Pakistani troops battling suspected al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan's lawless north on Monday discovered a mile-long tunnel running through the battlefield, through which senior al-Qaeda members may have escaped, officials said.
Several tunnels were discovered leading from a huddle of fiercely defended mud fortresses near Afghanistan's border, which have been besieged by a force of 7,000 Pakistani troops for almost a week. The tunnels were said to have led to a nearby dry riverbed running along the border.
Brigadier Mahmood Shah, security chief of Pakistan's northern tribal region, said the longest tunnel was more than a mile (1.6km) long, and could have been used as an escape route.
"There is a possibility that the tunnel may have been used at the start of the operation," he said.
Senior Pakistani officials have suggested that al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, could be among the hundreds of besieged fighters. Seeking to explain the ferocity of resistance, President Pervez Musharraf said last week that a "high-value" target was probably among them.
US intelligence operatives are assisting the Pakistani army in the battle, in which more than 40 suspected terrorists, soldiers and civilians have been killed.
A senior US commander, General John Abizaid, visited Islamabad on Monday, raising speculation that the Pakistani army could be on the verge of capturing a major al-Qaeda prize. But Western diplomats in Islamabad were sceptical. The mud fortresses would be too obvious a hiding place, they said.
"It's very hard to believe al-Zawahiri has been hiding in what amounts to a military camp," said one diplomat. "Or if he is there, it's impossible to believe that the Pakistani intelligence services didn't know about it a long time ago."
Army officials said on Monday they were testing the DNA of six suspected foreign fighters killed in the battle, while interrogating 123 captured fighters. Five of the bodies were exhibited to journalists at an army hospital in the northern city of Rawalpindi on Monday. The nationalities of the dead men were impossible to determine.
"For us, every foreigner who is caught or killed is important because we do not know who they are," army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said. "We took the decision to do DNA tests to confirm the identities of these people. I cannot say if any among them is al-Zawahiri."
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS