YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Gavin Newsom Is a Hollow Man in a Hurry

    Gavin Newsom Is a Hollow Man in a Hurry

    Political memoirs written by ambitious politicians are rarely written to tell the truth about a life. Instead, they are written to correct the public record before someone else does. By the time a politician sits down to write a first draft, the story of their career has already been told through newspaper profiles, investigative reporting, and the occasional scandal. A memoir offers the chance to rewrite that story from the inside: to smooth out the contradictions, elevate the moments of principle, and quietly explain away the advantages that made the whole thing possible.

  • Tech Nonprofits to Feds: Don’t Weaponize Procurement to Undermine AI Trust and Safety

    While the very public fight continues between the Department of Defense and Anthropic over whether the government can punish a company for refusing to allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance, another branch of the U.S. government is quietly working to ensure that this dispute will never happen again. How? By rewriting government procurement rules.

    Using procurement — meaning, the processes by which governments acquire goods and services– to accomplish policy goals is a time-honored and often appropriate strategy. The government literally expresses its politics and priorities by deciding where and how it spends its money. To that end, governments can and should give our tax dollars to companies and projects that serve the public interest, such as open-source software development, interoperability, or right to repair. And they should withhold those dollars from those that don’t, like shady contractors with inadequate security systems .

    New proposed rules from the principal agency in charge of acquiring goods, property and services for the federal government, the General Services Administration, are supposed to be primarily an effort to implement one policy priority: promoting steering government funds toward “ideologically neutral” American AI innovation But the new guidelines do far more than that.

    As explained in comments filed today with our partners at the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Protect Democracy Project, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the GSA’s guidelines include broad provisions that would make AI tools less safe and less useful. If finally adopted, these provisions would become standard components of every federal contract. You can read the full comments here.

    The most egregious example is a requirement that contractors and government service providers must license their AI systems to the government for “all lawful purposes.” Given the government’s loose interpretations of the law, ability to find loopholes to surveil you, and willingness to do illegal spying, we need serious and proactive legal restrictions to prevent it from gobbling up all the personally data it can acquire and using even routine bureaucratic data for punitive ends.

    Relatedly, the draft rules require that “AI System(s) must not refuse to produce data outputs or conduct analyses based on the Contractor’s or Service Provider’s discretionary policies.” In other words, if a company’s safety guardrails might prevent responding to a government request, the company must disable those guardrails. Given widespread public concerns about AI safety, it seems misguided, at best, to limit safeguards a company deems necessary.

    There are myriad other problems with the draft rules, such as technologically incoherent “anti-Woke” requirements. But the overarching problem is clear: much of this proposal would not serve the overall public interest in using American tax dollars to promote privacy, safety, and responsible technological innovation. The GSA should start over.

    Note they are also about implementing “anti-woke” tech which is even more stupid. I rewrote to allude to it but really that’s a whole other blog post

  • Double Shot of Privacy’s Defender in D.C.

    You’re invited on a journey inside the privacy battles that shaped the internet. EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet.

    Join Cindy at two events in Washingtion, D.C. on April 13 and 14 discussing her new book: Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, on sale now. All proceeds from the book benefit EFF. Find the full event details below, and RSVP to let us know if you can make it.

    April 13 – With Gigi Sohn at Busboys & Poets

    Join American Association of Public Broadband (AAPB) Executive Director Gigi Sohn, in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn for a discussion about Cindy’s work, her new book, and what we’re all wondering: Can have private conversations if we live our lives online?

    Privacy’s Defender at Busboys & Poets
    Busboys & Poets – 14th & V
    2021 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20009
    Monday, April 13, 2026
    6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

    Register Now

    April 14 – With Women in Security and Privacy (WISP)

    Join Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) and EFF for a conversation featuring American University Senior Professorial Lecturer Chelsea Horne and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn as they dive into data security, Federal access to data, and your digital rights. 

