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Rain stops but misery continues
Two women pulled alive after 80 hours
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China seizes India-made drugs, 6 arrested
India rejects EU proposals on farm tariff
Syrian minister commits suicide
2 Chinese on space mission
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Rain stops but misery continues
Muzaffarabad, October 12 Most spent a shivering fourth night in the open, too afraid to use what is left of their damaged houses amid the ruins of a catastrophe that has left at least 23,000 dead in Pakistan and some 2.5 million homeless. The lucky ones managed to find themselves blankets and some even tents to protect against the cold. Others made do with pieces of cardboard and slept between mounds of rubble on the pavements. All emerged from the freezing night to find that snow had fallen on the peaks surrounding the once-picturesque Kashmiri city. “That was the fourth night we slept in the open,” said Khurshid Bibi, pointing to her family of 15 camped on the roadside outside their collapsed house in Gulshan street. “We were very, very cold. We need tents and blankets.” During yesterday’s rain they had sheltered in the only room left standing of their home, but they had been afraid it would collapse. Miraculously, she said no one from their family died in Saturday’s 7.6 magnitude quake, though rubble had fallen on her bedridden 80-year-old mother, now lying in a cot out in the street. Four days after the quake, many of the worst-affected have yet to see any aid, despite huge pledges from around the world. “Our resources are very stretched — every time we rush to one place we hear of another place that is worse,” said Colonel Y.P. Sayyaj in the mountain town of Bata Mora in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. “I know people are suffering but we have to prioritise. Everyone will get help in the end.” At the entrance to every small town and village driving up the mountain, entire populations waited in the hope of aid. At Bata Mora, about 250 km (155 miles) from Islamabad, a big crowd was waiting but no supplies had yet arrived. The arrival of aid in the town of Battagram, about 30 km from Bata Mora, yesterday caused scuffles. “The people are very angry over the late arrival of the aid,” said a local journalist. “Many people were lying under open sky in hail and rain yesterday with no shelter. A senior UN official said the aid operation had improved with the arrival of more helicopters, including some US military aircraft usually used in the war on militants in neighbouring Afghanistan. “But in the areas rescue teams have not yet been able to reach, hope basically is fading,” he said. Medical experts say an unhurt man can last three days without water and a woman four days, although in such disasters there are often extraordinary survival stories.
— Reuters |
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Two women pulled alive after 80 hours
Islamabad, October 12 The two women — Mrs Tariq, 55, and her mother Mah Begum, 75, — were the only survivors pulled to safety on Tuesday. Mah Bibi had her left foot fractured but her daughter went unscathed.Four other family members of the ladies — Anjum Tariq, 35, Mamoon Tariq Khan, 34, Haris, 20, and Talha Khan, 3, — had left the building soon after the building shook. “I, my mother Mah Bibi, my daughter Anjum Tariq and her son Talha were on the first floor of the building while my son Mamoon Tariq and nephew Haris were in another flat at the 8th floor,” survivor Mrs Tariq said. “I pushed my daughter Anjum and her son Talha out of the flat when we felt the jolts. I again went inside to take my mother, but the building collapsed in the meantime,” she told this reporter at the hospital. “I and my mother fell near a beam and we had very small space to move. There was complete darkness inside and we heard no human voice near us,” she said. The rescue effort lasted 10 hours, with the women being pulled out at 5.10pm, said volunteer Safdar who was the first to detect them alive. When the first contact with the survivors was established, their first inquiry was about their family. According to a senior army officer, they asked rescuers not to pull them out if their family members had perished. |
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China seizes India-made drugs, 6 arrested
Beijing, October 12 The case was uncovered on September 19 in a joint action by police in Shandong and Guangdong provinces and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, a spokesman of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, Liu Yuejin said here. The police have seized 1,010 kg of ketamine made in India and 9,888 US dollars of illicit funds, the official
Xinhua news agency reported. Three major suspects confessed that they aimed to open a new channel for smuggling drugs via Yantai, a port city in east China’s Shandong province. One of the major suspects, Kung Ka Sam, a Canadian Chinese, remains to be caught. The ministry is contacting the International Criminal Police Organisation to issue an
order to arrest him, Mr Liu said. The police got information in July that an international drug trafficking gang planned to smuggle more than one tonne
of ketamine from India to the Chinese mainland. The drug was hidden in 700 barrels of chemical material and transported from Mumbai to Yantai, in east China’s Shangdong province, via Singapore and South Korea. The smugglers planned to transport the drug to south China’s Guangdong Province for
sale. — PTI |
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India rejects EU proposals on farm tariff
Geneva, October 12 The US-Australia proposal of “progressivity within a band” and the EU formula of a “pivot within each band” for tariff reduction in agriculture would have been detrimental to the interests of developing countries, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said. The proposals were made on Monday at a meeting of the five interested parties (FIPs) in Zurich, convened especially to boost the stalled trade talks ahead of the WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong in December this year. Opposing the US proposal, Mr Nath said: “We (the G-20) had already agreed to the banded formula in the July framework. Progressivity is nothing but the Swiss formula which we have already rejected,” he said.
— PTI |
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Syrian minister commits suicide
Damascus, October 12 The UN’s chief investigator is expected to issue his report to the Security Council next week on the investigation into the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. Mr Kanaan, who was Syria’s top official in Lebanon for two decades until 2002, had been interviewed by UN investigators. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals have been arrested and charged in connection with the Hariri murder. Many Lebanese say Syria ordered the killing but Damascus has repeatedly denied any links. Hours before the news broke, Mr Kanaan spoke to the Lebanese radio station, denying reports in the Lebanese media that he had shown the UN investigators cheques paid to him by the late Hariri.
— AFP |
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2 Chinese on space mission
Beijing, October 12 The indigenously-made Shenzhou-6 lifted off without a hitch at 6.30 p.m. carrying astronauts Colonel Fei Julong, 40 and Colonel Nie Haisheng, 41, both ace fighter pilots, on a five-day mission.
— PTI |
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