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Saudi Arabia urged to reconcile with UAE to drive back Houthi separatists in Yemen

Saudi Arabia is being urged to reconcile with the United Arab Emirates over Yemen as the price Riyadh must pay to form a military alliance capable of driving the Houthis back. Relations between the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, where both had backed anti-Houthi forces, plummeted in January this year when a force with which it had been aligned – the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) – was attacked and defeated by Saudi Arabia in a move intended to squash its attempt to recreate a separate southern state. The UAE subsequently effectively quit Yemen. But the unexpected success in mid September of the Iran-aligned Houthi drive to the narrow Bab al-Mandab strait against pro-government forces has transformed the geopolitics of the region again. The push south defeated the previously UAE-backed National Resistance Forces led by Tareq Saleh, whose front rapidly collapsed. The future role of the UAE in Yemen was discussed at a meeting in Abu Dhabi on Sunday attended by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, UAE president Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan and a group of other Arab states, including representatives of Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu reportedly offered to help Saudi Arabia defeat the Houthis, an offer that Riyadh would probably find near impossible to accept, even though Donald Trump has failed to answer the Saudi call for US help in Yemen. A further meeting to discuss Yemen took place on Tuesday in Riyadh between Prince Khalid bin Salman al Saud, the Saudi defence minister, and Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE vice president. It is part of a range of signs from the two sides suggesting they may want to find a path to reconciliation, even if only on energy. Following the Houthi push to the Bab al-Mandab strait, a chokepoint on Saudi oil exports, its forces are now trying to consolidate their gains and take the south-western city of Taiz. “The Houthi forces are mounting simultaneous waves of attacks on the city trying to exhaust the Taiz Axis force defending the city. The Houthis are pushed back, but then the next day they come again on a different front,” said Baraa Shiban, a Gulf and Yemen specialist at the defence think tank Rusi who has just spent a week in Taiz. “Efforts are being made to try to end the rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and there may be some confidence-building measures. But the UAE has left Yemen, and it is unlikely that Riyadh would let them back in since they are aligned with the STC, and that would spell trouble … the UAE and Saudi Arabia are fundamentally on opposite sides.” The STC leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, fled into exile following the Saudi attack on its forces and the movement became marginalised as a political force. But the former Yemen foreign minister and STC supporter Khaled Alyemany told the Guardian that Saudi Arabia may have to reconsider its political approach to the southern issue since the Giant Brigades, the UAE-trained southern forces once associated with the STC, provide some of the most reliable, well-equipped forces on the ground to stem the Houthi advance. The Giant Brigades, however, have been urged by the STC to resist merging with Yemen government forces, arguing to do so will set back the separatist cause. “We cannot fight and wage wars in the north against the Houthis if we do not have a horizon for our independence,” Alyemany said. “The UN recognised government … operating from exile in Riyadh, insists that southerners fight to retake the capital, Sana’a, on its behalf, but without any promise of the south’s right to self-determination,” he said. “The problem is so long as the Yemen government derives its legitimacy from its Saudi funders rather than its people, the outcome is not Saudi Arabia’s stated goal of security along its southern borders.” The White House has also been privately urging the UAE and the Saudi to bury their differences and allow a unified military command including the Southern Giants Brigades to challenge the Houthi advance. An additional proposal is to use Israeli intelligence and hire Israeli private security firms, something the UAE has done sometimes to brutal effect in the past in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, reluctant to be seen cooperating with Israel, has also always resisted helping the southern separatists since division of the country might entrench Houthi rule in the north along its border. The Houthis have used drones and missiles to attack Saudi energy installations. Despite Saudi air cover and support, the current battle to prevent the Houthis consolidating their gains is such that the parliament of the UN-recognised government has sanctioned a general mobilisation of the Yemeni people to fight the Houthis. The World Health Organization stated that 838 people were killed and 3,643 others were injured due to the recent escalation in Yemen from 6 August last year until 26 September this year. The Houthis insist they are not seeking to block general commercial shipping in the strait, but only that linked to Saudi Arabia. On Monday it published figures showing commercial shipping was flowing as normal. The Houthis claim Saudi Arabia is in effect a colonial power, and the UN-recognised government based in Aden is a creature of Riyadh with no independent ability to govern the country. April Longley Alley, senior fellow at Washington Institute, told an International Crisis Group seminar that the war is existential for the Saudis, but the Houthis are not going to compromise. “We will have to see if they hold these territories, but what the Houthis learned from the Iran war is that Saudi under pressure and attack will seek de-escalation,” she said. “The Houthis are demanding a victor’s peace.”

