Tag: InternationalNews

{Patrols launched to monitor “foreign military aircraft” flying over the East China Sea air defence identification zone.}

China’s air force says it flew more than 40 bombers and other fighter planes through a strait between Japanese islands on their way to military drills in the western Pacific.

Regular long-range drills in the western Pacific and patrols over the East China Sea air defence identification zone were to protect China’s sovereignty and national security, China’s air force spokesman Shen Jinke said on Sunday, according to a statement posted on the Ministry of Defence website.

China drew condemnation from Japan and the United States in 2013 when it imposed an Air Defence Identification Zone in the East China Sea, in which aircraft are supposed to identify themselves to Chinese authorities.

The patrols were to “carefully monitor and judge the foreign military aircraft that enter the anti-aircraft defence zone, to take measures to respond to different threats in the sky, and to protect national airspace”, the statement said.

Aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army carried out the exercises after flying over the Miyako Strait, a body of water between Japan’s islands of Miyako and Okinawa, the air force statement said.

This comes as China has been increasingly asserting itself in territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.

China’s ties with Japan have been strained by a longstanding territorial dispute over a string of islets in the East China Sea, known in China as the Diaoyu and in Japan as the Senkaku.

The two countries have also clashed over what China sees as Japan’s refusal to take responsibility for its wartime past.

China’s navy has often used the Miyako Strait, a key strategic route for the military, as a pathway from eastern China to the Pacific Ocean.

Earlier this month, Chinese bombers, fighters and early warning and aerial refuelling aircraft flew through the Bashi Channel that separates Taiwan and the Philippines to exercises in the western Pacific.

{Gunman kills prominent writer Nahed Hattar outside Amman court where he was facing charges over “offensive” cartoon.}

A gunman has shot dead prominent Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar outside a court where he was facing charges for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam.

Hattar was struck by three bullets before the unidentified assailant was arrested on Sunday, state news agency Petra reported.

Witnesses and police said Nahed Hattar, 56, was preparing to enter the courthouse for a hearing when the lone gunman shot him at close range.

“He was standing at a short distance of about one metre in front of Nahed on the stairs of the Supreme Court,” a witness told the Associated Press news agency on condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions.

Hattar, a Christian, was arrested on August 13 after posting a caricature on his Facebook account that depicted a bearded man in heaven smoking in bed with women, asking God to bring him wine and cashews.

He removed the cartoon shortly thereafter, saying “it mocks terrorists and their concept of God and heaven. It does not infringe God’s divinity in any way”. It is not known who produced the cartoon.

Many Jordanian Muslims considered it offensive and against their religion. Authorities said Hattar violated the law by widely sharing the caricature.

He was charged with inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islam before being released on bail in early September.

Government spokesman Mohammad Momani condemned Hattar’s killing as a “heinous crime”.

“The government will strike with an iron hand all those who exploit this crime to broadcast speeches of hatred to our community,” he told the Petra agency.

But supporters of Hattar said they held the government responsible for the shooting, accusing Prime Minister Hani al-Mulki of creating a hostile atmosphere that encouraged violence against the writer.

“The prime minister was the first one who incited against Nahed when he ordered his arrest and put him on trial for sharing the cartoon, and that ignited the public against him and led to his killing,” said Saad Hattar, a cousin of the writer.

{{‘Shocked’}}

Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning journalist and director of Community Media Network, told Al Jazeera Hattar’s killing represents a “scary situation where people with opinions we don’t like or the government doesn’t like become susceptible to assassination”.

“It’s a clear case of intellectual terror,” said Kuttab.

“The omen is that many people are now going to be worried about what they say … It’s a scary situation for people who believe in the freedom of thought and opinion and the right of expressing their opinion.”

Social media accounts of prominent conservatives in Jordan and elsewhere were celebrating Hattar’s death, saying he deserved it for blasphemy.

Anja Wehler-Schoek, resident director of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Jordan, said she found the social media posts “shocking”. The German foundation promotes democracy and political education in the region.

