, a French MEP who serves as chair of the Parliament’s subcommittee on security and defense.
“They chose to use energy to blackmail Europe even before the war,” she said. “Now, Russia has to find new markets and must accept terms and conditions imposed by others. China is taking advantage of the situation.”
In a bid to sweeten the terms, Putin invited all of Asia, Africa and Latin America to buy Russian oil and gas in China’s domestic currency, the renminbi, at the close of Xi’s speech on Tuesday. This came after Xi had already indicated at the China-Arab Summit in December in Riyadh that he would welcome the opportunity to trade oil and gas with Saudi Arabia on similar terms.
The outreach is a nod to the 1974 pact between then-U.S. President Richard Nixon and the Saudi kingdom to accept dollars in exchange for oil, which would in turn be spent on Western goods, assets and services. Non-Western nations have, however, been threatening to move away from dollar pricing in energy markets for years to no effect.
Still, Russia’s efforts to peel away from Western-dominated energy markets are unlikely to make much difference to its fortunes in the long run, according to Simone Tagliapietra, a research fellow at the Bruegel think tank.
“What we are seeing is it’s proving extremely difficult for Russia to diversify away from Europe, and they’ve been forced to become a junior partner of China,” Tagliapietra said. “After this, Moscow won’t be an oil and gas superpower as it was before, not just because of sanctions but also because of the green transition.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Western governments are ticked off with TikTok. The Chinese-owned app loved by teenagers around the world is facing allegations of facilitating espionage, failing to protect personal data, and even of corrupting young minds.
Governments in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and across Europe have moved to ban the use of TikTok on officials’ phones in recent months. If hawks get their way, the app could face further restrictions. The White House has demanded that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, sell the app or face an outright ban in the U.S.
But do the allegations stack up? Security officials have given few details about why they are moving against TikTok. That may be due to sensitivity around matters of national security, or it may simply indicate that there’s not much substance behind the bluster.
TikTok’s Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew will be questioned in the U.S. Congress on Thursday and can expect politicians from all sides of the spectrum to probe him on TikTok’s dangers. Here are some of the themes they may pick up on:
1. Chinese access to TikTok data
Perhaps the most pressing concern is around the Chinese government’s potential access to troves of data from TikTok’s millions of users.
Western security officials have warned that ByteDance could be subject to China’s national security legislation, particularly the 2017 National Security Law that requires Chinese companies to “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. This law is a blank check for Chinese spy agencies, they say.
TikTok’s user data could also be accessed by the company’s hundreds of Chinese engineers and operations staff, any one of whom could be working for the state, Western officials say. In December 2022, some ByteDance employees in China and the U.S. targeted journalists at Western media outlets using the app (and were later fired).
EU institutions banned their staff from having TikTok on their work phones last month. An internal email sent to staff of the European Data Protection Supervisor, seen by POLITICO, said the move aimed “to reduce the exposure of the Commission from cyberattacks because this application is collecting so much data on mobile devices that could be used to stage an attack on the Commission.”
And the Irish Data Protection Commission, TikTok’s lead privacy regulator in the EU, is set to decide in the next few months if the company unlawfully transferred European users’ data to China.
Skeptics of the security argument say that the Chinese government could simply buy troves of user data from little-regulated brokers. American social media companies like Twitter have had their own problems preserving users’ data from the prying eyes of foreign governments, they note.
TikTok says it has never given data to the Chinese government and would decline if asked to do so. Strictly speaking, ByteDance is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which TikTok argues would shield it from legal obligations to assist Chinese agencies. ByteDance is owned 20 percent by its founders and Chinese investors, 60 percent by global investors, and 20 percent by employees.
There’s little hope to completely stop European data from going to China | Alex Plavevski/EPA
The company has unveiled two separate plans to safeguard data. In the U.S., Project Texas is a $1.5 billion plan to build a wall between the U.S. subsidiary and its Chinese owners. The €1.2 billion European version, named Project Clover, would move most of TikTok’s European data onto servers in Europe.
Nevertheless, TikTok’s chief European lobbyist Theo Bertram also said in March that it would be “practically extremely difficult” to completely stop European data from going to China.
