Tag: InternationalNews

{Security forces claim to have killed three people, including prime suspect Bangladeshi-Canadian citizen Tamim Chowdhury.}

Bangladesh police have stormed a house outside the capital, Dhaka, shooting dead three people, including the main suspect in the last month’s cafe attack that killed 22 hostages.

“We can see three dead bodies here,” senior police officer Sanwar Hossain told AFP news agency on Saturday.

“Tamim Chowdhury is dead. He is the Gulshan attack mastermind and the leader of JMB (Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh, a domestic armed outfit),” he said.

Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi-Canadian citizen, had earlier been named by the police as the main suspected in the attack on the cafe in Gulshan, an upscale Dhaka neighbourhood.

The bodies were retrieved after police staged an hour-long gun battle with the suspects in Narayanganj, a city 25km south of Dhaka, Hossain said.

“The operation went on for an hour. We can see three dead bodies. They did not surrender. They threw four-five grenades at police and fired from AK 22 rifles,” Bangladesh national police chief AKM Shahidul Hoque told AFP.

Demonising the opponents

Al Jazeera’s Tanvir Chowdhury, reporting from Dhaka, said it will likely require relatives to positively identify the body or DNA testing to confirm that the person killed was Tamim Chowdhury, as the police have reported.

“The police do claim a lot [of] things but then later we find out that there are a lot of gaps in the information. So we will have to wait until it’s confirmed,” he said.

A team from the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit and police cordoned off the house in Narayanganj area earlier this morning on information that suspects were staying there, Mainul Haq, superintendent of Narayanganj police, told The Daily Star newspaper.

At least 20 hostages, including 18 foreigners and two policemen, died in last month’s attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery cafe in Dhaka, which was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

In June more than 11,000 people were arrested in a bid to quash a spate of brutal murders of secular writers, gay rights activists and religious minorities.

Both ISIL and a local branch of al-Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks.

Critics say Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s administration is in denial about the nature of the threat posed by armed groups and accuse her of trying to exploit the attacks to demonise her domestic opponents.

{Eight police officers killed and scores wounded in the town of Cizre close to the Syrian border, state media says.}

At least eight police officers have been killed and 70 wounded in a truck bomb attack at a police headquarters in southeastern Turkey, according to a Turkish minister.

The bomb was exploded at a checkpoint outside the headquarters on Friday, after the attackers failed to pass the guards there, state media said. The blast was followed by an armed battle between the police and attackers.

Ambulances, including helicopters, have been sent to the scene, Turkish television channels said.

Recep Akdag, Turkey’s health minister, said that at least eight officers were killed in the incident and four of the 70 wounded people were in critical condition.

The ministry said earlier that a dozen ambulances and two helicopters had been sent to the scene.

Predominantly-Kurdish Cizre is in Turkey’s Sirnak province and it borders both Syria and Iraq.

Large plumes of smoke billowed from the attack site, footage on Turkish televisions showed. They also displayed a large three-storey building reduced to its concrete shell, with no walls or windows, and surrounded by grey rubble.

{{PKK blamed}}

State media blamed the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels for the attack.

On Thursday, Interior Minister Efkan Ala accused the same group of attacking a convoy carrying the country’s main opposition party leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. One security official was killed in the incident.

The PKK, an armed group seen as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and the EU, has recently stepped up its attacks in southeastern Turkey.

The latest attack in Cizre comes two days after Turkish forces launched an unprecedented ground and air offensive into neighbouring Syria, which, according to Turkish officials, targeted the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Ankara sees Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed People’s Protection Units (YPG) fighters as an extension of the PKK.

Southeastern Turkey is going through the most intense fighting in decades after a ceasefire between the Turkish state and the PKK collapsed in July last year.

The military has repeatedly ordered military operations and curfews in southeastern urban centres, including Cizre, since then.

More than 40,000 people, have died since the PKK rebels took up arms in 1984.

{Thousands of residents and rebels to exit Daraya in deal that cedes control of besieged suburb to government forces.}

Hundreds of rebel fighters and thousands of civilians are to evacuate the besieged Damascus suburb of Daraya after rebels and the Syrian army agreed to a deal, a rebel leader and a state news agency have said.

Thursday’s development ended one of the longest standoffs in the Syria’s five-year war.

“Seven hundred armed men with their personal weapons will leave Daraya to head to the [rebel-controlled] city of Idlib, while thousands of men and women with their families will be taken to reception centres,” Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

One rebel official in the suburb told AFP news agency that the civilians would be transferred to regions around Damascus under government control.

The rebels would have to surrender other armaments to the army.

A military source told AFP that the army would enter Daraya after the evacuation of the rebel-held town.

“We reached agreement on the evacuation of all of the people of Daraya, civilians and fighters,” said Captain Abu Jamal, head of Liwa Shuhada al-Islam, the largest of two main rebel groups inside Daraya.

The evacuation, which is similar to deals concluded in several besieged areas throughout the course of the conflict, could start as early as Friday and last for two or three days, he said.

“It’s difficult to describe my feelings, we kept holding on for four years to the last breath. The city was destroyed over our heads and we are now not leaving a city but a pile of rubble,” said Hamam al Sukri, a resident who had been living in a basement with his six-member family, told Reuters news agency.

In 2012, several hundred people were killed in Daraya, including civilians, many execution style, after security forces stormed the suburb after locals took up arms. Both the army and rebels blamed the other.

Rebels and local council sources said around 5,000 people would be evacuated from the suburb that, before the war, was home to a quarter of a million people.

This would include around 1,000 fighters who would be evacuated with their light weapons to rebel-held areas in northern Syria. The army would reassert its control over the city and seize heavy weapons, state media said.

Abu Jamal said the deal was reached after a ceasefire on Wednesday was followed by talks that led to the authorities agreeing to rebel terms for an evacuation.

“We got the freedom of getting civilians to leave freely to liberated areas or wherever they want. Otherwise it would have been a final surrender with the regime taking us as prisoners of war and sending civilians to an unknown fate,” Abu Jamal, the rebel commander, said.

The Syrian army has surrounded rebels and civilians and blocked food deliveries in Daraya since 2012, regularly bombing the area only 7km from President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power.

Authorities agreed in June of this year to allow food deliveries into the suburb under a ceasefire deal, but only one shipment has been made since then.

In the past few weeks the army has escalated its bombardment of the rebel-held bastion, intensifying the use of barrel and incendiary bombs. Last week Daraya’s only remaining hospital was hit, rebels and aid workers said.

{Syrian rebels backed by Ankara continue to make gains against ISIL, while Kurds follow Washington’s demands to retreat.}

Turkey sent more tanks into northern Syria on Thursday and demanded Kurdish fighters retreat within a week as it seeks to drive out the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from the border region in its first major incursion into the war-torn county.

Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters, along with Turkish special forces and tanks, and supported by Turkish and US air power, took over the ISIL-controlled town of Jarablus on Wednesday, pushing the group back to its last stronghold in northeastern Syria – al-Bab.

Syrian rebel and Turkish forces pressed on past Jarablus on Thursday in attempt to clear the border area of any ISIL presence.

“The Free Syrian Army now is in total control of Jarablus and the area surrounding it, and they say that they are now going to try to move forward to recapture the territory that is now under ISIL control … particularly in al-Bab,” said Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Karkamis, just across the border from Jarablus.

But Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and senior government officials have made it clear that the aim of “Operation Euphrates Shield” is as much about stopping the Kurdish YPG from seizing more territory along the border and filling the void left by ISIL, also known as ISIS, as it is about eliminating the hardline group itself.

Turkey demanded that the YPG retreat to the east side of the Euphrates within a week. The Kurdish fighters had moved west of the river earlier this month as part of a US-backed operation, now completed, to capture the city of Manbij from ISIL.

But just hours after the YPG said it had withdrawn east of the Euphrates, Turkish state media reported that Turkish artillery had shelled YPG fighters south of Jarablus, claiming they had advanced westward.

Ankara views the YPG as a threat because of its close links to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which has been fighting Turkish forces for the past three decades.

It has been alarmed by the YPG’s gains in northern Syria since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, fearing it could extend Kurdish control along Turkish borders and fuel the ambitions of its own Kurdish rebels.

Turkey’s stance has put it at odds with Washington, which sees the YPG as its strongest ground force in the war against ISIL. It is one of the most powerful rebel groups in Syria and regarded as the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed alliance formed last October to fight ISIL.

Turkish Defence Minister Fikri Isik said preventing the Kurdish PYD party – the political arm of the YPG – from uniting Kurdish cantons east of Jarablus with those further west was a priority.

