Fayaz and his wife believed they were moments from safety when the bombs began to fall: “We were getting on the boat one after another – that’s when they started bombing us.”

Wails and shouts filled the air around 17:00 local time on 5 August, Fayaz* says, as thousands of scared Rohingyas made their way to the banks of the Naf river in the town of Maungdaw.

Attacks on villages earlier in the area meant this was what hundreds of families, including Fayaz’s, saw as their only option – that to get to safety, they had to escape from western Myanmar to Bangladesh’s safer shores.

Fayaz was carrying bags stuffed with whatever they had managed to grab. His wife was carrying their six-year-old daughter, their eldest was running alongside them. His wife’s sister was walking ahead, with the couple’s eight-month-old son in her arms.

The first bomb killed his sister-in-law instantly. The baby was badly injured – but alive.

“I ran and carried him… But he died while we were waiting for the bombing to stop.”

Nisar* had also made it to the riverbank by about 17:00, having decided to escape with his mother, wife, son, daughter and sister. “We heard drones overhead and then the loud sound of an explosion,” he recalls. “We were all thrown to the ground. They dropped bombs on us using drones.”

Nisar was the only one of his family to survive.

Fayaz, his wife and daughter escaped and would eventually make it across the river. Despite his pleas, the boatman refused to allow Fayaz to bring the baby’s body with them. “He said there was no point in carrying the dead, so I dug a hole by the river bank and hastily buried him.”

Now they’re all in the relative safety of Bangladesh, but if they are caught by authorities here they could be sent back. Nisar clutches a Quran, unable still to process how his world was shattered in a single day.

“If I’d known what would happen, I would never have tried to leave that day,” Nisar says.

It is notoriously difficult to piece together what is happening in Myanmar’s civil war. But the BBC has managed to construct a picture of what happened on the evening of 5 August through a series of exclusive interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya survivors who escaped to Bangladesh, and the videos they shared.

All of the survivors – unarmed Rohingya civilians – recount hearing many bombs exploding over a period of two hours. While most described the bombs being dropped by drones, a weapon increasingly being used in Myanmar, some said they were hit by mortars and gunfire. The MSF clinic operating in Bangladesh has said it saw a big surge in wounded Rohingya in the days that followed – half of the injured were women and children.

Survivors’ videos analysed by BBC Verify show the river bank covered in bloodied bodies, many of them women and children. There’s no verified count of the number of people killed, but multiple eyewitnesses have told the BBC they saw scores of bodies.

Survivors told us they were attacked by the Arakan Army, one of the strongest insurgent groups in Myanmar which in recent months has driven the military out of nearly all of Rakhine State. They said they were first attacked in their villages, forcing them to flee, and then were attacked again by the river bank as they sought to escape.

The AA declined to be interviewed but its spokesman Khaing Tukha denied the accusation and responded to the BBC’s questions with a statement which said “the incident did not occur in areas controlled by us”. He also accused Rohingya activists of staging the massacre and falsely accusing the AA.

Nisar stands by his account, however.

“The Arakan Army are lying,” he says. “The attacks were done by them. It was only them in our area on that day. And they have been attacking us for weeks. They don’t want to leave any Muslim alive.”

Most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims live as a minority in Rakhine – a Buddhist-majority state, where the two communities have long had a fraught relationship. In 2017, when the Myanmar military killed thousands of Rohingyas in what the UN described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, local Rakhine men also joined the attacks. Now, amid a spiralling conflict between the junta and the AA, which has strong support in the ethnic Rakhine population, Rohingyas once again find themselves trapped.

Despite the risk of being caught and returned to Myanmar by the Bangladeshi authorities, Rohingya survivors told the BBC they wished to share details of the violence they faced so it would not go undocumented, especially as it unfolded in an area that is no longer accessible to rights groups or journalists.

“My heart is broken. Now, I’ve lost everything. I don’t know why I survived,” Nisar says.

A wealthy Rohingya trader, he sold his land and house as the shelling increased near his home in Rakhine. But the conflict intensified faster than he expected, and on the morning of 5 August, the family decided to leave Myanmar.

He is crying as he points to his daughter’s body in one of the videos: “My daughter died in my arms saying Allah’s name. She looks so peaceful, like she’s sleeping. She loved me so much.”

In the same video, he also points to his wife and sister, both severely injured but alive when the video was filmed. He could not carry them out as bombs were still falling, so he made the agonising choice to leave them behind. He found out later they had died.

“There was nowhere left that was safe, so we ran to the river to cross over to Bangladesh,” Fayaz says. The gunfire and bombs had followed them from village to village, and so Fayaz gave all his money to a boatman to carry them across the river.

Devastated and angry, he holds up a photo of his son’s bloodied body.

“If the Arakan Army didn’t fire at us, then who did?” he asks. “The direction that the bombs came from, I know the Arakan Army was there. Or was it thunder falling from the sky?”

These accusations raise serious questions about the Arakan Army, which describes itself as a revolutionary movement representing all the people of Rakhine.

Since late last year, the AA, part of the larger Three Brotherhood Alliance of armed insurgents in Myanmar, has made huge gains against the military.

But the army’s losses have brought new dangers for Rohingyas, who have previously told the BBC they were being forcibly recruited by the junta to fight the AA.

This, together with the decision by the Rohingya militant group ARSA to ally itself with the junta against the Rakhine insurgents, has soured already poor relations between the two communities and left Rohingya civilians vulnerable to retribution.

One survivor of the 5 August attack told the BBC that ARSA militants who had aligned themselves with the junta had been among the fleeing crowd – and that might have provoked the attack.

“Even if there was any military target, there was a disproportionate use of force. There were children, women, the elderly that were killed that day. It was also indiscriminate,” says John Quinley, a director of the human rights group Fortify Rights, which has been investigating the incident.

“So that would leave us to believe that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a war crime did happen on 5 August. The Arakan Army should be investigated for these crimes and Arakan Army senior commanders should be held accountable.”

This is a precarious moment for the Rohingya community. More than a million of them fled to Bangladesh in 2017, where they continue to be restricted to densely-packed, squalid camps.

More have been arriving in recent months as the war in Rakhine reaches them but, it’s no longer 2017, when Bangladesh opened its borders. This time, the government has said it cannot allow any more Rohingyas into the country.

So survivors who can find the money to pay boatmen and traffickers – the BBC was told it costs 600,000 Burmese kyat ($184; £141) per person – then have to slip past Bangladeshi border guards and chance their luck with locals, or hide in Rohingya camps.

When Fayaz and his family arrived in Bangladesh on the 6 August, the border guards gave them a meal but then put them on a boat and sent them back.

“We spent two days afloat with no food or water,” he says. “I gave my daughters water from the river to drink, and pleaded with some of the others on the boat to give them a few biscuits from the packets they had.”

They got into Bangladesh on their second attempt. But at least two boats have capsized because of overcrowding. One woman, a widow with 10 children, said she had managed to hide her family during the bombing, but five of her children drowned when their boat overturned.

“My children were like pieces of my heart. When I think of them, I want to die,” she says, weeping.

Her grandson, a wide-eyed eight-year-old boy, sits beside her. His parents and younger brother also died.

But what of those who were left behind? Phone and internet networks in Maungdaw have been down for weeks but after repeated attempts, the BBC contacted one man, who wished to remain anonymous for his own safety.

“The Arakan Army has forced us out of our homes and are holding us in schools and mosques,” he said. “I am being kept with six other families in a small house.”

The Arakan Army told the BBC that it rescued 20,000 civilians from the town amid fighting against the military. It said it was providing them with food and medical treatment, and add that “these operations are conducted for the safety and security of these individuals, not as forced relocations”.

The man on the phone rejected their claims. “The Arakan Army has told us they will shoot us if we try to leave. We are running out of food and medicines. I am ill, my mother is ill. A lot of people have diarrhoea and are vomiting.”

He broke down, pleading for help: “Tens of thousands of Rohingya are under threat here. If you can, please save us.”

Across the river in Bangladesh, Nisar looks back at Myanmar. He can see the shore where his family was killed.

“I never want to go back.”

Donald Trump appears to have falsely implied he has Taylor Swift’s endorsement, posting fake images on social media of the singer and her fans supporting him.

The Republican presidential candidate posted the message “I accept!” alongside the images, which were taken from other social media accounts. Many appear to have been created using artificial intelligence.

The post sparked a backlash among Swift’s fans, known as Swifties, who accused Trump of spreading misinformation.

The singer has not endorsed a candidate in the 2024 election but backed the Democrats in 2020 and criticised Trump while he was president.

One of the photos shared by Trump depicted Swift fans wearing t-shirts that read: “Swifties for Trump”.

The post appeared to have a label of “satire” with a headline that read: “Swifties turning to Trump after ISIS foiled Taylor Swift concert”.

Swift recently cancelled three concerts in Vienna following a possible security threat. Police arrested two people on suspicion of planning attacks inspired by the Islamic State group.

Another re-posted photo mimicked a World War One US army recruiting poster, which replaced Uncle Sam’s face with Swift’s and read: “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump”.

NBC News reported two of the images Trump re-posted feature real women who are Trump supporters.

Swift supported the Democratic Party in the 2020 election, and criticised Trump during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

“After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence?,” she posted on Twitter/X. “We will vote you out in November.”

Earlier this year, BBC discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people supporting Trump. There was no evidence linking the images to Trump’s campaign.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter are among the six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.

The 56m (183ft) vessel was carrying 22 people including British, American and Canadian nationals. Fifteen people were rescued, including a one-year-old British girl, and authorities are continuing their search into the night.

Local media reported the yacht, named Bayesian, capsized at about 05:00 local time after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.

Mr Lynch, known by some as “the British Bill Gates”, co-founded software company Autonomy, which was later bought by tech giant Hewlett-Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn).

Witnesses told Italian news agency Ansa that the Bayesian’s anchor was down when the storm struck, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose its balance and sink off the coast of village Porticello, near Sicilian capital Palermo.

A waterspout is similar to a tornado and can form over oceans, seas or large lakes.

Divers have identified a wreckage 50m below the water’s surface and are searching for those missing.

The director general of Sicily’s civil protection agency, Salvatore Cocina, told the BBC Mr Lynch, his daughter Hannah Lynch and the yacht’s chef were among the missing.

He said the search, involving caving and rescue diving teams, would continue overnight.

The body of one man was found outside of the wreckage. His nationality has not been confirmed.

BBC Verify looked at corporate records and found the Bayesian’s ownership is tied to Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.

Sources close to the matter have confirmed to the BBC Ms Bacares has been rescued.

Fifteen people managed to get to safety after the storm hit.

Ansa news agency reported a 35-year-old mother held her one-year-old daughter in her arms in the sea.

The woman, named as locally as Charlotte Golunski, said: “For two seconds I lost the little girl in the sea, then I immediately hugged her again amidst the fury of the waves.

“I held her tightly, close to me, while the sea was stormy. Many were screaming.

“Luckily the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on board.”

The baby is fine and the mother was treated with stitches, the agency said.

She added she had been on the boat with her husband, who is also safe, and colleagues from a London company.

A doctor based at the Di Cristina Hospital in Palermo, where some of the survivors were taken, said they were “very tired” and “constantly asking about the missing people”.

Dr Domenico Cipolla told Reuters news agency: “We have given the survivors this information, but they are talking and crying all the time because they have realised that there is little hope of finding their friends alive.”

Survivors said the trip has been organised by Mr Lynch for his work colleagues.

In the initial aftermath, a nearby Dutch-flagged vessel rescued survivors from the waves, tending to them until emergency services arrived.

Captain Karsten Borner said after the storm had passed, the crew noticed that the yacht that had been behind them had disappeared.

“We saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position, and we found this life raft drifting,” he told Reuters.

That life raft was carrying 15 survivors, three of whom were “heavily injured”, he said.

A local fisherman told Reuters news agency he had seen people being rescued by an inflatable boat dispatched from another yacht.

The captain of a local fishing trawler said he saw debris, including cushions from the deck, floating in the sea.

Footage from the wreckage site showed helicopters circling over several coastguard vessels as divers wearing bright orange descended into the water.

Eight of those rescued are receiving treatment in hospital, the Italian coastguard said.

The western half of the Mediterranean has experienced severe storms since the middle of last week.

Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, a clutch of bad weather passed by the north coast of Sicily.

BBC Weather forecaster Matt Taylor said: “A waterspout is a tornado that has occurred over water rather than land.

“They can form during intense storms, on the base of cumulonimbus/thunder clouds.

“Turbulence, and the wind blowing in slightly different directions around the cloud, can cause rotation under the base of the cloud and the spout to form.

“Like tornadoes, they bring powerful winds, but instead of picking up dust and debris they cause a water mist around the column of rotating air.”

The UK Foreign Office said it is supporting a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily. Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also sending a team of inspectors to conduct a “preliminary assessment” into the sinking of the UK registered-boat.

The Bayesian’s registered owner is listed as Revtom Ltd. The superyacht can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites.

The yacht’s name is understood to be based on the Bayesian theory, which Mr Lynch’s PhD thesis was based on.

Mr Lynch’s wife Ms Bacares is named as the sole legal owner of Revtom registered in the Isle of Man.

A spokesperson for Camper and Nicholsons International, the firm that manages the 2008-built boat, told BBC Verify: “Our priority is assisting with the ongoing search and providing all necessary support to the rescued passengers and crew.”

Mr Lynch sold his company Autonomy to American computing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011 for $11bn (£8.6bn).

But an intense legal battle following the high-profile acquisition loomed over Mr Lynch for over a decade. He was acquitted in the US in June on multiple fraud charges, for which he had been facing two decades in jail.

The sinking of the yacht came on the same day that Mr Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, was confirmed by his lawyer as having died after being hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

Clutching a toothbrush and toothpaste, Kevin Lik waited for six hours in the main office of penal colony 14, near Arkhangelsk in Russia’s far north-west. It was late in the evening of Sunday 28 July, and the 19-year-old says he had no idea what was about to happen.

“Maybe you’re taking me to be shot,” he said to the governor of the colony.

“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” came the reply.

Kevin says he was told the same thing by an officer from Russia’s FSB state security agency a year and a half ago, before they locked him up.

“I lost a lot of weight in the colony,” he explains shyly, as we speak on a video call. Kevin is about 6ft 4in tall (1.9m) but weighs only 11 stone (70kg).

Along with American journalist Evan Gershkovich, he is one of 16 people released by Russia on 1 August in a prisoner swap with the US and other Western countries.

The teenager – with dual Russian and German citizenship – was arrested last year while still at school and became the youngest person in modern Russian history to have been convicted of treason.

I ask if he considers himself more Russian or German. “It’s a very complicated question,” he replies.

Kevin was born in 2005 in Montabaur, a small town in the west of Germany. His Russian mother, Victoria, had married a German citizen and, although the marriage didn’t last, she and her son stayed.

They visited Russia every couple of years until Victoria decided she wanted to go back permanently – she missed her relatives and hometown of Maykop in the North Caucasus. Kevin was 12 when they made the move there in 2017.

They lived on the outskirts of town, in an apartment with views of mountains and a military base. Kevin says he loved walks in the countryside and collecting plants for his herbarium, and also studying at school.

He enthusiastically shows me certificates from national and local academic competitions that he won.

It was the 2018 Russian presidential election that sparked his interest in politics, he says. His mother – a public sector healthcare worker – would come home and say she and her colleagues had been bussed to polling stations where they were told: “Vote for Putin, or we’ll take away your bonus.”

He was only 12 at the time, but says he understood “there was almost no democracy in Russia”.

Kevin was enraged that almost every classroom in his school had a portrait of Putin.

“They constantly told us that school is not a place for politics. It’s just not right to hang portraits and promote a personality cult like that,” he says.

A year or so later, he caused a scandal when he swapped a school portrait of Putin for one of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“One teacher said that during Stalin’s time, I would have been shot,” Kevin recalls – while a sympathetic teacher, he says, advised him to be careful.

His mother was called to the school: “They scolded her, yelled at her,” he says.

The BBC has asked the school for comment, but has not had a response.

As Kevin approached his final school year, his mother decided they should move back to Germany.

By this time, Russia had invaded Ukraine and, in order to leave the country permanently, Kevin’s name had to be removed from the military register.

Victoria was invited to the enlistment office to sort out her son’s paperwork. When she got there on 9 February 2023, the police met her. Kevin says they groundlessly accused her of swearing in public. She was sentenced to 10 days’ detention, which meant they had to delay their plans to leave.

Left alone, Kevin stopped going to school. He ventured out for a few hours one day, and says that when he returned to the apartment “things had been moved around”.

When Victoria was released, they tried to get to Germany by heading south to the city of Sochi, which has an international airport. After checking into a hotel, Kevin says they went out for a snack and he noticed a man in a medical mask and hoodie filming them on his phone. Within seconds, he says a minibus pulled up.

“Eight or nine FSB officers jumped out. One grabbed me by the arm. Another came up, showed his ID, and said: ‘A criminal case has been opened against you under article 275: treason.’

“My eyes were wide with shock.”

The minibus took them to the hotel, where they collected their luggage. On the way back to Maykop they were put in a car without licence plates and taken to a pizzeria.

“They ordered pizza and offered us some. They didn’t handcuff me or restrain me. I was thinking everything over in my head but couldn’t understand how I had committed treason,” says Kevin.

He asked if he would be put in jail. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” came the response.

Kevin remembered a former FSB operative, Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a man in Berlin on Kremlin orders. He started wondering if Russia planned to use him – a German citizen – “as a hostage” to get Krasikov back.

They got home in the middle of the night. He shows me the video FSB officers made as they searched the apartment. They found a broken telescope – an old birthday present from his mother.

The authorities suspected he had used it to photograph military vehicles from his window to send to German intelligence. They took his phone and laptop and found pictures of the base.

Kevin freely admits he took the photos but says he had no intention of passing them on to anyone.

At 03:00, Kevin was taken to the local FSB building for interrogation. Because he was only 17, his mother went with him. He was scared.

Kevin says the lawyer assigned to him told him straight away that he should confess to reduce the sentence.

As we speak, he reels off details of Russia’s criminal code and uses legal terms to explain why he was wrongfully accused. But, back then, he had no idea how to handle the situation.

A confession had already been typed and Kevin agreed to sign it, which he later regretted. He says he was afraid if he didn’t sign, things would have “got worse because they could have started pressuring my mum”. The FSB investigator told them he had the power to seize their apartment, says Kevin.

“The testimony was absolute nonsense,” he says. “It’s a chess game, it was clear there was no justice.”

Because he was still a minor, he was taken to a special facility two hours’ drive away in Krasnodar and placed in a solitary cell. He had been up all night but couldn’t sleep.

“They brought me food but I couldn’t eat it. I really wanted to see my mum.”

A few months later, when he turned 18, he was moved to a different prison on the outskirts of Krasnodar where he mixed with other inmates.

Kevin says he was left terrified after a group of inmates beat him up. “They tied my hands, beat me, and even put out a cigarette on me. They hit me so hard in the chest I couldn’t breathe.”

All this time, the authorities continued to investigate him. His class teacher testified against him, claiming that when they had gone to an academic competition in Moscow Kevin had wanted to go to the German embassy to contact intelligence officers. Kevin tells me all he wanted was to get an official German ID, because he had turned 16.

A Ministry of Defence expert analysed the photos Kevin had taken and concluded they didn’t constitute a state secret but, in foreign hands, could have harmed Russia.

The FSB file on him also included details of childhood trips to Russia, including one when he was two years old. Kevin says he also found out his phone had been tapped as early as 2021.

Ten months after Kevin’s arrest, at the end of December 2023, he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to four years in a penal colony.

Apart from his mum, no-one he knew from Maykop contacted him after his arrest, but after the media reported his case, strangers began writing.

“The letters helped me a lot,” he says. “On my birthday, I received 60 cards. I made it my goal to reply to each person.”

The letters and cards were later confiscated.

Kevin’s journey to the penal colony in Arkhangelsk took a month, via several other prisons. He arrived there at the end of June this year. In those following weeks, he says he passed the time by reading and studying.

Suddenly, as he was leaving the bath house on Tuesday 23 July, he was approached by a senior prison officer and told he had 20 minutes to “urgently write a petition” for a presidential pardon, which he did.

Then, on the 28th, a prison officer stopped him and told him to get his toothbrush, toothpaste and slippers.

“Usually, you get this kit when they’re about to put you in the punishment cell,” explains Kevin. But instead, he was locked in an office.

At 01:00 on the morning of Monday 29th, a convoy arrived to take him away.

The thought of being exchanged was at the back of Kevin’s mind, but seemed too good to be true.

He was flown to Moscow, where he was kept in jail until Thursday 1 August, when he was put on a plane with the other prisoners who were being swapped.

It was never spelled out to him that he was being exchanged, he says, but by the time he was in the air bound for Turkey it was clear what was happening.

As Kevin had long-suspected, assassin Vadim Krasikov was among those being returned to Russia.

In Germany, after a hospital check-up, Kevin was finally able to greet his mother, who had got a visa to fly in from Russia.

“She cried. I told her everything was fine, not to worry, that I loved her very much.”

Mother and son are now living in Germany and Kevin is full of enthusiasm to finish school.

“I don’t have a desire for revenge, but I do have a very strong desire to participate in opposition activities,” he tells me.

Kevin still has his prison uniform, stuffed in a bag in the corner of his room.

When I ask what he wanted most of all while he was forced to wear it, he simply replies: “To hug Mum of course.”

The religious composition of Indians who emigrate differs significantly from those who stay in India, analysis by the US-based Pew Research Center has found.

About 80% of people in India are Hindu, but they form only 41% of emigrants from the country, the survey on the religious composition of the world’s migrants says.

In contrast, about 15% of people living in India are Muslim, compared with 33% of those who were born in India and now live elsewhere.

Christians make up only about 2% of the Indian population, but 16% who have left India are Christian.

“Many more Muslims and Christians have left India than have moved there. People of other, smaller religions, like Sikhs and Jains, are also disproportionately likely to have left India,” Stephanie Kramer, a lead researcher of the analysis, told me.

More than 280 million people, or 3.6% of the world’s population, are international migrants.

As of 2020, Christians comprised 47% of the global migrant population, Muslims 29%, Hindus 5%, Buddhists 4% and Jews 1%, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of UN data and 270 censuses and surveys.

The religiously unaffiliated, including atheists and agnostics, made up 13% of global migrants who have left their country of birth.

The migrant population in the analysis includes anyone living outside their birthplace, from babies to oldest adults. They could have been born at any time as long as they are still alive.

As far as India is concerned, the analysis found that the religious make-up of the population who have moved to India is much more similar to that of the country’s overall population.

Also, Hindus are starkly under-represented among international migrants (5%) compared with their share of the global population (15%). There are about one billion Hindus around the world.

“This seems to be because Hindus are so concentrated in India and people born in India are very unlikely to leave,” said Ms Kramer.

“More people who were born in India are living elsewhere than from any other country of origin, but these millions of emigrants represent a small fraction of India’s population.”

About 99% of Hindus lived in Asia back in 2010, almost entirely in India and Nepal, and researchers say they wouldn’t expect that share to drop much, if at all.

Since partition, India hasn’t experienced a mass migration event, and many of those who migrated then are no longer alive.

“In contrast, other religious groups are more dispersed globally and face more push factors that drive emigration,” Ms Kramer said.

So are Hindus some sort of a global outlier in this respect?

Researchers say Hindus do stand out in comparison to the other religious groups analysed.

“They’re less likely to leave home than people of other faiths, and their global migration patterns mostly depend on who leaves and arrives in India, rather than a broad collection of countries like other major religions,” says Ms Kramer.

The analysis found that Hindus have the longest average migration distance of 4,988km (3,100 miles), often moving from India to distant places like the US and the UK.

Researchers attribute this to the lack of recent crises forcing Hindus to flee to nearby countries. Instead, most are economic migrants seeking job opportunities, often in distant locations.

India certainly isn’t unique in having an emigrant population with a religious make-up different from those still living in the country.

Hindus are over-represented among emigrants from Bangladesh, according to the survey.

The study estimates that fewer than 10% of residents of Bangladesh are Hindu but 21% of the people who have left Bangladesh are Hindu.

Around 90% of people living in Bangladesh are Muslim, but 67% of emigrants from Bangladesh are Muslim.

Hindus make up only about 2% of Pakistan’s population, and 8% of people who were born in Pakistan and now live elsewhere are Hindu.

Myanmar has a lower percentage of Muslims in its population of residents compared with its emigrant population. Muslims make up about 4% of Myanmar’s resident population and 36% of its emigrant population.

Clearly, Muslims also migrate out of majority-Muslim countries. But religious minorities in those countries often migrate more.

So what does the Pew report broadly reveal about the religious composition of the world’s migrants?

“We find that people often go to places where their religion is common, and that those from minority religious groups within their country of birth are more likely to leave,” says Ms Kramer.

Thirty six flights were cancelled and 201 delayed at a Japanese airport on the weekend after a pair of scissors went missing in a store near the boarding gates.

Security checks at Hokkaido’s New Chitose Airport domestic terminal were suspended for about two hours on Saturday morning, leaving hundreds of travellers temporarily stranded.

There were huge bottlenecks and queues as passengers in the departure lounge were forced to retake security checks.

Authorities tried to locate the missing scissors, which were found at the same store the following day.

Although the scissors weren’t located on Saturday, the day they went missing, security checks and flights eventually resumed that day.

Hokkaido Airport, the operator of New Chitose airport, announced on Monday that the scissors had been found by a worker at the store on Sunday.

Authorities explained that they held off on making the announcement until they had confirmed that the scissors were the same as the ones that were lost.

Many travellers affected by the cancellations and delays were flying home after Japan’s annual Bon holiday.

“I don’t think we have any choice (but to wait),” one traveller told local media at the time. “But I do hope they are bit more careful about it.”

Another traveller said there were “So many things to worry about these days… it never ends. And I don’t feel safe until I get home.”

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has asked Hokkaido Airports to investigate the cause and prevent it from happening again.

“We recognise that this occurred as a result of insufficient storage and management systems at the store,” Hokkaido Airport said. “We are aware that this is also an incident that could be linked to hijacking or terrorism, and will once again work to ensure thorough management awareness.”

Social media users on X praised the airport’s response to the incident, with several saying it reaffirmed their confidence in Japanese air safety.

“This incident showcased the safety of Japanese aviation and the thoroughness of its manuals!” one user wrote.

Another said it “made me realise once again that New Chitose Airport is a safe airport to use.”

New Chitose is one of Japan’s busiest airports, serving the world’s second-most travelled domestic air route – between Tokyo and Sapporo – according to aviation analytics company OAG.

More than 15 million travellers used the airport in 2022.

George Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman, is facing years in prison after pleading guilty to two federal counts of fraud.

Santos, 36, appeared in court in Central Islip, New York, on Monday and admitted wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for stealing the IDs of campaign staff and misusing campaign funds.

The judge estimated a sentencing range of six to eight years for the charges he admitted.

His guilty plea cements the downfall of the novice New York politician, who was expelled from Congress last year after a brief, scandal-plagued tenure.

“I deeply regret my conduct and the harm it has caused and accept full responsibility for my actions,” Santos said in a statement read to the court.

It reverses his denial last year of charges including lying to Congress about his finances and using campaign contributions for personal expenses.

A plea agreement calls for Santos to make restitution of at least $374,000 (£288,000).

The aggravated identity theft charge carries a two-year mandatory prison term that must be served consecutively with any sentence for the wire fraud charge.

In court, Santos admitted to theft and applying for unemployment benefits that he was not entitled to receive.

He also acknowledged making false statements and omissions on financial statements submitted to the House Ethics Committee and the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Santos was charged with 23 federal felony crimes including wire fraud, money laundering and the misuse of campaign funds.

In December, he became the first member of Congress to be expelled in more than 20 years, and only the sixth in history. His brief tenure in office was marked by several controversies, alleged lies and allegations of fraud.

Santos defeated a Democratic incumbent in 2022, flipping the district that encompasses parts of New York’s Long Island and Queens.

However, he faced a string of allegations that he had made false claims about a career on Wall Street, his university education, his Jewish ancestry, and his mother’s death in the 9/11 attacks.

The House Ethics Committee voted in 2023 to investigate Santos over several allegations that he had engaged in “unlawful activity” during his 2022 campaign, lied to Congress and engaged in sexual misconduct.

Federal prosecutors filed 13 charges against him months later. These included seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds and two counts of lying to the House of Representatives.

He was later charged with 10 additional counts, accused of stealing the identities of campaign donors and using their credit cards.

The House ethics panel report was then released, accused him of misusing campaign funds for personal benefit – including on Botox, credit card debts, and subscriptions on the porn-heavy OnlyFans website.

Two of his former aides have already pleaded guilty to fraud in connection to Santos’ campaign.

His sentencing is scheduled for 7 February.

A British-Mexican man convicted of drug offences in Qatar after being detained there for six months has told BBC News he “never thought I’d return home”.

In his first interview since leaving the country, Manuel Guerrero Aviña, who says he was targeted because he is gay, warned LGBT people to “be careful when visiting Qatar”, saying: “What happened to me could happen to anyone.”

He was arrested in February after arranging to meet a man – who he later found out was an undercover police officer – using gay dating app Grindr.

Human-rights groups have raised concerns over Manuel’s detention and called his trial “grossly unfair” – but Qatari officials insist he was arrested because of drug offences.

The 45-year-old former British Airways worker now wants to focus on returning to work and spending time with his family.

Manuel made headlines around the world following his arrest and his family started a campaign for him to be freed.

At a court hearing in June, he was found guilty of possessing an illegal substance, given a six-month suspended prison sentence, fined £2,100 and was the subject of a deportation order.

After returning to the UK, he has – for the first time – given a first-hand account of his 44 days in a Qatari prison and subsequent detention in the country.

“There were so many times I was terrified,” Manuel said.

“I thought I would never be able to leave.

“I thought I might get lost in the system.

“I was really scared.

“I never thought I’d return home safely.”

Manuel has always insisted police officers planted drugs in his flat and says the real reason for his arrest was his sexuality.

“I absolutely deny the drugs charges,” he told BBC News.

“Throughout the entire interrogation, everything they asked me about was about my sexual partners, my sexual orientation, whether I’ve been having sex, who I have had sex with and things like that.

“If it was just a drugs case, they would have been asking me about drugs.”

Homosexuality is criminalised in Qatar and human-rights organisations have repeatedly raised concerns about the treatment of LGBT people in the country.

But Manuel said he had lived there for seven years without getting in trouble with police.

“There seemed to be an unwritten rule that whatever went on in private was OK,” he said.

“I thought I was being compliant by being discreet when [in public] and following the rules – but I was just trying to live a little bit of my life behind doors.

“I thought it was fine as long as it wasn’t in public.”

BBC News previously reported how, on 4 February, Manuel had been messaging a man on dating apps Grindr and Tinder and invited him to his flat.

After going to meet the man in the lobby of his building, Manuel says he was instead met by police officers who handcuffed him before searching his flat, eventually arresting him.

During his time in prison, Manuel says, he witnessed people being whipped and was moved into cramped conditions after refusing to unlock his phone or disclose the names and phone numbers of other LGBT people living in Qatar.

“They were trying to force me to confess and unlock my phone – but I couldn’t put other people from the gay community at risk,” he said.

“Why would I put someone else through that pain?”

BBC News has seen a confession, written in Arabic, which Manuel says he was forced to thumbprint without the presence of a lawyer or the aid of a translator.

We cannot independently verify all of his claims.

Many of the accusations about his treatment after his arrest relate to time spent behind closed doors with few witnesses.

But the Guerrero Aviña family has shared a detailed timeline of events – and previous reporting on the treatment of LGBT people and the behaviour of police officers in Qatar suggest others have had similar experiences.

A Qatari official told BBC News Manuel had been treated with “dignity and respect throughout his detention” and sentenced “following an investigation and trial”.

He had been arrested “for possessing an illegal substance” and “no other factors were considered when making the arrest”.

“Mr Aviña and his family have made numerous false allegations in an attempt to generate public sympathy and support for his case,” the official said.

“A person’s beliefs, background or orientation do not exempt them from the law, especially when facing serious charges related to drug possession.

“Qatar has stringent laws governing the possession of illegal drugs – and the authorities are continuously working to combat this issue.

“As Mr Aviña himself has acknowledged, he lived in Qatar without any issues for seven years.”

But former British diplomat in Qatar and co-director of human-rights organisation FairSquare James Lynch said the trial had been “grossly unfair” and likened it to other cases he had dealt with.

“Manuel was clearly targeted because he was LGBT and living in Qatar and living his life,” Mr Lynch said.

“Over the last three years, we’ve dealt with several cases of people who’ve been arrested and then interrogated without a lawyer.

“The Qataris need to sort out the way justice is delivered in the country.”

Manuel, who is living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was also supported by HIV charities in the UK, after claims he had not been given regular access to his medication, which keeps the virus under control.

He said: “I had to beg on a daily basis to prison officers to try and get access to my medication.

“It was a really difficult time for me without access to my medication, because you’re worried about the effects on your health and it also has an impact on your mental health.”

Now back in the UK, Manuel says, he is receiving medical attention and slowly becoming more able to be his true self.

“It’s not about seeing symbols everywhere like rainbows or flags,” he said.

“It’s more that it feels amazing to be able to recover some of the small things that you don’t realise you’ve lost until you have them back.

“Things like seeing people holding hands in the street, being able to be affectionate with my friends without thinking about how we’re interacting, being able to do that without it being behind closed doors.”

The boss of Foxtel – a majority News Corp-owned cable television company in Australia – has “unreservedly” apologised after an image surfaced of him performing a Nazi salute.

Patrick Delaney said he believed he was showing “the similarity” between the gesture and one used by some fans of a Western Sydney soccer club when the photo was taken a decade ago.

“Regardless of the context, the fact I demonstrated this offensive salute was wrong,” he said in an email to staff seen by the BBC.

The Jewish Council of Australia condemned Mr Delaney’s actions as “deeply concerning”.

“Equally [concerning] is that he operates in a media industry where he felt this was somehow okay,” Sarah Schwartz, the council’s executive officer, said in a statement on Monday. “It shouldn’t need to be said that the salute is an offensive and violent act not only for Jews, but also for other racialised groups.”

In his internal memo, Mr Delaney said that he had been “searching [his] mind” for a circumstance where “a photo capturing me in this pose could ever be possible”.

He then explained that he believed he was impersonating a threatening gesture made by a group of Western Sydney Wanderers fans during the 2014-15 season, while visiting the set of a Fox Sports television program during his tenure as the channel’s CEO.

Mr Delaney said the photograph – first published by Crikey – was “completely inconsistent” with his “values, beliefs, and family connections”.

He also condemned “racism in all its forms”, pointing to his commitment to the ‘Say No to Antisemitism letter’ which he signed along with other prominent Australian leaders in the wake of the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October.

About 1,200 people were killed in that attack, and 251 others were taken hostage.

Mr Delaney added that he would continue to meet with Jewish leaders to “express” his “deep remorse”.

But Ms Schwartz said the idea that Mr Delaney could sign a letter condemning antisemitism, while also feeling comfortable doing a Nazi salute, was proof the nation needed “more than superficial pledges”.

The scandal comes at a time when Australia is grappling with a sharp uptick in both antisemitism and Islamophobia, amid rising community tension over the Israel-Gaza war.

In July, the federal government installed a special envoy to combat antisemitism, while promising to appoint an Islamophobia equivalent in the coming months.

During a visit to Sydney in November, Lachlan Murdoch called on News Corp’s staff in Australia to “address and tackle” all forms of antisemitism and said there was “no room for equivocation” or fence-sitting on the issue.

Once a mainstay across the nation’s homes, Foxtel’s business model has been in sharp decline in recent years, after being displaced by the rise of cheaper international streaming services.

Earlier this month, News Corp said it was considering selling the ailing pay TV company.

US actor Michael Madsen was arrested on Saturday on a charge of domestic battery, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has said.

In a statement sent to the BBC, it said its deputies responded to a “family disturbance” incident shortly after midnight in the city of Malibu, California.

The department said a woman alleged “her husband pushed her and locked her out of their residence”.

Madsen, who starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill films, was later released from custody on a $20,000 (£15,400) bond. The 66-year-old has not publicly commented on the issue.

“The investigation is ongoing and will be forwarded to the Van Nuys Superior Court House for filing,” the sheriff’s department said.

The statement provided no further details.

A representative for Madsen said in a statement to Variety website that “it was a disagreement between Michael and his wife, which we hope resolves positively for them both”.

Michael Madsen and DeAnna Madsen have been married for 28 years.

Madsen is best known for his roles as psychopath Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs and assassin Budd in Kill Bill: Volume 2.

Iran was behind the recent hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, US intelligence officials have confirmed.

The FBI and other federal agencies said in a joint statement that Iran had chosen to interfere in the US election “to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions”.

The Trump campaign pointed the finger at Iran on 10 August for hacking its internal messages. Iranian officials denied it.

Sources familiar with the investigation told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they suspect Iranian hackers also targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris.

“The [intelligence community] is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties,” US intelligence officials said in the statement.

“Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the US election process.”

The Trump campaign was reportedly sent a spear-phishing email – a message designed to look trustworthy in order to get the target to click on a malicious link.

The Harris campaign said last week it had also been the target of a spear-phishing attack, though it was unsuccessful.

The agencies that released Monday’s statement, including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the tactics were “not new” and noted that Russia and Iran had employed such methods during previous US elections.

It remains unclear what information, if any, was stolen during the hack. Trump said the hackers were only able to obtain publicly available information.

The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post said they were leaked confidential information from inside the Trump campaign, including on its vetting of his running mate, JD Vance. The outlets have so far declined to offer specifics.

US officials said it was clear Iran wanted to shape the outcome of elections it believes are “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests”.

The American intelligence agencies added that they had “observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle”.

There has been growing concern about potential Iranian hackers.

Recently, Microsoft said it had seen “the emergence of significant influence activity” by groups linked to Iran.

Before he dropped out of the White House race last month, President Joe Biden’s campaign was targeted by Iranian hackers, as was Trump’s, according to Google.

A British mother on board a yacht which sank off the coast of Sicily has described holding her baby girl above the surface of the sea to save her from drowning.

The mother, named locally as Charlotte Golunski, her partner and one-year-old daughter are reported to be among 15 people to have been rescued from the luxury yacht Bayesian early on Monday.

Six people – including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch – are missing with one man found dead outside the wreckage.

The 56m (183ft) vessel, which was carrying 10 crew and 12 passengers, sank half a mile off the coast of Palermo after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.

Charlotte told Italian newspaper La Repubblica her family survived because they were on deck when the yacht sank.

She said they were woken by “thunder, lightning and waves that made our boat dance”, and it felt like “the end of the world” before they were thrown into the water.

• British tech tycoon Mike Lynch among missing after yacht sinks – LIVE UPDATES

“For two seconds I lost my daughter in the sea then quickly hugged her amid the fury of the waves,” the paper quoted her as saying.

Charlotte said she held her baby “afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning”.

“It was all dark. In the water I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others,” she added.

A lifeboat inflated and she said 11 people were able to climb in. All three of the family were unharmed and taken to hospital for check-ups.

Karsten Borner, captain of a nearby boat, said his crew took on board some survivors on a life raft, including three who were seriously injured.

Describing the moment, the storm hit, he told Italian news outlet Rai the superyacht tipped to its side and sank within “a few minutes”

“It all happened in really little time,” he said.

A local fisherman, Giuseppe, told Reuters he was on board a motorboat when he saw “mats and T-shirts floating in the sea”.

Another witness, Fabio Cefalù, captain of a trawler, says he was about to go out on a fishing trip when he saw flashes of lightning so he stayed in the harbour.

“At about 4:15am we saw a flare in the sea,” he said, according to the EVN news agency reports.

“We waited for this waterspout to pass. After 10 minutes we went out to the sea and we saw cushions and all the rest of the boat [that had sunk], and everything which was on the deck, at sea. However, we did not see any people in the sea.”

Another fisherman described seeing the yacht “sinking with my own eyes”.

Speaking to the newspaper Giornale di Sicilia, the witness said he was at home when the tornado hit.

“Then I saw the boat, it had only one mast, it was very big,” he said.

Shortly afterwards he went down to the Santa Nicolicchia bay in Porticello, the fishing village near Palermo where the disaster unfolded, to get a better look at what was happening.

He added: “The boat was still floating, then all of a sudden it disappeared. I saw it sinking with my own eyes.”

Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur, is missing after a luxury yacht sunk off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily.

After co-founding British tech firm Autonomy in 1996, and backing several successful tech firms, the businessman was regarded by some as the UK’s answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

One person is dead and six are missing after a 56m superyacht called Bayesian, which has been linked to Mr Lynch’s family, sank following bad weather.

His wife, Angela Bacares, has been rescued.

• Follow live updates on this story

The British tech tycoon made his riches by selling his company Autonomy to US computing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011 for $11bn (£8.6bn).

But an intense legal battle following the high-profile acquisition loomed over Mr Lynch for over a decade.

He was acquitted in the US in June on multiple fraud charges, over which he had been facing two decades in jail.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4 in August, Mr Lynch said he believed he had only been able to prove his innocence in US court due to his wealth.

The sinking of the yacht came on the same day that Mr Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, was confirmed by his lawyer as having died after being hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

Born on 16 June 1965, Mr Lynch is the son of a nurse and a fireman, and was raised near Chelmsford in Essex.

He studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in mathematical computing, and later undertook a research fellowship.

In 1991, Mr Lynch helped establish Cambridge Neurodynamics – a firm which specialised in using computer-based detection and recognition of fingerprints.

His tech firm Autonomy was created five years later, using a statistical method known as “Bayesian inference” at the core of its software.

The company’s fast-paced growth and success throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s saw Mr Lynch earn a number of awards and accolades.

In 2006 he was awarded an OBE in recognition of his service to UK enterprise.

He served on the board of the BBC as a non-executive director, and in 2011 was appointed to the government’s council for science and technology – advising then prime minister David Cameron on the risks and possibilities of AI development.

After Autonomy’s sale to HP in 2011 – from which Mr Lynch is believed to have netted £500m – he went on to establish tech investment firm Invoke Capital.

The venture capital fund invested in the creation of British cyber security company Darktrace in 2013.

Mr Lynch, a shareholder in the firm, held a seat on its board until earlier this year.

He and his wife have two daughters, and live at the Loudham Hall estate in Suffolk.

Autonomy became successful for its software’s ability to extract useful information from data such as phone calls, emails and video.

It would then use this data to do things like suggest answers to a call-centre operator or monitor TV channels for words or subjects.

Prior to its purchase by HP in 2011, Autonomy had headquarters in San Francisco and Cambridge.

But the price tag came under scrutiny following the sale and Autonomy’s value was written down by billions just a year later.

In 2018, US prosecutors brought charges against Mr Lynch – accusing him of artificially inflating the company’s value.

They said he had concealed the firm’s loss-making business reselling hardware, and also accused him of intimidating or paying off people who raised concerns.

Mr Lynch told BBC Radio 4 at the start of August that while convinced of his innocence throughout the lengthy trial, he felt he was only able to prove his this in US court due to his wealth.

“You shouldn’t need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen,” he said.

“The reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not only because I was innocent… but because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that’s set up to sweep you away.”

He added that following the lengthy legal saga, he wanted “to get back to what I love doing, which is innovating”.

In January 2015, Abdullah, the 90-year-old king of Saudi Arabia, was dying in hospital. His half-brother, Salman, was about to become king – and Salman’s favourite son, Mohammed bin Salman, was preparing for power.

The prince, known simply by his initials MBS and then just 29 years old, had big plans for his kingdom, the biggest plans in its history; but he feared that plotters within his own Saudi royal family could eventually move against him. So at midnight one evening that month, he summoned a senior security official to the palace, determined to win his loyalty.

The official, Saad al-Jabri, was told to leave his mobile phone on a table outside. MBS did the same. The two men were now alone. The young prince was so fearful of palace spies that he pulled the socket out of the wall, disconnecting the only landline telephone.

According to Jabri, MBS then talked about how he would wake his kingdom up from its deep slumber, allowing it to take its rightful place on the global stage. By selling a stake in the state oil producer Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, he would begin to wean his economy off its dependency on oil. He would invest billions in Silicon Valley tech startups including the taxi firm, Uber. Then, by giving Saudi women the freedom to join the workforce, he would create six million new jobs.

Astonished, Jabri asked the prince about the extent of his ambition. “Have you heard of Alexander the Great?” came the simple reply.

MBS ended the conversation there. A midnight meeting that was scheduled to last half-an-hour had gone on for three. Jabri left the room to find several missed calls on his mobile from government colleagues worried about his long disappearance.

The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince

The story of the extraordinary rise to power of the man who runs Saudi Arabia and whose control of oil affects everyone, starting with how he outwitted hundreds of rivals to become crown prince.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

For the past year, our documentary team has been talking to both Saudi friends and opponents of MBS, as well as senior Western spies and diplomats. The Saudi government was given the opportunity to respond to the claims made in the BBC’s films and in this article. They chose not to do so.

Saad al-Jabri was so high up in the Saudi security apparatus that he was friends with the heads of the CIA and MI6. While the Saudi government has called Jabri a discredited former official, he’s also the most well-informed Saudi dissident to have dared speak about how the crown prince rules Saudi Arabia – and the rare interview he has given us is astonishing in its detail.

By gaining access to many who know the prince personally, we shed new light on the events that have made MBS notorious – including the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the launch of a devastating war in Yemen.

With his father increasingly frail, the 38-year-old MBS is now de facto in charge of the birthplace of Islam and the world’s biggest exporter of oil. He’s begun to carry out many of the groundbreaking plans he described to Saad al-Jabri – while also being accused of human rights violations including the suppression of free speech, widespread use of the death penalty and jailing of women’s rights activists.

The first king of Saudi Arabia fathered at least 42 sons, including MBS’s father, Salman. The crown has traditionally been passed down between these sons. It was when two of them suddenly died in 2011 and 2012 that Salman was elevated into the line of succession.

Western spy agencies make it their business to study the Saudi equivalent of Kremlinology – working out who will be the next king. At this stage, MBS was so young and unknown that he wasn’t even on their radar.

“He grew up in relative obscurity,” says Sir John Sawers, chief of MI6 until 2014. “He wasn’t earmarked to rise to power.”

The crown prince also grew up in a palace in which bad behaviour had few, if any, consequences; and that may help explain his notorious habit of not thinking through the impact of his decisions until he had already made them.

MBS first achieved notoriety in Riyadh in his late teens, when he was nicknamed “Abu Rasasa” or “Father of the Bullet”, after allegedly sending a bullet in the post to a judge who had overruled him in a property dispute.

“He has had a certain ruthlessness,” observes Sir John Sawers. “He doesn’t like to be crossed. But that also means he’s been able to drive through changes that no other Saudi leader has been able to do.”

Among the most welcome changes, the former MI6 chief says, has been cutting off Saudi funding to overseas mosques and religious schools that became breeding grounds for Islamist jihadism – at huge benefit to the safety of the West.

MBS’s mother, Fahda, is a Bedouin tribeswoman and seen as the favourite of his father’s four wives. Western diplomats believe the king has suffered for many years from a slow-onset form of vascular dementia; and MBS was the son he turned to for help.

Several diplomats recalled for us their meetings with MBS and his father. The prince would write notes on an iPad, then send them to his father’s iPad, as a way of prompting what he would say next.

“Inevitably I wondered whether MBS was typing out his lines for him,” recalls Lord Kim Darroch, National Security Adviser to David Cameron when he was British prime minister.

The prince was apparently so impatient for his father to become king that in 2014, he reportedly suggested killing the then-monarch – Abdullah, his uncle – with a poisoned ring, obtained from Russia.

“I don’t know for sure if he was just bragging, but we took it seriously,” says Jabri. The former senior security official says he has seen a secretly recorded surveillance video of MBS talking about the idea. “He was banned from court, from shaking hands with the king, for a considerable amount of time.”

In the event, the king died of natural causes, allowing his brother, Salman, to assume the throne in 2015. MBS was appointed Defence Minister and lost no time in going to war.

Two months later, the prince led a Gulf coalition into war against the Houthi movement, which had seized control of much of western Yemen and which he saw as a proxy of Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran. It triggered a humanitarian disaster, with millions on the brink of famine.

“It wasn’t a clever decision,” says Sir John Jenkins, who was British ambassador just before the war began. “One senior American military commander told me they had been given 12 hours’ notice of the campaign, which is unheard of.”

The military campaign helped turn a little-known prince into a Saudi national hero. However, it was also the first of what even his friends believe have been several major mistakes.

A recurring pattern of behaviour was emerging: MBS’s tendency to jettison the traditionally slow and collegiate system of Saudi decision-making, preferring to act unpredictably or upon impulse; and refusing to kowtow to the US, or be treated as head of a backward client state.

Jabri goes much further, accusing MBS of forging his father the king’s signature on a royal decree committing ground troops.

Jabri says he discussed the Yemen war in the White House before it started; and that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, warned him that the US would only support an air campaign.

However, Jabri claims MBS was so determined to press ahead in Yemen that he ignored the Americans.

“We were surprised that there was a royal decree to allow the ground interventions,” Jabri says. “He forged the signature of his dad for that royal decree. The king’s mental capacity was deteriorating.”

Jabri says his source for this allegation was “credible, reliable” and linked to the Ministry of Interior where he was chief of staff.

Jabri recalls the CIA station chief in Riyadh telling him how angry he was that MBS had ignored the Americans, adding that the invasion of Yemen should never have happened.

The former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers says that while he doesn’t know if MBS forged the documents, “it is clear that this was MBS’s decision to intervene militarily in Yemen. It wasn’t his father’s decision, although his father was carried along with it.”

We’ve discovered that MBS saw himself as an outsider from the very beginning – a young man with much to prove and a refusal to obey anybody’s rules other than his own.

Kirsten Fontenrose, who served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, says that when she read the CIA’s in-house psychological profile of the prince, she felt it missed the point.

“There were no prototypes to base him on,” she says. “He has had unlimited resources. He has never been told ‘no’. He is the first young leader to reflect a generation that, frankly, most of us in government are too old to understand.”

MBS’s purchase of a famous painting in 2017 tells us much about how he thinks, and his willingness to be a risk-taker, unafraid to be out of step with the religiously conservative society that he governs. And above all, determined to outplay the West in conspicuous displays of power.

In 2017, a Saudi prince reportedly acting for MBS spent $450m (£350m) on the Salvator Mundi, which remains the world’s most expensive work of art ever sold. The portrait, reputed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, depicts Jesus Christ as master of heaven and Earth, the saviour of the world. For almost seven years, ever since the auction, it has completely disappeared.

Bernard Haykel, a friend of the crown prince and Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, says that despite rumours that it hangs in the prince’s yacht or palace, the painting is actually in storage in Geneva and that MBS intends to hang it in a museum in the Saudi capital that has not yet been built.

“I want to build a very large museum in Riyadh,” Haykel quotes MBS as saying. “And I want an anchor object that will attract people, just like the Mona Lisa does.”

Similarly, his plans for sport reflect someone who is both hugely ambitious and unafraid to disrupt the status quo.

Saudi Arabia’s incredible spending spree on world-class sport – it is the sole bidder to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034, and has made multimillion-dollar investments in staging tournaments for tennis and golf – has been called “sportswashing”. But what we found is a leader who cares less about what the West thinks of him than he does about demonstrating the opposite: that he will do whatever he wants in the name of making himself and Saudi Arabia great.

“MBS is interested in building his own power as a leader,” says Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6, who has met him. “And the only way he can do that is by building his country’s power. That’s what’s driving him.”

Jabri’s 40-year career as a Saudi official did not survive MBS’s consolidation of power. Chief of staff for the former Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef, he fled the kingdom as MBS was taking over, after being tipped off by a foreign intelligence service that he could be in danger. But Jabri says MBS texted him out of the blue, offering him his old job back.

“It was bait – and I didn’t bite,” Jabri says, convinced he would have been tortured, imprisoned or killed if he returned. As it was, his teenage children, Omar and Sarah, were detained and later jailed for money laundering and for trying to escape – charges that they deny. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for their release.

“He planned for my assassination,” Jabri says. “He will not rest until he sees me dead, I have no doubt about that.”

Saudi officials have issued Interpol notices for Jabri’s extradition from Canada, without success. They claim he is wanted for corruption involving billions of dollars during his time at the interior ministry. However, he was given the rank of major-general and credited by the CIA and MI6 with helping to prevent al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 implicates MBS in ways that are very hard to refute. The 15-strong hit squad was travelling on diplomatic passports and included several of MBS’s own bodyguards. Khashoggi’s body has never been found and is believed to have been hacked into pieces with a bone saw.

Professor Haykel exchanged WhatsApp messages with MBS not long after the murder. “I was asking, ‘how could this happen?’,” Haykel recalls. “I think he was in deep shock. He didn’t realise the reaction to this was going to be as deep.”

Dennis Ross met MBS shortly afterwards. “He said he didn’t do it and that it was a colossal blunder,” says Ross. “I certainly wanted to believe him, because I couldn’t believe that he could authorise something [like] that.”

MBS has always denied knowledge of the plot, although in 2019 he said he took “responsibility” because the crime happened on his watch. A declassified US intelligence report released in February 2021 asserted that he was complicit in the killing of Khashoggi.

I asked those who know MBS personally whether he had learned from his mistakes; or whether having survived the Khashoggi affair, it had in fact emboldened him.

“He’s learned lessons the hard way,” says Professor Haykel, who says MBS resents the case being used as cudgel against him and his country, but that a killing like Khashoggi’s would not happen again.

Sir John Sawers cautiously agrees that the murder was a turning point. “I think he has learned some lessons. The personality, though, remains the same.”

His father, King Salman, is now aged 88. When he dies, MBS could rule Saudi Arabia for the next 50 years.

However, he has recently admitted he fears being assassinated, possibly as a consequence of his attempts to normalise Saudi-Israeli ties.

“I think there are lots of people who want to kill him,” says Professor Haykel, “and he knows it.”

Eternal vigilance is what keeps a man like MBS safe. It was what Saad al-Jabri observed at the beginning of the prince’s rise to power, when he pulled the telephone socket out of the wall before speaking to him in his palace.

MBS is still a man on a mission to modernise his country, in ways his predecessors would never have dared. But he’s also not the first autocrat who runs the risk of being so ruthless that nobody around him dares prevent him from making more mistakes.

Dozens of workers from around the world may have been trafficked into the UK to work for a small family-owned Scottish fishing firm, a BBC investigation has revealed.

Thirty-five men from the Philippines, Ghana, India and Sri Lanka were recognised as victims of modern slavery by the Home Office after being referred to it between 2012 and 2020.

The workers were employed by TN Trawlers and its sister companies, owned by the Nicholson family, based in the small town of Annan on the southern coast of Scotland.

The TN Group denied any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and said its workers were well treated and well paid.

The company was the focus of two long-running criminal investigations but no cases of human trafficking or modern slavery have come to trial, although some of the men waited years to give evidence.

While TN Trawlers’ lead director, Thomas Nicholson, was under active investigation, TN Group companies continued recruiting new employees from across the world.

Experienced fisherman Joel Quince was 28 when he landed at Heathrow Airport in 2012, thrilled to have secured a job as a deckhand with TN trawlers.

Joel had a young family back home in the Philippines, thousands of miles away. He had been expecting to earn a good income working in the UK. He was to be paid $1,012 (£660) a month for a 48-hour week.

He caught a bus from London to Carlisle, where, he says, he was picked up by the owner’s son, Tom Nicholson Jr.

“On our way to go to the boat he told us: ‘You have to give me your documents’ – so without hesitation I gave all my documents to them,” he said.

Joel says he was then taken straight to the fishing ground to start working.

But he was surprised to find that his boat was the Philomena rather than the Mattanja, which was the only vessel he was authorised to work on under the terms of his visa. “This was already something fishy for me,” he said

He claims that instead of the 48-hour week he had been told about, he was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week while the Philomena was out fishing.

On his monthly wage of £660, it meant Joel was earning less than the UK minimum wage – although at that time there was no legal requirement to pay it to fishermen like him.

Joel was one of about 30 seafarers who arrived in the UK to join TN Trawlers between 2011 and 2013, mostly from the Philippines. They joined dredgers trawling for scallops along the UK coastline.

These dredgers, built in the 1970s and 80s, work by towing metal nets along the seabed. They scrape up shellfish, as well as stones and bycatch – the other marine life which gets caught in the nets. Deckhands throw back the stones and pack the scallops in ice below deck.

Several of the men the BBC spoke to had little or no fishing experience. All describe working shift patterns as gruelling as Joel’s or worse.

Joel said he struggled to get up to go to work because he was so exhausted – but he didn’t complain because his colleagues were also suffering.

“If I stop working, there’s three people suffering, not getting their rest, because the operation keeps continuing. They won’t stop.”

He said there was not enough drinking water on board the vessels, and the crew were reduced to eating tomatoes from the stores to wet their throats. He also said that on one occasion a skipper threw an empty Coke can at the crew.

All the men the BBC spoke to described shortages of proper clothing, food and water.

Jaype Rubi was a young Filipino when he worked on board the TN dredger Sea Lady in 2012.

“Picking up and throwing out rocks is really tiring,” he said.

“The boat had CCTV, so the skipper could watch us. If we stop, he’d pull down the window and say: ‘Why are you resting’?”

Jaype said it was “super cold” and there was not enough food.

When he spoke to his mum on the phone, he started crying. “I said: ‘I want to go home because it’s a nightmare working on that boat’.”

Jaype said he was subjected to verbal abuse and was treated “like a slave”.

Other men said that, despite arriving in the UK on 48-hour transit visa, they were told to work onshore in the TN yard at Annan, in breach of their visa entitlement.

One man, Jovito Abiero, told the BBC he was sometimes sent to the home of the company owner Tom Nicholson to do gardening.

On 22 August 2012, Joel was aboard the Philomena off the coast of Northern Ireland during rough weather.

He was fixing a broken link in the metal nets when the towing bar swung up. He leapt out of the way – but fell and hit his head on the deck.

His crew mates estimated he was unconscious for up to 15 minutes.

When Joel woke up with a bandage on his head, he asked his skipper – Tom Nicholson Jr – if they were going to hospital.

“He said: ‘No, we’re not going to the hospital. We continue fishing’,” said Joel.

Joel was given paracetamol by the skipper and his head was bandaged. The Philomena didn’t turn around and head for the port of Troon in Ayrshire until 11 hours after the accident.

Joel got off the Philomena, never to return. He found support at the Fishermen’s Mission, a harbourside charity that supports seafarers.

At that time the mission was run by two sisters, Paula Daly and Karen Burston, who helped Joel get medical help. They had been hearing rumours about TN boats for some time.

“In 2012, it became really quite abundantly clear that we were getting the same message from quite a few different crew,” said Paula.

“There were so many things that were so wrong,” added Karen.

Police forces on several UK coasts had long been aware of allegations about TN Trawlers.

The company had been prosecuted in 2007 for illegal catches worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Tom Nicholson and TN Trawlers were ordered to pay £473,000 under proceeds of crime laws.

They were also ordered to pay almost £150,000 in fines and costs after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency found a string of defects and safety breaches on vessels between 2009 and 2011.

A 2012 police briefing, seen by the BBC, also noted six Filipino fishermen swam ashore from TN boats and complained of mistreatment.

That year, police in Dumfries and Galloway launched Operation Alto, an investigation into human trafficking and labour abuse at TN Trawlers.

Eighteen former TN Trawlers employees – including Joel – passed into the Home Office’s National Referral Mechanism, a system which identifies and supports victims of human trafficking.

File on 4: Invisible Souls

Fishermen from the Philippines, Ghana and Sri Lanka speak out for the first time about how badly they say they were treated by a Scottish fishing company.

Listen on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 20 August or on BBC Sounds.

Modern slavery is a term that can encompass human trafficking and slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour.

The Home Office defines the essence of human trafficking as a situation where a person is “coerced or deceived into a situation where they are exploited”.

Under this guidance, the men were all given recognition by the Home Office that they had been trafficked.

They were taken to a safe house somewhere in Scotland, then police asked them to stay in the UK to help with further enquiries and act as witnesses when the case came to court.

TN Trawlers continued to recruit, switching its main recruitment operation from East Asia to West Africa.

In June 2013, Gideon Mensah from Ghana signed up to work on the TN scalop dredger Noordzee. He said he soon found himself in the same situation as the Filipinos – overworked and undernourished.

Gideon told the BBC his wages were diverted to his recruitment agent back home, leaving him with £50 cash in hand each month – just £1.66 per day.

He was later recognised as a victim of modern slavery by the Home Office and spent several years on file as a witness for forthcoming prosecutions.

In 2017, five years after Joel Quince stepped off the Philomena at Troon harbour, 25-year old Vishal Sharma left India and arrived in London on a transit visa.

He’d signed a contract with a different company to work in the engine room of a Belgian tanker for 15 months.

But his agent in India then told him to travel to a different meeting point in the south of England, and he was taken to the Noordzee.

“I asked: ‘Why am I working there? It’s not my ship… I am not a fisherman’.”

Vishal claims he was threatened with deportation if he didn’t comply.

He spent three weeks on the trawler and says he was never paid.

He claims he worked 22-hour days, had little food, and that his boots began to fall apart in the seawater.

Men continued to arrive from Ghana, including Augustus Mensah and Gershon Norvivor. They both described being put to work in the Nicholsons’ compound before being shipped out, and both ended up working on a vessel called on the Sea Lady.

The BBC has seen payment schedules given to both men upon employment. Both were to earn £850 per month, with an additional cash payment of £50.

Based on a 48-hour working week, they would receive £4.68 an hour.

The conditions they alleged were similar to those described to the BBC by the workers from 2012.

“We were short of food and short of water,” says Gershon.

He claimed deckhands would drink washing water from the ship’s rusty tank. When the tank was empty, they’d melt the ice used to pack the scallops.

“We went to the fish room with a bucket or a sack and you put an ice block in… you put it on the stove… and the guys would make coffee with it.”

On 6 December 2017, a dredge net full of scallops swung and crashed into Augustus’ head and knocked him out. Gershon did what he could to help his friend, rinsing away the blood.

The crew managed to get word to the police onshore in Portsmouth.

“When we were rescued by the police we were very happy,” said Augustus.

Augustus, Gershon and Vishal, along with six other crew members from Ghana, India and Sri Lanka, were taken into the National Referral Mechanism system and recognised by the Home Office as victims of modern slavery. They were asked to stay in the UK as potential witnesses in the ongoing investigation into Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers.

After a five-year wait, the case was dropped after some of the men failed to identify suspects during an identity parade.

In a letter from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) this year, Vishal was told that, while prosecutors said there was evidence a crime had been committed, there was not enough evidence to prove the identity of the perpetrator.

Disclosure: Slavery at Sea

A three-year investigation uncovers allegations of modern slavery aboard UK fishing vessels.

Watch on BBC iPlayer or on BBC Scotland at 21:00 on Monday.

The Filipinos’ case finally reached Hamilton Sheriff Court in October 2022, some 10 years after the men were removed from the boats.

Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers pleaded guilty to failing to get adequate care for Joel Quince. The Crown accepted his not guilty plea to withholding some of the Filipino crewmen’s passports without reasonable excuse.

Despite the Home Office’s conclusion that the men were trafficking victims, the case did not involve charges of trafficking or modern slavery.

Thomas Nicholson Snr was fined £13,500 and ordered to pay Joel £3,000 in compensation.

Text message exchanges between Nicholson Snr and the vessel’s skipper Tom Nicholson Jr on the day of the accident were read out in court, in which the father instructed his son not to take Joel ashore for medical treatment.

After hearing the messages, Joel told the BBC: “He was a devil with a human image. He doesn’t see me as a person… he doesn’t see us.”

Thomas Nicholson Snr was the director of TN Trawlers, TN Enterprises, Sea Lady Trawlers, and Olivia Jean. The companies owned at least six scallop dredgers.

A spokesman for TN Group said it disputed suggestions that workers were mistreated.

It said it always provided food and accommodation to workers and that they were “always free to come and go when ashore”.

He said: “The overwhelming experience of our workers was that they were well treated and well remunerated. We dispute many of the accounts put to us, in some cases over a decade on.

“We absolutely refute any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and our many testimonials and long-term employees are testament to that.”

He said the company regretted the delay in bringing Joel Quince ashore for medical treatment.

“We fell short on that occasion. We have accepted responsibility, compensated and we apologise to that individual,” said the spokesman.

“Working conditions on the high seas, sometimes in dangerous waters and in a confined environment, are extremely difficult.”

The Crown Office said it was fully committed to tackling human trafficking.

“We recognise that the time taken in dealing with these complex and challenging matters has been difficult for those affected,” said a spokesperson.

“COPFS deal with every case on its own individual facts and circumstances and takes action where it assesses there is sufficient admissible evidence that a crime has been committed and it is in the public interest to do so.”

Life after TN Trawlers has seen mixed fortunes for its former crewmen.

Many of those involved in Operation Alto have had their permission to remain in the UK extended, some indefinitely. This enables them to work in the UK and support their families – something they had always wanted.

The men from Ghana interviewed by the BBC have seen their leave to remain expire, meaning they face the possibility of leaving the UK.

However, all the men spoke of their bitterness at working for the company – and their experience of the justice system in the UK.

Joel Quince said his eyes had been opened.

“I see now how it works,” he said.

“This is how your UK law is done… You favour the wealthy people, and you don’t care about the poor.”

With just three months to go before the 2024 election, thousands of people are gathering in Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention.

It’s a tradition dating back to the 1830s, when a group of Democratic delegates supporting President Andrew Jackson gathered in Baltimore to nominate him for a second term.

This year will look slightly different from others, as the party has already officially nominated Vice-President Kamala Harris in a virtual roll call after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

But many of the other DNC traditions – including appearances from celebrities and memorable speeches from party leaders – will remain the same. Here’s what to know.

This year’s convention is taking place at the United Center Arena in Chicago from Monday 19 August to Thursday 22 August.

• The many identities of the first female vice-president
• A simple guide to the US election
• Project 2025 – a wishlist for a Trump presidency

Because Ms Harris and Mr Walz have already been nominated, this year’s convention will focus on speeches from prominent Democrats and the adoption of the party’s platform.

Delegates work during the day to finalise the platform, a draft of which has already been released.

It focuses on a broad range of issues, including plans to lower inflation, mitigate climate change and tackle gun violence. In the draft, Democrats contrast each of the party positions with Project 2025, an ultra-conservative blueprint for what a second Trump administration could look like, authored by the Heritage Foundation. Trump has sought to distance himself from the project, though several of his allies were involved in writing it.

Dozens of prominent Democrats and celebrities will be taking the stage in Chicago.

President Biden will headline the convention on Monday night, and his record will be honoured throughout the evening.

The crowd will also hear from First Lady Jill Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Maryland Rep Jamie Raskin, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democratic leaders. Americans affected by abortion bans in Republican-controlled states and voices from the labour movement – including United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain – will be heard as well.

The first evening of the DNC will “showcase Kamala Harris’s commitment to fighting for everyday Americans” with a particular focus on “freedom”, DNC officials told reporters.

On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama is expected to deliver remarks, as is former First Lady Michelle Obama. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Ms Harris’s husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, will also address the convention on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s line-up reportedly features former President Bill Clinton and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, among others.

Ms Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will give the prime-time speech that night after his nomination.

The most important night of the convention is Thursday, when Vice-President Harris will take the stage. She will formally accept the presidential nomination and give her speech on the final night of the convention dedicated “For the Future”.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will also take the stage at some point during the week.

Famous politicians aren’t the only ones who will make an appearance. The convention will also hear from several everyday Americans, including Trump voters.

Around 50,000 people are expected to attend this year’s convention in Chicago. This includes thousands of delegates chosen by state Democratic parties as well as super delegates, who are major elected officials, notable members of the Democratic Party and some members of the Democratic National Committee.

Thousands of members of the media will also be in attendance.

It will be a star-studded convention with appearances from several celebrities. In 2020, actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Eva Longoria attended the convention, while Elizabeth Banks and America Ferrera appeared in 2016.

Rumours have swirled about whether mega-stars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift will attend this year, but neither has confirmed.

Demonstrations are planned for outside the DNC venue, many of which are centred around opposition to US support of Israel’s war in Gaza. Organisers have said as many as 10,000 people could take part in marches. Protesters have been haggling with the city of Chicago about where they can demonstrate.

Members of the public can only attend the convention in person by becoming volunteers. But as with the Republican convention, there will be plenty of national media coverage, and the convention itself will offer live-streams on social media platforms.

You’ll be able to follow BBC News coverage – featuring on-site reporting and analysis – across the website and app, and on our live-stream.

The BBC News Channel will carry special coverage from 20:00 ET (01:00 BST) each night. You can find special episodes of The Global Story and Americast podcasts on BBC Sounds and other podcast platforms.

Sign up to North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s election newsletter US Election Unspun for his take on the week’s events direct to your inbox.

• VOTERS: What Democrats make of Tim Walz as VP
• EXPLAINER: Where the election could be won and lost
• ANALYSIS: Harris faced years of doubt, but she still prepared

The religious composition of Indians who emigrate differs significantly from those who stay in India, analysis by the US-based Pew Research Center has found.

About 80% of people in India are Hindu, but they form only 41% of emigrants from the country, the survey on the religious composition of the world’s migrants says.

In contrast, about 15% of people living in India are Muslim, compared with 33% of those who were born in India and now live elsewhere.

Christians make up only about 2% of the Indian population, but 16% who have left India are Christian.

“Many more Muslims and Christians have left India than have moved there. People of other, smaller religions, like Sikhs and Jains, are also disproportionately likely to have left India,” Stephanie Kramer, a lead researcher of the analysis, told me.

More than 280 million people, or 3.6% of the world’s population, are international migrants.

As of 2020, Christians comprised 47% of the global migrant population, Muslims 29%, Hindus 5%, Buddhists 4% and Jews 1%, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of UN data and 270 censuses and surveys.

The religiously unaffiliated, including atheists and agnostics, made up 13% of global migrants who have left their country of birth.

The migrant population in the analysis includes anyone living outside their birthplace, from babies to oldest adults. They could have been born at any time as long as they are still alive.

As far as India is concerned, the analysis found that the religious make-up of the population who have moved to India is much more similar to that of the country’s overall population.

Also, Hindus are starkly under-represented among international migrants (5%) compared with their share of the global population (15%). There are about one billion Hindus around the world.

“This seems to be because Hindus are so concentrated in India and people born in India are very unlikely to leave,” said Ms Kramer.

“More people who were born in India are living elsewhere than from any other country of origin, but these millions of emigrants represent a small fraction of India’s population.”

About 99% of Hindus lived in Asia back in 2010, almost entirely in India and Nepal, and researchers say they wouldn’t expect that share to drop much, if at all.

Since partition, India hasn’t experienced a mass migration event, and many of those who migrated then are no longer alive.

“In contrast, other religious groups are more dispersed globally and face more push factors that drive emigration,” Ms Kramer said.

So are Hindus some sort of a global outlier in this respect?

Researchers say Hindus do stand out in comparison to the other religious groups analysed.

“They’re less likely to leave home than people of other faiths, and their global migration patterns mostly depend on who leaves and arrives in India, rather than a broad collection of countries like other major religions,” says Ms Kramer.

The analysis found that Hindus have the longest average migration distance of 4,988km (3,100 miles), often moving from India to distant places like the US and the UK.

Researchers attribute this to the lack of recent crises forcing Hindus to flee to nearby countries. Instead, most are economic migrants seeking job opportunities, often in distant locations.

India certainly isn’t unique in having an emigrant population with a religious make-up different from those still living in the country.

Hindus are over-represented among emigrants from Bangladesh, according to the survey.

The study estimates that fewer than 10% of residents of Bangladesh are Hindu but 21% of the people who have left Bangladesh are Hindu.

Around 90% of people living in Bangladesh are Muslim, but 67% of emigrants from Bangladesh are Muslim.

Hindus make up only about 2% of Pakistan’s population, and 8% of people who were born in Pakistan and now live elsewhere are Hindu.

Myanmar has a lower percentage of Muslims in its population of residents compared with its emigrant population. Muslims make up about 4% of Myanmar’s resident population and 36% of its emigrant population.

Clearly, Muslims also migrate out of majority-Muslim countries. But religious minorities in those countries often migrate more.

So what does the Pew report broadly reveal about the religious composition of the world’s migrants?

“We find that people often go to places where their religion is common, and that those from minority religious groups within their country of birth are more likely to leave,” says Ms Kramer.

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s jailed former prime minister, appears to be eyeing up a new role from behind bars – that of Oxford University chancellor.

Mr Khan, who has been in prison for more than a year on charges he says are politically motivated, submitted his application ahead of the deadline on Sunday night, his adviser confirmed on X.

The one-time cricket star is already an honorary fellow of Oxford’s Keble College, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) in 1972.

The University of Oxford gave no comment about the specific application and will not confirm the candidates for the position until early October with voting to be held online on 28 October.

Previously candidates were required to be nominated by 50 members of the University’s Convocation.

The Oxford chancellor’s role is largely ceremonial and is voted for by graduates of the university who have had their degree conferred provided they have registered to vote and members of the university’s congregations including academic staff.

Candidates cannot be current students, employees of the University or candidates to political office.

Christopher Patten is the outgoing chancellor, who has held the position since 2003.

Lord Patten, 80, was the last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992.

Imran Khan was jailed on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts.

Cases against the former politician mounted and the 71-year-old was given three long prison sentences, but all of these have now fallen away.

A United Nations panel declared his detention was arbitrary but Mr Khan remains in jail with new cases against his name.

US talk show host Phil Donahue has died at the age of 88, his family has confirmed to the US media.

The presenter died at his home on Sunday after a long illness and surrounded by family, according to a statement issued to NBC’s Today show.

Donahue, who created and hosted The Phil Donahue Show, was considered the “king of daytime talk” in the US.

Over his career, Donahue interviewed well-known figures including Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr, Sir Elton John, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Dolly Parton and Michael J Fox.

Donahue is considered a trailblazer in the daytime television landscape.

His TV show was the first to include many elements familiar to viewers today, including participation from the studio audience.

He hosted more than 6,000 editions of his talk show between 1967 and 1996.

Born in Cleveland in 1935, Donahue began his media career in the late 1950s in talk radio and television, launching his eponymous talk show in 1967.

In 1974, the show relocated from Ohio to Chicago and changed its name to simply Donahue.

The show got into its groove soon after, once Donahue began involving the studio audience in discussions and the programme more widely.

Donahue married his second wife, actress Marlo Thomas, in 1980 after the two first met three years earlier when she was a guest on his talk show.

For its last decade on air, the show was hosted from New York City. The final episode was broadcast in September 1996.

Donahue was credited with changing the face of daytime television and challenging assumptions about what female audiences in particular wanted from talk shows.

“If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey Show,” Winfrey wrote in the September 2002 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine.

“He was the first to acknowledge that women are interested in more than mascara tips and cake recipes – that we’re intelligent, we’re concerned about the world around us and we want the best possible lives for ourselves.”

Donahue himself once said: “I honestly believe we have spoken more thoughtfully, more honestly, more often to more issues about which women care than any other show.”

He won 20 Emmy Awards across his career, 10 of which were for outstanding host and 10 for the talk show itself.

Earlier this year, he was awarded the medal of freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US, by President Joe Biden.

Donahue is survived by Thomas and four children from his first marriage.

Nasty – a slinky, innuendo-laden jam by US R&B star Tinashe – has beaten hit songs by Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish to be named the UK’s TikTok song of the summer.

The song soundtracked more than 10 million videos on the video sharing app, where the standout lyric “match my freak” became a popular catchphrase.

But in a sign that TikTok’s stranglehold on the music industry may be waning, the song only got to number 66 in the UK charts, and 61 in the US.

By contrast, last year’s song of the summer on TikTok, Dave and Central Cee’s Sprinter, sold 1.2 million copies and spent 10 weeks at number one.

Tinashe’s song became a viral sensation in April, when its sensuous groove was superimposed on a video of bespectacled British dancer Nate de Winer.

That edit has been watched more than 13 million times, with De Winer’s dance recreated by everyone from Christina Aguilera to Janet Jackson.

It was even spliced into footage of King Charles revealing his official portrait at Buckingham Palace in May.

Tinashe, whose career was held back by record label shenanigans, suddenly found herself with a hit, 10 years after her debut single.

“I was saying this to my mom the other day, 10 years later, who would have thought?” she told Variety magazine.

“I definitely think that everything that I’ve done up to now, all those grinding it out moments where I just had my head down and was just putting out the best music I could and being really consistent and making great visuals and things like that, it’s all led up to this.”

Other artists who had breakout success on TikTok this summer included British singer-songwriter Blood Orange, whose vibey 2011 single Champagne Coast enjoyed an unexpected resurgence; and pop star Sabrina Carpenter, whose breakout hits Espresso and Please Please Please both made the app’s Top 10.

TikTok’s Top 10 songs of the summer (UK)

1. Tinashe – Nasty
2. Blood Orange – Champagne Coast
3. Tommy Richman – Million Dollar Baby
4. Leostaytrill & Mr Reload It – Pink Lemonade (Str8 Reload)
5. Sabrina Carpenter – Please Please Please
6. Billie Eilish – Birds Of A Feather
7. Central Cee & Lil Baby – Band4Band
8. Myles Smith – Stargazing
9. Jordan Adetunji – Kehlani
10. Sabrina Carpenter – Espresso

Tinashe’s song was also TikTok’s second-biggest song of the summer globally.

The number one spot in that chart went to Chilean artists’ Cris MJ and Floyymenor for their infectious reggaeton track, Gata Only, which was used in more than 15 million videos.

TikTok’s Top 10 songs of the summer (Global)

1. FloyyMenor and Cris MJ – Gata Only
2. Tinashe – Nasty
3. Tommy Richman – Million Dollar Baby
4. Billie Eilish – Birds Of A Feather
5. Sevdaliza – Alibi
6. Sabrina Carpenter – Please Please Please
7. El Alfa, Nfasis – Este
8. Lay Bankz – Tell Ur Girlfriend
9. Luis R Conriquez, Neton Vega – Si No Quieres No
10. Karol G – Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido

TikTok’s list, based on its own data, shows how viral success doesn’t always translate to wider success.

Tinashe’s song has yet to sell the equivalent of 200,000 copies in the UK – the threshold for a silver disc.

Three other tracks featured in the UK’s “songs of the summer” have failed to crack the official Top 40.

