Science

A British collector has returned a set of ancient bronze warrior helmets to Spain in a move the country has called the most significant restitution of stolen heritage since 2012.

The helmets were originally legally bought by the British collector Christian Levett, who – when he discovered they had been taken illegally from an archaeological site in Aranda de Moncayo, northern Spain during the 1980s – arranged to return them.

The items were made between 400BC and 200BC, and Levett worked with Spain’s ambassador to Unesco to return the helmets, signing an act of voluntary surrender after reading about the looting of the objects in the Spanish media.

Levett, a retired investment manager and founder of commodity hedge fund Clive Capital, originally paid £250,000 for the helmets – buying seven at auction in Munich in 2008 and one from a London dealer in 2009.

The items were on display at the Mougins Museum of Classical Art (MACM), an institution Levett opened in the south of France in 2011.

“In my personal opinion, when it’s clear beyond doubt, as in this case, that an object has been illegally looted and illegally exported from a particular source country, then I personally cannot see why anyone would want to retain that piece in their collection,” Levett told Artnet News.

The return is the most significant since 2012, when the US ordered the repatriation to Spain of a 15-tonne haul of coins (worth $500m) that was taken from the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes wreck. The ship was sunk by a British ship near Portugal during a battle in 1804.

Spain’s ministry of culture has recently identified 681 shipwrecks that sank between 1492 and 1898 along the southern Atlantic coast of the US and in the Caribbean. Less than a quarter of them have been located and they are thought to contain food, clothes for slaves, weapons and religious objects.

Levett said the “initial cultural crime” had now been solved with the return of the helmets, but that he would now attempt to get his money back from the people who sold them to him.

Vladimir Putin has claimed the Chechen separatist shot dead in Berlin in what prosecutors believe was a state-sanctioned assassination had been responsible for carrying out killings on Russian soil, frustrating German politicians who have sought clarification over the Kremlin’s involvement in the murder.

At a joint press conference with the leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine at the end of a summit in Paris, Putin described the Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili as “a cruel and bloodthirsty person” whom Russian authorities had sought to have extradited from his exile in Germany.

“In just one of the attacks in which he took part, he killed 98 people. He was one of the organisers of explosions in the Moscow metro,” said the Russian president, without providing further evidence for his claim.

Khangoshvili, 40, was shot in a Berlin park just before midday on 23 August in what has been called a “second Skripal case” after the 2018 attack on the former Russian spy in Salisbury in the UK.

Germany’s highest public prosecutor last week took over investigations after saying he had “sufficient evidence” linking the alleged hitman, who was arrested near the crime scene, to Russian or Chechen government agencies.

The first incident to which Putin referred is likely to be the attack on Russian interior ministry positions in Ingushetia, a region bordering Chechnya, in 2004. It is believed a group of insurgents led by Khangoshvili took part in the attack and he told friends he thought he could be targeted for his role in those events.

The accusation of complicity in the Moscow metro attacks, which took place in March 2010, has not been made before. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up on busy underground platforms during rush-hour, killing at least 40 people. Putin vowed at the time that those responsible would be hunted down and “destroyed”.

Khangoshvili’s associates say that by 2010 he was not deeply involved in the Chechen insurgency, which had become more radical Islamist in nature. Khangoshvili left Chechnya for Georgia in 2004, after which he offered only occasional help and was not involved in planning attacks inside Chechnya, claim those who knew him.

A spokesperson for Germany’s federal prosecutor said on Tuesday she could not comment on the new claims while investigations were ongoing.

Sources in German government circles said on Tuesday they were not aware of Russia ever having submitted an extradition request for Khangoshvili.

Politicians in Germany said the new allegations seemed designed to further muddy the waters around the murder. Nils Schmid, a foreign policy expert for Merkel’s junior coalition partners, the Social Democrats, told the broadcaster ARD he was shocked by Putin’s choice of words, and that carrying out a politically sanctioned killing on German soil could never be justified even if the terrorist allegations proved to be true.

The investigative outfit Bellingcat has identified the hitman as Vadim Krasikov, whom Russia had sought for a similar killing in 2014 only to silently withdraw his arrest warrant a year later, as well as purging his records from state databases and issuing him with a new passport.

Two Russian diplomats have been expelled from Germany as the diplomatic row between the two countries has deepened.

Putin rejected on Monday Moscow’s direct involvement in the murder. He said: “I don’t know what happened to him. It’s a criminal milieu and there, anything can happen.