National Rally’s Jordan Bardella rails at ‘war’ on party after antisemitism claims

Jordan Bardella, the head of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), has claimed a “total war” is being waged against his party as he faces a political storm after the publication of antisemitic comments he allegedly wrote as a young party member. Bardella, who is facing calls from political opponents to resign, said on Tuesday that the report by the investigative website Mediapart was false. To a standing ovation from his party’s lawmakers and senators at a meeting in parliament, he said the report was an attempt to damage his party as Le Pen tops the polls before the 2027 presidential election. “We are seeing the beginnings of a total war, an attempt to destabilise the presidential campaign,” Bardella said. He accused Mediapart of wanting “to kill my political career” and said he would take legal action for defamation. Le Pen, at Bardella’s side, said she had “absolute confidence” in him. Journalists at Mediapart said they had independently authenticated the comments allegedly written between 2013 and 2015, including in email groups and on messaging services. Bardella was aged 17 to 18 at the time and was a member of the party that was then called the Front National. The alleged comments included “the Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so”. He is also alleged to have written “all the banks are owned by Jews”. Mediapart’s investigation has shaken Le Pen’s presidential campaign. Since Le Pen took over the party leadership in 2011, she has sought to detoxify the party image and move it away from its antisemitic past in order to increase its electoral reach. When Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founded the party in 1972, its ranks included former members of a Waffen SS military unit under Nazi command during the second world war. Pierre Bousquet, a former member of the Waffen SS Charlemagne division, was the party’s treasurer for its first nine years. Another early member had been in the paramilitary militia under Philippe Pétain, the leader of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis and ensured the deportation of one-quarter of France’s Jewish population to concentration camps, about 76,000 people. In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen described the Holocaust as a “mere detail” of the second world war. In the decades that followed he was convicted more than 15 times for hate speech and contesting crimes against humanity as he repeated negationist comments, including saying the Nazi occupation was “not particularly inhumane”. Marine Le Pen, who expelled her father from the party in 2015 after he repeated antisemitic comments, has in recent years directly appealed to French Jewish voters. She said her party would protect them, describing the RN as “the best shield for our fellow French citizens of Jewish faith”. Bardella made an unprecedented visit to Israel in 2025, the first by a French far-right leader, in an attempt to demonstrate the RN’s new credentials. In 2023, Bardella told a TV interviewer he did not think Jean-Marie Le Pen was antisemitic, before backtracking on his comments after criticism. The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, responding to the Mediapart investigation, wrote on social media: “To all those with a short memory: antisemitism isn’t an accident in the RN, it’s that party’s history. That’s the real face of the far right.” Aurore Bergé, the minister for equality and against discrimination, said the “antisemitic and conspiracy theory” content of the alleged messages “reminds those who might have forgotten the nature of the far right”. Raphaël Glucksmann, a candidate in the Socialist presidential primary, wrote on social media that no public relations exercise would fundamentally change the RN. “Let us never forget that they all joined a party founded by antisemitic fanatics and out-and-out racists,” he said. Yonathan Arfi, of the CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, told France Culture radio he was “stupefied by the virulence of the antisemitic comments” allegedly made by Bardella. He said that if true, the comments undermined the RN’s claims to have detoxified its image. He asked: “How could a political party leader, having made such sickening comments, reach such a high position in a party that claims to have changed and now fights against the hatred of Jews?” The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, said Bardella, an MEP, should resign from all his political positions. She said: “The man who presents himself today as the biggest defender of Jews … is in reality an obsessional antisemite.”

