A suicide car bomber killed at least eight Pakistani paramilitary troops yesterday in a region near the Afghan border that has been a target in a surge of suspected US missile strikes.
The bombing occurred at a checkpoint near the main gate of the Zalai Fort where Frontier Corps troops were gathered, said Major General Athar Abbas, the Pakistan army’s top spokesman.
The fort is 20km outside Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, a tribal region considered a hub for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters involved in attacks on US and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
South Waziristan was the site of one of two suspected US missiles attacks on Friday that killed 29 people, including several suspected foreign militants, intelligence officials said.
It was not immediately clear if yesterday’s suicide attack was linked to the missile strikes. However, the missile strikes have strained Pakistan’s alliance with the US in its war on terror and spurred militant calls for revenge.
The Pakistani troops were washing their vehicles yesterday when the suicide attacker came, two intelligence officials said. They described the explosion as “large” and said it destroyed the checkpoint and damaged the front wall of the fort.
The intelligence officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media. It was not possible to immediately verify the details. South Waziristan is a dangerous, remote area where travel by foreigners and many journalists is restricted.
Meanwhile, gunmen in Pakistan kidnapped the brother of Afghanistan’s finance minister while he was walking to his mother’s home after praying at a mosque, Afghan officials said yesterday.
Zia ul-Haq Ahadi was abducted in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Friday, said Haziz Shams, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s Finance Ministry. The kidnapped man’s brother is Afghan Finance Minister Anwar ul-Haq Ahadim.
Shams said it wasn’t known who kidnapped Ahadi. No demands had been made, and the kidnappers have not contacted officials or the Ahadi family.
Ahadi is a businessman who lives in Afghanistan and was in Peshawar to visit his mother, who is ill, said Abdul Razaq, an assistant to the finance minister.
Ahadi was walking home after Friday prayers at a neighborhood mosque when he was taken, Razaq said.
Earlier this year, Taliban gunmen kidnapped Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan on the main highway in between Peshawar and the Afghan-Pakistan border. He was freed after three months in captivity.
Kidnappings in Afghanistan have spiked in the last year because criminal groups have found it to be a lucrative way to make money through the ransoms that families and companies usually pay for hostages.
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