Pigs, Death

17/10/07, CTV, Man who died in airport likely asking for help: mom, Source.
19/10/07, CBC, Witness blames RCMP, Vancouver airport for death of Tasered man, Source.
26/10/07, Mark Hume - Sunny Dhillon, Questions hang over taser death, Source.
26/10/07, Editorial, The tragic death of Mr. Dziekanski, Source.



17/10/07, CTV, Man who died in airport likely asking for help: mom, (Back).

A Polish man who died after being Tasered at a Vancouver airport was likely frustrated no one could understand his pleas for help, his grieving mother said Wednesday.

"He was speaking Polish, asking for help. But they don't understand," Zosia Cisowski told CTV British Columbia.

"If they don't understand, why didn't they take him to immigration so they could help him?"

Robert Dziekanski, 40, of Pieszyce, Poland, had flown to B.C. to start a new life as a Canadian.

But after arriving, he was unable to make his way to the public meeting area. Cisowski said she waited for 10 hours while her son was delayed at customs, but couldn't find anyone to help her.

"Please help me. My son has come," she remembered telling officials. "My son can't speak English. He could be lost. They say, no, someone will take care of him."

Police said that at some point Dziekanski went out of control, throwing chairs, pounding glass walls and refusing to calm down.

A witness who used her cellphone camera to film Dziekanski described him as shaking, sweating and "shouting back" at police. Sima Ashrafinia said that Dziekanski also smelled of alcohol.

Airport security called in the RCMP, who eventually used Tasers to subdue him. Moments after officers restrained him, Dziekanski lost consciousness and died.

Cisowski, who worked two jobs for seven years to save enough money for her son's immigration, said she believes the RCMP overreacted.

She wishes the RCMP had found an interpreter to calm him down, rather than Tasering him.

"He loved me so much, I loved him so much," she said. "He always listened to me. I gave him good advice."

A prominent Vancouver criminal lawyer has offered her services to Cisowski, and a possible civil suit could be launched against the RCMP and Citizenship and Immigration.

On Tuesday, assistant-deputy chief coroner Jeff Dolan said there was no trauma, disease or any other obvious cause of death.

He said toxicology or microscopic examination may determine why Dziekanski died.

Dziekanski had been travelling and waiting at airports for at least 24 hours. Early Saturday, he took a five-hour bus ride from Poland to Frankfurt. He would have arrived two hours ahead of his plane from Frankfurt to Vancouver, which is typically an 11-hour flight. But it was late arriving to Vancouver, adding another two hours to the trip.

The flight finally arrived at the Vancouver International Airport at about 3:30 on Saturday afternoon. And as a new immigrant, it took a long time to process Dziekanski.

His mother gave up waiting and returned home to Kamloops at 10 p.m. on Saturday night, unaware of what was happening inside the airport.

Canada Border Services won't say how long her son was in Customs and Immigrations, and it's unknown how long he may have been wandering around the airport.


19/10/07, CBC, Witness blames RCMP, Vancouver airport for death of Tasered man, (Back).

A man who witnessed a Taser incident at Vancouver International Airport last Sunday said security at the facility and RCMP are to blame for the death of a distraught man in the terminal who didn't understand English.

Lorne Meltzer, a corporate valet, told CBC News Thursday he was at the airport picking up a client just before 1:30 a.m. Sunday and found himself facing Robert Dziekanski.

He said he tried to calm an agitated Dziekanski, 40, in the public arrivals area and unwittingly let the Polish immigrant back into the secure international arrivals area, using his pass to open the one-way doors.

Meltzer has a security pass to the secure international arrivals area, as a personal assistant to a Vancouver businessman who often has clients fly into town.

"I think the responsible parties are the Vancouver Airport and the RCMP for not having other negotiating tactics once he's at the heightened state," said Meltzer, who was the person who called in RCMP.

He said he clearly warned them the man didn't speak English.

