 |
Friday,
August 24, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
|
LTTE attack on army camps leaves 15 dead Kabul, August 23 Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban will allow the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to meet eight foreign aid workers accused of spreading Christianity, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil said today. Pak fears fallout of UN sanctions Sharif aide freed after 2 years Kuwait bans visas for Pakistanis Missiles hit Hamas leader’s car
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Commonwealth chief
in Pak Bloodshed threat over Fiji poll
|
|
LTTE attack on army camps leaves 15 dead Colombo, August 23 The troops, however, succeeded in repulsing the attacks at Janakapura army camp and nearby Kokkuthoduvai coastal military base, the Defence Ministry spokesman, Brig Sanath Karunaratne, said here. He said seven soldiers and eight guerrillas were killed and 26 others, including 15 LTTE cadres, injured in the fighting. Within hours of the LTTE offensive, Sri Lankan Air Force jets bombarded suspected rebel bases in jungles in Batticaloa district. Air Force jets destroyed a suspected LTTE base at Kndikudichaaru in the Thoppigala district in the eastern Batticaloa district. This was the second major LTTE strike in as many days after the rebels overran a police station in Ampara district, 350 km from the capital, killing 17 police personnel. Meanwhile, the island nation’s main Opposition party agreed to meet a government delegation tomorrow to resolve the country’s worsening political and economic crisis, but made it clear that any discussion would be on its own terms and demands. United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickremesinghe replied to Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake’s invitation for discussions, but stuck to key opposition demands that the prorogued Parliament be convened and the proposed referendum be cancelled. Demanding that the talks be held within an “agreed time-frame”, he said priority should also be given to the establishment of five independent commissions on elections, police, judiciary, media and public service. “Any dialogue should be predicated on these issues being taken as a matter of priority,” he said in his reply to Mr Wickremanayake. Significantly, Mr Wickremesinghe himself will not participate in the dialogue. The UNP today went ahead with a planned anti-government rally where the party activists demanded that the government face a vote of no-confidence or quit.
PTI |
|
Taliban to let ICRC meet aid workers Kabul, August 23 “We have no problem. They (ICRC) can see them any time,” Mr Muttawakil told Reuters by telephone from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. He said the Taliban had not informed the ICRC of this yet and gave no other details. The Taliban have consistently refused any contact, either consular or legal, with the aid workers of German-based Shelter Now International, who have been detained for more than two weeks. ISLAMABAD: The parents of two American women imprisoned in Afghanistan made a passionate appeal to the Taliban’s reclusive leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to allow them to see their daughters, a Taliban official said on Thursday. Their daughters are among six other foreign aid workers and 16 Afghan staff of Shelter Now International, who have not been seen since their arrest more than two weeks ago on charges of preaching Christianity in this deeply devout Muslim nation. In a letter to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, who is rarely seen in public, the parents asked for “compassion”, Sohail Shaheen, a spokesman at the Afghan Embassy in the neighbouring Pakistan said. They told of the anguish they feel as parents and asked to be allowed to travel to Afghanistan to see their children, he said. The mother of one imprisoned woman and the father of the other woman submitted their visa applications yesterday as well as the letter to Omar and several letters for their detained children, Shaheen said.
Reuters, AP |
|
Pak fears fallout of UN sanctions Islamabad, August 23 Pakistani Foreign Secretary Inamul Haq held a private meeting with UN Security Council President Alfonso Valdivieso in New York on Tuesday and later revealed some of Islamabad’s concerns to reporters. “We conveyed the view that sanctions have had an adverse impact on the people of Afghanistan and also indirectly on Pakistan, because almost 200,000 Afghani people over the past few months have moved into Pakistan,” he said. “Most of them are economic refugees who left Afghanistan partly as a result of the drought and partly because of the imposition of sanctions.” But UN officials and others who work with the newly arrived refugees in northwestern Pakistan said Mr Haq forgot to mention the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan, which Pakistan is accused of encouraging. “The latest refugee influx has been caused by a combination of things like fighting in the north, the drought and the economic situation. But fighting has been a major factor,” a UN High Commissioner for Refugees official said in Islamabad. Analysts said the sanctions were specifically tailored to avoid any humanitarian impact, and Pakistan’s repeated attempts to link them to the refugee crisis were a smokescreen. UNITED NATIONS: Expressing concern over the deteriorating humanitarian and political situation in Afghanistan, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on the Security Council to decide on a comprehensive approach to end the civil war, allowing people to freely choose their representatives. “The root cause of conflict is continued foreign intervention and conditions which prevent people from exercising their right to decide freely the form of government and whom they wish to govern them,” Mr Annan said in his periodic report to the 15-member council on Wednesday. Mr Annan, in his report, suggests chalking out a strategy to end the Afghan conflict using incentives and disincentives to ensure that the parties enter into a serious negotiations and move towards a settlement.