‘We will not be intimidated,’ says Estonian PM after attributing recent arson attack to Russia – as it happened

And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Estonia said an August arson attack on a drone manufacturer supplying Kyiv was an act of sabotage commissioned by Moscow’s security services (10:10, 10:25), with several allies expressing their solidarity and support for Tallinn (10:20, 10:27, 11:12, 12:46, 13:30). Estonia’s PM Kristen Michal said the country “will not be intimidated” (12:08) The Kremlin rejected what it called Estonia’s “baseless” accusation, with spokesperson saying it was “ill considered” and “absolutely no relation to reality” (11:32). In other news, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte has urged allies to keep calm and carry on supporting Ukraine, saying Russia is “failing to undermine” the alliance’s support for Kyiv despite growing number of sabotage, drone incidents against Nato (11:07). Lithuania’s prime minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius pushed back against recent warnings from Denmark, Poland and Germany about a potential imminent threat, saying there is no evidence of Russia “getting ready” to act against the region (11:10). Ukrainian leaders condemned another day of Russian strikes on Ukraine, which foreign minister Andrii Sybiha warned are “intensifying by the day” (9:49, 10:41, 13:17). If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

Spain announces plan to ease housing crisis amid outcry over eviction of 87-year-old

Spain’s Socialist Workers’ party-led coalition government has approved a range of measures aimed at easing the country’s housing crisis, including extending a ban on evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, after a public outcry over the eviction of an 87-year-old disabled woman from her Madrid apartment last week. Two decrees have been approved by cabinet but will need to be approved in Congress, where the coalition lacks a majority. The government has requested a special parliamentary session on Friday in the hope of getting the decrees passed as soon as possible. Although the fine print has yet be revealed, the main decree includes: extending restrictions on evictions of vulnerable tenants to 2030; regulating temporary lettings and lettings by room; a ban on so-called vulture funds buying property until 2028, plus a two-year extension on current rental agreements that are due to expire at the end of 2028. A separate agreement was reached on the automatic renovation of rental agreements. Hundreds of people remained camped out in ⁠one of Madrid’s main squares on Tuesday to protest against Maricarmen Abascal’s removal from her home on a stretcher last Wednesday. They are demanding legal reforms including a rent freeze and the ⁠automatic renewal of leases without abusive rent hikes. It is believed that the first decree has the approval of the conservative Catalan and Basque parties, which previously opposed the government’s housing overhauls, but they are likely to vote down the second decree. Mónica García, the health minister, celebrated the decision, saying: “We’ve achieved something that even a month ago was unthinkable.” She added: “It’s time to intervene in the speculative housing market and begin to restore the balance between citizens and vulture funds.” The Tenants’ Union, which has been the driving force behind the demand for changes to the housing law, as well as the occupation of Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol by protesters in recent days, said it needed to read the small print but opposed the policy of dividing the issue into separate decrees. “It’s a tactic of tearing something into shreds so that all that’s left are scraps,” said Alicia Del Río, a union spokesperson in Madrid. “The union demands the implementation of the Maricarmen decree in its entirety,” she said, referring to a set of changes drawn up by the union. “They have to accept what people are demanding.” The government has 30 days from the decree’s publication to reach a consensus with allies in congress. Junts, the Catalan pro-independence party that would need to back the decree for it to pass, said on Tuesday it was still far from agreeing to ‌it and wanted protection for small landlords, who make up the vast majority of property owners in Spain. “Owning two properties isn’t the same as owning entire buildings,” said Míriam Nogueras, Junts’ spokesperson in congress. “But here they’re not making any distinction between the two.” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, dismissed the proposals. “The government has created a problem that didn’t exist when it took office,” he said. “A problem that was created over eight years can’t be solved in five minutes.” Urbagestión, the company whose eviction of Abascal last Wednesday forced the housing crisis to the top of the political agenda, has said Abascal can return to her apartment at a rent that will not exceed 30% of her income. On Tuesday, she accepted the offer and will pay €533 (£457) a month – less than a third of the original demand of €1,650 that had led to her eviction. Underlining the lack of affordable housing, Ada Colau, a housing activist and a former Barcelona mayor, recently revealed that she has had to move out of her rented apartment after 15 years because it became impossible to pay the rent with a single income since she separated from her husband. Colau, who renounced most of her mayoral salary during her eight years in office, said the market was geared towards dual incomes, whether couples or people sharing, adding that she had gone to live with a relative.

