SEATTLE – More victims are surfacing in connection with a local travel agency that suddenly closed its doors earlier this summer – leaving an untold number of customers holding the bag.
Now the agency, Alem Travel, is at the center of a police investigation as detectives try to determine what happened to the business’ owner and thousands of dollars in ticket money that simply vanished.
For years Alem Travel has been the go-to travel agency for the Ethiopian community. But a few weeks ago, travelers bound for Ethiopia were shocked to learn the airline tickets they bought didn’t exist and they were left in the lurch.
In a previous report, KOMO News talked to several victims who said they trusted the 12-year-old business at 1812 East Madison Street and the man who ran it – until he disappeared with their money.
Now even more victims are turning up.
Aster Tareken is one of them. She said she hasn’t seen her daughter Bethlehem in two years. The 17-year-old is supposed to be home right now but instead she’s stuck in Ethiopia. Her airline ticket is canceled.
Aster thinks her Seattle travel agent booked the ticket, canceled it and pocketed the refund.
Now she’s out $1,650 and her daughter is stranded in Africa.
“What am I gonna do now? How am I gonna tell my daughter I feel really sorry for her? How am I gonna explain this to her?” Aster says.
Like the previous victims, Aster bought her ticket from Alem Travel.
KOMO News has tried repeatedly to contact Alem Travel in Seattle. But sources say the owner, Solomon Biruk, may be in Ethiopia.
Seattle police confirm that multiple victims have surfaced since KOMO News aired its original report on the agency and its victims.
Selamneh Ambaw is one of them. He got a confirmation number – and even a printed itinerary – for his planned trip in October to Ethiopia.
The airline said a reservation was made, but says the ticket was then canceled.
Selamneh says, “I said, ‘Ah, this does not sound good.’ I said, ‘I can’t seem to get a hold of this guy ’cause he’s no longer around.'”
He lost $1,383, which he paid in cash.
“It’s just very, very sad,” he says. “Like I said, I just wonder what happened for him to do something like that.”
All the travelers out of money said they’ve worked with Alem before and never had a problem. They and neighboring businesses are stumped.
Bryan Vehrs says, “He was one of the hardest-working people here, from my experience – was incredibly honest and ethical.”
Aster and Selamneh both saved for their trips. Now Aster is borrowing money to get her daughter home.
KOMO News Problem Solvers also were contacted by a ticket consolidator in Washington, D.C., who said they sold Alem Travel 42 airline tickets and never got paid because, they allege, Alem used unauthorized credit cards.
LONDON, UK — An immigrant from Ethiopia has been charged over the robbery of £40million (USD $60 million) worth of jewels in Britain’s biggest-ever jewelery heist.
Solomun Beyene, 24, has been charged with conspiracy to rob and possession of a firearm.
Another man, Craig Calderwood, of no fixed address, was also charged over the armed raid during which two smartly dressed men took a cab to Graff Jewellers in Mayfair before producing handguns and grabbing 43 jewels.
Both men appear before Wimbledon Magistrates Court today.
A third man has been charged in connection with the £40m raid at Graff jewellers in central London.
Two shots were fired and 43 pieces of jewelery taken during the raid
Clinton Mogg, 42, from Bournemouth, was arrested following the daylight break-in on August 6. He is accused of conspiracy to rob, Scotland Yard said.
Earlier, two men appeared in court in Wimbledon following the raid in New Bond Street. Solomun Beyene, 24, of northwest London, and Craig Calderwood, 26, of no fixed abode, were both charged with conspiracy to rob and possession of a handgun.
Detectives launched a huge manhunt for two men who were captured on CCTV. Footage showed them both on the day of the raid and also visiting the jeweler two days earlier.
A £1 million reward has been offered on behalf of Graff’s insurers for information leading to the prosecution of the robbers.
The pair are accused of undertaking the audacious robbery at the New Bond Street store on August 6. They are also charged with possessing handguns.
The two men appeared in the dock flanked by five prison officers amid heightened security.
Both Beyene and Calderwood spoke only to confirm their names, addresses and dates of birth.
Calderwood, who has short straight red hair combed flat on his head, wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt.
Beyene, who wore a grey short-sleeved T-shirt and has heavily-tattooed forearms, looked briefly at his parents who sat in the public gallery.
Presiding magistrate Anne Packer remanded the two men in custody and ordered them to appear at Kingston Crown Court for a preliminary hearing on September 1.
Solicitors acting on behalf of the two alleged robbers made no representation in court. There was no application for bail.
Speaking after the hearing, defense solicitor Antonie Xavier, who represents Beyene, said his client denies any involvement in the robbery.
He said: “It is totally denied. The CCTV shows quite clearly he could not be the person. He has always denied that he was ever near there.
“This is a shot in the dark.”
A huge manhunt was launched after the audacious raid on the central London jeweler two weeks ago.
CCTV pictures of two men talking their way past security guards before robbing the shop have been beamed around the world.
The gang forced a woman member of staff to fill a bag with 43 pieces of jewellery, including earrings, necklaces and watches, worth almost £40 million.
They used a series of getaway cars and a motorcycle to escape across the capital, firing two shots in the process.
A 50-year-old man who was held last week in Ilford, east London, has been released on bail pending further inquiries.
BERLIN (AFP) — Olympic champion Kenenisa Bekele remained on course for an unprecedented distance double at the World Athletics Championships after moving seamlessly into the men’s 5000m final.
The Ethiopian used his trademark last-lap kick to win his semi-final in 13min 19.77sec, far off his own world record of 12:37.35.
Bekele, who has been the fastest in the world over 5000m every year since 2004, won his fourth 10,000m world title on Monday to tie him with former master Haile Gebrselassie’s record over the distance.
His performance in the semi-final here suggests that his rivals in a high-quality field will have their work cut out to prevent him repeating his Beijing Olympics exploits.
In the Chinese capital, Bekele became the first male athlete to claim the 5000/10,000m double since another Ethiopian, Miruts Yifter, achieved the same feat in the widely boycotted 1980 Games in Moscow.
In the race at a packed, sun-kissed Olympic Stadium, Japan’s Yuchiro Ueno set the early pace, Kenyans Vincent Chepkok and Joseph Ebuya at the head of the chasing pack which quickly reeled the Japanese runner back in.
With nine laps to go, the upright figure of Qatar’s Saif Shaheen moved up through the field to second as the field strung out.
Chris Solinksy of the United States, Moroccan Anis Selmouni and Bekele followed Shaheen and the Kenyan duo.
When the bell went for the final lap, Bekele had to go wide to get past Briton Mohammed Farah and American Matthew Tegenkamp but once ahead stayed like that through to the line.
Tegenkamp finished second with Farah third, Chepkok in fourth and Spain’s Jesus Espana in the final automatic qualification spot.
Defending champion Bernard Lagat of the United States got through his semi with ease, a handy last-lap breakaway of five coming across the line in close order.
Ugandan Moses Kipsiro, who won bronze at the last worlds in Osaka in 2007, won the heat in 13:22.98, with Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge, defending silver medallist, coming though in second ahead of James C’Kurui of Qatar.
Lagat and Moroccan Chakir Boujattaoui completed the automatic qualifiers.
One runner who did not qualify was Qatar’s two-time world 3000m steeplechase champion Saif Shaheen, who finished well down the field in the opening semi-final.
“I am a steeplechase runner, but this year I could not qualify for the steeple, so I decided to run the 5000m,” said Shaheen, who previously competed as Stephen Cherono for Kenya.
“But I have some health problems: hamstring and the stomach. I just decided to run the race despite my problems.
“This was my last race for this year. I will go to Munich tomorrow and see the doctor. I hope to come back for the indoors season.”
There was good news for Bekele’s compatriot Ali Abdosh, who will compete in Sunday’s final despite finishing in 13th position in his semi-final.
Abdosh was spiked on the second lap and lost 200m as he attempted to put one shoe back on.
When did Somalis overthrow Siad Barre? It must be 20 years now or there about. After Siad Barre, came one General Aideed. He is the Somali warlord credited with disorganizing the America humanitarian marines deployed to bring food supplies, law and order into war-torn Somalia in the early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The encounter left the Americans with blood on their noses and a humiliating experience that saw a dead body of one marine dragged along Mogadishu streets as barefoot Somali fighters celebrated America’s humiliation. These horror pictures were so devastating to the American public back home that Bill Clinton ordered the operation stopped and the rest of the marines evacuated.
The only remaining super power had been badly humiliated by a wretched ragtag army in the Third World.
For close to 20 years, successive American administrations have been weary of meddling in Somali conflict. More importantly, America has thought it wise not to engage Somalis directly as they have done with Iraqis, Afghans, Koreans and Vietnamese in recent years. Instead, they have used neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and Uganda to contain the alleged Osama bin Laden influence in that chaotic lawless country.