2. A way in for Chinese spies
If Chinese agencies can’t access TikTok’s data legally, they can just go in through the back door, Western officials allege. China’s cyber-spies are among the best in the world, and their job will be made easier if datasets or digital infrastructure are housed in their home territory.
Dutch intelligence agencies have advised government officials to uninstall apps from countries waging an “offensive cyber program” against the Netherlands — including China, but also Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Critics of the cyber espionage argument refer to a 2021 study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which found that the app did not exhibit the “overtly malicious behavior” that would be expected of spyware. Still, the director of the lab said researchers lacked information on what happens to TikTok data held in China.
TikTok’s Project Texas and Project Clover include steps to assuage fears of cyber espionage, as well as legal data access. The EU plan would give a European security provider (still to be determined) the power to audit cybersecurity policies and data controls, and to restrict access to some employees. Bertram said this provider could speak with European security agencies and regulators “without us [TikTok] being involved, to give confidence that there’s nothing to hide.”
Bertram also said the company was looking to hire more engineers outside China.
3. Privacy rights
Critics of TikTok have accused the app of mass data collection, particularly in the U.S., where there are no general federal privacy rights for citizens.
In jurisdictions that do have strict privacy laws, TikTok faces widespread allegations of failing to comply with them.
The company is being investigated in Ireland, the U.K. and Canada over its handling of underage users’ data. Watchdogs in the Netherlands, Italy and France have also investigated its privacy practices around personalized advertising and for failing to limit children’s access to its platform.
TikTok has denied accusations leveled in some of the reports and argued that U.S. tech companies are collecting the same large amount of data. Meta, Amazon and others have also been given large fines for violating Europeans’ privacy.
4. Psychological operations
Perhaps the most serious accusation, and certainly the most legally novel one, is that TikTok is part of an all-encompassing Chinese civilizational struggle against the West. Its role: to spread disinformation and stultifying content in young Western minds, sowing division and apathy.
Earlier this month, the director of the U.S. National Security Agency warned that Chinese control of TikTok’s algorithm could allow the government to carry out influence operations among Western populations. TikTok says it has around 300 million active users in Europe and the U.S. The app ranked as the most downloaded in 2022.
A woman watches a video of Egyptian influencer Haneen Hossam | Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images
Reports emerged in 2019 suggesting that TikTok was censoring pro-LGBTQ content and videos mentioning Tiananmen Square. ByteDance has also been accused of pushing inane time-wasting videos to Western children, in contrast to the wholesome educational content served on its Chinese app Douyin.
Besides accusations of deliberate “influence operations,” TikTok has also been criticized for failing to protect children from addiction to its app, dangerous viral challenges, and disinformation. The French regulator said last week that the app was still in the “very early stages” of content moderation. TikTok’s Italian headquarters was raided this week by the consumer protection regulator with the help of Italian law enforcement to investigate how the company protects children from viral challenges.
Researchers at Citizen Lab said that TikTok doesn’t enforce obvious censorship. Other critics of this argument have pointed out that Western-owned platforms have also been manipulated by foreign countries, such as Russia’s campaign on Facebook to influence the 2016 U.S. elections.
TikTok says it has adapted its content moderation since 2019 and regularly releases a transparency report about what it removes. The company has also touted a “transparency center” that opened in the U.S. in July 2020 and one in Ireland in 2022. It has also said it will comply with new EU content moderation rules, the Digital Services Act, which will request that platforms give access to regulators and researchers to their algorithms and data.
Additional reporting by Laura Kayali in Paris, Sue Allan in Ottawa, Brendan Bordelon in Washington, D.C., and Josh Sisco in San Francisco.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Officials in Kyiv and Berlin condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Moscow would station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus.
The Kremlin “took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, tweeted on Sunday.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, added that the move was a violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, something that Putin denied in his announcement on Saturday. Podolyak tweeted that Putin “is afraid of losing & all he can do is scare [us] with tactics.”
Putin said on Saturday that Russia would construct a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by July. He likened the plans to the U.S. stationing its nuclear weapons in Europe, and said Russia would retain control of the nuclear arms stationed in Belarus.
