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Middle East crisis live: Trump uses expletive-ridden social media post to threaten Iran’s infrastructure

Trump warns Iran to reopen strait of Hormuz by Tuesday or face ‘hell’

Donald Trump issued an expletive-laden warning on Sunday that Tehran had until Tuesday night to reopen the strait of Hormuz or the US would obliterate Iran’s power plants and bridges. Iran’s powerful parliament speaker responded with a warning that the US president’s “reckless moves” would mean “our whole region is going to burn”. The latest threat of escalation in the five-week-old war followed the rescue of a second crew member of a downed F-15E fighter by US commandos, ending a two-day search after the warplane crashed in south-west Iran. Iran distributed images showing the wreckage of several aircraft, but did not deny that US forces had rescued the officer who had taken cover in a mountainous area while American special forces and Iranian troops raced to find him. Trump has extended deadlines at least twice for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz, which has sent the price of oil shooting up, and shifted his deadline again from Monday to Tuesday in his expletive-laden post. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”, the US president posted on his Truth Social website. Trump separately suggested that there is a “good chance” of an agreement with Iran on Monday, telling Fox News that negotiations were taking place. “If they don’t make a deal and fast, I’m considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil,” he said. However, Trump has repeatedly said since the US-Israeli war started on 28 February that Iran wants to make a deal. Iran has acknowledged that messages have been passed between the two sides, including through Pakistan. But Tehran insists that it has not entered into peace talks. Iranian officials also fear that they will be targeted when they break cover to head to any negotiations, according to diplomatic intermediaries. Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iran parliament, responded to Trump’s latest threats in a social media post. “Your reckless moves are dragging the United States into a living HELL for every single family, and our whole region is going to burn because you insist on following Netanyahu’s commands,” he wrote. “Make no mistake: You won’t gain anything through war crimes. The only real solution is respecting the rights of the Iranian people and ending this dangerous game.” Trump’s expletive-laden post also drew criticism on Capitol Hill. “Happy Easter, America. As you head off to church and celebrate with friends and family, the President of the United States is ranting like an unhinged madman on social media,” the Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on X. “He’s threatening possible war crimes and alienating allies. This is who he is, but this is not who we are. Our country deserves so much better.” The destruction on Thursday of the region’s tallest bridge, hailed in Iran as an engineering marvel, pointed to a grim new phase of the war, in which the US president has threatened to throw Iran back to the “stone ages”. During war, international law protects civilians and what are known as civilian objects, such as infrastructure, rules that are enshrined in the Geneva conventions. Oona A Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale University, said that US president had offered no explanation that would make the civilian objects he has threatened to target into lawful military objectives. She also warned that other nations had an obligation to ensure respect of the Geneva conventions, and not to aid and abet wrongful acts. “If these threatened attacks were to be carried out, they would constitute war crimes,” said Hathaway. “Immiserating the civilian population for bargaining leverage is not lawful.” Iranian steel manufacturing sites, petrochemicals plants, universities and medical facilities have all been bombed during the joint US-Israeli campaign. About 81,000 civilian sites have been damaged, including 61,000 homes, 19,000 commercial sites, 275 medical centres, and nearly 500 schools, according to Iranian authorities. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said Israel has destroyed 70% of Iran’s steel production, claiming it was used for making missiles. He has also confirmed attacks on petrochemical plants. Iran has been able to take control of the strait of Hormuz by threatening and attacking shipping passing through the waterway, providing a chokehold on the oil trade that is Tehran’s strongest pressure point in the conflict. Iran continued to hit economic infrastructure across the Gulf over the weekend in response to the attacks, in acts that legal experts have also said are unlawful. On Sunday, it struck a petrochemicals complex in Bahrain. Video footage showed thick black smoke rising from the site. The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said a number of its facilities were targeted by Iranian drone attacks, resulting in fires and “significant material losses”. Kuwait also reported that two power and water desalination plants sustained “significant material damage” after being attacked by Iranian drones. In Lebanon, Israel again struck in southern Beirut, killing at least four people and injuring 39 others. Lebanon’s national news agency reported that an Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon’s Kfar Hatta killed at least seven people, including a four-year-old girl. It was on Thursday that Iranians got a visceral demonstration of the kinds of attacks that may now be unleashed, with the destruction of the 136 metre-high $400m (£300) B1 suspension bridge between Tehran and Karaj. The attack happened on the last day of the holidays to mark Iranian new year, and according to reports many families were picnicking nearby when missiles punched through the middle of the bridge, sending up a giant fireball. The day trippers, who had pitched tents to enjoy the holiday, ran screaming. Local authorities said that 13 people were killed and 95 injured in the attack. The bridge had not even been opened. It was so far known only as B1, ahead of an inauguration due in the summer. Trump posted a video of the bridge’s demolition, warning Iran to cut a deal before there was nothing left. On Sunday, Trump told Axios that several days ago, the US and Iran were close to an agreement to hold direct negotiations. “But then they said they will meet us in five days. So I said, ‘Why five days?’ I felt they were not being serious. So I attacked the bridge.” An engineer behind the bridge’s construction, interviewed on Iranian television, broke down. “We made everything with our own knowhow, workers and resources,” he said, using a tissue to wipe tears. “I am ashamed of myself for not being able to have people use it.” A civil engineer in Iran who worked on other major infrastructure projects said that recent strikes on civilian infrastructure, all built with indigenous knowledge, had already “made it impossible to conceal hostility toward the Iranian people behind the mask of mere opposition to the government”. But it was the strike on the bridge that was most painful for him, as he said it had no military, nuclear or government link. “The target of this attack was nothing other than Iran’s pride,” he said. “A nation that has achieved such a level of self-sufficiency and productivity cannot be returned to the stone age.”

