A case of a rhino with a bullet hole through its head, a poisoned giraffe and a maimed lion are all crime scenes you might find you might find at the Wildlife Forensics Academy (WFA), an hour’s drive north of Cape Town, South Africa.

On a mission to tackle poaching, the WFA recreates wildlife crimes in a warehouse and students and rangers dressed in hazmat suits are taught how to handle the evidence.

Across the world, wildlife crimes – including animal trafficking and poaching – are on the rise and are a major threat to the planet’s biodiversity. In Africa, rhinos are a prime target, with around 10,000 lost to poaching in the last decade, the majority in South Africa. Almost 500 rhinos were poached in the country in 2023, with more than 300 from within KwaZulu-Natal province, home to Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park. Yet the province only recorded 49 related arrests and seized just 13 firearms.

By providing forensics training, Greg Simpson, co-founder of the WFA, hopes to increase the rate of successful convictions. Often, he says, wildlife crimes happen in remote areas without witnesses and first responders can accidentally disrupt the scene and contaminate evidence. As a result, the culprit isn’t caught or punished.

“It’s really important to give people skills so that they can collect evidence … that can be used in an investigation and hopefully down the line will end up in a prosecution,” he says.

Crime scene simulation

The facility tries to make the training experience as realistic as possible. It uses life-size animals preserved by taxidermy, and some are marked with bloody wounds made with red paint. Besides the corrugated iron walls and roof, the warehouse looks like a typical dry African landscape, with sandy terrain and a scattering of plants. There is a poachers’ house and truck, ready to be searched and swabbed for fingerprints, and footprints lie on the ground, ready to be measured and identified.

Once the crime scene has been investigated, the students are taught how to chemically analyze the evidence at an on-site laboratory. The lessons culminate in a replica courtroom where they practice presenting the evidence at trial and undergo cross-examination.

“The purpose of cross-examination is to test the credibility, the trustworthiness of evidence. And unless you can survive it, the court might not accept your evidence,” says Phil Snijman, director of education at the WFA and former state advocate and prosecutor.

Fingerprints, DNA samples, ballistics (when a weapon is matched to a cartridge), shoe tracks can all be discounted by the court if they have not been correctly sealed, photographed or documented, he explains. And while he does not expect the course to make students and rangers forensic experts, he believes that it will help them to preserve the evidence correctly if they are ever the first responders to a crime scene.

Boosting convictions

Launched in 2022, the WFA attracts university students, such as those studying veterinary or biomedical sciences, and wildlife rangers from all over the world to its one to four-week courses. This year, it expects to train around 200 people. One of them is Leita Mkhabela, a ranger from the all-female Black Mamba anti-poaching unit that operates in Greater Kruger, a collection of private game reserves in northeast South Africa, who attended a course in April.

“This is something we come across every day, we have a high rate of rhino poaching,” she says. “We have so many poachers that have walked free in court because rangers didn’t collect enough evidence. It’s really important for rangers to get this knowledge.”

Mkhabela plans to take back all that she has learned to her colleagues so that they can implement the techniques in the bush. She believes that increasing the rate of convictions will act as a deterrent for poachers.

There are signs that the training is leading to convictions. According to the WFA, a ranger reported that since doing the course, he was able to collect traces of poison at a crime scene involving wild dogs, and police were confident they would be able to arrest and convict the poachers as a result.

Other forensic laboratories have been set up across the continent, in countries such as Malawi and Botswana. One initiative, led by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), ran four workshops during 2023 and early 2024, training 80 wildlife rangers, investigators, and intelligence officers from the Kenya Wildlife Service on collecting and presenting evidence in court. In the first quarter of this year, IFAW reported 32 wildlife crime cases being presented in court and 24 people accused of wildlife crimes awaiting prosecution. Previously, these cases would have been dropped due to a lack of sufficient evidence, it says.

