North Korea test-fires ‘multiple’ ballistic missiles as US-South Korea war games begin
Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
(SEOUL and LONDON) — North Korea fired “multiple” ballistic missiles on Monday, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, as U.S.-South Korea war games began nearby.
The missiles, which were “unidentified,” were fired from the North’s Hwanghae Province at about 1:50 p.m. local time, the South Korean military said. They were aimed inland, toward the West Sea.
The South Korean military “has increased surveillance and maintaining readiness posture in close cooperation with the U.S.,” the Joint Chiefs said.
The annual U.S.-South Korea joint exercises, which are known as “Freedom Shield,” were scheduled to begin Monday and run through March 21, according to the U.S. Army.
The training alongside South Korean soldiers will include urban combat, field hospital operations, field artillery exercises, air assault training and air defenses, the Army said in a statement on Monday. The U.S. Marine Corps is also expected to take part in a joint assault exercise.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry described the planned exercises as “aggressive,” with officials telling state media on Sunday that the “U.S. random exercise of strength will result in aggravated security crisis.”
“This is a dangerous provocative act of leading the acute situation on the Korean peninsula, which may spark off a physical conflict between the two sides by means of an accidental single shot, to the extreme point,” the ministry said in a statement to the Korean Central New Agency on Sunday.
ABC News’ Somayeh Malekian contributed to this report.
Maiker Escalona was a barber in Venezuela. (Raida)
(NEW YORK) — Over the last month, the Trump administration has sent over 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador to be detained in a notorious mega-prison with a track record of human rights abuses.
An official with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has acknowledged that “many” of the men lack criminal records in the United States — but said that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
The families of some of the men — who learned about their whereabouts by seeing them in promotional videos shared by the El Salvadoran and United States governments — have denied any gang affiliation in court filings and shared their stories with ABC News. They said that they fear for the safety of their loved ones and do not know if they will ever return.
Maiker Espinoza Escalona – Deported to El Salvador under Title 8 on March 30
Escalona was detained by U.S. authorities last year when he tried to enter the United States to seek asylum with his partner Yorely Bernal Inciarte and their one-year old baby.
The family was immediately separated, with Escalona sent to a detention center in El Paso, Texas.
On Sunday, Escalona was deported to El Salvador under Title 8, with authorities alleging he was a member of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — an accusation his family denies.
“They are liars,” said Raida, Inciarte’s mother, of the Trump administration. “I cannot believe that half of Venezuela is Tren de Aragua. That can’t be.”
According to Escalona’s sister, he entered the United States to pursue a career as a barber and does not have a criminal record in Venezuela. She suspects he and his wife were detained based on their tattoos.
“He finished high school, he took courses in barbering and set up his barbershop in Venezuela. But things got a bit tough in Venezuela, so he emigrated to have a better life,” she said.
Jose Franco Caraballo Tiapa – Deported to El Salvador on March 15
Tiapa, a 26-year-old Venezuelan migrant who was seeking asylum in the U.S., was detained by immigration officials during a routine ICE check-in last month.
His wife Ivannoa Sanchez told ABC News she believes her husband is one of the hundreds of Venezuelan men who earlier this month was sent by plane to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
According to Sanchez, the couple crossed the U.S. border in November 2023 and surrendered to authorities. After claiming asylum and being detained for a few days, ICE released them and ordered them to check in routinely with the federal agency.
Sanchez said the couple had gone to several of their scheduled check-ins without experiencing any issues. But on Feb. 3, Tiapa was not allowed to return home with his wife despite being scheduled to have his first court appearance in his asylum case in March.
Sanchez provided ABC News with documents that confirmed Tiapa’s scheduled appointment with an immigration judge on March 19. She also provided ABC News with documents that show Tiapa does not have a criminal record in Venezuela.
“He went to his routine ICE appointment and he didn’t come out,” Sanchez told ABC News.