A timeline of the two US military jets shot down by Iran forces

In a significant escalation of the US-Israel war in Iran, Iranian forces shot down two US military jets in recent days. Three pilots involved in the loss of an F-15 Strike Eagle and an A-10 Warthog ground attack plane have been rescued, but the incidents put the US on notice that Iranian air defenses may not be as degraded as the Trump administration has broadly claimed. Here’s a timeline of what we know so far. 4/3/2026 Reports of US planes struck down Overnight on Friday, an F-15E Strike Eagle with two crew members and belonging to the 48th Fighter Wing of the US air force in Europe was shot down by Iranian forces, with photos showing the photos of the wreckage circulating on social media. It is believed to be the first US plane brought down by enemy fire during the conflict. A second plane, an A-10 Warthog, was struck by Iranian fire. Before ejecting, the pilot was able to get the aircraft to Kuwaiti airspace and was also rescued, according to the Washington Post. 4/4/2026 A search and rescue mission unfolds One pilot on the F-15E Strike Eagle was rescued seven hours later with help from two US military helicopters, according to reports. The helicopter that rescued the pilot was reportedly hit by small arms fire, some wounding crew members on board. The helicopter landed safely and injured rescuers were reported to be receiving medical treatment. US officials then went quiet, offering no indication if the second airman had ejected safely and was in hiding, had been killed in the crash, or captured by Iranian forces. But US aircraft and helicopters were seen in the area where the fighter jet went down. 4/4/2026 Search for the second airman US and Iranian forces race to find the “seriously injured” second airman, the F-15’s weapons officer, outside Isfahan. The unnamed officer, armed only with a pistol, is later reported to have hidden out on a 7,000-ft ridge while US MQ-9 Reaper drones hit nearby Iranian forces if they came close to his position. Iranian forces got within 3km (1.8 miles) of the downed airman, a colonel, according Air & Space Forces Magazine. “This brave Warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour,” Trump said on Sunday. According to reports, the downed pilot made contact with US forces using an encrypted radio, while continuing to evade the pursuing Iranian forces. 4/4/2026 The CIA reportedly deploys a ruse The CIA pulled off a diversion, according to Axios, reportedly by planting fake information that the second airman had already been rescued and was being driven out of Iran. The agency used “unique capabilities” to search and locate them. “This was the ultimate needle in a haystack but in this case it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA’s capabilities,” an official told the outlet. The Pentagon and White House then ordered an immediate rescue mission. Two MC-130J Air Force special operations transport planes landed at an landing airport near the downed airman. A regional intelligence official briefed on the mission told the Associated Press that the US military blew up two transport planes due to a technical malfunction. Reports suggest they make have got stuck in mud and were blown up on the ground by US forces to prevent them falling into Iranian hands. US forces then used three other transport planes to carry the airman and his rescuers out of Iran, according to the New York Times. 4/5/2026 Trump announces rescue “WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Member Officers, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is now SAFE and SOUND!” Trump said. He later posted: “The Iranian Military was looking hard, in big numbers, and getting close. He is a highly respected Colonel. This type of raid is seldom attempted because of the danger to “man and equipment.” It just doesn’t happen!” Trump says the rescue of the missing F-15 weapons systems officer by US special operation forces was “an Easter miracle” in a text to NBC News on Sunday. “The enemy was large and violent. The rescuers were brilliant, strong, decisive, and as cool as anyone can be. The Iranians thought they had him, but it wasn’t even close,” he said, according to NBC. Trump said that after the fighter jet’s pilot was rescued on Friday, the US “couldn’t talk about” that mission “in that it would have highlighted that there was a second”. 4/5/206 Iran acknowledges a “so-called US military rescue operation” Iran’s military said on Sunday the US operation to rescue the airman had used an abandoned airport in Isfahan province. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for the Iranian military’s central command, said: “The so-called US military rescue operation, planned as a deception and escape mission at an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan under the pretext of recovering the pilot of a downed aircraft, was completely foiled.” Zolfaghari also said two US “C-130 military transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed”.

