CHINA
Baby-napper gets death
A Chinese court says it has sentenced a woman to death for trafficking and abducting 223 infants from late 2009 to August 2010.The Qujing Intermediate People’s Court in southwest China’s Yunnan Province said yesterday in a statement posted on its official Web site that Jiang Kaizhi was the leader of a trafficking ring that abducted and bought infants from the province and transported them to be sold in central China’s Henan Province. The court says 35 others involved in the trafficking ring were sentenced on Friday to prison for terms ranging from three years to life.
THAILAND
Two Canadians found dead
The bodies of two Canadian sisters have been found in a hotel room on the popular tourist resort island of Phi Phi, Thai police said yesterday, without revealing the suspected cause of death. The sisters, aged 26 and 20, were found dead on Friday afternoon by hotel staff on the Andaman sea island, 800km south of Bangkok. “Their bodies were found a little after midday [Friday]. They were sisters,” said Lieutenant Pongpan Waiyawat of the island’s police force. “We have to wait for the post mortem to determine the cause of death, but based on initial investigations there’s no sign of violence in their room.”
INDIA
Dozens die in bus plunge
At least 32 pilgrims were killed and more than 20 injured yesterday when their bus plunged off a bridge in western India, the Press Trust of India reported. The pilgrims were returning from a visit to the popular Shirdi Saibaba temple, built in honor of an Indian guru, when the accident occurred before dawn in Maharashtra State’s Osmanabad District, police said. “We had to struggle to rescue survivors and retrieve the victims’ bodies from water,” a police official said. Nearly 135,000 people, or 366 a day, died on India’s roads in 2010, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
BANGLADESH
Reporter stabbed to death
Police say that unidentified men have stabbed a journalist to death apparently for his reports on the illegal drug trade in the southwest. Local police chief A.K.M. Faruk Hossain said yesterday that the attack on Zamal Uddin took place late on Friday at Kashipur Bazar in Jessore District bordering India. The area is 140km west of the capital, Dhaka. Hossain says the reporter was rushed to hospital with severe injuries and later declared dead. Uddin worked for the Bengali-language Gramer Kagoj daily. The police chief says Uddin had recently filed a complaint with police seeking security after he was threatened for his articles on the illicit drug trade.
BANGLADESH
One dead in bridge collapse
One person was killed and up to 10 were missing after several vehicles plunged into a canal as a small bridge collapsed in Bangladesh’s northeast on Friday night, police said. Six trucks, a microbus and an auto-rickshaw were on the bridge when it caved in, making a loud noise and plunging the vehicles into a canal at Companyganj, about 200km from the capital, police said. “We’ve recovered one dead body and rescued 15 persons alive. The rescued persons were sent to local hospitals,” district police chief Shakhawat Hossain said. Hossain could not give the exact number of missing people as police did not know how many passengers the lorries were carrying, which had been transporting stones from a nearby quarry.
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