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Russia ‘poses rapidly increasing threat’ to Nato, warns Dutch prime minister – Europe live

AFP reports that Estonia is banning the transit of Russian and Belarusian grain on its territory. Foreign minister Margus Tsahkna posted to social media to say: I warned already in September: do not make plans to transport Russian grain through Estonia. Today, we turned that warning into law. Together with Latvia and Lithuania, we are working to ensure that Baltic ports do not become a transit route for Russia. The move appears mostly rhetorical, as national broadcaster ERR said Russian grain transport has been “essentially nonexistent”.

British Sikh activist released from Delhi jail after nine-year detention

The British Sikh activist Jagtar Singh Johal has been released from a Delhi prison after the Indian high court warned the government it would be found in contempt of court if it continued to attempt to keep him in jail despite an 18 September court order releasing him on bail. Johal has been incarcerated for nine years without any full trial. The court order was issued after Johal’s lawyers issued a writ of habeas corpus alleging he was being detained against the express direction of the court. Johal’s nine-year detention on alleged terrorist offences, has been a cause of diplomatic tension between the UK and India, but campaigners have claimed the British government has not been active enough to secure his release or, alternatively, a full trial. The campaign group Reprieve says his case has never come to full trial largely because of the inability of the Indian government to assemble credible witnesses to back their claim that Johal transported £3,000 to France to fund a multinational extremist plot involving targeted killings in the Punjab in 2016-17. On Thursday morning, the high court in Delhi instructed the Indian government to release Johal by 2.30pm Indian time, giving government officials three hours to comply or find themselves risking contempt proceedings. In the end, he was released in the late afternoon wearing a red T-shirt to be greeted by friends, family and flowers. Documents shown to the court by Johal’s lawyers on behalf of his father-in-law as petitioner revealed that messages from the prison to the Ministry of Home Affairs seeking permission for his release had been left unanswered. His lawyers in their petition stated he had met all the bail conditions yet “the detainee has nevertheless not been released, and is being held in custody without the authority of any court, pending a ‘clarification’ sought by the jail from the Ministry of Home Affairs”. The petition added that no clarification from the ministry had been forthcoming, explaining: “Every day of such detention is a continuing violation of the detainee’s fundamental rights under article 21 of the constitution of India.” Johal has been detained by Indian authorities since 4 November 2017. He is facing eight charges of terrorism in the federal court, but had been cleared of largely similar charges by a Punjab court. He claims any initial confessions he gave were extracted under torture. The bail terms last week imposed 11 conditions, including surrender of passport, a personal bond of 500,000 Indian rupees (£3,930) with two sureties, fortnightly reporting to the investigating officer, prior intimation of any change of residence and a ban on travelling to the Punjab. He was also restricted from talking to media about the case directly or indirectly. The Indian government has alleged the Khalistan Liberation Force undertook the killings and Johal had “complete knowledge of the conspiracy” and was a KLF member. His Dumbarton-based brother Gurpreet Singh Johal said: “There have been so many setbacks and disappointments in the last nine years that I didn’t dare to believe it until I saw Jagtar walking out of the prison gates with my own eyes. The last two weeks have been torture – knowing that Jagtar had been granted bail, but the authorities were refusing to let him out. I’ll sleep well tonight, knowing that he’s not behind bars. “Tomorrow morning, the fight continues, because he’s still on trial and facing the death penalty for something he didn’t do, trapped in a sham legal process designed to punish him for standing up for human rights”. Reprieve’s deputy executive director, Dan Dolan, said: “While tonight is the first night in almost nine years that Jagtar Singh Johal is not caged in a prison cell, he still has the threat of a death sentence hanging over him. It should also be noted that, despite bail being ordered, the prison refused to release Jagtar until his family brought a habeas corpus petition and a judge warned the jail they’d be found in contempt of court”. The UK Foreign Office is understood to have been supporting recent calls for his release on bail after last week’s court order, as have two campaign groups in the UK Redress and Reprieve.

Ukraine persists with Russian oil refinery strikes in defiance of Trump

Ukraine is pressing on with strikes on Russian oil refineries, defying Donald Trump, who blames the attacks for exacerbating a global diesel shortage and pushing up fuel prices. Kyiv struck an oil facility in Russia’s southern Samara region overnight, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday in a statement on social media. The Ukrainian president added that a Russian vessel in the Black Sea was hit, as well as a launch and storage site for attack drones in the Oryol region. Trump has urged Zelenskyy in a private phone call to halt attacks on Russian refineries and repeatedly suggested in public that Ukraine’s strikes are to blame for the squeeze on global fuel supplies. “Diesel is really hurt much more, not by the Middle East, but by what’s going on in Russia, because those diesel refineries are being knocked out at a pretty alarming rate,” Trump said on Wednesday. Diesel prices in the US have risen to record highs in recent weeks, adding to cost of living pressures that have helped push Trump’s approval ratings to a career low before next month’s crucial midterm elections. Energy analysts, however, have pointed to the war in Iran and wider disruption to global oil markets as the leading drivers of the price increases. Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian refineries have nevertheless emerged as an additional headache for Trump, with the attacks also contributing to tighter diesel supplies at a politically sensitive moment for the US president. Ukraine’s campaign in recent months has knocked out more than 45% of Russia’s refining capacity, according to Ukrainian estimates, prompting fuel rationing in some regions and long queues at petrol stations. Earlier this week, Russia – traditionally the world’s second-largest diesel exporter – extended its ban on diesel exports until the end of October, adding further pressure to a global supply crunch. Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at Ukraine’s government-run National Institute for Strategic Studies, said it was unlikely Kyiv would stop targeting Russian oil infrastructure as long as Moscow continued its daily attacks on Ukraine. “There is no rationale for Ukraine to continue exercising restraint while it is being bombarded and major urban areas are under constant attack,” he said. “We need to deprive Russia of revenue,” he added. Zelenskyy has been pushing for a US-brokered energy ceasefire with Russia, but Putin has shown little interest in the proposal, instead vowing to intensify strikes on Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia has continued its deadly missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities, targeting energy infrastructure, commercial warehouses and other businesses in an apparent effort to cripple the country’s economy and render Kyiv increasingly uninhabitable. A Russian drone struck a school in Kyiv on Thursday morning, but no one was injured because the children were sheltering in the basement, mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A key bridge in the Ukrainian capital was also hit, forcing authorities to suspend metro services and other public transport. Kyiv has experienced near round-the-clock Russian attacks in recent weeks, at times increasingly resembling a frontline city in what many see as the most challenging period for the capital since the early days of the full-scale invasion. Russia’s newer jet-powered drones have proved particularly difficult for Ukrainian air defences to intercept, with success rates significantly lower than for the slower Shahed-type drones. The sustained attacks have revived fears of another winter with prolonged power and heating outages, after similar strikes last year left parts of Ukraine without electricity during temperatures that fell as low as -20C.

Motive behind flydubai cockpit stabbing unknown as international investigation opens