Hungarian PM faces ‘false flag’ claims after Serbia says explosives found near pipeline

Serbia has said it found “explosives of devastating power” near a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas to Hungary and beyond, sparking claims by Hungary’s leading opposition candidate of a possible “false flag” operation aimed at influencing the country’s elections. On Sunday, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said he had been informed by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, of the discovery near an extension of the TurkStream pipeline, which transports Russian gas through the Balkans to central and eastern Europe. “An investigation is under way,” Orbán said on social media, adding that he had convened an emergency meeting of the country’s defence council. The incident comes one week before Hungarians are due to cast their votes in a pivotal parliamentary election, in which Orbán’s 16-year hold on power is facing an unprecedented challenge from Péter Magyar, a former top member of the ruling Fidesz party. The election has pitted two versions of Hungary’s future against each other, as Orbán and Fidesz seek to convince voters that the war in Ukraine poses a deep threat to the country and that Orbán is best placed to handle this risk, while Magyar and his Tisza party urge voters to focus on economic stagnation, fraying social services and corruption. Vučić said on Sunday that the Serbian army and police had found two backpacks containing “two large packages of explosives with detonators” in the northern Serbian municipality of Kanjiža, “a few hundred metres from the gas pipeline”. He said he had informed Orbán of the initial results of the investigation into what he described as a “threat to the critical gas infrastructure”. The explosives could have “endangered many lives” and caused significant damage to the pipeline, Vučić added. He did not detail the origins of the explosives, saying instead that there were “certain traces” he could not disclose. “Our intelligence services did a good job,” he said. The incident, coming as Orbán trails in the polls, prompted political scrutiny across Hungary. On Sunday, Magyar said on social media that he and the Tisza party had been warned by multiple sources that something might happen in Serbia around Easter, “possibly involving a gas pipeline”, and allegedly carried out with Serbian and Russian assistance. “And now it has,” he said. He called on Orbán’s government to stop spreading panic and causing disruption. “Hungarians have every reason to fear that the outgoing prime minister, following the advice of Russian agents, is attempting to instil fear in his own people through false-flag operations,” he said. “I also want to make it clear that he will not be able to prevent next Sunday’s election.” The scepticism was echoed by Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “Looks like a seemingly convenient threat of terrorist action,” he said on social media. “Designed to whip up further fear of military action against Hungary, for which Ukraine will no doubt be blamed.” The campaign heated up in February after Orbán claimed, without providing evidence, that Ukraine was plotting to disrupt Hungary’s energy system and said he had dispatched troops to safeguard the country’s energy infrastructure. Orbán has also repeatedly accused Ukraine of intentionally delaying repairs to the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline, which brings Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia via Ukraine, and blocked EU approval of a €90bn loan to Ukraine over the feud. Rahman said Brussels and EU capitals “have been expecting a false-flag operation by Orbán – citing a national security risk – as grounds to postpone next Sunday’s elections that he looks set to lose. Could this be it?” On Sunday, Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, singled out Ukraine but stopped short of blaming them outright for the latest incident. “In the past few days and weeks, the Ukrainians organised an oil blockade against us, and then tried to put us under a total energy blockade … And now we have today’s incident,” he said in a post on Facebook. Orbán, posting on social media after the defence council meeting, said that what was so far known of the incident pointed to a prepared “act of sabotage”. While he did not directly blame Ukraine for the incident, he said: “Ukraine has been for years trying to cut off Europe from Russian energy.” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that it rejected any attempt to link Kyiv to the incident. “Ukraine has nothing to do with this,” it said on social media, adding that it had most probably been “a Russian false-flag operation as part of Moscow’s heavy interference in Hungarian elections”. Ákos Hadházy, a Hungarian independent MP and longtime critic of Orbán, cast doubt on the news from Serbia. “This is completely transparent and pathetic,” he wrote on social media. “But let’s not forget that propaganda still works,” he added. “Nor should we forget that next week, quite brutal things could come from the struggling regime.” Szabolcs Panyi, one of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists, also urged people to treat Sunday’s revelations with caution. Weeks earlier, he and other journalists had been told by sources in Hungarian government circles of a “Russia-backed false flag attack in Serbia targeting the gas pipeline to Hungary”, Panyi said on social media. The Serbian claims could rock the final days of the campaign, just as the White House gears up to have JD and Usha Vance visit the country in an apparent effort by the US vice-president to bolster Orbán in the polls. The US administration has long rallied behind Orbán, with Donald Trump repeatedly endorsing him and describing him as a “fantastic guy” and a “strong, powerful leader.” In recent weeks, questions have swirled about the US effort to keep Orbán in power, particularly as Russia appears to also be working to sway the election in Orbán’s favour. The Washington Post reported recently that Russian intelligence operatives had proposed staging an assassination attempt on Orbán to boost his chances of winning, while the Guardian found that disinformation networks with links to Russia were publishing content aimed at undermining Orbán’s main opponent.

