World News Quick Take

■ India
At least nine burnt alive
At least nine people were burnt alive and 13 injured when their jeep rammed into a cycle rickshaw carrying kerosene oil in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, police said yesterday. "The vehicle ferrying the passengers caught fire and fell in a ditch after losing control, killing at least nine of them on the spot," said B.D. Prasad, police chief of Bihar's Nawada district, 140km south of the state capital Patna. Eyewitnesses said the car had earlier hit a motorcycle near Sobhia village, injuring two people, and was attempting to flee when it hit the rickshaw late on Saturday.

■ India
Two die in train wreck
A passenger train collided head-on with a stationary engine in New Delhi on Saturday, killing two people and injuring at least 18 others, police said. The two engines caught fire after the collision in Shakur Basti, a western suburb of New Delhi, a police official said on condition of anonymity. One of the coaches overturned and also caught fire, engulfing it in black fumes. Firefighters and railway guards had to cut through the coach to pull out two bodies of passengers who died in the fire. At least 18 other people who sustained burns were being treated at nearby hospitals, a railway official said.

■ Bangladesh
Elephants kill four villagers
At least four people were trampled to death by wild elephants roaming in the jungles near the resort town of Rangamati in south eastern Bangladesh, forest guards said on Saturday. Witnesses said a herd of at least nine elephants went on a rampage in a village outside a wildlife sanctuary wrecking mud and straw huts and destroying banana plantations. Among the dead were a young boy and his mother. The overnight attack by the elephants left also 11 people injured and forced panic stricken villagers abandon their dwelling houses. Last month a similar attack by elephants in the area left seven villagers dead, forest guards said.

■ Malaysia
Mahathir attacks Hollywood
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has accused Western movies of corrupting Asian youths by promoting sex and violence, a newspaper reported yesterday. "In my opinion, there are too many foreign films associated with sex and violence," Mahathir was quoted as saying by the New Sunday Times newspaper. "Isn't there any other kind of films? This is not only happening in Malaysia," Mahathir said. "I met an ambassador from Japan recently and he told me it was no different in his country. Terminator this, terminator that, shootings, killings," he said, in reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger's popular action movies.

■ Hong Kong
Smugglers' tunnel found
Authorities discovered a suspected smugglers' tunnel linking a Chinese border town with Hong Kong, a news report said yesterday -- but police would only confirm the existence of the tunnel on the mainland side. The Apple Daily tabloid said a 25m tunnel connected an apartment unit in the Chinese town of Sha Tau Kok with a drainage canal on the border, where smugglers allegedly traveled to Hong Kong through a second tunnel 300m long. Police in the nearby Chinese city of Shenzhen confirmed the existence of the tunnel on the Chinese side, but said it didn't reach the border, Hong Kong police spokesman T.K. Ng said.

■ France
Raffarin chides officials
French Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said Saturday he was angry that officials have been unable to pinpoint the number of victims of a scorching heat wave, calling recent estimates unreliable. In an interview with several radio stations, Raffarin cast doubt on France's recent staggering estimate of about 10,000 dead from two weeks of scorching temperatures this month, which reached 40 Celsius. Raffarin said he was unable "to obtain reliable figures [when] I see day after day estimates here, projections there and forecasts that announce contradictory figures." The prime minister said he had told Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei "in the firmest way possible" to determine the precise toll within a month.

■ Iran
Al-Qaeda agents extradited
Iran extradited a number of Saudi members of al-Qaeda to Saudi Arabia, the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, reported on Saturday. IRNA quoted Tehran's ambassador to Riyadh as saying the al Qaeda members had been arrested in Iran after the US-led war on Afghanistan, but did not name them, or say how many had been extradited or when they had been handed over to Saudi Arabia. The envoy said Iran and Saudi Arabia, leading oil producers and both Muslim nations, had signed a security pact and "have shown a firm resolve to improve ties in all areas."

■ United States
`Dead' fugitive unmasked
A woman's scheme to avoid prison by faking her own death in a truck accident came undone when a childhood friend, now a sheriff's deputy, spotted her by chance. Misty Quackenbush, 27, of Cortez, was supposed to have been sentenced on July 11 to four years in prison on her guilty plea to distribution of methamphetamines. Instead, she allegedly placed personal identification in an abandoned pickup near a reservoir, doused the truck with blood of unknown origin and fled. About four weeks later, former Montezuma County deputy Brandon Brown, now a Texas lawman, spotted Quackenbush in Shamrock, Texas.

■ Russia
Crashed helicopter found
Emergency yesterday began the grim task of removing the victims' bodies from the tangled wreckage of an Mi-8 helicopter that had been carrying the governor of the oil-rich Sakhalin region and other senior regional officials when it crashed in the rugged Kamchatka Peninsula. The destroyed helicopter was found in a marshy field Saturday, three days after its last contact with air traffic controllers. All 20 people on board, including Governor Igor Farkhutdinov, were killed. Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was dispatched to the scene by President Vladimir Putin, said that the helicopter fell vertically from a height of about 1,350m.

■ Colombia
Journalist shot to death
Suspected rebels in Colombia have killed one journalist and wounded another after the car in which they were traveling did not stop at a rebel roadblock, police said on Saturday. Juan Carlos Benavides, a 25-year-old radio journalist, was shot from behind by gunmen of the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia near the southern town of Puerto Asis in the jungle province of Putumayo on Friday night, town mayor Jose Coral said.