AFP, PTI |
|
Sharif aide freed after 2 years Islamabad, August 23 With Mr Khan’s release, almost all close aides and ministers in the Sharif cabinet, except former Commerce Minister Ishaq Dar, have been freed. Mr Sharif is currently in exile in Saudi Arabia. Mr Khan, Petroleum Minister in Mr Sharif’s cabinet, was arrested after the military takeover on October 12, 1999, and detained at his house in the nearby Rawalpindi. Mr Khan is a senior leader of Mr Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML). Mr Khan told mediapersons after his release that he was pained that Mr Sharif had ignored him during his detention while other mainstream politicians would regularly inquire after him. Former Commerce Minister Dar remains under house arrest in Lahore. Mr Sharif’s press secretary, Sadiqul Farooq, is serving a three-year term in a corruption case.
IANS |
|
Kuwait bans visas for Pakistanis Islamabad, August 23 Online news agency said Pakistan has decided to initiate a dialogue to resolve this issue, and the Interior Minister is likely to leave for Kuwait in the first week of September on the directions of President Pervez Musharraf. Ministry sources said Pakistan’s ambassador in Kuwait has stated that the oil-rich nation announced the curbs due to apprehensions by Kuwaiti authorities that many of the Pakistanis are drug traffickers. Kuwait is, however, giving visas to people of India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Online said.
IANS |
|
Missiles hit Hamas leader’s car Gaza, August 23 Arab foreign ministers held an emergency meeting in Cairo to discuss the crisis but wound up with little more than tepid calls for political and economic help for the Palestinians, and a familiar litany of condemnation of Israeli policies. In the helicopter attack, gunships swooped over two cars carrying the leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif — wanted by Israel for masterminding a deadly suicide bombing campaign — and Adnan al-Ghoul, one of Hamas’s top bomb makers. The cars raced into a field and drove around in circles to throw off the helicopters which fired four missiles, killing Ghoul’s son, Bilal, when it hit one of the vehicles. “The assassination will be met with assassination and the bombardment with bombardment,’’ Hamas members shouted over megaphones shortly after the helicopter strike in central Gaza near the Bureij refugee camp. Deif, the leader of Hamas’s Izz-el-Deen al-Qassam military wing, and Adnan al-Ghoul escaped unharmed from the attack which turned one of the cars into a mound of twisted, smouldering metal and left pieces of wreckage hanging from trees. Deif has topped Israel’s wanted list since 1989 for masterminding the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers and Hamas’s bombing campaign on buses in Jerusalem and a Tel Aviv shopping centre in 1996 in which scroes of people were killed. The killing of Ghoul’s son, who was also a Hamas militant, was expected to fuel the group’s determination to retaliate against Israel. Hamas has been behind a spate of deadly bombings since interim peace deals were signed with Israel in 1993. Nablus: A missile fired from an Israeli army base near the West Bank city of Nablus hit the car of a Palestinian official today, wounding him and two others, Palestinian witnesses and emergency workers said. Rescue workers at the scene said senior Fatah official Jihad al-Miseemy and two other persons were wounded after the car they were travelling in was hit by a missile.
Reuters |
|
Discovery back with 3 astronauts Cape Canaveral, August 23 The shuttle slipped in behind a line of storm clouds that had caused NASA to postpone an earlier landing attempt and almost kept the crew in space an extra day. The members of the space station’s Expedition Two crew —Americans Susan Helms, James Voss and their Russian commander, Yury Usachev — made the hour-long ride to Earth in reclined seats so that blood would not rush from their heads as they returned to gravity. The three spent 167 days in space. That puts Voss and Helms second on the US Long-duration flight list behind astronaut Shannon Lucid, who spent 188 days aboard the Mir space station in 1996, NASA said. Usachev, a veteran of the Mir program, has a total of 553 days in earth orbit, putting him fifth on an all-time list dominated by Russians. They did not join the four other Discovery astronauts for the traditional walk-around inspection of the orbiter after landing, but shuttle commander Scott Horowitz reported they were fine. The old Progress cargo ship was destroyed to make room for a new Russian cargo ship to arrive on Thursday. The $95 billion space station programme is a partnership among space agencies in the USA, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan.
Reuters |
|
Commonwealth
chief in Pak Islamabad, August 23 Mr Don McKinnon, Commonwealth Secretary-General, will meet General Musharraf as well as the Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar. In Pakistan for one day, Mr McKinnon is expected to concentrate much of his attention on Pakistan’s planned return to democracy.
AP |
|
Bloodshed
threat over Fiji poll Suva, August 23 But Dong Huu Nguyen, head of the UN Fijian Electoral Observer Mission, said he expected the week-long election to restore democracy in Fiji would proceed smoothly despite the threat of violence.
Reuters |
 |
| Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir | Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs | Nation | Editorial | | Business | Sport | World | Mailbag | In Spotlight | Chandigarh Tribune | Ludhiana Tribune 50 years of Independence | Tercentenary Celebrations | | 121 Years of Trust | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said he still hoped to meet Palestinian President Yasser Arafat “rather soon’’ for talks on ending bloodshed, possibly in Berlin following this week’s mediation mission by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