There is no revival of Christianity in Britain | Letter

The retraction of the Bible Society’s report on Gen Z church attendance (YouGov withdraws survey said to show rising church attendance in England and Wales, 26 March) is a welcome moment of clarity, but the “fraudulent” data identified by YouGov only tells half the story. The report’s central premise, that young people are flocking back to the pews, was always an outlier when measured against the gold-standard British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. Our new analysis of the BSA data shows that six in 10 people aged 16 to 34 identify with no religion. Furthermore, this is not a “phase” of youthful rebellion; 94% of those raised without religion remain non-religious as adults. For this generation, the search for meaning is not found in dogma, but in the humanist values of reason, kindness and personal responsibility. As the Church of England’s identity falls to just one in 10 of the general population, the disconnect between our national institutions and the British public has never been wider. We must stop treating the non-religious as a demographic absence and recognise them as a community with a positive, ethical worldview that deserves equal standing in the public square. Andrew Copson Chief executive, Humanists UK • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets

When Corentin Roudaut moved to Paris 10 years ago, he was too scared to cycle. The IT developer had biked everywhere as a student in Rennes but felt overwhelmed by the bustling French capital. Cars were everywhere. Cyclists had almost no protection. But once authorities carved out space for a segregated bike lane on Boulevard Voltaire near his home in the 11th arrondissement, Roudaut returned to the two-wheel commute and did not look back. He now volunteers with Paris en Selle, a cycling campaign group, and has watched with wonder as the city has shaken off its car-centric reputation. “It was a process that started slow and really accelerated in the last 10 years,” Roudaut said. “At least in some parts of the city, we have a [cycle] network that is starting to be safe and pretty much complete.” Paris has embarked on a grand transformation since Anne Hidalgo became mayor in 2014, planting 155,000 trees, adding several hundred kilometres of bike lanes, pedestrianising 300 school streets and banning cars from the banks of the Seine. Parking spots have been turned into green spaces and terraces for cafes and bars. Fewer parents have to fear their child being run over when they walk to school. Hidalgo left office on Sunday 29 March after 12 years as mayor, and now her fight to make the city more livable has been held up as an example for progressive European cities as national governments roll back green policies. “When people ask me if I have any advice, I say don’t be afraid of being ambitious,” said Roudaut, who last year welcomed a delegation of Green politicians from Germany trying to understand why Paris was doing what Berlin could not. Even though Hidalgo achieved only part of her plan, he added, “everybody’s saying: ‘Look at what Paris has done, it’s so amazing.’” Parisians do not all feel the same. Efforts to make streets safer have taken space away from cars, sparking direct opposition from motorists, while referendums on charging SUV drivers more to park and pedestrianising more school streets were won with troublingly low turnouts. Before last month’s municipal elections, Rachida Dati, the mayoral candidate for the rightwing Les Républicains, criticised the chaos in public space as “anxiety-inducing”, though she stopped short of proposing to undo central policies. In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian last week, Hidalgo said pedestrianising the city’s riverbanks had been “a tough battle” but now that it had happened people did not want to go back. “Today there are generations of children who have not known cars there. People say ‘wow!’ when you tell them,” she said. Experts say the transition was made easier by the city’s unusually tight administrative boundaries, which give commuter suburbs less say over its transport than in other capitals, as well as groundwork laid by previous mayors. But still courage was needed to push through policies that inconvenienced motorists while introducing shared social and environmental benefits. More could still be done but the changes so far are “fabulous”, said Audrey de Nazelle, an environmental epidemiologist at Imperial College London who grew up in Paris and returns frequently. She remembers when cycling was so rare “you could go and have coffee together” if you ran into someone else on a bike. “What’s missing in the rest of the world is courage,” she said. “Mayors could say: ‘This is my opportunity [to leave a] legacy,’ but most will not dare.” Paris is one of 19 global cities that achieved remarkable reductions in two toxic air pollutants between 2010 and 2024, a report last month found, although the list also includes a handful of neighbouring capitals with less progressive urban politics. Fine-particle pollution fell faster in Brussels and Warsaw over the same period, while nitrogen dioxide fell faster in London. Berlin, which last year opened a new stretch of motorway inside the city and voted to scrap 30km/h speed limits on 23 main streets, still has a higher share of cyclists than Paris. Rather than being exceptional, Paris has caught up with many other cities from a lower starting point, said Giulio Mattioli, a transport researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund, who used to live in Paris. “The conditions were there already, you just needed to make some bike lanes and people would use them,” he said. Cities across Europe saw a boom in cycling and bike-friendly infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic but have suffered setbacks amid a political shift to the right and the emergence of conspiracy theories that have unexpectedly taken aim at ideas such as having amenities within walking distance. While Paris proper has undergone a radical shift to becoming a “15-minute city”, the extensive suburbs are still dominated by cars and are cut off by a busy ring road. Analysis for the thinktank Terra Nova by Jean-Louis Missika, a former deputy mayor who served under Hidalgo and her predecessor, said transforming the Boulevard Périphérique that surrounds the city was essential to making Paris a post-car metropolis. “As long as this 35km motorway continues to encircle Paris, the Greater Paris metropolis will remain a figment of the imagination, an administrative construct devoid of urban reality,” he wrote. “Because a metropolis cannot be built by erecting walls between its inhabitants.”

Despite propaganda coup of F-15 crew rescue, downing is reminder to US that Iran can fight back