    Privacy’s Defender with WISP
    True Reformer Building – Lankford Auditorium
    1200 U St NW, Washington, DC 20009
    Tuesday, April 14, 2026
    6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

    REGISTER NOW

    “Privacy’s Defender is a compelling account of a life well lived and an inspiring call to action for the next generation of civil liberties champions.”

    ~Edward Snowden, whistleblower; author of Permanent Record

    Can’t make it? Look for Cindy at a city (or web connection) near you! Find the latest tour dates on the Privacy’s Defender hub or follow EFF for more.

    Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, Privacy’s Defender is a compelling testament to just how much privacy and free expression matter in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen human rights. Thank you for being a part of that fight.

    Want to support the cause and get a copy of the new book? New or renewing EFF members can preorder one as their annual gift!

  • Palantir’s ‘Workflow’ of AI-Directed Death

    The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

    In the brief video below, a Pentagon official shows off the government’s fancy new AI-guided target-and-destroy computer program.

    “This is Maven Smart System,” says the Pentagon’s chief artificial intelligence officer, “Palantir’s software-as-a-service product that we are deploying across the entire Department [of War].”

    “As you can see, it’s not just one data feed, it’s multiple,” he continues. “The single visualization tool allows you to select-deselect different types of data, look at different approaches to data, but more importantly — action, from the same system that you’re trying to develop your workflows around. Once you have a detection that you want to actually move into a targeting workflow, this is what we do: left click, right click, left click .…”

    Eventually, a nominated target (“a detection”) gets moved to a new “workflow” called CoA (for course of action) generation, in which the AI helps choose the best available weapon. From there “we can move directly into ‘how do we action that target?’,” i.e., how do we blow it up or kill it.

    An image from the Pentagon’s March 12 video demonstration about the course-of-action generation choices.

    “So, we’ve gone from identifying the target, to now coming up with a course of action, to now actioning that target — all from one system. This is revolutionary. [Before,] we were having this done in about eight or nine systems, where humans were literally moving ‘detections’ left and right in order to get to our desired end state, in this case, actually closing a kill chain.”

    Before Maven, humans were doing too much of the mental lifting. Now, Maven is doing more of that, which means a contemplated killing can be more briskly accomplished.

    Perhaps the humans will eventually be taken out of these workflows, and the computer itself could “close a kill chain.”

    But not quite yet. “There’s always a human in the loop, so there is always a human that makes the ultimate decision,” Palantir’s head of U.K. and European operations reassured the BBC. “That’s the current setup.”

    The current setup. Right.

    Eight years ago, Google bailed out of Project Maven. Thousands of its employees had threatened to resign at the very idea of creating a “GoogleEarth for War” — a zoom-in-or-out video-and-satellite feed that could, with just a few mouse clicks, destroy or kill what it sees.

    Just several weeks ago, Anthropic, another tech company with halfhearted “Don’t Be Evil” pretensions, got into a similar public row with the Pentagon. Anthropic said it did not want the government to use its Claude AI for “mass surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons.”

    The company expressed fear that the Pentagon’s planned AI system might indeed end up off the leash, out there making its own decisions about whom to target, or when and how to kill them.

    Given the rapidly accumulating warning signs about rogue AI, this seems like a legitimate question, and one worthy of careful consideration and debate. But it was instead shut down instantly by our U.S. president — who reacted as if the asking of such questions represented a personal betrayal of his own awesomeness. Donald Trump banned the company from all federal contracts, and went on a Truth Social freakout in which he threatened “criminal consequences” for the “Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic”.

    The president’s Truth Social post. The author posts these screenshots often because Truth Social is not searchable and Trump’s posts sometimes mysteriously just disappear.

    One day later, the United States and Israel launched our sneak-attack assassination of the Iranian leadership in a massive bombing campaign that also accidentally killed about 175 people, most of them children, at an elementary school.

    Days later, Project Maven — brought to us by the tough-talking, CIA-seed-money-funded sociopaths at Palantir — was publicly embraced by both the Pentagon and then by all of NATO. We’re told that the Maven Smart System was involved in many of the thousands of missile strikes visited on Iran during our month-old war there.

