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Kaieteur News
Sunday April 19, 2015
Car bomb kills three outside U.S. consulate in Iraq’s Kurdish capital ERBIL (Reuters) - A car bombing claimed by the Islamic State killed three people on Friday outside the U.S. consulate in Erbil, in a relatively rare attack in the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region. No U.S. personnel were hurt in the blast, according to the U.S. State Department, which said a “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device” exploded right outside the entrance to the heavily fortified compound. Iraq’s Kurdish region is an important partner for the U.S.-led coalition in its campaign to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State group, which overran large parts of Iraq last summer and threatened to reach Erbil. A Reuters witness heard the blast, which was followed by gunfire and a column of black smoke high above the Ankawa district, a predominantly Christian neighborhood packed with cafes popular with foreigners. “It seems the consulate was the target,” Nihad Qoja, the mayor of Erbil’s city center, told Reuters. The head of security for Ankawa
said three people were killed and 14 wounded. “They (Islamic State) want to show they are present,” Sherzad Farmand said. Islamic State also claimed responsibility for two car bombings in the Baghdad that killed at least 27 people on Friday. “The fighters of the Islamic State detonated two car bombs in the heart of the Iraqi capital this evening and a third in Erbil,” the group said via its news agency. U.S. officials said they found the Islamic State claim of responsibility for the Erbil consulate attack credible. “We have no reason to doubt their claim of responsibility,” a U.S. counter terrorism official told Reuters. Such attacks are relatively rare in Kurdistan, which has managed to insulate itself from the worst of the violence afflicting the rest of Iraq. The last major attack in Erbil, also claimed by Islamic State, was in November, when a suicide car bomber blew himself up outside the governor’s office, killing five.
‘Mysterious’ disease kills 18 in Nigeria: official
Two children hawk their wares in Akure, Ondo State in southwestern Nigeria. Lagos (AFP) - A “mysterious” disease that kills patients within 24 hours has claimed at least 18 lives in a southeastern Nigerian town, the government said Saturday. “Twenty-three people (were affected) and 18 deaths were recorded,” the Ondo state health commissioner, Dayo Adeyanju, told AFP. The government spokesman for the state, Kayode Akinmade, earlier gave a toll of 17 dead. “Seventeen people have died of the mysterious disease since it broke out early this week in Ode-Irele town,” Akinmade told AFP by telephone. The disease, whose symptoms include headache, weight loss, blurred vision and loss of consciousness,
killed the victims within a day of falling ill, he said. Laboratory tests have so far ruled out Ebola or any other virus, Akinmade said. The World Health Organization meanwhile said it had information on 14 cases with at least 12 dead. “Common symptoms were sudden blurred vision, headache, loss of consciousness followed by death, occurring within 24 hours,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told AFP by email, adding that an investigation was ongoing. Another WHO spokesman, Gregory Hartl, told AFP that according to a preliminary report, all those affected began showing symptoms between April 13 and 15. Akinmade said health officials and experts from the
government and aid agencies, as well as WHO epidemiologists, had arrived in Ode-Irele to search for answers. The state’s health commissioner, Adeyanju, told AFP that he and his officials had gone on a “field visit with the WHO, UNICEF, NCDC (Nigerian Centre for Disease Control)”. “This was basically a case search to unravel the cause (of the disease),” he said in a text message. The WHO’s Jasarevic said blood and urine samples had been taken from two victims and cerebrospinal fluid from another. “All samples have been sent to Lagos University Teaching Hospital this morning, and results are still pending. Investigations are still ongoing,” he said.