“Islamic State should be completely cleansed, this is an absolute must. But it’s not enough for us … The PYD and the YPG militia should not replace Islamic State there,” Isik told Turkish broadcaster NTV.

“The PYD’s biggest dream is to unify the western and eastern cantons. We cannot let this happen,” he said.

{{The Euphrates River
}}

US Secretary of State John Kerry told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu by phone on Thursday that YPG fighters were retreating to the east side of the Euphrates, as Turkey has demanded, foreign ministry sources in Ankara said.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition against ISIL also said that the SDF had withdrawn across the Euphrates, but had done so “to prepare for the eventual liberation” of Raqqa, ISIL’s stronghold in northern Syria.

Isik said the retreat was not yet complete and that Washington had given assurances that this would happen in the next week.

“We are closely following this … If the PYD does not retreat to east of the Euphrates, we have the right to do everything about it,” he said.

Speaking during a visit on Wednesday to Turkey, US Vice President Joe Biden also tried to soothe Turkish concerns about Kurdish territorial gains in Syria.

He said there should be no separate Kurdish entity in northern Syria and the country should remain united.

Kurdish fighters would not receive US support if they failed to pull back east of the Euphrates as promised, he said.

The Turkish-backed offensive comes four days after a suicide bomber suspected of links to ISIL killed 54 people at a Kurdish wedding in the southeastern city of Gaziantep.

{{Rebels advance}}

A senior Turkish official said there were now more than 20 Turkish tanks inside Syria and that additional tanks and construction machinery would be sent in as required. A Reuters news agency witness saw at least nine tanks enter on Thursday, and 10 more were waiting outside a military outpost on the Turkish side.

“We need construction machinery to open up roads … and we may need more in the days ahead. We also have armoured personnel carriers that could be used on the Syrian side. We may put them into service as needed,” the official said.

Erdogan said on Wednesday that ISIL had been driven out of Jarablus and that it was now controlled by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.

“The myth that the YPG is the only effective force fighting Islamic State has collapsed,” Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin wrote on Twitter, reflecting Turkish frustration at how closely Washington has been working with the Kurdish fighters.

Saleh Muslim, head of the Kurdish PYD, said on Wednesday that Turkey was entering a “quagmire” in Syria and faced defeat there like Islamic State. Redur Xelil, spokesman for the YPG, said the intervention was a “blatant aggression in Syrian internal affairs”.

After seizing Jarablus, the Turkish-backed rebels have advanced up to 10 km south of the border town, rebel sources and a group monitoring the war said.

{At least 16 rescued as efforts under way to recover more bodies after bus fell into Trishuli river in Chitwan district.}

A packed passenger bus plunged into a river early on Friday in central Nepal, killing 21 people, a senior local official said.

Rescuers struggled to recover bodies and help the injured to safety after the bus fell into the swelling Trishuli river, off the highway at Chandi Bhanjyang village in Chitwan district.

“Twenty-one people have died in the accident and 16 have been rescued,” district chief Binod Prakash Singh told AFP news agency, adding that the injured had been taken to a local hospital for treatment.

Singh said that rescuers were searching the area where the bus was still partially submerged to ensure that no passengers were stuck inside.

The bus was heading to the tourist town of Pokhara from the southern district of Rautahat.

Accidents are relatively common on Nepal’s highways because of poor roads and badly maintained vehicles.

At least 25 people were killed last week when a crowded bus veered off a hilly road in Nepal’s Kavre district and fell some 500 metres down a slope.

{Rodolfo Illanes, Bolivia’s deputy interior minister, was reportedly beaten to death after being kidnapped by miners.}

Bolivia’s Deputy Interior Minister, Rodolfo Illanes, has been killed after being kidnapped by protesting miners, a senior government official has said.

“All the indications are that our deputy minister Rodolfo Illanes has been brutally and cowardly assassinated,” Carlos Romero, the Minister of Government, said late on Thursday in comments quoted by the Reuters news agency.

He said the 56-year-old had gone to talk to protesters earlier on Thursday in Panduro, around 160km from the capital, La Paz, but was intercepted and kidnapped by striking miners.

The government was trying to recover his body, Romero said.

Local media also reported Illanes’ death, citing a radio station director who claimed he saw his body.

Protesters have been demanding more mining concessions with less stringent environmental rules, the right to work for private companies, and greater union representation.

Protests turned violent this week after two workers were killed on Wednesday after shots were fired by police. The government said 17 police officers had been wounded.

The National Federation of Mining Cooperatives of Bolivia, once strong allies of leftist President Evo Morales, began what they said was an indefinite protest after negotiations over mining legislation failed.

Morales nationalised Bolivia’s resources sector after taking power in 2006, initially winning plaudits for ploughing the profits into welfare programmes and boosting development.

However, his government has been dogged by accusations of cronyism and authoritarianism in recent years, and even the unions who were once his core support have become disillusioned with him as falling prices have limited spending.

{Italian rescue workers toil through night after 6.2 magnitude quake hits central Italy, killing at least 247 people.}

The death toll from a devastating earthquake that hit and flattened central Italian towns has soared to more than 240 as rescuers desperately searched through the night for survivors under the ruins of collapsed buildings.

With 368 people injured, some critically, and an unknown number still trapped in mountains of rubble on Thursday morning, the toll was expected to rise further.

Wednesday’s pre-dawn earthquake razed homes and buckled roads in a cluster of mountain communities 140km east of Italy’s capital, Rome. It was powerful enough to be felt in Bologna to the north and Naples to the south, each more than 200km from the epicentre.

The US Geological Survey said it was a 6.2 magnitude quake that hit near the town of Norcia, in the region of Umbria.

The death toll is 247 as of Thursday morning, the country’s civil protection agency said. The toll had stood at 159 on Wednesday night.

Hundreds of people spent a chilly night in hastily assembled tents with the risk of aftershocks making it too risky for them to return home.

“Tonight will be our first nightmare night,” said Alessandro Gabrielli, one of hundreds preparing to sleep in tents in fields and parking lots in the small town of Amatrice, each one housing 12 people whose homes had been destroyed.

“Last night, I woke up with a sound that sounded like a bomb,” he told the Reuters news agency.

One hotel that collapsed in Amatrice probably had about 70 guests, and only seven bodies had so far been recovered, said the mayor of the town that was one of the worst hit by the earthquake.

“Half the town is gone,” Sergio Pirozzi told RAI state television. “There are people under the rubble … There’s been a landslide and a bridge might collapse.”

Besides Amatrice, the worst-hit towns were believed to be Accumoli, Posta and Arquata del Tronto, Luca Cari, fire department spokesman, told Reuters news agency, adding that helicopters would be sent up at first light to assess the damage.

Guido Bordo, 69, said that the holiday house of his sister and her husband near Accumoli died under their collapsed holiday house.

“I was not here. As soon as the quake happened, I rushed here. They managed to pull my sister’s children out, they’re in hospital now,” said.

A hostel on the Gran Sasso mountain, a popular area for hikers and climbers, said on its Facebook page that a large piece of rock had collapsed as a result of the tremor.

Gilberto Saccorotti, a geologist at Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology, told Al Jazeera: “That particular area has a long history of very [powerful], very energetic seismicity. It’s not surprising to have had a [powerful] earthquake there.

“From my knowledge of the area, the roads are very narrow, so if one road fails, the connection may become very difficult … The depth is quite shallow, about four kilometres. Usually the typical depth is in the order of ten kilometres.”

Saccarotti said it was difficult to predict whether there would be another earthquake or more aftershocks.

The last major earthquake to hit Italy struck the central city of L’Aquila in 2009, killing more than 300 people.

{After nearly four years of negotiations, the two sides announce final agreement, which will be put to a referendum.}

The Colombian government and the leftist FARC rebel group have reached a historic peace deal to end five decades of fighting that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

After nearly four years of arduous negotiations in Cuba, the two sides announced on Wednesday a final agreement under which the rebels will lay down weapons and reintegrate into civilian life.

“The Colombian government and the FARC announce that we have reached a final, full and definitive accord … on ending the conflict and building a stable and enduring peace,” the two sides said in a joint statement read out in Havana by Cuban diplomat Rodolfo Benitez.

“We don’t want one more victim in Colombia.”

The deal will now be put to a decisive referendum on October 2.

“Colombians: the decision is in your hands. Never before have our citizens had within their reach the key to their future,” Santos, who was re-elected in 2014 on the promise of a peace deal, said in a televised address.

“Today I can say – from the bottom of my heart – that I have fulfilled the mandate that you gave me.”

The final text of the deal will be sent to Colombia’s Congress on Thursday and will be available on the internet and social media, he said.

“We have won the most beautiful of all battles,” lead FARC negotiator Ivan Marquez said after the announcement in Havana on Wednesday.

“The war with arms is over. Now begins the debate of ideas.”

The two sides had signed a ceasefire in late June.

Six-point deal

The peace deal comprises six agreements reached at each step of the arduous negotiations.

They cover justice for victims of the conflict, land reform, political participation for ex-rebels, fighting drug trafficking, disarmament and the implementation and monitoring of the accord.

Under the peace deal, the FARC will begin moving its estimated 7,000 fighters from their jungle and mountain hideouts into disarmament camps set up by the United Nations, which is helping monitor the ceasefire.

The FARC will then become a political party. Its weapons will be melted down to build three peace monuments.

Special courts will be created to judge crimes committed during the conflict.

An amnesty will be granted for less serious offences. But it will not cover the worst atrocities, such as massacres, torture and rape.

Those responsible for such crimes will face up to 20 years in prison, with lighter sentences if they confess.

Santos insisted there would be no impunity for such crimes.

Most opinion polls suggest Colombians will back the deal but Santos, who has staked his legacy on peace, will face fierce opposition from powerful sectors of the country who believe the only solution is to finish the FARC militarily.

The deal is opposed by two former Colombian presidents, including popular right-wing hardliner Alvaro Uribe.

In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, several hundred people gathered around a giant screen in the rain to listen to the announcement, waving Colombian flags and banners.

“I’m so happy. It was time to end the war,” Margarita Nieto, a 28-year-old accountant, told the Reuters news agency. “I know what is coming will be hard, but together we can cope.”

Others are more sceptical about the terms of the agreement, especially the participation of FARC rebels in politics and the fact that they will not serve jail time for crimes committed during the war.

“The future worries me,” Susana Antequeria, 30, told Reuters. “But I’ll put up with it for peace.”

US President Barack Obama spoke by phone with Santos on Wednesday to congratulate him on the deal, the White House said.

Sustainable peace

More than 220,000 people were killed in the conflict, tens of thousands disappeared and millions fled their homes because of the violence.

The FARC took up arms in 1964 to fight against deep economic and social inequalities and, funded by the cocaine trade and kidnappings for ransom, swelled to as many as 17,000 fighters at the end of the 1990s, controlling large swaths of the country.

But the leftist rebel group were hit hard by Uribe’s government from 2002, when he launched a US-backed offensive that killed many guerrilla leaders and halved their ranks.

An agreement with the FARC does not guarantee an end to political violence. Talks between the smaller, leftist National Liberation Army and the government have stalled.

Key to securing a sustainable peace is additional investment in Colombia’s poorer, rural areas, though deep infrastructure problems across the mountainous nation may stymie progress.

{At least 12 killed, including seven students, as Afghan forces kill two suspected attackers at elite university.}

An attack at the campus of the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul has ended in the early hours of Thursday morning with 12 people, including seven students, dead, a police spokesman has said.

Fraidoon Obaidi, the chief of the Kabul police Criminal Investigation Department, told Reuters news agency that security forces shot dead two men suspected of carrying out the attack, which began late on Wednesday with a large explosion followed by gunfire.

Obaidi said that another 44 people, including 35 students, were wounded, while about 700 to 750 students were evacuated from the university.

Sporadic gunfire could be heard through the night and, before dawn, police said the operation had concluded.

“The fight is over and at least two attackers have been killed,” a police official at the scene told Reuters. “Right now a clearance operation is ongoing by a criminal technique team.”

No group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes as the Taliban step up their summer fighting season against the Western-backed Kabul government.

The attack came after two professors at the university – an American and Australian – were kidnapped in the heart of the capital earlier this month, the latest in a series of abductions of foreigners in the conflict-torn country.

The management of the elite American University of Afghanistan, which opened in 2006 and caters to more than 1,700 students, was not immediately reachable for comment.

NATO ended its combat mission in Afghanistan in December 2014 but thousands of troops remain to train and assist Afghan forces, while several thousand more US soldiers are engaged in a separate mission focusing on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

The US said it was closely monitoring the situation in Kabul after the university attack and that forces from the US-led coalition were involved in the response in an advise-and-assist role.