Suspected militants bombed a bus carrying prisoners in northwest Pakistan on yesterday, killing at least nine people, as fighting between security forces and extremists flared across the country’s tribal belt.
The powerful blast caused a massive crater in the middle of a bridge in Bannu and left the burned-out vehicle completely mangled.
There was no immediate claim for the attack, though police said militants were the likely culprits. It happened as a van carrying prisoners crossed a bridge in the North West Frontier Province, said Waqas Ahmad, an area police chief.
The dead included police officers and prisoners, said Jalil Khan, another police official.
Hours earlier, security forces drove off a Taliban attack on a fort and pounded another band of militants holed up in a health center, officials said on Wednesday as fighting spread to new areas in the tribal belt along the Afghan border.
As many as 49 insurgents were reported killed in separate attacks.
Meanwhile, hundreds of lawyers demonstrated and blocked roads in major cities yesterday, demanding the reinstatement of judges purged last year by former president Pervez Musharraf.
Black-suited lawyers were joined by political party workers and other supporters carrying black flags as they blocked key roads for two hours in Islamabad, shouting slogans against the government.
They also chanted slogans against Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of former prime minister Benezir Bhutto, who was assassinated last December. Zardari is the favorite to replace Musharraf when lawmakers select a new president on Sept. 6. But his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is accused by lawyers of not reinstating the judges sacked by Musharraf last year.
However, the protesters numbers were smaller than in the past and supporters of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif largely stayed away.
Sharif’s party quit Pakistan’s four-party coalition on Monday after the PPP dragged its feet on the judges issue.
The government has since reappointed eight judges sacked by Musharraf but lawyers’ groups have dismissed the gesture as a political stunt designed to harm their demands for the reinstatement of all those removed last year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema