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Rescue
workers swamped by corpses US faults
France on terror alert Still no signal from
Mars probe China
seals toxic gas well WINDOW ON PAKISTAN
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Five killed in Rawalpindi blast Islamabad, December 27 The explosives imported from China and stored in a flour mill godown caught fire from sparks from an electric pole which crashed into the building after being hit by a truck, local television networks said quoting officials. The blasts this morning were caused by explosives used for firecrackers and not by terrorists, the officials said as panic gripped the city. District Mayor Tariq Kiyani told reporters at the blast site that the explosives caught fire due to negligence of workers.
— PTI |
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15 Bangladeshi peacekeepers killed in crash Dhaka, December 27 Among the victims were a Lieutenant-Colonel, six Majors, seven Captains and a Warrant Officer of the Bangladeshi Army, who were returning home on the completion of an assignment, Defence ministry sources said. Rescuers battled high waves in the sea yesterday to free the bodies from the wreckage of the aircraft which crashed into the sea soon after take-off from Cotonou city where it had stopped before flying to Beirut. The Bangladeshis UN peace keepers had boarded the ill-fated aircraft to reach Dubai via Beirut from where there would have flown to Dhaka. Sources said arrangements were underway to bring the bodies back home at the earliest.
— Reuters |
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Rescue workers swamped by corpses Bora (Iran), December 27 A journalist at the scene said cars and trucks loaded with piles of bodies were flowing into the cemetery of the stricken town of
Bora, southeast of Bam. Many corpses were abandoned in a corner of the cemetery, with grave diggers overwhelmed by the rush. A father was seen carrying his two children, aged three and seven, ready to bury them with their clothes still on, without having first washed the bodies in keeping with Islamic customs. Corpses were lain out on football pitches, on grass verges and in the streets as the magnitude of the death toll forced relief workers to turn every available open space into a makeshift mortuary. Dozens of Iranian military planes have been mobilised to evacuate the wounded from the earthquake-hit zone of Bam to hospitals in Tehran and other cities. Several aircraft ferried in hundreds of wounded from Bam to the capital’s airport, from where they were being transferred with the help of soldiers to a fleet of ambulances headed for Tehran hospitals. Natives of Bam, meanwhile, were frantically trying to find seats on any flights bound for the region to search for relatives. Rescue work official Mohammad Jahanshahi told the official news agency
IRNA: “We urgently need body bags. When daybreak comes, thousands of bodies will be pulled from the ruins and we have an immediate need for bags to transport the bodies.” Twelve sniffer dogs were sent into Bam to try and locate survivors under the rubble. The temperature dropped to below freezing overnight in Bam, making it unlikely that survivors would still be found in the ruins.
— AFP |
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US faults France on terror alert
Washington, December 27 Six flights between Paris and Los Angeles were cancelled on Wednesday and Thursday at the urging of Washington after US officials spotted what they believed were suspicious names on lists of those due to board the planes. Air France made clear at the time the cancellations had been ordered for security reasons. US law enforcement and intelligence officials had hoped all suspects could be detained as they showed up for the flights, said a senior U.S. official familiar with the situation who did not want to be identified. The official said “a chorus of groans’’ from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House went out when the French disclosed the reason for the flight cancellations. Washington believed that the longer publicity could have been avoided, “the greater the chance to catch anybody else who was suspected of being involved,’’ he said. “The French announcement caught everyone off guard.’’ Nine persons on the passenger list for Air France Flight A-F068 to Los Angeles on December 24 — the first flight grounded — were questioned and released. One was French and the others were four Americans, two Germans, an Algerian and a Belgian, a French Interior Ministry spokesman said. A source close to French anti-terror investigating judges said in Paris: ‘’We have not detected passengers with the profile of people belonging to a radical Islamic group... All the checks so far have come to nothing.’’ US concerns centered on passengers whose names matched those on a US terrorism watch list, but who failed to show up for the
flights, officials said. Among them was a Tunisian passenger reported to be a licensed pilot and suspected of having ties with al Qaida, which is blamed for the September 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks on the United States.
— Reuters |
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Still no signal from Mars probe London, December 27 The failure to pick up a signal from Beagle 2 has raised fears that the probe, no bigger than an open umbrella, may have suffered the same fate as so many craft before it and ended up as scrap metal strewn across the bleak Martian landscape. “Tonight’s scan for a signal from Beagle 2 by the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory (in Britain) was unsuccessful,’’ mission organisers said on their website. Of the previous 11 probes dropped on the red planet’s surface, only three have survived and it is estimated that around two in every three Russian and U S missions to Mars have been whole or partial failures. Beagle 2 is the first fully European mission to be sent to any planet and had been hailed as a triumph for British ingenuity and for European space exploration. European Space Agency (ESA) officials said yesterday they were still optimistic of finding the probe. There are 13 further scheduled transmissions before it goes into emergency auto-transmit mode. Beagle 2’s failure to make contact soured Christmas and Boxing Day for scientists, who are trying to answer a question which has fascinated mankind for generations :is there life on Mars? They gathered in London yesterday, hoping to hear the probe broadcasting its signature tune — composed for the occasion by pop group Blur — across the 100 million km from Mars. ESA officials said that even if Beagle 2 was not found, the Mars Express mother craft that carried the 34 kg probe had successfully been guided on to an orbit around Mars from where it would study the planet for two years. “For the scientists here the orbiter is the most important part of the mission,’’ said Mr Gerhard Schwehm, an ESA planetary mission official. “The landing probe on Mars is in essence the icing on the
cake, he added.’’ — Reuters |
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China seals toxic gas well Beijing, December 27 Dressed in special breathing gear, a crew of 80 technicians began work to pour some 480 cubic metres of mud into the well, plugging a deadly flow of natural gas and sulphurated hydrogen that turned surrounding farmland into a death zone late on Tuesday. “The capping of the Chuandongbei well has been completed successfully,’’ the official Xinhua news agency said soon after the operation began today. In separate reports, Xinhua said air pressure around the cap began to drop 10 minutes after the capping procedure began. At least 191 people, mostly villagers, and a large numbers of livestock were killed after the blow-out, which spewed a poisonous gas cloud into the night sky.
— Reuters |
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WINDOW
ON PAKISTAN NO one in the Pakistani media clearly knows the identity of those who made two deadly attempts in less than a fortnight to finish off the Pakistan President and army chief, Gen Pervez Musharraf. Many editorials and comments, however, linked these desperadoes to the Islamic extremist organisation Al Qaida. The suicide attack on December 24 in which 14 persons, mostly passers-by, lost their lives, was the most desperate. Media and the people had mostly forgotten the first attack at an army cantonment early last year. Many commentators reasoned that these attempts by extremist religious elements were due to Musharraf’s recent peace initiatives with India and the support, which his government has extended, to the American anti-terrorist campaign. Dawn, the largest circulated daily, as well as Daily Times, the influential daily, besides Nation and the News International of the popular Jang group, which had been critical of the military dictator all through, also chastised the army and its chief for bringing some kind of sham democracy. Daily Times while discussing the nuclear issue and the role of the government scantiness in passing secrets to Iran, besides the presence of terrorists from outside was straight in its criticism. It wrote: “Pakistanis often bemoan the lack of sovereignty in our foreign policy. For example, most opposition politicians have been lambasting governments in power for “bartering Pakistan’s external sovereignty by taking loans and accepting IMF conditionalities that bestow poverty on the masses and enslave the country to the foreign policy of great powers”. But it is internal sovereignty that a state must guard at all cost. Daily Times urged: “In our case, Pakistan adopted a policy of proxy wars on two fronts at the cost of internal sovereignty. Internal control was lost after the compulsion of importing warriors led to their immunity from the law inside Pakistan. Once such immunity was granted through special agencies handling jihad, larger sections of the state began to be included in it. Jihad, when it is not declared by the Islamic state, tends to eat at the fabric of the state’s sovereignty. Just as foreign mujahideen had a free run of the country, the personnel involved in the strategy of jihad gradually assumed immunity.” Daily Times was blunt to state that,” If 9/11 had not happened and the UN Security Council had not forced Pakistan to reimpose internal controls, more and more Pakistanis would have found their way into the toils of global terrorism. We already have our plate full. We have to clean up and return to normalcy after years of chaos.” Ayaz Amir, the well known columnist writing in Dawn said, “ In Al Qaida list of enemies Musharraf is somewhere at the top. He befriended the United States when it attacked Afghanistan and continues to cooperate with the US in the hunt for Al Qaida suspects. Amir raised basic questions as to why is Musharraf on anyone’s hit list? What has he done to arouse extremist anger? His answer was: “It is tempting to say that his worries arise solely from his being an American ally. But that wouldn’t be the whole truth. In the eyes of Al Qaida and other extremist organisations in the forefront of what can loosely be called ‘jihad’, his sin is worse. He has abandoned jihad. His crime thus is not simply that of the unbeliever but of the apostate who has renounced the true faith.” “It is a sobering thought to remember that the driving force behind both Afghan and Kashmir policy was the army. By supporting a friendly regime in Afghanistan the army believed it was acquiring ‘strategic depth’. Supporting the Kashmir insurgency it was thought would keep a large section of the Indian army tied down and might even bring India to the negotiating table.” But Amir clearly warns, “The fight against extremism will remain incomplete as long as the army doesn’t accept responsibility for its part in pursuing policies which have given Pakistan a bad name and the image of a country chaotic and dangerous. And it won’t be complete as long as the army leadership does not realise that the real antidote to religious extremism lies not in more presidential security but in the building of enduring political institutions.” Nation writing on the 127th birth anniversary of the founder of Pakistan,
Quaid-e-Azam, found Pakistan dithering away from basic principles of federalism and democracy. The policies of military rulers, who overthrew elected governments after Ayub, created a strong sense of deprivation in smaller provinces, thus weakening the federation. Attempts to change the parliamentary and federal character of the Constitution has also caused the crisis that engulfed the country for the last one year, and which may still not be over. Had successive governments followed the rule of law, which the founder considered a sine qua non for a modern country, Pakistan would have by now been a developed state and a flourishing democracy”. |
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