Investigators were on Thursday intent on finding out who else may be behind the truck attack in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day that killed 15 and injured dozens when the chief suspect, 42-year-old US citizen, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, drove a pickup truck into a crowd on busy Bourbon Street.

Jabbar was killed in the attack as he shot at police and was shot to death as law enforcement returned fire.

“We do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible,” Alethea Duncan, assistant special agent with the FBI, said. “We are aggressively running down every lead, including those of his known associates.”

The attack took place early Wednesday morning in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which was crowded with people celebrating the new year.

Jabbar, from Houston, Texas, drove a rented white pickup truck between the 100 and 400 blocks of Bourbon Street, crashing into revelers and mowing many down, then shooting from the truck, including hitting two police officers before he was killed.

Jabbar, who served in the US army for 13 years, was wearing body armor and a helmet, according to a law enforcement bulletin, and was displaying an Islamic State flag mounted on a pipe in the bed of the vehicle. The FBI has said that it is investigating the attack as an “act of terrorism”.

Investigators found guns and what appeared to be improvised explosive devices in the vehicle, as well as elsewhere in the city’s French Quarter.

On Wednesday, the Louisiana attorney general, Liz Murrill, told NBC News that she can say “with some certainty” that “there are multiple individuals who are involved”.

Murrill said that the explosive devices associated with the attack appear to have been manufactured at a rented Airbnb in New Orleans that she said was rented out “for that purpose”.

In addition, a house fire occurred on Wednesday morning “that was connected to this event where we believe the IEDs were being made” Murrill added.

On Thursday morning, the New Orleans police superintendent, Anne Kirkpatrick, stated on NBC’s Today show that authorities were investigating “people of interest” related to Wednesday’s attack.

“We have people of interest, they are not people who are suspects at this time” Kirkpatrick said, adding “The FBI is tracking down everybody.”

Authorities are also investigating a potential connection between the attack in New Orleans and explosion that occurred later on Wednesday of a Tesla Cybertruck outside a hotel owned by Donald Trump in Las Vegas, which resulted in one fatality.

The vehicles involved in the two attacks were both rented using the popular car-sharing app Turo.

A spokesperson for Turo stated that they were cooperating with law enforcement. The company also said that “do not believe that either renter … had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat”.

On Thursday morning, as the city of New Orleans continues to reel from the attack, investigators continue to actively search for answers and potential accomplices.

Later on Thursday afternoon, the Sugar Bowl, a college football playoff quarter-final, is scheduled to take place in New Orleans. The event, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday, had been postponed by one day due to the New Year’s Day attack.

Kirkpatrick said the event would have Super Bowl-level security, with collaboration from local, federal and military partners for safety.

“We are going to have absolutely hundreds of officers and staff lining our streets, lining Bourbon Street, lining the French Quarter,” Kirkpatrick said. “We are staffing up at the same level if not more so than we were prepared for Super Bowl.

The driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that caught fire and exploded in Las Vegas outside one of the hotels in Donald Trump’s business empire has been identified as soldier Matthew Livelsberger, who is either an active member or veteran of the US army, from Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Livelsberger, 37, was killed in the explosion, while seven bystanders were wounded. The military veteran, identified by Denver’s KOAA and KTNV media outlets, was behind the wheel of the electric-powered truck, which investigators soon after discovered was packed with fireworks-style mortars, camping fuel and gas canisters when it exploded on Wednesday morning.

Law enforcement sources confirmed to local news outlets that the electric vehicle was rented from Turo, the vehicle-sharing service that was also used in the New Orleans attack on the same day. There, suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar used the Turo app to rent an electric Ford pickup truck used in that attack in the early hours of New Year’s Day, which killed 15 and injured dozens more.

News station Denver 7 cited law enforcement sources on Thursday that Livelsberger and Jabbar had served at the same military base – a possible connection the US army has not independently confirmed to the Guardian.

CNN’s Pentagon reporter cited multiple US officials who said that Livelsberger was earlier described as a military veteran but later on Thursday morning it was reported that he is an active-duty special forces operations sergeant, who was on leave from Germany where he was serving with 10th SFG, according to several media outlets, including CNN, citing multiple unnamed US officials.

Authorities were investigating the link as a possible connection between the two New Year’s Day attacks, those sources told the outlet.

The FBI is conducting operations and searches in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in relation to the Cybertruck explosion, sources told ABC News, with the assistance of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Investigators are following leads in at least four states and overseas, sources said.

In a national address on Wednesday, Joe Biden said that ongoing investigations into the New Orleans attack were “fluid”. The president added that law enforcement officials were investigating whether the Bourbon Street attack was related at all to the Las Vegas Tesla vehicle explosion.

No such connection had yet been uncovered, Biden said, and he pledged to keep Americans updated “contemporaneously” as the investigation progresses.

