(LONDON and ISTANBUL) — A predawn fire at a hotel in the Kartalkaya Ski Resort in Turkey killed at least 76, with another 51 injured, Turkey’s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said Tuesday.
“We are in deep pain,” Yerlikaya told reporters during a press conference.
The fire ignited after 3 a.m. on Tuesday at the Grand Kartal, a hotel at the resort in Northwestern Turkey.
A city official told ABC News that after the fire broke out in the middle of the night, around 3:27 a.m. local time, most of the victims, including children, appeared to have lost life due to suffocation.
There were 238 registered guests in the 12-story hotel at the time of the fire, according to the interior minister.
The fire department had not reported a negative situation regarding the fire adequacy of the hotel until Tuesday, Yerlikaya said, adding that an investigation is ongoing.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said an administrative and criminal investigation is underway.
“All necessary steps will be taken and are being taken to shed light on all aspects of the incident and to hold those responsible accountable,” he said.
ABC News’ Somayeh Malekian contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The first flight carrying “high-threat” migrants to Guantanamo Bay arrived Tuesday evening, part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
The C-17 plane took off from El Paso, Texas, and landed landed at 7:20 p.m. Eastern time, according to U.S. Transportation Command.
The 10 people on the flight were suspected members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The migrants, however, will not be co-located with existing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have the primary guard of them.
“These 10 high-threat individuals are currently being housed in vacant detention facilities,” the Defense Department said in a Wednesday statement, calling the detention of these migrants at Guantanamo Bay a “temporary measure.” “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is taking this measure to ensure the safe and secure detention of these individuals until they can be transported to their country of origin or other appropriate destination.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 29 directing the secretaries of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to “expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity” to house migrants without legal status living in the United States. The Migrant Operations Center is separate from the high-security prison facility that has been used to hold al Qaeda detainees.
“There’s a lot of space to accommodate a lot of people,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “So we’re going to use it.
“The migrants are rough, but we have some bad ones, too,” he added. “I’d like to get them out. It would be all subject to the laws of our land, and we’re looking at that to see if we can.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the flights carrying migrants to Guantanamo Bay were underway Tuesday morning, saying on Fox News, “Trump, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are already delivering on this promise to utilize that capacity at Gitmo for illegal criminals who have broken our nation’s immigration laws and then have further committed heinous crimes against lawful American citizens here at home.”
While Trump has said the United States will work to prepare the base to hold 30,000 migrants awaiting processing to return to their home countries, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Guantanamo Bay’s high-security prison facility could house “the worst of the worst” criminals being deported.
“Where are you going to put Tren de Aragua before you send them all the way back?” Hegseth asked. “How about a maximum-security prison at Guantanamo Bay, where we have the space?”
He called the base “the perfect place to provide for migrants who are traveling out of our country,” including for “hardened criminals.”
“President @realdonaldtrump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst. That starts today,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on Tuesday. It is unclear what charges the migrants on the plane face.
“Due process will be followed, and having facilities at Guantánamo Bay will be an asset to us and the fact that we’ll have the capacity to continue to do there what we’ve always done. We’ve always had a presence of illegal immigrants there who have been detained — we’re just building out some capacity,” Noem told NBC News on Sunday. “We appreciate the partnership of the DoD in getting that up to the level that it needs to get to in order to facilitate this repatriation of people back to their countries.”
She added that it is “not the plan” to have migrants stay at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely.
As of Monday, there were about 300 service members supporting the immigrant holding operations at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, according to U.S. Southern Command. U.S. officials told ABC News that as many as 200 more Marines are expected to arrive in waves.
The Defense Department posted that the troops are at Guantanamo Bay “to prepare to expand the Migrant Operations Center” to house up to the 30,000 migrants temporarily, separate from the maximum-security prison.
“As we identify criminal illegals in our country, the military is leaning forward to help with moving them out to their home countries or someone else in the interim,” Hegseth said on Jan. 31. “Now if … they can’t go somewhere right away, they can go to Guantanamo Bay.”
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, told ABC News’ Phil Lipof on Jan. 29 that a “big challenge” of holding migrants at Guantanamo Bay is the large number Trump has suggested.
“I don’t know that they have the capacity for that,” said Greenberg, who noted that “in the old days and the ’90s, I think they held 21,000 at the most.”
She added that the base has long held refugees and migrants, including in the Biden administration, though in much smaller numbers, and has typically been used for those intercepted at sea rather than to hold migrants flown in from the continental U.S.
However, Greenberg noted that the reports from those who have spent time at Guantanamo Bay are “not good.”
“There was a report released in September by the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sort of detailed the conditions that migrants are held in currently at Guantanamo, which included unsanitary conditions, mistreatment, not to mention this sort of fuzzy legal status,” she said.
(MEXICO CITY) — There is only one gun store in the entire country of Mexico, yet America’s southern neighbor is awash in violent crimes perpetrated with millions of firearms made in the United States.
In a historic case on Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether American gun manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson, Glock, Beretta and Colt, can be held liable for allegedly “aiding and abetting” the illicit flow of weapons across the border.
The high court has never before taken up the issue of the sweeping gunmaker immunity found in a 2005 federal law aimed at protecting the industry. Its decision could have a significant impact on firearm companies and the victims of gun violence pursuing accountability.
The government of Mexico is seeking $10 billion in damages and court-mandated safety mechanisms and sales restrictions for U.S.-made guns. The justices will decide whether the case can move forward under an exception in the law.
“Between 70-90% of the crime guns in Mexico are illegally trafficked from the U.S.,” said Jonathan Lowy, an attorney representing the Mexican government. “Essentially, Mexico’s gun problem and the problem of armed cartel violence is almost entirely a result of this crime — a gun pipeline from the U.S. gun manufacturers ultimately to the cartels.”
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 broadly bars lawsuits against any gun manufacturer over the illegal acts of a person using one of a manufacturer’s guns. But it does create an exception for claims involving a gun company’s alleged violation of rules governing the sale and marketing of firearms.
Mexico alleges the manufacturers have for years knowingly marketed and distributed their weapons to border community dealers who participate in illegal gun trafficking into Mexico.
“The law is clear that any person or company can be responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions and, in this case, of their deliberate actions,” Lowy said.
The gun companies, which declined ABC News’ request for an interview, said in court documents that the exception does not apply and the case should be dismissed, in part, because the alleged link to crimes in Mexico is too diffuse and far removed.
“Mexico’s alleged injuries all stem from the unlawful acts of foreign criminals,” the gun companies argued in their Supreme Court brief.
The court has “repeatedly held that it requires a direct connection between a defendant’s conduct and the plaintiff’s injury,” the companies claimed. “Thus, the general rule is that a company that makes or sells a lawful product is not a proximate cause of harms resulting from the independent criminal misuse of that product.”
More than 160,000 people in Mexico were killed by guns between 2015 and 2022, according to an analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety.
A large majority of guns involved in the shootings came from U.S. border states. More than 40% of illegal guns seized in Mexico over a five-year period came from Texas, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report.
In 2023 alone, more than 2,600 firearms were seized going south into Mexico, up 65% from the year before, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and 115,000 rounds of ammunition were captured headed the same direction, up 19% from 2022.
“In its zeal to attack the firearms industry, Mexico seeks to raze bedrock principles of American law that safeguard the whole economy,” the companies wrote in their brief. “It is the criminal who is responsible for his actions, not the company that made or sold the product.”
A federal district court dismissed Mexico’s case in 2022 citing the PLCAA protections. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in early 2024, saying Mexico had made a plausible case for liability under the law’s exception.
The Supreme Court will decide whether to affirm that judgment and allow the case to continue toward what would be a first-of-its-kind trial.
Mexico, in the meantime, announced it will expand its lawsuit after the Trump administration designated six Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
“You will also see an expansion of this lawsuit for the complicity of those who sell weapons, which are [then] introduced into our country,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters last month.
In essence, Mexico will argue that American gun manufacturers aren’t just enabling ordinary gun crime but terrorism, by the U.S. government’s own characterization.
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver an opinion in the case, Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, by the end of June.
ABC News’ Matt Rivers and Patty See contributed to this report.
(KYIV, Ukraine) — Russia has carried out a massive missile and drone attack on Ukraine overnight, targeting energy and gas infrastructure in various regions, Ukrainian officials said Friday morning.
A total of 261 missiles and drones were launched by Russia, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, which said it used Mirage-2000 fighter jets for the first time alongside F-16s to repel the attack.
The latest attack is one of the largest air attacks of the war to date as Russia, in recent months, has dramatically increased the number of drones it can launch every night against Ukrainian cities.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there can be “no pause” in pressure on Russia earlier this week just the day after the U.S. confirmed it had stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv.
President Donald Trump’s decision to pause all U.S. military aid and intelligence sharing has raised concerns that Ukraine’s air defenses will become less effective in the days, weeks and months to come.
The pause followed last week’s explosive Oval Office meeting between Zelenskyy and Trump. White House officials have suggested the freeze may be lifted if Ukraine takes concrete steps towards a peace deal with Russia to end Moscow’s 3-year-old invasion.
It now appears likely that Russia will try to increase these attacks at a critical time as the end of U.S. intelligence sharing and supplies of anti-aircraft missiles could weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend against them.
Russian missiles and drone attacks are a nightly occurrence in Ukraine. The country has become largely reliant on Western anti-air weapons to defeat incoming projectiles.
U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine had allowed Kyiv to give warnings to targeted areas ahead of Russian drone and missile strikes, tracking Russian aircraft taking off, drones being launched and missiles being fired.
A Ukrainian intelligence official told ABC News on Wednesday that the intelligence sharing pause included a halt in sharing U.S. satellite imagery through the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia while seeking to undermine Zelenskyy’s legitimacy as president. The White House is pushing Kyiv to accept a deal to end the fighting and to sign an agreement giving the U.S. access to Ukrainian mineral resources.
