Category: Nation & World

PROVO, Utah — The Utah man charged with killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk returned to court Friday as his attorneys seek to disqualify prosecutors because an adult child of a deputy county attorney involved in the case attended the rally where Kirk was shot.

Defense attorneys say the relationship represents a conflict of interest after prosecutors said they intend to seek the death penalty against Tyler Robinson for aggravated murder.

Robinson, 22, has pleaded not guilty in the Sept. 10 shooting of Kirk on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem, just a few miles north of the Provo courthouse.

The 18-year-old child who attended the event — and whose name was redacted from court filings — later texted with their father in the Utah County Attorney’s Office to describe the chaotic events around the shooting, the filings from prosecutors and defense lawyers state.

Robinson’s attorneys say that personal relationship is a conflict of interest that “raises serious concerns about past and future prosecutorial decision-making in this case,” according to court documents. They also argue that the “rush” to seek the death penalty against Robinson is evidence of “strong emotional reactions” by the prosecution and merits the disqualification of the entire team.

Defense attorney Richard Novak urged Judge Tony Graf on Friday to bring in the state attorney general’s office in place of Utah County prosecutors to address the conflict of interest. Novak said it was problematic for county prosecutors to litigate on behalf of the state while defending their aptness to remain on the case.

Utah County Attorney Richard Gray replied that Novak’s last-minute request was aimed at delaying the case against Robinson.

“This is ambush and another stalling tactic to delay these proceedings,” Gray said.

The director of a state council that trains prosecutors said he was not aware of any other major case where attorneys had been disqualified for bias.

“I would bet against the defense winning this motion,” Utah Prosecution Council Director Robert Church said. “They’ve got to a show a substantial amount of prejudice and bias.”

Several thousand people attended the outdoor rally where Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA who helped mobilize young people to vote for President Donald Trump, was shot as he took questions from the audience. The adult child of the deputy county attorney did not see the shooting, according to an affidavit submitted by prosecutors.

“While the second person in line was speaking with Charlie, I was looking around the crowd when I heard a loud sound, like a pop. Someone yelled, ‘he’s been shot,’” the child stated in the affidavit.

The child later texted a family group chat to say “CHARLIE GOT SHOT.” In the aftermath of the shooting, the child did not miss classes or other activities, and reported no lasting trauma “aside from being scared at the time,” the affidavit said.

Prosecutors have asked Judge Graf to deny the disqualification request.

“Under these circumstances, there is virtually no risk, let alone a significant risk, that it would arouse such emotions in any father-prosecutor as to render him unable to fairly prosecute the case,” county attorney Gray said in a filing.

Gray also said the child was “neither a material witness nor a victim in the case” and that “nearly everything” the person knows about the actual homicide is mere hearsay.

If the Utah county prosecutors were disqualified, the case would likely be picked up by prosecutors in a county with enough resources to handle a big case. That could be Salt Lake City, or possibly even the state attorney general’s office, said prosecution council director Church. The judge would have the final say, he said.

Prosecutors have said text messages and DNA evidence connect Robinson to the killing. Robinson reportedly texted his romantic partner that he targeted Kirk because he “had enough of his hatred.”

At the school where the shooting took place, university president Astrid Tuminez announced Wednesday that she will be stepping down from her role after the semester ends in May.

The state university has been working to expand its police force and add security managers after it was criticized for a lack of key safety measures on the day of the shooting.

Prosecutors are expected to lay out their case against Robinson at a preliminary hearing scheduled to begin May 18.

WASHINGTON — A Cuban immigrant died in a Texas immigration detention facility earlier this month during an altercation with guards, and the local medical examiner has indicated that his death will likely be classified as a homicide.

The federal government has provided a differing account surrounding the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, saying the detainee was attempting suicide and staff tried to save him.

A witness told the Associated Press that Lunas Campos died after he was handcuffed, tackled by guards, and placed in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. The immigrant’s family was told by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday that a preliminary autopsy report said the death was a homicide resulting from asphyxia from chest and neck compression, according to a recording of the call reviewed by the AP.

The death and conflicting accounts have intensified scrutiny into the conditions of immigration jails at a time when the government has been rounding up immigrants in large numbers around the country and detaining them at facilities like the one in El Paso where Lunas Campos died.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is legally required to issue public notification of detainee deaths. Last week, it said Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old father of four and registered sex offender, had died at Camp East Montana, but made no mention of him being involved in an altercation with staff immediately before his death.

In response to questions from the AP, the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, on Thursday amended its account of Lunas Campos’ death, saying he tried to kill himself.

“Campos violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “During the ensuing struggle, Campos stopped breathing and lost consciousness.”

In an interview before DHS updated its account, detainee Santos Jesús Flores, 47, from El Salvador, said he witnessed the incident through the window of his cell in the special housing unit, where detainees are held in isolation for disciplinary infractions.

“He didn’t want to enter the cell where they were going to put him,” Flores told the AP on Thursday, speaking in Spanish from a phone in the facility. “The last thing he said was that he couldn’t breathe.”

Among the first sent to Camp Montana East

Camp Montana East is a sprawling tent facility hastily constructed in the desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base. The AP reported in August that the $1.2 billion facility, expected to become the largest detention facility in the United States, was being built and operated by a private contractor headquartered in a single-family home in Richmond, Va. The company, Acquisition Logistics LLC, had no prior experience running a corrections facility.

It was not immediately clear whether the guards present when Lunas Campos died were government employees or those of the private contractor. Emails seeking comment on Thursday from Acquisition Logistics executives received no response.

Lunas Campos was among the first detainees sent to Camp Montana East, arriving in September after ICE arrested him in Rochester, N.Y., where he lived for more than two decades. He was legally admitted to the U.S. in 1996, part of a wave of Cuban immigrants seeking to reach Florida by boat.

ICE said he was picked up in July as part of a planned immigration enforcement operation due to criminal convictions that made him eligible for removal.

New York court records show Lunas Campos was convicted in 2003 of sexual contact with an individual under 11, a felony for which he was sentenced to one year in jail and placed on the state’s sex offender registry.

Lunas Campos was also sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervision in 2009 after being convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance, according to the New York corrections records. He completed the sentence in January 2017.

Lunas Campos’ adult daughter said the child sexual abuse accusation was false, made as part of a contentious custody battle.

“My father was not a child molester,” said Kary Lunas, 25. “He was a good dad. He was a human being.”

Conflicting accounts

On the day he died, according to ICE, Lunas Campos became disruptive while in line for medication and refused to return to his assigned dorm. He was then taken to the segregation block.

“While in segregation, staff observed him in distress and contacted on-site medical personnel for assistance,” the agency said in its Jan. 9 release. “Medical staff responded, initiated lifesaving measures, and requested emergency medical services.”

Lunas Campos was pronounced dead after paramedics arrived.

Flores said that account omitted key details — Lunas Campos was already handcuffed when at least five guards pinned him to the floor, and at least one squeezed his arm around the detainee’s neck.

Within about five minutes, Flores said, Lunas Campos was no longer moving.

“After he stopped breathing, they removed the handcuffs,” Flores said.

Flores is not represented by a lawyer and said he has already consented to deportation to his home country. Though he acknowledged he was taking a risk by speaking to the AP, Flores said he wanted to highlight that “in this place, guards abuse people a lot.”

He said multiple detainees in the unit witnessed the altercation, and security cameras there should have captured the events. Flores also said investigators had not interviewed him.

DHS did not respond to questions about whether Lunas Campos was handcuffed when they say he attempted suicide, or exactly how he had tried to kill himself.

“ICE takes seriously the health and safety of all those detained in our custody,” McLaughlin said. “This is still an active investigation, and more details are forthcoming.”

