■ Indonesia
Peeping toms aid drug bust
Teenage peeping toms hoping to spy on a couple locked in a heated embrace instead led police to arrest a Zimbabwean with a haul of heroin, a report said yesterday. The group of teenagers peeped into a rented house in Jakarta on Saturday, where Zimbabwean national Frederik Lutta, 32, and his Indonesian girlfriend were staying, the Media Indonesia daily said. But instead of finding the couple in bed, they saw them busily measuring out a white powder on scales, the paper said. Police raided the house and allegedly found 1.27kg of heroin with an estimated street value of 1.27 billion rupiah (US$140,000), the report said.
■ Nepal
Rebels attack prison
Five people died and 103 prisoners escaped when hundreds of Maoist rebels attacked a prison and other government targets in the east of the country, an army official said yesterday. "Security forces have recovered at least two bodies of Maoists from the clash sites while one soldier, one policeman and a civilian were also killed," the official said. The rebels besieged a district prison, police office and other buildings on Sunday night. Witnesses reported several large explosions during fighting which lasted until the early hours yesterday in Ilam district, 680km east of Kathmandu. The army official said more Maoists were believed to have been killed and their bodies taken away on a bus by the rebels.
■ Pakistan
Muslims protest cartoons
About 50,000 people rallied over the weekend in Karachi to protest the Prophet Mohammed cartoons, many of them chanting that those who drew the images should be hanged. The protesters also chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Musharraf," a reference to President Pervez Musharraf. Hundreds of riot police lined the 2km stretch of a road in central Karachi where the rally was held on Sunday, but there was no violence.
■ Thailand
Four killed in south
A group of some 30 suspected Islamic militants stormed a Buddhist village in the south yesterday, killing three people, while a Muslim man was shot dead in a separate attack, police said. The heavily armed attackers, all dressed in black, broke into a community in Pattani Province and gunned down an elderly couple and their neighbor. The militants burned the body of one of the victims and set ablaze an empty house. Separately, a gang of suspected Islamic militants on motorcycles shot a Muslim villager, police said. Some Muslims are targeted by Islamic insurgents because they are seen as government collaborators.
■ Indonesia
Two arrested for terror links
Police have arrested two men suspected of links to a wanted Malaysian terrorist, police said yesterday. Ahmad Basyir, 36, was arrested in Surabaya on Friday while Ahmad Arif Hermansyah, whose age not given, was nabbed there a day later, national police deputy spokesman Anton Bahrul Alam said. Basyir, Alam said, "is suspected of having hidden, and provided a house, for Noordin M. Top and Azahari, before the latter was shot." Malaysian master-bombmaker Azahari Husin was shot dead during a police raid last November. His compatriot and partner Noordin remains on the run. Both were known to be key members of the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group blamed for a series of terrorist attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
■ Netherlands
Babic commits suicide
Milan Babic, the Serb leader of a rebel republic in Croatia and one of the key figures in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, committed suicide in prison, the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague said yesterday. Babic, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for crimes against humanity, was found dead on Sunday evening in his cell at the UN detention center in Scheveningen, the tribunal said in a statement. Babic was a ranking Croatian Serb leader when the Serb minority revolted after Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, setting off a war that lasted until 1995. The tribunal did not say how Babic killed himself, but did say an inquiry has been ordered. Babic, 50, pleaded guilty in 2004 to a single charge of inflaming an ethnic cleansing campaign that killed hundreds of Croats and expelled tens of thousands in the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina. He had voluntarily surrendered to face the charges.
■ Lebanon
Historian's remains found
Lebanon has found the remains of Michel Seurat, a French history researcher whom Islamic militants kidnapped in 1985 during the civil war, a police official said yesterday. The bones were found during excavation along a road leading to Beirut airport. DNA tests have confirmed that all the bones belonged to Seurat, the police officer said. Seurat was kidnapped on May 22, 1985. Hostages who were later freed said Seurat died of either hepatitis or cancer.
