Braving the heat, mourners climbed the mountain trail to the Boeing 747 crash site on Osutaka Ridge in Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, where they paid their respects at a monument and grave markers for their lost loved ones.

Kuniko Miyajima, who leads an association of the victims’ kin, said, “We all share a desire for safety and peace.” The 76-year-old, who lost her 9-year-old son Ken in the 1985 crash, said she hopes to pass on the lessons learned from the tragedy to the next generation.

Yuji Akasaka, president of Japan Airlines Co., also laid flowers and offered his prayers at the monument. According to Japan Airlines, 272 people from 76 families joined the hike, almost double last year’s numbers.

Also among the hikers was Kyoko Fukuda, 84, who lost her 56-year-old husband Takeshi. It was her first hike since 2019 as she had refrained from climbing the trail during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At her late husband’s grave marker, she talked about the birth of a great-grandchild and said, “As always, I am doing just fine.”

An evening memorial ceremony was later held at the foot of the mountain ridge in the village of Ueno. Candles numbering the same as the 520 lives lost were lit, and a moment of silence was offered at 6:56 p.m., the exact time the crash occurred.

Tears were shed as photos and flowers were placed in front of a memorial bearing the victims’ names.

With coronavirus pandemic measures that had restricted the number of attendees in 2020 now lifted, relatives of the victims were able to take part for the first time in four years.

“I am thankful that I am able to attend for the first time in several years. I do not want it to be forgotten,” said Masae Takishita, a 54-year-old resident of Canada whose 11-year-old brother died in the accident.

The village’s mayor, Hachiro Kurosawa, echoed her sentiment in a speech he gave at the ceremony, noting the importance of “continuing to pass on the memories.”

File photo taken in August 1985 shows wreckage of a Japan Airlines B-747 that crashed in a mountainous area northwest of Mt. Mikuni in Gunma Prefecture. (Kyodo)

On Aug. 12, 1985, a packed JAL flight 123 en route from Tokyo to Osaka crashed around 40 minutes after take-off, leaving only four survivors among the 524 people on board.

Kyu Sakamoto, a 43-year-old singer known for his hit song “Sukiyaki,” was among the dead.

Many were traveling to their hometowns during Japan’s Bon summer holiday season.

In 1987, a Japanese government investigation commission concluded that the accident was caused by improper repairs by Boeing Co. on the plane’s rear pressure bulkhead, whose rupture blew off the craft’s vertical stabilizer and destroyed its hydraulic systems.

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A middle-aged Russian man and two Danish teenagers were killed in the attack. Four others were seriously injured. A 22-year-old man arrested near the scene has been charged and was due to be questioned by a judge.

What happened in the attack?

The shooting occurred at around 17:30 local time (also 17.30 CET), causing panic at one of Scandinavia’s largest shopping centers. The Fields Center is located between Copenhagen city center and the Danish capital’s international airport.

When the first shots were heard, more than 100 people rushed out of the center, according to footage of the attack. Others were forced to hide inside.

Police say three people were killed and four others were injured with gunshot wounds. Several other people received minor injuries as they fled the shopping center, they added.

A young man, armed with a large rifle according to witnesses, was arrested without violence shortly after the arrival of the police.

After the shooting, a big contingent of heavily armed police officers patrolled the area, with several fire department vehicles also parked outside the shopping center.

Who were the victims?

Copenhagen chief police inspector Søren Thomassen said the three people who were killed were a 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, both Danes, and a 47-year-old Russian man.

The four other people who were treated for gunshot wounds are two Danish and two Swedish citizens. They were in a critical but stable condition, Thomassen said.

What do we know about the suspect?

Police have described the man as a “native Dane”. Chief police inspector Søren Thomassen said he was known to the police “only marginally”.

Thomassen said police had no indication that anyone helped the gunman, identified as a 22-year-old Dane, during the attack. He said while the motive was unclear, there was nothing suggesting terrorism.

Police said they seized a rifle from the suspect who also carried a knife. “We also know that he has had access to a gun,” Thomassen said, adding “I will not comment further on it now.”

He confirmed that the suspect was known to mental health services but provided no further information.

Earlier, police said that they were investigating videos posted online purporting to show the suspect with guns pointed at his temple, raising questions over his psychiatric condition.

Thomassen dismissed reports that the perpetrator may have targeted specific people.

“We do not have anything to support this, and we are also aware that on social media there is also an abundance of talk about whether there should be a racist motive for any of this or some other form of motive. We simply cannot say that we have anything to support this here and now,” he said.

Thomassen said the 22-year-old would be arraigned later on Monday on preliminary charges of murder.

What have eyewitness accounts described?

Laurits Hermansen told the DR station that he was in a clothing store at the shopping center with his family when he heard “three-four bangs. Really loud bangs. It sounded like the shots were being fired just next to the store.”

“All of a sudden we heard gunshots, I heard ten shots, and we ran as far as we could to take refuge in the toilets,” Isabella, who hid there for two hours, told DR public television channel. “I was scared, many people were crying”.

Images from the scene showed people running out of the shopping center. Danish broadcaster TV2 posted a photo of a man being put on a stretcher. Witnesses said people were crying and hid in shops.

TV2 published a grainy photo of the alleged gunman, a man wearing knee-length shorts, a vest or sleeveless shirt, and holding what appeared to be a rifle in his right hand.

“He seemed very violent and angry,” eyewitness Mahdi Al-Wazni told TV2. “He spoke to me and said it (the rifle) isn’t real as I was filming him. He seemed very proud of what he was doing.”

Some witnesses interviewed by Danish media said the suspect tried to trick victims, saying for example that his gun was fake to get them to come closer. “He was psychopathic enough to go out and stalk people, but he wasn’t running,” one said.

What has been the reaction?

Many visitors were at the scene before a concert by British star Harry Styles at a nearby venue, which was canceled later in the evening.

“My team and I pray for everyone involved in the Copenhagen shopping mall shooting. I am shocked. Love H,” the British star wrote on Snapchat.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen blasted a “cruel attack” in a shopping center where “adults, young people and children” were present. Danish Queen Margrethe II and several foreign leaders expressed their thoughts and condolences, as did the Tour de France.

A large police presence was deployed to the scene of the shooting and in several places around Copenhagen, in sharp contrast to the celebratory scenes two days earlier when the Tour de France passed through the Danish capital.

The last attack in Copenhagen was on 14 and 15 February 2015, when a 22-year-old man was killed in a shootout with police after going on a shooting spree in the capital that left two people dead and five police officers wounded. That attack was believed to have been motivated by Islamic extremism.

The shooting came a week after a mass shooting in neighbouring Norway, where police said a Norwegian man of Iranian origin opened fire during an LGBTQ festival in Oslo, killing two and wounding more than 20

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The teenager was wearing military gear and live streaming with a helmet camera during the attack in Buffalo. Police said he shot 11 black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch.

Later, he appeared before a judge in a paper medical gown and was arraigned on a murder charge. The suspected gunman in Saturday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, New York, about 320 kilometers southeast of Buffalo.

The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes.

President Joe Biden in a statement said he and the first lady were praying for the victims and their families.

“We still need to learn more about the motivation for today’s shooting as law enforcement does its work, but we don’t need anything else to state a clear moral truth: A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation,” Biden said.

“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America.”

The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, security guard Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, fired multiple shots. A bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof armor but had no effect, Gramaglia said.

The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims.

Police entered the store and confronted the gunman in the vestibule. He put his rifle to his own neck, but two officers talked him into dropping the gun, Gramaglia said.

“This is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at the news conference. “The depth of pain that families are feeling and that all of us are feeling right now cannot even be explained.”

Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s transmission “less than two minutes after the violence started.”

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators were looking into whether he had posted a manifesto online.

Erie County Sheriff John Garcia pointedly called the shooting a hate crime. “This was pure evil. It was (a) straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community,” he told a news briefing.

Among the dead was Ruth Whitfield, the 86-year-old mother of a retired Buffalo fire commissioner.

Officials said the rifle Gendron used in the attack was purchased legally but that the magazines he used for ammunition were not allowed to be sold in New York.

In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people.

The shooting came little more than a year after a March 2021 attack at a King Soopers grocery in Boulder, Colorado, that killed 10 people.

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Dozens were waiting inside the compound of Connaught Hospital, central Freetown, on Sunday, where the largest numbers of injured were taken.

On one wall were lists – some typed, some handwritten – of patients who had been identified. A young man asked for a pen so he could write his phone number beside his brother’s name, saying he still had no information about his brother’s condition. Another man said his son was in the hospital but wasn’t too “damaged”, and he hoped to take him home soon.