Estonia blames Russia for arson attack on drone maker supplying Ukraine

European and Nato leaders have expressed full support for Estonia and Ukraine after the Baltic state said an August arson attack on a drone manufacturer supplying Kyiv was an act of sabotage commissioned by Moscow’s security services. Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said on social media on Tuesday that such attacks were “absolutely unacceptable” and that Russia’s chargé d’affaires in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, was being summoned to his ministry. Estonia’s national security agency said a fire broke out on 15 August at a building in Tallinn used by Milrem Robotics, which makes unmanned ground vehicles used in Ukraine. Two Latvian suspects were detained in Latvia on 17 August, followed by a third the next day. All three were handed over to Estonia, it said. Tsahkna said the subsequent investigation had led authorities to “conclude with certainty” that the attack was “an act of sabotage ordered by the special services of the Russian Federation”. It was part of a “broader campaign across Europe aimed at intimidating us and weakening our support for Ukraine”, he said. Estonia’s prime minister, Kristen Michal, said his country’s response to Russia’s campaign would “be the opposite: stronger security at home, more support for Ukraine and greater pressure on Russia. We will not be intimidated.” Estonia has repeatedly accused Russia of hybrid provocations since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and, along with its fellow Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania, has significantly increased its defence spending. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Estonia’s allegations were “unfounded, ill-considered, absolutely not reflecting the reality, not containing any substantiation whatsoever”. He said Russia “cannot take such statements seriously, and we won’t”. Western allies pledged their continued support to Estonia and Ukraine. Speaking in Brussels, Mark Rutte, Nato’s secretary general, said Russia “continues its reckless campaign of hostile actions against Nato allies”, adding that it was “failing … on the battlefield in Ukraine, and failing to undermine our unity and support for Ukraine”. Speaking alongside Rutte, Lithuania’s prime minister, Mindaugas Sinkevičius, said Russia’s actions were becoming “increasingly hostile and less restrained … We see the hybrid attacks – in Lithuania, Poland, Germany, elsewhere. And it’s not a question of proximity now, it’s a question of Russia’s actions.” Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kęstutis Budrys, said Russia’s fingerprints were “all over” the Tallinn attack, while the Latvian president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, said further support for Ukraine “will be needed, and must be provided”. The EU said it stood with Estonia, describing the arson attack as “reckless” and saying it would not be put off supporting Ukraine. “Moscow is trying to scare Europe into winding down its support for Ukraine. This will not happen,” a European Commission spokesperson said. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called the arson attack a “dangerous escalation”. Moscow “needs to know that it will not overcome our unity or our determination to continue supporting Ukraine”, Macron said on social media. Sweden’s acting prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, called Estonia’s formal attribution of the attack “extremely serious”, and Britain’s ambassador to Estonia, Jo Lomas, said the UK “stands with Estonia in confronting these unacceptable attacks. They will not weaken our resolve or our support for Ukraine.” About 200 incidents of suspected Russian sabotage and malign activity have been recorded across Europe since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, including arson plots at warehouses, drone incursions, thefts of defence technology and cyber-attacks on essential European infrastructure. Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report

Two ex-ministers from Orbán era held over suspected bribery and misuse of public funds