Kevin Pretorius, director of the Green Law Foundation and a practicing attorney at the High Court of South Africa, who specializes in criminal and environmental law, and is not involved with WFA, says that one of the main hurdles in convicting wildlife crimes is the “admissibility of evidence,” especially since the charge must be proven “beyond reasonable doubt.”

“The training of a cohort of people that understand the value of evidence, and that a crime scene tells a story, and that story can assist the investigator in linking the perpetrator to a crime, is always valuable,” he says.

For the WFA, assisting law enforcement is its central mission, but it also hopes to raise awareness of the threats presented by the illegal wildlife trade and why it should be treated as a priority. “It’s a threat to biodiversity, it’s a threat to human health,” says Simpson. “If we can improve knowledge around this, that would be really valuable.”

Pakistan is extending the stay of nearly 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees – but its mass deportation of “illegal immigrants” will continue, authorities said.

Afghan refugees in Pakistan with Proof of Registration (POR) cards will be able to stay in the country until June 30, 2025, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s office said Wednesday.

The fate of 1.45 million refugees whose PORs expired at the end of June had previously been in doubt, with many fearing they’d be deported.

News of the extension came one day after the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees visited Afghanistan and urged Pakistan to extend the POR cards.

“Glad that Pakistan’s tradition of hospitality is maintained,” Filippo Grandi wrote on X Thursday.

But Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs disputed the UN’s claims that Islamabad had put on hold its plan announced last October to deport undocumented Afghan refugees.

Pakistan is home to one of the world’s largest refugee populations – most of them from Afghanistan. But the country has not always welcomed Afghan refugees, subjecting them to hostile living conditions and threatening deportation over the years.

More than 3 million Afghan refugees, including registered refugees and more than 800,000 undocumented people were living in Pakistan as of March 2024, according to UNHCR data.

Some fled their home country decades ago during the Soviet invasion, while other Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan when the Taliban retook Afghanistan in 2021, implementing its oppressive rule.

Last October, Pakistan gave undocumented Afghans weeks to leave or face deportation, claiming Afghan nationals carried out 14 of 24 major terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year. Between September 15, 2023 and the end of June, about 650,000 Afghans had returned home, according to the UNHCR. Some 32,000 of them were deported.

They’re returning to a country under the control of a militant regime that has imposed a form of gender apartheid and where millions live in poverty.

A UN report published Tuesday detailed human rights violations by the Taliban’s so-called morality police – which have disproportionately targeted women and girls – creating a “climate of fear and intimidation” in Afghanistan.

Moniza Kakar, a lawyer who helps Afghan migrants navigate Pakistan’s legal system, said the POR card extension will not provide stability for all refugees.

“There is still a huge worry amongst families of being split because of these issues of documentation.”

Thyagi Ruwanpathirana, regional researcher for South Asia at Amnesty International, said the human rights group had “documented extensive delays and barriers refugees face in obtaining POR cards.”

The status of 80,000 Afghan Citizen Card holders, another form of registration for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, was also uncertain, Ruwanpathirana added.

“We urge the government of Pakistan to formally suspend its ‘Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan,’ stop all deportations, and develop a national legal framework to regulate access to refugee status in line with international refugee law,” she said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

A Spanish tourist was crushed to death by a herd of elephants inside South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park after he left his vehicle to take a close-up photo of the breeding animals, local police said.

Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia identified the tourist as Carlos Luna, whom it said was from Zaragoza.

The Pilanesberg Game Reserve is South Africa’s fourth-largest park and a popular tourist destination. It is also home to more than 7,000 animals, according to its website.

Police said that while touring the park, the man and his passengers “spotted three elephants with three calves,” adding that “the man stopped the vehicle, alighted and went closer to take pictures” before he was attacked and killed by the herd.

The province’s tourism board said in a statement that the Spaniard “did not heed the warnings” of “his fellow passengers, and occupants from two other vehicles that were at the sighting” before approaching the elephants “that were feeding a distance from the road.”