The motive, background and affiliation of the Omani co-pilot who stabbed his captain in an apparent attempt to crash an Israel-bound flight from Dubai remains unknown, as international teams open investigations into the incident. Israeli passengers intervened to stop the attack on Wednesday, restraining the co-pilot, while a reserve crew in the plane was able to stabilise the plummeting plane and ultimately land it safely in Saudi Arabia. The plane had more than 170 people onboard and Israeli officials praised the bravery of those who intervened, announcing that four of the Israeli passengers would receive a “heroism” award for preventing a potential disaster. Saudi investigators, who initially detained the co-pilot upon landing, were cooperating with the United Arab Emirates, the US, Oman and Israel to try to determine the attacker’s motive, a regional official familiar with the investigation said. “All possible scenarios, from terrorism to mental disorders, are being looked into. Nothing is ruled out for now,” they told the Associated Press. Benjamin Netanyahu said that it was still not known who may have been ultimately behind the apparent attempted attack. The Israeli prime minister told Fox News it was “too early to say” if there was any Iranian involvement. “We’ll get to the root of this attacker, whether he had accomplices, whether Iran was behind it. I think we’ll find out very soon,” Netanyahu said. It came just days after Netanyahu warned of an unspecified security threat to Israel that could come during its October election. The Israeli military had said before the incident it had no specific intelligence of an imminent threat, while the opposition leader Yair Lapid said that a security briefing on Tuesday night included no mention of a related threat. Other Israeli officials, including the defence minister, Israel Katz, and the ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, suggested the incident was a “terror attack”, with the Israeli foreign ministry briefing its diplomats that the attack was against Israel and its relationship with the UAE. Danon told Fox News that Israel had “no doubt it was a terror attack from a radical individual”, but said that until now investigators had not established any link to a specific organisation or state. Donald Trump suggested the co-pilot was “perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job”, while telling reporters at the White House that he and Netanyahu had spoken at length. Netanyahu also spoke to the president of the UAE, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who agreed to Israel’s involvement in the investigation. Flydubai said its flights to and from Israel would be suspended while the investigation took place and urged all parties “to refrain from premature speculation while authorities gather the facts”. The UAE announced on Thursday that it would be conducting its own investigation of the incident, which started about two and a half hours after takeoff from Dubai. It said its investigators had begun to look into the attacker’s motive and if he had any links to any “terrorist purpose”. Passengers said they saw a knife-wielding man – apparently the Omani co-pilot – putting the captain of the plane on the floor, after which the plane began to plummet. The wounded pilot, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, managed to send out an emergency signal and open the cockpit door, allowing passengers to enter and stop the plane’s descent. A video shared by the prime minister’s office showed one passenger, Yaniv Hayoun, a plumber, speaking to Netanyahu at length about how the events onboard played out. Hayoun told the prime minister he and other passengers heard screaming and felt the air pressure change as the plane dived before they forced their way into the cockpit and found the attacker at the instrument panel. “I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and dragged him out first,” Hayoun said during the meeting with Netanyahu after the plane had landed safely and the passengers were flown to Israel. Machchhar was widely praised for his bravery, with Netanyahu and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, hailing him as a hero. India’s ambassador to the UAE met the wounded captain’s family and briefed them on his recovery, the Indian consulate in the UAE said. Machchhar was being treated in a hospital in Tabuk. “Captain Smit Machchhar is a HERO,” Modi said, in a post on social media. “In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others.”

