The media adviser to former Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai, Muyiwa Adekeye, has said the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) has not responded to his principal’s bail application eight days after his detention.
In a statement posted on X on Monday night, Adekeye wrote, “Today marks eight days since Malam Nasir El-Rufai was detained. He voluntarily reported at the EFCC in the morning of Monday, February 16, 2026, in response to an invitation.”
According to him, El-Rufai was initially held by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) until the night of February 18, when he was moved to ICPC custody.
“As at today, his lawyers have not received any response from the ICPC to their application for bail; and they have not been shown any remand order as the 48-hour window for holding a person without charge has expired,” Adekeye added.
READ ALSO: El-Rufai Sues ICPC For ₦1bn Over Alleged Abuja Home Invasion
Court Proceedings
The aide said at least two court matters involving the former governor are scheduled for hearing this week.
He stated, “The hearing in his fundamental rights case against the Federal Government, the ICPC, the EFCC and the DSS has been fixed for 25th February. This case, which is before the FCT High Court, is seeking an order to admit him to bail.”
He added that El-Rufai “is scheduled for arraignment on the same date on the widely publicised charges filed by the DSS.”
Adekeye also disclosed that El-Rufai has approached the Federal High Court to challenge the legality of a search conducted at his Abuja residence on February 19.
He said the suit seeks a declaration “that the search warrant is invalid, for lack of particularity, material drafting errors, ambiguity in execution parameters, overbreadth and lack of probable cause.”
The former governor is also asking the court to rule that the search violated his fundamental rights and to restrain authorities from using items recovered during the operation in any proceedings against him.
Detention Timeline
Providing a chronology of events, Adekeye said ICPC officials searched El-Rufai’s residence on February 19, after which he underwent further interrogation on February 20.
He noted that a bail application was filed after the interrogation, but “has had no response, so far.”
On his earlier detention by the EFCC between 16 and 18 February, the aide said El-Rufai was granted administrative bail with conditions, including a serving federal permanent secretary as surety, while his lawyers sought a variation of the terms.
Adekeye also relayed complaints by El-Rufai’s counsel, Ubong Akpan, who described his continued custody at the time as “unlawful detention without justification.”
He further alleged that access to the former governor by lawyers and family members was difficult, adding that “his lawyers have reported that he suffered an overnight episode of bleeding from his nose.”
The statement further claimed that on February 12, El-Rufai’s passport “was snatched at the airport, during a failed attempt to arrest him,” an action his lawyers reportedly condemned as unlawful.
Adekeye said the ICPC later issued a letter inviting him for questioning, to which his lawyers responded that he would honour the invitation on February 18.
Justice Peter Kekemeke of the Federal Capital Territory High Court in Maitama has struck out a suit filed by the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) against Mike Ozekhome, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.
The ICPC had filed a three-count charge of alleged forgery against Ozekhome on January 16, 2026. The Attorney-General of the Federation later took over the case on January 26.
At the last hearing, counsel to the Attorney-General, Rotimi Oyedepo, stated that the case would be prosecuted with the highest standard of efficiency, diligence and due process.
READ ALSO: [Alleged Forgery] AGF Takes Over Ozekhome’s Case From ICPC
However, during Tuesday’s proceedings scheduled for Ozekhome’s arraignment, Oyedepo moved an application to withdraw the case.
He explained that the office of the Attorney-General required time to review and consolidate issues arising from multiple investigating agencies in order to strengthen the prosecution.
In the early hours of February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian state television to announce a “special military operation” against Ukraine.
A full-scale invasion of Ukraine came days after the Russian president recognised the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states.
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“I deem it necessary to make a decision that should have been made a long time ago – to immediately recognise the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic,” Putin said on February 21, 2022.
An operation that was only supposed to last a few months is now entering its fifth year.
On the fourth anniversary of Europe’s largest war since 1945, Al Jazeera maps the ground lost and reclaimed, the drone revolution shaping the conflict and the debilitating attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure by Russian forces.
Russia controls 20 percent of Ukraine
Russia launched its military operation along multiple axes, from the north towards the capital, Kyiv, from the east across the eastern Donbas region, and from the south out of Crimea Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. At its furthest advance in March 2022, Moscow’s forces occupied roughly 27 percent of Ukrainian territory. That early momentum, however, proved unsustainable.
In the second half of 2022, Ukraine mounted sweeping counteroffensives that unravelled Russian positions in Kharkiv oblast and forced a withdrawal from Kherson city. By late November, the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, DC, estimated Ukraine had reclaimed approximately 74,000sq km (28,600sq miles), reducing Russian control to about 19 percent of the country.
From 2023, the conflict became one of attrition centred on the mineral-rich Donbas region. Russian forces took Soledar and Bakhmut after months of brutal combat, and, in 2024, Avdiivka – gains that were secured at extraordinary human and material cost. That same year, Ukraine mounted a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, underscoring that the front line into Russia’s west was not impenetrable.