“An adult elephant cow charged at the man, who then ran … (but) was unfortunately not able to escape or evade the elephant, which was now joined by the whole herd, and was caught and trampled to death,” the board said.

It added that the elephants left the scene afterward and did not attack anyone.

“Statements by witnesses who observed the whole incident further suggest that the female elephant that charged and attacked might have done so to protect the herd and young ones.”

Plans are being made to repatriate the tourist’s body, the Spanish newspaper said, citing officials.

Elephant attacks are not rare in South Africa.

In 2019, a suspected poacher was attacked and killed by an elephant, and his body eaten by lions in the northeastern Kruger National Park, authorities said at the time.

In the same year, a security guard was similarly crushed to death by an elephant at a mine in the country’s Limpopo province.

Other parts of Southern Africa have witnessed similar tragedies. Three months ago, an elderly American woman was killed after an elephant charged at a vehicle transporting tourists inside Zambia’s largest national park.

The North West tourism board said it was “saddened” by the incident at the Pilanesberg park, urging tourists to “respect distance between vehicles and animals and … to only alight in specially designated areas.”

The Israeli military has expanded its evacuation order to the whole of Gaza City after sending tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing from several of the city’s neighborhoods earlier this week.

It has also issued a notice saying it will be suspending inspections along two roads in Gaza City to allow civilians to reach humanitarian zones more easily and quickly as the city “will remain a dangerous combat zone.”

“We announce to you that Tariq Bin Ziyad and Omar Al-Mukhtar Streets are considered safe passages to cross west to Al-Rashid (Al-Bahr) Street and from there south. Al-Wahda and Khalil Al-Wazir streets are considered safe passages to cross east to the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood and the city roundabout, and from there to Salah Al-Din Street to the south,” an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) flier dropped on the city says.

Bassal added that several Palestinians are besieged in the Jordanian hospital and at Al-Aqsa University in the city, as the situation remains dangerous.

“Today, suddenly, all bakeries in Gaza are completely closed. It seems that there are instructions for them to do so, or that they fall in the red zone,” he added.

The IDF has been issuing evacuation orders affecting large parts of Gaza City since Sunday, urging 250,000 residents to head to “safe zones” further south, in Deir al-Balah and al-Zawaida.

The IDF has said that evacuation orders are necessary so that civilians don’t get caught up in its renewed operations in areas where Hamas is seeking to re-establish a presence. The IDF insists it goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas has said the evacuations threaten to return negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage deal to “point zero.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The daughter of Cameroon’s president said she hoped that by coming out as a lesbian she can help change laws that ban homosexuality in the country.

Brenda Biya, who lives between the United States and Switzerland, came out in an Instagram post on June 30.

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien published on Tuesday, the 27-year-old said she had not come out to her family before she publicly posted a photo of her kissing her girlfriend.

“There are plenty of people in the same situation as me who suffer because of who they are,” she said. “If I can give them hope, help them feel less alone, if I can send love, I’m happy.”

Same-sex relations are punishable by up to five years in prison under Cameroon’s penal code.

Her father, Paul Biya, 91, who has led Cameroon for four decades, has not publicly commented on the matter.

Brenda Biya said the law punishing gay sex existed before her father came into power in 1982, and she hopes her story will lead to change in the legislation.

“It may be too soon for it to disappear completely but it could be less strict. We could first eliminate the prison sentence,” she said in the interview.

Bandy Kiki, a Cameroonian LGBT rights activist based in Britain, said she was happy for Biya, who she said had affirmed the existence of LGBT people in Cameroon.

“However, it highlights a harsh reality: anti-LGBT laws in Cameroon disproportionately target the poor,” she said.

“Wealth and connections create a shield for some, while others face severe consequences.”

At least 27 people have been killed and 53 have been injured in the strike, which hit the gate of the Al-Mutanabbi school complex, also known locally as the Al-Awda Schools, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

“Part of the section is missing, showing a cutaway of the internals,” Ball tweeted.