Sanchez said that after being detained in Dallas, her husband was transferred to a detention center in Laredo, Texas, where she was able to speak with him regularly. In mid-March, she said her husband told her that he believed he was going to be transferred and possibly deported, and she now believes he is detained in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
“He has never done anything, not even a fine, absolutely nothing,” Sanchez said of her husband. “We chose this country because it offers more security, more freedom, more peace of mind. But we didn’t know it would turn into chaos.”
Francisco Garcia Casique – Deported to El Salvador on March 15
Garcia Casique was detained by immigration authorities last month after going to an ICE office for a routine appointment, his brother told ABC News.
Garcia Casique originally entered the United States in December 2023 and surrendered to authorities, according to his brother Sebastian. After appearing before an immigration judge, Garcia Casique was released with an ankle monitor. A review of federal court records found no criminal court cases associated with Garcia Casique.
According to his brother, Garcia Casique was a professional barber who aspired to start a career in the United States.
“[He] was hoping for a better future to help us, help all the family members, and look at the situation now,” his brother said.
Earlier this month, Garcia Casique called his family from the detention center in Texas where he was being held to let them know that he believed he was being deported to Venezuela. A few days later, his family recognized his brother in a photo posted on social media by the White House.
“It’s a nightmare,” his brother told ABC News.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – Deported to El Salvador on March 15 due to ‘administrative error’
Abrego Garcia — a Salvadoran national who has two U.S. family members and protected legal status — was sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison due to an “administrative error,” according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.
Abrego Garcia entered the United States in 2011 when he was 16 to escape gang violence in El Salvador, according to his lawyers. He received a form of protected legal status in 2019, married a U.S. citizen, and has a 5-year-old child.
Earlier this month, he was detained by ICE officials who informed him that his immigration status had changed, sending him to a detention center in Texas before being removing him to El Salvador on Mar. 15.
While the Trump administration has argued that Abrego Garcia is a MS-13 member who is a “danger to the community,” his attorneys said that he “is not a member of” and “has no affiliation with Tren de Aragua, MS-13, or any other criminal or street gang,” and that the U.S. government “has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation.”
Jerce Reyes Barrios – Deported to El Salvador on March 15
Reyes Barrios was a professional soccer player in Venezuela who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border legally in 2024 after being detained and tortured by the Maduro regime, according to his attorney Linette Tobin.
He was immediately detained after authorities accused him of being a member of TdA based on what they said was a gang-affiliated tattoo, and they claimed a photo showed him throwing up gang signs. However, the tattoo in question was an homage to the Real Madrid soccer team logo adorned with a rosary and the word “Dios” meaning God, according to the artist who did the piece.
Barrios did not have a criminal record in Venezuela, according to government records reviewed by ABC News, and he worked as a professional soccer player and children’s soccer coach.
“He collaborates with the schools to teach children his techniques. A lot of children admire him because he’s a goalie,” his family member Ayari del Carmen Pedroza Guerrero said in an interview with ABC News.
Border czar Tom Homan defended Barrios’ removal when pressed about the lack of evidence regarding his alleged gang affiliation by ABC’s Jonathan Karl.
“We got to count on the men and women who do this every day for a living, who designated these people as a members of TdA, through, like I said, various law enforcement methods,” Homan said. “This will be litigated.”
Lawyers for the man accused of killing four Idaho college students are asking the judge in his capital murder case to ban a key witness from using the phrase “bushy eyebrows” to describe the assailant she saw the night of the bloody attack.
That request was included in roughly 100 pages of court filings unsealed Tuesday as preparations continue in advance of the August trial of Bryan Kohberger, who’s charged in the November 2022 killings of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.
A roommate of the victims, who lived at the off-campus Moscow, Idaho, home where the killings occurred originally told detectives that the masked male intruder she saw on the night of the killings had a singular physical attribute: “bushy eyebrows.” That phrase has rocketed around the world as the headline-grabbing case has moved slowly toward a trial in Boise, Idaho.
Kohberger’s defense attorneys argued the superficial description will unfairly point the finger at him and potentially bias the jury.
“The description provided by [the roommate] is unreliable and should be excluded,” defense lawyer Elisa Massoth wrote. “Although she has never identified Mr. Kohberger, testimony by [the roommate] from the witness stand, describing bushy eyebrows while Mr. Kohberger sits as the accused at trial, will be as damning as her pointing to him and saying, ‘he is the man that did this.'”