    No one will say if Maven was involved in the school strike itself — which pretty much tells you right there that it was. Otherwise, they’d deny it. So, when that undeclared war opened with more than 1,000 bombs dropped in a single day, an elementary school was likely nominated as a detection on the Maven dashboard, then left click, right click, left clicked into a workflow, then actioned to an ultimately undesired end state.

    The post Palantir’s ‘Workflow’ of AI-Directed Death appeared first on Truthdig.

  • Yout.com Hopes Supreme Court’s Cox Ruling Helps Its Case; RIAA Disagrees

    Yout.com Hopes Supreme Court’s Cox Ruling Helps Its Case; RIAA Disagrees

    YouTube downloaders and other nifty tools are seen as a major piracy threat by the music industry.

    To curb this trend, music companies have taken legal action against various stream-ripping services. This includes Yout.com, which is operated by the American developer Johnathan Nader.

    Nader is not easily defeated, however. In 2020 he took the RIAA to court in an attempt to have the site declared legal.

    Appeal Pending

    At the end of 2022, the district court handed a win to the RIAA and dismissed the matter at an early stage. Judge Stefan Underhill concluded that Yout had failed to show that it doesn’t circumvent YouTube’s technological protection measures. As such, it could be breaking the law. That wasn’t the end though.

    Yout’s operator opted to appeal at the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking it to reverse the lower court’s decision. The stream-ripper’s arguments are partly supported by amicus briefs from GitHub and the EFF, both of which joined the case.

    On the other side of the aisle, the RIAA dug in its heels. The music group saw no reason to doubt the lower court’s position and, in its response to the appeal, found the Copyright Alliance at its side.

    Yout Flags Cox Supreme Court Precedent

    The Second Circuit appeal has been pending for a while, but some fresh arguments appeared this week, after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Cox v. Sony, reversing a billion-dollar verdict against the internet service provider and narrowing the standard for contributory copyright liability.

    Yout’s lawyers were quick to flag the decision to the Second Circuit via a supplemental authority letter. They argued that the Supreme Court’s discussion of when a service is ‘tailored to infringement’ has bearing on Yout’s own situation.

    “Although Cox Communications is not an anti-circumvention case, it nonetheless may provide useful guidance to the Court in the present case as the Supreme Court discusses when a ‘service is tailored to infringement’,” Yout’s counsel wrote.

    From the letter

    letter

    The Supreme Court held that a service that has noninfringing uses cannot be held liable, even if the operator knows that the service may be used for copyright infringement. Yout suggests the same logic should apply in its case.

    RIAA: Cox Does Not Apply

    Shortly after Yout informed the court, the RIAA sent a direct response.

    “Yout’s letter is not helpful to the resolution of this case,” RIAA writes. “The Cox decision addresses common law contributory liability for infringement. Yout’s complaint involves statutory anti-circumvention claims.”

    The distinction matters according to the RIAA, as the anti-circumvention of the DMCA (Section 1201) operates independently of the contributory liability doctrine. This means that a technology with noninfringing uses can still be prohibited under Section 1201, if it meets one of three criteria.

    Under 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1), liability for trafficking exists if a technology or service meets any one of these three disjunctive criteria:

    • It is primarily designed to circumvent technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works.
    • It has only limited commercially significant purposes other than to circumvent.
    • It is marketed as circumvention tool.

    RIAA argues that all these criteria are met here, as Yout is designed to let users save local copies of YouTube content, its revenue model depends on that downloading functionality, and it markets itself explicitly as a stream recording tool, while borrowing the first four letters of YouTube’s name.

    Whether this exchange of opinions will influence the Second Circuit’s eventual decision has yet to be seen. The key issue on appeal remains whether YouTube’s rolling cipher qualifies as a technological protection measure under Section 1201 of the DMCA, and whether Yout circumvents it.

    —

    A copy of Yout’s Rule 28(j) letter is available here (pdf). The RIAA’s response can be found here (pdf).