Two ministers in Viktor Orbán’s former far-right government suspected separately of misusing millions of euros of public funds and taking millions more in bribes have been detained, hours after Hungarian MPs voted to lift their immunity. Prosecutors said on Tuesday that Balázs Hankó, Orbán’s culture minister and still an MP in the former prime minister’s nationalist Fidesz party, was taken into custody late on Monday. Hankó is suspected of misappropriation of funds. He has denied any wrongdoing. Miklós Seszták, an MP from Fidesz ally KDNP who served as minister for national development between 2014 and 2018, was also detained on Monday as part of an ⁠investigation into alleged bribery. He too has denied wrongdoing. “Yesterday was an important day,” said Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar on Tuesday. His Tisza party swept to victory in April elections promising to investigate alleged corruption and abuse of office during Orbán’s 16-year rule. “After decades of lies, for the first time, many millions of Hungarians could experience what real regime change and equality before the law really mean, Magyar said on social media. “Hungary is no longer a country without consequences.” The arrests came hours after Hungary’s parliament on Monday voted to suspend Hankó and Seszták’s immunity – but also that of Magyar, who had asked for his to be lifted so he could clear himself of what he called a “character assassination”. The graft investigations into the Orbán-era ministers are the first against senior figures in the former government. Magyar, meanwhile, is accused of snatching a phone from a man filming him in a nightclub in 2024 and throwing it into the Danube River. The prime minister has denied his conduct amounted to theft and called the case, which involves a damages claim of €300 (£260), a “sham”. He said he took responsibility for his actions but denied committing a crime and criticised prosecutors for “conflating” the ex-ministers’ corruption cases with “an attempted political character assassination”. Magyar has repeatedly said that in recent years corruption and misuse of public funds have cost Hungary between 8% and 10% of its GDP under successive governments led by Orbán, who has repeatedly denied allowing rampant corruption and outright theft of public money during more than a decade and half in power. Prosecutors allege Hankó oversaw the criminal misuse of 17.3bn forints (€47m) of public funds from Hungary’s national cultural fund (NKA), channelling the money to artists and groups with ties to Fidesz and financing its 2026 election campaign. “My conscience is clear, this is a political show trial,” Hankó said ‌in a live video broadcast on Orbán’s Facebook page shortly before his arrest. In July, police raided the Fidesz offices and seized the party’s internet servers in connection ⁠with alleged “misappropriation and other criminal offences” at the NKA, prompting Orbán to accuse authorities of conducting a sham investigation in order to render his party “legally unviable”. Prosecutors also suspect Seszták of accepting more than 12bn forints (€32.6m) in bribes and kickbacks connected to vehicle procurements under Hungary’s state bus company, as well as to public construction projects. The case centres on the purchase of secondhand buses at allegedly inflated prices. Separately, Hungary’s national ‌asset protection and recovery office, the anti-corruption body established by Magyar’s government as part of his anti-graft ⁠drive, on ⁠Monday announced the first four cases it intends to tackle. The first concerned “selling political connections to obtain residence permits ‌for employment”, the body said in a statement, and the second case is about alleged corruption involving local council expenditure on park maintenance and public catering. The third case involved “a state-owned company and state investments” and has links to Dániel Jellinek, a real estate mogul and one of Hungary’s wealthiest businessmen, the statement said. The real estate firm that Jellinek heads has said he will cooperate fully with the authorities. “Our firm position is that Mr Jellinek has not committed any offence in connection with the matter. We are confident that the investigation will confirm this and that the proceedings against him will soon be discontinued,” it said in a statement this month. The fourth concerned “seemingly unjustified propaganda and event costs” at the sovereignty protection office, an Orbán-era body set up to monitor what Fidesz alleged was “undue political interference” by foreign entities in Hungary, and abolished by Magyar’s government in June.