The American involvement in the current Somali conflict is something that has confused analysts on the scene. More curiously, it has not been the kind of involvement that would be considered humanitarian. It is more to do with arms supplies to one side of the conflict than anything else. One wonders what will happen if the present good boy of Mogadishu turns against the hands that fed him just like Osama bin Laden did after the Russian-Afghan conflict. It is obvious to us that when Ethiopia’s [tribal junta] decided to invade Somalia in support of the ousted Abdulahi Yusuf regime, it was to defeat an Islamic “terrorist” group then led by the current president. The Ethiopian regime’s air power scattered the Islamic courts insurgents forcing their commanders to take refuge in Yemen. Now, hardly a year later, this former Al Qaeda sympathizer has suddenly become the good boy worthy of American arms supply.
America’s involvement in the Horn of Africa’s conflict is not something new. It is as old as our independence. We remember that at one point when Siad Barre’s regime was the darling of the Soviet Union,
Americans were the biggest supporters of Emperor HaileSelassie. However, when Mengitsu HaileMariam’s regime overthrew the monarch and established a communist regime on the model of the Kremlin with full backing from Moscow, Americans quickly filled the vacuum the USSR had left in Mogadishu.
Therefore as the Ogaden war erupted between Ethiopia and Somalia, it was really a war of influence between Moscow and Washington. Yet, both super powers achieved their primary objectives. Their arms industries found ready-made markets in the Horn of Africa. And even after the Ogaden war, other civil wars had to continue in both countries for decades with Ethiopian one being conducted in two phases. The first phase had to do with getting rid of Mengitsu’s regime, while the second phase pitted former allies against one another.
It was Eritrea’s war of cessation. As Ethiopia continued to slide deeper and deeper into protracted civil wars, Somalia never rested after the Ogaden war either. More prolonged conflicts finally threw Siad Barre out in the early 1990s. One would have expected a new regime, more humane to replace Barre and restore sanity into the country. It was not to be. The era of warlords had arrived.
We all know that very few African countries are in the business of manufacturing arms of any kind save for South Africa. We are all net importers of military armaments we deploy in our conflicts. We don’t even manufacture gas masks, teargas, bullet-proof vests and helmets. All we export to industrialized Europe, America and China are raw materials like oil, diamonds, gold, uranium, tea and coffee, most of which they extract themselves and pay us peanuts for! In exchange, our countries have huge and secretive military budgets that we must spend year in year out whether we are at war or not.
This state of affairs has been made worse by our selfish, unfocused and uncaring political leadership from our region for nearly half a century. At the center of it all is deep-seated corruption and insatiable greed for individual wealth. This is the greed that has enslaved our countries to the industrialized nations with occasional belief that we can depend on them in our hour of need when hunger ravages our neighborhoods. It is a slave-master relationship that will take time to break.
This article is a public reaction to a long email letter sent to me by an Oromo interlocutor. The email states that unity between Amhara democratic forces and Oromo freedom fighters is necessary both to defeat the undemocratic Woyanne regime and initiate a promising future for Ethiopia. However, the letter blames the lack of unity on the resistance of Amhara democratic forces to concede the right to self-determination to the Oromo people. The imposition of an unconditional unity prevents the Oromo freedom fighters from effecting a serious move toward a rapprochement, while the refusal of some Oromo fighters to even give a chance to unity deeply upsets Amhara democratic forces. The letter suggests a middle ground based on a common goal, namely, a union of independent nations that recognizes the self-determination of each nation, and so provides the condition of a voluntary union. In other words, the pledge to give a chance to the integrity of Ethiopia should satisfy the Amhara democratic forces, just as the recognition of the right to self-determination should suit the Oromo by convincing them to enter into a free union with the Amhara and other peoples.
Though the author claims not to be a representative of the OLF, I am not convinced to what extent his views differ from the official position of the organization. Also, my purpose here is less to respond to my interlocutor than to propose some general reflections concerning the right to self-determination as a condition of union. Let me begin by what amazes most: the defenders of the right to self-determination have rejected everything of Stalin (Lenin and the Soviet Union), except his view of nations and nationalities. It is for me next to impossible to understand how scholars and politicians stop short of being critical of the Stalinist doctrine of self-determination even as they know that Stalin has been entirely wrong in everything. What are the chances for a doctrine whose inherent perversion led to such disastrous consequences to be right on the crucial issue of nation-building?
My contention is that, far from promoting free union, the right to self-determination actually blocks it. It is when union becomes unconditional that it forces peoples to find a form of accommodation that suits them all. Here is an illustrative analogy: if two competing individuals decide to build a house together, their cooperation makes sense if the house becomes their common interest, that is, if both intend to live in the same house. However, if one of the partners is at the same time building another house, whatever partnership they had becomes so suspicious that it comes to an end.