The roommate’s varying accounts and self-confessed sleepy intoxication that night make her memory fickle, Kohberger’s lawyers have argued. And, they argued, she seemed preoccupied with bushy eyebrows even before her friends were killed.
When police photographed the crime scene right after the killings, her room was found to have “many pictures of eyes with prominent eyebrows” on the walls in her room, Kohberger’s lawyers said.
“Many of which she had drawn. Some of the eyebrows are heavy, voluminous, puffy, or perhaps subjectively bushy,” and there was “artwork of human figures with an emphasis upon the eyes and eyebrows were pinned to corkboards,” they said.
Kohberger’s defense attorneys have also asked the judge to bar words like “murder,” “psychopath” and “sociopath” during the trial.
“To label Mr. Kohberger as a ‘murderer,’ the alleged weapon consistent with an empty sheath as a ‘murder weapon’ or to assert that any of the four decedents was ‘murdered’ by Mr. Kohberger denies his right to a fair trial and the right to be presumed innocent,” the defense said.
Prosecutors allege that in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, Kohberger broke into an off-campus home and stabbed the four students to death. He was arrested in late December, after a six-week manhunt, at his parents’ Pennsylvania home and indicted in May 2023.
He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. At his arraignment, he declined to offer a plea, so the judge entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.
If convicted, Kohberger could face the death penalty. But not if his lawyers get their way.
Defense attorneys cite autism in bid to strike death penalty
Among the flurry of new filings, the defense also argued his life should not be on the line — because he has been diagnosed with autism, and so his impairments in communication, problems with social skills and impulse control mean he is “insufficiently culpable to be executed.”
His diagnosis however should not be wielded against him, the defense said — arguing prosecutors should not be allowed to use it “by criminalizing his status as a disabled person.”
Even if this does not work to strike the death penalty, his diagnosis could resurface in the sentencing phase if Kohberger is convicted, where his lawyers will likely raise it again as a mitigating factor.
This is not the first time his lawyers have attempted to get the death penalty taken off the table.
In their argument about his condition now, Kohberger’s lawyers shed new light on what has been a heretofore little-known person to the public.
“Mr. Kohberger displays extremely rigid thinking, perseverates on specific topics, processes information on a piece-meal basis, struggles to plan ahead, and demonstrates little insight into his own behaviors and emotions” and “his tone and cadence are abnormal, his interactions lack fluidity, and his language is often overinclusive, disorganized, highly repetitive, and oddly formal,” they argued.
He “frequently shifts the topic back to himself even when it is inappropriate. He uses abrupt, matter-of-fact phrases that would be considered rude. He carries on about topics in a circular manner and perseverates about specific, non-essential details,” they said, adding his autism is “also accompanied by obsessive-compulsiveness, and an eating disorder. Since childhood, Mr. Kohberger has exhibited compulsions around getting things in his eyes, hand-washing and other germ avoidant behaviors.”
(BOSTON) — A Massachusetts woman is on trial again for the death of her police officer boyfriend, after a jury was unable to reach a verdict in the initial murder trial last year.
Karen Read is accused of killing her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, in January 2022. The prosecution alleges that, following a night of drinking in Canton, Read struck O’Keefe with her SUV outside of a private residence, then left the scene. An autopsy found that he died of hypothermia and blunt force injuries to the head.
Read’s defense attorneys have long centered on allegations that the defendant was the subject of a cover-up.
Read has maintained her innocence. She pleaded not guilty to charges including second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter while operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.
During opening statements Tuesday in Norfolk County Superior Court in Dedham, special prosecutor Hank Brennan focused on numerous accounts Read has given in interviews with the media, in which he claims Read makes a series of “admissions.” Brennan announced his intent to present Read’s numerous statements to the media as important evidence in the Commonwealth’s case.
“You are going to hear from her own lips, and many of her statements, her admissions to her extraordinary intoxication. Her admissions to driving the Lexus. Her admissions to being angry at John that night,” he said.
