gang

Several foreign suspects were among those arrested, according to prosecutors.

Dutch police have arrested ⁠34 ⁠suspects after a drug-related shooting in a small town in the east of the country that left a security guard dead and two police officers injured.

Jolanda Aalbers, head of the regional police, told reporters on Tuesday that a “large group” of masked men had opened fire at 4am (02:00GMT) when police arrived at a house in Overasselt, a village near the German border, to investigate reports of suspicious activity.

During the shootout, a 51-year-old security guard was killed while two of the officers arriving at the scene sustained injuries that were not life-threatening, Aalbers said.

“When the first police unit arrived at the scene, shots were fired immediately,” the police chief said. “That was an incredibly traumatic incident. They had to rescue their colleagues and get them to safety. I have tremendous respect for what they did.”

Aalbers added that several weapons, data storage devices, and vehicles were seized at the scene.

Among those arrested ⁠were suspects from the ⁠Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Algeria, according to regional prosecutors.

They said that there were indications the shooting was connected to a “long-running” conflict, as the same house had ⁠been shot a dozen times in a single incident last ⁠year. Two people were convicted in that incident.

Local media linked the incident to the criminal underworld of Dutch drug lord Jos Leijdekkers, also known as “Bolle Jos” (“Fat Jos”). One of the Netherlands’ most wanted criminals, he was previously convicted for his role in international cocaine trafficking.

Dutch Minister of Justice and Security David van Weel said that police “acted swiftly in response to the life-threatening situation in Overasselt, which involved an unprecedented number of people”.

In a post on X, he noted that 34 arrests had been made and said “the investigation is still ongoing” while condemning the “horrific act of violence”.

Island nation grapples with violence as it seeks to hold first elections in more than a decade.

At least 30 people have been killed as a new wave of violence grips Haiti.

A powerful gang coalition mounted the deadly attack on a farming community in Kenscoff, south of the capital, Port-au-Prince, late on Sunday, officials reported. The flare-up in violence comes as Haiti hopes to hold its first general election in more than a decade.

Jean Massillon, Kenscoff’s mayor, said armed men “sowed chaos” as they set homes on fire and killed residents.

He said gang members targeted a church and homes, including that of Jean William Pape, a leading public health expert.

Massillon blamed the attack on members of Viv Ansanm, a group that was designated as a “foreign terrorist organisation” by the United States government last year.

Gangs control an estimated 70 percent of Port-au-Prince. Viv Ansanm has repeatedly targeted Kenscoff, which occupies a strategic position overlooking routes into Petion-Ville, where several embassies, upscale hotels and ⁠the temporary seat of government are located.

A United Nations-backed gang suppression force is mandated to help police fight the gangs and restore order, but it has not yet reached its full capacity of 5,500 members.

According to the UN, gang violence has displaced 1.5 million people across Haiti. The violence has persisted despite efforts to rein it in. More than 3,100 people were reported killed and 1,189 injured from January to June as gangs continued a reign of terror in Port-au-Prince that sparked international concern last year.

Haiti’s prime minister’s office on Monday condemned the “heinous attack” and sought to reassure Haitians that security forces were on high alert and reinforcements were being deployed.

“Kenscoff will not be abandoned,” a statement read. “The government’s authority will be restored, ⁠without weakness and without delay.”

Haitians have been registering to vote in elections planned in January, but experts have warned it’s currently too dangerous to hold the vote.

Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was gunned down near the Las Vegas Strip in a killing that rocked the rap world, the trial of the man prosecutors allege did everything but pull the trigger got underway Monday with new revelations.

Nevada prosecutors allege Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a one-time Compton gang member, orchestrated Shakur’s killing as revenge for an attack on his nephew hours earlier and are using Davis’ own words in interviews and a book he co-authored as evidence.

In opening statements, prosecutors said an ugly gang rivalry on the streets of Compton led to the slaying of Shakur, a famed rapper and actor, who died six days after he was shot.

The Sept. 7, 1996, shooting, they said, was rooted in a war between Southside Crips-Burris Street, led by Davis, and Mob Piru, a gang long associated with Death Row Records. Shakur was closely affiliated with Death Row, and the record company’s boss, Marion “Suge” Knight, was inside his car the night he was attacked.

In court testimony Monday, it was revealed that Shakur was conscious after the shooting en route to the hospital but did not cooperate with authorities.

The first witness, Garry Dale, a Las Vegas Metro police officer, testified that he saw Shakur pulled out of the car with gunshot wounds and rode in the ambulance with him.

When he asked Shakur who shot him, the rapper replied, “‘No, we’ll take care of it,’” Dale said. “I couldn’t get him to talk any further.”

Duane “Keffe D” Davis is accused of murder in the 1996 killing of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur.

(Steve Marcus / Associated Press)

The incident, according to Clark County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Binu Palal, followed a violent confrontation at a Mike Tyson fight earlier that night in Las Vegas. Palal showed video of Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’ nephew Orlando Anderson. Travon Lane, a Mob Piru member, had spotted Anderson in the MGM Grand hotel lobby. Months earlier, Anderson stole Lane’s Death Row Records chain in the Lakewood mall during an attack.

