Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton, who took female victims to his pig farm during a crime spree near Vancouver in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has died after being assaulted in prison, authorities said Friday. He was 74.

The Correctional Service of Canada said in statement that Pickton, an inmate of Port-Cartier Institution in the province of Quebec, died in hospital following injuries in the May 19 assault involving another inmate. He was one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers and his case made international headlines.

A CANADIAN SERIAL KILLER WHO BROUGHT VICTIMS TO A PIG FARM IS HOSPITALIZED AFTER A PRISON ASSAULT

A 51-year-old inmate was in custody for the assault on Pickton, police spokesman Hugues Beaulieu said earlier this month.

Robert “Willie” Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2007, with the maximum parole ineligibility period of 25 years, after being charged with the murders of 26 women.

Police began searching the Pickton farm in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam more than 22 years ago in what would be a years-long investigation into the disappearances of dozens of women from Vancouver’s seediest streets, sex workers and drug addicts abandoned on the margins of society.

The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on the farm. Pickton once bragged to an undercover police officer that he killed a total of 49 women.

During his trial, prosecution witness Andrew Bellwood said Pickton told him how he strangled his victims and fed their remains to his pigs. Health officials once issued a tainted meat advisory to neighbors who might have bought pork from Pickton’s farm, concerned the meat might have contained human remains.

Cynthia Cardinal, whose sister Georgina Papin was murdered by Pickton, said Pickton’s death means she can finally move on from her sister’s murder.

“This is gonna bring healing for, I won’t say all families, I’ll just say most of the families,” she said. “I’m like — wow, finally. I can actually move on and heal and I can put this behind me.”

Vancouver police were criticized for not taking the cases seriously because many of the missing were sex workers or drug users.

Canada’s correctional service said it was conducting an investigation into the attack on Pickton.

“The investigation will examine all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the assault, including whether policies and protocols were followed,” the service said in the statement. “We are mindful that this offender’s case has had a devastating impact on communities in British Columbia and across the country, including Indigenous peoples, victims and their families. Our thoughts are with them.”

Pickton’s confirmed victims were six: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Papin and Marnie Frey.

“Earlier today, I was made aware of the death of an inmate at Port-Cartier Institution,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in statement. “At this time, my thoughts are with the families of the victims of this individual’s heinous crimes.”

At the time of Pickton’s sentencing, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice James Williams said it was a “rare case that properly warrants the maximum period of parole ineligibility available to the court.”

After February landslide win, 42-year-old set to govern for another five years with near-total control of parliament and other state institutions.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is set to be sworn in for a second term, riding on a wave of popularity that has helped him consolidate his power and influence in the country.

The 42-year-old, who unapologetically describes himself as a “cool dictator”, was re-elected in February with 85 percent of the vote. He is set to govern for another five years with near-total control of parliament and other state institutions.

The former publicist and mayor will take the oath of office at the National Palace in the capital, San Salvador, on Saturday.

The ceremony is due to be attended by dignitaries including Spanish King Felipe VI and Argentinian President Javier Milei, with whom Bukele shares an admiration for former United States President Donald Trump, whose son and namesake is also attending the event.

On Friday, inauguration preparations were disrupted by reports that police thwarted a plot to detonate explosives at locations across the country.

Bukele enjoys sky-high approval ratings due to his brutal crackdown on criminal gangs, credited with returning a sense of normalcy to a violence-fatigued society.

The campaign has drawn criticism from rights groups but has made Bukele the most popular leader in Latin America, according to a regional poll.

Bukele’s New Ideas party scored a near-clean sweep in legislative elections, where it took 54 of 60 seats.

Yet experts warn his extended honeymoon with voters may be nearing its end as economic worries overtake safety concerns in the public discourse, amid high government debt and fast-rising prices for consumer goods in a country where more than a quarter of the six million population lives in poverty.

Food inflation, meanwhile, has outpaced salary increases while public debt has skyrocketed on his watch to more than $30bn, or 84 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Gangs as a ‘cancer’

Bukele will have even more power in his second term after the legislative assembly approved a reform that will make it easier for him to push through constitutional changes.

The president has laughed off criticism of authoritarian tendencies, but he was only able to seek re-election after a loyalist Supreme Court ruling allowed him to bypass a constitutional ban on successive terms.

“What he has demonstrated is that the law is irrelevant and that he can do whatever he wants, how he wants,” public policy expert Carlos Carcach told AFP news agency, describing Bukele as an “all-powerful” president.

With his preferred getup of jeans and a baseball cap, millennial Bukele came to power in 2019 promising to crush the country’s gangs, to which he attributes some 120,000 murders over three decades – more than the 75,000 lives lost in El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 to 1992.

During Bukele’s first term, authorities rounded up more than 80,000 presumed gangsters under a state of emergency in place since March 2022 that allows for arrest without a warrant.

His government also built the largest prison in Latin America to hold them.

The result, Bukele has boasted, has been turning “the murder capital of the world, the world’s most dangerous country, into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere”.

