Grandparent scam: London, Ont., senior beats fraudsters not once, but twice
It was a typical Tuesday for Mabel Beharrell, 84, until she got the call that would turn her world upside down. Her teenaged grandson was in trouble and needed her help.
The first thing you notice when you drive into the tiny Polish village of Bohoniki is the mosque. It’s a wooden building, quite humble, with a small minaret crowning the shingled roof.
About a hundred people live in Bohoniki, with links to Islam that go back 600 years. They are known as the Tatars of Poland, who somehow managed to resist religious assimilation and the overwhelming domination of the Roman Catholic Church.
It’s not very far from the village to Poland’s troubled border with Belarus. As hundreds of migrants tried to sneak or force their way into Europe, held back by walls of razor wire and soldiers in battle dress, the Tatars of Bohoniki took on a tragic and solemn duty.
They began to bury some of the dozen or more who died on the way.
“Our tradition says Muslims must be buried in a Muslim cemetery,” one of the villagers told me. We were standing in front of a freshly-dug grave. The earth is sandy-coloured.
“Personally, I feel sadness. All Muslims are brothers, it doesn’t matter where they come from.”
The village cemetery sits on a tree-covered hillside, surrounded by plowed fields. It’s a peaceful setting, and faithfully looked after.
The first migrant they buried was a 19-year-old Syrian, Ahmed al-Hassan, who drowned crossing the river Bug. His grieving family watched the burial over a video link from thousands of kilometres away.
The second victim appeared to be African, about 30 years old. He died from exposure. That’s all the villagers knew about him. He went into Polish ground without a name.
“He left his home country for a better life,” said one of the men who carried the coffin, “and the worst thing happened to him here in Poland.”
European leaders point fingers shaking with contempt at the man they hold responsible for engineering this border crisis, the burly, crude, belligerent, and perhaps murderous strongman of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko.
With the brutal trademark of being “Europe’s last dictator,” he is surely a candidate for prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Wanted: For rigging the 2020 Belarus presidential election, then arresting and torturing hundreds of his political opponents.
It was after Europe imposed sanctions on Belarus that Lukashenko seized on the cruelty—or to his mind, the opportunity—of using migrants for retaliation.
Thousands of people from the Middle East were welcomed with visas, herded to the border with Poland, and then held there in a freezing stranglehold—with the dream of a new life in Europe just a few impossible steps away.
For his part, Lukashenko was merely exploiting Europe’s greatest weakness: how to seal off the continent from another crisis of mass migration, like the arrival of a million war-ravaged Syrians in 2015.
Even as Poland turned water cannons against the migrants, even as it lined up a small army of security forces along the border, even as it sent back those who did manage to cross—through all of it, Europe remained steadfast in solidarity.
Nor is it the first time migrants have been used as bargaining chips. Libya once threatened to unleash an “influx of starving and ignorant Africans” on Europe. Today, Europe helps finance the Libyan Coast Guard.
In 2016, Turkey was paid billions of dollars to keep migrants from reaching European shores. In effect, it was protection money. And what happened when Europe tried to punish Turkey over human rights abuses? Turkey threatened to scuttle the deal.
No surprise then that the autocratic leader of Belarus would seek to "weaponize" poor migrants, and send them into battle against his political enemies.
Which is how a nameless man, from an unknown country, came to be given a Muslim burial in a small village in Poland.
After his grave was covered in a mound of earth, villagers circled it with a fringe of stones and lay tree branches on top.
“It pains me,” said the imam, as he prayed for the man’s journey to paradise.
It was a typical Tuesday for Mabel Beharrell, 84, until she got the call that would turn her world upside down. Her teenaged grandson was in trouble and needed her help.
The deaths of four people on a farm near the Saskatchewan village of Neudorf have been confirmed a murder-suicide.
The Canada Revenue Agency announced Thursday it will not require 'bare trust' reporting from Canadians that it introduced for the 2024 tax season, just four days before the April 2 deadline.
The Parole Board of Canada has granted full parole to one of three men convicted in the brutal murders of three McDonald's restaurant workers in Cape Breton more than 30 years ago.
Nearly 20 hours after a man climbed and remained perched on top of the Reconciliation Bridge in downtown Calgary, the situation came to a peaceful resolution.
Ontario released its annual sunshine list Thursday afternoon, noting that the largest year-over-year increases were in hospitals, municipalities, and post-secondary sectors.
Genetic analysis has shed light on a long-standing mystery surrounding the fates of U.S. President George Washington's younger brother Samuel and his kin.
A spokesman for a regional Muslim advocacy group says Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's stance on the Israel-Hamas war could complicate his party's relationship with Muslim Canadians.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump is officially selling a copy of the Bible themed to Lee Greenwood’s famous song, 'God Bless the USA.' But the concept of a Bible covered in the American flag has raised concern among religious circles.
B.C. conservation officers recently seized a nine-foot-long Burmese python from a home in Chilliwack.
A New Brunswicker will go to bed Thursday night much richer than he was Wednesday after collecting on a winning lottery ticket he let sit on his bedroom dresser for nearly a year.
The Ontario government is introducing changes to auto-insurance, but some experts say the move is ill-advised.
A Toronto restaurant introduced a surprising new rule that reduced the cost of a meal and raised the salaries of staff.
Newfoundland’s unique version of the Pine Marten has grown out of its threatened designation.
A Toronto man is out $12,000 after falling victim to a deepfake cryptocurrency scam that appeared to involve Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It started small with a little pop tab collection to simply raise some money for charity and help someone — but it didn’t take long for word to get out that 10-year-old Jace Weber from Mildmay, Ont. was quickly building up a large supply of aluminum pop tabs.
There’s a group of people in Saskatoon that proudly call themselves dumpster divers, and they’re turning the city’s trash into treasure.
Ontario is facing a larger than anticipated deficit but the Doug Ford government still plans to balance its books before the next provincial election.