How gold surpassed cocaine as Peru’s most profitable criminal industry

“Halt, stop right there,” shouts a Peruvian Navy Seal, firing warning shots into the air. But the fleeing man pays no attention, scrambling up to the rim of a football pitch-sized crater and disappearing into the dense rainforest as the commandos give chase, swearing and shooting. Meanwhile, other marines set dynamite charges on a makeshift wooden raft that floats in the crater, which is essentially an enormous pit of opaque, stagnant water. The raft has a diesel-fuelled suction pump motor with thick plastic tubing used to suck up and sift through river sediment for tiny particles of gold. Soon after, a mushroom of orange and black fumes envelops the trees – and seconds later comes the sound of the explosion, shattering the peace of the Tambopata National Reserve, one of Peru’s most prized Amazon parks. Located in the south-eastern Madre de Dios region, the reserve is visited by about 40,000 tourists a year, many of whom stay in luxurious ecolodges further down the Malinowski River that marks the Tambopata park’s northern border. But today eight patrols are moving along the river, by helicopter or boat – and every few hundred metres they encounter more evidence of illegal gold mining, operations that have laid waste to more than 500 hectares of the park’s rainforest in the last year, according to satellite mapping data from Amazon Conservation. In total, more than 140,000 hectares have been lost to mining in Madre de Dios – a shocking 97.5% of the total deforestation caused by mining in Peru’s Amazon rainforest, an area twice the size of the US state of California. Military crackdowns on illegal mining in the Amazon are not new in Peru. But the skyrocketing international price of gold has caused this destructive activity to spread, empowering local gangs and attracting transnational organised crime. “Dirty” gold has become the country’s most profitable illicit industry, even surpassing drug trafficking in the world’s second-biggest producer of cocaine after Colombia. “Gold prices have risen,” said Gen Víctor Cotrina, the military commander of Madre de Dios, who is leading the crackdown on illegal gold mining. “That’s why, if a miner’s motor is destroyed, he’ll replace it quickly because gold is at its peak price; the very next day he’s back to his mining activities. He’s back at work again.” For troops used to combating drug trafficking by targeting well-hidden plantations of coca, which is used to make cocaine, the fight against illegal gold presents new challenges as the end product is not an illicit drug but a legally traded commodity, Cotrina said. “The difference is that an open-pit mining operation doesn’t require covert operations, whereas drug trafficking does.” He said previous anti-mining crackdowns had been ineffective due to corruption and patchy enforcement. But now, with “aerial surveillance and military personnel who are available 24/7 to conduct patrols, we are determined to eliminate mining in this region”. According to Peru’s financial supervisory body, illegal gold mining is the top illicit finance threat to the country. For the first time, the illegal trade surpassed the legal production of gold in the first half of this year, according to the Peruvian Economics Institute think tank, which estimates it could reach as much as $18 billion in value by the end of 2026. The country’s Financial Investigation Unit found that illegal mining accounted for nearly 60% of all investigations in terms of value between 2021 and 2025 – far higher than drug trafficking (8%) or tax crimes (4%). The evidence is not difficult to find or destroy. Behind the wall of green that marks the edge of the reserve, troops and environmental prosecutors set ablaze a network of well-supplied mining camps, built with timber and blue tarpaulins and stocked with food and beer. In one location they find a jungle brothel with wooden tables, a bar counter, a stereo and a giant teddy bear, a shower still wet with beauty products inside. A lone cockerel crows as the abandoned camps go up in flames. But during four days