■ Italy
Al-Qaeda threat welcomed
A former minister who made T-shirts emblazoned with cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed said on Sunday he was honored to be singled out by al-Qaeda in its latest call for attacks against the West. Al-Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged Muslims to launch strikes like those against New York, London and Madrid. In the message, he specifically pointed to Italy's former reforms minister Roberto Calderoli, whose inflammatory T-shirts cost him his Cabinet post and have been partly blamed for deadly riots outside an Italian consulate in eastern Libya. Calderoli said he was happy to irritate al-Qaeda.
■ Zimbabwe
Killing a lion costs US$40
Big game hunters bid US$1.5 million to shoot leopards, lions, elephants and buffaloes in Zimbabwe this year, state media reported on Sunday. In an annual state auction on Friday, 64 local agents and foreign hunters, including bidders from Austria, Germany, Russia, Spain and the US, paid a fixed fee of US$40 for a license to kill a lion, the Sunday Mail reported. Bidding for elephants exceeded US$20,000. The state Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said the hunting revenues were to be used in conservation programs.
■ France
Synagogue attacks probed
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy urged a swift investigation into two attacks on Jewish youth, his ministry said on Sunday, amid heightened sensitivity to anti-Semitism following a brutal killing last month. Sarkozy wrote letters expressing "sympathy and solidarity" with the families of two young Jews attacked in separate incidents on Friday near a synagogue in the town of Sarcelles, north of Paris. One of the victims suffered a broken nose, while the other was not injured. Fears of anti-Semitism resurfaced after the killing of a 23-year-old salesman last month.
■ Venezuela
Chavez accuses US of plot
President Hugo Chavez accused the US of attempting to foment the secession of an oil-rich region in western Venezuela on Sunday and demanded independence for Puerto Rico. Chavez said US officials were working behind the scenes with the governor of Zulia state, which is home to much of Venezuela's all-important oil industry, to create a secession movement loyal to US interests. "The imperialists are there trying to give strength ... trying to give form to a secessionist movement, of course, to take control of the great oil wealth there," said Chavez, speaking during his weekly television and radio program Hello President. Zulia state is governed by Manuel Rosales, an outspoken opponent of left-leaning Chavez.
■ United States
Moussaoui trial begins
After more than four years of wrangling and delay, the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, a 37-year-old French citizen and the only man charged in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is ready to begin. Final jury selection was scheduled yesterday, with a jury pool of 83 called to the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. Prosecutors and defense lawyers will whittle that group to a jury of 18 -- 12 plus six alternates. Opening statements were slated yesterday afternoon, and the first witness was also expected to take the stand.
■ United States
Homeless man set on fire
A homeless man sleeping in a park was attacked by two men who kicked him in the stomach and then set him on fire, police said. No arrests were made, and police gave no indication of what might have motivated the attack on early Sunday. The 30-year-old homeless man, whose name was not released, told police he was awakened by the men kicking him in Langone Park in Boston's North End. He drifted back to sleep after the assault, but the men returned, drenched him with a flammable liquid and set his legs on fire, police said. A caller to emergency services reported flames in the park, and firefighters found the man wrapped in a blanket after he had ripped off some of his burning clothes.
■ Spain
Suspects to be charged
Charges are set to be issued shortly against some 40 suspects in connection with the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, as the second anniversary of the blasts which killed 191 people nears, a judicial source said on Sunday. A total of 116 people are under investigation for the blasts on four commuter trains, for which Islamic extremists sympathetic to al-Qaeda have claimed responsibility. But the source said only "a figure probably much reduced," likely around one-third, would be charged and brought to trial for Spain's worst-ever terror attack, in which nearly 2,000 people were also injured. Of the suspects, 24 are in jail in Spain, and one is in prison in Italy.
■ Poland
First H5N1 case confirmed
Authorities yesterday confirmed the presence of the H5N1 bird flu virus in two dead wild swans, according to a Polish PAP news agency report. "It was the H5N1-type -- this is certain," Jan Zmudzinski from the State Veterinary Institute in Pulawy said. "The molecular biology tests specific for H5 and N1 were positive," he said. On Sunday, Agriculture Minister Krzysztof Jurgiel confirmed the nation's first cases of the H5 type of bird flu, but said more tests were needed to discover whether the H5N1 strain of the disease was present in the birds.
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