By 2025, despite heavy reported losses, Russia had only gained a further 0.8 percent of Ukraine’s territory, according to Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii. These advances mainly occurred in Donetsk, particularly in the town of Pokrovsk, which saw only 70 metres (77 yards) of Russian advances a day in 2025, according to the Reuters news agency. Pokrovsk was finally captured by Russia in early December.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), an independent conflict monitor, the capture of Pokrovsk paved the way for operations in Dnipropetrovsk, resulting in a tripling of violence in the region compared with the year before.
Moscow’s forces concentrated fighting around the logistical hub of Kostiantynivka, which they entered in December, in a bid to gain control of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – the last major cities under Ukrainian control in Donetsk. In December, the ISW estimated Russian advances had claimed no more than 5 percent of Kostiantynivka.
In the north, Ukraine managed to hold off Russia’s yearlong campaign for Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region with a surprise counteroffensive in December.
The map below shows four years of territorial changes on the ground, highlighting Russia’s gains and Ukraine’s efforts to regain territory.
(Al Jazeera)
Air and drone attacks have increased threefold
Russia has accelerated its drone production and has integrated drones more systematically into its campaign against Ukraine. According to ACLED, in 2025, drone-led targeting of civilians became the leading form of attack, dwarfing other media.
Shelling, artillery and missile attacks initially dominated the conflict, with more than 101,200 events recorded since the war began. While these types of events have decreased as the war has gone on, there has been a rise in air/drone attacks and armed clashes.
Air and drone attacks rose from 6,000 in 2023 to almost 16,000 in 2024 and more than 29,000 in 2025. The jump reflects Russia’s expanding drone programme.
Russia is mainly using Shahed-type drones in their attacks. At the start of the war, these low-cost weapons were primarily supplied by Iran. Now, similar drones are produced in Russia, costing between $20,000-50,000 in production. For example, Geran-2, which are Russian analogues of the Iranian missiles, can reach a range up to 2,000km (1,243 miles) depending on the type. According to the ISW, Russia is producing these drones in Tatarstan, a republic about 800km (500 miles) east of Moscow.
In January, Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskii, said: “At the moment, the enemy produces daily 404 ‘Shaheds’ (Iranian-designed drones) of different kinds. And the plans are to increase that. The enemy plans to boost production significantly, up to 1,000 drones a day.”
Ukraine has employed several tactics and weapons to take down or disable drones, including modern air defence systems, mobile fire teams and electronic warfare.
However, Russia escalated its use of coordinated mass strikes with waves of drone attacks, missiles and decoys used to overwhelm air defences in Ukraine.
Particularly devastating drone attacks on civilians have landed in densely populated cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa.
More than 1,900 attacks on energy infrastructure
Last month, 16-year-old Taira Sluisarenko’s apartment building in eastern Kyiv was hit by a Russian drone, blowing out windows and buckling walls in the apartments above hers.
“I was sitting on the toilet floor and right away felt [the explosion] shake us more than usual,” she told Al Jazeera.
A second drone struck the same location and killed Serhiy Smolyak, a 56-year-old emergency medic, and wounded his colleagues. Russia deployed 278 missiles and drones that night, which killed four and injured dozens.
Days later, with temperatures plunging to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared a nationwide state of emergency for the energy sector, stating that Ukraine’s energy system was meeting only 60 percent of the country’s electricity needs.
Across Ukraine, similar strikes have played out with grim regularity since 2022, falling hardest in winter, when they strip millions of heat, water and power as temperatures plunge double-digits below freezing.
According to data from ACLED, since the conflict began, Russia has carried out more than 1,900 attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which, before the war, was one of Europe’s most robust. The majority of attacks have occurred along the front line.
On January 16, Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal said: “There is not a single power plant left in Ukraine that the enemy has not attacked.”
Depending on the facility and scale of damage, the time it takes to repair Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ranges from hours or weeks to months or years.
In September last year, Russia launched yet another campaign of targeted attacks against energy infrastructure in Ukraine in the lead-up to the coldest months. October saw the highest number of attacks with 175 strikes, followed by January with 138 attacks.
Across the country, generation plants and distribution networks have buckled under the recent assaults, and rolling blackouts have returned.
The failure of peace talks
In the past four years, there have been more than a dozen rounds of peace talks and summits, other than sporadic direct negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.
The most intensive period of negotiations came in the first two months of the war, with five rounds of talks held in Belarus and Turkiye between late February and late March 2022. The most significant were held on March 29, 2022, in Istanbul, where Ukraine presented a detailed 10-point proposal, including neutrality. The talks collapsed in April following the discovery of mass civilian killings in Bucha, 25km (16 miles) west of Kyiv.
From mid-2022 until early 2025, diplomatic efforts were dominated by multilateral summits, which excluded Russia. Without Moscow’s participation, none of these summits yielded breakthroughs.
Direct negotiations resumed in May 2025, when Turkiye successfully brought both sides to Istanbul for two rounds of talks, which resulted in a prisoner exchange.
The most recent developments have been the Trump administration’s engagement starting in late January 2026, with envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner facilitating trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva. They are the first sustained direct negotiations since Turkiye’s first efforts in 2022. As of yet, there have no breakthroughs on a peace agreement.