Meltzer claimed the officers gave Dziekanski two commands in English and within seconds Tasered him after he held a stapler in an apparent threatening manner.

Robert Dziekanski, seen in this picture taken in Poland, was a construction worker in his home country.

"He [Dziekanski] raised the stapler in the air and they [RCMP] said, 'Put your hands on the desk,' in English," Meltzer said.

Meltzer said the RCMP were too hasty to use the Taser and he refutes the police claim that the area was too crowded to use pepper spray, because "it was empty."

Dziekanski was Tasered by RCMP and later died. Police and a witness conflict in the number of jolts the man is alleged to have received.

RCMP insist that the man was zapped two times, but Sima Ashrafinia, who was at the airport and recorded the incident on her cellphone, told CBC News on Monday that RCMP officers stunned Dziekanski four times.

An autopsy by the B.C. Coroner's Service on Tuesday did not find the cause of death, citing no trauma or disease was found. Officials are still waiting for the results of toxicology tests and microscopic examinations.


26/10/07, Mark Hume - Sunny Dhillon, Questions hang over taser death, (Back).

He spent 10 hours frustrated by airport bureaucracy. Just 24 seconds later, police shot him with tasers.

VANCOUVER — Dazed and confused after more than 15 hours of travel, unable to communicate in English and scared because he couldn't find his mother, Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski was jolted by a taser just 24 seconds after being confronted by police in Vancouver International Airport.

That allegation was made Thursday by a lawyer for Mr. Dziekanski's family who says video evidence will show that the RCMP took him down with a taser jolt moments after approaching him.

"I've been in touch with witnesses. I have viewed a video, which was taken by a bystander, which is not going to be released until at least the time of the inquest. From my observation, the interaction between the police and this individual, who didn't appear to me to be posing a danger to anybody at the time … was 24 seconds, roughly, before he was tasered," Walter Kosteckyj said, adding the airport surveillance videos also won't likely be released until an inquest is held.

A CTV News report Thursday night, based on emergency radio logs, shows police arrived at the scene at 1:28 a.m. and, two minutes later, it was reported a "male has been tasered."

Mother of a Polish immigrant who died after being tasered at Vancouver's airport says her son was probably confused and anxious.

The radio log does not indicate when police first approached Mr. Dziekanski, just that he was down two minutes after they arrived — and that by 1:32 he had lost consciousness.

CTV reported there was a 12-minute delay before medical help arrived. Mr. Dziekanski died shortly after being tasered — only 10 hours after arriving in the country that was to be his new home.

Asked to describe what he saw on the video, Mr. Kosteckyj replied: "I would describe it as something that will be shown to police academies around North America as not the way to intervene in this kind of situation."

Police have described a much more measured response in which officers gave a wildly agitated Mr. Dziekanski two jolts from a taser just to subdue him long enough to put handcuffs on him. The RCMP say they too have videos, but they can't be released because an investigation is under way.

Mr. Dziekanski died not far from dramatic Coast Salish totemic "welcome figures" that had greeted him at the entrance to the Arrivals Hall several hours earlier.

Mr. Kosteckyj described how a journey to a new life devolved into a nightmarish scenario, in which Mr. Dziekanski was left wandering helpless and alone in a busy airport while his mother, Zofia Cisowski, was searching for him nearby.

The waiting mother and increasingly frantic son were separated by glass walls and what appears to be impenetrable airport bureaucracy that somehow failed to help them connect.

"Unbelievably, these people were probably no more than 150 to 200 feet apart for at least five hours, and she was unable to get any message to him. And no one on the other side [of the glass walls] thought to interview him or come outside or vice versa," Mr. Kosteckyj said.

He said he could not explain why no one was able to come to the assistance of Mr. Dziekanski in an airport that handles 17 million visitors a year.

"For all the high-tech stuff they have at the airport, and all the security they have, somehow a guy can sit or be in that baggage area, that immigration area, for a period of nine hours … without anyone really taking much notice of him — as unbelievable as that sounds," Mr. Kosteckyj said.