Donald Trump will inevitably claim the rescue of the second crew member of the downed F-15 fighter as a propaganda triumph, though the 48-hour drama is a reminder that an undefeated Iran is able to fight back and inflict costs on the US. It also ought to be a caution for a White House still contemplating whether to launch a ground operation in Iran to seize an island in the Persian Gulf – particularly if there a serious ambition to extract Iran’s highly enriched uranium from deep underground. The US-Israeli bombing of Iran has been so heavily skewed in the attackers’ favour that a single shoot-down, five weeks into the war, immediately became a significant problem for the Americans because it is so rare – and memorable. The last time a US warplane was shot down by hostile forces was in 2003, during the Iraq war. Though it is not exactly clear how the F-15E was brought down, the fact that it was is a reminder that the air superiority achieved by the US and Israeli air forces is not entirely absolute, even as they bomb Iran about 300 to 500 times a day. An F-15E Strike Eagle has a cost of $31m (though a new replacement could be $100m) but it is the rescue, far more high-risk than whatever mission the US warplane was on, where the difficulties clearly began. A decision to use an abandoned Iranian airstrip south of Isfahan as a forward operating location went wrong when two C-130 Hercules transporters, probably modified search and rescue variants, got stuck in the ground. They were destroyed by the US to prevent them falling into the Iranians’ hands, US sources indicated, and more transporters had to be brought forward to complete the extraction of the wounded second crew member. Each of the modified Hercules have a list price of nearly $115m. An HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter involved in the rescue was also damaged by gunfire on Friday – so it is easy to conclude that the cost in lost and damaged airframes exceeds $250m, largely for the rescue of the second crew member. In military terms, a single episode like this does not matter much to the US. Losing aircraft, whether shot down or in accidents, is part of war. The US had 218 F-15E Strike Eagles and 55 C-130s in its special force command before it attacked Iran, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A full-scale US search and rescue operation was politically necessary to prevent Iran from capturing either member of the crew. The capture of one or both would have been a coup for Tehran, reviving memories of the US embassy hostage crisis of 1979-80, which did so much damage to the then president, Jimmy Carter. The point was underlined by Trump, who emphasised in a social media post, using capitals, that the US would never leave an American warfighter behind. It is an attractive commitment, but one that means further cost and risk will be incurred each time it is called upon. On this occasion Iranian forces failed to locate either of the F-15E crew. They were not able to contest the US’s use of the abandoned airbase south of Isfahan, though this could have been because of Reaper drones loitering overhead, which, according to US briefings, were there to kill any Iranian males getting within 3km. But the enforced loss of the rescue C-130 transports is a reminder of the greater risks inherent in any US ground operation in Iran. Could it really be feasible for US special forces to seize the 440kg of highly enriched uranium thought to be hidden underground in canisters at Isfahan and fly them away without major incident? There is no doubt that Iran – bombed in excess of 15,000 times so far – is being battered by the relentless US and Israeli airstrikes. But Tehran can still turn relatively small US or Israeli losses into a propaganda victory, whatever the state of its troops or air defences, precisely because they have been infrequent. In an asymmetric conflict, the weaker side only has to get lucky once.

Lorna Richmond obituary

My friend Lorna Richmond, who has died aged 96, worked for many years at the Africa Bureau in London, an independent body that co-operated with liberation movements to bring about an end to empire on that continent. As assistant to the bureau’s maverick director, the Rev Michael Scott, an Anglican priest known for leading passive resistance demonstrations in a way that often ensured his arrest and imprisonment in various countries, Lorna kept the organisation running on the home front. The period of her full employment, from the 1950s to mid-60s, was arguably the busiest and most successful time in the bureau’s history. While Scott was in Africa assessing the demands for independence in places such as Kenya, the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and South West Africa (now Namibia), Lorna and the London team were busy organising fundraising events, meeting delegations from African nations, and keeping a constant stream of politicians and journalists informed. Born in Stratford, east London, Lorna was the daughter of George Richmond, a staff engineer at the Gas Light and Coke company, and his wife, Mary. After secondary education at a boarding school near Bishop’s Stortford, in Hertfordshire, Lorna attended secretarial college. She then spent three years with family in Canada, working as a secretary, before returning to the UK. While doing secretarial temp work in London, Lorna took a course in international relations before starting full-time with the Africa Bureau, originally set up by David Astor, the then editor of the Observer, in 1952. Lorna served there for the major part of Scott’s 16 years as director until a funding crisis meant she had to leave, along with others, to save money. When Scott himself stepped down from leadership of the Bureau in 1968, Lorna continued to look after his affairs and interests in other organisations he was involved in, such as the Africa Publications Trust, the Africa Educational Trust, and the Minority Rights Group. Rarely of fixed abode, when in London Scott would stay with friends or in cheap bed and breakfast accommodation, until in 1970 Lorna offered him residence in the spare room of her flat in Primrose Hill, north London. The arrangement continued until Scott died in 1983. Lorna then moved into her elderly mother’s home in the village of Kingston, close to Lewes, East Sussex, while continuing to travel regularly to London to attend meetings of the Friends of Namibia. In 1992 she welcomed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to St Pancras, a tiny church in Kingston, where she had had Scott’s ashes interred, to unveil a new stained-glass window dedicated to his memory. Lorna and I became friends when I co-wrote, with Anne Yates, a book entitled The Troublemaker: Michael Scott and His Lonely Struggle Against Injustice (2006), for which she became one of our main sources of information. Lorna’s younger brother, Marcus, predeceased her. She is survived by a niece, Vanessa.