The right to self-determination cannot provide the common goal for a lasting union. Moreover, nobody is inclined to make serious concessions if the outcome is so precarious. It is when we decide to live in the same house, no matter what, that we would be inclined to better the house. While Stalin recognizes the right to secede, Rousseau maintains that a nation means an indivisible unity for only indivisibility creates a common goal. Obviously, a conditional unity is hardly able to produce a serious commitment to the idea of a lasting union.
The Stalinist approach has no historical foundation as nations did not emerge as a result of peoples exercising the right to self-determination. The politics of either lumping people together or splitting them apart according as they want or do not want to stay together is too artificial to be anything more than a manipulation of political elites. Instead, modern nations have come into being through inner movements smashing the oppressive structures of conquests and empires. With the exception of overseas colonial empires––whose difficulties to modernize relate to the absence of organized democratic movements in the pre-independence phase––the resolution to build a common house guaranteeing freedom and equality for all is the cornerstone of modern nation, not the right to secession.
Those who truly care about democracy and freedom must understand that the refusal of self-determination alone can bring about the changes that they hope. What the refusal means is that we make unity unconditional so that everything else becomes negotiable. But if the union is conditional, the blackmail of secession seriously jeopardizes the exercise of democratic rules. What is more, a union is formed without the equal alienation of rights since one of the partners reserves the right to secede. As Rousseau puts it, the condition of modern democracy is “the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others” (The Social Contract).
It is clear that the act by which a people join a political union is also the act by which it ceases to consider itself as a nation. It becomes part of an organic whole and its distinctive characteristics, such as language, religion, customs, etc., become regional expressions of a larger union. How the specificities integrate into the union is negotiable, and various forms of arrangement can ensure their protection. By contrast, union defined as a collection of autonomous nations is a Stalinist aberration and a contradiction in terms. Let us listen to Stalin:
“The right of self-determination means that a nation may arrange its life in the way it wishes. It has the right to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign, and all nations have equal rights” (Marxism and the National Question).
What Stalin says here applies to an entity like the United Nations rather than to real existing nations whose characteristic is precisely to be sovereign in an indivisible way.
What this shows is that political unity among democratic forces has become impossible in Ethiopia because we find ourselves in an ideological muddle inherited from the Soviet Union. No more than Stalin could the Woyanne regime preserve the unity of Ethiopia without the creation of a party based on the rigid and oppressive principle of democratic centralism. The result is a tyrannical government that keeps peoples together by force after telling them that they are indeed nations and nationalities. On the other hand, opposition forces cannot unite because they are faced with the impossible dilemma of uniting elites who claim to represent nations.
It is high time that we understand that the political failure of opposition forces emerge from the fact that they want to solve a problem that is made unsolvable. The divagations of a deranged man (Stalin) on the right to self-determination has put Ethiopia in a political impasse, which if left as is, will lead to a breakup with disastrous consequences for the whole region. The best alternative is to renew the commitment to unconditional unity, thereby creating the conditions of a satisfactory solution for all. If the union is abiding, then serious talks can start on how to build the common house.
That is why I was more than happy to read in the recently released political program of the organization known as Medrek a strong reaffirmation of unity. The program plainly states that members of the organization believe that any challenges to the unity of Ethiopia must be dealt with on the basis of unity and democratic progress, and not through recourse to secession (page 22). This rebuttal of article 39 of the Ethiopian Constitution allowing the right to self-determination, including the right to secession, became necessary as a condition of unity among opposition forces.
The rebuttal is indeed a great step forward, even though it is not bold enough to reject the usage of the terms “nations” and “nationalities.” This lack of boldness exposes the program to the charge of being contradictory, since the term “nation” implies, by definition, the right to self-determination. I recommend the term “ethnic groups,” with the understanding that the Amhara and the Tigreans are no less ethnic groups than the Oromo, the Gurage, the Somali, etc. In so doing, we define Ethiopia as a multicultural nation rather than as a multinational state, a feature that requires a federal arrangement with large autonomy and self-rule. In this way, we avoid the present impasse without, however, sacrificing those rights necessary to realize the full equality of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups.
AUSTIN, TEXAS — A woman found dead in a Williamson County apartment Monday has been identified as Senait Worku Abebe, 26, according to the Williamson County sheriff’s office.
Senait, an immigrant from Ethiopia, appears to be the victim of a murder-suicide at the Rattan Creek Luxury Apartment Homes, at Parmer Lane and Dallas Drive, according to sheriff’s reports. The body of a man believed to have killed Senait also was found in the apartment. The sheriff’s office has not released the man’s name pending notification of his family.
Investigators believe Senait and the man were cab drivers.
SEATTLE – More victims are surfacing in connection with a local travel agency that suddenly closed its doors earlier this summer – leaving an untold number of customers holding the bag.