Hakeem Alaraibi was arrested in 2012 and convicted two years later in absentia on charges of vandalising a police station as part of a government crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired protests.

The footballer, who said he was playing in a match during the alleged crime, was granted refugee status in Australia in 2017, where he has played for semi-professional club Pascoe Vale FC, according to the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD).

But he was detained at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport on Tuesday during a personal trip, rights groups said, fearing he will be sent back to Bahrain on an Interpol red notice, a non-binding request to comply with national arrest warrants.

AFP could not reach Alaraibi on his personal phone number but in a video interview from an airport detention room posted by Australian channel SBS he said he wanted to go back to Australia.

“They want to kill me in Bahrain,” he said.

Thai immigration did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Bahrain, an oil-rich Sunni-led country home to the US fifth fleet, crushed Arab Spring protests by the Shiite majority.

Alaraibi says he was beaten in custody and believes he was targeted because he is in the Shiite majority and due to his brother’s political activism.

He also publically opposed the FIFA presidential candidacy for Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, a member of Bahrain’s ruling monarchy and the president of the Asian Football Confederation.

Thailand does not recognise refugees but with its lax visa rules, the country often finds itself at the centre geopolitical disputes over them.

Thailand was thrust into the headlines in 2015 for deporting more than 100 Uighur back to China, where the Muslim minority face persecution.

Additionally, dozens of Pakistani Christians have been rounded up in recent weeks as part of a visa overstay crackdown.

Sunai Phasuk, senior Thailand researcher for Human Rights Watch, told AFP that “under no circumstances” should Alaraibi be handed over to Bahrain.

“Hakeem is a refugee accepted by Australia, so Thailand should do the right thing by sending him back to Australia on the next flight,” he said, adding that he faces a prison term of up to 10 years in Bahrain.

The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy said he also faces risks of torture.

A spokesperson for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told AFP that embassy officials in Bangkok are in “direct contact with Thai authorities regarding this issue”.

The drug overdose rate rose 9.6 percent compared to 2016, while suicides climbed 3.7 percent, said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics.

As a result, the average life span in America dropped to “78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2016,” said the report.

The data comes as the United States grapples with a vast opioid epidemic, fueled by addiction to prescription painkillers as well as street drugs like heroin and synthetic opioids including fentanyl.

“The latest CDC data show that the US life expectancy has declined over the past few years. Tragically, this troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide,” said CDC director Robert Redfield.

“Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”

A ‘very concerning’ trend

Overdoses were a major factor when US life expectancy dropped slightly in 2015 for the first time in decades.

Another downtick was reported by the CDC in 2016, though those data were later revised to show a flat year, said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the NCHS.

Overall, the statistics show a “downward trend in life expectancy since 2014,” a time period in which Americans have lost 0.3 years of life, he told AFP, describing the trend as “very concerning.”

Anderson said declines like this haven’t been seen since the great flu pandemic of 1918 and World War I — though those losses were steeper.

The peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s also saw a nationwide drop in life expectancy.

“We’re a developed country, we have a lot of resources, we should have increasing life expectancy, not decreasing life expectancy,” he added.

Canadians live on average three years longer than Americans. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, at almost 84.

‘Hard to digest’

Drug overdose deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl — which killed the musicians Prince and Tom Petty — and tramadol increased by 45 percent between 2016 and 2017.

The rate of heroin deaths was seven times higher than in 1999.

CDC figures showed that a total of 70,237 people died of overdoses in 2017.

Most of these deaths were unintentional in nature.

The rise — although dramatic at nearly 10 percent year-on-year — was about half the spike seen a year earlier.

In 2016, 21.6 percent more people died from overdoses compared to 2015.

Separately released preliminary government data for the first part of 2018 have also appeared to show a leveling off in overdose deaths.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said at a health conference in October, when that data came out, that the “seemingly relentless trend of rising overdose deaths seems to be finally bending in the right direction.”

But experts urged caution in interpreting the results to mean the opioid epidemic has peaked, or is anywhere near an end.

“It is encouraging to see the trajectory of this start to decrease, without a doubt,” said Harshal Kirane, director of addiction services at Staten Island University Hospital in New York, who was not involved in the data collection.

“What would be a signal of some real change would be when the total number of overdose deaths year to year is actually decreasing,” he told AFP.

“Seventy-thousand deaths is hard to digest in any way as a positive outcome.”

“We could face an environmental catastrophe,” Beatriz Alva, a manager with state oil firm Petroperu, told channel N television.

Alva gave the volume of spilled crude as “more or less 8,000 barrels.”

Residents in a remote community of Morona district, in the northeastern Loreto region, “cut the pipeline” on Tuesday night and prevented workers from repairing it, Alva said.

Residents of the district are overwhelmingly indigenous people.

Villagers had threatened last week to cut the pipeline, which moves crude from Amazonian wells to coastal refineries, in a protest against alleged irregularities in local elections held in October.

Peru’s Amazon region has seen repeated oil spills in recent years, some the results of a lack of maintenance. Others were caused by protest attacks.

The country produced 127,000 barrels of oil per day in 2017, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.