of operations in late August, prosecutors arrested just a handful of suspects. Two women had been left behind by the fleeing miners: Andrea, 30, wept as she begged the officers not to arrest her, explaining she was a single mother who had been working as a cook and could find no other work to support a sick mother and two children. Liz Compi, 20, was found sitting on a boat with her one-year-old son. She said she had taken the job as a cook for $450 a month after being abandoned by her partner and sacked from a previous job. Authorities took both women back to the city and released them. Ronal Flores, a deputy prosecutor for Peru’s Office of the attorney Ggeneral who helped to rescue Compi, said it was pointless to arrest most workers at the camps as they tended to have no knowledge of the workings of the much bigger illicit enterprise. Many are left behind to sink motors in the river to avoid detection; even hours later, the machines can be winched up with pulleys and put back to work. “In these places, the big fish – the owners – are rarely caught. It’s usually the low-level operatives who we find,” said Flores, a short, energetic man with a black moustache who led the operations on behalf of the Public Prosecutor’s Office backed by the US non-profit Global Conservation. He admitted that they could only slow the pace of the rainforest’s destruction, but that the state agencies lacked the budget to maintain the intensity of raids, even though the military destroyed and seized an estimated $500m in machinery, supplies and illegal dredgers, according to government figures. Flores said the raids had destroyed about 150 mining barges and motors in the Amazon park, but that was “nothing compared to the magnitude of the damage being caused within the reserve”. A single mining dredger, operating 24 hours a day, can produce as much as 50 grams of gold – which, with the price of gold at more than $4,650 a troy ounce in late August (having peaked at roughly $5,600 an ounce in late January), could fetch more than $6,000 in Madre de Dios. Since the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic, the price of gold has tripled. Tens of thousands of miners have poured into protected Amazon parks and Indigenous reserves, stripping away vast tracts of rainforest and leaving behind a denuded, pocked terrain, stagnant pools and disrupted river courses. Mercury is the cheapest and easiest way to extract gold because it binds with the particles in the river sediment. As a result, an estimated 180 tonnes of the toxic metal contaminates Peru’s waterways every year, poisoning wildlife and damaging human health, particularly among Indigenous communities that depend principally on freshwater fish as their main protein source. The latest raids, dubbed Operación Mercurio II, follow on from an earlier iteration, Operación Mercurio, which began in 2019 and achieved a 62% overall reduction in illegal mining deforestation, including a 92% drop in the most critical illegal hub, La Pampa. But the miners returned to La Pampa and deforestation surged, while extortion and hired killings spiralled as a local gang, Los Guardianes de la Trocha, took control of the $1bn trade. The dirty gold departs Peru as contraband to Bolivia and Brazil, but much of it is laundered into the legal trade via a controversial registration system called Reinfo. The system, in theory, should bring informal miners into the legal economy, but critics say it allows them to continue working without environmental permits and laundering illegal gold through formal companies. The trade is so lucrative that members of Congress have backed five repeated extensions of Reinfo, despite pushes to reform or eliminate the registry. “The government’s response is moving very slowly,” said Flores after another day of relatively fruitless jungle raids, destroying camps that are likely to spring back up soon after. “Meanwhile, illegal mining operates 24 hours a day. The miners measure time in grams, not minutes, so we need to rethink how we investigate mining,” he said. “Unfortunately, as we can see today, they are getting the better of us.”