But it has come at a cost.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported the killing and torture of detainees, and thousands of innocent people – including minors – among those arrested.

MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka (AP) — At the site of a bloody battlefield that marked the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, Singaram Soosaimuthu fishes every day with his son, casting nets and reeling them in.

It is a skill he has known for much of his life — and one that he had to relearn after a devastating injury. The former Tamil fighter lost both legs in 2009 as the nation’s generation-long civil war drew to a close and the Tamils retreated in defeat.

Making something of himself despite his injuries brought Soosaimuthu success — an achievement in which he finds profound meaning. He sees his fellow ethnic Tamils in the same light: To regain their voice, they must thrive.

But defeat — bloody, protracted and decisive — has brought Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil community to a point of despair.

Some parents have given up hope of ever learning the fate of the thousands of missing children. Parts of the Tamil lands are decimated, with poor infrastructure and fewer economic opportunities. Survivors have lived under surveillance for years, and many now feel that members of the rising generation have grown too fearful and apathetic toward speaking up for their rights.

“There is a clear agenda underway to degenerate a defeated community,” says Selvin Ireneus, a social activist based in Jaffna, the Tamils’ northern cultural heartland.

The government, he says, doesn’t want today’s Tamils to be politically evolved. After fighting ended, he asserts, narcotics and other vices have been systematically introduced into the region. “They only want them to eat, drink and enjoy and not have a political ideology,” Ireneus said. “This has happened with all defeated communities in the world.”

The island nation of 20 million is overwhelmingly ethnically Sinhalese, with the Tamil community making up about 11% of the population. The separatist civil war broke out in 1983 after years of failed attempts to share power within a unified country, with Tamil fighters — known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or simply the Tamil Tigers — eventually creating a de facto independent homeland in the country’s north.

The group was crushed in a 2009 government offensive. The war killed at least 100,000 on both sides, and left many more missing.

Though not all Tamils were part of or supported the Tamil Tiger rebel group, their defeat has effectively become a political defeat to the community. They have lost their bargaining power.

“What is remaining now is a very small community, and they don’t have the courage … to show dissent,” says K.T. Ganeshalingam, head of political science at the University of Jaffna.

Sri Lanka’s government had promised the United Nations and countries like India and the United States that they would share power with the Tamil-majority areas to resolve the causes that led to the civil war. However, successive governments have not followed up.

Fifteen years on, some in Tamil areas are still in denial that the armed campaign has been defeated and that the rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was seen as invincible, has been killed. Sections of the expatriate Tamils in Europe have been claiming that Prabhakaran would return soon to take on the campaign to the next stage, including a woman who claims to be his daughter and is said to be collecting donations in his name.

Prabhakaran’s nephew in Denmark, Karthic Manoharan, says the time has come to put a stop to the rumors and state, emphatically, that the leader is dead.

“We don’t have any doubt regarding (his death) because he loved his country so much. And he’s not a coward to run from the country and live in another country, in a different country to save himself, his wife and his daughter,” Manoharan says.

Such beliefs are more than simply inaccurate, says Ganeshalingam; they’re genuinely harmful to any possible future that the Tamil people are trying to chart. He wonders: “If I have not grasped the fact that I am defeated, how can I rise from that?”

Discussing the Tamil Tigers’ defeat, their past mistakes and even Prabhakaran’s death is discouraged in Tamil society, especially in the diaspora. Ganeshalingam says such attitudes have created a stagnation in Tamil politics.

Political leaders are divided and are in disarray. A political alliance that the Tamil Tigers formed is fragmented with many leaders breaking away to form their own parties. Civil activists are now working to unify them and strengthen their bargaining position ahead of the presidential election later this year.

In the villages of Mullaitivu district, where the final battle between government forces and the Tamil Tigers unfolded, many men are addicted to narcotics and alcohol, forcing women to be the family’s main breadwinners, says Yogeswari Dharmabaskaran, a social worker in the Udaiyarkattu area of Mullaitivu district. School dropouts soar in the villages, she says, as boys find easy money through selling narcotics, illegal tree-felling and the mining of river sand.

In Jaffna, local politician Thiyagaraja Nirosh says family elders discourage young people from discussing political rights. Because of that, it is difficult to find younger candidates to run in local elections.

“There is fear that talking politics is dangerous. Many family elders do not encourage talking politics,” Nirosh says “The reason is that there has been no justice for the past killings. They see no guarantee that such incidents won’t recur.”

Thayalan Kalaipriya, a former rebel, wonders about the future often. She says her many losses have made her deeply desire unity among all Sri Lankans; at the same time, she says it is painful to realize their efforts to win political rights have been wasted.

Former rebels often do not receive adequate support and at times ex-fighters, like those who conscripted children at the height of the war, are treated with resentment, although she says some respect their commitment and sacrifice.

She finds solace by working with her young children, educating them and helping to give them a good life in a land she hopes is free of civil war and the sad echoes it has caused.

“We teach our children about what happened,” she says, “but never to seek revenge.”

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Associated Press journalist Nat Castañeda in Copenhagen contributed to this report.