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Tuesday,
March 19, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Church attack linked to Pearl killers
Zinni brokers Israeli, Palestinian talks |
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Start talks with MDC, Mugabe told
LTTE favour Thailand as alternate venue
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Church attack linked to Pearl killers Islamabad, March 18 The wife and daughter of a U.S. diplomat were among the five people killed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Sunday when two unidentified men threw grenades inside the city’s main church. The attack came hours before General Tommy Franks, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command, arrived here for talks on joint efforts in fighting militants, Pakistani officials said. “We see a link between the two events,” a senior Pakistani investigator told UPI. “We believe the attackers were reacting to media reports that Franks has come to discuss Omar Sheikh’s extradition,” he said. Arrested last month, Sheikh — a UK-born Muslim of Pakistani origin — confessed to kidnapping Pearl before a court in Karachi, but later said police forced him to do so. Militants of Sheikh’s extremist Jaish-e-Mohammad group have threatened to attack U.S. interests and American citizens across the world if Pakistan extradites him to the U.S. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said he believed the attack was part of a backlash against his government’s decision to support the U.S.-led war on terror. He said one of the men killed in the blast but not yet identified, “may have committed a suicide attack.” But Islamabad’s police chief Durrani said the investigators believe both the bombers “escaped unhurt, closing the door behind them to trap the people.” One Pakistani investigator said there were four attackers, “two went inside the church while two others waited for them outside with a vehicle and whisked them away as soon as they finished the job.” He said the bombs thrown inside the church were of Russian make, easily available in Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan and popular among religious extremists. The International Protestant Church of Islamabad is about 137 metres from the U.S. embassy. Situated between the Chinese and the American embassies, it is one of the most heavily guarded parts of Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave. The Islamabad police said that while they also suspect a link between the request for Sheikh’s extradition and the attack on the church, they are not ruling out other possibilities. They said the church had a reputation for proselytising and had converted many Afghan and Pakistani Muslims to Christianity. This, the police said, made the church an obvious target. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has constituted a committee to investigate the attack on the church. The committee will look for any lapses on the part of the security agencies, after attackers entered the church and threw grenades, the PTV station said. WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush vowed to help find the people behind a grenade attack on a Pakistan church that killed five persons, including a US diplomat’s wife and daughter, and wounded more than 40. Forty-two persons from various nations were wounded in the church attack and the death toll could rise. Officials said six or seven persons suffered serious injuries.
IANS, Reuters, DPA |
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Zinni brokers Israeli, Palestinian talks Jerusalem, March 18 Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said if the meeting was successful, Israel could pull out of recently reoccupied Palestinian areas later — a move demanded by the Palestinians as a key condition for declaring a truce. But while Zinni appeared to be making progress in his efforts to end 18 months of violence, the Palestinians and the USA were on a collision course over a visit to Israel by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney arrived in Israel where he will meet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the end of an 11-nation tour in which Israeli-Palestinian violence clouded his efforts to rally Arab countries to future U.S. moves in a global war against terror. Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said the Palestinian leadership had decided that if Cheney did not meet President Yasser Arafat, no Palestinian official would see him. Israeli Generals Doron Almog and Yitzhak Eitan sat down with Palestinian security officials Mohammed Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub and Amin al-Hindi at a Jerusalem hotel for the security session chaired by Zinni, following talks between commanders late on Sunday. Abed Rabbo said the Palestinians had agreed to the security meeting after receiving guarantees from Zinni the Israeli pullout would get under way. Ben-Eliezer said the security chiefs would try to wrap up “the final details so that a pullout can take place tonight”. “If things go well, I expect there will be a good possibility that a ceasefire will be declared,” Ben-Eliezer told reporters. Political pandits said the meeting itself was a small sign of progress for Zinni, who is in the region for the third time in four months to secure an Israeli-Palestinian truce. In another incident in the French Hill area of East Jerusalem, a Palestinian bomber blew himself up next to a bus at a busy intersection but only a few were injured, sources said. Undeterred by terror attacks, a determined Zinni said he would continue his efforts towards peace. He denounced the attacks saying that it was “critical that the Palestinian authority take responsibility and act against terror.” “Now is the time to get to a ceasefire,” he said. Reuters,
PTI |
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Start talks with MDC, Mugabe told Johannesburg, March 18 “Our first step is to get them together, talking at a table,” ANC Secretary-General Kgalema Motlanthe told reporters after a three-day meeting of the party’s National Executive committee. ANC officials spoke to reporters as Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria began talks in Harare with Mugabe about Zimbabwe’s political crisis. Mugabe won a fifth term as President last week, but the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Commonwealth observers, the European Union and Britain and the USA have denounced the conduct of the election. MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai and two other MDC leaders were charged with treason before the election, after the release of a video purporting to show them discussing Mugabe’s possible assassination with a Canadian security company. Motlanthe said it might be in Zimbabwe’s national interest to abandon the treason charges, which carry a possible death penalty.
The ANC leaders said South Africa and the world should respect the sovereignty and culture of Zimbabwe and should not try to determine the outcome of any domestic issue. “It is not correct that Zimbabwe should be regarded as free game for all manner of people who feel they have a right to determine who should govern in Zimbabwe. That’s the right of Zimbabweans,” Motlanthe said. HARARE: A white farmer was shot dead near his homestead early today, apparently while trying to escape an attack by settlers and war veterans, a farm community spokeswoman said. It was the first attack on a white farmer since President Mugabe was reelected. Commercial Farmers’ Union spokeswoman Jenni Williams said Terry Ford of the farm Gowrie, about 40 km southwest of Harare, was found shot through the head. “There is evidence of a bullet exit wound from the head,” she said. Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena confirmed that Ford had been murdered.
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LTTE favour Thailand as alternate venue Colombo, March 18 LTTE’s political in charge of Batticaloa-Amparai districts, K. Karikalan had said last week that the organisation believed India would assist the peace process by hosting talks despite strong protest from certain political parties. Meanwhile, a highly placed government source said the responsibility of selecting a proper venue was totally left to the Norwegian facilitator. We are ready to travel even to the moon to continue the process until a lasting peaceful solution is found to the long drawn conflict, he said.
UNI |
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Zahir Shah may
skip Kabul Kabul, March 18 After several changes of date, the former Afghan monarch is finally due to arrive on March 25, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday.
AFP |
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