Fayed survivors say GMC let abuse continue by refusing to investigate doctors

Victims of Mohamed Al Fayed have accused the medical regulator of allowing his sexual abuse to continue unchecked by refusing to investigate allegations that doctors were complicit in his crimes. Survivors of Fayed’s abuse have called for the General Medical Council (GMC) to be investigated after it dismissed a request in 2017 to scrutinise a doctor accused of subjecting a woman to intrusive sexual health examinations and sharing the results with Fayed. Almost a decade after complaints were first made to the GMC about Dr Wendy Snell, who died in 2022, the doctors’ regulator has now taken action against two other surviving doctors who are also accused of passing sexual health information to Fayed about women who he later abused. Fayed, the former owner of Harrods died in 2023 a year before hundreds of women went public with accusations of sexual assault by Fayed over the previous decades. Pelham Spong complained to the GMC in 2017 about Snell, a doctor employed by Fayed who subjected her to sexual health tests in 2008 as part of an interview process for a job with the former Harrods owner. The same day Fayed grabbed her face and forcibly kissed her, Spong alleged. Fayed also quizzed Spong about a sexually transmitted disease that Snell had assured her would be kept confidential along with all her results, she claimed. Her complaint, seen by the Guardian, said: “I know that there are other women who have similar stories involving both Fayed, and doctors and improper health screenings at Harrods. In fact, the recruiter who sent me on this interview had previously sent another candidate.” It added: “I felt humiliated, ashamed, and embarrassed that this potential employer knew the most intimate details of my body.” The GMC told Spong it was not in the “greater public interest” to investigate Snell. It added: “We have no powers to investigate, resolve or comment on whether a gynaecological examination should have formed part of your recruitment process.” Spong, who was 23 at the time of the abuse, told the Guardian: “It’s shocking that the GMC received intelligence like mine in 2017 and did nothing. They have been sitting on this for almost 10 years and let my abusers escape. There was an alarming lack of curiosity by the GMC which begs all sorts of questions. I was reporting trafficking.” In October 2017 Spong also reported her ordeal to the Metropolitan police, which obtained a copy of her complaint to the GMC as part of its initial inquiries, before taking no further action. She said: “Fayed continued abusing women until he died. So the fact that the Met and the GMC didn’t do their job in 2017 means more women were harmed. That’s on them, so absolutely they should be investigated.” Spong is backing calls for a public inquiry into Fayed’s crimes that would include failures by the Met and the GMC. Joan* alleges she was raped in the 1990s by Fayed’s brother Salah Fayed after a sexual health examination by Dr Ann Coxon. She alleges that before she was raped, Salah Fayed, who died in 2010, phoned Coxon in her presence and put her on speaker. She alleges Coxon then told him the results of her sexual health tests over the call. Joan said: “I heard it first-hand and I’ve got it all written up in an affidavit that I made at the time. I have also got the test that she refers to.” Joan said: “If the GMC had acted when the first complaints were made in 2017, Fayed could have been stopped and held to account. If they were hearing reports about malpractice they should have escalated it to the police. But instead the GMC, very begrudgingly, very slowly, after massive political pressure, are only now finally starting to take action. This is just the wrong way around. What is the GMC for?” A third victim Judith*, says she was groped by Mohamed Al Fayed after a humiliating sexual health examination by Snell as part of a recruitment process for a job working for the family. She said the examination occurred after Fayed sold Harrods in 2010. Judith said: “I had a full gynaecological test with sexually transmitted disease testing as well. I was really shocked and traumatised that this was needed and I felt so much shame. As a result, I have really struggled with having smear tests since. So the whole episode has really put my life at risk.” She said: “I don’t want an apology from the GMC and a promise that this will never happen again. Instead there has to be clear legislation in place to ensure private doctors are monitored. At the moment there seems to be no oversight at all. “A public inquiry needs to be started as soon as possible and that the GMC should be part of that.” Coxon told the Guardian she could not comment but has previously denied carrying out sexual health tests on Harrods staff. The GMC has imposed restrictions on her ability to practise, and that of another doctor, pending a full investigation. Emma Jones, a solicitor at Leigh Day who is representing several of Fayed’s victims, said: “The GMC is finally taking things seriously, because they’ve imposed interim conditions on these doctors which isn’t always a standard step in these investigations. This is far too little, far too late. “When the complaints were first made to the GMC it should have reported them to the police. It beggars belief why they were not investigated earlier – they were such serious allegations they were conducting sexual health examinations and reporting back to Fayed without permission of the patient. “The failings of the GMC is one of the crucial areas that needs to be investigated, and the only way to do that properly is through a public inquiry.” A GMC spokesperson said: “The reports of sexual abuse carried out by Mohamed Al Fayed are horrifying and shocking. “We are investigating doctors employed by Mr Al Fayed, and have written to the parties involved to provide an update on our investigations. We are taking these concerns very seriously and remain in contact with relevant authorities, including the Metropolitan police. “We will take the appropriate action if we identify any potential fitness to practise concerns about individual doctors, but cannot provide information about individual investigations.” * Names have been changed