A man in California deliberately plowed his car into a group of eight pedestrians because he thought some of them were Muslim, local authorities have said.

Isaiah Joel Peoples, 34, faces eight counts of attempted murder for injuring eight people, including a 13-year-old girl, after he deliberately veered his car into the pedestrians.

According to the AP news agency, the teenage girl was the most seriously injured in the incident and is currently in a coma with severe brain trauma.

Three adults also remain in hospital with injuries that include broken limbs and fractures.

Jay Boyarsky, the chief assistant district attorney for Santa Clara, said the charges carry a sentence of life in prison and he will file hate crime allegations if warranted.

“There is very appalling and disturbing evidence that at least one or two of these victims were targeted based on the defendant’s view of what their race or religion may have been,” he said.

Phan Ngo, the chief of Sunnyvale’s Department of Public Safety, said that Peoples showed no remorse after his car hit the victims.

“He targeted the victims based on their race and his belief that they were of the Muslim Faith. We will be providing support to our diverse communities,” he wrote on Twitter.

“There is absolutely no tolerance for hate in our community”.

There is absolutely no tolerance for hate in our community. We are here for all our community members. https://t.co/P5dDE72aEx

— Phan Ngo (@SunnyvaleChief) April 26, 2019

Witness Don Draper said when he marched over to Peoples’ car after he crashed, he found the driver muttering over and over, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus”.

His family told the AP, that Peoples, a Iraq war veteran, experienced post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq.

His attorney, Chuck Smith, said that the crash was in no way deliberate, claiming it “was clearly the product of some mental disorder or mental defect”.

According to the FBI, hate crimes surged by at least 17 percent in the US in 2017, with 7,175 documented hate crimes. At least 15 of those resulting in murders.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has also documented a sharp rise in hate incidents following Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, with the number of active hate groups peaking to an all time high of 1,020 in 2018.

Madrid, Spain – As Spain prepares to vote in national elections on Sunday, old wounds have come to the forefront of the campaign season.

The question of Spain’s treatment of its dictatorial past, and its causalities, has become a hot-button election issue, thanks to a rising far-right.

The remains of 40,000 Spaniards who died in the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, rest at an imposing memorial near Madrid called The Valley of the Fallen.

Spain’s former fascist leader Francisco Franco, whose repressive government ruled from 1939 until 1975 and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of political opponents, is also interred there.

Franco ordered the construction of the imposing monument – allegedly aided by forced labour – after his civil war victory. 

The monument features a Catholic Basilica carved into a hillside and a 150-metre-tall cross which sits above it, visible from 32 kilometres.

The leader of the centre-left Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (PSOE), Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, has called for Franco’s remains to be removed from the monument, which belongs to the Spanish state.

Sanchez also attempted to include 15 million euros (nearly $17m) to identify Franco’s victims in a budget that failed to pass in February, which led to snap polls.

The far-right Vox party, which has seen surprising gains in regional elections and is projected to take roughly 12 percent of the vote, said it would block plans to exhume Franco and the thousands of mass graves for which his forces were responsible.

When Vox helped mainstream the centre-right People’s Party (PP) wrest control of Andalucia from PSOE, it was partly on the condition they negate laws which allow the exhumation of mass graves.

Forgetting traumatic events does not help to overcome them … A mature society must be capable of a critical and rigorous reading of its immediate past.

Jordi Font Agullo, director of the Democratic Memorial

For Mauricio Cela, a waiter in his sixties who works at a traditional restaurant in Madrid’s centre, the issue is complicated.

“My family believes my grandfather is [in] one of those graves,” Cela told Al Jazeera.

Cela said he considers himself conservative, but he would like to know his ancestor’s resting place. He had hoped his family would get the chance to do so, even if PSOE-allocated funds were responsible.

“It’s not a political thing, it’s personal. I want to vote for the right, but I don’t know if I want to give up this opportunity.”

Historical memory

The PSOE-headed government that ruled Spain from 2004 until 2011 passed the law of Historical Memory in 2007, which condemned atrocities under Franco, called for symbols of his rule to be removed from public spaces and claimed that the state would help in locating and identifying those still missing as a result of the civil war and Francoist oppression.

