Syrian Protesters Mass Again Despite Harsh Crackdown

The crowds protesting the authoritarian rule of President Bashar al-Assad appeared fueled in part by escalating anger about the torture and killing of a 13-year-old boy. Witnesses said protesters in dozens of communities on Friday dedicated their marches to him and other children killed during the uprising.

They defied the continuing brutal crackdown that has killed more than 1,000 people, with hundreds more rounded up in mass arrests.

On Friday, more than 30 protesters were killed in the city of Hamah, according to Rami Abdelrahman, a human rights monitor. That report could not be immediately confirmed.

The boy who was killed, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, has become a symbol of government oppression after a video of his mutilated body was circulated on YouTube.

“We won’t forgive, we will kill the child killer,” chanted protesters in Homs, a center of dissent, according to a witness who gave his name as Mohamed. “We will continue until your end.”

Earlier this week, Unicef issued an unusual statement describing “extreme violence against children in Syria.”

“We are particularly disturbed by the recent video images of children who were arbitrarily detained and suffered torture or ill-treatment during their detention, leading in some cases to their death,” the statement said.

Though Unicef has issued more general warnings about the effects of recent unrest in the Middle East on the lives of children there, the statement is the first time since the Arab Spring began that the organization has called on a specific government to investigate what it called “horrific acts” against children.

The Internet shutdown severely disrupted the flow of the YouTube videos and Facebook and Twitter posts that have allowed protesters and others to keep track of demonstrations, since foreign news media are banned and state media are heavily controlled. Both land lines and cellphones are so frequently monitored by Syria’s feared secret police that Skype had become a major means of communication among activists, and its loss as a tool may be a blow to the protest movement. Government Web sites, including those for the Ministry of Oil and the state news agency, SANA, remained online.

Two-thirds of Syria’s Internet network went offline at 6:35 a.m. Friday, said James Cowie, an analyst at Renesys, an Internet analytic firm, in a cascading blackout that took 30 minutes.

Forty of the country’s 59 Internet pathways were disabled, including Syria’s entire 3G mobile network, run by the country’s only telecom provider, Syriatel, which is owned by Rami Makhlouf, Mr. Assad’s cousin.

“People that want to use their smart phones to Tweet or read Web pages cannot,” Mr. Cowie said. “All of the IPs on those phones appear to be down.”

Phone service was also heavily disrupted across the country, and for the past several days, rights activists have reported that water and electricity had been shut off in a string of towns in central and southern Syria.

Egypt and Libya had earlier shut off access to the Internet in an attempt to crush popular uprisings led by young people and aided by social media networks.

“When a government shuts down the Internet, it shows the disconnection between the governing and the governed,” Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, wrote in a Twitter post on Friday afternoon.

Oula Abdulhamid, a Syrian activist who helped organize a conference for members of the Syrian opposition in Turkey this week, said the protest videos posted Friday were mainly the work of activists who had crossed Syria’s borders.

Liam Stack reported from Cairo, and Katherine Zoepf from New York. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

View the original article here

Crime Scene: A Missing Bronx 12-Year-Old Is Back Home, but the Mystery Lingers

His case, happily, ended the way so many do, with his return home, but his parents’ relief has given way to new anxiety. They still do not know where he spent nine excruciating days in May.

“He said he was on the subway, he got off the subway, walked the streets,” his mother, Jennifer, said. “Get back on the subway, go to the library. He said he slept on the subway.” The family’s last name is being withheld in hopes of keeping this reminder of a troubled episode out of Internet searches for the rest of the boy’s life.

Children disappear in this city, and the city has a way of nudging them back home. The police send out e-mails with descriptions and pictures, and parents make their own “Missing” posters and put them up on lamp poles and, lately, on Facebook, the new milk carton.

Kids run away, or they get lost, or they are the subject of a communication mix-up between a mother and an aunt. But whatever happened to Denzel has refused to fall into any typical explanation, and suggests countless eyes passed over him without pausing.

If he knows where he was, he is not telling. More is known about what did not happen to him. His mother said he was given a rigorous exam by his doctor, who administered a wide variety of tests for drugs and disease. All negative, she said.

Jennifer, 50, works nights as a nurse’s aide at a nursing home, and Denzel is the baby of her three children. He had received a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and was struggling in school. “His concentration level is very poor,” his mother said. “He doesn’t complain about anything. He’s a jolly child. He’s a bit withdrawn lately, but I don’t see anything that tells me he’s going to run away.”

She was at work and her husband was asleep when the boy disappeared from their brick home in the Wakefield neighborhood of the northern Bronx before dawn on May 17. Denzel ran away from home twice before, but just overnight. The family called the police, and detectives took his school picture from a year ago.

Then, nothing.

No calls. The picture appeared on several Web sites. There was one reported sighting of Denzel, but it was false. Jennifer said she called Facebook, a site Denzel had increasingly visited on their home computer, but Facebook would not give her Denzel’s password without a detective’s request. The police said such a request requires a subpoena, but detectives were able to monitor activity on Denzel’s page, and saw none. Days passed after his disappearance on that Tuesday. The week ended. She was terrified that the boy’s gentle demeanor would bring him harm on the streets.

The weekend came and went.

Where would he go to use a computer? She visited libraries around her neighborhood. “I asked them to put the picture up inside,” Jennifer said, “but not so he could see it,” lest he panic and flee. The Wakefield branch had a better idea: an investigator for the library, Victor Nieves, attached a flag to his account, so that if Denzel used his card, a note with Mr. Nieves’s number would pop up on a librarian’s screen.

Thankfully, the plan did not have time to work. On the night of May 25, Denzel materialized, in the form of a dirty, gaunt boy, at his aunt’s front door in the Bronx. “His eyes were red,” Jennifer said. “Of course, he was skinny. He looked scared.”

His mother peppered him with questions. What did you eat? Where did you sleep? Did anyone abuse you? He said no, but little else.

“He came out of character, is how you would say it,” said Lt. Christopher Zimmerman with the Missing Persons Squad of the police. “I’m trying to be gentle with the wording. He is a 12-year-old boy.”

A psychiatrist examined Denzel on Tuesday, eight days after his reappearance. “The psychiatrist said he’s charming, but not talking,” Jennifer said. He was admitted for more tests. His father thinks hospitalization is an overreaction. The boy needs to talk to someone, that’s all.

For his mother, this not-knowing is torture. Her boy is back, but this piece of his 12-year-old life is still missing. She tells herself she should have seen this, as if mental distress were a bloody nose or a skinned knee.

“I thought I was doing a good job, but something slipped by me,” Jennifer said this week, in tears. “If someone saw him, they can say, ‘I saw him here, begging.’ That would be something.”

Involved in a crime?
E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com.

View the original article here