Police arrested a woman and a 13-year-old child they alleged were suicide bombers planning to kill a provincial governor in central Afghanistan, officials said yesterday.
The pair were arrested late Thursday as they were fixing explosives to themselves behind the governor’s residence in Ghazni, provincial government spokesman Ismail Jahangir said.
“They both were attempting to get into [the] governor’s compound and target the governor and high-ranking officials,” Jahangir said.
Women rarely carry out attacks in Afghanistan’s insurgency, which is led by the Taliban movement that was in government between 1996 and 2001 and is said to have support from extremist circles based in Pakistan.
A suicide attack in May in southwestern Farah Province was apparently carried out by a woman in a burqa.
Jahangir said the woman and child could not speak either of Afghanistan’s main languages, Dari and Pashtu, but spoke Urdu and Arabic.
The pair were presented to the media several hours after their arrest.
The deputy police chief of Ghazni, Abdul Ghani, told reporters the woman had said she was from Multan, Pakistan, and had come to the city — the capital of a province of the same name — to carry out a suicide attack.
She claimed to have entered the country with three associates who had not been arrested, Ghani said. The police chief did not confirm whether the boy was also meant to be involved in the bombing or what his relationship was to the woman.
A 14-year-old boy from Pakistan’s tribal belt was arrested with explosives in Ghanzi last year and told police he had been tasked with killing the governor.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai pardoned the boy and handed him over to his parents.
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.
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
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the