The law did away with the “pact of forgetting” made between PP, PSOE and the Spanish communist party after Franco’s death that had governed Spain’s stance towards its history.

There is no official count of the people killed or disappeared during the civil war, but estimates exceed 100,000.

Experts say there are over 3,000 mass graves across Spanish territory. Roughly 740 of these have been exhumed since 2000, leaving about 114,000 bodies in 2,500 more graves.

Still, many view the law as “too little, too late”, according to Heather Graham, an historian who specialises in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath and is also a history professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The law “putatively gave rights to victims, it did so in such a way as (often) to block their enquiries because it also gave absolute protection” to perpetrators, Graham said.

Furthermore, the law was hobbled by not explicitly providing funding for the efforts to identify and exhume victims. 

No money was allocated to these efforts by PP, which ruled from 2011 to 2018.

Graham stressed that the movement to exhume mass graves originated in civil society at the beginning of the 21st century, which pressured the national government to confront Spain’s past.

“It remains very much the exception rather than the norm for [a government] anywhere to deal with their own ‘difficult pasts’ in an open and honest way,” she said.

Regional trauma

Spain is home to four minority national identities and languages, including Basques, Catalans, Valencians and Gallegos. The majority group are known as Castilians, and their language is commonly known as Spanish.

The Franco government was known for its efforts to homogenise Spain. Catholicism was the only state-sanctioned religion and minority languages and culture were made illegal.

Catalonia bore the brunt of this oppression, with many of their leaders, including their regional president, Lluis Companys, being executed by Francoist firing squads.

Jordi Font Agullo, director of the Democratic Memorial, an institution inside the Department of Justice of the Government of Catalonia, said these wounds are still open for many Catalans: “For a great part of the Catalan society the memories of that historical period – civil war and dictatorship – are still alive.”

The region has attempted to attain independence in recent years, citing their unique culture and language, as well as continued discrimination from the Spanish state, as reasons for separating.

This perceived discrimination harkens back to Franco, Agullo said.

When asked about this election season’s policy proposals of a return to willful ignorance towards Franco’s policies, Agullo said he thinks it’s “a serious mistake” not to confront the past with all its complexity.

“Forgetting traumatic events does not help to overcome them, but [entrenches] them and [fosters] phenomena such as negationism and historical manipulation. A mature society must be capable of a critical and rigorous reading of its immediate past,” he concluded.

The US government commission on religious freedom has urged action against ally Saudi Arabia after its mass execution of 37 people, most of them Shia Muslims.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, whose members are appointed by the president and lawmakers across party lines but whose role is advisory, said the US State Department “must stop giving a free pass” to Saudi Arabia.

On Friday, the commission issued a statement after reports emerged the youngest of the 37 men executed on Tuesday was only 16 when he was charged.

Abdulkarim al-Hawaj’s death sentence had prompted an outcry from the United Nations, which had urged the kingdom to overturn the ruling.

Hawaj reportedly “confessed” to his crimes after being beaten and tortured with electricity while his hands were chained above his head, human rights charity Reprieve has said.

Another of the men executed on Tuesday was Mujtaba al-Sweikat, who was 17 when he took part in a pro-democracy rally in 2012.

According to Reprieve, Sweikat was “severely beaten all over his body, including the soles of his feet”. It said he was convicted “on the basis of a confession extracted through torture”.

Tenzin Dorjee, the chair of the commission, called the executions “shocking” and urged the State Department to end waivers to the kingdom.

“The Saudi government’s execution of minority Shia Muslims on the basis of their religious identity and peaceful activism is not only shocking, but also directly contradicts the government’s official narrative of working toward greater modernisation and improving religious freedom conditions.

“The State Department must stop giving a free pass to the Saudi government, which, for many years, has punished numerous Saudi citizens and expatriate workers for exercising their fundamental right to freedom of religion or belief,” she said.

The State Department classifies Saudi Arabia among its “countries of particular concern” for violations of religious freedom, which would normally require the Washington to take punitive actions such as imposing economic sanctions.

However successive secretaries of state have each year issued waivers on punishing Riyadh, citing national security interests.

Top five executioner

Human rights groups have said that nearly all of the Saudi citizens beheaded on Tuesday were Shia, with one of the men’s body put on public display after death.

President Donald Trump has vowed to preserve a close relationship with Saudi Arabia, pointing to its major purchases of US weapons, its giant oil exports and its hostility toward US rival Iran.

Trump has not commented on the executions, although the State Department said it urged “Saudi Arabia and all governments” to respect freedom of religion.

According to data released by SPA, at least 100 people have been executed in Saudi Arabia since the beginning of this year.

The oil-rich Gulf state is ranked among the top five executioners in the world, and according to Amnesty International carried out the death sentences of 149 people last year.

Quito, Ecuador – The indigenous Waorani community in Ecuador won a landmark lawsuit on Friday against three government bodies for conducting a faulty consultation process with the community before putting their territory up for sale in an international oil auction.

The ruling immediately suspends any possibility of selling the community’s land for oil exploration. It also sets an important precedent for other communities in Ecuador’s southern Amazon rainforest, trying to keep oil extraction out of their territories.

“Today, the courts recognise that the Waorani people, and all indigenous peoples, have rights over our territories that must be respected,” said Nemonte Nenquimo, one of the Waorani plaintiffs and representative of the Coordinating Council of the Waorani Nationality Ecuador Pastaza (CONCONAWEP).

“The government’s interests in oil is not more valuable than our rights, our forests, our lives,” she added.

In March, the Waorani community sued the Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources, the Secretary of Hydrocarbons and the Ministry of Environment for conducting a faulty consultation process with the community in 2012 before putting their territory up for sale in an international oil auction.

According to both national and international law, communities must be consulted before any extraction process is planned on or near their territory in what is called the free, prior and informed consultation process. As a result of the 2012 consultation process with the Waorani, and seven other indigenous nationalities, the Amazon rainforest was divided into 16 different oil blocks and put up for sale in an international oil auction. Last year, the government reduced the size of the oil auction to two blocks, removing block 22 that overlaps Waorani territory, but it quickly added that the region would not be exempt from future drilling plans. 

‘Historic day’

During the three-day trial earlier this month, the three judges heard testimony from various experts and elders from the community who explained how the consultation process in 2012 was largely used as a way to promote oil extraction, rather than warn communities of its environmental impacts. 

Friday’s ruling lasted almost six hours, as the judges highlighted a number of ways in which the consultation process was inadequate and violated the community’s right to self-determination. According to the tribunal, during these consultation meetings: there was no real dialogue with communities, they were called without enough prior notice, there were not enough elders present, and there were no clear translations into the local Waorani language, among others problems.

“This is undoubtedly a historic day for the advancement of rights and constitutional development in Ecuador,” said Lina Maria Espinosa, the community’s lawyer with the local non-government organisation Amazon Frontlines.

“It is the demonstration that state development plans cannot be executed over the life and integrity of the people,” Espinosa said, adding the ruling sets an important precedent for the seven other indigenous nations consulted in the 2012 process.

Dario Cueva, the lawyer representing the Ministry of the Environment, refused to comment on the ruling.

He told Al Jazeera by phone that his team was “analysing the case and what our next steps will be”.

“Our territory is not for sale.”

The Indigenous Waorani community in Ecuador wants to put an end to oil drilling in their land, so they filed a lawsuit against the govt. A ruling is expected on April 26. pic.twitter.com/nnyBWe3HoP

— AJ+ (@ajplus) April 26, 2019

The Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Resources did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by the time of publication.

This is the second community to win a major lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government in recent years.

Last year, the indigenous Kofan community in the northern Amazon sued the same three government bodies for allowing mining operations to continue near their territory, without undergoing a consultation process. Four judges ruled in the community’s favour and 52 mining concessions were cancelled.