The shift reflects TikTok’s declining emphasis on music, as it focuses more on long-form videos and directing users to its shopping platform.

“Breakout music virality has become rare,” wrote the New York Times’ pop critic Jon Caramanica earlier this year.

“When marketers and publicists realized that TikTok was their best hope for attention, they swarmed, turning the app into a conventional promotional dust bowl.”

The app has also been harmed by a spat with Universal, one of the world’s three largest record companies.

In January, the company pulled millions of songs from TikTok after talks over royalty payments broke down.

Suddenly, users (and Universal’s own artists) found that their most popular videos had gone silent.

Although the dispute was resolved in May, the experience made some creators cautious about using commercial music in their videos.

TikTok is stil vital for artists promoting their work – and the roll-out of Charli XCX’s zeitgeist-gobbling Brat album was masterfully conducted on the app.

But, crucially, it was only one component of a bigger marketing campaign.

The days of TikTok breaking another artist like Lil Nas X, Doja Cat or PinkPantheress may not be over, but the likelihood has diminished.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter are among the six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.

The 56m (183ft) vessel was carrying 22 people including British, American and Canadian nationals. Fifteen people were rescued, including a one-year-old British girl, and authorities are continuing their search into the night.

Local media reported the yacht, named Bayesian, capsized at about 05:00 local time after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.

Mr Lynch, known by some as “the British Bill Gates”, co-founded software company Autonomy, which was later bought by tech giant Hewlett-Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn).

Witnesses told Italian news agency Ansa that the Bayesian’s anchor was down when the storm struck, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose its balance and sink off the coast of village Porticello, near Sicilian capital Palermo.

A waterspout is similar to a tornado and can form over oceans, seas or large lakes.

Divers have identified a wreckage 50m below the water’s surface and are searching for those missing.

The director general of Sicily’s civil protection agency, Salvatore Cocina, told the BBC Mr Lynch, his daughter Hannah Lynch and the yacht’s chef were among the missing.

He said the search, involving caving and rescue diving teams, would continue overnight.

The body of one man was found outside of the wreckage. His nationality has not been confirmed.

BBC Verify looked at corporate records and found the Bayesian’s ownership is tied to Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.

Sources close to the matter have confirmed to the BBC Ms Bacares has been rescued.

Fifteen people managed to get to safety after the storm hit.

Ansa news agency reported a 35-year-old mother held her one-year-old daughter in her arms in the sea.

The woman, named as locally as Charlotte Golunski, said: “For two seconds I lost the little girl in the sea, then I immediately hugged her again amidst the fury of the waves.

“I held her tightly, close to me, while the sea was stormy. Many were screaming.

“Luckily the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on board.”

The baby is fine and the mother was treated with stitches, the agency said.

She added she had been on the boat with her husband, who is also safe, and colleagues from a London company.

A doctor based at the Di Cristina Hospital in Palermo, where some of the survivors were taken, said they were “very tired” and “constantly asking about the missing people”.

Dr Domenico Cipolla told Reuters news agency: “We have given the survivors this information, but they are talking and crying all the time because they have realised that there is little hope of finding their friends alive.”

Survivors said the trip has been organised by Mr Lynch for his work colleagues.

In the initial aftermath, a nearby Dutch-flagged vessel rescued survivors from the waves, tending to them until emergency services arrived.

Captain Karsten Borner said after the storm had passed, the crew noticed that the yacht that had been behind them had disappeared.

“We saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position, and we found this life raft drifting,” he told Reuters.

That life raft was carrying 15 survivors, three of whom were “heavily injured”, he said.

A local fisherman told Reuters news agency he had seen people being rescued by an inflatable boat dispatched from another yacht.

The captain of a local fishing trawler said he saw debris, including cushions from the deck, floating in the sea.

Footage from the wreckage site showed helicopters circling over several coastguard vessels as divers wearing bright orange descended into the water.

Eight of those rescued are receiving treatment in hospital, the Italian coastguard said.

The western half of the Mediterranean has experienced severe storms since the middle of last week.

Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, a clutch of bad weather passed by the north coast of Sicily.

BBC Weather forecaster Matt Taylor said: “A waterspout is a tornado that has occurred over water rather than land.

“They can form during intense storms, on the base of cumulonimbus/thunder clouds.

“Turbulence, and the wind blowing in slightly different directions around the cloud, can cause rotation under the base of the cloud and the spout to form.

“Like tornadoes, they bring powerful winds, but instead of picking up dust and debris they cause a water mist around the column of rotating air.”

The UK Foreign Office said it is supporting a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily. Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also sending a team of inspectors to conduct a “preliminary assessment” into the sinking of the UK registered-boat.

The Bayesian’s registered owner is listed as Revtom Ltd. The superyacht can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites.

The yacht’s name is understood to be based on the Bayesian theory, which Mr Lynch’s PhD thesis was based on.

Mr Lynch’s wife Ms Bacares is named as the sole legal owner of Revtom registered in the Isle of Man.

A spokesperson for Camper and Nicholsons International, the firm that manages the 2008-built boat, told BBC Verify: “Our priority is assisting with the ongoing search and providing all necessary support to the rescued passengers and crew.”

Mr Lynch sold his company Autonomy to American computing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011 for $11bn (£8.6bn).

But an intense legal battle following the high-profile acquisition loomed over Mr Lynch for over a decade. He was acquitted in the US in June on multiple fraud charges, for which he had been facing two decades in jail.

The sinking of the yacht came on the same day that Mr Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, was confirmed by his lawyer as having died after being hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

In January 2015, Abdullah, the 90-year-old king of Saudi Arabia, was dying in hospital. His half-brother, Salman, was about to become king – and Salman’s favourite son, Mohammed bin Salman, was preparing for power.

The prince, known simply by his initials MBS and then just 29 years old, had big plans for his kingdom, the biggest plans in its history; but he feared that plotters within his own Saudi royal family could eventually move against him. So at midnight one evening that month, he summoned a senior security official to the palace, determined to win his loyalty.

The official, Saad al-Jabri, was told to leave his mobile phone on a table outside. MBS did the same. The two men were now alone. The young prince was so fearful of palace spies that he pulled the socket out of the wall, disconnecting the only landline telephone.

According to Jabri, MBS then talked about how he would wake his kingdom up from its deep slumber, allowing it to take its rightful place on the global stage. By selling a stake in the state oil producer Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, he would begin to wean his economy off its dependency on oil. He would invest billions in Silicon Valley tech startups including the taxi firm, Uber. Then, by giving Saudi women the freedom to join the workforce, he would create six million new jobs.

Astonished, Jabri asked the prince about the extent of his ambition. “Have you heard of Alexander the Great?” came the simple reply.

MBS ended the conversation there. A midnight meeting that was scheduled to last half-an-hour had gone on for three. Jabri left the room to find several missed calls on his mobile from government colleagues worried about his long disappearance.

The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince

The story of the extraordinary rise to power of the man who runs Saudi Arabia and whose control of oil affects everyone, starting with how he outwitted hundreds of rivals to become crown prince.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

For the past year, our documentary team has been talking to both Saudi friends and opponents of MBS, as well as senior Western spies and diplomats. The Saudi government was given the opportunity to respond to the claims made in the BBC’s films and in this article. They chose not to do so.

Saad al-Jabri was so high up in the Saudi security apparatus that he was friends with the heads of the CIA and MI6. While the Saudi government has called Jabri a discredited former official, he’s also the most well-informed Saudi dissident to have dared speak about how the crown prince rules Saudi Arabia – and the rare interview he has given us is astonishing in its detail.

By gaining access to many who know the prince personally, we shed new light on the events that have made MBS notorious – including the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the launch of a devastating war in Yemen.

With his father increasingly frail, the 38-year-old MBS is now de facto in charge of the birthplace of Islam and the world’s biggest exporter of oil. He’s begun to carry out many of the groundbreaking plans he described to Saad al-Jabri – while also being accused of human rights violations including the suppression of free speech, widespread use of the death penalty and jailing of women’s rights activists.

The first king of Saudi Arabia fathered at least 42 sons, including MBS’s father, Salman. The crown has traditionally been passed down between these sons. It was when two of them suddenly died in 2011 and 2012 that Salman was elevated into the line of succession.

Western spy agencies make it their business to study the Saudi equivalent of Kremlinology – working out who will be the next king. At this stage, MBS was so young and unknown that he wasn’t even on their radar.

“He grew up in relative obscurity,” says Sir John Sawers, chief of MI6 until 2014. “He wasn’t earmarked to rise to power.”

The crown prince also grew up in a palace in which bad behaviour had few, if any, consequences; and that may help explain his notorious habit of not thinking through the impact of his decisions until he had already made them.

MBS first achieved notoriety in Riyadh in his late teens, when he was nicknamed “Abu Rasasa” or “Father of the Bullet”, after allegedly sending a bullet in the post to a judge who had overruled him in a property dispute.

“He has had a certain ruthlessness,” observes Sir John Sawers. “He doesn’t like to be crossed. But that also means he’s been able to drive through changes that no other Saudi leader has been able to do.”

Among the most welcome changes, the former MI6 chief says, has been cutting off Saudi funding to overseas mosques and religious schools that became breeding grounds for Islamist jihadism – at huge benefit to the safety of the West.

MBS’s mother, Fahda, is a Bedouin tribeswoman and seen as the favourite of his father’s four wives. Western diplomats believe the king has suffered for many years from a slow-onset form of vascular dementia; and MBS was the son he turned to for help.

Several diplomats recalled for us their meetings with MBS and his father. The prince would write notes on an iPad, then send them to his father’s iPad, as a way of prompting what he would say next.

“Inevitably I wondered whether MBS was typing out his lines for him,” recalls Lord Kim Darroch, National Security Adviser to David Cameron when he was British prime minister.

The prince was apparently so impatient for his father to become king that in 2014, he reportedly suggested killing the then-monarch – Abdullah, his uncle – with a poisoned ring, obtained from Russia.

“I don’t know for sure if he was just bragging, but we took it seriously,” says Jabri. The former senior security official says he has seen a secretly recorded surveillance video of MBS talking about the idea. “He was banned from court, from shaking hands with the king, for a considerable amount of time.”

In the event, the king died of natural causes, allowing his brother, Salman, to assume the throne in 2015. MBS was appointed Defence Minister and lost no time in going to war.

Two months later, the prince led a Gulf coalition into war against the Houthi movement, which had seized control of much of western Yemen and which he saw as a proxy of Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran. It triggered a humanitarian disaster, with millions on the brink of famine.

“It wasn’t a clever decision,” says Sir John Jenkins, who was British ambassador just before the war began. “One senior American military commander told me they had been given 12 hours’ notice of the campaign, which is unheard of.”

The military campaign helped turn a little-known prince into a Saudi national hero. However, it was also the first of what even his friends believe have been several major mistakes.

A recurring pattern of behaviour was emerging: MBS’s tendency to jettison the traditionally slow and collegiate system of Saudi decision-making, preferring to act unpredictably or upon impulse; and refusing to kowtow to the US, or be treated as head of a backward client state.

Jabri goes much further, accusing MBS of forging his father the king’s signature on a royal decree committing ground troops.

Jabri says he discussed the Yemen war in the White House before it started; and that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, warned him that the US would only support an air campaign.

However, Jabri claims MBS was so determined to press ahead in Yemen that he ignored the Americans.

“We were surprised that there was a royal decree to allow the ground interventions,” Jabri says. “He forged the signature of his dad for that royal decree. The king’s mental capacity was deteriorating.”

Jabri says his source for this allegation was “credible, reliable” and linked to the Ministry of Interior where he was chief of staff.

Jabri recalls the CIA station chief in Riyadh telling him how angry he was that MBS had ignored the Americans, adding that the invasion of Yemen should never have happened.

The former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers says that while he doesn’t know if MBS forged the documents, “it is clear that this was MBS’s decision to intervene militarily in Yemen. It wasn’t his father’s decision, although his father was carried along with it.”

We’ve discovered that MBS saw himself as an outsider from the very beginning – a young man with much to prove and a refusal to obey anybody’s rules other than his own.

Kirsten Fontenrose, who served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, says that when she read the CIA’s in-house psychological profile of the prince, she felt it missed the point.

“There were no prototypes to base him on,” she says. “He has had unlimited resources. He has never been told ‘no’. He is the first young leader to reflect a generation that, frankly, most of us in government are too old to understand.”

MBS’s purchase of a famous painting in 2017 tells us much about how he thinks, and his willingness to be a risk-taker, unafraid to be out of step with the religiously conservative society that he governs. And above all, determined to outplay the West in conspicuous displays of power.

In 2017, a Saudi prince reportedly acting for MBS spent $450m (£350m) on the Salvator Mundi, which remains the world’s most expensive work of art ever sold. The portrait, reputed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, depicts Jesus Christ as master of heaven and Earth, the saviour of the world. For almost seven years, ever since the auction, it has completely disappeared.

Bernard Haykel, a friend of the crown prince and Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, says that despite rumours that it hangs in the prince’s yacht or palace, the painting is actually in storage in Geneva and that MBS intends to hang it in a museum in the Saudi capital that has not yet been built.

“I want to build a very large museum in Riyadh,” Haykel quotes MBS as saying. “And I want an anchor object that will attract people, just like the Mona Lisa does.”

Similarly, his plans for sport reflect someone who is both hugely ambitious and unafraid to disrupt the status quo.

Saudi Arabia’s incredible spending spree on world-class sport – it is the sole bidder to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034, and has made multimillion-dollar investments in staging tournaments for tennis and golf – has been called “sportswashing”. But what we found is a leader who cares less about what the West thinks of him than he does about demonstrating the opposite: that he will do whatever he wants in the name of making himself and Saudi Arabia great.

“MBS is interested in building his own power as a leader,” says Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6, who has met him. “And the only way he can do that is by building his country’s power. That’s what’s driving him.”

Jabri’s 40-year career as a Saudi official did not survive MBS’s consolidation of power. Chief of staff for the former Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef, he fled the kingdom as MBS was taking over, after being tipped off by a foreign intelligence service that he could be in danger. But Jabri says MBS texted him out of the blue, offering him his old job back.

“It was bait – and I didn’t bite,” Jabri says, convinced he would have been tortured, imprisoned or killed if he returned. As it was, his teenage children, Omar and Sarah, were detained and later jailed for money laundering and for trying to escape – charges that they deny. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for their release.

“He planned for my assassination,” Jabri says. “He will not rest until he sees me dead, I have no doubt about that.”

Saudi officials have issued Interpol notices for Jabri’s extradition from Canada, without success. They claim he is wanted for corruption involving billions of dollars during his time at the interior ministry. However, he was given the rank of major-general and credited by the CIA and MI6 with helping to prevent al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 implicates MBS in ways that are very hard to refute. The 15-strong hit squad was travelling on diplomatic passports and included several of MBS’s own bodyguards. Khashoggi’s body has never been found and is believed to have been hacked into pieces with a bone saw.

Professor Haykel exchanged WhatsApp messages with MBS not long after the murder. “I was asking, ‘how could this happen?’,” Haykel recalls. “I think he was in deep shock. He didn’t realise the reaction to this was going to be as deep.”

Dennis Ross met MBS shortly afterwards. “He said he didn’t do it and that it was a colossal blunder,” says Ross. “I certainly wanted to believe him, because I couldn’t believe that he could authorise something [like] that.”

MBS has always denied knowledge of the plot, although in 2019 he said he took “responsibility” because the crime happened on his watch. A declassified US intelligence report released in February 2021 asserted that he was complicit in the killing of Khashoggi.

I asked those who know MBS personally whether he had learned from his mistakes; or whether having survived the Khashoggi affair, it had in fact emboldened him.

“He’s learned lessons the hard way,” says Professor Haykel, who says MBS resents the case being used as cudgel against him and his country, but that a killing like Khashoggi’s would not happen again.

Sir John Sawers cautiously agrees that the murder was a turning point. “I think he has learned some lessons. The personality, though, remains the same.”

His father, King Salman, is now aged 88. When he dies, MBS could rule Saudi Arabia for the next 50 years.

However, he has recently admitted he fears being assassinated, possibly as a consequence of his attempts to normalise Saudi-Israeli ties.

“I think there are lots of people who want to kill him,” says Professor Haykel, “and he knows it.”

Eternal vigilance is what keeps a man like MBS safe. It was what Saad al-Jabri observed at the beginning of the prince’s rise to power, when he pulled the telephone socket out of the wall before speaking to him in his palace.

MBS is still a man on a mission to modernise his country, in ways his predecessors would never have dared. But he’s also not the first autocrat who runs the risk of being so ruthless that nobody around him dares prevent him from making more mistakes.

Donald Trump appears to have falsely implied he has Taylor Swift’s endorsement, posting fake images on social media of the singer and her fans supporting him.

The Republican presidential candidate posted the message “I accept!” alongside the images, which were taken from other social media accounts. Many appear to have been created using artificial intelligence.

The post sparked a backlash among Swift’s fans, known as Swifties, who accused Trump of spreading misinformation.

The singer has not endorsed a candidate in the 2024 election but backed the Democrats in 2020 and criticised Trump while he was president.

One of the photos shared by Trump depicted Swift fans wearing t-shirts that read: “Swifties for Trump”.

The post appeared to have a label of “satire” with a headline that read: “Swifties turning to Trump after ISIS foiled Taylor Swift concert”.

Swift recently cancelled three concerts in Vienna following a possible security threat. Police arrested two people on suspicion of planning attacks inspired by the Islamic State group.

Another re-posted photo mimicked a World War One US army recruiting poster, which replaced Uncle Sam’s face with Swift’s and read: “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump”.

NBC News reported two of the images Trump re-posted feature real women who are Trump supporters.

Swift supported the Democratic Party in the 2020 election, and criticised Trump during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

“After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence?,” she posted on Twitter/X. “We will vote you out in November.”

Earlier this year, BBC discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people supporting Trump. There was no evidence linking the images to Trump’s campaign.

Clutching a toothbrush and toothpaste, Kevin Lik waited for six hours in the main office of penal colony 14, near Arkhangelsk in Russia’s far north-west. It was late in the evening of Sunday 28 July, and the 19-year-old says he had no idea what was about to happen.

“Maybe you’re taking me to be shot,” he said to the governor of the colony.

“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” came the reply.

Kevin says he was told the same thing by an officer from Russia’s FSB state security agency a year and a half ago, before they locked him up.

“I lost a lot of weight in the colony,” he explains shyly, as we speak on a video call. Kevin is about 6ft 4in tall (1.9m) but weighs only 11 stone (70kg).

Along with American journalist Evan Gershkovich, he is one of 16 people released by Russia on 1 August in a prisoner swap with the US and other Western countries.

The teenager – with dual Russian and German citizenship – was arrested last year while still at school and became the youngest person in modern Russian history to have been convicted of treason.

I ask if he considers himself more Russian or German. “It’s a very complicated question,” he replies.

Kevin was born in 2005 in Montabaur, a small town in the west of Germany. His Russian mother, Victoria, had married a German citizen and, although the marriage didn’t last, she and her son stayed.

They visited Russia every couple of years until Victoria decided she wanted to go back permanently – she missed her relatives and hometown of Maykop in the North Caucasus. Kevin was 12 when they made the move there in 2017.

They lived on the outskirts of town, in an apartment with views of mountains and a military base. Kevin says he loved walks in the countryside and collecting plants for his herbarium, and also studying at school.

He enthusiastically shows me certificates from national and local academic competitions that he won.

It was the 2018 Russian presidential election that sparked his interest in politics, he says. His mother – a public sector healthcare worker – would come home and say she and her colleagues had been bussed to polling stations where they were told: “Vote for Putin, or we’ll take away your bonus.”

He was only 12 at the time, but says he understood “there was almost no democracy in Russia”.

Kevin was enraged that almost every classroom in his school had a portrait of Putin.

“They constantly told us that school is not a place for politics. It’s just not right to hang portraits and promote a personality cult like that,” he says.

A year or so later, he caused a scandal when he swapped a school portrait of Putin for one of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“One teacher said that during Stalin’s time, I would have been shot,” Kevin recalls – while a sympathetic teacher, he says, advised him to be careful.

His mother was called to the school: “They scolded her, yelled at her,” he says.

The BBC has asked the school for comment, but has not had a response.

As Kevin approached his final school year, his mother decided they should move back to Germany.

By this time, Russia had invaded Ukraine and, in order to leave the country permanently, Kevin’s name had to be removed from the military register.

Victoria was invited to the enlistment office to sort out her son’s paperwork. When she got there on 9 February 2023, the police met her. Kevin says they groundlessly accused her of swearing in public. She was sentenced to 10 days’ detention, which meant they had to delay their plans to leave.

Left alone, Kevin stopped going to school. He ventured out for a few hours one day, and says that when he returned to the apartment “things had been moved around”.

When Victoria was released, they tried to get to Germany by heading south to the city of Sochi, which has an international airport. After checking into a hotel, Kevin says they went out for a snack and he noticed a man in a medical mask and hoodie filming them on his phone. Within seconds, he says a minibus pulled up.

“Eight or nine FSB officers jumped out. One grabbed me by the arm. Another came up, showed his ID, and said: ‘A criminal case has been opened against you under article 275: treason.’

“My eyes were wide with shock.”

The minibus took them to the hotel, where they collected their luggage. On the way back to Maykop they were put in a car without licence plates and taken to a pizzeria.

“They ordered pizza and offered us some. They didn’t handcuff me or restrain me. I was thinking everything over in my head but couldn’t understand how I had committed treason,” says Kevin.

He asked if he would be put in jail. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” came the response.

Kevin remembered a former FSB operative, Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a man in Berlin on Kremlin orders. He started wondering if Russia planned to use him – a German citizen – “as a hostage” to get Krasikov back.

They got home in the middle of the night. He shows me the video FSB officers made as they searched the apartment. They found a broken telescope – an old birthday present from his mother.

The authorities suspected he had used it to photograph military vehicles from his window to send to German intelligence. They took his phone and laptop and found pictures of the base.

Kevin freely admits he took the photos but says he had no intention of passing them on to anyone.

At 03:00, Kevin was taken to the local FSB building for interrogation. Because he was only 17, his mother went with him. He was scared.

Kevin says the lawyer assigned to him told him straight away that he should confess to reduce the sentence.

As we speak, he reels off details of Russia’s criminal code and uses legal terms to explain why he was wrongfully accused. But, back then, he had no idea how to handle the situation.

A confession had already been typed and Kevin agreed to sign it, which he later regretted. He says he was afraid if he didn’t sign, things would have “got worse because they could have started pressuring my mum”. The FSB investigator told them he had the power to seize their apartment, says Kevin.

“The testimony was absolute nonsense,” he says. “It’s a chess game, it was clear there was no justice.”

Because he was still a minor, he was taken to a special facility two hours’ drive away in Krasnodar and placed in a solitary cell. He had been up all night but couldn’t sleep.

“They brought me food but I couldn’t eat it. I really wanted to see my mum.”

A few months later, when he turned 18, he was moved to a different prison on the outskirts of Krasnodar where he mixed with other inmates.

Kevin says he was left terrified after a group of inmates beat him up. “They tied my hands, beat me, and even put out a cigarette on me. They hit me so hard in the chest I couldn’t breathe.”

All this time, the authorities continued to investigate him. His class teacher testified against him, claiming that when they had gone to an academic competition in Moscow Kevin had wanted to go to the German embassy to contact intelligence officers. Kevin tells me all he wanted was to get an official German ID, because he had turned 16.

A Ministry of Defence expert analysed the photos Kevin had taken and concluded they didn’t constitute a state secret but, in foreign hands, could have harmed Russia.

The FSB file on him also included details of childhood trips to Russia, including one when he was two years old. Kevin says he also found out his phone had been tapped as early as 2021.

Ten months after Kevin’s arrest, at the end of December 2023, he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to four years in a penal colony.

Apart from his mum, no-one he knew from Maykop contacted him after his arrest, but after the media reported his case, strangers began writing.

“The letters helped me a lot,” he says. “On my birthday, I received 60 cards. I made it my goal to reply to each person.”

The letters and cards were later confiscated.

Kevin’s journey to the penal colony in Arkhangelsk took a month, via several other prisons. He arrived there at the end of June this year. In those following weeks, he says he passed the time by reading and studying.

Suddenly, as he was leaving the bath house on Tuesday 23 July, he was approached by a senior prison officer and told he had 20 minutes to “urgently write a petition” for a presidential pardon, which he did.

Then, on the 28th, a prison officer stopped him and told him to get his toothbrush, toothpaste and slippers.

“Usually, you get this kit when they’re about to put you in the punishment cell,” explains Kevin. But instead, he was locked in an office.

At 01:00 on the morning of Monday 29th, a convoy arrived to take him away.

The thought of being exchanged was at the back of Kevin’s mind, but seemed too good to be true.

He was flown to Moscow, where he was kept in jail until Thursday 1 August, when he was put on a plane with the other prisoners who were being swapped.

It was never spelled out to him that he was being exchanged, he says, but by the time he was in the air bound for Turkey it was clear what was happening.

As Kevin had long-suspected, assassin Vadim Krasikov was among those being returned to Russia.

In Germany, after a hospital check-up, Kevin was finally able to greet his mother, who had got a visa to fly in from Russia.

“She cried. I told her everything was fine, not to worry, that I loved her very much.”

Mother and son are now living in Germany and Kevin is full of enthusiasm to finish school.

“I don’t have a desire for revenge, but I do have a very strong desire to participate in opposition activities,” he tells me.

Kevin still has his prison uniform, stuffed in a bag in the corner of his room.

When I ask what he wanted most of all while he was forced to wear it, he simply replies: “To hug Mum of course.”

Iran was behind the recent hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, US intelligence officials have confirmed.

The FBI and other federal agencies said in a joint statement that Iran had chosen to interfere in the US election “to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions”.

The Trump campaign pointed the finger at Iran on 10 August for hacking its internal messages. Iranian officials denied it.

Sources familiar with the investigation told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they suspect Iranian hackers also targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris.

“The [intelligence community] is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties,” US intelligence officials said in the statement.

“Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the US election process.”

The Trump campaign was reportedly sent a spear-phishing email – a message designed to look trustworthy in order to get the target to click on a malicious link.

The Harris campaign said last week it had also been the target of a spear-phishing attack, though it was unsuccessful.

The agencies that released Monday’s statement, including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the tactics were “not new” and noted that Russia and Iran had employed such methods during previous US elections.

It remains unclear what information, if any, was stolen during the hack. Trump said the hackers were only able to obtain publicly available information.

The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post said they were leaked confidential information from inside the Trump campaign, including on its vetting of his running mate, JD Vance. The outlets have so far declined to offer specifics.

US officials said it was clear Iran wanted to shape the outcome of elections it believes are “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests”.

The American intelligence agencies added that they had “observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle”.

There has been growing concern about potential Iranian hackers.

Recently, Microsoft said it had seen “the emergence of significant influence activity” by groups linked to Iran.

Before he dropped out of the White House race last month, President Joe Biden’s campaign was targeted by Iranian hackers, as was Trump’s, according to Google.

The religious composition of Indians who emigrate differs significantly from those who stay in India, analysis by the US-based Pew Research Center has found.

About 80% of people in India are Hindu, but they form only 41% of emigrants from the country, the survey on the religious composition of the world’s migrants says.

In contrast, about 15% of people living in India are Muslim, compared with 33% of those who were born in India and now live elsewhere.

Christians make up only about 2% of the Indian population, but 16% who have left India are Christian.

“Many more Muslims and Christians have left India than have moved there. People of other, smaller religions, like Sikhs and Jains, are also disproportionately likely to have left India,” Stephanie Kramer, a lead researcher of the analysis, told me.

More than 280 million people, or 3.6% of the world’s population, are international migrants.

As of 2020, Christians comprised 47% of the global migrant population, Muslims 29%, Hindus 5%, Buddhists 4% and Jews 1%, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of UN data and 270 censuses and surveys.

The religiously unaffiliated, including atheists and agnostics, made up 13% of global migrants who have left their country of birth.

The migrant population in the analysis includes anyone living outside their birthplace, from babies to oldest adults. They could have been born at any time as long as they are still alive.

As far as India is concerned, the analysis found that the religious make-up of the population who have moved to India is much more similar to that of the country’s overall population.

Also, Hindus are starkly under-represented among international migrants (5%) compared with their share of the global population (15%). There are about one billion Hindus around the world.

“This seems to be because Hindus are so concentrated in India and people born in India are very unlikely to leave,” said Ms Kramer.

“More people who were born in India are living elsewhere than from any other country of origin, but these millions of emigrants represent a small fraction of India’s population.”

About 99% of Hindus lived in Asia back in 2010, almost entirely in India and Nepal, and researchers say they wouldn’t expect that share to drop much, if at all.

Since partition, India hasn’t experienced a mass migration event, and many of those who migrated then are no longer alive.

“In contrast, other religious groups are more dispersed globally and face more push factors that drive emigration,” Ms Kramer said.

So are Hindus some sort of a global outlier in this respect?

Researchers say Hindus do stand out in comparison to the other religious groups analysed.

“They’re less likely to leave home than people of other faiths, and their global migration patterns mostly depend on who leaves and arrives in India, rather than a broad collection of countries like other major religions,” says Ms Kramer.

The analysis found that Hindus have the longest average migration distance of 4,988km (3,100 miles), often moving from India to distant places like the US and the UK.

Researchers attribute this to the lack of recent crises forcing Hindus to flee to nearby countries. Instead, most are economic migrants seeking job opportunities, often in distant locations.

India certainly isn’t unique in having an emigrant population with a religious make-up different from those still living in the country.

Hindus are over-represented among emigrants from Bangladesh, according to the survey.

The study estimates that fewer than 10% of residents of Bangladesh are Hindu but 21% of the people who have left Bangladesh are Hindu.

Around 90% of people living in Bangladesh are Muslim, but 67% of emigrants from Bangladesh are Muslim.

Hindus make up only about 2% of Pakistan’s population, and 8% of people who were born in Pakistan and now live elsewhere are Hindu.

Myanmar has a lower percentage of Muslims in its population of residents compared with its emigrant population. Muslims make up about 4% of Myanmar’s resident population and 36% of its emigrant population.

Clearly, Muslims also migrate out of majority-Muslim countries. But religious minorities in those countries often migrate more.

So what does the Pew report broadly reveal about the religious composition of the world’s migrants?

“We find that people often go to places where their religion is common, and that those from minority religious groups within their country of birth are more likely to leave,” says Ms Kramer.

A British-Mexican man convicted of drug offences in Qatar after being detained there for six months has told BBC News he “never thought I’d return home”.

In his first interview since leaving the country, Manuel Guerrero Aviña, who says he was targeted because he is gay, warned LGBT people to “be careful when visiting Qatar”, saying: “What happened to me could happen to anyone.”

He was arrested in February after arranging to meet a man – who he later found out was an undercover police officer – using gay dating app Grindr.

Human-rights groups have raised concerns over Manuel’s detention and called his trial “grossly unfair” – but Qatari officials insist he was arrested because of drug offences.

The 45-year-old former British Airways worker now wants to focus on returning to work and spending time with his family.

Manuel made headlines around the world following his arrest and his family started a campaign for him to be freed.

At a court hearing in June, he was found guilty of possessing an illegal substance, given a six-month suspended prison sentence, fined £2,100 and was the subject of a deportation order.

After returning to the UK, he has – for the first time – given a first-hand account of his 44 days in a Qatari prison and subsequent detention in the country.

“There were so many times I was terrified,” Manuel said.

“I thought I would never be able to leave.

“I thought I might get lost in the system.

“I was really scared.

“I never thought I’d return home safely.”

Manuel has always insisted police officers planted drugs in his flat and says the real reason for his arrest was his sexuality.

“I absolutely deny the drugs charges,” he told BBC News.

“Throughout the entire interrogation, everything they asked me about was about my sexual partners, my sexual orientation, whether I’ve been having sex, who I have had sex with and things like that.

“If it was just a drugs case, they would have been asking me about drugs.”

Homosexuality is criminalised in Qatar and human-rights organisations have repeatedly raised concerns about the treatment of LGBT people in the country.

But Manuel said he had lived there for seven years without getting in trouble with police.

“There seemed to be an unwritten rule that whatever went on in private was OK,” he said.

“I thought I was being compliant by being discreet when [in public] and following the rules – but I was just trying to live a little bit of my life behind doors.

“I thought it was fine as long as it wasn’t in public.”

BBC News previously reported how, on 4 February, Manuel had been messaging a man on dating apps Grindr and Tinder and invited him to his flat.

After going to meet the man in the lobby of his building, Manuel says he was instead met by police officers who handcuffed him before searching his flat, eventually arresting him.

During his time in prison, Manuel says, he witnessed people being whipped and was moved into cramped conditions after refusing to unlock his phone or disclose the names and phone numbers of other LGBT people living in Qatar.

“They were trying to force me to confess and unlock my phone – but I couldn’t put other people from the gay community at risk,” he said.

“Why would I put someone else through that pain?”

BBC News has seen a confession, written in Arabic, which Manuel says he was forced to thumbprint without the presence of a lawyer or the aid of a translator.

We cannot independently verify all of his claims.

Many of the accusations about his treatment after his arrest relate to time spent behind closed doors with few witnesses.

But the Guerrero Aviña family has shared a detailed timeline of events – and previous reporting on the treatment of LGBT people and the behaviour of police officers in Qatar suggest others have had similar experiences.

A Qatari official told BBC News Manuel had been treated with “dignity and respect throughout his detention” and sentenced “following an investigation and trial”.

He had been arrested “for possessing an illegal substance” and “no other factors were considered when making the arrest”.

“Mr Aviña and his family have made numerous false allegations in an attempt to generate public sympathy and support for his case,” the official said.

“A person’s beliefs, background or orientation do not exempt them from the law, especially when facing serious charges related to drug possession.

“Qatar has stringent laws governing the possession of illegal drugs – and the authorities are continuously working to combat this issue.

“As Mr Aviña himself has acknowledged, he lived in Qatar without any issues for seven years.”

But former British diplomat in Qatar and co-director of human-rights organisation FairSquare James Lynch said the trial had been “grossly unfair” and likened it to other cases he had dealt with.

“Manuel was clearly targeted because he was LGBT and living in Qatar and living his life,” Mr Lynch said.

“Over the last three years, we’ve dealt with several cases of people who’ve been arrested and then interrogated without a lawyer.

“The Qataris need to sort out the way justice is delivered in the country.”

Manuel, who is living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was also supported by HIV charities in the UK, after claims he had not been given regular access to his medication, which keeps the virus under control.

He said: “I had to beg on a daily basis to prison officers to try and get access to my medication.

“It was a really difficult time for me without access to my medication, because you’re worried about the effects on your health and it also has an impact on your mental health.”

Now back in the UK, Manuel says, he is receiving medical attention and slowly becoming more able to be his true self.

“It’s not about seeing symbols everywhere like rainbows or flags,” he said.

“It’s more that it feels amazing to be able to recover some of the small things that you don’t realise you’ve lost until you have them back.

“Things like seeing people holding hands in the street, being able to be affectionate with my friends without thinking about how we’re interacting, being able to do that without it being behind closed doors.”

Fayaz and his wife believed they were moments from safety when the bombs began to fall: “We were getting on the boat one after another – that’s when they started bombing us.”

Wails and shouts filled the air around 17:00 local time on 5 August, Fayaz* says, as thousands of scared Rohingyas made their way to the banks of the Naf river in the town of Maungdaw.

Attacks on villages earlier in the area meant this was what hundreds of families, including Fayaz’s, saw as their only option – that to get to safety, they had to escape from western Myanmar to Bangladesh’s safer shores.

Fayaz was carrying bags stuffed with whatever they had managed to grab. His wife was carrying their six-year-old daughter, their eldest was running alongside them. His wife’s sister was walking ahead, with the couple’s eight-month-old son in her arms.

The first bomb killed his sister-in-law instantly. The baby was badly injured – but alive.

“I ran and carried him… But he died while we were waiting for the bombing to stop.”

Nisar* had also made it to the riverbank by about 17:00, having decided to escape with his mother, wife, son, daughter and sister. “We heard drones overhead and then the loud sound of an explosion,” he recalls. “We were all thrown to the ground. They dropped bombs on us using drones.”

Nisar was the only one of his family to survive.

Fayaz, his wife and daughter escaped and would eventually make it across the river. Despite his pleas, the boatman refused to allow Fayaz to bring the baby’s body with them. “He said there was no point in carrying the dead, so I dug a hole by the river bank and hastily buried him.”

Now they’re all in the relative safety of Bangladesh, but if they are caught by authorities here they could be sent back. Nisar clutches a Quran, unable still to process how his world was shattered in a single day.

“If I’d known what would happen, I would never have tried to leave that day,” Nisar says.

It is notoriously difficult to piece together what is happening in Myanmar’s civil war. But the BBC has managed to construct a picture of what happened on the evening of 5 August through a series of exclusive interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya survivors who escaped to Bangladesh, and the videos they shared.

All of the survivors – unarmed Rohingya civilians – recount hearing many bombs exploding over a period of two hours. While most described the bombs being dropped by drones, a weapon increasingly being used in Myanmar, some said they were hit by mortars and gunfire. The MSF clinic operating in Bangladesh has said it saw a big surge in wounded Rohingya in the days that followed – half of the injured were women and children.

Survivors’ videos analysed by BBC Verify show the river bank covered in bloodied bodies, many of them women and children. There’s no verified count of the number of people killed, but multiple eyewitnesses have told the BBC they saw scores of bodies.

Survivors told us they were attacked by the Arakan Army, one of the strongest insurgent groups in Myanmar which in recent months has driven the military out of nearly all of Rakhine State. They said they were first attacked in their villages, forcing them to flee, and then were attacked again by the river bank as they sought to escape.

The AA declined to be interviewed but its spokesman Khaing Tukha denied the accusation and responded to the BBC’s questions with a statement which said “the incident did not occur in areas controlled by us”. He also accused Rohingya activists of staging the massacre and falsely accusing the AA.

Nisar stands by his account, however.

“The Arakan Army are lying,” he says. “The attacks were done by them. It was only them in our area on that day. And they have been attacking us for weeks. They don’t want to leave any Muslim alive.”

Most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims live as a minority in Rakhine – a Buddhist-majority state, where the two communities have long had a fraught relationship. In 2017, when the Myanmar military killed thousands of Rohingyas in what the UN described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, local Rakhine men also joined the attacks. Now, amid a spiralling conflict between the junta and the AA, which has strong support in the ethnic Rakhine population, Rohingyas once again find themselves trapped.

Despite the risk of being caught and returned to Myanmar by the Bangladeshi authorities, Rohingya survivors told the BBC they wished to share details of the violence they faced so it would not go undocumented, especially as it unfolded in an area that is no longer accessible to rights groups or journalists.

“My heart is broken. Now, I’ve lost everything. I don’t know why I survived,” Nisar says.

A wealthy Rohingya trader, he sold his land and house as the shelling increased near his home in Rakhine. But the conflict intensified faster than he expected, and on the morning of 5 August, the family decided to leave Myanmar.

He is crying as he points to his daughter’s body in one of the videos: “My daughter died in my arms saying Allah’s name. She looks so peaceful, like she’s sleeping. She loved me so much.”

In the same video, he also points to his wife and sister, both severely injured but alive when the video was filmed. He could not carry them out as bombs were still falling, so he made the agonising choice to leave them behind. He found out later they had died.

“There was nowhere left that was safe, so we ran to the river to cross over to Bangladesh,” Fayaz says. The gunfire and bombs had followed them from village to village, and so Fayaz gave all his money to a boatman to carry them across the river.

Devastated and angry, he holds up a photo of his son’s bloodied body.

“If the Arakan Army didn’t fire at us, then who did?” he asks. “The direction that the bombs came from, I know the Arakan Army was there. Or was it thunder falling from the sky?”

These accusations raise serious questions about the Arakan Army, which describes itself as a revolutionary movement representing all the people of Rakhine.

Since late last year, the AA, part of the larger Three Brotherhood Alliance of armed insurgents in Myanmar, has made huge gains against the military.

But the army’s losses have brought new dangers for Rohingyas, who have previously told the BBC they were being forcibly recruited by the junta to fight the AA.

This, together with the decision by the Rohingya militant group ARSA to ally itself with the junta against the Rakhine insurgents, has soured already poor relations between the two communities and left Rohingya civilians vulnerable to retribution.

One survivor of the 5 August attack told the BBC that ARSA militants who had aligned themselves with the junta had been among the fleeing crowd – and that might have provoked the attack.

“Even if there was any military target, there was a disproportionate use of force. There were children, women, the elderly that were killed that day. It was also indiscriminate,” says John Quinley, a director of the human rights group Fortify Rights, which has been investigating the incident.

“So that would leave us to believe that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a war crime did happen on 5 August. The Arakan Army should be investigated for these crimes and Arakan Army senior commanders should be held accountable.”

This is a precarious moment for the Rohingya community. More than a million of them fled to Bangladesh in 2017, where they continue to be restricted to densely-packed, squalid camps.

More have been arriving in recent months as the war in Rakhine reaches them but, it’s no longer 2017, when Bangladesh opened its borders. This time, the government has said it cannot allow any more Rohingyas into the country.

So survivors who can find the money to pay boatmen and traffickers – the BBC was told it costs 600,000 Burmese kyat ($184; £141) per person – then have to slip past Bangladeshi border guards and chance their luck with locals, or hide in Rohingya camps.

When Fayaz and his family arrived in Bangladesh on the 6 August, the border guards gave them a meal but then put them on a boat and sent them back.

“We spent two days afloat with no food or water,” he says. “I gave my daughters water from the river to drink, and pleaded with some of the others on the boat to give them a few biscuits from the packets they had.”

They got into Bangladesh on their second attempt. But at least two boats have capsized because of overcrowding. One woman, a widow with 10 children, said she had managed to hide her family during the bombing, but five of her children drowned when their boat overturned.

“My children were like pieces of my heart. When I think of them, I want to die,” she says, weeping.

Her grandson, a wide-eyed eight-year-old boy, sits beside her. His parents and younger brother also died.

But what of those who were left behind? Phone and internet networks in Maungdaw have been down for weeks but after repeated attempts, the BBC contacted one man, who wished to remain anonymous for his own safety.

“The Arakan Army has forced us out of our homes and are holding us in schools and mosques,” he said. “I am being kept with six other families in a small house.”

The Arakan Army told the BBC that it rescued 20,000 civilians from the town amid fighting against the military. It said it was providing them with food and medical treatment, and add that “these operations are conducted for the safety and security of these individuals, not as forced relocations”.

The man on the phone rejected their claims. “The Arakan Army has told us they will shoot us if we try to leave. We are running out of food and medicines. I am ill, my mother is ill. A lot of people have diarrhoea and are vomiting.”

He broke down, pleading for help: “Tens of thousands of Rohingya are under threat here. If you can, please save us.”

Across the river in Bangladesh, Nisar looks back at Myanmar. He can see the shore where his family was killed.

“I never want to go back.”

Ukrainian authorities have ordered the evacuation of a key city in the Donbas region as Russian forces continue to make gains in the east of the country, despite Ukraine’s ongoing offensive into Russia’s Kursk region.

Officials said families with children living in Pokrovsk and surrounding villages would be forced to leave.

The head of the city’s military government, Serhii Dobriak, said residents had at most two weeks to flee the Russian advance.

The strategically important city is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistical hub for Kyiv’s troops on the eastern front.

Donetsk region head Vadym Filashkin said over 53,000 people, including almost 4,000 children, remained in the city.

He said authorities had taken the decision to forcibly evacuate children and their parents or guardians.

“When our cities are within range of virtually any enemy weapon, the decision to evacuate is necessary and inevitable.”

Mr Dobriak said the rate of evacuations from the city had risen to about 500 to 600 people a day. He said that while basic services continued to operate, they would likely soon cease to function as the Russian army closes in.

The evacuation order came even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his forces were continuing to make gains during their incursion of Russia’s Kursk region.

On Monday, President Zelensky said Ukraine had gained control of over 1,250 sq km of Kursk’s territory and 92 settlements.

“The Russian border area opposite our Sumy region has been mostly cleared of Russian military presence,” he said on X.

“A few months ago, many people around the world would have said this was impossible and crossed Russia’s strictest ‘red line’,” he added.

One of the aims of the incursion is reportedly to divert Russia’s troops away from the Donbas region, relieving pressure on beleaguered Ukrainian troops there.

On Monday, Russian military bloggers claimed Ukraine had blown up a third bridge over the River Seym in the Kursk region. Kyiv did not claim responsibility but the destruction of the bridge would likely further hinder Russian military logistics and help Ukraine consolidate its control over the territory it has seized from Moscow.

But BBC Verify has identified new pontoon bridges – temporary, floating crossings, quickly constructed and used in the absence of permanent structures – over the river, apparently constructed by Russian forces.

In these satellite images taken on Saturday, the two recently built crossings, near Glushkovo, can be seen.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank said that while Russia appeared committed to a strategy of “gradual creeping advances” in the east, Ukraine’s surprise advance into Kursk showed that seizing the initiative had allowed Kyiv to make significant gains rather than slowly losing a “war of attrition”.

The ISW said it had assessed Ukraine to be present across 800 sq km of Russian territory, though it added that presence did not necessarily equate to control. By contrast, the think tank estimates that Russia gained about 1,175 sq km between January and July.

Thirty six flights were cancelled and 201 delayed at a Japanese airport on the weekend after a pair of scissors went missing in a store near the boarding gates.

Security checks at Hokkaido’s New Chitose Airport domestic terminal were suspended for about two hours on Saturday morning, leaving hundreds of travellers temporarily stranded.

There were huge bottlenecks and queues as passengers in the departure lounge were forced to retake security checks.

Authorities tried to locate the missing scissors, which were found at the same store the following day.

Although the scissors weren’t located on Saturday, the day they went missing, security checks and flights eventually resumed that day.

Hokkaido Airport, the operator of New Chitose airport, announced on Monday that the scissors had been found by a worker at the store on Sunday.

Authorities explained that they held off on making the announcement until they had confirmed that the scissors were the same as the ones that were lost.

Many travellers affected by the cancellations and delays were flying home after Japan’s annual Bon holiday.

“I don’t think we have any choice (but to wait),” one traveller told local media at the time. “But I do hope they are bit more careful about it.”

Another traveller said there were “So many things to worry about these days… it never ends. And I don’t feel safe until I get home.”

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has asked Hokkaido Airports to investigate the cause and prevent it from happening again.

“We recognise that this occurred as a result of insufficient storage and management systems at the store,” Hokkaido Airport said. “We are aware that this is also an incident that could be linked to hijacking or terrorism, and will once again work to ensure thorough management awareness.”

Social media users on X praised the airport’s response to the incident, with several saying it reaffirmed their confidence in Japanese air safety.

“This incident showcased the safety of Japanese aviation and the thoroughness of its manuals!” one user wrote.

Another said it “made me realise once again that New Chitose Airport is a safe airport to use.”

New Chitose is one of Japan’s busiest airports, serving the world’s second-most travelled domestic air route – between Tokyo and Sapporo – according to aviation analytics company OAG.

More than 15 million travellers used the airport in 2022.