He said Mr. Dziekanski's journey to Canada began in Poland about 3 a.m., when he left his home town of Pieszyce to get to an airport for his first airplane flight. The 40-year-old construction worker, who had never left Poland before, was immigrating to Canada to join his mother, 61, who lives in Kamloops, about a five-hour drive from Vancouver.

They had arranged to meet at the baggage carousel in the international terminal at YVR. What neither of them seemed to know, however, was that the baggage area is inside a secure area just past Canada Customs and Immigration. There is no line of sight into the Arrivals Hall from the public waiting area, except for a short distance through sliding glass doors.

Mr. Dziekanski arrived at about 3 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 14.

"He made his way to primary customs in the ordinary fashion … he went through there in the normal time frame … he then proceeded through and was directed to secondary customs, which is normal for someone who doesn't speak English and is immigrating to the country," Mr. Kosteckyj said. His papers were in order and he proceeded without difficulty.

But what happened after that was far from normal. For nearly 10 hours, Mr. Dziekanski stayed in the Arrivals Hall, growing increasingly frustrated and eventually becoming frantic.

Outside, in the public area, his mother spent nearly six hours pacing the corridors and, in broken English, asking airport officials for help in locating her son.

Mr. Kosteckyj said she visited one booth in international arrivals "at least three to four times and conveyed to them that she was concerned about her son being in the area and she wanted to get a message to him and how could she do that? They wrote her name down and said that they would make inquiries."

At about 10 p.m., she was told he wasn't there. She made the long drive home, only to find a phone message waiting, saying her son had been found.

"She called back to immigration when she got in, which would have been around 2 a.m., and spoke to someone there and was advised that her son was somewhere in the area and was fine. And she advised, you know, 'Please take care of him because he can't speak English and I'll get there as soon as I can.' And of course he had died, been killed really, some time on or about 1 or 1:30," Mr. Kosteckyj said.

At a news conference, Ms. Cisowski said she had dreamed of opening a small business in Kamloops with her son. "I've lost my only family," she said. "I studied English during the day and at night I saved money to get my son to Canada."

Mr. Dziekanski arrived with three bags, two of which were filled with geography books.


26/10/07, Editorial, The tragic death of Mr. Dziekanski, (Back).

Twenty-four seconds. That was the time that elapsed between the RCMP's arrival to confront an unarmed, shouting Polish man at the Vancouver airport earlier this month and their use of a taser -- twice -- on that man. Minutes later, the man was dead. Twenty-four seconds was not nearly long enough for the RCMP to understand the situation, or for the man to calm down and try to make himself understood.

For everything that is wrong with Canadian policies on taser use, consider the story of Robert Dziekanski's last day on Earth, leading up to those 24 seconds.

The 40-year-old had travelled five hours by bus in Poland and another 10 by plane to reach Vancouver, and the mother he had not seen in years. He quickly cleared Canadian customs and retrieved his bag, according to the family's lawyer, Walter Kosteckyj of Vancouver. (Mr. Kosteckyj has obtained a videotape taken by a passerby, from which he produced the 24-second estimate.) Obedient son that he was, Mr. Dziekanski stood by the baggage carousel, as his mother had instructed. It was his first airplane trip.

His mother had not realized when she gave the instruction that the carousel was in a secure area. She could not see into the secure area and her son could not see out. So she went to an information kiosk in the international arrivals area and asked for help. Three or four times she went to the kiosk, but no one was able to find her son. Finally, after 10 hours, she was told he was not there, and she went home.

Apparently no one noticed or tried to help a man waiting in the small, secure international arrivals area for 10 hours. When he at last emerged into an open area and found his mother not there, the exhausted Mr. Dziekanski exploded in rage and frustration. He banged on windows, shouted, threw a computer. At least three RCMP officers hustled onto the scene. Mr. Dziekanski was no real threat. He just wanted his mother. How could the RCMP have known that in 24 seconds?