Livelsberger served for more than 19 years in the army – 18 of which were spent with special forces, according to his LinkedIn profile. His most recent role was listed as a remote and autonomous systems manager, which he had been in for just three months.

Jabbar enlisted in the army in March 2007, working in both human resources and information technology, and was deployed to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010, then transferred into the US army reserve in 2015. He served until July 2020 and left the military with the rank of staff sergeant.

The Trump hotel was not damaged in the explosion. The Tesla founder, Elon Musk, later posted on X that “the evil knuckleheads picked the wrong vehicle for a terrorist attack. Cybertruck actually contained the explosion and directed the blast upwards. Not even the glass doors of the lobby were broken.”

Colorado Springs addresses connected to Livelsberger were staked out and later raided by FBI agents on Wednesday.

Kevin McMahill, sheriff of the Las Vegas metropolitan police department, confirmed at a news conference that the truck used in the attack was rented from Turo in Colorado and driven to Nevada.

McMahill said investigators were able to track the truck’s journey from Colorado to Las Vegas as the driver stopped at charging stations along the route and that the truck was in front of the hotel for 15 to 20 seconds before it exploded.

The sheriff said Musk helped the investigation by having the truck unlocked after it auto-locked in the blast and by giving investigators video of the suspect at charging stations along its 800-mile route.

McMahill also addressed the political questions that hang over the Las Vegas incident. “It’s a Tesla truck. And we know that Elon Musk is working with president-elect Trump. And it’s the Trump Tower. So there’s obviously things to be concerned about there,” he said.

A Turo spokesperson said in a statement: “We are actively partnering with law enforcement authorities as they investigate both incidents. We do not believe that either renter involved in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat.”

Musk said on Wednesday afternoon on X that “we have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself. All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.”

In an earlier post on the platform after attending a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Musk said: “The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

Joe Biden and Donald Trump have given drastically contrasting reactions to the deadly New Year’s Day explosions in New Orleans and Las Vegas that killed at least 16 people.

The US president cautioned against “jumping to conclusions” and expressed empathy for victims and the city of New Orleans, while his incoming successor sought to blame Democrats, “open borders” and institutions that he has vowed to purge, including the FBI, once he returns to office.

Speaking from the White House on Wednesday evening, Biden cited FBI reports that identified the suspected perpetrator of the attack in New Orleans’s busy Bourbon Street, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, as “an American citizen, born in Texas” who appeared to have been inspired by the Islamic State.

“He served in the United States army on active duty for many years,” Biden said in a four-minute address.

The president also said he had been told by the FBI that Jabbar had posted videos on social media hours before the attack, which killed 15 people. The videos “indicat[ed] that he’s inspired by Isis, expressing a desire to kill”.

“The Isis flag was found in his vehicle, which he rented to conduct this attack,” he said. “Possible explosives were found in the vehicle as well, and more explosives were found nearby.”

Biden said intelligence and law enforcement agents were working to establish if the suspect acted alone or had co-conspirators, adding that the investigation was “fluid”.

The president said investigators were exploring possible links between the New Orleans attack and a later episode outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas – owned by the president-elect – in which one person was killed after a Tesla cyber vehicle, built by the company owned by Elon Musk, Trump’s richest supporter, exploded.

“Thus far, there’s nothing to report on that score,” Biden said, adding that “no one should jump to conclusions.”

His measured tone differed markedly from that of the president-elect, who in an early morning social media post, labelled the country over which he is about to preside after his inauguration in 18 days’ time a “disaster” and a “laughing stock”.

He appeared to blame the New Orleans attack on the negligence of law enforcement agencies that he said had been too busy conducting criminal investigations into him that he has long derided as political witch-hunt.

He also repeated an assertion – first made on Wednesday in its immediate aftermath – that the attack proved the need for an immigration crackdown, despite the fact that the suspect was born and bred in the US.

“Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”

He used the events to renew his rhetorical assaults on the FBI, the Department of Justice (DoJ) and other agencies, calling on the CIA to get involved even though its mission is to deal with foreign rather than domestic intelligence.

“The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job,” Trump wrote. “They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself.

“The USA is breaking down – A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it.”

Israeli airstrikes killed at least 43 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Thursday, including 11 people in the sprawling al-Mawasi tent encampment designated as a humanitarian safe zone for civilians.

Among those killed in the al-Mawasi strike was the director general of Gaza’s police department, Mahmoud Salah, and his deputy, Hussam Shahwan, according to the Hamas-run Gaza interior ministry.

“By committing the crime of assassinating the director general of police in the Gaza Strip, the occupation is insisting on spreading chaos … and deepening the human suffering of citizens,” Hamas added in a statement.

The Israeli military said it had conducted the strike on the al-Mawasi encampment, just west of the city of Khan Younis, and eliminated Shahwan, calling him the head of Hamas security forces in southern Gaza, but made no mention of Salah’s death.

Medics said the 11 people killed included women and children.

The latest strikes in Israel’s 15-month war in Gaza, which has led to more than 45,500 Palestinian deaths, came as negotiations for a ceasefire-for-hostages deal appeared to have stalled again, despite pressure to conclude an agreement before Donald Trump is sworn in as US president on 20 January. The war was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad said in a video message on Thursday that an Israeli hostage had tried to take his own life, without giving further details on the hostage’s identity or current condition. In a statement by the group on the Telegram messaging service, a spokesperson for al-Quds Brigades, the group’s armed wing, said one of the group’s medical teams had intervened and prevented him from dying.

Other Israeli airstrikes killed at least 26 Palestinians, including six in the interior ministry headquarters in Khan Younis and others in north Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, the al-Shati beach camp and central Gaza’s Maghazi camp.

“As the year begins, we got reports of yet another attack on Al-Mawasi with dozens of people killed, another reminder that there is no humanitarian zone let alone a safe zone,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, said in a post on X. “Every day without a ceasefire will bring more tragedy.”

Later on Thursday, separate Israeli airstrikes killed at least four people in central Gaza City and two in its Zeitoun district, medics said.

The latest deaths in Gaza came as the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank ordered the suspension of broadcasts by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera across the Palestinian territories, accusing the network of incitement, official media reported.

Al Jazeera is already banned from broadcasting from Israel amid a long-running feud with the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

In September, armed and masked Israeli forces raided the Al Jazeera office in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, saying it was “used to incite terror”.

The military issued an initial 45-day closure order, prompting the Palestinian foreign ministry to condemn “a flagrant violation” of press freedom.

On Wednesday, however, the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, said Al Jazeera’s “insistence on broadcasting inciting content and reports characterised by misinformation, incitement, sedition and interference in Palestinian internal affairs” had led to its suspension.

An Al Jazeera employee contacted by Agence France-Presse confirmed the network’s office in Ramallah had received a suspension order on Wednesday.

Wafa said: “The specialised ministerial committee, comprising the ministries of culture, interior and communications, has decided to suspend broadcasts and freeze all activities of Al Jazeera satellite channel and its office in Palestine.

“The decision also includes temporarily freezing the work of all journalists, employees, crews and affiliated channels until their legal status is rectified due to Al Jazeera’s violations of the laws and regulations in force in Palestine.”

Al Jazeera condemned the decision in a statement, saying it “aligns with Israeli occupation practices targeting its media teams”.

It accused the PA, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank, of “attempting to deter Al Jazeera from covering escalating events in the occupied Palestinian territories” including in Jenin and its refugee camp.

The PA’s security forces have been engaged in weeks of deadly clashes with armed militants in Jenin, in the northern West Bank.

Analysts have suggested the PA’s security clampdown in Jenin is being driven by a desire to reassert its frayed authority on the West Bank and also to send a signal to western countries, not least the incoming Trump administration.

Agencies contributed to this article

German officials have called for a clampdown on illegally imported and homemade “firework bombs” after pyrotechnics for personal use killed at least five people across the country on New Year’s Eve.

The use of personal firecrackers is widespread and only lightly regulated in Germany, leading to hundreds of injuries and massive deployments of police and first responders in cities at the end of every year.

In Berlin alone, police and hospital officials said 17 people had been hurt by Kugelbomben, spherical explosives that are legally restricted to professional firework displays. Five victims including small children suffered serious injuries to their hands, faces and eyes while others sought help for burns and hearing damage.

“The number of patients treated compared to previous years was average or a little below average,” a spokesperson for the UKB hospital in Berlin told local media. “But the severity of the injuries is unusual.”

Most of the fatalities were young men killed in separate accidents while trying to ignite pyrotechnics, in some cases using illicit firework bombs that they had jerry-rigged for more spectacular effect. The Kugelbomben had been mainly brought in from Poland or the Czech Republic and combined with components such as aerosol cans and plastic pipes for a bigger bang and a higher trajectory, authorities said.

The spherical or ball bombs come in various sizes and are reserved in Germany for professional fireworks displays. Before New Year’s Eve, however, they could be seen on offer illegally on social media channels.

Berlin’s regional head of the GdP police union, Stephan Weh, demanded a crackdown on outlawed pyrotechnic imports and a general ban on private fireworks.

“Rockets, firecrackers and compound fireworks are used to attack people and the number of Kugelbomben is growing,” he said in a statement. “Fireworks belong in the hands of professionals.”

A spherical explosive set off in Berlin’s central Schöneberg district, where young revellers have frequently clashed with police in previous years, severely damaged several buildings, leaving 36 residences uninhabitable and sending two people to hospital. A fire brigade spokesperson compared the scene of destruction to a “battlefield”.

Another of the firework bombs went off in a crowd in the northern district of Tegel, injuring eight people, two of them critically including a young boy.

