President Donald Trump’s nominee for the FBI director, Kash Patel, on Thursday, said the U.S. SEAL Team Six spent only 60 seconds in rescuing a kidnapped American citizen who had been kept hostage in northern Nigeria.

Mr Patel stated this during his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate on January 30, 2025.

He was grilled about his role in the secret operation to rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old son of American missionaries who had been kidnapped by armed bandits from the neighbouring Niger and moved to northern Nigeria for ransom.

“The operation lasted for 60 seconds,” Mr Patel told the U.S. Congress on Thursday.

He was further grilled about his alleged carelessness in parroting a false approval that the Nigerian government had given the SEAL Team Six clearance to use the Nigerian airspace. Mr Patel was the brain behind the rescue operation, having obtained intelligence on the location where Mr Walton was being held.

He saw the opportunity for the Seal Team Six to strike given the bandits could move Mr Walton to a new location.

It was while the aircraft was aboard with agents mid-air that the U.S. senior officials learnt that the Nigerian government had not yet granted the Navy SEALs clearance to use their airspace, let alone land.

Then-Defence Secretary, Mark Esper, in his memoir, noted it was one of Mr Patel’s  numerous slip-ups and that he was highly concerned for the SEALs, particularly whether they would get shot down from the unauthorised mission.

“I was concerned that being packed in an aircraft burning holes in the sky for an extra hour or so would wear on the special operators, that it might affect their readiness somehow,” ABC cited Mr Esper’s memoir recounting the op.

Mr Esper said the SEALs had their suspicions that Mr Patel fabricated the clearance he said the Nigerian government gave them.

“My team suspected Patel made the approval story up, but they didn’t have all the facts,” Mr Esper wrote.

Mr Patel refuted the allegations in his own book “Government Gangsters” claiming there were persons who tried to undermine the president’s agenda by raising roadblocks to counterterrorism missions in Africa and the Middle East.

The operation was eventually a success after the State Department intervened and acted swiftly to obtain airspace permission from the Nigerian authorities before the Navy SEALs landed.

Mr Patel has faced significant opposition in his quest to become FBI director and it is yet unclear whether he answered the queries satisfactorily.

At least 700 people have been killed since Sunday in intense fighting in Goma, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province, a UN spokesman said Friday.

Rwandan-backed armed group M23 has seized Goma, the biggest city in the country’s east, and is advancing south as volunteers and the struggling Congolese army attempt to beat them back.

“The World Health Organization and its partners conducted an assessment with the government” between Sunday and Thursday, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general.

They reported that “700 people have been killed and 2,800 people injured that are receiving treatment in health facilities,” he said.

Goma was taken after fighting earlier this week, and M23 fighters have vowed to march to the capital Kinshasa.

“If you look at the past, this has the potential of triggering a wider regional conflict,” UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix said during a press conference.

“Therefore it is of the utmost importance that all diplomatic efforts should be geared toward avoiding this and bringing about the secession of hostilities,” he said.

In Goma, “the situation remains tense and volatile, with occasional shooting continuing within the city,” Lacroix said, but added that calm has been “gradually restored.”

Lacroix said he is concerned about the fighters’ advance towards the south, towards the large city of Bukavu, in South Kivu.

“The information I have is that M23 and RDF are about 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of Bukavu,” he said, referring to the Rwanda Defence Force, and added that they “seem to be moving quite fast.”

One risk is that they might capture the Kavumu airport, also in South Kivu, he said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo accuses Rwanda of seeking to profit from the region’s wealth of minerals which are used in global electronics — a claim backed by UN experts which say Kigali has “de facto control” over the M23.

Rwanda denies this — and any military involvement — saying its primary interest is to eradicate a group composed of Hutu militants formed in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

AFP

Russia on Friday criticised President Donald Trump’s plan to build a “Star Wars”-like missile shield for the United States, saying it risked turning space into an arena of “confrontation”.

In an executive order on Monday, Trump called for the creation of an “Iron Dome for America” to counter ballistic and hypersonic missile threats, reviving parts of a controversial Reagan-era plan nicknamed “Star Wars” that would have placed missile interceptors in space.

“We regard this as yet another confirmation of the US intent to turn space into an arena of armed confrontation and to deploy weapons there,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a briefing.

Zakharova said the plan would expand Washington’s missile deterrence to a scale “comparable to Reagan’s Star Wars”, which she called “odious”.

She said the move was primarily aimed at “devaluing Russian and Chinese strategic deterrence capabilities”.

“To put it mildly, these US approaches will not contribute to reducing tensions,” she said.

The “Iron Dome” in Trump’s decree refers to a highly successful system employed by Israel to down short-range rockets.

Washington faces various missile threats from adversaries, but they differ significantly from the short-range weapons that Israel’s Iron Dome is designed to counter.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year unveiled a new hypersonic missile nicknamed “Oreshnik”, a weapon that experts believe flies at 10 times the speed of sound.

The United States said in its 2022 National Defense Strategy that Beijing is also closing the gap with Washington when it comes to ballistic and hypersonic missile technology.

Both Moscow and Washington have traded accusations of weaponising space in recent years.

The United States accused Russia last May of deploying a “space weapon” into the same orbit as a US satellite.

AFP