A clue to the prompt use of the taser lies in a paper from the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust, a liability insurer. "If you're going to use a CED [conducted energy device], do so before everyone is exhausted" from a struggle, it says, because "one theory recently recognized as medically plausible is that CED use essentially accentuates the negative effects of physical exhaustion." In other words, police are well aware of the risks of exhaustion. But if they are to use the taser as recommended by that paper, they don't have time to determine whether the target individual is exhausted already and therefore at high risk. Nor do they have time to look for peaceful alternatives to this potentially lethal weapon. They rely on the technology, and hope for the best.

This is a terribly limited technology. It is far riskier than police forces are willing to acknowledge, as Mr. Dziekanski's death and those of 16 others in Canada in the past 4½ years show. Mr. Dziekanski's death cries out for a fresh, civilian review of the uses of this technology.

(Back)

01/10/07, Thom Shanker, U.S. Is Top Arms Seller to Developing World

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study to be released Monday. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.

The global arms market is highly competitive, with manufacturing nations seeking both to increase profits and to expand political influence through weapons sales to developing nations, which reached nearly $28.8 billion in 2006.

That sales total was a slight drop from the 2005 figure of $31.8 billion, a trend explained by the strain of rising fuel prices that prompted many developing states — except those that produce oil — to choose upgrading current arsenals over buying new weapons.

The report, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,” was produced by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress, and presents a number of interesting observations linking arms sales and global politics. For example, Russia has been a major supplier of weapons to Iran in past years, including a $700 million deal for surface-to-air missiles in 2005.

But anxieties over Iran’s nuclear program can be seen as having deterred Moscow from concluding significant new conventional arms deals with Iran in 2006, deals that could be viewed as overly provocative while the Security Council debates new sanctions on Iran.

At the same time, though, Russia continues to nurture an arms-trade relationship that is deeply disturbing to the Bush administration, by signing weapons deals with oil-rich Venezuela and its anti-American leader, Hugo Chávez.

The Russian agreements with Venezuela in 2006 included the sale of two dozen Su-30 fighter jets valued at more than $1 billion, along with attack and transport helicopters valued at more than $700 million.

Russia also sold Venezuela a large number of AK-series assault rifles in a deal that included a pledge to build a factory in Venezuela to produce those rifles and ammunition, together valued at more than $500 million.

“Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chávez, has taken a hostile approach to relations with the United States in recent years,” wrote Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service.

“Thus his decision to seek advanced military equipment from Russia is a matter of U.S. concern,” Mr. Grimmett wrote in the report. “Chávez appears embarked on an effort to make Venezuela an important military force in Latin America.”

The study makes clear also that the United States has signed weapons-sales agreements with nations whose records on democracy and human rights are subject to official criticism.

The announcement of major new arms agreements with Pakistan last year renewed debate over whether the Bush administration was elevating its counterterrorism priorities above its pledge to spread democracy around the world.

Pakistan was a major recipient of American arms sales in 2006, including the $1.4 billion purchase of 36 new F-16C/D fighter aircraft and $640 million in missiles and bombs. The deal included a package for $890 million in upgrades for Pakistan’s older versions of the F-16.

At the same time, the State Department’s own survey of global human rights in 2006 noted a variety of shortcomings in Pakistan’s record on human rights and democratization.

But the Bush administration has argued that it is important to maintain the support of a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the broader counterterrorism fight, in particular as Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders regroup in the rugged North-West Frontier Province along the Afghan border.

In 2006, the United States agreed to sell $10.3 billion in weapons to the developing world, or 35.8 percent of these deals worldwide, according to the study. Russia was second with $8.1 billion, or 28.1 percent, and Britain was third with $3.1 billion, or 10.8 percent.

Pakistan concluded $5.1 billion in agreements to buy arms in 2006. That total was followed by India with $3.5 billion in agreements and Saudi Arabia with $3.2 billion in deals.