The German town where the right has banned new ‘stumbling stones’ for Nazi victims

The town hall of Heidenau, Germany has a freshly restored cream-coloured facade, tidy flower boxes on the windowsills and a charming shingled clocktower. At the entrance, closer inspection reveals a single brass plaque embedded in the pavement honouring the former mayor Paul Gröger, whom the Nazis hounded into killing himself. The plaque is one of 128,000 Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) across Europe, a donor-funded project keeping alive the memory of individual victims of the Nazi era. It is by some measure considered the world’s biggest grassroots memorial project, and has become an integral part of Germany’s “remembrance culture” for the atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler. But last week at the same town hall, the council of Heidenau voted to halt the laying of future stumbling stones. In a decision that drew a national outcry, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party joined forces with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to help form the majority. “They want to drive the victims’ memory out of the city centre, just like the victims themselves were driven out,” said Anne Nitschke of AKuBiZ, a citizens’ group coupling history education with pro-democracy work in Saxony state, a hotbed of rightwing extremism. “The point of the Stolpersteine is that you stumble across them every day and then think about who lived here and who was forced to leave,” said Nitschke, 40. Her organisation had filed for permission to lay another 12 plaques for Holocaust victims, until the Heidenau council stopped them. The vote came in a month in which the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin AfD widened a lead at the top of the national polls, won two state elections and performed strongly in a third, in the capital, Berlin. Like the other mainstream parties, Merz’s CDU has ruled out cooperation with the far right in a stance known as the “firewall”. But political realities have often made the AfD an unavoidable partner in municipal policymaking, particularly in the former communist east. Supporters of the stumbling stones ban criticised that their placement on the ground meant they were walked on and exposed to the elements. They called for a “memorial space” in a Christian cemetery north of town “for the victims of war, terrorism, dictators and forced displacement”. Nitschke noted that the council had not made any plans or committed funding for such an endeavour, and said the broad spectrum cited served to deny the “singularity of the Holocaust”. Merz’s national CDU referred queries to the Heidenau chapter, which did not respond to a request for comment. The AfD began as a Eurosceptic party 13 years ago and has morphed into an increasingly nationalist force. It has long targeted memory culture as detrimental to patriotism. One of its founders, Alexander Gauland, compared the Nazi period to a “speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history”. The Saxony-Anhalt chapter, which won a record 44% of the vote in September, pledged to “liberate” Germans from shame over the Holocaust while offering “more Bismarck, less Hitler” in schools. And the part’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, falsely called the Nazi leader “a communist, socialist guy” in a campaign appearance with Elon Musk last year. (The tech billionaire told AfD supporters at the event there was “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt” in Germany.) Many residents of the town said they supported the Stolpersteine and were sceptical of the councillors’ motives. “Why would they have anything against the Stolpersteine? It’s easy enough to walk around them if you don’t want to step on them,” said Christine Bauer, 85, who uses a rolling walker to move about town. “I’m a child of the war and remember its awful aftermath,” said Bauer, who worked on Elbe river ships until she retired. “It’s not as if the town council didn’t have bigger problems to worry about now,” she added, mentioning affordability. But Silke Schutz, 63, a baker who called herself a “staunch AfD voter”, described the Stolpersteine as “a waste of money, regardless of who pays for them”. “There are so many victims no one cares about,” she said, citing people killed in traffic accidents. “We had nothing to do with the war and at some point it [remembrance] has got to come to an end. But when I express my opinion, I’m insulted as a Nazi.” Started by the artist Gunter Demnig in the 1990s, the Stolpersteine are laid before a Nazi victim’s last home or workplace and inscribed with stark biographical details: date of birth and the date and circumstances of their death. Heidenau has five, all laid personally by Demnig. He reacted angrily to the town council’s decision, calling it a “unprecedented” and wrong. Four plaques are laid just a few minutes’ walk from the Heidenau railway station in honour of the Reiner family. Its Jewish patriarch, Maximilian, ran a local department store until he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. He survived and, after liberation two years later, emigrated to the US and died soon after, in 1949. Gröger, the Social Democratic mayor until 1933, refused to run up the swastika flag at the town hall and was removed from office. In June, Nazi officers spirited him away to the Hohnstein concentration camp, where they beat and tortured him. In August, he took his own life. School pupils raised the funds for his plaque, while AKuBiZ sponsored the remaining four Stolpersteine. Descendants often travel from abroad to attend their installation, as most Holocaust victims lack a gravesite. Local residents support the project by regularly polishing the Stolpersteine, and digital apps provide detailed information about the victims’ fates. Nitschke said no plans had been announced to remove any of the existing Stolpersteine, but for now the 12 planned plaques were on hold, including for Fritz Goldstein, a Jew whom the Nazis stripped of his property and deported to the Soviet Union with his wife, Martha. He died a broken man aged 50, five years after his return to Heidenau. Juliane, 29, a music teacher who declined to give her last name, said she found it moving to learn about the victims through the Stolpersteine. “It is so important we don’t forget, so we don’t make the same mistakes again.” But 28-year-old Philipp, a cook, said he supported the town council’s ban. “It’s not relevant to me – it’s in the past. So there’s no point in dwelling on it now. At some point, you’ve got to put it behind you.” He said Germany’s memory culture had been imposed from abroad. “Other countries just want Germany to constantly have to justify what it did.” Nitschke said her team planned a legal challenge to the ban. This weekend they will lead a march through town to the sites of the planned new Stolpersteine, recounting the stories of each of the victims.

‘It’s utter surrealism’: Venezuela’s Chavistas lament government’s embrace of Trump

He was one of the most passionate propagandists for Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution: a feisty leftist TV personality who spent more than two decades singing the movement’s praises on his state-funded show, The Razorblade. Mario Silva’s devotion was such that he often hosted his programme with Chávez’s portrait behind him and he had El Comandante’s curly signature tattooed on to his left wrist. But nine months after Venezuela’s political landscape was scrambled by Donald Trump’s abduction of Chávez’s heir, Nicolás Maduro, Silva’s show has been cancelled, and its host is livid about the revolution’s direction under Maduro’s former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez. “[I feel] a lot of disappointment – depressed … and sometimes I wake up and feel like the world is collapsing around me,” the 66-year-old said during a rare interview at his home studio in the mountains outside the capital, Caracas. Silva has spent recent weeks railing against Rodríguez’s interim administration on YouTube, his home since his programme on state TV was axed, berating those he blames for Venezuela’s “shameful and utterly illegitimate surrender” to the US. Since January, a parade of high-ranking US officials – including the head of the CIA, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff and the energy secretary, Chris Wright – have visited Caracas, while Trump recently trumpeted striking “the biggest oil deal in world history” with Rodríguez’s regime. Last week, Rodríguez and Trump met on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, posing for a smiley photograph that left diehard Chavistas such as Silva aghast. “I thought it [the photo] was artificial intelligence or something like that. But it’s surrealism, utter surrealism … It’s impossible to understand,” Silva fumed on YouTube as a red flag emblazoned with the faces of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin hung behind him. “They have surrendered this country and surrendered it the most vile and despicable way,” Silva went on. “Honestly, they are dragging the country’s name through the mud. They are dragging Chávez’s name through the mud.” In another broadcast, Silva seethed about the cosy post-Maduro relationship that has developed between one-time anti-imperialist flagbearers in Caracas and Trump officials: “Traitors and lackeys, you will have to answer for this!” Silva is not the only Chavista loyalist struggling to comprehend the ideological U-turn being executed by Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice-president but has engineered a historic rapprochement with the US since his rendition on 3 January. Elías Jaua, a vice-president and foreign minister under Chávez, is also up in arms, and claims the feeling is widely shared. “What I hear from comrades across the country is bewilderment, disagreement and indignation,” said Jaua, who believes Trump’s oil deal “amounts to an act of pillage against an entire nation”. Juan Barreto, a former member of the ruling Socialist party (PSUV) and mayor of Caracas, said such an agreement would have been unimaginable when the Bolivarian revolution began after Chávez’s 1998 election. He said Chavistas, who had once vowed “Not a drop of oil to the empire if Venezuela is attacked!”, were now in effect saying: “All of the oil reserves [for the US], for as long as you want!” “The current situation is one of tutelage,” Barreto said. Rodríguez has defended the deal, claiming it will create more than $209bn (£158bn) in revenues that will help improve healthcare and education. “We are thinking of Venezuela’s future,” she said in a recent TV broadcast. Héctor Rodríguez, another prominent Chavista politician, has sought to deflect criticism of Venezuela’s interim government by recalling how Chávez was forced to make a tactical retreat after his failed coup attempt in 1992. “No one can tell me Chávez was a coward. He understood that the balance of power had shifted … and decided to take a step backwards,” Rodríguez said recently. Last week as Delcy Rodríguez met Trump in New York, thousands of people joined a pro-government rally in Caracas, where supporters parroted the slogan “Delcy avanza, tú tienes mi confianza!” (“Move forward, Delcy. I trust in you!”). “No matter how much they kick and scream, there’s nothing they can do to try to cover up the success of President Delcy Rodríguez’s visit to New York,” her interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, told the crowd. Unlike at previous marches, there was scant mention of Maduro and few calls for him to be released. The depth and potential consequences of Chavista anger over Rodríguez’s embrace of Venezuela’s longtime foes in Washington remain unclear. Orlando Pérez, a Latin America expert from the University of North Texas at Dallas, recognised there was indignation at what some considered a sellout of their anti-imperialist ideals. “There are Chavistas that are pissed off, there’s no question about it,” he said. “There are Chavistas who see this as a betrayal of Hugo Chávez and the betrayal of the movement.” But Pérez believed that for many Chavistas who had remained in power after Trump’s invasion, the “pragmatic reality” was that working with Washington was “a necessary evil” if it meant keeping Venezuela’s opposition out of power. “If that means negotiating with Trump, if that means dealing with the CIA etc, it’s fine,” he said. “Beyond whatever ideological position they might have … I suspect most of them are gritting their teeth and just going along with this process as long as they can stay in power and keep their jobs. I think for most it’s as simple as that: it’s about their material wellbeing.” However, Pérez believed Rodríguez’s government would need to demonstrate to supporters “tangible benefits to the cooperation” with the US in order to avoid a backlash. “They’re going to have to show that these things have a material consequence to the lives of their social base … if you don’t deliver, then it is going to get very volatile,” he warned. So far there has been no sign of significant resistance from outraged supporters of Chavismo. But Silva claimed the government’s new direction and economic policies could eventually trigger a social uprising and protests. “Worsening economic conditions will degrade [people’s] quality of life, and that pressure is bound to explode. It has to explode – it’s not just wishful thinking. This isn’t a prediction born of desire, it’s an inevitability,” said the broadcaster, who has claimed he is facing investigation for alleged acts of “aggravated defamation and slander against the interim government”. Silva lit one cigarette after another as he recalled the early hours of 3 January 2026 when, as US troops swept into Venezuela’s capital, he realised the revolution he had spent more than 20 years defending was not going to defend itself. The Chavista broadcaster said he moved from one strategic point to another across Caracas before finally calling the commander at his assigned post. “I said: ‘Hey, what happened? Where are the weapons?’” Silva recalled, his face settling into a sad grin as he remembered the answer. “Go to sleep, Mario,” he was told. Silva pauses. “You have no idea how disappointed I was.”

