UnitedHealth suspect, Syria’s lost prisoners and Haiti 'witchcraft' massacre
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Today, a suspect is in custody in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. Syrians search a notorious Sednaya prison for missing relatives. And in Haiti, a brutal string of murders over the weekend has very personal ties to one notorious gang leader. It's Tuesday, December 10th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday.

I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. And I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago. When you hear LSEC data and analytics, what do you think of? Comprehensive data you can trust. Exclusive access to Reuters news. Industry-leading analytics and unique insights. Discover new possibilities with LSEC data and analytics. Authorities have arrested the man suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson last week.

New York City officials announced the news Monday, ending a massive five-day manhunt. The suspect has been identified as 26-year-old Luigi Mangione.

Julio Cesar Chavez sent us this from where he was captured in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Mangione was brought before a judge around 6.27 p.m. He was wearing a long-sleeve athletic shirt and jeans with socks but no shoes. Police said Mangione was arrested Monday morning after a McDonald's customer recognized him from the photos of the suspect that had been circulated and asked an employee to call the police.

Mangione was found with a ghost gun, a firearm assembled from parts, making it untraceable, and a silencer consistent with the weapon used to shoot Thompson, according to police. Now, a profile of the Ivy League-educated suspect is coming together.

And our reporter Andrew Hay is covering the story. He grew up in Maryland. He attended a private boys' school in Baltimore where he was the valedictorian. And then he went on to the University of Pennsylvania where he got undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science. Now, we had a news conference today from the New York Police Department where we learned that this suspect Mangione was found with...

with a manifesto of sorts, a handwritten note which the police chief said expressed ill will towards corporate America and specifically with regards to insurance firms said that they were putting profits above people. And further than that on his ex profile there may be a clue

He has an x-ray picture of spinal fusion surgery. That's when you put titanium plates in the back of a person and you screw screws into their spinal column, which is following a catastrophic back injury. Whether that had something to do with his ill will towards the health industry, we don't know.

The South Korean parliament has passed a bill to appoint a special council-led probe of the president following his botched attempt to declare martial law. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes the stand today for the first time in his long-running corruption trial. Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He denies any wrongdoing.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has had surgery in Sao Paulo to drain a bleed on his brain linked to a fall at home in October. That's according to a medical note published by the government. Daniel Penney, a former Marine who in 2023 used a chokehold to restrain a homeless man on a New York subway, has been found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has lost a bid to change his family trust and consolidate control of his media empire with his son Lachlan. The trust currently divides control of the media company that includes Fox and News Corp, equally among all four of Murdoch's oldest children, three of whom are more politically moderate than Lachlan.

It's the opening day of Reuters Next, Reuters' annual live journalism summit. And we've let Carmel Crimmins loose in New York for it. Carmel, how's the city that never sleeps treating you? Splendid as always, Tara. All right. So who's hitting the main stage today at Next? We've got a cracking lineup. We've got the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and Ferrari, so that's Wall Street and fast cars covered. We've got the chief financial officer of OpenAI and the president of Google parent Alphabet, so that's Silicon Valley well represented. And we've got the CEO of Google,

and loads more. We'll be diving into geopolitics, the Trump presidency, AI, and finance. So how can people tune into all this? They can catch a live stream on the Reuters app and Reuters.com, and we'll have coverage of all the news at the event there too. Nisar al-Jabbar sits outside Syria's once-forbidding Sednaya prison.

where 10 years ago she was told by authorities that her imprisoned brother was dead and that she should not return. She didn't believe them. After the dramatic fall of President Bashar al-Assad, thousands of prisoners have walked free, with Jabir joining the wave of families desperately searching for information.

Our Syria bureau chief, Maya Jibaili, was also there as those families trawled the dark corridors and hidden cells in the labyrinthine complex. There were several people that had come out of the prison alive, extremely traumatized, very, very poor shape health-wise. And people were hoping that there were further underground levels that were going to be uncovered where they could find their loved ones.

And we saw civil defense workers that were drilling into the floor, drilling into walls, breaking down doors and trying to find any hidden cells or any hidden sections of the prison that had not been opened yet.

There were also a lot of people that were picking up documents, papers, and were desperately looking through them to find the names of their relatives. The reason why this is so traumatic for Syrians was that in many cases they could never actually get a straight answer from Syrian security forces about where their loved ones were. I was looking through some papers and family members would just come running up to me and say, are there names there? Can you find anyone who maybe is from this area of Syria or from this part of Damascus?

I also spoke to many activists who have been working on the issue of the forcibly disappeared for years. And they told me it was great that a lot of people could be released within hours of President Bashar al-Assad's government toppling. But they were also worried that the documents that were being picked up and scattered and picked up and taken home contained really important evidence. And that meant ultimately that justice could not be served.

In Washington, officials say they're trying to find out the whereabouts of Austin Tice, the American journalist captured in Syria 12 years ago. Israel has denied an incursion into the country, saying they've remained within a designated buffer zone. Security sources had claimed Israel had moved to within 16 miles of Damascus after airstrikes on Syrian army and air bases.

Hundreds of Haitians were killed over the weekend in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest communities in Haiti. The series of killings are suspected to be orchestrated by a gang leader named Monel Mikanoua-Felix. But unlike much of the recent violence in Haiti, this rampage was more personal and targeted at the slum's elders.

Harold Isaac is in Haiti. Help me understand what happened over the weekend. What we've gathered so far is that Mika Nga, the notorious gangster that has a tight grip on Cité Soleil, had an ailing son and referred essentially to a voodoo priest for treatment. And...

It appears that the voodoo priest indicted, for lack of a better word, the elderly community within Cité Soleil that he alleged were responsible of witchcraft, which he claims has made his kids sick. And as such, the first part of that massacre happened on Friday, where over 50 people got killed. And then subsequently, when the kid died on the Saturday,

Another set of people were killed gruesomely in response to the kid's death. Mikanel hasn't publicly responded to the claims that he's behind these killings. But what do we know about him and how he fits into this broader network of gang leaders in Haiti, specifically the more notable Jimmy Barbecue Charizé? Well, from what we know, they've been long affiliated.

Meccano was reputed to be a very strong ally, a very reliable ally of barbecue. But one of the things that really he's been notorious for is really the grip that he has on Cite Soleil in the War of Germany area, where even cell phones are not really allowed for folks to use, which really kind of slowed the spread of the news.

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And for today's recommended read, Google says it has cracked a quantum computing challenge with a new generation of chip, solving a computing problem in just five minutes that would take a classical computer more time than the history of a universe. A link to that story is in the pod description. For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or download the Reuters app.

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