
A plane carrying a Brazilian football team has crashed in Colombia, killing 71 passengers and crew.
Players of the Chapecoense football team, journalists and crew members were on the chartered flight from Sao Paulo to Medellin via Bolivia when it disappeared from radar tracking screens on Tuesday. Three footballers, two crew members and a journalist survived the crash in the Medellin mountains and were pulled from the rubble. The team was to have competed in the final of the Copa Sudamericana in Medellin.
US admits to attack that killed Syrian government troops
The US led coalition has confirmed it mistakenly carried out an air strike in Syria that killed government troops fighting ISIS. The September 17 attack near Deir al-Zour was meant to target the Islamic State’s positions but instead killed about 60 Syrian troops. Australia was involved in the attack along with aircraft from the UK, US and Denmark.
Syrian president Bashar al Assad has alleged that the attack was intentional. “It was four airplanes that kept attacking the position of the Syrian troops for nearly one hour, or a little bit more than one hour,” Associated Press news agency reported him as saying. A spokesman for US Central Command said that the attack was “regrettable” and was not aimed at Syrian troops.
German intelligence agency employee arrested
An employee of German intelligence agency, BfV, has been arrested after making Islamist statements and sharing confidential material. “The man is accused of making Islamist statements on the Internet using a false name and of revealing internal agency material in Internet chatrooms,” a spokesman said.
A German newspaper reported the man had planned a bomb attack on the BfV’s Cologne office, but this has not been confirmed. It has also been suggested in the German media that the man was recently hired by BfV to monitor the Islamic State’s position in Germany.
ISIS claims responsibility for US university attack
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a car and knife attack at Ohio State University which left 11 people injured. The attacker, 18-year old Somali-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan, drove his car into a group of people and then stabbed them before he was shot by campus police at the university he attended.
The FBI have searched Artan’s apartment for clues and are investigating whether he had any assistance. Amaq, a pro-ISIS news agency, reported that Artan was a “soldier”, but there is no evidence to verify the Islamic State’s link to him.
Brussels dance tax
Belgium has extended a tax on dancing to cafes in the nation’s capital, Brussels. Businesses have to pay 43 cents for each dancer per night. The law was introduced two years ago but is only now being enforced in cafes. City authorities said that clubs and cafes cause disruption to public order and the tax is needed to cover the extra expense. – Compiled from web sources by Samantha Besgrove, Alicia Camilleri and Nikolina Matijevic