Australian couple on plane diverted after flydubai pilot’s alleged attack on co-pilot

Two Australian citizens onboard a flight to Tel Aviv that was diverted after one of the pilots allegedly stabbed the other in an attack are “safe,” the foreign minister confirmed. The passengers are a Jewish couple from Sydney, the Israeli embassy in Australia confirmed to the Guardian on Thursday. No further details were provided. The flydubai aircraft was travelling from the United Arab Emirates to Israel when it was forced to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. In a post on social media, Penny Wong thanked the “heroes” for thwarting the attack. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email “Relieved to confirm at least two Australians who were on the Flydubai flight to Israel are safe – thanks to the heroes who thwarted the attack and helped bring the passengers to safety,” she wrote. “We’re thinking of those injured and hope for their full recovery.” One of the pilots, whom Israeli officials said was an Omani citizen, is accused of stabbing his co-pilot. During the alleged attack, the plane plunged about 17,000 feet in just two minutes. Passenger Yaniv Hayoun later recounted how he and other passengers heard screaming and felt pressure as the plane dived before forcing their way into the cockpit and finding the attacker at the instrument panel. “I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and dragged him out first,” Hayoun said during a meeting with Netanyahu after the plane had landed safely and the passengers were flown to Israel. “He was trying to destroy the instruments to disable the plane.” Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman, said the incident reminded him of the 11 September attacks. “You have here a very special incident, and due to the real heroism of some people on board, they were saved.” Newman said heightened security alerts had been issued after the attack. “It just shows that … those that hate Israel also hate the peace. “It’s an attempt to hit at the peace itself, at the Abraham Accords, and the relationships which Israel does have with Arab and Muslim countries.” The Abraham Accords normalised relations between the UAE and Israel in 2020. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said it was too early to tell who was ultimately behind the incident. There are about 12,000 Australian citizens living in Israel and 25,000 in the UAE.

‘Where illegal ebikes go to die’: first bikes seized under new laws in NSW crushed

The first illegal ebikes seized under new laws have been crushed in New South Wales, as a major Sydney hospital has warned of a spike in trauma injuries driven by those riding under the influence. The NSW government crushed 23 ebikes at a wrecking yard in western Sydney on Thursday, turning them into scrap metal. NSW police are assessing applications for the return of an additional 13 bikes seized during a joint operation with Transport for NSW in the northern beaches in September. The NSW transport minister, John Graham, told reporters onsite on Thursday “this isn’t a scene from Mad Max. This is where illegal ebikes go to die.” Graham said tough new laws were necessary “because of some of the bad behaviour we’ve seen … on our state’s streets, on the golf courses in Sydney suburbs, even on the Sydney Harbour Bridge”. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email On the same day, St Vincent’s hospital released figures that showed a 22% spike in legal and illegal ebike injuries, with 42% of those injuries triggering a trauma response and the majority being injured while riding under the influence of alcohol or drugs, riding too fast or without a helmet. It found 361 patients presented to the hospital for ebike injuries between January and July, compared with 296 presentations during the same period last year. Dr Ed Lewis, acting head of rehabilitation medicine, told reporters injuries included fractures, internal bleeding, as well as the “perforation of certain organs”. He said they often included brain injuries from severe head trauma, “as well as milder knocks, like a concussion, which can still have long-term repercussions for patients”. Lewis told Guardian Australia that those contemplating riding an ebike home while intoxicated “need to have a plan B or a backup solution”. “The message that we want to say to people is: enjoy using ebikes, but respect what they are. Respect that they are fast. Wear a helmet and just don’t ride impaired.” Graham said the government was concerned by the number of injuries, but it was “important to keep it in context”. “The number of ebike injuries is still low compared to cars … but is rising,” he said. “If you’re not wearing a helmet, you are dicing with danger.” He stepped aside to allow a giant metal claw pick up a tangle of ebikes, cracking frames in half and popping tyres. They were loaded into a conveyor belt before being crushed and shredded. Graham said batteries had been removed for safe disposal and recycling beforehand. Under powers which came into effect in August, police and transport officers can seize bikes not restricted to 25km/h, whose maximum speed while not pedalling does not exceed 6km/h, and maximum continuous power of 500 watts, due to reduce to 250 watts in March 2029. The government says the bikes crushed include one capable of speeds of more than 90km/h seized from a 14-year-old, a food delivery bike, and bikes with speed restriction settings that had been tampered with. The 36 ebikes seized so far represent a fraction of the estimated 760,000 in the state. The changes were prompted by a surge in injuries and high-profile incidents, including one in which about 40 ebikes swarmed the Sydney Harbour Bridge in February. An expert review on implementing an age limit of between 12 and 16 was due to report back to the government in June. The NSW premier, Chris Minns, appearing on the debut of Kyle Sandilands Live in August, said the government was “examining an … age limit of 12”, but hadn’t finalised the details. On Thursday, Graham would not say if the premier had revealed the planned age limit. “I want to discuss this with my colleagues and also with the public,” he said.