The death toll of the Friday night disaster has risen to 101, according to officials from Sierra Leone’s National Disaster Management Agency. The West African country has declared three days of national mourning.

The explosion happened after a fuel tanker, which was turning on a busy road, was hit by a speeding truck. In the aftermath of the crash, dozens of people rushed forward to collect the leaking fuel in containers, with the hope of using or selling it.

Ibrahim Tucker said he was visiting his sister in the area when the explosion took place.

“I didn’t see what caused the fire, I just saw flames,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I ran away … People were really, really damaged [injured] – the people who didn’t die. Many people lost their lives and some really needed medical attention, a lot of them.”

Hassan Kanu, 52, a local community worker who had contacts at the Red Cross, said he called them to take away bodies in the aftermath. “They arrived dressed like they were fighting Ebola and took the bodies to their vehicle,” he said.

Kanu said the people close to the tanker when the explosion happened had “turned to ash so you cannot recognize their faces”.

He described a motorbike driver trying to put out the flames engulfing him by speeding towards a water tank with his bike on fire. “He’s at the hospital [now] and we don’t know if he is alive or if he passed away. The fire was over his body.”

Kanu said many people in the area have lost their livelihoods due to the widespread destruction.

“Today is a sad day for us and we cannot even have food or anything to eat … We need assistance,” he said.

Burned car and motorcycles at the site of a fuel tanker explosion in Freetown, 
Sierra Leone [File: Handout via Reuters]

Many of the victims were female traders who sell small goods on the side of the usually busy road.

“A lot of my friends are missing,” said Aminata Susan Kamara, 27, who sells soft drinks.

She said she heard the sound of the vehicles crashing before people started rushing forward and calling their relatives on the phone to come and gather fuel with them.

Like other witnesses, she said the driver of the tanker disembarked, shouting at people to stay away. After that, she left to go home, but from a distance realized that fire had broken out.

Chaos ensued, and Kamara said some people trapped in minibusses died because the conductor refused to let them out until they had paid their fares – a story repeated by another witness.

Aminata Susan Kamara, 27, who sells soft drinks in the area of the blast, 
said a lot of her friends are still missing after Friday’s explosion 
[Sally Hayden/Al Jazeera]

On Saturday, young men were scavenging for scrap metal close to charred vehicles and areas of ash-covered ground that were still smoking. A crowd stood gaping at what some of them said was a piece of burned flesh.

The World Health Organization said it was working to deploy burn-patient care experts and will send 6.6 tonnes of emergency medical supplies to help the victims.

Victims who survive will have significant long-term needs, including plastic surgery, physiotherapy, and counseling on living with disfigurement said Colonel Dr. Stephen Sevalie, who oversees medical care in the 34 Military Hospital, where seven people died after they were admitted and roughly 20 were being treated in what was once a COVID-19 ward.

“We have to deal with what we have. We are putting together plans,” Sevalie said.

President Julius Maada Bio cut short a visit to the United Kingdom, where he was attending the COP26 climate conference, to return and meet victims of the disaster. He visited the site of the explosion on Sunday morning.

“Let us be law-abiding,” he told the gathered crowd. “We have lost over 100 of our compatriots in a single instance and now we are struggling with about one hundred survivors in the hospitals. This is a moment to come together and avoid the blame game … We must say never again will we make such a mistake.”

“This national tragedy is heart-rending,” he added in a televised address on Sunday evening while saying he had reassured victims of the government’s commitment to supporting them.

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Zarif on Sunday paid a visit to the Lebanese embassy and signed a memorial book of the victims of the Tuesday explosion.

In a recent condolence message posed on his Twitter account in Arabic language he said, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the great and resilient people of Lebanon. As always, Iran is ready to provide assistance in any way which may seem necessary. Stay strong Lebanon.”

Also in a phone conversation with his Lebanese counterpart Charbel Wehbe, the Iranian foreign minister voiced Iran’s readiness to provide more humanitarian supplies to the disaster-hit people of Beirut.

The explosion occurred at the Beirut port in the heart of the city’s downtown business district — now totally destroyed — on Tuesday.

The huge blast left at least 154 people dead and thousands of others wounded and in need of medical assistance. Some 300,000 people were also displaced as residential buildings were fully or partially damaged.

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