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Travellers at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo international airport can now buy a model Kalashnikov assault rifle before they catch their flight.

A Kalashnikov boutique has opened at Sheremetyevo to promote the world-famous Russian gunmaker’s brand. The shop’s souvenirs include camouflage gear and “I love AK” T-shirts.

The AK-47 assault rifle has a worldwide reputation for reliability. The Soviet bloc countries, and many guerrillas, relied on the gun for decades.

An airport official quoted by Reuters news agency said the model guns were clearly imitations and would not pose security problems.

Sheremetyevo is Russia’s biggest international airport, and handled more than 31 million passengers last year. There is widespread international concern about replica weapons which can be mistaken for the real thing and potentially used by terrorists.

Kalashnikov Souvenirs

A Russian state corporation, Rostec, owns 51% of the shares in the Kalashnikov concern, which makes the guns at Izhevsk, in central Russia. In 2014 the EU and US added Kalashnikov to their lists of Russian arms manufacturers subject to sanctions because of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

The airport shop is part of the firm’s drive to expand its civilian merchandise. “Kalashnikov is one of the most popular brands that come to mind when people think of Russia,” said the firm’s marketing director Vladimir Dmitriyev, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency. “So we are pleased to provide everyone with an opportunity to take home a souvenir with our brand on it.”

Most of the victims of the bombing of a Kurdish wedding party in the Turkish city of Gaziantep on Saturday were children, media reports say.

Twenty-nine victims were under the age of 18, reports said, with one official saying 22 were under the age of 14. The death toll rose to 54 on Monday. The suicide bomber himself was a child aged 12-14, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.

Mr Erdogan has blamed so-called Islamic State (IS) for the attack. Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, is known to contain several IS cells.

On Monday, Turkish officials were awaiting the results of DNA tests as they tried to identify the suicide attacker, the Hurriyet newspaper said. It added that the type of bomb, which contained scraps of metal, was similar to those used in previous attacks on pro-Kurdish gatherings.

Kurdish fighters, backed by the US-led coalition, have been at the forefront of the fight against IS in Syria. Prosecutors said a search was also under way for two people believed to have accompanied the suspected attacker to the wedding party but who left before the blast.

The death toll rose to 54 after three critically injured people died in hospital early on Monday. Thirteen of those killed were women, Turkish media said. Sixty-six people are still in hospital, 14 of them in a serious condition, Dogan news agency reported.

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The Mexican government’s human rights body has accused police of killing 22 people in extrajudicial executions in a raid on a drug cartel last year.

One police officer and 42 suspects were killed in the raid on a ranch in Tanhuato, Michoacan state, on 15 May. Officers said they had returned fire in self-defence but the high death toll aroused suspicions.

The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) says police attempted a cover-up. Police dispute the findings.
Human rights groups in the country have long been demanding an improvement in policing standards and an end to arbitrary killings.

Previously, the government said there had been no human rights violations during the raid on the ranch.
They said a war was being fought between two local drug gangs and those killed were believed to be members of one of the cartels.

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Aerial photos have been released showing Islamic State (IS) militants using civilians as shields to escape the northern Syrian town of Manbij.

The Syrian Democratic Forces said the pictures, showing a convoy of hundreds of vehicles, were taken on Friday. The US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters did not attack as there were civilians in each of the vehicles and it wanted to avoid casualties.

The militants were thought to have gone north, towards the Turkish border.

SDF fighters took full control of Manbij after a 10-week offensive backed by US-led coalition air strikes and special forces personnel. As it became apparent that the town would fall, some 100 to 200 IS militants gathered members of their families, supporters and civilian hostages, Baghdad-based US-led coalition spokesman Col Chris Garver told reporters on Tuesday.

The civilians were then placed with the militants in every vehicle in the convoy that headed north, tracked by SDF fighters and the coalition, he said. “We had to treat them all as non-combatants. We didn’t shoot. We kept watching.”

Hundreds of the civilians were released on Saturday, while others escaped. During the offensive, the SDF had offered the militants a safe route out of Manbij to avoid civilian casualties, but they refused.

Col Garver said the jihadists kept “throwing civilians… into the line of fire, trying to get them shot to use that potentially as propaganda”. IS militants attempted to flee the Iraqi city of Falluja in a large convoy in June, but were bombed by Iraqi and coalition warplanes. About 175 vehicles were destroyed.

Two big car bombs have hit police stations in separate cities in Turkey, killing six people and wounding at least 219 others.

The first attack targeted a police station in the eastern city of Van, killing one police officer and two civilians. Some 73 people were hurt. Hours later, a police station in Elazig was hit, killing at least three police officers and wounding 146 people.

Turkish officials blamed the Kurdish militant group, the PKK. The PKK has carried a series of bombings targeting the police in the largely Kurdish south-east since a ceasefire with the government broke down last year.

Ongoing Conflict

Television footage showed plumes of smoke rising above the destroyed police building in Elazig. The force of the blast blew out nearby cars, uprooted trees and left a large crater outside the building.

At least eight people were killed in two attacks on police vehicles in nearby Diyarbakir and Kiziltepe last week.

Since last month’s failed coup in Turkey, there has been much talk of national unity. But this has not included the pro-Kurdish political party which the Turkish authorities say supports the PKK. The pro-Kurdish HDP denies any link to the militants.