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63 killed, 200 injured in Pak blast
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Blogger’s death sparks protest in B’desh, calls for death to war criminals
People attend the funeral of activist Rajib
Haidar at the Shahbagh intersection in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Saturday. Reuters
Afghan forces can’t ask for NATO air strikes: Karzai
Divers scour Russian lake after meteor strike
Iran not seeking N-weapons: Khamenei
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63 killed, 200 injured in Pak blast
Islamabad, February 16 The blast occurred at Kirani Road in Hazara town, a suburb of Quetta with a large Shia population that has been targeted by terrorists in the past. The area was crowded at the time of the blast. The bomb was hidden in a vehicle and triggered by remote control, DIG Wazir Khan Nasir told reporters. He said the Shia Hazara community was the target of the attack. Officials at the Bolan Medical Complex, Civil Hospital and a military hospital said 63 persons had died and over 200 injured were being treated. Several women and children were among the dead. The death toll could rise as some of the wounded were in a serious condition, officials said. Officials said the vehicle with the bomb was parked near the pillar of a building in a market. The building collapsed due to the intensity of blast and several persons were trapped in the debris. An estimated 100 kg of explosives was used in the attack, officials said. Footage on television showed several buildings were reduced to piles of rubble by the blast that was heard all over Quetta, the capital of the restive Balochistan province. Several shops and vehicles were destroyed. Angry people took to the streets and protested against the attack. The protesters pelted vehicles with stones and prevented rescue workers and the police from approaching the site of the blast for some time. They also blocked roads and fired in the air. Security forces cordoned off the area and did not allow the media to approach the site of the blast. Officials said this was done as terrorists had set off a bigger bomb after a smaller initial blast in recent attacks. No group claimed responsibility for the blast. Similar attacks in the recent past have been blamed on the banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a notorious militant group that often targets Shias.
— PTI
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Blogger’s death sparks protest in B’desh, calls for death to war criminals
Dhaka, February 16 "We have launched a massive manhunt for killers of Rajib Haidar. The detective branch and the Criminal Investigation Department separately took fingerprints to track down the assailants," a police spokesman said. The protesters at Shahbagh accused the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) of killing Haidar with lethal weapons last evening while he was returning home. The killing prompted
the protesters to go back to their 24-hour movement instead of seven-hour
programme which they had declared hours before the death. Haidar's death came hours after violence at south-eastern Cox's Bazaar district that left three persons dead. The violence broke out after JI activists turned violent following Friday prayers to protest their top leaders' trial for war crimes. The JI and their student affiliate Islamic Chhatra Shibir were trying to wage counter protest attacking or torching vehicles and attacking policemen apparently under a hit-and-run strategy to halt their stalwarts' ongoing trial.
— PTI
The outrage
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Afghan forces can’t ask for NATO air strikes: Karzai
Kabul, February 16 NATO air strikes and civilian casualties have become a significant stress point in the relationship between Karzai and his international backers. The issue threatens to further destabilise a precarious international withdrawal, to be completed by the end of 2014. Addressing a conference at Kabul's National Military Academy, Karzai expressed his anger about the strike and said he would issue a decree on Sunday preventing any resort to such measures by his forces. "Tomorrow, I will issue a decree stating that under no conditions can Afghan forces request foreign air strikes on homes or villages during operations," Karzai told more than 1,000 officers, commandos and students. If issued, such a decree would for the first time bar Afghan security forces from relying on NATO air strikes, and increase pressure on them as they increasingly assume control of security from international forces. — Reuters
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Divers scour Russian lake after meteor strike
Moscow, February 16 The 10-tonne meteor streaked across the sky in the Urals region yesterday morning just as the world braced for a close encounter with a large asteroid that left some Russian officials calling for the creation of a global system of space object defence. The unpredicted meteor strike brought traffic to a halt in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk as residents poured out on the streets to watch the light show before hovering for safety as a sonic boom shattered glass and set off car alarms. The shattered glass injured most of the people. "We have a special team working that is now assessing the seismic stability of buildings," Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov told residents as he inspected the damage in the central Russian city. "We will be especially careful about switching the gas back on," he said in televised remarks. — AFP
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Iran not seeking N-weapons: Khamenei
Tehran, February 16 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran, told a group of Iranians at his home in Tehran that his country backs the elimination of nuclear weapons. "We believe that nuclear weapons must be eliminated. We don't want to build atomic weapons. But if we didn't believe so and intended to possess nuclear weapons, no power could stop us," Khamenei said in comments posted on his website khamenei.ir. Iran recently has highlighted a religious decree Khamenei issued more than seven years ago that bans nuclear weapons in an effort to back up its claim that Tehran's nuclear programme is being used for peaceful purposes and medical research.
— AP
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Dhaka, February 16