“This is clearly a very dark day for Jordan, which has long been celebrated as a model of peaceful co-existence,” she said. “I am very worried we are seeing the end of an era here and more and more problems to come in the future.”

Jordan’s Islamists hopeful about making electoral gains

Sara Williams, a Jordan-based journalist, told Al Jazeera that Hattar had been detained in the past over critical postings about Jordan’s king.

“The was not his first brush with the law, but people I have spoken to are shocked about today’s events,” Williams said.

“This morning, outside the hospital where Mr Hattar’s body was taken, some family members of his were screaming [with] rage at the interior ministry, which is responsible for security, and particularly cursing the minister of interior.

After sharing the cartoon on Facebook, the backlash against Hattar was immediate, with Jordanian social media users lambasting the writer for purposely causing offence to Muslims.

Social media users also called on the government to question and arrest Hattar, and some attacked him for being Christian and a secularist.

Attempting to explain his motive for sharing the cartoon, Hattar said he did not intend to cause offence to Muslims and wanted the cartoon to “expose” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In another explanation, Hattar said “as a non-believer” he respected “the believers who did not understand the satire behind the cartoon”.

{Residents speak of “ferocious bombardment” as at least 91 people are killed and nearly two million left without water.}

Syrian civilians trapped in the besieged city of Aleppo have made desperate pleas for help, as warplanes pummelled rebel-held areas and deteriorating security conditions left two million people without access to safe drinking water.

Residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo said “ferocious bombardment” by Syrian and Russian jets on Saturday had levelled neighbourhoods and killed at least 91 civilians.

“We don’t have the equipment to pull the corpses out,” a resident said, standing on the rubble of a destroyed building in the city’s al-Bab district.

Describing the horror around him, he said an entire family was killed in a strike, with several people still lying under the debris.

“We are trying to help the injured, those who survived … but the situation is catastrophic. Destruction and death, everywhere around us. It seems that the Russians and the regime have been given a green light to slaughter us all. As if starving the people here was not enough – it’s now mass murder.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera late on Saturday, Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, a professor at the University of Aleppo, said that residents were expecting another night of horror.

“What we are suffering can’t be expressed by words in any language,” he said.

“We don’t have water to give our children … [Rescuers] can’t help people anymore and the roads have been cut off by rubble. In the hospitals, there are three-four people on one bed, even in the intensive care units.”

Another resident from the al-Mashhad district pleaded with the international community to save the more than 250,000 civilians stuck in besieged areas as air raids continued to flatten civilian areas.

“We urge all honourable people around the world, please, we beg you, come to our aid; save us,” he said.

The Syrian military, which is backed by the Russian air force, said on Monday it was starting a new offensive to recapture opposition-controlled areas in Aleppo, ending a week-long US-Russia brokered ceasefire following a US-led coalition air strike on a Syrian army post.

Since then, at least 180 people have been killed in rebel-held areas of Aleppo province, including the besieged eastern part of the city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday.

The residents’ pleas came as the UN said nearly two million people in Aleppo were without running water amid worsening humanitarian and security conditions.

Hanaa Singer, a UNICEF representative in Syria, said intense air attacks damaged the Bab al-Nairab station that supplies residents in rebel-held eastern parts with water.

Singer said rebels shut down the Suleiman al-Halabi pumping station in retaliation, cutting water to 1.5 million people in government-held western parts of the city.

“Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of water-borne diseases,” Singer said in a statement released late on Friday.

Meanwhile, Syrian rebels said late on Saturday they had regained control of Handarat, a former Palestinian refugee camp north of Aleppo city, after it had earlier fallen to government soldiers.

Rami Abdulrahman, the director for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting was “back and forth” and inconclusive.

An army statement had earlier said that Handarat, an elevated ground overlooking one of the main roads into Aleppo, had been captured and that a “large numbers of terrorists” had been killed.

The army’s assault on Handarat marks the first major ground advance by the government in an offensive that rebels say has unleashed unprecedented firepower against their half of the city.

Residents in the rebel-held zones say there is no safe way for them to flee the besieged area.

International efforts to enforce a ceasefire have failed and there appears to be no ongoing political track that will bring about any immediate cessation of hostilities.

Moreover, many besieged areas, with hundreds of thousands of people, remain without aid.

Humanitarian deliveries have been further hampered by an attack on Monday on an aid convoy outside Aleppo, which killed 20 people. The US blames Russia for the attack, but Moscow has rejected the allegation.

While 36 trucks from the international Red Cross entered al-Waer, in the central city of Homs, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, has previously said that aid convoys will not go to Aleppo .

The Syrian civil war started as a largely unarmed uprising against Assad in March 2011, but quickly escalated into a full-blown armed conflict.

Five years on, more than 400,000 Syrians are estimated to have been killed, and almost 11 million Syrians – half the country’s prewar population – have been displaced from their homes.

{Bodycam and dashboard footage does not show whether black man killed by US police was holding a gun.}

Police in Charlotte have released video footage of the fatal shooting of Keith Scott, the 43-year-old father of seven whose killing sparked days of protests in the US city and reignited rage over the use of lethal force against black men.

A dashboard camera from a police car shows Scott, killed on Tuesday, exiting his car and backing away from it. Police shout to him to drop the gun, but it is not clear that he has anything in his hand. Then shots break out and Scott drops to the ground.

A second body camera video from an officer does not show the moment of the shooting. It shows Scott outside his vehicle before he is shot, but it is not clear whether he has something in his hand. Then the officer moves and Scott is out of view until he is seen on the ground.

Prior to releasing the footage, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney told reporters on Saturday that evidence showed that Scott was in possession of a handgun during the confrontation. He also said that Scott was in possession of marijuana at the time.

“The footage itself will not create in anyone’s mind absolute certainty as to what this case represents and what the outcome should be,” said Putney, who described the videos as supporting other evidence, rather than being standalone proof.

Police said the videos were released for the sake of transparency, and initially live tweeted details about the footage. But suddenly, the tweets were deleted from the police department’s account – followed later by an announcement from the same account that “an employee, uncomfortable with decision to live tweet, deleted all of @cmpd’s tweets. That should not have happened. Retweeting them now.”

After watching the released footage, Joe Cox, a military veteran in Charlotte, described the police’s behaviour as “really aggressive”.

“His wife was talking to him, trying to calm him down and trying to calm down the police at the same time … It seems the police just escalated the situation,” he told Al Jazeera.

He said the video had not convinced him to believe the police account of events.

“I didn’t see him with a gun in his hand,” Cox said.

On Friday, Scott’s wife Rakeyia released her own dramatic video of the fatal shooting to the US media, and called on the police to release their video recordings of the incident.

In Rakeyia Scott’s two-minute video, the actual moment her husband was shot was not shown, but she can be heard pleading with the armed officers not to shoot her husband and telling them her husband is unarmed.

There was no visible weapon near Scott’s body in the video, which was filmed a few metres from the scene.

{{Conflicting accounts}}

Police had previously said a black officer – named as Brentley Vinson – fired the fatal shots at Scott after he ignored repeated warnings to drop a gun.

However, neighbours said he was holding only a book. Police said a gun was found next to his body.

Vinson, a two-year member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department, has been placed on leave, standard procedure in such cases.

Scott’s death extends a long line of black victims killed by police, and protesters have dismissed the police account that Scott was holding a gun when he was killed.

Many continued their protest for a fourth night on Friday into the early hours of Saturday, defying a recently imposed curfew from midnight to 6am.

{{‘214 black Americans killed by police’}}

Scott was the 214th black person killed by US police so far this year of 821, according to Mapping Police Violence.

There is no national-level government data on police shootings.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed a law last week that would require authorities to obtain a court order before releasing police video. Critics said the law would prevent the transparency needed to quell public anger in the wake of police shootings.

Charlotte is the latest US city to be shaken over police killings of black men by police, a list that includes Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Ferguson and Missouri.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Thursday, prosecutors charged a white police officer with manslaughter for killing an unarmed black man on a city street last week.

{Arcan Cetin, 20, suspected of killing five people at a shopping mall in Washington state has been captured, police say.}

The suspect in a shooting at a Washington state mall that left five dead and sparked an intensive, nearly 24-hour manhunt is in custody, authorities said.

Washington state police identified the suspect via Twitter as 20-year-old Arcan Cetin of Oak Harbor, Washington.

Authorities announced earlier that the suspect had been apprehended on Saturday evening.

A gunman opened fire at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington, on Friday night, killing four females and a male before fleeing.

The first emergency call came in just before 7pm on a busy Friday night at the Cascade Mall: A man with a rifle was shooting at people in the Macy’s department store.

By the time police arrived moments later, four people were dead, and the shooter was gone, last seen walking towards a local highway.

A fifth victim, a man, died in the early morning hours on Saturday as police finished sweeping the 434,000-square-foot building.

“This was a senseless act. It was the world knocking on our doorstep, and it came into our little community,” Burlington Mayor Steve Sexton said at a news conference on Saturday.

As the small city absorbed the tragic news, critical questions remained, including the shooter’s motive.

Surveillance video captured the suspect entering the mall unarmed and then recorded him about 10 minutes later entering the Macy’s with a “hunting type” rifle in his hand, Mount Vernon police officer Chris Cammock said.

Authorities did not say how the suspect may have obtained the weapon – whether he retrieved it from outside or picked it up in the mall – but they believe he acted alone.

The weapon was recovered at the scene.

The identities of the victims – four women who ranged in age from a teenager to a senior citizen – were withheld pending autopsies and notification of family.

The identity of the man who was fatally shot was also withheld and may not be released until on Monday.

{Young man killed by Indian army ignites fresh protests in northern Kashmir as uprising in valley continues.}

A 19-year-old man was killed by Indian government forces after they fired shots at protesters demanding freedom from Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

A police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press news agency, said the man died in the northwestern Sopore area on Friday after soldiers opened fire on demonstrators who allegedly attacked an army convoy with stones.

However, residents and family members said the man, Waseem Ahmad, was working in his orchard along with other people when soldiers fired.

Ahmad’s cousin, Abdul Rasheed Lone, confirmed there was no protest taking place when troops fired the shots.

“Waseem was going along with a few boys towards his paddy fields to help his uncle when four army vehicles drove up and soldiers opened fire on him,” Lone told Al Jazeera

“There was no protest or stone pelting. Everything was quiet. He was killed without a reason. It was a cold-blooded murder.”

A local doctor told the Greater Kashmir newspaper that a round went through Ahmad’s back and hit his heart.

“The bullet had damaged his heart and caused instant death,” said Dr Masood, of District Hospital Baramulla, in north Kashmir.

Protesters took to the streets of the village after news of Ahmad’s death, chanting “We want freedom” and clashed with government forces.

Fighting also erupted in at least three other places and at least 30 people were reported injured.

A strict curfew was also imposed on Old Srinagar and south Kashmir.

Government forces also blocked worshippers from Friday prayers at large mosques for the 11th consecutive week.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the two countries gained independence from British rule in 1947. Both claim the territory in its entirety.

Rebel groups have for decades fought Indian soldiers – currently numbering about 500,000 – demanding independence for the region or its merger with Pakistan.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting.

The latest protests were sparked by the killing of a popular rebel commander, Burhan Wani, in July.

The demonstrations, and a sweeping security crackdown, have all but paralysed life in Indian-administered Kashmir.

More than 80 civilians have been killed and thousands wounded, including hundreds blinded and maimed mostly by government forces firing live rounds and shotgun pellets at rock-throwing protesters.

Two policemen have also been killed and hundreds of government forces hurt in the clashes.

Meawhile, tensions continue to rise between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue following the Uri attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir that left 17 Indian soldiers dead.

No group claimed responsbility but India has blamed Pakistan and armed groups based in the country for the incident.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denied his country’s involvement and labeled India’s handling of the uprising in Kashmir as “barbarism” at the UN General Assembly in New York last week.

Sharif also called for called for an independent inquiry and a UN fact-finding mission into “rights violations” in Kashmir as well as for renewed talks with India.

{{Human rights violations}}

Earlier this month, India refused to allow Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvaz to travel to Geneva to participate in a session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Parvez was subsequently arrested for “inciting violence”, a move that outraged human rights activists worldwide. At least 50 international scholars, including Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, have signed a petition calling for his release.

{Assailants hit a police checkpoint with gunfire and detonate a truck packed with explosives in Tikrit.}

At least 11 people have been killed in Iraq after attackers hit a police checkpoint and then detonated a car bomb at the entrance to the city of Tikrit.

Iraqi police and military officials said on Saturday there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the city, which is 150km north of Baghdad.

Tikrit was retaken from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – ISIL also known as ISIS – in April 2015.

The attack came days after Iraqi forces recaptured the town of Shirqat, 100km north of Tikrit, from ISIL in preparation for a move on the northern city of Mosul later this year.

One of Saturday’s attackers was killed at the checkpoint after shooting dead four police officers at around 5am local time (0200 GMT), according to police and sources from Salahuddin Operations Command, which is responsible for security in the area.

Two other assailants continued about 7km to the city limits and detonated the explosives in their pickup truck, killing eight people and wounding 23, sources told Reuters news agency.

A provincial spokesman told the AP news agency the attack was a triple suicide bombing.

Colonel Mohammed al-Jabouri said three assailants rammed their explosives-laden vehicles into the checkpoint.

Al-Jabouri said 12 security officers were killed and 34 others were wounded.

He said the attack occurred as the local police chief and head of the provincial security committee were visiting the site. Both escaped unharmed.

The governor of Salahuddin province, Ahmed al-Jabouri, accused ISIL of being behind the attacks, vowing to “retaliate for the martyrs by chopping off the heads of Daesh” fighters, using the Arabic acronym for the group.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but ISIL has claimed multiple similar attacks.

{UNICEF says nearly two million people without water as jets continue pounding Aleppo ahead of ground offensive.}

Warplanes mounted a new wave of heavy air strikes on rebel-held areas of Aleppo on Saturday pressing on with a major offensive by the Russian-backed Syrian military to take back the entire city.

The attacks came as a UN official said nearly two million people in Aleppo are without running water as security conditions deteriorate.

Residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo say it has been subjected to the most ferocious bombardment of the war since the government declared a new offensive that has killed dozens of people in the last three days.

“Unfortunately it continues. There are planes in the sky now,” Ammar al-Selmo, head of Civil Defence in the opposition-held east, told Reuters news agency.

Rebels said air strikes on Saturday morning hit at least four areas of the opposition-held east, home to more than 250,000 people. The attack has drawn on ordinance more destructive than anything previously used against the area, and many buildings have been entirely destroyed, residents say.

“They are using weapons that appear to be specifically for [bringing down] buildings,” said a senior official in an Aleppo-based rebel faction, the Levant Front. “Most of the victims are under the rubble because more than half the civil defence has been forced out of service.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based organisation that reports on the war, said at least 50 people had been killed on Saturday.

“The raids are intense and continuous,” said Syrian Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman.

The Syrian army said it is targeting rebel positions in the city and denied hitting civilians.

Water sources cut

Hanaa Singer, UNICEF representative in Syria, said intense attacks damaged the Bab al-Nairab station that supplies some 250,000 people in rebel-held eastern parts of the contested city with water.

Singer said in retaliation, the Suleiman al-Halabi pumping station, also located in the rebel-held east, was switched off – cutting water to 1.5 million people in government-held western parts of the city.

“Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of water-borne diseases,” Singer warned in her statement released late Friday.

Residents say more than 150 air strikes have been launched, crushing emergency service structures, as well as underground shelters used by civilians to hide from bombings.

At least 30 neighbourhoods were targeted, Al Jazeera’s Amr al-Halabi said, reporting from Aleppo. He added the relentless strikes hampered the ability of rescue workers to help civilians caught up in the fighting.

Three centres for a volunteer rescue group known as the White Helmets were also hit.

“We have four centres in eastern Aleppo. The aircraft targeted three centres. Two of them are now out of service,” Abdul Rahman al-Hassani of the White Helmets told Al Jazeera.

He added five vehicles belonging to the group were destroyed, including an ambulance.

“Our centres were the direct target [of the strikes],” Hassani said.

“We feel the earth trembling and shaking under our feet. Aleppo is burning,” said Bahaa al-Halabi, an activist from a besieged rebel-held district.

The Syrian military, which is backed by the Russian air force, said it was starting a new operation against the rebel-held east.

The Syrian defence ministry has called on residents to move to government-held areas, adding there would be “no detention, or inquiry to any citizen” who reached the checkpoints that divide the city.

A high-ranking military source confirmed the intense bombardment was in preparation for a ground assault.

“We have begun reconnaissance, aerial and artillery bombardment,” he told the AFP news agency, adding the strikes could “go on for days” before the ground operation starts.

Aleppo was once Syria’s commercial and industrial hub but has been ravaged by fighting and roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.

The announcement of the new Syrian army offensive on Thursday came as international powers failed to revive a collapsed ceasefire during diplomatic talks in New York.

The Syrian war has seen more than 400,000 people killed and almost 11 million Syrians – half the country’s prewar population – displaced.

{Young man killed by Indian army ignites fresh protests in northern Kashmir as uprising in valley continues.}

A 19-year-old man was killed by Indian government forces after they fired shots at protesters demanding freedom from Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

A police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press news agency, said the man died in the northwestern Sopore area on Friday after soldiers opened fire on demonstrators who allegedly attacked an army convoy with stones.

However, residents and family members said the man, Waseem Ahmad, was working in his orchard along with other people when soldiers fired.

Ahmad’s cousin, Abdul Rasheed Lone, confirmed there was no protest taking place when troops fired the shots.

“Waseem was going along with a few boys toward his paddy fields to help his uncle when four army vehicles drove up and soldiers opened fire on him,” Lone told Al Jazeera

“There was no protest or stone pelting. Everything was quiet. He was killed without a reason. It was a cold-blooded murder.”

A local doctor told the Greater Kashmir newspaper that a round went through Ahmad’s back and hit his heart.

“The bullet had damaged his heart and caused instant death,” said Dr Masood of District Hospital Baramulla in north Kashmir.

Protesters took to the streets of the village after news of Ahmad’s death, chanting “we want freedom” and clashed with government forces.

Fighting also erupted in at least three other places and at least 30 people were reported injured.

A strict curfew was also imposed on Old Srinagar and south Kashmir.

Government forces also blocked worshippers from Friday prayers at large mosques for the 11th consecutive week.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the two countries gained independence from British rule in 1947. Both claim the territory in its entirety.

Rebel groups have for decades fought Indian soldiers – currently numbering about 500,000 – demanding independence for the region or its merger with Pakistan.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting.

The latest protests were sparked by the killing of a popular rebel commander, Burhan Wani, in July.

The demonstrations, and a sweeping security crackdown, have all but paralysed life in Indian-administered Kashmir.

More than 80 civilians have been killed and thousands wounded, including hundreds blinded and maimed mostly by government forces firing live rounds and shotgun pellets at rock-throwing protesters.

Two policemen have also been killed and hundreds of government forces hurt in the clashes.

Meawhile, tensions continue to rise between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue following the Uri attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir that left 17 Indian soldiers dead.

No group claimed responsbility but India has blamed Pakistan and armed groups based in the country for the incident.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denied his country’s involvement and labeled India’s handling of the uprising in Kashmir as “barbarism” at the UN General Assembly in New York last week.

Sharif also called for called for an independent inquiry and a UN fact-finding mission into “rights violations” in Kashmir as well as for renewed talks with India.

{{Human rights violations
}}

Earlier this month, India refused to allow Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvaz to travel to Geneva to participate in a session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Parvez was subsequently arrested for “inciting violence”, a move that outraged human rights activists worldwide. At least 50 international scholars, including Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, have signed a petition calling for his release.