“But I believe that it is not appropriate to expel diplomats who have nothing to do with this, purely on the basis of preliminary conclusions,” Putin added.

He criticised Germany for not heeding Russian extradition requests and said the Kremlin would retaliate by expelling two German diplomats. “There are unwritten laws in such cases: you expelled our diplomats, we expel yours.”

The Russian president nonetheless claimed he was willing to comply with a German request to aid with investigations into the murder.

Angela Merkel confirmed she had raised the issue in a meeting with Putin before the Paris summit. She said: “I assume the Russian side will provide us with their information.”

Sweden’s former ambassador to China has been charged after holding unauthorised meetings in Stockholm aimed at freeing dissident bookseller Gui Minhai.

Anna Lindstedt is suspected of organising a meeting in January between Gui’s daughter, two businessmen and China’s ambassador about the possible release of her father.

Hans Ihrman, Deputy Chief Public Prosecutor at the National Security Unit said Lindstedt “exceeded her mandate and has therefore rendered herself criminally liable”.

The charge against Lindstedt “during negotiations with a foreign power is unprecedented in modern times”.

The former ambassador allegedly told Angela Gui that she should fly to Stockholm to explore a “new approach” to her father’s case. It is alleged that the businessmen in attendance could arrange a Chinese visa for her and connect her with China’s ruling Communist Party.

Angela Gui later said in her blog that she was advised to keep quiet about her father’s case while negotiations were proceeding.

Anna Lindstedt was replaced as ambassador in February amid a furore over her alleged role in setting up the meetings. Sweden’s Foreign Ministry said it had no advance knowledge of the meeting.

In a written statement to Swedish news agency TT, Lindstedt’s lawyer said that she rejected the accusation.

“Ambassadors must adhere to certain guidelines and instructions” issued by the Swedish Government and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Ihrman.

An investigation into the ambassador was launched in February after the Swedish Security Service filed a criminal complaint.

Who is Gui Minhai?

Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-based publisher of books critical of China’s communist leaders, went missing in Thailand in 2015.

He was released in October 2017, but his whereabouts were unclear until January last year when his daughter said he was seized by Chinese agents on a Beijing-bound train in the presence of Swedish diplomats.

China later confirmed it had detained him again, on suspicion of revealing state secrets and intelligence on China.

Stockholm has accused China of preventing Sweden giving consular support to Gui, which Beijing rejects, and relations between the two countries have turned frosty.

In November, China’s ambassador to Sweden threatened to blacklist Swedish Minister of Culture Amanda Lind for attending a literary award ceremony in Stockholm where Gui was honoured.

Finland’s transport minister, Sanna Marin, has been selected to lead the Social Democratic party, making her the country’s youngest prime minister ever.

The 34-year-old Marin, whose party is the largest in a five-member governing coalition, will be the world’s youngest-serving prime minister when she takes office in the coming days. She is also Finland’s third female government leader.

Having emerged as Finland’s largest party in the April election, the Social Democrats can appoint one of their own to the post of prime minister in the Nordic nation of 5.5m people.

Her appointment comes after Antti Rinne resigned on Tuesday after a party in the coalition said it had lost confidence in him following his handling of a postal strike.

“We have a lot of work ahead to rebuild trust,” Marin told reporters after winning a narrow vote among the party leadership.

“I have never thought about my age or gender, I think of the reasons I got into politics and those things for which we have won the trust of the electorate.”

Four other parties in Finland’s coalition government are also led by women: the Left Alliance is led by Li Anderson, 32; the Green League is led by Maria Ohisalo, 34; the Centre Party is led by Katri Kulmuni, 32; and Anna-Maja Henriksson, 55, is head of the Swedish People’s party.

According to Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the Ilta-Sanomat tabloid, Marin will become the world’s youngest sitting prime minister. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is 39, and the PM of Ukraine, Oleksiy Honcharuk is 35. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un is reported to be 35.

Marin has had a swift rise in Finnish politics since becoming head of the city council of her industrial hometown of Tampere at the age of 27.

She will take over in the middle of a three-day wave of strikes, which will halt production at some of Finland’s largest companies from Monday. The Confederation of Finnish Industries estimates the strikes will cost the companies a combined €500m ($550m) in lost revenue.

The centre-left coalition, which took office just six months ago, has agreed to continue with its political programme stressing a shift to carbon neutrality, after Rinne announced he was stepping down at the demand of the Centre Party.