DHS wouldn’t say whether other agencies were investigating. The El Paso medical examiner’s office confirmed Thursday that it conducted an autopsy, but declined further comment.

A final determination of homicide by the medical examiner would typically be critical in determining whether any guards are held criminally or civilly liable. When such deaths are ruled accidental or something other than homicide, they are less likely to trigger criminal investigations, while civil wrongful death lawsuits become harder to prove.

The fact that Lunas Campos died on an Army base could also limit state and local officials’ legal jurisdiction to investigate. An El Paso County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson declined to comment Thursday on whether it was involved in an investigation.

The deaths of inmates and other detainees after officers hold them face down and put pressure on their backs and necks to restrain them have been a problem in law enforcement for decades. A 2024 AP investigation documented hundreds of deaths during police encounters in which people were restrained in a prone position. Many uttered “I can’t breathe” before suffocating, according to scores of body camera and bystander videos. Authorities often attempt to shift the blame for such deaths to preexisting medical conditions or drug use.

Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist who has studied prone restraint deaths, said the preliminary autopsy ruling of homicide indicates guards’ actions caused Lunas Campos’ death, but does not mean they intended to kill. He said the medical examiner’s office could come under pressure to stop short of calling it a homicide, but will probably “stick to its guns.”

“This probably passes the ‘but for’ test. ‘But for’ the actions of the officers, he would not have died. For us, that’s generally a homicide,” he said.

‘I just want justice, and his body here’

Jeanette Pagan-Lopez, the mother of Lunas Campos’ two youngest children, said the day after he died the medical examiner’s office called to inform her that his body was at the county morgue. She immediately called ICE to find out what happened.

Pagan-Lopez, who lives in Rochester, said the assistant director of the El Paso ICE field office eventually called her back. She said the official told her the cause of death was still pending and that they were awaiting toxicology report results. He also told her the only way Lunas Campos’ body could be returned to Rochester free of charge was if she consented to his being cremated, she said.

Pagan-Lopez declined and is now seeking help from family and friends to raise the money needed to ship his body home and pay for a funeral.

After failing to get details about the circumstances surrounding his death from ICE, Pagan-Lopez said she got a call from a detainee at Camp Montana East who then put her in touch with Flores, who first told her about the altercation with guards.

Since then, she said she has repeatedly called ICE, but is no longer getting a response. Pagan-Lopez, who is a U.S. citizen, said she also twice called the FBI, where an agent took her information and then hung up.

Pagan-Lopez said she and Lunas Campos were together about 15 years before breaking up eight years ago. She described him as an attentive father who, until his detention, had worked in a minimum-wage job at a furniture store, the only employment she said he could find due to his criminal record.

She said that in the family’s last phone call the week after Christmas, Lunas Campos talked to his kids about his expected deportation back to Cuba. He said he wanted them to visit the island, so that he could stay in their lives.

“He wasn’t a bad guy,” Pagan-Lopez said. “I just want justice, and his body here. That’s all I want.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump plans to pardon former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez, a White House official said Friday.

Vázquez pleaded guilty last August to a campaign finance violation in a federal case that authorities say also involved a former FBI agent and a Venezuelan banker. Her sentencing was set for later this month.

Federal prosecutors had been seeking one year behind bars, something that Vázquez’s attorneys opposed as they accused prosecutors of violating a guilty plea deal reached last year that saw previous charges including bribery and fraud dropped.

They noted that Vázquez had agreed to plead guilty to accepting a promise of a campaign contribution that was never received.

Attorneys for Vázquez did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The official who confirmed the planned pardon indicated Trump saw the case as political prosecution and said the investigation into Vázquez, a Republican aligned with the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, had begun 10 days after she endorsed Trump in 2020. The official wasn’t authorized to reveal the news by name and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

CBS News was the first to report the plan to pardon Vázquez.

Pablo José Hernández, Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress and a member of the island’s main opposition party, condemned a pardon for Vázquez.