“The United States has been doing this for decades,” Putin was quoted as saying. “They deployed their tactical nuclear weapons long ago on the territories of their allies, NATO countries, in Europe,” he said.
Saturday evening, the German Federal Foreign Office told national media that the decision was akin to a “further attempt at nuclear intimidation.”
“The comparison made by President Putin on the nuclear participation of NATO is misleading and cannot serve to justify the step announced by Russia,” the Foreign Office was quoted as saying.
The Biden administration in the U.S. said it would “monitor the implications” of Putin’s announcement but would not adjust its nuclear weapons strategy.
“We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor any indications Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said. “We remain committed to the collective defense of the NATO alliance.”
Russia used Belarus as a staging ground to send troops into Ukraine for Putin’s invasion. And Moscow and Minsk have maintained close military ties as the Kremlin continues its war on Ukraine.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
It may come with security risks but, for European Parliamentarians, TikTok is just too good a political tool to abandon.
Staff at the European Parliament were ordered to delete the video-sharing application from any work devices by March 20, after an edict last month from the Parliament’s President Roberta Metsola cited cybersecurity risks about the Chinese-owned platform. The chamber also “strongly recommended” that members of the European Parliament and their political advisers give up the app.
But with European Parliament elections scheduled for late spring 2024, the chamber’s political groups and many of its members are opting to stay on TikTok to win over the hearts and minds of the platform’s user base of young voters. TikTok says around 125 million Europeans actively use the app every month on average.
“It’s always important in my parliamentary work to communicate beyond those who are already convinced,” said Leïla Chaibi, a French far-left lawmaker who has 3,500 TikTok followers and has previously used the tool to broadcast videos from Strasbourg explaining how the EU Parliament works.
Malte Gallée, a 29-year-old German Greens lawmaker with over 36,000 followers on TikTok, said, “There are so many young people there but also more and more older people joining there. For me as a politician of course it’s important to be where the people that I represent are, and to know what they’re talking about.”
Finding Gen Z
Parliament took its decision to ban the app from staffers’ phones in late February, in the wake of similar moves by the European Commission, Council of the EU and the bloc’s diplomatic service.
A letter from the Parliament’s top IT official, obtained by POLITICO, said the institution took the decision after seeing similar bans by the likes of the U.S. federal government and the European Commission and to prevent “possible threats” against the Parliament and its lawmakers.
For the chamber, it was a remarkable U-turn. Just a few months earlier its top lawmakers in the institution’s Bureau, including President Metsola and 14 vice presidents, approved the launch of an official Parliament account on TikTok, according to a “TikTok strategy” document from the Parliament’s communications directorate-general dated November 18 and seen by POLITICO.
“Members and political groups are increasingly opening TikTok accounts,” stated the document, pointing out that teenagers then aged 16 will be eligible to vote in 2024. “The main purpose of opening a TikTok channel for the European Parliament is to connect directly with the young generation and first time voters in the European elections in 2024, especially among Generation Z,” it said.
Another supposed benefit of launching an official TikTok account would be countering disinformation about the war in Ukraine, the document stated.
Most awkwardly, the only sizeable TikTok account claiming to represent the European Parliament is actually a fake one that Parliament has asked TikTok to remove.
Dummy phones and workarounds
Among those who stand to lose out from the new TikTok policy are the European Parliament’s political groupings. Some of these groups have sizeable reach on the Chinese-owned app.
All political groups with a TikTok account said they will use dedicated computers in order to skirt the TikTok ban on work devices | Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images
The largest group, the center-right European People’s Party, has 51,000 followers on TikTok. Spokesperson Pedro López previously dismissed the Parliament’s move to stop using TikTok as “absurd,” vowing the EPP’s account will stay up and active. López wrote to POLITICO that “we will use dedicated computers … only for TikTok and not connected to any EP or EPP network.”
That’s the same strategy that all other political groups with a TikTok account — The Left, Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and Liberal Renew groups — said they will use in order to skirt the TikTok ban on work devices like phones, computers or tablets, according to spokespeople. Around 30 Renew Europe lawmakers are active on the platform, according to the group’s spokesperson.
Beyond the groups, it’s the individual members of parliament — especially those popular on the app — that are pushing back on efforts to restrict its use.
