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July 31, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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200 feared dead |
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Lanka not to lift ban on LTTE Frankfurt airport shut to agitators |
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6 Tibetans jailed in China Beijing, July 30 China has sentenced six Tibetan political activists to prison terms ranging from seven years to life for “splittist” activities, a prison official said today.
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Israelis gun down 6 Fatah officials Nablus (West Bank), July 30 The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident, described by an official from Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, to which the six belonged, as an assassination. The bloodshed came hours after a day of violence at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site ended without loss of life, with Israel and the Palestinians scoring their political points and retiring from the arena. Palestinian security officials said Israeli tank shells killed the six men in the West Bank village of Fara, close to the Jewish settlement of Alon Moreh and about 25 km from the Palestinian-ruled city of Jenin. Some of the officials said the men were in a house in the village, while others later reported that they were in a junkyard and that a seventh Fatah activist was seriously wounded. The six dead men were members of the Al-Aqsa “martyrs brigades”, an armed faction of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, who were wanted by Israeli authorities in connection with several anti-Israeli attacks. The officials identified them as Maher Jarabwe, (24), Abdel-Rahman Ishtawe, (24), Hikmat Abu al-Hubal, (27), Mohammed Taie, (18), Munir Mustapha, in his 20s, and Amin al-Malek, age unknown. “It was an Israeli assassination,” the Fatah official said about the night-time attack. The Fatah official, who asked not to be identified, said the men had been on Israel’s most-wanted list. Palestinian officials have said Israeli forces have killed more than 40 Palestinian activists in “assassination’’ operations since the start of the uprising. Israeli leaders describe such killings as “active defence” against Palestinians who plan or carry out attacks on Israelis. In Jerusalem on Sunday, plans by a radical Jewish group, the Temple Mount Faithful, to lay a cornerstone for a Third Jewish Temple at the Old City compound revered by Jews and Muslims, was the spark that lit an always short fuse in the holy city. Israeli officials said the men had been preparing a bomb. “It is not the first time the Palestinians claim the army launched a liquidation operation when we know with certainty it was a ‘work accident’,” Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelossof told army radio, using the Israeli term for unplanned Palestinian explosions. “This new criminal act could cause an explosion in the area. It could drive the entire region into a non-ending cycle of blood and violence, one which the present Israeli Prime Minister began 10 months ago”, Abed Rabbo said. The Palestinian uprising erupted after Sharon, then Opposition leader, visited the hotly contested holy site in Jerusalem known to Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount. GAZA: Israeli helicopter gunships fired at least three missiles at a Palestinian police headquarters in Gaza city on Monday, witnesses said. A correspondent said he saw three or four missiles fired from a helicopter. Later, white and grey smoke billowed over the area where the missiles landed. There were no immediate reports of injuries or casualties. The attack was the latest violence in 10 months of a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Reuters, AFP |
200 feared dead Beijing, July 30 |
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Typhoon strikes Taiwan: 35 die Taipei, July 30 The eastern coastal county of Hualien took the brunt when typhoon “Toraji” swept ashore. Rescue workers recovered 21 bodies from under mud and rocks and dozens more were still missing, a spokesman for the National Fire Administration’s disaster response centre said. The victims in Hualien included members of a family whose riverside home was crushed by a landslide. “Suddenly everything in the house was floating in water. It was dark and I couldn’t see anything” said Fan Cheng-I, the only member of the family of seven to be rescued. “I had to cling to the bars on our windows to keep from being washed away,” he told local television while lying in hospital. Two bodies had been recovered from the collapse and four members of the family remain missing. Two policemen drowned when their patrol car plunged into a river. Nantou, a mountainous county still reeling from a devastating earthquake in 1999, was also hit hard. Eleven people died, most of whom drowned after being swept away by floods, the centre spokesman said. Television showed villagers in Nantou trapped by a collapsed bridge stumbling their way across a muddy river, clinging to a rope strung over the water by rescuers. In a scene recalling the earthquake’s devastation, riverfront houses loomed over the river at a dangerous tilt after a landslide swept away most of their foundations. Hundreds of homes and thousands of acres of farmland had also been destroyed in Toraji’s rampage overnight, the National Fire Administration (NFA) said. The state-funded Central News Agency said 22 persons were killed in Hualien and 10 died in Nantou and the toll was expected to rise. The NFA said Toraji had claimed at least 22 lives. NFA director Chao Kang said Hualien was the worst hit by mudslides while the central Nantou county suffered serious flooding as water from swollen rivers inundated homes and hundreds of acres of farmland. An earthquake measuring 4.9 on the Richter Scale also struck Hualien this morning but there was no report of any casualties or damage. Toraji, packing winds of 150 km per hour, was downgraded to a tropical storm after its landfall at Hualien’s Hsiuguluan river today.
Reuters, AFP |
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Lanka not to lift ban on LTTE Colombo, July 30 “The issue of removing the ban on the LTTE, both at home and abroad, is totally out of question in the light of the brutality they exhibited during last week’s attack on the airport, targeting civilians and commercial installations,” he was quoted as saying in the state-run ‘Daily News’ today. “It (lifting the ban) is totally out of question mainly by the international community,” Mr Kadirgamar said. “The condemnation by many countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and Russia, shows the attitude of these nations towards the LTTE’s brutality,” he said. While the USA, where the LTTE is designated a terrorist organisation, the ban is due for review this September, Britain will soon consider appeals against the then Home Secretary Jack Straw’s inclusion of the LTTE in the list of proscribed groups in March this year. Sri Lanka banned the LTTE in January 1998 and the ban continues under provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. India outlawed the LTTE in 1992. The LTTE had made lifting of the ban, on its functioning in Sri Lanka, the main pre-requisite for agreeing to sit down for direct negotiations with the Lankan Government under Norwegian facilitation, but Colombo has rejected the condition. Meanwhile, Sri Lankan military authorities have offered to return the bodies of 14 Tamil Tiger suicide bombers killed during an attack on the international airport, officials said. The military made the offer to the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) and was awaiting a response, a defence official here said. The ICRC confirmed the offer had been made and that it was in consultation with both sides.
