■SRI LANKA
Explosion kills 25
Improperly stored detonators are likely to have triggered a dynamite explosion that killed 25 people and injured dozens, police said. Three containers of explosives used for road construction exploded on Friday inside a police compound, destroying the police station and a nearby agriculture office crowded with farmers. A police officer involved in the investigation said on Saturday the detonators were stored together with dynamite in one of the containers and may have been accidentally activated by a worker who was removing them for the day’s work.
■MALAYSIA
Indonesian maid burned
Police said yesterday they have arrested a couple for burning their Indonesian maid with a hot iron and scalding water with the husband also accused of raping the woman repeatedly. The latest case was among a string of shocking mistreatment of domestic workers that has strained ties between the country and Indonesia, prompting Jakarta to temporarily ban maids from working there since June last year. The couple, who reportedly have four children aged five to 15, face up to seven years in jail for causing grievous harm to the Indonesian woman. The husband could also face a maximum 20 years imprisonment if convicted of raping her.
■THE PHILIPPINES
Tourism target shifted
The country has announced it will stop marketing its tourist attractions to Hong Kong as the key market is lost after a hostage-taking fiasco left eight people from the territory dead. Tourism Secretary Alberto Lim said the government would instead focus its marketing efforts on other countries to hit the target of 3.3 million arrivals this year from just over 3 million last year. “Going to Hong Kong at this time would be wrong. They would say we are only after their business. We should show sympathy instead,” the minister added. The territory issued a an alert warning against all visits to the country after a sacked police officer hijacked a tourist bus in Manila, killing eight Hong Kong visitors as police mounted a bungled rescue. The Aug. 23 bloodbath outraged China and Hong Kong and prompted many prospective visitors to cancel. Some tourists already in the country left abruptly before their tours were completed. Lim said the country lost about 40 million pesos (US$890,000) in tourist income in the first two weeks after the hijacking. Samie Lim, vice president for tourism for the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said he found in recent visits to Hong Kong and China that it remained front-page news.
■THE PHILIPPINES
Abu Sayyaf kidnapper killed
Security forces yesterday killed a Muslim extremist involved in the kidnap of three Americans nine years ago, which led to the death of two of them, a military official said. Abdulkarim Sali, a member of the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf extremist group, was killed by soldiers and police in the southern island of Baslian before dawn, said regional military chief Lieutenant General Benjamin Dolorfino. An Abu Sayyaf band raided the island resort of Dos Palmas in a 2001, seizing Christian missionary couple, Gracia and Martin Burnham, fellow American Guillermo Sobero and a number of Filipinos. Sobero was beheaded as a warning to pursuing troops while Martin Burnham was later killed in a raid which freed his wife. Sali had been a wanted man for the kidnappings and had a bounty on his head, said the general.
■FRANCE
Limbless man swims Channel
A Frenchman who lost all his limbs in an electrical accident swam across the Channel on Saturday. Philippe Croizon, 42, set off from Folkestone just before 8am and arrived on the French coast near Wissant just before 9:30pm, propelled by his specially designed flipper-shaped prosthetic legs. “I did it, it’s crazy!” Croizon said on France Info radio, saying he hoped to become “a symbol of overcoming one’s limits.” Steadying himself with the stumps of his arms, Croizon had kept up a constant speed in good weather and had been accompanied by dolphins for part of the crossing, his support team said. In 1994, the metalworker was hit by a 20,000-volt charge as he attempted to remove a television aerial from a house roof when an arc of current surged through him from a nearby powerline. Croizon trained for his feat for two years and last month completed a 12-hour swim between the ports of Noirmoutier and Pornic on France’s Atlantic coast.
■GERMANY
Get used to migrants: Merkel
Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germans had for too long failed to grasp how immigration was changing their country and would have to get used to the sight of more mosques in their cities, according to newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The country, home to at least 4 million Muslims, has been divided in recent weeks by a debate over integration sparked by disparaging remarks about Muslim immigrants by an outspoken member of the central bank. “Our country is going to carry on changing and integration is also a task for the society taking up the immigrants,” Merkel said. “For years we’ve been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before.” The uproar was sparked by the Bundesbank’s Thilo Sarrazin, who argued Turkish and Arab immigrants were failing to integrate and swamping the nation with a higher birth rate.
■OMAN
Shourd returns home
Sarah Shourd, one of three Americans held in Iran for more than a year on suspicion of spying, left Muscat on Saturday on her way home to the US. “I thank Sultan Qaboos and the Omani authorities for hosting me in Oman,” she said at a news conference shortly before her departure, a witness said. “I would like to thank the American ambassador for hosting my family,” she said, asking people to pray for the release of her two male companions, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal. US officials and the detainees’ families have rejected Iran’s charges of espionage.
■SOMALIA
Confidence vote postponed
A vote of confidence in Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke, seen as a power-struggle between the leader of the government and President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, has been postponed, officials said on Saturday. Sharmarke has come under pressure to step down in recent months, with Ahmed leading calls for him to go. Legislators voted on Thursday to hold a confidence vote on Saturday but there were not enough present for a quorum and the parliament speaker said the session would not take place. Parliament has already voted once to oust Sharmarke and his Western-backed government, but the prime minister rejected the previous vote in May as unconstitutional and refused to resign.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
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