“Using any munition, even of this size, will always incur risks in a densely populated area,” said Cobb-Smith, who is also a former British Army artillery officer.

A manhunt is underway in north London for a man suspected of being armed with a crossbow, after three women were killed Tuesday evening.

Police said they were searching for a 26-year-old man, named as Kyle Clifford, in connection with the deaths, who could be in north London or the neighboring county of Hertfordshire.

Police were called to a house in Bushey, Hertfordshire, on Tuesday evening, where they found three seriously injured women.

All the women, who are believed to be related, later died from their injuries, according to police. According to police, they are aged 25, 28 and 61, and were killed in what is believed to have been a “targeted incident.”

A crossbow is believed to have been used in the triple murder, though police said Wednesday that other weapons may also have been used.

Police have asked the public not to approach the suspect.

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said she is being kept “fully updated” by police on the ongoing manhunt.

“The loss of three women’s lives in Bushey last night is truly shocking. My thoughts are with the family & friends of those who have been killed & with the community,” Cooper wrote on X Wednesday.

“I am being kept fully updated. I urge people to support Hertfordshire Police with any information about this case,” she added.

A neighbor of the victims said she “would see them every day passing by and they would say good morning,” according to PA Media.

“It’s really sad what’s happened, very shocking,” she added.

This is a breaking news story, and will be updated.

Aged just four, Julia Abu Zeiter suffers from a rare neurological disease that can be fatal without medication.

The nine-month war in Gaza nearly took Julia’s life, as the fighting and displacement cut off her access to treatment.

After an arduous journey, she was finally evacuated from the war-torn enclave on June 27, accompanied only by her 21-year-old aunt, Dareen Zeiter.

Julia suffers from a rare neurological disorder called alternating hemiplegia of childhood, or AHC. It causes recurrent episodes of paralysis and life-threatening seizures. No cure exists for the illness, which is estimated to occur in approximately one in a million births. Its patients are referred to as “human time bombs” and need to constantly be monitored for signs of an oncoming episode. As soon as it strikes, lifesaving measures must quickly be administered.

The two Palestinians were among around a dozen patients leaving the floating hospital to continue their treatment in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi. Most of those patients are children, including two suffering from Leukemia.

Gaza’s ‘invisible victims’

Moored off the coast of Arish on the north coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the hospital is some 40 kilometers from Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza strip that now lies in ruins after Israel launched its ground operation there in May.

The city also housed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a crucial land bridge through which two-thirds of aid entering Gaza passed. The crossing has been closed since it was seized by the Israeli military.

The 100-bed UAE ship has received 2,400 injured Palestinians since February, according to the hospital director, Dr. Ahmed Mubarak.

Julia is “an invisible victim” of the war, Mubarak said, caught up in what Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, described as Gaza’s “silent killings, the result of deliberate deprivation.” The organization’s head of emergency programs, Mari Carmen Viñoles, said in May that Israel’s “blockades, delays, and restrictions on humanitarian aid and essential medical supplies” have made aid deliveries impossible.

Julia and Dareen are two of countless Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza, which Israel launched in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 others hostage, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel’s war has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry there. Swathes of the enclave have been turned to rubble and almost the entire strip’s population of two million is internally displaced.

Julia and Dareen were forced to leave their home in northern Gaza when the war began. The four-year-old witnessed “explosions and shelling” throughout, her aunt said.

A punishing siege by Israel has choked the enclave, bringing humanitarian aid down to a trickle and preventing Gazans moving in and out. For Julia, this meant running out of her medication, which triggered a series of life-threatening seizures.

With the help of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a US-based non-governmental organization, Julia was able to finally evacuate through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, Dareen said.

‘Hunger is what destroys us’

Down the hall of makeshift wards from Julia was Ibrahim, who was injured in his family home in Jabalya, northern Gaza, when an airstrike hit their building on November 21. He had turned seven that day.

