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World News
Seven killed in Somalia blasts
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T least seven people, mostly Somali soldiers, were killed yesterday in bomb explosions in the Somali capital Mogadishu, officials and witnesses said. A roadside bomb planted under a tree killed four soldiers and one civilian in northern Mogadishu’s Karan district while at least two soldiers died in a separate grenade attack in Bakara market. “Four soldiers were killed when a bomb planted in the shade of a tree was detonated. One civilian was also killed in the attack and the security forces are conducting investigations,” Abdirahman Mumin, a Somali security official told AFP from the scene of the blast. He attributed the attack to the Somali Islamist extremists who abandoned fixed positions in the capital last August and who have since concentrated on guerrilla tactics. “I think Al-Shebab planted the bomb during the night when nobody was in the area,” he said. In a second attack, unknown assailants hurled grenades at Somali soldiers who were pulling down illegal buildings near Bakara market, killing at least two of them. “There was a heavy explosion in Bakara market as the soldiers were destroying illegal buildings. It was a grenade attack and I saw the dead bodies of two soldiers,” Dahir Moalim, a witness, told AFP.
THE NATION ON SUNDAY, MAY 20, 2012
Army, mutineers clash in DR Congo A
RMY troops clashed with ex-rebel mutineers in the Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday in fighting close to a national park famed for its rare gorillas. The two sides have been mired in tit-for-tat jungle clashes for weeks after the exrebel soldiers, integrated into the army under a 2009 peace deal, started to mutiny, complaining of poor conditions. The latest fighting started early yesterday, when mutineers attacked loyalist positions in the Rutshuru territory in eastern Nord-Kivu province, a military official told AFP. But Lieutenant Colonel Vianney Kazarana, a mutiny spokesman, said loyalist forces had initiated the fighting. Kinshasa accuses the mutineers’ former chief of staff General Bosco Ntaganda,
wanted by the International Criminal Court for enlisting child soldiers, of leading the mutiny. Loyalist soldiers fell back about two kilometres (one mile) before regrouping and shelling the mutineers. There were no immediate reports of deaths. “It’s the government’s army that started to attack us,” Kazarana said. “We advanced a little and gathered some heavy weapons.” The region melds into Virunga National Park on the Ugandan border, home to more than half of the world’s 700 or so mountain gorillas. It is not known how the fighting has affected the gorilla population. The WWF has previously said at least 23 of the critically endangered apes had been killed over years of fighting in the region, long a
theatre of armed conflict. The resumption of violence has prompted the displacement of thousands of civilians. More than 8,200 have fled to Rwanda since April 27 and more than 30,000 went to Uganda in May, the United Nations said. “All week people have been leaving, but since the fighting on Saturday, the population has fled to Uganda. It’s like a desert here now,” Bunagana police chief Leon Bipegeka said. “Now there are maybe more dogs and soldiers.” Thought to number about 300, the mutineers began abandoning positions in early April and were soon being hunted by the army. They are now consolidated on hillsides in Virunga, about 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Goma, the capital of Nord-Kivu. The mutineers have formed
Gulf states issue Lebanon travel warning
T •Ntaganda
a new military group called the March 23 Movement, comprising ex-members of their rebel National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP). On Friday, the government called on mutineers to return to their ranks. Only the “initiators of the mutiny and the criminals among them” would face court martial, government spokesman Lambert Mende said. Mende said ex-CNDP chief Ntaganda, known as “The Terminator”, had allied himself with local militiamen and other fighters. Human Rights Watch this week said he was again forcing boys into military service, accusing him of pressing at least 149 boys and young men into service.
Seven charged in major roundup of Irish militant suspects
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Gay Muslim activist launches book in Malaysia
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Canadian Muslim gay activist launched her controversial new book on liberal Islam in Muslimmajority Malaysia yesterday despite a government minister’s attempts to shut down the event. Irshad Manji launched “Allah, Liberty and Love” at a hastily arranged event in the capital Kuala Lumpur after two other venues pulled out of hosting her, according to local publisher ZI Publications. Jamil Khir Baharom, minister in charge of Islamic affairs, had said Islamic officials and the Home Ministry would not allow the author’s roadshow in the country following complaints. He was quoted by national news agency Bernama as saying earlier yesterday that the book was offensive to Muslims as was Manji’s ideology and openly gay lifestyle, which was deemed to be against Islam. According to her website, the book, now available in the local Malay language, “shows all of us how to reconcile faith and freedom in a world seething with repressive dogmas... This book is the ultimate guide to becoming a gutsy global citizen”. The book has not been officially banned. Manji was due to fly to New York City late yesterday. Her previous internationally acclaimed book, “The Trouble with Islam Today”, is already banned in Malaysia, ZI Publications said.