“We have a joint government programme which glues the coalition together,” Marin said.

The timing of the change in leadership is awkward for Finland, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union until the end of the year, playing a central role in efforts to hammer out a new budget for the bloc.

Lawmakers are likely to approve the appointment of Marin and her new government quickly so she can represent Finland at the 12 Dec EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.

A network of elite German combatants with links to far-right “prepper” circles secretly trained civilians in “commando-like structures”, raising fears the group planned to build up a paramilitary fighting unit.

Drone footage filmed in June 2018 at a former barracks of the German armed forces in the southern town of Mosbach shows a group of around half a dozen men in military-style gear moving in formation across sandy terrain, holding what appear to be assault rifles in a firing position.

Experts interviewed by the German public broadcaster ARD’s Monitor programme after viewing the footage classified the exercises as “combat training” – illegal in Germany unless carried out by active members of the military, police or private security companies and supervised by state authorities.

The exercise in Mosbach, however, was organised by Uniter, a private support network for active and former soldiers and security personnel. Its founder, André Schmitt, is known to have founded and administered a Germany-wide Telegram chat group, which had sub-groups in which so-called preppers discussed plans to build up parallel infrastructures in preparation for the anticipated collapse of the prevailing social order.

The group chat, which was divided into southern, northern, western and eastern districts, expanded in the autumn of 2015, when Angela Merkel’s refugee policy became the focus of the national debate in Germany. Members discussed the threat of terrorist attacks and how to respond to them by hoarding weapons, munitions and food supplies.

They have since dismissed their chats as “thought experiments”.

When approached by Monitor researchers, Schmitt, a former member of Germany’s Special Forces Command (KSK) who refers to himself as “Hannibal” in the group chats, said the exercises in Mosbach had been part of a medical training course and that participants only had airsoft guns.

Schmitt said in a statement: “The work of rescue workers and aid agencies in crisis and conflict zones is accompanied by so-called security elements.”

In an audio message heard by the Guardian and Monitor, however, Schmitt says the purpose of the exercise was to train “good infantry, who can be easily deployed, whether across Germany or anywhere”. When asked why he was trying to train infantry, Schmitt told Monitor they were needed “to support the medical response unit in the context of humanitarian UN missions”.

Internal documents presented on the programme suggest the exercises were part of “Kommando Pipeline” training designed to produce in its last phase “combat-ready” fighters trained in handling rifles and handguns, as well as close combat and urban warfare.

In recent months a number of investigations across Germany have tried to establish a fuller picture of the network’s activities. In November, a member of one of the northern German chat groups went on trial in the north-east city of Schwerin accused of illegally hoarding and stealing weapons, partly from the German military.

A member of the southern network, a disgraced former army officer known as Franco A, is to stand trial over alleged plans to impersonate a Syrian refugee and carry out a terrorist attack that would be perceived as motivated by Islamist extremism. Investigators found a Uniter badge at his home, though the association denies he was a member of the network.

Germany’s public prosecutor general is also investigating a police officer and a lawyer who are suspected of plotting to round up and murder “representatives of the political left”. The accused deny any such plans.

Angela Merkel has expressed “deep shame” during her first visit as German chancellor to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial and vowed to fight rising racism and antisemitism in Germany and Europe.

Dressed in black, Merkel said the crimes committed at the site in southern Poland where the Nazis ran their largest death camp would always be part of German history.

“This site obliges us to keep the memory alive. We must remember the crimes that were committed here and name them clearly,” Merkel said during a ceremony also attended by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.

“I feel deep shame given the barbaric crimes that were committed here by Germans,” she added.

The German chancellor also pledged a donation of €60m (£51m) towards a fund to conserve the physical remnants of the site of the barracks, watchtowers and personal items of those who died, such as shoes, spectacles and suitcases.

Before her speech, Merkel and Morawiecki toured the camp’s crematorium where victims’ bodies were burned. They walked through the camp’s iron gate bearing the motto Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free) and visited the barracks.

Since becoming chancellor in 2005, Merkel has paid her respects at other Nazi concentration camps, and has been five times to Israel’s Holocaust museum and Yad Vashem memorial.

Poland’s foreign ministry called her visit “historic” in acknowledgement of the unique status Auschwitz has in the world’s collective memory. The ministry also noted it was only the third visit to the camp of an incumbent head of a German government.