Ibrahim was aboard the ship with his aunt, Alaa, 21. Alaa and Ibrahim were both injured in the airstrike, having survived after being pulled from the rubble, Alaa said. The aunt sustained critical burns, while Ibrahim broke his arm and leg, she said.

The boy’s injuries did not heal properly, requiring further treatment.

“Look, this is my dad,” Ibrahim said, holding up a photo of his father, who died during the airstrike, on his aunt’s phone.

Before losing their home and family, Alaa and Ibrahim remained in northern Gaza until April, when residents were experiencing severe hunger as aid struggled to reach them amid Israel’s military operations and what humanitarian aid officials said was increased lawlessness and looting of trucks there.

In mid-March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that famine is “imminent” in northern Gaza and said it was projected to occur between then and May.

On Tuesday, the United Nations, citing a report by independent experts, said that the recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition in Gaza indicates famine has spread across the entire strip, decrying Israel’s “intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people” as a “form of genocidal violence”.

While Julia and Ibrahim have made it out, millions of others remain trapped in the war zone, with few signs of a ceasefire deal in sight.

Nearly 26,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza in six months, the aid group Save the Children said in April, just over 2% of Gaza’s entire child population.

“Even amid the complexities of war, how can we not grasp one universal truth: a child is a child,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said last month, calling for “a ceasefire (that) gets hostages home, and stops the killing of children.”

Dareen, Julia’s aunt, said the responsibility over her niece was too big to shoulder.

Arson at warehouses linked to arms for Ukraine. Surveillance cameras where NATO trains Ukrainian troops. Blunt vandalism of ministerial cars. Even an apparent, failed bomb plot.

Russia has been engaged in a “bold” sabotage operation across NATO’s member states for more than six months, targeting the supply lines of weapons for Ukraine and the decision-makers behind it, according to a senior NATO official.

Multiple security officials across Europe describe a threat that is metastasizing as Russian agents, increasingly under scrutiny by security services and frustrated in their own operations, hire local amateurs to undertake high-risk, and often deniable, crimes on their behalf.

The NATO official said they had observed “an unprecedented escalation and spread of Russia’s hybrid warfare” over the past six months, which included “physical sabotage” on the supply line of NATO weapons intended for Ukraine. “It is everything from point of production and origin, to storage, to those who are making decisions, to the actual delivery,” the senior NATO official said. “It is bold. Russia is attempting to intimidate (our) allies.”

Russia has dismissed the claims as unfounded but Russian sabotage and hybrid warfare will be on the agenda of the NATO 75th anniversary meeting in Washington, DC, which began Tuesday. Yet it is unclear how publicly member states will express their outrage at what analysts have called the Kremlin’s new “shadow war,” as they may be reluctant to provide Moscow with a propaganda win, or foment alarm at a series of security breaches across Europe.

Recent high-profile arrests have revealed the ad-hoc, clumsy nature of how the Kremlin’s intelligence operations have evolved since the start of the war in Ukraine. Last year, 14 Ukrainians and two Belarusians were arrested in Poland in one case on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence. A Ukrainian, who under Polish privacy law can be identified only as Maxim L., 24, was sentenced to six years after weeks of receiving tasks from a Russian handler, Andrzej, whom he had never physically met but encountered on the Telegram messaging app in February 2023.

Andrzej at first paid him $7 in digital currencies for spraying anti-war graffiti around Poland, Maxim said. Yet the tasks soon became darker.

‘Easy money… it seemed so insignificant’

He said he did not feel an obligation to fight for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022. “That country has never done anything for me,” he said. “I don’t believe that just because you are born in a certain country, you have to go to war for it. Don’t get me wrong: I am not pro-Russian, I am not pro-Ukraine. I am not pro-anything.”