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

  • ‘We watched them die before our eyes’: Sudan health workers helpless amid medical shortages

    As violence forces tens of thousands to flee Sudan’s South Kordofan state, doctors in a key maternity hospital are facing impossible choices – with too few supplies, too many patients, and lives slipping away.

  • Weekly Roundup: April 3

    On Monday, Ruthy Gourevitch and Jacob Udell explained why landlords nationwide are scrambling to repay their investors, and why confronting this growing financial distress is the first step toward solving our national housing nightmare. On Wednesday, Alaa Hajyahia and Helen Zhao traced the Jones Act’s colonial origins, described its ongoing economic harms, and explained how this law…

    Source

  • Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Who Claims He “Would Have” Perfectly Controlled COVID In 2020, Can’t Even Fix A Few Broken Windows Today

    Trust in MAHA leaders has justifiably collapsed, and the sycophants who previously glorified Dr. Jay Bhattacharya have mysteriously vanished, unwilling to even acknowledge what they helped unleash on us all.

    The post Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Who Claims He “Would Have” Perfectly Controlled COVID In 2020, Can’t Even Fix A Few Broken Windows Today first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Can we build crisis care outside the broken mental health system?

    Can we build crisis care outside the broken mental health system?

    Being violently locked away and forcibly drugged made my mental health crisis many times worse – an experience shared by far too many people who have been subjected to standard NHS crisis “care”.  Yet the mental health system seems to resist change like a train with no brakes…

    …But what if we didn’t have to wait for change within a broken mainstream system that’s sustained by vested interests? What if communities could construct services to care for each other at times of need – outside the psychiatric system?

    It is incredibly exciting to be involved in Soteria London’s project to plan and build community support for people experiencing a mental health crisis… The kind of real help I wish I’d had!

    Soteria’s first step has been researching successful projects outside the medical model of ‘mental health’ that are already helping transform lives. We heard from the inspirational people running a Crisis Café, led by those with their own experience of mental health crisis, and providing a safe non-clinical space with people to simply talk to. The way those who have used this service describe it shows how completely this approach contrasts with the prison-like cells of mainstream crisis services: “It’s the community I never had”, “It’s a quiet safe space run by people who just understand and listen!!”, “It’s my safe haven”.

    Another really exciting initiative we looked at is a ‘foster-care’ programme placing people in mental health crisis with families who are supported to care for them through the Shared Lives Mental Health Crisis Scheme in South East Wales . Again the help comes in the form of human connection, treating the person in crisis as an individual not a patient, and carefully matching them with a family that they are happy to stay with. The warm relationships and belief in full recovery evident in interviews with those experiencing the scheme is heartwarming.

    Risk assessment and management is a collaborative and consensual process, and risks are largely avoided thanks to the calm and non-coercive environment, which doesn’t trigger the kind of reactions that often lead to physical restraint or sedation being used on psychiatric wards. It is the ordinary moments of home life which form the building blocks of recovery, just as in a similar scheme in Sweden for people experiencing psychosis called Healing Homes, that was documented in a fascinating film by American therapist Daniel Mackler available online.

    This Shared Lives approach costs 5 times less than inpatient beds, saving over £2500 per week for each person who avoids a psychiatric ward. And with evidence of better outcomes too (which will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the traumatic and dehumanising treatment that is commonplace in psychiatric inpatient facilities!). Shared Lives was even featured in the World Health Organisation’s Guidance on Community Mental Health Services alongside some other inspirational examples of communities across the globe organising to look after each other outside the medical model of mental health.

    Our Soteria London community also discussed models of care that provide support in people’s own homes, working collaboratively with the person in crisis and their family and friends, like the increasingly well-known Open Dialogue approach pioneered in Finland (and documented in another inspiring online film. This revolutionary approach first developed in the 1980s in Western Lapland has resulted in radically improved outcomes. Rates  of complete and sustained recovery from psychosis in the Finnish Open Dialogue programme have been consistently above 80% with data spanning more than a decade suggesting that the approach even reduced the incidence of severe mental health problems in the population, as the collaborative and consensual approach empowered communities and facilitated early help which actually prevented problems progressing. In our Soteria London planning meeting we discussed the idea of having ‘Compassionate Crews’ of volunteers and staff, on standby to go out to people’s homes and provide support to families at times of crisis.