“Impunity protects and fosters corruption. The pardon … undermines public integrity, shatters faith in justice, and offends those of us who believe in honest governance,” said Hernández, a Democrat with Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party.

Vázquez, an attorney, was the U.S. territory’s first former governor to plead guilty to a crime, specifically accepting a donation from a foreigner for her 2020 political campaign.

She was arrested in August 2022 and accused of engaging in a bribery scheme from December 2019 through June 2020 while governor. At the time, she told reporters that she was innocent.

Authorities said that Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions was investigating an international bank owned by Venezuelan Julio Martín Herrera Velutini because of alleged suspicious transactions that had not been reported by the bank.

Authorities said Herrera and Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent who provided consulting services to Herrera, allegedly promised to support Vázquez’s campaign if she dismissed the commissioner and appointed a new one of Herrera’s choosing.

Authorities said Vázquez demanded the commissioner’s resignation in February 2020 after allegedly accepting the bribery offer. She also was accused of appointing a new commissioner in May 2020: a former consultant for Herrera’s bank.

Vázquez was the second woman to serve as Puerto Rico’s governor and the first former governor to face federal charges.

She was sworn in as governor in August 2019 after former Gov. Ricardo Rosselló resigned following massive protests. Vázquez served until 2021, after losing the primaries of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party to former Gov. Pedro Pierluisi.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump took the unusual step on Friday of thanking the Iranian government for not following through on executions of what he said was meant to be hundreds of political prisoners.

“Iran canceled the hanging of over 800 people,” Trump told reporters while leaving the White House to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. He added, “and I greatly respect the fact that they canceled.”

The Republican president also suggested on his social media site that more than 800 people had been set to be executed, but he said they now won’t be.

“Thank you!” he posted.

Those sentiments come after Trump spent days suggesting that the U.S. might strike Iran militarily if its government triggered mass killings during widespread protests that have swept that country.

The death toll from those protests continues to rise, activists say. Still, Trump seemed to hint that the prospects for U.S. military action were fading since Iran had held off on the executions.

The president’s rosy assessment did not match the more complicated situation on the ground in Iran but appeared to be Trump backing away from his early pronouncements that suggested a U.S. attack on that country might be imminent.

Trump had previously posted of Iran and the protesters there, “Help is on the way.” But asked if that was still the case on Friday, he replied: “Well, we’re going to see.”

Questioned about who convinced him to back down on seeming suggestions that he would strike Iran, Trump said, “Nobody convinced me. I convinced myself.”

“You had yesterday scheduled over 800 hangings. They didn’t hang anyone,” Trump said. “They canceled the hangings. That had a big impact.”

Cleric warns of ‘hard revenge’ on Trump, Netanyahu

As Iran returned to uneasy calm, a senior hard-line cleric called Friday for the death penalty for detained demonstrators and directly threatened Trump — evidence of the rage gripping authorities in the Islamic Republic.

Harsh repression that has left several thousand people dead appears to have succeeded in stifling demonstrations that began Dec. 28 over Iran’s ailing economy and morphed into protests directly challenging the country’s theocracy.

There have been no signs of protests for days in Tehran, where shopping and street life have returned to outward normality, though a week-old internet blackout continued. Authorities have not reported any unrest elsewhere in the country.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency on Friday put the death toll, at 2,797. The number continues to rise.

Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi urged the U.S. to make good on its pledge to intervene, calling Trump “a man of his word.”

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami’s sermon, carried by Iranian state radio, sparked chants from those gathered for prayers, including: “Armed hypocrites should be put to death!” Executions, as well as the killing of peaceful protesters, are two of the red lines laid down by Trump for possible military action against Iran.

Khatami, a member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts and Guardian Council long known for his hard-line views, described the protesters as the “butlers” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “Trump’s soldiers.” He insisted their plans “imagined disintegrating the country.”