The interior affairs spokesperson of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union in Berlin, Burkard Dregger, demanded tougher measures to prevent the spread of Kugelbomben in German cities during the December holidays.

“The import of banned fireworks – Kugelbomben – from eastern neighbouring countries has got to be stopped with even stricter border checks,” he told the local public broadcaster RBB, calling for talks with the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic to reach a regional consensus.

The opposition Greens called for a total ban on private firework sales. “The question is why we as a society are prepared to have a night of setting off firecrackers with immeasurable collateral damage for people, animals and the environment,” the party’s interior affairs spokesperson, Vasili Franco, said.

In the Netherlands, a 46-year-old man who was severely injured in a firework accident in the town of Tiel died in hospital on Wednesday, authorities said, bringing the number of New Year’s Eve fireworks-related fatalities across the country to two.

A 14-year-old boy was killed in Rotterdam while trying to relight a “cobra”, a particularly explosive – and illegal – firework on Tuesday evening.

Dozens more people suffered serious eye and other injuries despite sales of consumer fireworks being supposedly outlawed in 19 Dutch cities, including Rotterdam and Amsterdam, whose mayors have demanded a national ban.

And in France, 984 cars were set on fire and 420 people arrested in an annual ritual described by the hardline interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, as “gratuitous and endemic violence” by “thugs attacking the property of often modest, ordinary people”.

Italy’s foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador on Wednesday and urged the immediate release of an Italian journalist held in solitary confinement in Tehran.

Cecilia Sala, a 29-year-old freelance journalist for Il Foglio newspaper and a podcaster, reportedly spoke of the harsh conditions of her detainment in the notorious Evin prison, including having to sleep on the floor of her cell without a mattress.

Sala, who was in Iran on a journalistic visa, was arrested on 19 December on charges of breaching Islamic law.

The foreign ministry said that during the meeting with Mohammad-Reza Sabouri, Iran’s ambassador in Rome, it reiterated its requests for Sala to receive “dignified detention conditions that respect human rights” and for a guarantee that full consular assistance is permitted, including allowing Italy’s ambassador in Iran to visit her and “provide her with the types of comfort that have so far been denied”.

During a phone call to her parents on Wednesday, Sala said she only had two blankets, one to sleep on and one to fend off the biting cold, according to reports in the Italian press. She said food was being given to her through a crack in the door, that her reading glasses had been confiscated and that a neon light was on in her cell all day and night.

On Sunday in an interview with La Repubblica, a US state department spokesperson said Sala’s detention was allegedly a reprisal for the arrest of Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, a Swiss-Iranian businessman and alleged arms trafficker with ties to the Iranian regime, on a US warrant at Milan’s Malpensa airport on 16 December. “Unfortunately, the Iranian regime continues to unjustly detain citizens of many other countries, often using them as political leverage,’’ the spokesperson said.

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said the government was “working with great discretion to solve this extremely intricate problem”.

Sala has nearly half a million followers on Instagram and is a regular guest on Italian talkshows. She has covered among other topics the fall of Kabul and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the crisis in Venezuela, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Evin prison is known for the detainment of opponents of the Iranian regime, journalists and foreign citizens. Among the prisoners is Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian 2023 Nobel peace prize laureate, who said in an interview published on Thursday that she would publish her autobiography and was working on a book on women held like her on political charges.

Mohammadi spoke to the French magazine Elle in Farsi by text and voice message during a three-week provisional release from the prison on medical grounds after undergoing bone surgery.

“I’ve finished my autobiography and I plan to publish it. I’m writing another book on assaults and sexual harassment against women detained in Iran. I hope it will appear soon,” she said.

Mohammadi, 52, has been jailed repeatedly over the past 25 years, most recently since November 2021 on convictions relating to her advocacy against the compulsory wearing of the hijab for women and capital punishment in Iran.

She said the imprisonment had left a physical toll. “My body is weakened, it is true, after three years of intermittent detention … and repeated refusals of care that have seriously tested me, but my mind is of steel,” Mohammadi said.

She said there were 70 prisoners in the women’s ward at Evin “from all walks of life, of all ages and of all political persuasions”, including journalists, writers, women’s rights activists and people persecuted for their religion.

One of the most commonly used “instruments of torture” was isolation, said Mohammadi, who shares a cell with 13 other prisoners.

“It is a place where political prisoners die,” she said of Evin. “I have personally documented cases of torture and serious sexual violence against my fellow prisoners.”

Police in South Korea have raided Muan international airport, the scene of Sunday’s plane crash, in which 179 people died, as well as the office of the airline that operated the flight, media reports said.

Jeju Air flight 2216 was carrying 181 people from Thailand to South Korea when it issued a mayday call and belly-landed on the runaway, before crashing into a barrier and bursting into flames. Two flight attendants survived the crash, the worst aviation disaster on the country’s soil.