Clare Daly, an Irish independent member who sits with the Left group, is one of the most popular MEPs on the platform with over 370,000 subscribed to watch clips of her plenary speeches. Daly has gained some 80,000 extra followers in just the few weeks since Parliament’s ban was announced.
Daly in an email railed against Parliament’s new policy: “This decision is not guided by a serious threat assessment. It is security theatre, more about appeasing a climate of geopolitical sinophobia in EU politics than it is about protecting sensitive information or mitigating cybersecurity threats,” she said.
According to Moritz Körner, an MEP from the centrist Renew Europe group, cybersecurity should be a priority. “Politicians should think about cybersecurity and espionage first and before thinking about their elections to the European Parliament,” he told POLITICO, adding that he doesn’t have a TikTok account.
Others are finding workarounds to have it both ways.
“We will use a dummy phone and not our work phones anymore. That [dummy] phone will only be used for producing videos,” said an assistant to German Social-democrat member Delara Burkhardt, who has close to 2,000 followers. The assistant credited the platform with driving a friendlier, less abrasive political debate than other platforms like Twitter: “On TikTok the culture is nicer, we get more questions.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
PARIS — France is bracing for fresh chaos Tuesday with a day of protests planned against Emmanuel Macron’s detested pensions reform, and trade unions calling for a general strike.
Protests last Thursday descended into turmoil with clashes between police and protesters, and scenes of violence across the country. In the wake of the unrest, which resulted in more than 450 arrests, the French president was forced to cancel a state visit by King Charles III amid security concerns.
Public transport, universities, schools and public services are expected to be disrupted again Tuesday. The impact of the industrial action is being felt across all sectors and areas of public life. A rolling strike of waste collectors in Paris has meant that trash is still piled high in parts of the French capital, and a strike at refineries has led to fuel shortages at some petrol pumps.
Despite widespread unrest, the French president pledged last week that he would not backtrack on the pensions reform which raises the age of retirement to 64 from 62, saying it was “necessary” for the country to balance the books of its generous pensions scheme.
The French government sparked outrage when it invoked article 49.3 of the French constitution to pass its pensions reform, in a controversial move that bypassed a vote in parliament it was expected to lose. The government narrowly survived two motions of no confidence in the National Assembly after the controversial move.
Tuesday’s protest could be an indicator of whether Macron’s inflexibility whips up more discontent on the street or whether the protest movement is starting to subside. French police have been accused of using heavy-handed tactics and it is likely that students and pupils will join protests in greater numbers. On Saturday, a man was left in a critical condition after clashes with police at a French water reservoir project.
Stalemate over pensions reform
Ahead of the protests on Tuesday, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called for talks with trade unions and announced she would no longer use article 49.3 except when it comes to budgetary measures.
“Obviously there are tensions over the reform, we need to listen,” she told AFP on Sunday. “[We need] to calm the country and give the French some answers promptly.”
A demonstration of Totalenergies striking employees outside the Gronfreville-l’Orcher refinery | Lou Benoist/AFP via Getty Images
However, talks between the government and trade unions over the pensions reforms are at a standstill. Macron has said he is open to discussing a range of issues including working conditions, pay and work-related strain, but not the pensions reform. Trade unions say they would agree to talks only if the government agreed to re-examine the legal age of retirement.
With no clear way out and in the wake of a string of violent incidents over the last weeks, there are fears within the trade unions that France may be facing a socio-political crisis similar to the Yellow Jackets movement that rocked the country in 2018-2019.
Trade union leader Laurent Berger warned Monday that France was in “a total state of tension.”
“There is a common will [with the government] to find an exit for this protest movement and not descend into a madness that might take hold of the country, with violence and resentment,” he warned in an interview with French channel France 2.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Belgium’s intelligence service is scrutinizing the operations of technology giant Huawei as fears of Chinese espionage grow around the EU and NATO headquarters in Brussels, according to confidential documents seen by POLITICO and three people familiar with the matter.