    And of course we couldn’t forget the original Soteria House run by the pioneering psychiatrist Loren Mosher in the US in the 1970s and 80s, caring for people in psychosis in a home-like environment supported by non-medical staff (described in Mosher’s book ‘Soteria: Through Madness To Deliverance’) and since emulated by other Soteria Houses with similar success.

    A local example of truly trauma-informed residential care that we heard about is the Drayton Park Women’s Crisis House which provides a women-only environment (unlike women’s psychiatric wards that are staffed by men as well as women). At Drayton Park staff routinely do something revolutionary (yet rather obvious to anyone not indoctrinated in the disease model of mental health) and actually ask every woman who comes if there a history or current experience of abuse – and the majority do indeed disclose. We also heard about a community service hosting people experiencing suicidal thoughts and feelings in a home-like environment supported by volunteers, also right here in London, called the Maytree Respite Centre.

    Another idea we discussed came from the approach taken by some organisations working to support people out of homelessness by providing personalised budgets to fund the specific help that the individual actually needs and wants. As someone who was blessed to be able to pay privately for some of the help I personally needed to survive and recover from my own prolonged mental health crisis I thought this was an incredibly powerful idea. For instance if I hadn’t had the money to pay for help with cleaning and childcare whilst in crisis I’m certain I would have faced huge pressure and stress from long-term social services involvement. Being able to pay a private psychiatrist enabled me to withdraw from the debilitating psychiatric drugs I’d been forced to take by mental health services. And accessing body-based therapies like floatation tanks and massage made a huge difference in my recovery from trauma. Such life-transforming help shouldn’t be reserved for those who can pay! And empowering individuals to tap into their own knowledge of their needs and take charge of their own recovery is also a powerful way to support healing, especially after experiencing disempowering and infantilising state services.

    Soteria London has built a community of those with lived experience of distress and altered mental states, family members and supporters through the regular events the organisation holds. This enables us to tap into invaluable collective expertise, and some common themes emerged from our discussions in terms of the elements that people felt were important for any form of crisis service. A vital point that multiple people made was that often a crisis may actually be due to adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs or to severe withdrawal symptoms from abruptly stopping or changing the dose. Therefore any service should be fully aware of the role that prescription drugs may be playing in an individual’s problems and able to share accurate independent information about these psychoactive “medications” and about safer gradual approaches to withdrawal. Equally with psychiatric coercion being so common people in crisis may need advocacy support in order to safeguard their autonomy.

    It also seemed evident when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the various models of care that ideally we need to develop flexible services that offer a variety of approaches tailored to individual needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all model. But thankfully there are successful blueprints that a social enterprise like Soteria can turn to rather than reinventing the wheel, and Intentional Peer Support has even published a ‘Peer Respite Handbook:
    ‘A Guide to Understanding, Supporting and Building Peer Respites’, available online.

    It’s no easy task for a social enterprise to set up support structures for people in such severe crisis that they’d otherwise end up locked up under the Mental Health Act… But everyone involved in Soteria London knows from bitter first-hand experience as ex-patients or family members how urgent and important it is to get on with building our own support systems outside the broken mental health system (even the term “crisis” triggered traumatic associations for many of us who have been subjected to Crisis Team treatment!). Being part of Soteria’s project felt for me like an antidote to all those negative experiences. And the energy, enthusiasm and optimism infusing these exciting discussions around building positive “crisis care” made clear that our growing community of mutual support has huge potential to make these ideas a reality for those at the sharp end of mental health crises in our local communities.

    Soteria London is planning an online follow up meeting on 23rd April 2026 6.30-8 pm to present our next steps to build our models of crisis support – please email londonsoteria@gmail.com if you are interested.