The aftermath of the crash now appears to include police involvement, with media reporting that officers had also raided a third location, the office of a regional aviation office, on suspicion of professional negligence resulting in death.

“In relation to the plane accident that occurred on December 29, a search and seizure operation is being conducted from 9am on January 2 at three locations,” including Muan airport, the Jeju Air office in Seoul, plus a regional aviation office, police said in a statement. “The police plan to swiftly and rigorously determine the cause and responsibility for this accident in accordance with the law and principles.”

Investigators planned to seize documents and materials related to the operation and maintenance of the aircraft as well as the operation of airport facilities, a police official told Reuters.

An official said police had banned the Jeju Air chief executive, Kim E-bae, and another unidentified official from leaving the country, calling them key witnesses who potentially face charges of causing deaths by negligence, which is punishable by up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 20 million won (£10,950).

Pressure is building on authorities to establish the cause of the crash, which occurred after the Boeing 737-800’s landing gear apparently failed to deploy as it came in to land at Muan, in the country’s south-west, on Sunday morning.

Inspectors have retrieved both black boxes from the charred remains of the aircraft and are working to decode data from the cockpit voice recorder.

The plane’s flight data recorder, however, is to be transferred to the US for analysis after local officials said they were unable to extract data from the device, which had been damaged in the crash.

The government ordered an emergency safety inspection of South Korea’s entire aviation operations, while separate checks, focusing on the landing gear, are being carried out on all 101 Boeing 737-800s used by six of the country’s airlines.

The interim president, Choi Sang-mok, said “immediate action” must be taken if the inspections uncovered any irregularities with the aircraft.

“As there is great public concern about the same aircraft model involved in the accident, the transport ministry and relevant agencies must conduct a thorough inspection of operation maintenance, education and training,” Choi said on Thursday. If any issues are found during the inspection, please take immediate corrective action.”

The investigation has yet to determine why the landing gear appeared to fail, with a bird strike and mechanical failure among the possible causes.

It is also focusing on a concrete barrier near the end of the runway, the location of which has drawn criticism from aviation experts. The passengers are thought to have died when the plane smashed into the barrier at high speed, burst into flames and broke apart.

Relatives of the victims, who include five children aged under 10 and nine members of the same family, were allowed to visit the site on Wednesday for the first time since the crash.

They placed tteokguk – rice-cake soup traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day – and cried as they said goodbye to their loved ones.

Hundreds of people waited patiently to pay their respects at a nearby memorial altar set up to honour the victims, forming a queue that stretched for several hundred metres. Other altars have been set up across the country.

Police in South Korea have raided Muan international airport, the scene of Sunday’s plane crash, in which 179 people died, as well as the office of the airline that operated the flight, media reports said.

Jeju Air flight 2216 was carrying 181 people from Thailand to South Korea when it issued a mayday call and belly-landed on the runaway, before crashing into a barrier and bursting into flames. Two flight attendants survived the crash, the worst aviation disaster on the country’s soil.

The aftermath of the crash now appears to include police involvement, with media reporting that officers had also raided a third location, the office of a regional aviation office, on suspicion of professional negligence resulting in death.

“In relation to the plane accident that occurred on December 29, a search and seizure operation is being conducted from 9am on January 2 at three locations,” including Muan airport, the Jeju Air office in Seoul, plus a regional aviation office, police said in a statement. “The police plan to swiftly and rigorously determine the cause and responsibility for this accident in accordance with the law and principles.”

Investigators planned to seize documents and materials related to the operation and maintenance of the aircraft as well as the operation of airport facilities, a police official told Reuters.

An official said police had banned the Jeju Air chief executive, Kim E-bae, and another unidentified official from leaving the country, calling them key witnesses who potentially face charges of causing deaths by negligence, which is punishable by up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 20 million won (£10,950).

Pressure is building on authorities to establish the cause of the crash, which occurred after the Boeing 737-800’s landing gear apparently failed to deploy as it came in to land at Muan, in the country’s south-west, on Sunday morning.

Inspectors have retrieved both black boxes from the charred remains of the aircraft and are working to decode data from the cockpit voice recorder.

The plane’s flight data recorder, however, is to be transferred to the US for analysis after local officials said they were unable to extract data from the device, which had been damaged in the crash.

The government ordered an emergency safety inspection of South Korea’s entire aviation operations, while separate checks, focusing on the landing gear, are being carried out on all 101 Boeing 737-800s used by six of the country’s airlines.

The interim president, Choi Sang-mok, said “immediate action” must be taken if the inspections uncovered any irregularities with the aircraft.

“As there is great public concern about the same aircraft model involved in the accident, the transport ministry and relevant agencies must conduct a thorough inspection of operation maintenance, education and training,” Choi said on Thursday. If any issues are found during the inspection, please take immediate corrective action.”

The investigation has yet to determine why the landing gear appeared to fail, with a bird strike and mechanical failure among the possible causes.