Helmut Kohl went there twice, in 1995 and 1989. Before him, Helmut Schmidt was the first to visit in 1977. Merkel has previously visited both Dachau – the first Nazi death camp – and Buchenwald, together with the former US president Barack Obama.

No official reason has been given as to why this is the first time in her 14 years in power that she had visited the most notorious of the Nazi death camps. But speculation is rife in Berlin that she was keen to do so ahead of the possible collapse of her government, after repeated threats from the incoming new leadership of her junior coalition partner the Social Democrats to withdraw from government.

A rise in the number of antisemitic attacks in Germany has led to pressure for her to take a symbolic stand, especially following a brutal attack in front of a synagogue in the central city of Halle two months ago, in which two people were murdered by an attacker claiming he was driven by antisemitic motives.

Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who is accompanying Merkel, along with Romani Rose, the chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, said he welcomed her visit, calling it an “important signal at a time of a swing to the right” in Germany.

There is no other memorial site that so emphatically brings home the events of the Shoah than Auschwitz,” he said. Rose said that even 75 years after its liberation “the former Nazi death camp and the industrial mass murder that took place there still makes visitors shudder”.

Schuster has repeatedly warned of the dangers of Alternative für Deutschland, the leading opposition in the Bundestag, one of whose figureheads, Björn Höcke, has called for Germans to make a “180-degree” turn in the way they perceive their culpability in the Holocaust, and referred to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame”.

A huge rise in the number of visitors, from about 1 million five years ago to 2.15 million last year, has posed a particular challenge, the memorial’s director, Piotr Cywiński, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, saying that visitors often tried to take home objects from the former death camp as souvenirs.

Nazi forces killed an estimated 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex during their occupation of Poland during the second world war. Most of the victims were Jews transported from across Europe to be killed in gas chambers. Tens of thousands of other people were killed there too, including Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Roma. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on 27 January 1945.

Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.

Camus died on 4 January 1960 when his publisher Michel Gallimard lost control of his car and it crashed into a tree. The author was killed instantly, with Gallimard dying a few days later. Three years earlier, the author of L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) had won the Nobel prize for “illuminat[ing] the problems of the human conscience in our times”.

“The accident seemed to have been caused by a blowout or a broken axle; experts were puzzled by its happening on a long stretch of straight road, a road 30 feet wide, and with little traffic at the time,” Herbert Lottman wrote in his 1978 biography of the author.

Catelli believes a passage in Zábrana’s diaries explains why: the poet wrote in the late summer of 1980 that “a knowledgeable and well-connected man” had told him the KGB was to blame. “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed.”

The order, he said, had been issued by Dmitri Shepilov, the Soviet Union’s minister of internal affairs, in retaliation for an article by Camus in the French newspaper Franc-Tireur published in March 1957.

“It seems it took the intelligence three years to carry out the order,” Zábrana’s diary reports. “They managed eventually and in such a way that, until today, everyone thought Camus had died because of an ordinary car crash. The man refused to tell me his source but he claimed it was completely reliable.”

Camus had sided publicly with the Hungarian uprising since autumn 1956, and was highly critical of Soviet actions. He also publicly praised and supported the Russian author Boris Pasternak, who was seen as anti-Soviet.

Catelli has spent years researching the validity of Zábrana’s account. In his book, he interviews Zábrana’s widow Marie, investigates the KGB’s infiltration of France, and includes secondhand testimony from the controversial French lawyer Jacques Vergès. Catelli was contacted by Giuliano Spazzali, an Italian barrister, after the book’s publication in Italy. Spazzali recounted a conversation he’d had with the late Vergès about Camus’ death.

“Vergès said the accident had been staged. It is my opinion that Vergès had more evidence than he cared to share with me. I refrained from asking,” Spazzali told Catelli. “Discretion is the best attitude when a hot topic rises unexpectedly. I didn’t investigate any further, and yet I remember how Vergès was certain that the staged accident was schemed by a KGB section with the endorsement of the French intelligence.”

Catelli argues that Camus’ outspokenness was interfering with French-Soviet relations, and “Camus’ prominent character … stood out in the eyes of the French people as a reminder of the USSR’s cruel imperialism. Both the French and the Soviet governments would have benefited greatly from silencing this unpleasant reminder … No proper investigation was carried out.”

Catelli’s said his theory had not been endorsed by Camus’ daughter Catherine, who prohibited publisher Gallimard from quoting her father’s work. The book has nonetheless been published in France, Argentina and Italy, and received the backing of Paul Auster, who called Catelli’s argument compelling.

“A horrible conclusion, but after digesting the evidence Catelli has given us, it becomes difficult not to agree with him. Thus ‘car accident’ should now be filed in another drawer as ‘political assassination’ – and thus Albert Camus was silenced when he was 46 years old,” writes Auster in a foreword.

“I hope that the academics will not follow the old opinion that it was a simple accident,” said Catelli, who is talking to British publishers about an English translation. “I think we owe it to the memory of Albert Camus.”

Cambridge French literature professor Alison Finch was not persuaded. “Supporters of the assassination theory include a creative writer and film director (Paul Auster); a Czech writer and translator whose family were persecuted by the communist regime and who had good reason to hate communism (Jan Zábrana); the highly controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès, who, to be sure, defended Algerian independence fighters tortured by the French but who became infamous for defending the indefensible. Of course, this is what the law must do, but in general he’d be regarded as a maverick rather than a reliable commentator.”

Finch also questioned suggestions of French connivance. “This would mean that the assassination was approved at the highest level and presumably by De Gaulle. This, to me, is implausible. De Gaulle, an accomplished writer himself, had great respect for French intellectuals, including those whose views he disagreed with,” she said.

The Death of Camus draws to a close with Catelli expressing the hope that it will bring forth more evidence, “before the waves of time come to lay waste to the sandy, frail traces of what happened”.

Russian authorities have detained a man who built a fake frontier post in the woods near the country’s border with Finland and promised migrant workers he could smuggle them into the European Union.

The man erected mock border posts and charged four men from south Asia more than $10,000 to take them to EU member Finland, the Russian border guard service said on Wednesday.

“The man never planned to carry out his promises,” Interfax news agency said.

Authorities did not specify the nationalities of the would-be migrants involved in the incident, which took place on Thursday last week.

He installed sham fence posts purportedly marking the state border between Russia and Finland and took the group on a circuitous route in the Vyborg region by car and on foot, at one point marching around a lake with an inflatable boat, “just in case”. All five were later detained.

Video footage showed men standing in the darkness among fir trees, their hands up in the air.

On Wednesday, a court in Saint Petersburg fined the migrants and ordered their deportation.

The man behind the smuggling scheme was from central Asia and could be charged with fraud, according to media reports.

Russia shares borders with a number of EU countries and many people seeking a better life in Europe pass through Russia.

Russian authorities have detained a man who built a fake frontier post in the woods near the country’s border with Finland and promised migrant workers he could smuggle them into the European Union.

The man erected mock border posts and charged four men from south Asia more than $10,000 to take them to EU member Finland, the Russian border guard service said on Wednesday.

“The man never planned to carry out his promises,” Interfax news agency said.

Authorities did not specify the nationalities of the would-be migrants involved in the incident, which took place on Thursday last week.

He installed sham fence posts purportedly marking the state border between Russia and Finland and took the group on a circuitous route in the Vyborg region by car and on foot, at one point marching around a lake with an inflatable boat, “just in case”. All five were later detained.

Video footage showed men standing in the darkness among fir trees, their hands up in the air.

On Wednesday, a court in Saint Petersburg fined the migrants and ordered their deportation.

The man behind the smuggling scheme was from central Asia and could be charged with fraud, according to media reports.

Russia shares borders with a number of EU countries and many people seeking a better life in Europe pass through Russia.

Greece’s prime minister will meet Turkey’s president on Wednesday in an attempt to ease frictions over energy exploration and Ankara’s deal with Libya on Mediterranean maritime zones, a government spokesman has said.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis will meet the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the sidelines of a Nato alliance summit in London, the Greek spokesman Stelios Petsas said.

“We hope that the meeting tomorrow will be a meeting where it will be possible to pave the way for a new form of respect for international law and for the two countries’ good neighbourly relations,” he told reporters.

Libya and Turkey signed an agreement on boundaries in the Mediterranean last week that could complicate Ankara’s disputes over offshore energy exploration with countries including Greece.

Athens says the accord is geographically absurd because it ignores the presence of the Greek island of Crete between the coasts of Turkey and Libya.

Petsas said that following the announcement of the accord with Libya, Greece warned Libya’s ambassador to Athens that if he failed to provide clarifications to the Greek government over the deal he would be expelled.

Athens has already sought support from the European Union and Nato, which Petsas said “could not stand indifferent when one of its members openly violates international law”.

Erdoğan has confirmed the meeting with Mitsotakis.