A massive snowstorm has pummelled the northeast United States, with residents, municipal workers, and a powerful railroad snow-clearing machine nicknamed “Darth Vader” working tirelessly to excavate the region.
The storm – record-breaking in some areas – forced millions of people to stay home, shut schools and caused the cancellation of thousands of flights on Monday.
The weather event, which meteorologists described as the most powerful in a decade, left more than 24 inches (61cm) of snow in parts of the northeast US. By Tuesday, authorities began reopening roads, restoring mass transit in certain cities, and reinstating power to portions of the hundreds of thousands of residents who had lost electricity across the states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island.
In New York, where classes were cancelled on Monday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that schools would resume in-person instruction on Tuesday – a decision that led to concerns about feasibility, given the snow-clogged pavements.
More than 2,000 flights to and from the US were cancelled on Tuesday, according to FlightAware, with the majority of disruptions occurring at airports in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Rhode Island’s TF Green international airport halted operations on Monday after receiving nearly 38 inches (97cm) of snow, surpassing a 1978 record.
New York’s Central Park recorded 19 inches (48cm) of snowfall, while it measured more than 36 inches (91cm) in Warwick, Rhode Island – the highest total in the nation. Nantucket in Massachusetts experienced the strongest wind gust, recorded at 134km/h (83mph), with hurricane-force gusts reported across Cape Cod.
Emergency declarations were issued in New York, Philadelphia and several other cities and states.
The Boston Globe daily suspended its print publication for the first time in more than 150 years, as snow and wind made it unsafe for staff to reach the printing facility.
Monday’s event was characterised by meteorologists as a “classic bomb cyclone”, which occurs when a storm’s pressure drops significantly within 24 hours, often during the autumn and winter seasons when Arctic air masses collide with warmer temperatures.
Mexico remains on high alert after a wave of reprisal attacks triggered by the killing of its most wanted drug cartel leader, even as President Claudia Sheinbaum claimed the country is at peace and life is returning to normal.
Some 10,000 soldiers have been deployed across 20 of Mexico’s 32 states to maintain order following the killing of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera in a military operation about 130km (80 miles) from Guadalajara city on Sunday.
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Guadalajara is the capital of western Mexico’s Jalisco state – the stronghold of Oseguera’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) – where at least 2,000 soldiers have been sent.
Schools in Guadalajara and several other Mexican cities were closed on Monday. However, public transport partially resumed, though buses carried few passengers, as people witnessed a slow return to normalcy.
Security Minister Omar Garcia Harfuch said on Monday that at least 74 people were killed, including 25 National Guard officers, in the operation that killed the cartel boss and the subsequent violence over the killing of the 59-year-old drug kingpin, one of the most wanted men in Mexico and the United States.
Burned-out vehicles are seen on the boardwalk in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico [Arturo Montero/EPA]
“El Mencho” was considered the last of the drug lords who acted in the brutal mould of the now-imprisoned Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, of the rival Sinaloa Cartel. He was a founding member of CJNG, which was formed in 2009 and has grown into one of Mexico’s most violent crime organisations.
Following his killing, suspected CJNG members set fire to cars in several states and blocked numerous roads. They also attacked banks, petrol stations and shops.
Al Jazeera’s John Holman, reporting from Mexico City, said there was an eerie quiet in the country following El Mencho’s killing.
“Many businesses are closed, and the trucks that the CJNG cartel dragged across roads to stop Mexican security forces and create chaos have been moved out of the way,” Holman said.
Meanwhile, President Sheinbaum said on Monday that peace had returned to the country. “Mexico is calm. We woke up without any roadblocks, and all activity has been restored,” she said.
The White House confirmed that the US provided intelligence support to the operation to capture the cartel leader and applauded Mexico’s army for taking down a man who was one of the most wanted criminals in both countries.
Sheinbaum stressed that only Mexican forces were involved in the operation.
“There was no participation in the operation by US forces. What we have is a lot of exchange of information provided by the US government, but the entire operation, from its planning stage, is the responsibility of [Mexico’s] federal forces,” the president said.
Scotland and Ireland will face hosts England at the Women’s T20 World Cup after the draw for this summer’s tournament was finalised.
Scotland and Ireland booked their place at the World Cup in the qualifying tournament in Nepal earlier this month.
They join England in Group Two, alongside West Indies, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
The game between England and Scotland at Headingley on 20 June will mark the first occasion the two countries have met in any kind of cricket World Cup fixture, men or women, in the UK.
Ireland meet England in Southampton on 16 June, while Ireland and Scotland start their campaigns against each other at Old Trafford on 13 June.
The tournament begins a day earlier when England take on Sri Lanka at Edgbaston.
Bangladesh and the Netherlands were the other two teams to come through the qualifier and join Australia, South Africa, India and Pakistan in Group One.
With the 12-team field confirmed – the largest in the 17-year history of the Women’s T20 World Cup – the full groups and fixtures have been published for the first time.
New Zealand will defend the title they won in the United Arab Emirates two years ago in the first Women’s T20 World Cup to be held in England since the inaugural tournament in 2009.