    ****

    Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

    The post Can we build crisis care outside the broken mental health system? appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Despite European Extradition Requests, Guinea Keeps Convicted Robber in Prison

    Ibrahim Akhlal is a fugitive from Belgium where he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for a series of armed robberies. He is also wanted by the Netherlands where he faces charges related to a gold heist of “exceptional brutality,” which involved a car chase and shootout with police.

    Despite an extradition request from Belgium, and another one from the Netherlands, Akhlal remains in prison in the West African nation of Guinea. 

    Akhlal, who is a citizen of both Belgium and Morocco, was sentenced in Guinea for escaping prison there after his conviction for using a fraudulent passport. But his term expired more than a year ago. 

    Guinea has no extradition treaty with either Belgium or the Netherlands, but under the law, authorities can honor such a request if they choose to. Guinean officials declined to comment on the extradition requests, and would not explain why Akhlal is still incarcerated.

    “Ibrahim Akhlal is being illegally and arbitrarily detained in the Central Prison,” said his lawyer, Mory Doumbouya.

    In an interview in his office, behind the overcrowded prison in the Guinean capital of Conakry where Akhlal is held, Doumbouya described his client as a “hostage of the Guinean judicial system.” 

    Guinean court files accessed by OCCRP confirm that Akhlal has served his sentence.

    Speaking anonymously as they were not authorised to talk to journalists, three Guinean officials — from the legal, law enforcement, and prison sectors — confirmed that Akhlal is still incarcerated in Conakry.

    Akhlal appears to be stuck in a diplomatic standoff, according to Kars de Bruijne of Clingendael, a research institute in The Hague.

    “He is really caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said after reviewing Akhlal’s situation.

    “According to the Guinean law he should be released,” said de Bruijne, who is the institute’s programme lead for West Africa and the Sahel. However, if the Guineans release Akhal without extraditing him, “they could get in trouble with the Netherlands and Belgium.” 

    Jailbreak and a Gold Heist

    At just 30 years old, Akhlal already has a series of criminal master strokes under his belt.

    In March 2020, he escaped St. Gilles prison in Brussels where he was awaiting judgement on cases involving armed robbery, forgery, theft and organized crime — charges that later resulted in multiple convictions amounting to a 21-year prison sentence.

    While on the run, Akhlal allegedly took part in an attack on an armored truck transporting precious metals in Amsterdam. Seven men involved in the robbery were convicted. Akhlal has been indicted and charged, but still needs to go to trial.

    Official statements from the Amsterdam Court of Justice and the Public Prosecutor’s Office describe the heist — and what happened next.

    At least eight men, allegedly including Akhlal, had targeted the premises of Schöne Edelmetaal, a precious metals dealer and processor in a northern suburb of the Dutch capital in May 2021. As a new transport arrived, the men were waiting outside in two Audis and a Porsche Cayenne. They broke into the warehouse, using one of the cars as a battering ram. 

    Armed with automatic weapons and wearing balaclavas, the attackers tied up employees and loaded gold and other precious metals worth an estimated $16 million into the cars. Then they fled the scene. 

    A high-speed car chase followed, with the suspects — allegedly including Akhal — shooting at pursuing police vehicles. Some suspects were cornered in a cow field near a hamlet where one was shot and killed. Police arrested six men. 

    But the car carrying Akhlal and another suspect took a different turn and escaped. The loot in their vehicle — worth about $4.7 million, according to the Amsterdam Court of Justice — was not recovered. 

    Akhlal resurfaced a year-and-a-half later, thousands of miles away in West Africa. In what was hailed as a success of “effective international cooperation,” by the Belgian Federal Police, he was tracked to the Republic of Guinea and arrested there. 

    In a letter addressed to the Guinean Attorney General seven days after the arrest, then-Minister of Justice Alphonse Charles Wright specified that Akhlal had entered Guinea on September 22, 2022. 

    “In order to hide his identity, he fraudulently obtained administrative documents, notably a passport of the Republic of Guinea,” he wrote in the letter. 