The combined value of arms sales worldwide to both developed and developing nations in 2006 reached $40.3 billion, a decline of nearly 13 percent from 2005.

When combining totals for arms sales to developed and developing nations, the ranking of world arms dealers remained the same. The United States led with $16.9 billion, followed by Russia with $8.7 billion and Britain with $3.1 billion. The 2006 sales figures for all three nations were higher than their totals in 2005.

China plays an interesting role in the arms market, being both a purchaser of advanced air and naval weapons, from Russia, and as a supplier of less-expensive arms to developing nations.

Mr. Grimmett’s study uses figures in 2006 dollars, with amounts for previous years adjusted for inflation, to give a constant financial measurement.

01/10/07, Walt Bogdanich, The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste

PANAMA — Eduardo Arias hardly fits the profile of someone capable of humbling one of the world’s most formidable economic powers.

A 51-year-old Kuna Indian, Mr. Arias grew up on a reservation paddling dugout canoes near his home on one of the San Blas islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast. He now lives in a small apartment above a food stand in Panama, the nation’s capital, also known as Panama City.

But one Saturday morning in May, Eduardo Arias did something that would reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol, the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient in antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here, killing or disabling at least 138 Panamanians last year.

Mr. Arias reported his discovery, setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. Japan had 20 million tubes. Officials in the United States unwittingly gave the toothpaste to prisoners, the mentally disabled and troubled youths. Hospitals gave it to the sick, while high-end hotels gave it to the wealthy.

People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in their mouths, and until Panama blew the whistle, no one seemed to know it.

The toothpaste scare helped galvanize global concerns about the quality of China’s exports in general, prompting the government there to promise to reform how food, medicine and consumer products are regulated. And other countries are re-examining how well they monitor imported products.

Lost in this swirl of activity was the identity of the person who started it all — Mr. Arias. Until The New York Times tracked him down with the help of the Panama City mayor’s office, his name had not been known, even to some people working on the case. “We haven’t been able to find him,” said Julio César Laffaurie, the Panamanian prosecutor pursuing the case of the contaminated toothpaste.

In looking back over events of the past year, Dr. Jorge Motta, director of the Gorgas Memorial Institute, a prominent research center in Panama City, said he was grateful that some good had come from the national trauma brought on by the toxic cough syrup.

“The whole questioning about Chinese goods began in Panama with our deaths,” he said, putting a twist on an old Chinese saying by adding, “A little butterfly in Panama beat her wings and created a storm in China.”

Mr. Arias, who lives alone and does not own a car, went to buy blank CDs on May 5 at Vendela, a discount store where he had heard prices were so low that street vendors bought supplies there. Stepping into the store, a large display of toothpaste caught his eye.

“Without touching the tube, the letters were big enough for me to read: diethylene glycol,” Mr. Arias said.

A year ago, those words would have meant nothing to him. “Nobody had ever heard of this stuff,” Mr. Arias said. But a steady drumbeat of news about poison cough syrup had engraved the words in his mind.

“It was inconceivable to me that a known toxic substance that killed all these people could be openly on sale and that people would go on about their business calmly, selling and buying this stuff,” said Mr. Arias, who has a midlevel government job reviewing environmental reports.

Mr. Arias thought about alerting the store clerk but figured nothing would come of it. Instead, he bought a tube with the plan of turning it over to the health authorities. It was not easy.

Since government offices were closed on the weekend, he said, he used a vacation day on Monday to walk the tube to the nearest Health Ministry office. But that office refused to accept it, directing him to a second health center.

Mr. Arias walked there and found himself in a crowded office. “It’s always filled with people who are seeking medical attention,” he said. The clerk there directed him to another section of the building where he spoke to another official.

“I said, look, here is this toothpaste I bought on the pedestrian mall,” he said he told the official, “and it says right here — it’s got diethylene glycol.”

The official told him he needed to take the toothpaste to a third health center, this one much farther away. “I said, wait, wait, do I have to walk all the way over there?” he recalled. “Can’t I give it to you and make the complaint here?”