Andrzej soon started sending Maxim location pins where he should plant surveillance cameras along the railway tracks near the border town of Medyka, through which military and humanitarian aid would flow to Ukraine. “I didn’t think any of it could cause any actual harm. It seemed so insignificant,” he said.

Andrzej later asked him to burn down the fence of a Ukrainian-owned transportation company in the eastern Polish town of Biala Podlaska, he said, which Maxim says he faked, taking a photograph of the fence with lumps of coal he had placed to mimic fire damage.

Yet Maxim’s slow realization that Andrzej was a Russian agent became complete, he said, when he was told to put cameras outside a base where Poland was training Ukrainian soldiers. “That’s when I knew it could be serious,” he said. “It made me feel uneasy. That was when I decided I’d quit. But I never got a chance. I got arrested the next day.”

Polish internal security agents arrested Maxim on March 3, 2023, after weeks of surveillance, sparked partially by the discovery of a gas station receipt Maxim had accidentally dropped on one of his operations, according to a Polish official. Multiple other arrests followed this, making it the largest known Russian espionage operation in Poland of recent times, raising concerns in Warsaw about the extent of Moscow’s infiltration. Two Russian citizens were detained last August on suspicion of recruiting to Wagner and a Polish man and two Belarusians this May for alleged arson.

Another Polish man was arrested in April 2024 for possessing ammunition, and surveilling Rzeszow Jasionka airport, a hub for moving NATO arms to Kyiv, in a suspected plot to assassinate Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who also frequently uses the facility.

The Polish plots join a series of incidents across Europe which, when viewed together, portray the widescale ambition of Moscow’s operations. Russia was “likely” behind an arson attack that hit Poland’s largest shopping center in May, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said, and suspicions have been voiced about another fire at an ammunition factory, south of the capital, in June. Czech officials have voiced concerns at Russian involvement in the hacking and disruption of its railways last year.

Last month, a suspicious fire hit a metals factory for a defense manufacturer outside Berlin, and a 26-year-old pro-Russian Ukrainian was arrested after blowing himself up with a homemade bomb near Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. A warehouse fire in East London in March led to two men being charged by London’s Metropolitan Police Service with arson and assisting a foreign intelligence service, namely Russia.

While the incidents have not all been definitively linked to Russian intelligence, they have been unified by the apparent involvement of amateurs, or petty criminality aimed at spreading fear or disruption.

A ‘pretty dangerous game’

The senior NATO official said Russian sabotage on NATO states amounted to a “pretty dangerous game, if (Russia believes) these things are always below the threshold of armed conflict,” that would not trigger the NATO Article 5 stipulation that an attack on one member state is an attack on the entire alliance. “Finding where that line is, is a difficult and dangerous calculation to make,” the official said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s beleaguered invasion of Ukraine shows the Kremlin head was not always getting good military advice.

Russia is using the “full gamut” of hybrid operations, the official added. “We see everything from high-end operations in Europe, where we have seen as much as 400,000 euros ($433,000) paid for some type of intelligence activity, to some places where thugs are being hired for a couple of thousand euros.”

A similar threat has grown on Russia’s border with NATO, in Estonia, where 10 suspected Russian agents were arrested in February after the interior minister’s car was vandalized. The incident was a high-profile peak in what Estonian officials have said is a years-long campaign by Moscow to destabilize its tiny NATO neighbor, about a fifth of whose population of 1.3 million is Russian-speaking, according to a 2021 analysis by the EU.

Recent months have seen GPS jamming impede civilian aircraft landings, and even the buoys that demark part of Russia’s border with Estonia disappear, amid a short-lived call from Moscow for the maritime frontiers to be reassessed.

He said the operations were moving “towards physical attacks” and suggested the war in Ukraine might lead to more aggressive Russian tactics in the months ahead, if operatives were redeployed to the Baltic areas from the war.