    Following the arrest, Belgian police issued a statement saying that authorities were “actively in contact with their Guinean counterparts in order to proceed with the extradition of the former fugitive as soon as possible.”

    More than three years later, Belgium’s extradition request is still pending while Akhlal remains imprisoned in Conakry.

    In the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal last year convicted seven men, with sentences ranging from nine to 15-and-a-half years for robbing the transport vehicle carrying precious metals. 

    The Amsterdam Court of Justice described the robbery as one of “exceptional brutality” with “excessive violence.”

    Akhlal still faces a string of charges in the Netherlands related to the robbery. They include theft and “attempted aggravated manslaughter of police officers… [by] multiple shots with (automatic) firearms,” as well as arson and property damage. 

    Unanswered Questions

    Motorcycle taxis wind through the bustling streets of Kaloum, Conakry’s business district, zipping past street vendors and taxis carrying loads of bananas on their roofs. All activity comes to a frequent halt to make way for military convoys escorting the president from the palace to his residence.

    Amid the hustle is Conakry’s Court of First Instance. In a dimly lit room stacked with files and notebooks, a clerk retrieved books containing Akhlal’s sentences inscribed in blue and red ink.

    The records show that on January 8, 2023, shortly after his arrest, Akhlal was sentenced to two years in prison, with one year suspended. The charges were “forgery and use of forged documents in public records” related to his possession of a Guinean passport under a false identity.

    In June 2023, he escaped prison. Wright, the justice minister at the time, later said “armed men” were complicit in the escape. In an interview with the Belgian broadcaster VRT, Wright later condemned the “flagrant complicity” in the escape of several guards and prison employees.

    Several weeks after his escape, Akhlal was apprehended in the northern Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou. The city lies near the border of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony largely controlled by Morocco, but considered a disputed territory, where the Polisario Front launched an armed independence campaign in 1973. 

    A Mauritanian police officer told OCCRP that Akhlal stayed in the town for several days in the pink-painted Hotel Sahel, where he asked staff to turn off security cameras. He was arrested in the Grand Mosque, not far from the hotel, with several phones, large stashes of money and was “very skinny and stressed.”

    Akhlal was brought back to Guinea, where he was convicted over the prison escape. Court records show that the prison sentence expired on January 3, 2025. 

    The Attorney General at the Court of Appeal of Conakry, Fallou Doumbouya — a common name in Guinea, which he shares with Akhlal’s lawyer — declined to comment.  

    “I have absolutely nothing to tell you,” he said to a reporter in his office in December. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions subsequently sent to him.  

    Meanwhile, Akhlal’s lawyer insists that his client’s detention has no legal basis. Akhlal remains behind bars “for reasons that are beyond our understanding,” added the lawyer, Mory Doumbouya.

    Also a mystery is Guinea’s decision not to extradite Akhlal. Although the West African nation does not have an official treaty with either Belgium or the Netherlands, Guinea’s Code of Criminal Procedure allows extradition upon the discretion of authorities. 

    The Guinean ministries of justice and foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comment on the Belgian and Dutch requests.   

    De Bruijne of the Clingendael Institute said extraditions are tricky even with countries in the region that have such treaties.

    “It is a big problem,” he said, pointing to the Netherlands’ failure to persuade Sierra Leone to extradite Jos Leijdekkers, a cocaine kingpin on Europol’s most wanted list.

    Leijdekkers was sentenced in absentia by a Rotterdam court to 24 years in prison for large-scale cocaine trafficking, ordering a murder, and involvement in a violent robbery. He has also been convicted in Belgium in separate drug-related cases.

    “To be honest, it is always a bit of guesswork, also on my part, on what the reason is that countries refuse to extradite people with a clear criminal profile,” said de Bruijne.

    The Dutch Public Prosecution Service offered no explanation as to why Akhlal was still being held in Guinea despite the extradition requests.

    The Belgian Embassy in Conakry, and the Federal Public Service Justice, a state body that plays a key role in international judicial cooperation, both declined to comment.

    The Belgian Federal Police said their rule was to “not communicate about ongoing cases.”