Brennan directed the jury’s attention to a clip of the defendant’s interview from October 2024.
“I didn’t think I ‘hit him,’ hit him,” Read said in the interview. “But could I have clipped him, could I have tapped him in the knee and incapacitated him?”
Brennan told jurors they will see a host of video and DNA evidence during the trial, including what he said is DNA of O’Keefe’s hair recovered from Read’s bumper.
He also pointed to evidence pulled from Read’s Lexus, which he said will show that the defendant’s vehicle reversed at least 70 feet around the time of the alleged murder. Brennan repeatedly highlighted the broken taillight identified on the defendant’s vehicle as evidence that her Lexus struck O’Keefe.
Defense attorney Alan Jackson asserted in his opening statement that Read did not cause the death of O’Keefe.
“There was no collision with John O’Keefe,” Jackson repeated three times.
Jackson said the assertion that O’Keefe was struck by Read’s Lexus SUV is “contrary to science.”
“John O’Keefe did not die from being hit by a vehicle, period,” Jackson said.
Jackson promised to show the jury that the police investigation on which the Commonwealth has based its case is “riddled with errors.”
He made numerous references to personal relationships that investigating officers held with witnesses in this case, including Boston police officer Brian Albert, who owned the residence where O’Keefe was found dead on the lawn.
The attorney also criticized the involvement of former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator in the case. Jackson introduced Proctor as “a longtime family friend of the Alberts who has been disgraced by his own agency,” alluding to his dismissal by state police.
“You’ll see from the evidence in this case that this case carries a malignancy, one that is spread through the investigation,” Jackson said. “It’s spread through the prosecution from the very start, from the jump, a cancer that cannot be cut out, a cancer that cannot be cured, and that cancer has a name. His name is Michael Proctor.”
The attorney promised to show the jury personal text messages between Proctor and his high school friends, in which he made vulgar and sexist comments about Read. Jackson then alleged that Proctor admitted in the same text conversation to seizing the defendant’s cell phone without her permission and searching her phone for nude photos.
Proctor’s family responded to Jackson’s opening statement, calling it “yet another example of the distasteful, and shameless fabrication of lies that embodies their defense strategy” in a statement to ABC Boston affiliate WCVB.
“Jackson is under no oath to tell the truth; he does not have to speak in truths,” the statement continued. “The defense team continues to do anything to deflect from facts of the case and continues to use inappropriate analogies like casting someone as a cancer. We wholeheartedly believe the truth will prevail in this case, and justice for Officer John O’Keefe and his family will be achieved.”
The Commonwealth’s first witness, Timothy Nuttall, a Canton firefighter and paramedic who administered medical aid to O’Keefe, testified that he heard Read say, “I hit him,” at the scene.
“She said, ‘I hit him, I hit him, I hit him,'” Nuttall said. “I remember it very distinctly.”
In his cross-examination, Jackson focused on the witness’ ability to accurately recall details from that morning.
Jackson pointed to an inconsistency between Nuttall’s testimony in Read’s first trial, where he stated that Read said, “I hit him,” twice, and his statements Tuesday in court, where he now claims she repeated the statement three times.
“So your memory is clearer today, now, as you sit here, than it was a year ago, when you testified it was two times?” Jackson asked.
“Yes, sir,” Nuttall said with a nod.
The next witness, Kerry Roberts, testified that she saw Read point to an abnormality in the taillight of her SUV the morning that O’Keefe was found and that she recalled seeing a piece missing.
Roberts will resume her testimony on Wednesday. The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.
Hours before the proceedings began on Tuesday, roughly two dozen protesters supporting Read gathered near the courthouse. Judge Beverly Cannone ordered a 200-foot no-protest zone around the courthouse in the interest of ensuring a fair trial.
A man “lingering and filming” within the buffer zone was arrested Tuesday morning after police say he ignored multiple requests to leave the zone, Massachusetts State Police said. The Arlington man was expected to be arraigned Tuesday on a trespassing charge, police said.
ABC News’ Nadine El-Bawab contributed to this report.