It is also focusing on a concrete barrier near the end of the runway, the location of which has drawn criticism from aviation experts. The passengers are thought to have died when the plane smashed into the barrier at high speed, burst into flames and broke apart.

Relatives of the victims, who include five children aged under 10 and nine members of the same family, were allowed to visit the site on Wednesday for the first time since the crash.

They placed tteokguk – rice-cake soup traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day – and cried as they said goodbye to their loved ones.

Hundreds of people waited patiently to pay their respects at a nearby memorial altar set up to honour the victims, forming a queue that stretched for several hundred metres. Other altars have been set up across the country.

Forty years after one of world’s deadliest industrial disasters struck the Indian city of Bhopal, a cleanup operation has finally begun to remove hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste from the site.

However, local campaigners have accused the Indian government of greenwashing, arguing that the 337 tonnes of waste removed this week represents less than 1% of the more than 1m tonnes of hazardous materials left after the disaster and that the cleanup has done nothing to tackle chemical contamination of the area.

There have also been protests over fears that the incineration of the waste will only lead to further contamination and toxic exposure in other areas.

At about midnight on 2 December 1984, the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal exploded, releasing 40 tonnes of toxic methyl isocyanate and other lethal gases into the air.

More than 3,000 people were killed in the immediate aftermath and at least 25,000 are estimated to have died overall.

Local groups have claimed the true number is probably even higher due to the long-term effects of the poisonous gas, which include high rates of cancers, kidney and lung diseases. High numbers of babies have been stillborn or born with severe disabilities to gas-affected mothers in recent years.

Despite the scale of the industrial disaster, a proper operation to remove all the toxic waste from Bhopal has never been carried out, either by the US company Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemicals, which was the majority owner of the factory at the time, or by the Indian government, which took back control of the land where the factory stood.

Rights groups have accused the US corporations and the Indian government of attempting to play down the lasting impact of Bhopal’s untouched chemical debris.

Official surveys submitted to the courts have shown that the contamination, which includes highly poisonous heavy metals and UN-banned organic pollutants, has spread to at least 42 areas in Bhopal. Testing near the site revealed levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the groundwater were 50 times higher than what is accepted as safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Lethal levels of toxic waste have also been found in factory pits and festering open ponds where the waste was being dumped by the Union Carbide factory prior to the explosion.

For years, campaigners have been fighting for Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals to be held liable for the cost of the cleanup and safe removal of the waste, a process which is expected to cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, but the US corporation has always denied liability, citing a 1989 settlement with the Indian government.

In what was initially taken as progress, last month the Madhya Pradesh high court ordered authorities to finally take responsibility for the chemical waste, criticising the inertia of the past four decades and asking whether the government was “waiting for another tragedy”.

However, the government has now removed 337 tonnes of overground waste that had already been put into containers and moved to a warehouse in 2005, which campaigners claim no longer posed any significant threat and was not contributing to the groundwater contamination.

Rachna Dhingra, a coordinator of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, called the move a “farce and greenwashing publicity stunt to remove a tiny fraction of the least harmful waste” and questioned why Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals were not being held accountable.

She said: “There’s still 1.1m tonnes of poisonous waste leaching into the ground every day that they refuse to deal with. We can see for ourselves the birth defects and chronic health conditions. All this does is take the heat off the government and lets the US corporations off the hook. It does nothing to help the people in Bhopal who for decades have been seen as expendable.”

Dhingra was also highly critical of the government’s decision to take the removed waste to be incinerated at a plant 150 miles away in Pithampur that has previously failed tests on conducting such operations safely and exposed local people to high levels of toxins.

The incineration, which is likely to take about six months, will create 900 tonnes of toxic residue, which will then be buried in landfills. The move has provoked large protests by people in Pithampur who are fearful of further toxic exposure and leakages into their groundwater from the waste.

Swatantra Kumar Singh, the director of the state government’s Bhopal gas tragedy relief and rehabilitation department, denied there was any contamination risk to the local ecosystem and said the waste would be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner.

Many local people and human right groups consider the Bhopal disaster to be a continuing miscarriage of justice. The 1989 settlement led to most victims being given 25,000 rupees (about $500 at the time), while most of those who developed related conditions or died years later got nothing at all.

None of the nine Indian officials who were convicted in 2010 over their roles in the disaster served any time in prison, and Dow Chemicals has maintained in the courts that it is not criminally liable for the actions of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary before it bought the parent company.

Campaigners have accused the US government of blocking attempts to extradite Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals officials to face justice in India over failures that led to the explosion.

South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has rallied his supporters in a letter saying he will “fight until the end” as he faces an attempt by authorities to arrest him over his short-lived declaration of martial law, a lawyer said.

“I am watching on YouTube live all the hard work you are doing,” Yoon wrote late on Wednesday to the hundreds of supporters who had gathered near his official residence to protest against the investigation into him.