In recent months, Belgium’s State Security Service (VSSE) has requested interviews with former employees of the company’s lobbying operation in the heart of Brussels’ European district. The intelligence gathering is part of security officials’ activities to scrutinize how China may be using non-state actors — including senior lobbyists in Huawei’s Brussels office — to advance the interests of the Chinese state and its Communist party in Europe, said the people, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The scrutiny of Huawei’s EU activities comes as Western security agencies are sounding the alarm over companies with links to China. British, Dutch, Belgian, Czech and Nordic officials — as well as EU functionaries — have all been told to stay off TikTok on work phones over concerns similar to those surrounding Huawei, namely that Chinese security legislation forces Chinese tech firms to hand over data.
The scrutiny also comes amid growing evidence of foreign states’ influence on EU decision-making — a phenomenon starkly exposed by the recent Qatargate scandal, where the Gulf state sought to influence Brussels through bribes and gifts via intermediary organizations. The Belgian security services are tasked with overseeing operations led by foreign actors around the EU institutions.
The State Security Service declined to comment when asked about the intelligence gathering.
A Huawei spokesperson said the company was unaware of the company’s Brussels office staff being questioned by the intelligence service.
China link
Belgian intelligence officers want to determine if there are any direct ties between the Chinese state and Huawei’s Brussels office, the people said. Of particular interest, they added, are Huawei representatives who may have previously held posts in Brussels institutions with access to a network of EU contacts.
At the core of Western concerns surrounding Huawei — which is headquartered in Shenzhen, China — is whether the firm can be instrumentalized, pressured or infiltrated by the Chinese government to gain access to critical data in Western countries.
Huawei’s EU lobbying offices — one located in between the European Parliament and European Commission and Council buildings and the other a “cybersecurity transparency center” close to the U.S. embassy — have been a major lobbying power in EU policymaking over the past decade. The most recent corporate declarations put the firm among the top 30 companies spending most on EU lobbying in Brussels, with a declared maximum spending of€2.25 million per year. In 2018 — right at the start of the geopolitical storm that struck the firm — it entered the top 10 of lobbying spenders in Brussels.
The company’s Shenzhen headquarters has also strengthened its control over its Brussels office activities over the past decade. In 2019 it replaced its then-head of the EU office Tony Graziano — who had a long track record of lobbying the EU and had led Huawei’s Brussels office since 2011 — with Abraham Liu, a company loyalist who had risen up the ranks of its international operations. Liu was later replaced with Tony Jin Yong, currently the main representative of Huawei with the EU. It has also consistently brought in Chinese staff to support its public affairs activities.
The Chinese telecoms giant last year started ramping down its EU presence, folding its activities across Europe into its regional headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany, POLITICO reported in November. Part of that shake-up was to let go of some of the firm’s Western strategists, who had worked to push back on bans and blocks of its equipment in the past years.
The scrutiny of Huawei’s EU activities comes as Western security agencies are sounding the alarm over companies with links to China | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images
Huawei has continuously stressed it is independent from the Chinese state. “Huawei is a commercial operation,” a spokesperson said. Asked whether the company had a policy to check which of its staff are members of the Chinese Communist Party, the spokesperson said: “We don’t ask about or interfere with employees’political or religious beliefs. We treat every employee the same regardless of their race, gender, social status, disability, religion or anything else.”
One key concern brought up by Western security authorities in past years is that Huawei as a China-headquartered company is subject to Beijing’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires companies to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts” as well as “protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.”
Asked how it handles legal requests from the Chinese government to hand over data, the spokesperson referred to the company’s frequently asked questions page on the matter, which states: “Huawei has never received such a request and we would categorically refuse to comply if we did. Huawei is an independent company that works only to serve its customers. We would never compromise or harm any country, organization, or individual, especially when it comes to cybersecurity and user privacy protection.
Eye on EU
Huawei has faced pushback from Belgian security services in past years. The country’s National Security Council in 2020 imposed restrictions on its use in critical parts of 5G networks.
Belgium — while being a small market — is considered strategically important for Western allies because of the presence of the EU institutions and the headquarters of the transatlantic NATO defense alliance.
The Belgian State Security Service’s interest in Huawei follows an increasing interest in China’s operations in the EU capital. In 2022, the service released an intelligence report laying out its findings on the operations of Chinese-backed lobbyists in Brussels. In it, the VSSE hit out at the Chinese state for operating in “a grey zone between lobbying, interference, political influence, espionage, economic blackmail and disinformation campaigns.”