PTI, AFP |
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Frankfurt airport shut to agitators FRANKFURT airport, one of the busiest in continental Europe, closed its check-in hall on Sunday to anyone without a ticket in an attempt to stop human rights activists disrupting flights by protesting against the deportation of asylum seekers. Demonstrators, who have set up a summer camp in Kelsterbach, near the airport, had planned to gather inside the building for a peaceful protest involving speeches and music. Airport management said they had succeeded in keeping the protest outside the building by setting up ticket controls at the entrance. The protesters’ wrath was directed at the German airline Lufthansa, which has been given the responsibility of carrying immigrants back to their countries of origin. The airline has a contract with the German government under which it takes home nearly 10,000 rejected asylum seekers a year. All are escorted by guards and some are restrained with handcuffs and helmets during flights. Criticism of the practice has intensified since the deaths of several immigrants, including Aamir Ageeb, a Sudanese man who suffocated while being escorted by three police officers on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Cairo in May 1999. Der Spiegel magazine reported today that Mr Ageeb suffocated as a result of the force with which he was pinned down by police officers during take-off, according to an expert’s report. The death had previously been blamed on a special helmet meant to protect his head and to prevent him from biting guards. Lufthansa claimed it was merely carrying out its job, and had nothing to do with Germany’s asylum policy. The company stressed that it is increasingly turning down immigrants who are bound, wearing helmets or who try to resist deportation. Around 1,000 people gathered at the weekend at the protest camp organised by the human rights group No Person. It held a rally on Saturday at Frankfurt, which included a demonstration outside the Italian consulate in protest at police brutality during the G8 meeting in Genoa. The Belgian airline, Sabena, stopped transporting deportees against their will after the death of a Nigerian on one of its flights three years ago. Swissair will no longer fly rejected asylum seekers wearing handcuffs after a Palestinian died last year. Austria’s interior ministry outlawed the practice of binding the mouths of deportees after a Nigerian suffocated on a flight out of Vienna in the late 1990s. The Guardian, London |
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6 Tibetans jailed in China Beijing, July 30 The Chinese authorities in the Himalayan region arrested the six separately in March, 2000, according to an advocacy group affiliated with the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile in Dharamsala. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said “the activists range in age from 27 to 64 and are from one county in eastern Tibet’s Nagchu Prefecture. The centre said the six were tried at Nagchu Intermediate People’s Court on charges of colluding with the Dalai splittist clique and carrying out activities endangering state security. Evidence included wood-block prints and posters that advocated independence for Tibet, and cassette recordings of speeches by the Dalai Lama, the centre added. The Tibetan spiritual leader fled into exile in 1959 after a failed uprising in Tibet against the Chinese rule. China accuses him of seeking to free Tibet from the Chinese control. The Dalai Lama says he wants autonomy, not independence for the region.
AP |
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Pak Ministry officer shot Karachi, July 30 He is the second prominent Shiite official to be killed in cold blood here in five days, raising concerns that the vicious cycle of religious violence in Pakistan is taking a new turn for the worse. The police said Hussain, the Director of the ministry’s Research Department, was getting into his car when the killer opened fire with an automatic weapon before fleeing with two accomplices. The 52-year-old was hit five times and died on the way to hospital. “It looks like a sectarian-related killing but we will also investigate some other options,” the Sindh Home Secretary, Brigadier Mukhtar Sheikh, said. Last week the Managing Director of the Pakistan’s biggest state-owned oil company was gunned down in another suspected religious murder of a high-profile Shiite.
AFP |
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‘Lagaan’ subtitles kick up row London, July 30 The subtitles appearing on British screens several times use the word “ape” to describe Hindu gods whom the film characters refer to with great reverence. Hanuman, particularly, is described in the subtitles as an “ape” while the characters are actually praying for his blessings for success in a cricket match against a colonial British team. The National Hindu Students Forum (NHSF) will file a petition in protest against the subtitling in the film. It plans to collect thousands of signatures and hand it over to distributors. “These subtitles should have been thought about much more carefully,” Nishma Shah, general secretary of the NHSF, told IANS yesterday. “This film is being distributed widely in the West and the perception by Westerners of our deities and our gods has not been given its true and correct form.” Several other Hindu groups are not inclined to wait. IANS |
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Jimmy Carter to reach Dhaka on Aug 2 Dhaka, July 30 The delegation will include a member of Cambodia’s National Assembly and officials of the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Carter Centre, non-governmental organisations monitoring polls in various countries. The Bangladesh Foreign Secretary told mediapersons that the delegation would meet Bangladesh President Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed, other national leaders and bureaucrats. |
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1 dies in Northern Ireland violence Belfast, July 30 The police said it was investigating the attack, but the IRA’s political ally Sinn Fein blamed a Protestant guerrilla group, the Ulster Defence Association
(UDA). The attack occurred on the outskirts of the British province’s Capital, Belfast, in a mixed Protestant and Roman Catholic area late yesterday as another night of violence — gunfire and petrol and blast bombs — racked parts of the city.
Reuters |
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