“We have to face the facts. Russia is big enough to have resources to fight a war against Ukraine and also maintain its security operations against European countries… against us. There are people who take part in the war against Ukraine, and then they are rotated to some other region or area. They have more experience. Their mindset is more violent. They are perhaps not so patient anymore trying to get results.”

A former soldier who was sexually assaulted while serving in Japan’s military has reached a civil settlement with three of her convicted attackers in a case that exposed a widespread culture of harassment in the country’s self-defense force.

The settlement, initiated by the three former soldiers who were found guilty of sexual assault by a Japanese court in December, includes them apologizing and paying a sum of money, Rina Gonoi said on her X account on Tuesday. She did not disclose the amount of money involved.

“Today, I would like to announce that a settlement has been reached in the civil trial with the three perpetrators who were found guilty in the criminal trial,” Gonoi said.

Gonoi pursued both criminal and civil cases in the courts, including the civil lawsuit in which she is seeking compensation from the government and five former members of the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) for emotional stress caused by sexual abuse, public broadcaster NHK reported.

“I am relieved that the three years of fighting came to an end and I’m feeling three years’ worth of exhaustion all at once, but I will take care not to get sick,” Gonoi said on her Instagram account on Tuesday night.

She had previously reached a settlement with another of the five former members of the JSDF in the civil case, and the trial will continue against the government and the remaining former members, NHK reported.

Gonoi said she endured physical and verbal sexual abuse on a daily basis for more than a year while serving in the JSDF, and vowed to bring her tormentors to justice when she left the military in June 2022.

Authorities initially seemed unwilling to believe her but Gonoi’s refusal to be silenced eventually prompted prosecutors to reopen investigations in a sweeping probe into sexual harassment across the JSDF.

The broad investigation led by Japan’s defense ministry found that Gonoi had suffered physical and verbal sexual harassment daily between late 2020 and August 2021.

Japan’s struggles with gender inequality, which were highlighted during the #MeToo campaign, are well documented. The country ranks bottom of all G7 nations and 125th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s index for gender inequality.

Not backing down

As a child, Gonoi said she saw JSDF members as heroes. She grew up wanting to be like them after women officers in particular came to her rescue following the deadly 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that decimated her hometown of Higashi-Matsushima in Japan’s northern prefecture of Miyagi.

“They’d comment on my body and the size of my breasts. Or they’d come up to me in the hallways and suddenly hug me in the corridor. That kind of thing happened daily,” Gonoi recalled of her time in the station.

The last straw came in August 2021, when Gonoi said she was pinned to a dormitory floor as several senior male officers simulated sexual intercourse. It was this incident that convinced her to report her assailants.

When she reported the alleged abuse to military authorities, two investigations were launched, but both were dropped on grounds of a lack of evidence – prompting her to take the battle to social media.

Going public was a rare move in a country where sexual assault survivors can face backlash for raising their voices.

But it paid off, as the social media scrutiny pressured the JSDF into a rethink.

The defense ministry eventually launched a broad investigation into sexual harassment across the JSDF that found Gonoi had suffered physical and verbal sexual harassment daily between late 2020 and August 2021.

The case reached the highest levels, with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida saying during a parliamentary meeting in October 2022 that he understood sexual harassment cases were handled inappropriately by the JSDF and the ministry.

Last December, a Japanese court ruled that the three men had committed forcible indecency against Gonoi.

The court sentenced the trio to two years in prison with a suspended sentence, NHK reported, which could allow them to avoid jail time if they do not commit a crime over a two-year period.

The landmark decision was an encouraging sign but “the country still has a long way to go to change both the criminal justice system and the culture of victim-blaming that undermines the credibility of survivors,” according to Amnesty International’s East Asia researcher Boram Jang.

“Rina Gonoi dared to speak out to break the cycle of impunity for gender-based violence in Japan. This is a rare victory not just for her, but for all victims and survivors of sexual assault in Japan, many of whom suffer in silence,” Jang said in a statement after the ruling.