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New Iraq prison photos emerge
Bush chides Rumsfeld Ill-treatment of Indians in Iraq being probed: USA |
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US soldiers kill
41 Iraqi resisters
Two Tiger leaders killed
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New Iraq prison photos emerge Washington, May 6 The photographs are similar to those broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes II” and published by the New Yorker magazine showing Iraqi prisoners in various images of humiliation, The Washington Post reported. The new collection included more than 1,000 digital images ranging from scenes of mundane military life to pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers. Some of the pictures also appear to show American soldiers abusing prisoners, many of whom wear ID bands. However, The Post said it could not eliminate the possibility that some of those images were staged. The article said the photographs, taken from the summer of 2003 through the winter, were passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Among the images is a picture of a soldier holding a leash tied around a man’s neck in an Iraqi prison. The man is naked, grimacing and lying on a floor. There are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. According to The Post, the photographs were taken by several digital cameras and loaded onto compact discs, which circulated among soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md. The pictures were among those seized by military investigators probing conditions at Abu Ghraib, a source close to the unit was quoted as telling the newspaper. |
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Bush chides Rumsfeld Washington, May 6 Although Mr Bush is giving no consideration to asking Mr Rumsfeld to resign, the President informed the Defence Secretary of his dissatisfaction at a meeting in the Oval Office yesterday, the official, who spoke to selected US media on the condition of anonymity, was quoted as saying by the Washington Post. Mr Bush was particularly bothered at not having been told that the photographs of abuses against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison were in circulation, even though Pentagon officials knew that the CBS had obtained them, he said. The President “is not satisfied and not happy” with the way Mr Rumsfeld informed him about the investigation into the abuses, the official said. Mr Bush also admonished Mr Rumsfeld for resisting repeated calls for prison changes in Iraq and failure to act on recommendations to improve conditions and release those not charged with crimes, he said. Other US officials said Mr Rumsfeld and the Pentagon resisted appeals in recent months from the State Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority to deal with problems relating to detainees. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff who led US armed forces during the first Iraq War, had urged action at several White House meetings that included Mr Rumsfeld, a senior State Department official familiar with discussions said.
— PTI |
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Ill-treatment of Indians in Iraq being probed: USA Washington, May 6 State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said at a press conference here yesterday that India’s Ministry of External Affairs had contacted the US Embassy in New Delhi about this on May 4 and the embassy had started looking into these reports and informed the ministry. ‘’Obviously, we take all such reports seriously, and we’ll do our best to find out the facts of the matter,’’ he assured. To a question Mr Boucher said there were apparently some press reports in India that some Indian nationals alleged they were lured to Iraq under false pretenses and mistreated while working in Iraq. Asked whether just the US Embassy in New Delhi was looking at it and was there any broader effort to find out what actually happened to these people if it goes to the behaviour of contractors working for the US Government in Iraq, Mr Boucher said the Embassy would try to identify, first of all, who these people worked with, where they worked and what they were doing. ‘’Then we will use our folks on the other end of the equation to find those specifics of that circumstance, see what really happened,’’ he
added. — UNI |
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US soldiers kill 41 Iraqi resisters
Najaf (Iraq), May 6 Witnesses said seven or eight US tanks surrounded the governor’s house, about 5 km from the sensitive religious sites in the city centre, and troops took occasional fire from militiamen holed up in the area using AK-47s and rocket propelled grenades. US tanks also moved into nearby Kerbala. The tanks took up positions close to the main shrines after destroying Sadr's offices with machinegun fire. Najaf locals said some fleeing militiamen had taken refuge in their homes, raising fears US forces could be drawn into urban fighting if they decided to flush out militia in the area. Doctors at a local hospital said they had received three dead from the area — two women and a nine-year-old child — and were also treating at least nine wounded, some of them women. The troops retook the governor’s office as Paul Bremer, the US-appointed administrator of Iraq, named a new governor for the city. But east of the city, across the Euphrates river, US forces drew out fighters of Sadr’s Mehdi army, and killed 41 of them in fierce fighting, the official said. |
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US soldier, 6 Iraqis die in car blast Baghdad, May 6 The blast occurred at 7:28 am (0830 IST) as civilians were queuing in their cars to enter the 14th of July Bridge, used only by the military and employees of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Witnesses said a suicide bomber sped his car around a roundabout outside a double set of blast walls where contractors were lining up to cross the bridge. “We saw a car on fire. We think it was a car bomb. There were two bodies covered in sheets,” said Mohammed Talum, who lives close to the bridge, a main entrance to the heavily-fortified US-led coalition headquarters in the capital. A senior US military officer at the bridge said six Iraqis were killed in the attack, while another officer reported the blast also claimed the life of one US soldier and wounded another. Hospitals reported 13 Iraqis wounded, four of them seriously injured. The death toll was expected to rise, officers said at the scene. Lieut Maki Khals, a traffic policeman, said “I saw the suicide bomber had exploded near the entrance of the Green
Zone.” — AFP |
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Two Tiger leaders killed Colombo, May 6 The two were gunned down at Earvur in Batticaloa district in what happened to be a retaliatory attack for last night’s killing of a rebel loyal to the renegade Batticaloa commander Karuna, the police said. The killings came amid a stepped-up recruitment of child soldiers in the island’s northern region of Wanni, local officials and residents said. Tamil Tigers began enlisting young fighters in the northern Wanni district during the past two weeks after demobilising nearly 1,000 child soldiers who were loyal to renegade Karuna, a local official said.
— PTI |
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Love bends gender London, May 6 A study by an Italian researcher shows that when couples fall in love, their testosterone levels alter. They fall in men and rise in women, so they become more like each other. ‘’Men who were in love had lower levels of the male sex hormone testosterone — linked to aggression and sex drive — than other men,’’ New Scientist magazine said today. ‘’Love-struck women, in contrast, had higher levels of testosterone than their counterparts.’’ Ms Donatella Marazziti, a scientist at the University of Pisa in Italy, made the discovery after studying 24 persons in love. ‘’It’s as if nature wants to eliminate what can be different in men and women, because it’s important to survive at this stage,’’ she said. Not all scientists agree with Ms Marazziti’s interpretation of the results and some say changing testosterone levels could be a result of an increased sexual activity. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t last long. Two years later, when the same people were tested again and were no longer madly in love, their testosterone levels were back to normal.
— Reuters |
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Naomi wins privacy battle London, May 6 In a 3-2 ruling, the Law Lords over turned a Court of Appeal judgement that cancelled a £3,500 award to Naomi from the Daily Mirror newspaper two years ago. Naomi 33, is one of the world’s most successful models, and she was said by her lawyers today to be delighted on the verdict, which could have a major impact on Britain’s free-wheeling Press. The case involved a February 2001 report in the Daily Mirror about Campbell’s addiction to drugs, which included a photo of her leaving a Narcotics Anonymous
meeting in Chelsea, west London. — AFP |
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US President George W. Bush privately admonished Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for keeping him in the dark about the photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, a senior White House official said.