At this point, Mr. Arias said he was given a form to fill out. He left wondering what if anything would come of his complaint.

Mr. Arias got his answer three days later when the nation’s top health official, Dr. Camilo Alleyne, announced that toothpaste containing diethylene glycol had been found by an unidentified shopper in Panama City.

The news set off alarms. In 2006 the government had mistakenly mixed mislabeled diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine, and Panama was still coping with its aftermath. The day before Dr. Alleyne’s announcement, a front-page newspaper article here reported the finding by The Times that the diethylene glycol in the cold medicine had come from a Chinese company not certified to sell pharmaceutical ingredients, and that it had been sold under a false label.

Over the years, counterfeiters have used diethylene glycol as a cheap substitute for its more expensive chemical cousin, glycerin, a common ingredient in medicine, food and household products.

Could the suspect toothpaste have come from China as well, investigators wanted to know? And how did it enter the country unnoticed?

“Under no circumstances were we ever going to let another incident such as happened last year happen again,” said Eric Conte, a top drug official at the Panamanian Health Ministry.

The label did not list its origin. “There was stuff in English, how to brush your teeth, and there was a list of ingredients,” Mr. Conte said. Markings suggested that it came from Germany, but the authorities were skeptical.

“We had a good idea where it came from,” said Reynaldo Lee, director of the national food protection agency. He suspected China, and shipping records proved him right.

The toothpaste had entered Panama through the Colón Free Trade Zone on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. One of the world’s biggest free zones, with 30,000 workers and 2,500 businesses, it is a place where billions of dollars in goods are unloaded, stored and either sold or reshipped free of tariffs. From there, 5,000 to 6,000 tubes slipped into the Panamanian market, without proper certification, mixed in with animal products, investigators said. A much larger number of tubes were reshipped from the free zone to other Latin American countries.

But it was not until the United States disclosed June 1 that tainted tubes had penetrated its borders that the hunt intensified, a task that grew more difficult when investigators discovered that some contaminated toothpaste did not list diethylene glycol on the label.

Even two well-known brands, Colgate and Sensodyne, got caught up in the sweep when counterfeiters were found to be selling toothpaste with antifreeze under their names. Some fake Colgate tubes also contained potentially harmful bacteria, according to a statement from Health Canada, the national health agency.

“Consumers should seal the tube and put the tube in a sealed bag,” Canadian officials advised. Investigators told The Times that both counterfeit brands came from China.

As the complaints mounted, China’s government defended legitimate manufacturers that used diethylene glycol as a thickening agent in toothpaste, saying it had caused no health problems among Chinese consumers.

Officials outside China took a different view. “They should apologize to the world, and not say that it is not dangerous” said Dora Akunyili, who runs the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control in Nigeria. “This is ridiculous.”

Like Panama, Nigeria had its own lethal encounter with diethylene glycol when dozens of children died in 1990 from medicine that also contained the poison.

In laboratory tests, Canadian authorities found diethylene glycol concentrations of nearly 14 percent in Chinese toothpaste — about twice the level of poison detected in the deadly Panamanian cough syrup.

“While toothpaste is not meant to be swallowed, it is often swallowed by young children,” Health Canada warned. Action against Chinese toothpaste is continuing. In late September, Brunei and Australia announced bans on toothpaste containing unacceptable levels of diethylene glycol.

As reports from around the world mounted, Chinese officials showed they were not immune to the criticism. When the makers of Sensodyne tracked counterfeit toothpaste through the Dubai Free Trade Zone to a factory in Shejiang Province in China, regulators there shut it down, a spokesman for Sensodyne said. The government also closed the chemical company that made the poison used in the toxic Panamanian cough syrup.

And in July, China ordered its manufacturers to stop using diethylene glycol in toothpaste.

The decision generated news coverage around the world. The name Eduardo Arias was nowhere to be found. He did not seem to mind.

“At least I contributed something,” he said.