In response to the study, the Chinese embassy in Belgium said the intelligence services “slandered the legitimate and lawful business operation of Chinese companies in Belgium, seriously affecting their reputation and causing potential harm to their normal production and operation.”
It’s not just China. “Undue interference perpetrated by other powers also continues to be a red flag for the VSSE,” the intelligence service said in its report. “The recent interference scandal in the European Parliament is a case in point.”
As far as that case goes, the Belgian authorities have so far charged several individuals in the ongoing criminal investigation into allegations of bribery between Qatar and EU representatives, with police raids yielding €1.5 million in cash.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Mumbai: Bollywood filmmaker-producer Karan Johar, who is busy with the post-production of his upcoming directorial ‘Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani’, was recently stopped by security personnel for a routine check at the Mumbai International Airport better known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport on Tuesday.
KJo, who is known to be friendly with the paparazzi, posed for them and moved on to go beyond the security check when he was notified about the procedure by one of the security personnel.
The video of the episode was shared on Instagram by celebrity paparazzo Viral Bhayani.
In the video KJo can be seen dressed in baggy black joggers with a black T-shirt, and a white jacket. He was also seen carrying a big bag as he rounded off his look with a pair of black sunglasses.
The ‘My Name Is Khan’ director was asked by a security personnel to show his ID and travel-related documents.
Karan produced his documents and handed them to the airport security. When given the go ahead by the security personnel, Karan proceeded inside the airport.
It’s unclear if Karan left the city for work or he went for a holiday.
Name of the Post :IB Security Assistant and MTS 2022 Admit Card Released
Total Post :1675
Intelligence Bureau (IB) has announced a notification for the recruitment of Security Assistant/ Executivee (SA/Exe) & Multi-Tasking Staff/General (MTS/Gen) vacancy.
Srinagar, Mar 19: Alleged conman from Gujarat Kiran Bhai Patel has claimed that police didn’t provide him Z security but that was meant for two other persons, both hailing from Gujarat, who were accompanying him.
The Counsel for the accused, Advocate Rehan Gowhar told the news agency Kashmir News Trust that all the allegations leveled against his client are baseless and untrue. Quoting his client, Advocate Rehan Gowhar said that police set both the accomplices of his client free and the Z security was actually for them.
Kiran Bhai Patel, an alleged conman from Gujarat has been arrested by Jammu Kashmir Police for posing as Additional Director of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
The accused is in judicial custody for 15 days and the matter is before the Chief Judicial Magistrate Srinagar Raja Tasleem Arif.
The Counsel for the accused said that they will apply for bail on the next hearing.
“Granting bail is the discretionary power of the court but we are claiming bail as a matter of right,” he said adding that the offenses for which his client has been arrested are not serious and grave in nature. [KNT]
SRINAGAR: Jammu and Kashmir police Sunday said that providing a security cover and bullet proof vehicle to a Conman from Gujrat who posed himself as a PMO official, was not an intelligence failure but a “mistake” which is being investigated.
“We don’t provide security cover to anyone on verbal communique or order,” ADGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar told reporters, on the sidelines of a function in Srinagar. He said that a team led by a senior IPS officer raided a hotel and arrested the Conman from Gujrat and recovered fake visiting cards from him. “A proper FIR has been lodged and the Conman was interrogated. At present he is behind the bars under judicial remand,” the ADGP said, adding, the JK police is in touch with the Gujrat police.
Asked whether providing security cover to Conman was a security lapse and intelligence failure, the ADGP said: “It was not an intelligence failure but yes a mistake for sure which is being investigated,” adding that any officer who ordered for providing security to the Conman will be dealt with.
About the query about possible rise in the crime rate, he said that there is no surge in the crime rate but there is an increase in reporting the crimes by the people who trust police for its thorough investigations. “Crime cases are being investigated thoroughly and culprits are being arrested and punished as well,” he said.
On attaching the properties, he said that property used for terrorist activity or used by terrorists for shelter will be attached be that a vehicle, building or a House. (KNO)