HE United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain yesterday urged their citizens to avoid travel to Lebanon, where clashes linked to the conflict in neighbouring Syria have left 10 people dead. “The UAE foreign ministry has urged citizens not to travel to Lebanon until the tense security situation there is cleared,” the ministry said in an English-language statement carried on state news agency WAM. The advice has been issued “to guarantee the safety of its citizens,” senior foreign ministry official Issa Abdullah al-Kalbani said in the statement. Qatar issued a similar warning due to the “unstable security situation” in Lebanon, its news agency QNA reported. And Bahrain asked its citizens not to travel to Lebanon to ensure their “security and safety” as it urged those already there to “immediately leave or stay away from insecure areas,” the official news agency BNA reported. Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansur, however, called on the Gulf states “to review these decisions as the situation in Lebanon does not justify them,” Lebanon’s state news agency NNA reported.
•People protest in the centre of Antananrivo, yesterday. Between 3000 and 5000 people gathered in the city centre called by the main opposition radio, Free FM. Madagascar electoral commission sources have said a date for elections will be announced around May 28. AFP PHOTO
Student dies, 7 hurt in blast near Italian school
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bomb exploded yesterday outside an Italian high school named after a slain anti-Mafia prosecutor, killing a teenage girl and wounding several other classmates, officials said. The device went off a few minutes before 8 a.m. in the Adriatic port town of Brindisi in the country’s south just as students milled outside, chatting and getting ready for class at the Morvillo-Falcone vocational institute. The school is named in honor of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, a judge who was also killed in a 1992 highway bombing in Sicily by the Cosa Nostra. The victim was identified as 16-year-old Melissa Bassi, from the nearby town of Mesagne, the town’s mayor Franco Scoditti said. Dr. Paola Ciannamea, a Perrino physician who helped treat the injured, told reporters that one of the injured was a teenage girl who was in a grave but stable condition after surgery. She added that surgery was still being performed on others.
Officials said at least seven students were injured, but some news reports put the figure at 10. Perrino Hospital health director Graziella Di Bella said most of the injured suffered burns and shrapnel-like wounds. “The explosion sent out fragments and flames ... pieces of iron,” Di Bella told Sky TG24 TV in an interview. She said a team of four psychologists were working with the students. “One of the (injured) girls asked me: ‘What do we have to do with this?” Di Bella said, adding the students were feeling a sense of “disorientation, terror” as well as anger. Most of the pupils at the school, which trains students for jobs in fashion and social services, are females. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack. Italy has been marking the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Sicilian highway that killed the prosecutor and his wife, but it was unclear if there was an organized crime link to yesterday’s explosion. National police chief Antonio Manganelli told Sky
TG24 in a phone interview that Italy’s “best investigators” had been dispatched to Brindisi to determine who was behind the attacks. Manganelli said there were “shadows” of doubt clouding the hypothesis that the school blast was caused by organized crime because the Sicilian-based Mafia usually targets precise individuals. Still, he said, neither the hypotheses of organized crime nor that of subversives have been ruled out.
Officials initially said the bomb was in a trash bin outside the school, but later ANSA, reporting from Brindisi, said the device had been placed on a low wall ringing the building. The wall was damaged and charred from the blast. Sky TG24 said the device included three containers of fuel. It was unclear if the blast was triggered by a remote control or by a timer. Public high schools in Italy hold classes on Saturday mornings.
EVEN Irish nationalists were remanded in custody in Northern Ireland yesterday on terrorism charges, in one of the highest profile security roundups in the province in recent years. Four of the suspects, including a 37-year-old woman, were charged with attending a militant training camp and firing range near the town of Omagh. The other three were relatives of prominent Lurgan nationalist Colin Duffy, who was acquitted this year of charges related to an attack by militant group the Real IRA on the army’s Massereene Barracks in Antrim three years ago. The suspects have yet to enter a plea. The Real IRA is one of several groups opposed to the 1998 peace deal that largely ended three decades of tit-for-tat killings between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists opposed to British rule of Northern Ireland, and predominantly Protestant unionists who wanted it to continue.
Syrian suicide blast, attacks kill at least 19
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T least 19 people were killed in violence across Syria yesterday, monitors said, including nine who died in what state television said was as a suicide bombing in Deir Ezzor. The assailant detonated an explosives-laden car outside security headquarters in Syria’s biggest eastern city, also wounding 100, state media said. The attack was the first of its kind in Deir Ezzor since an anti-regime uprising broke out in Syria in March 2011.
Among other fatalities in Syria yesterday were a woman and her two children gunned down in the northern city of Aleppo, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A “terrorist suicide bomber” used 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of explosives in the attack on the Deir Ezzor neighbourhood of Ghazi Ayyash, said state television. The powerful explosion left a crater 3.5 metres (yards) deep and damaged buildings
within a radius of 100 metres, the channel said, adding that a four-year-old girl was among those critically wounded. It occurred on a road housing a military and air force intelligence headquarters and a military hospital, according to the Observatory. Images broadcast on state television showed a large bloodstain on the ground, a damaged building and vehicles charred by the blast, as well as smoke rising from the targeted district.