“I will fight until the end to protect this country together with you,” he said in the letter, a photo capture of which was sent to the media by Seok Dong-hyeon, a lawyer advising Yoon.

The opposition Democratic party, which has majority control of parliament and led the impeachment of Yoon on 14 December after his declaration of martial law on 3 December, said the letter proved Yoon was delusional and that he remained committed to completing his “insurrection”.

“As if trying to stage insurrection wasn’t enough, he is now inciting his supporters to an extreme clash,” a party spokesperson, Jo Seoung-lae, said in a statement.

A court on Tuesday approved a warrant for Yoon’s arrest, which would potentially make him the first sitting president to be detained as part of investigations over allegations he masterminded insurrection by trying to impose martial law.

Insurrection is one of the few criminal charges from which a South Korean president does not have immunity.

The Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials (CIO), which is leading a joint team of investigators that includes police officers and prosecutors, has until 6 January to execute the arrest warrant.

It was unclear when and how it would make the arrest and whether the presidential security service, which has blocked investigators’ access to Yoon’s office and official residence despite them having a search warrant, would try to stop any arrest.

Yoon Kab-keun, a lawyer for the impeached president, has claimed the arrest warrant is illegal and invalid because the CIO does not have the authority under South Korean law to request a warrant.

The lawyer warned on Thursday that police officers would face arrest by “the presidential security service or any citizens” if they tried to detain Yoon on behalf of the CIO, saying its authority was limited to crowd control and maintaining public order.

Separately, the second hearing of Yoon’s impeachment trial will be heard at the constitutional court on Friday. Yoon has been suspended from presidential duties and the finance minister, Choi Sang-mok, has taken over as acting president until the outcome of the trial.

If the court upholds the impeachment and Yoon is removed from office, a presidential election will be held within 60 days.

The warrant for Yoon’s arrest and a search of his office and residence was issued after the conservative career prosecutor defied repeated summons by investigators to appear for questioning in the criminal investigation separate from the constitutional court trial.

A former defence minister, who officials said recommended to Yoon that he declare martial law, has been indicted on charges of insurrection and will go on trial on 16 January. Some of the top military officers commanding the defence of the capital, Seoul, have also been indicted for their alleged involvement.

Elon Musk has caused anger by calling for the release of Tommy Robinson and accusing Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists in Oldham in Greater Manchester.

The billionaire ally of Donald Trump pinned a message at the top of his X feed overnight saying “Free Tommy Robinson!”, tagging the far-right activist who is in jail for contempt of court.

As well as a number of messages in support of Robinson, Musk posted several times about rape gangs in Rochdale and Oldham, attacking the prime minister and the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, over their responses to the scandal.

In one post Musk said: “In the UK, serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service’s approval for the police to charge suspects. Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008-2013.”

He added that Phillips “deserved to be in prison” after she said it was for Oldham council to call an inquiry into child exploitation there, rather than the national government.

In another he said: “The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the [Crown Prosecution Service] at the time).”

Musk reposted several comments calling for the release of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who was jailed last October for repeating false allegations about a Syrian refugee.

Musk’s latest intervention in British politics has caused anger among Labour MPs, many of whom have been pushing the government to stop posting on X.

The Tesla co-founder and X owner has repeatedly attacked Starmer over the prime minister’s response to the UK riots last summer. He is reported to be considering donating as much as $100m (£80m) to Reform UK, and was pictured alongside the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and its treasurer, Nick Candy, two weeks ago.

Musk’s posts overnight are his most explicit endorsement yet of the British far right and come after he promised to support the German anti-migration party Alternative für Deutschland.

One MP said: “[Musk] has pushed it too far this time. Twitter [now X] is really rapidly becoming a cess pit, even for disinterested non-partisan types.”

Several ministers said they thought this should be the trigger for the government to leave Musk’s platform. Others, however, warned that doing so could cause a diplomatic incident given Musk’s role in the incoming Trump administration.

Downing Street declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Reform UK would not say whether the billionaire’s endorsement of Robinson – a divisive figure within the party – would change its willingness to accept his money.

A spokesperson for Oldham council said: “Survivors sit at the heart of our work to end child sexual exploitation. Whatever happens in terms of future inquiries, we have promised them that their wishes will be paramount, and we will not renege on that pledge.

“We all recognise that terrible mistakes were made in the past, with children ignored or dismissed. By ensuring that survivors have a voice that is heard, we can help make sure that no child will be failed in the future.”

The world’s oldest living Olympic gold medallist, the Hungarian gymnast Agnes Keleti, who escaped the Holocaust with false identity papers and the Soviet Union’s brutal clampdown on her home country by emigrating to Israel, has died aged 103.

Keleti, who did not compete in an Olympics until she was 31 but won more medals than anyone else at the Melbourne Games, died on Thursday in Budapest, where she had returned to live in 2015, the Hungarian Olympic Committee (HOC) said.

“Agnes Keleti is the greatest gymnast produced by Hungary, but one whose life and career were intertwined with the politics of her country and her religion,” the International Olympic Committee said.

Besides being the oldest female gymnast to win Olympic gold, Keleti’s 10 medals, including five golds, rank her as the second most successful Hungarian athlete of all time. She was also one of the three most successful Jewish Olympians.

Born into a Jewish family as Agnes Klein on 9 January 1921, Keleti took up music and gymnastics as a child, becoming an accomplished – and later a professional – cello player and winning her first national gymnastics championship aged 16.

She was considered a medal hope for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics but the games were cancelled because of the second world war and, with Hungary under Nazi occupation, Keleti was expelled from her Budapest club with all other “non-Aryans” in 1941.

Forced to go into hiding, she survived the war in a village in the Hungarian countryside. Her mother, Rosza, and sister, Vera, also survived, but her father, Ferenc Klein, and several other relatives died in Auschwitz.

“I managed to buy the identification papers of a Christian girl, she was around the same age as me,” she said in a 2020 interview. “With my false papers I managed to escape to the country. I stayed in a remote village and found work as a maid.”

With the 1944 Olympics also cancelled, Keleti, who returned to gymnastics while working as a professional cellist after the war, qualified for the 1948 London Games but was unable to compete because of a torn ankle ligament.

That meant her first Olympics was in Helsinki in 1952, by which time she was well past the retirement age of most gymnasts. Keleti won gold in the floor exercise, a silver in the team competition and two bronzes.

At the Melbourne Games in 1956 – competing against the legendary Larisa Latynina of the USSR, who went on to become the most decorated female gymnast in Olympic history – Keleti won four golds and two silvers.

Her victories, for the beam, floor exercise, uneven bars and the team portable apparatus, and second places in the individual all-around and team competitions, made her, aged 35, the Melbourne Games’s most successful competitor.

Astonishingly, her performance came after conflict had once more irrupted into her life. In November 1956, as she was training in Australia, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. Along with 44 other Hungarian athletes, Keleti did not go home.

After briefly coaching Australian gymnasts, she emigrated to Israel in 1957 where she eventually settled, building a national gymnastics programme, coaching the Israeli team and winning the country’s highest civilian honour, the Israel Prize, in 2017. She was still doing the splits in her 90s.

Keleti died in hospital after reportedly being admitted with pneumonia on Christmas Day. She is survived by two sons, Daniel and Rafael, from her marriage to Robert Biro, a Hungarian sports instructor whom she met in Israel.

“I live well, and I love life,” she said, explaining her longevity shortly before her 100th birthday three years ago, adding: “It was worth doing something well in life. I get the shivers when I see all the articles written about me.”

It is now a quarry in Oxfordshire. But nearly 166m years ago it was where a large number of dinosaurs crisscrossed the limestone floor.

Researchers have unearthed 200 large dinosaur footprints – said to be the biggest site of its kind in the UK – from two types of dinosaurs, thought to be the herbivorous cetiosaurus and the carnivorous megalosaurus. The longest trackways are 150 metres in length, and only part of the quarry has been excavated.

“This is one of the most impressive track sites I’ve ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of size of the tracks,” Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham, told the BBC. “You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business.”

In 1997, a trackway of megalosaurus footprints was discovered at Ardley quarry in Oxfordshire. Recollections of that discovery led Gary Johnson, a worker at Dewars Farm quarry, to consider whether bumps and dips he had found in the limestone floor there could be dinosaur footprints.

“I was basically clearing the clay and I hit a bump, and I thought it’s just an abnormality in the ground,” Johnson told the BBC. “But then it got to another, 3 metres along, and it was a hump again, and then it went another 3 metres, hump again.”

Over the summer a team of more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined an excavation at the site, which will feature on the TV series Digging for Britain next week.

The team found five trackways, four of which were believed to have been made by sauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Another track is believed to have been created by a megalosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur that walked on two legs.

The latter was “almost like a caricature of a dinosaur footprint”, Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate palaeontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told the BBC. “It’s what we call a tridactyl print. It’s got these three toes that are very, very clear in the print. The whole animal would have been 6-9 metres in length. They were the largest predatory dinosaurs that we know of in the Jurassic period in Britain.”

The trackways were studied in detail during the excavation, and casts of the tracks were made and more than 20,000 photographs taken, to create 3D models of the entire site and individual footprints.

Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist at the University of Birmingham, said dinosaur footprints provided a snapshot of the life of the animal, including how they moved and the environment in which they lived – information that would not be available from the bone fossil record alone.

Why these particular trackways were preserved remains unknown. “Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record,” Butler said. “We don’t know exactly what, but it might be that there was a storm event that came in, deposited a load of sediments on top of the footprints, and meant that they were preserved rather than just being washed away.”