U.S. marshals continue to hunt for a college student accused of abducting a Prince George’s County family in a failed bank robbery scheme last month.
Authorities are asking for the public’s help in capturing Beruk Ayalneh, 24, a native of Ethiopia. Ayalneh was one of three men who allegedly broke into the home of an assistant bank manager last month and held the woman, her husband and two boys at gunpoint overnight. The other two suspects, Yosef Tadele, 23, of Silver Spring and Yohannes T. Surafel, 24, of the District remain behind bars on kidnapping, armed robbery and assault charges.
Police say the trio’s plan was to keep the children, ages 8 and 11, as hostages and force the woman to take money from the SunTrust branch where she worked in Silver Spring. The father convinced the robbers to allow them to bring the children with them to the bank.
But on the way, the father, James Spruill, foiled the plot after he saw a Maryland state trooper. Spruill began driving erratically until the trooper flashed on his cruiser’s emergency lights. Only one of the kidnappers, Surafel, was in the vehicle, but his gun was trained on the 11-year-old boy.
When the trooper asked Spruill for his license, the father jumped at the gunman and pinned him down.
U.S. marshals hope Ayalneh, who is a student at Howard University and has no criminal history, will surrender. Surafel has already tried to kill himself in a holding cell in the College Park barracks, police said.
“[Ayalneh] is not a sophisticated criminal mastermind who’s well-schooled in running and hiding,” said Matthew Burke, supervisory inspector with the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force. “We hope his inexperience will help us.”
Ayalneh, who is a U.S. citizen of Ethiopian descent, is from the Northern Virginia area and has ties to D.C. and the Maryland suburbs. He is 5-foot-8 and 170 pounds.
Anyone with information on Ayalneh’s whereabouts can call the U.S. Marshals Service at 301-489-1717 or 800-336-0102. Law enforcement authorities are offering a reward for information leading to Lee’s arrest.
The Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force, run by the U.S. Marshals Service, is composed of 28 federal, state and local agencies from Baltimore to Norfolk. The unit has captured 19,000 wanted fugitives since its creation in 2004.
In a land tormented by poverty, famine, drought, war and HIV/AIDS, Amanuel Hospital is Ethiopia’s only psychiatric hospital.
Until recently, its 360 beds were the last and only refuge for the mentally ill in a country of 77 million people.
Not surprisingly, the hospital had a grim reputation, with more patients than beds, no dining room facilities, no specialty wards, few drugs and even fewer doctors.
Amanuel used to be regarded more as an asylum than a hospital. Just five years ago, Ethiopia, with more than double Canada’s population, had only nine psychiatrists.
But a special relationship with the University of Toronto is beginning to change that, transforming the face of public health care in Ethiopia.
Dr. Clare Pain, a Global Health Scholar with Mount Sinai Hospital’s Peter A. Silverman Centre for International Health, first volunteered in Ethiopia 24 years ago as a British physiotherapist working with children affected by polio. In the early 1990s, she returned as a Canadian psychiatrist and made friends with Ethiopia’s few practising psychiatrists.
“It is a unique country,” she said. “It is an ancient, mysterious, enormously stable place, culturally and socially. Materially they are quite compromised, but spiritually and socially they are rich. I’m absolutely in love with the place.”
In late 2002, Dr. Atalay Alem of Amanuel e-mailed Dr. Pain seeking her help. He had a dream of expanding psychiatric care in Ethiopia by establishing a domestic training program for psychiatric residents.
Only, Addis Ababa University lacked enough qualified staff to establish a program by itself. Could Dr. Pain help?
His request came just as the University of Toronto was seeking to expand its educational relationships in other countries. When Dr. Pain approached her departmental chairman with a proposal to launch a voluntary teaching program in Ethiopia, the university jumped at the idea.
In a matter of months, Dr. Pain and Dr. Alem had established a program that would send three teaching teams a year to Ethiopia for a month each.
The teams, which consist of two psychiatry professors and one senior psychiatry resident from U of T, are voluntary and unpaid.
They instruct Ethiopian doctors in such specialties as forensic, child and geriatric psychiatry, and substance abuse. When they aren’t lecturing, they provide clinical supervision as Ethiopian residents make their daily hospital rounds.
“It’s great fun and a privilege to teach,” said Dr. Pain.
“It’s very rewarding because it is stimulating to work with smart residents, who ask smart questions. They come at your own stuff from a different angle.
“And there are hordes of bright, young, competent specialists at U of T who totally get it. It’s as if they re-find their vocation through the eyes of the Ethiopian residents and doctors.”
During the past five years, the visiting Toronto specialists have helped train and graduated 26 psychiatrists in Ethiopia.
But the impact on the country’s health system is even more impressive. With a growing cadre of trained psychiatrists, Ethiopia has established four 20-bed psychiatric departments in regional hospitals, in addition to clinics staffed by psychiatric nurses in 26 district hospitals.
“Everyone who is a health professional [in Ethiopia] is now required to do some training in mental health,” said Dr. Pain.
“There is an acknowledgment that there is no health without mental health. We’ve started to deliver better medicine.”
In fact, the Toronto Addis Ababa Psychiatry Project has been so successful it is about to spawn a variety of similar programs in 10 other medical fields.
U of T is planning to launch an additional 10 small educational collaborations with the University of Addis Ababa in internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, family medicine, emergency medicine, laboratory medicine and rehabilitation medicine.
It will also help develop a PhD program in nursing, expand Ethiopia’s pharmacy PhD program and help develop a master’s program in library sciences.
“We seem to have stumbled on a model that works really well at building capacity and sustainability,” Dr. Pain said.
“It is like having a kid: Once you sign on, you can’t not fulfill your obligation.”
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP) – Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba, who claimed double Olympic gold at 5,000 and 10,000 meters at Beijing, will run at the Boston Indoor Games on February 7, organizers announced Thursday.
Dibaba, the only woman two capture two athletics gold medals last August in China, has twice broken the women’s world 5,000m indoor record at this meet and set an outdoor 5,000m world record last year at the Bislett Games in Oslo.
The 23-year-old joins a lineup that includes Beijing Olympic men’s pole vault champion Steve Hooker of Australia, 2008 Olympic women’s pole vault runner-up Jenn Stuczynski and 1,500m bronze medalist Nick Willis of New Zealand.
An early morning fire rips through a home in the Lakes Subdivision near Grand Canyon and Lake South.
The good news is, that all seven people sleeping inside, including five children managed to escape the flames.
Action News Anchor, Tiffani Sargent spoke with the family and has more about how they got out with their lives.
One neighbor says it’s a miracle everyone survived and that it’s another reminder of how smoke alarms can save lives.
The renter of the home, Mulu Chekol told her sister to grab the children and run downstairs.
When the fire started, all seven extended family members, immigrants from Ethiopia, were sleeping upstairs, but amazingly they all managed to get out the front door alive.
One of the children says he was very scared, but managed to help make sure that his twin sister, who’s disabled made it out first.
Omega Tsegaye says he’s sad because his cat died but he says he got something back from God. He says he managed to save not only his own life, but also all of his toys.
Meantime, Omega’s younger cousin says he was even more scared and can just remember running as fast as he could down the stairs.
Still, despite losing everything she owns, Mulu Chekol says someone was looking out for them.
While the cause of the fire is still unknown, firefighters say the fire may have started with some electrical wires.
Meantime, a neighbor says a small investment literally saved this family.
Karen Smith says everyone needs to make sure they have working smoke alarms inside their home.
Right now, many generous neighbors like Karen Smith and the American Red Cross are helping the family with food, shelter and clothing.
Unfortunately, the family did not have renter’s insurance.
Ethiopia’s leading opposition politician is in her 10th day of a hunger strike after she was jailed for life on Dec. 29 following a dispute with the government, according to her mother.
Birtukan Mideksa, 34, has been taking only juice and water and is being held in solitary confinement in a windowless 3-meter by 4-meter (10-foot by 13-foot) cell in Ethiopia’s Kaliti prison, said her mother, Almaz Gebregziabhere, who visited her in prison yesterday.
“I didn’t recognize her because of how she’s changed,” said Gebregziabhere, 72, in an interview today at her home in Addis Ababa. “I begged her for the sake of her daughter to eat, but she didn’t.”
Prison officials have banned all visitors except Gebregziabhere and Mideksa’s 3-year-old daughter, Halle, from visiting her, Gebregziabhere said. Gebregziabhere, speaking in Amharic through a translator, said the family had been unable to hire a lawyer for Mideksa because those contacted on her behalf have turned her down as a client, fearing government reprisals.
Mideksa, a leader of the now-dissolved Coalition for Unity and Democracy party, was first jailed after Ethiopia’s 2005 elections, in which the CUD claimed victory. She and dozens of other opposition leaders were sentenced to life in prison, though they were released in 2007 after a pardon agreement with the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
She was re-arrested Dec. 29 after she rejected government demands that she make a public statement saying she had formally requested the original pardon.
‘Humane Condition’
Bereket Simon, an adviser to Zenawi, said he wasn’t aware of Mideksa’s fast.
“We have a prison system whereby we hold prisoners in a humane condition,” Simon said. “This is a case where she has said that she didn’t ask for pardon and the decision of the judiciary is being applied. At this point, I don’t think it requires intervention by lawyers.”
Simon also said the government wasn’t interested in potential mediation efforts by the independent group that negotiated Mideksa’s initial release.
Following their release in 2007, some former CUD leaders chose exile in the U.S. or U.K. Mideksa stayed in Ethiopia and formed a new party that planned to contest the 2010 elections.
“Look what has happened to her,” said Berhanu Nega, who along with Mideksa led the CUD movement in 2005, in a phone interview from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The government “will never allow any peaceful transition in that country.”
Call to Struggle
Nega, who was elected mayor of Addis Ababa in 2005 before his imprisonment, has called for armed struggle to oust Zenawi. Nega left Ethiopia after his release from prison in 2007 to teach at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
His new movement, Ginbot 7, has formed an underground network inside Ethiopia with the goal of overthrowing Zenawi’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, Nega said.
The U.S., which views Ethiopia as a key ally in the fight against terrorism, offered a rare rebuke to Zenawi’s government following Mideksa’s arrest, warning Ethiopia to avoid steps that appear to “criminalize dissent.”
Government opponents accused the state of rigging the May 2005 poll, sparking protests in Addis Ababa. A judicial inquiry after the election concluded that government security forces had killed 193 opposition supporters in the unrest.
(To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via the Johannesburg bureau at [email protected].)
MIAMI, Florida (CBS4) ― By all accounts 39-year old Samuel Abate Balcha, a native of Ethiopia, had no enemies. He was well loved by his friends and neighbors and was a hard worker. But on January 1st, 2009 his body was found inside his efficiency apartment. His killer has yet to be found.
Now close friend Lazaro Diaz is making a plea to the community for help in bringing Balcha’s killer to justice.
“He didn’t deserve this, for someone to take his life,” said Diaz.
Miami police detective Fernando Bosch told CBS4’s Liv Davalos they are baffled by Balcha’s murder and don’t really have a motive.
“It’s a mystery why anyone would take his life, he was pretty much loved by everybody,” said Bosch.
Detectives say Balcha was killed possibly on December 30th, his body found days later by a concerned neighbor, his apartment ransacked. Police say Balcha, who was born in Ethiopia and had lived in Miami for four years, was a civil engineer but was working as a truck driver for a delivery company while going to school at Miami-Dade College to learn English.
“Everybody we spoke to said he was a gentleman, a friend, a brother, there are a lot of people that are concerned,” said Bosch.
Anyone who can help police find Balcha’s killer is asked to call Miami-Dade Crimestoppers at (305) 471-TIPS.
Authorities are asking for the public’s help in capturing Beruk Ayalneh, 24, a native of Ethiopia. Ayalneh was one of three men who allegedly broke into the home of an assistant bank manager last month and held the woman, her husband and two boys at gunpoint overnight. The other two suspects, Yosef Tadele, 23, of Silver Spring and Yohannes T. Surafel, 24, of the District remain behind bars on kidnapping, armed robbery and assault charges.
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP) – Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba, who claimed double Olympic gold at 5,000 and 10,000 meters at Beijing, will run at the Boston Indoor Games on February 7, organizers announced Thursday.
An early morning fire rips through a home in the Lakes Subdivision near Grand Canyon and Lake South. 
Ethiopia’s leading opposition politician is in her 10th day of a hunger strike after she was jailed for life on Dec. 29 following a dispute with the government, according to her mother.