“They should wait for hard revenge from the system,” Khatami said of Netanyahu and Trump. “Americans and Zionists should not expect peace.”

His fiery speech came as allies of Iran and the United States alike sought to defuse tensions. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Friday to both Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Israel’s Netanyahu, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

Peskov said “the situation in the region is quite tense, and the president is continuing his efforts to help de-escalate it.”

Russia had previously kept largely quiet about the protests. Moscow has watched several key allies suffer blows as its resources and focus are consumed by its 4-year-old war against Ukraine, including the downfall of Syria’s former President Bashar Assad in 2024, last year’s U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro this month.

Exiled Iranian royal calls for fight to continue

Days after Trump pledged “help is on its way” for the protesters, both the demonstrations and the prospect of imminent U.S. retaliation appeared to have receded. One diplomat told the Associated Press that top officials from Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar had raised concerns with Trump that a U.S. military intervention would shake the global economy and destabilize an already volatile region.

Yet the Trump administration has warned it will act if Iran executes detained protesters. Pahlavi, whose father was overthrown by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, said he still believes the president’s promise of assistance.

“I believe the president is a man of his word,” Pahlavi told reporters in Washington. He added that ”regardless of whether action is taken or not, we as Iranians have no choice to carry on the fight.“

Despite support by diehard monarchists in the diaspora, Pahlavi has struggled to gain wider appeal within Iran. But that has not stopped him from presenting himself as the transitional leader of Iran if the regime were to fall.

Iran and the U.S. traded angry accusations Thursday at a session of the United Nations Security Council, with U.S. ambassador Mike Waltz saying that Trump “has made it clear that all options are on the table to stop the slaughter.”

Gholam Hossein Darzi, the deputy Iranian ambassador to the U.N., blasted the U.S. for what he said was American “direct involvement in steering unrest in Iran to violence.”

Iran authorities list protest damage

Khatami, the hard-line cleric, also provided the first overall statistics on damage from the protests, claiming 350 mosques, 126 prayer halls, and 20 other holy places had sustained damage. Another 80 homes of Friday prayer leaders — an important position within Iran’s theocracy — were also damaged, likely underlining the anger demonstrators felt toward symbols of the government.

He said 400 hospitals, 106 ambulance, 71 fire department vehicles, and another 50 emergency vehicles also sustained damage.

Even as protests appeared to have been smothered inside Iran, thousands of exiled Iranians and their supporters have taken to the streets in cities across Europe to shout out their rage at the government of the Islamic Republic.

Amid the continuing internet shutdown, some Iranians crossed borders to communicate with the outside world. At a border crossing in Turkey’s eastern province of Van, a trickle of Iranians crossing Friday said they were traveling to get around the communications blackout.

“I will go back to Iran after they open the internet,” said a traveler who gave only his first name, Mehdi, out of security concerns.

Also crossing the border were some Turkish citizens escaping the unrest in Iran.

Mehmet Önder, 47, was in Tehran for his textiles business when the protests erupted. He said laid low in his hotel until it was shut for security reasons, then stayed with one of his customers until he was able to return to Turkey.

Although he did not venture into the streets, Önder said he heard heavy gunfire.

“I understand guns, because I served in the military in the southeast of Turkey,” he said. “The guns they were firing were not simple weapons. They were machine guns.”

In a sign of the conflict’s potential to spill over borders, a Kurdish separatist group in Iraq said it has launched attacks on Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in recent days in retaliation for Tehran’s crackdown on protests.

A representative of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, or PAK, said its members have “played a role in the protests through both financial support and armed operations to defend protesters when needed.” The group said the attacks were launched by members of its military wing based inside Iran.

The death toll of at least 2,797, provided by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, exceeds that of any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the chaos surrounding the 1979 revolution.

The agency has been accurate throughout years of demonstrations, relying on a network of activists inside Iran that confirms all reported fatalities. The AP has been unable to independently confirm the toll. Iran’s government has not provided casualty figures.