■ NEW ZEALAND
Tourist survives accident
German tourist Julia Jahn, 20, kept telling herself she was too young to die as she struggled for five hours to keep her head above water after her kayak became trapped on a river, a newspaper reported on yesterday. “I was thinking I want to survive. I’m still young. I don’t want to die, so I had such a big will to live,” Jahn, from Bavaria, told the Dominion Post as she talked about Friday’s ill-fated kayak trip in the wilderness of the North Island’s Whanganui River. She fought to stay alive as fellow tourist, Jack Marsden-Mayer, 29, from England, unable to free her, paddled his kayak 30.5km down the isolated river to a hiker’s hut with a radio to call police for help. Jahn, suffering hypothermia and slipping in and out of consciousness, was rescued by three local farmers with a jet boat and a rescue helicopter flew her to hospital.
■ CHINA
Subway death toll rises
The final death toll from the collapse of a subway tunnel that was under construction in the east has reached 21, with all hope gone of rescuing 13 missing workers, state media reported. After more than three days of efforts, searchers were unable to find the 13 missing labourers in the silt-filled tunnel in Hangzhou, the official Xinhua news agency said late on Tuesday. It cited rescuers as saying there was “no chance” of finding them alive. “If the workers are trapped in the middle of the mire, it may take two or three days for rescuers to reach them. If they are at the bottom, it’s hard to say when they can be reached,” Xinhua quoted a local official as saying. Eight people have already been confirmed dead in the accident, which happened on Saturday at a construction site for a subway in Hangzhou. Altogether 75m of a tunnel collapsed, creating a huge crater that also trapped 11 vehicles, including at least one bus.
■ INDIA
Police tortured men: group
Police officers allegedly tortured 21 Muslim men during an investigation into a series of bombings in the south, an international rights group said as it called for the officers to be prosecuted. Bomb attacks in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh state, in May and August last year killed more than 50 people. At the time police blamed Islamic militants and rounded up more than 100 Muslim men. New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that while most were released, at least 21 were held for long periods and allegedly tortured while under detention. “The detainees were stripped, hung upside down, severely beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and otherwise ill-treated,” the group said in a statement.
■ PHILIPPINES
Rebels killed in firefight
Two communist rebels were killed yesterday in a firefight with government troops in the east, an army spokesman said. The clash erupted at dawn when soldiers encountered about 20 communist guerrillas while on patrol in the village of San Marcos in Catanduanes Province, 375km southeast of Manila, Lieutenant Colonel Romeo Brawner said. The fighting lasted for almost one hour, resulting in the killing of two communist rebels, Brawner said, adding that no casualty was reported on the army’s side. Brawner said the bodies of the slain guerrillas, two rifles and subversive documents were recovered after the clash. Communist rebels have been fighting the government since the late 1960s, making the movement one of the longest-running leftist insurgencies in Asia.
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