The rivalry between the groups grew after the Southside Crips became the West Coast security for Sean “Diddy” Combs’ record label, prosecutors said.

“Let’s be clear, Duane Davis did not pull the trigger. But he did plan the shooting in retaliation of the beating of his nephew,” Palal said. “Remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.”

Palal noted that Shakur’s shooting was followed by numerous slayings in Compton, including that of an 11-year-old girl.

“In this world, silence means survival,” Palal said. “The one person who has had a hard time being silent is Duane Davis.”

The prosecutor played parts of an interview with a Los Angeles Police Department federal task force in 2008 in which Davis acknowledged his role in the rapper’s fatal shooting. They also cited other interviews as well as his own memoir.

The prosecutor said Davis got the gun from Eric Zip Martin, an East Coast drug dealer associated with Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment.

“He admits putting the gun he obtained that night in the back seat of the vehicle so the shooters could shoot,” the prosecutor said. “You will learn that Duane Davis got the gun. … You will learn that he got into a white Cadillac. You will learn when the opportunity presented itself for retribution, Duane Davis made sure that the shooter was armed and ready to execute their revenge.”

Palal said Davis and his crew set out in search of Knight and Shakur. In multiple accounts, including in his book “Compton Street Legend,” Davis wrote that they spotted the Death Row caravan stopped at a red light, with Shakur waving to female fans while hanging out of the BMW window.

“Tupac, he gave himself away,” Davis said in the recording played in court. “Otherwise, they would’ve got away.”

Davis was arrested in 2023 and indicted for masterminding the killing and providing the gun.

Rapper Tupac Shakur is show at Club Amazon in New York on July 23, 1993.

(Al Pereira / Getty Images)

Michael Sanft, Davis’ defense attorney, told jurors there will be no evidence linking his client to the shooting.

“There are no facts to point to Keffe — not one,” he said. “You’re going to hear about this over and over again.”

Sanft recounted decades of probes and noted that prior investigations did not take his client’s statements seriously because they were not credible. “He treats that book like it’s fact,” Sanft said of a lead detective in the case. The defense attorney, in an unusual move, repeatedly undermined his own client’s credibility.

Sanft portrayed Las Vegas police as incompetent, with lost records, and the LAPD and then Compton police as corrupt.

“What facts do they have to put Keffe D in a car in 1996? When you look at the video in 1996, do you see Keffe D?” he added, referencing the lobby beating.

Sanft said Death Row’s security chief was Reggie Wright Jr., a felon and former Compton police officer whose father led the Compton police gang unit. He said the former officer was not with Knight and ordered his security team not to carry firearms. The defense lawyer cast Davis’ memoir as fiction and said there was no evidence his client was in Las Vegas.

The prosecutor, however, told jurors that Davis, from 1998 to 2023, made several incriminating statements and, in 1998, admitted to the FBI to being in Las Vegas at the time of Shakur’s slaying.

Davis, according to prosecutors, told investigators during a secret meeting he “was mad about Orlando Anderson’s beating” and he was the boss who got the firearm and was in the white Cadillac. When Greg Kading, an LAPD detective who led the task force, left policing and later published a book revealing Davis’ role, it made Davis want to go public, according to the prosecution.

“Greg Kading is profiting off Duane Davis’ life story,” Palal said. By the time the book was released, the others who were allegedly in the car the night of the shooting were dead. Anderson was killed and Smith passed away. In 2019, after a series of interviews, Davis published his own book, which, full of bravado, gave a similar account of Shakur’s killing as that of the federal task force. The prosecutor then played an interview from the time of the book’s release, in which Davis justified his actions.

Rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight appears in court in 2018 in an unrelated case.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Ingrid Stokes, one of four women in a car that had been following Shakur the night of the attack testified that she freaked out and screamed, then fled the scene, telling police she “didn’t see anything” because “snitches get stitches.”

A third witness who testified Monday, former Las Vegas Metro Det. Brent Becker, said he interviewed Knight about the beating in the MGM Grand lobby, and Knight said he basically “didn’t know anything.” By 1997, detectives suspected that Davis was in the Cadillac that opened fire on Shakur, he testified.

Davis, now 63, has pleaded not guilty to murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. In recent weeks, he’s denied being in the Cadillac or Las Vegas that night and, in interviews with Las Vegas TV stations, blamed a former head of Death Row Records security.

“I had nothing to do with nobody’s murder,” he told interviewers.

Prosecutors are expected to call witnesses to support Davis’ claims from over the years. Davis’ lawyers will seek to portray him as a fabricator — his bragging is all fiction. Davis has done the same with Las Vegas reporters.

“I did not write the book; a ghostwriter wrote that book,” Davis said in a recent jailhouse interview. “I was trying to make my family some money.”