Syrian Army Kills 38 In North, Reports Say

Most of the deaths took place in Jisr al-Shoughour, where residents said 25 people had been killed by helicopter gunships bombarding the town and machine gun-mounted armored cars prowling the streets. Ten were reported to have died in the nearby village of Khan Sheikhoun, where tanks stood sentry between the main highway and the city center and a sniper perched in the minaret of one of the town’s main mosques.

“It is a big massacre,” said Abu Hussein, a resident of Jisr al-Shoughour with family in Khan Sheikhoun. “The civilians have no electricity or water, and there are no ambulances to hospitalize the wounded.”

Syria has been gripped since mid-March by a popular uprising against four decades of iron-fisted rule by the Assad family, and the government has responded to the revolt with a violent crackdown occasionally tempered by offers of political reform.

But there was little holding back over the weekend. The government unleashed the helicopter gunships, and residents in several cities said security forces appeared to move north to join the attack on its towns. Terrified residents streamed through the fields to escape the fighting, with dozens crossing the Turkish border and a large number reported arriving in the nearby port city of Latakia. On Sunday night, local activists said many of the fields had been set alight, and smoke hung over the town.

“They are trying to punish the residents for protesting,” said Ammar Qurabi, head of the National Association for Human Rights. “Dozens have been arrested over the last two days.”

The number of protesters in Idlib swelled so much in recent weeks that “the whole area is rising up,” said Wissam Tarif, a rights activist. Parts of the province had come to the kind of standstill associated with the besieged southern town of Dara’a, he said, where the arrest and torture of 15 schoolchildren for spraying antigovernment graffiti sparked the wave of uprisings.

Government tanks were reported to have pulled back slightly from the city of Hama on Sunday, a day after they were sent in to confront mourners for the 65 protesters killed Friday. The city was the site of a 1982 massacre when security forces commanded by President Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father, bombarded it in a siege that killed at least 10,000 people.

Bracing for a new onslaught, residents barricaded the streets with large trash-hauling bins on Saturday night, but a tense calm reigned on Sunday night.

Tanks remained “very close” to the city, said Radwan Ziadeh, an exiled human rights activist and visiting scholar at George Washington University, but residents reached by phone said many had appeared to move north. One resident, who gave his name as Abu Mohamed, said he watched 40 tanks move north from the city’s eastern approach along the road to Idlib, past barricades and burning tires laid in the road by protesters.

Tensions remained high in Hama, Abu Mohamed said. A general strike closed all the shops on Saturday and Sunday. And rumors swirled that the secret police were still lurking, recruiting cab drivers to kidnap “rebels” off the streets and infiltrating hospitals to kill the wounded.

Residents reported quiet in the central city of Homs as army units moved north toward Hama and Idlib, but its suburbs Rastan and Talbiseh remained under siege. Shelling killed at least 70 in Rastan last week, and both were reeling Sunday from days of arrests, said Abu Omar, a resident reached by phone. “They arrested almost everybody,” he said. “There are no more people.”

View the original article here

Oil Truck Explosion Kills at Least 15 in Pakistan

The tanker was damaged when a bomb went off near a boys’ college in Landi Kotal in the tribal region of Khyber Agency. Abdul Nabi, a local government official, said that the people died when they gathered around the truck to siphon fuel and it exploded.

Two survivors were being treated for burns at the Landi Kotal Hospital.

Fuel prices in Pakistan, which are controlled by the government, have increased sharply in recent months, setting off protests and demonstrations across the country.

In a separate attack, 16 oil tankers were damaged Friday night in the nearby town of Torkham, at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, when a remote-controlled bomb exploded, Mr. Nabi said. No one was hurt. The tankers were idling at a parking lot, waiting for their turn to enter Afghanistan.

Also on Friday, a bomb aimed at a two-car convoy carrying American consular officials exploded in Peshawar. A Pakistani motorcyclist was killed, but no Americans died or were seriously wounded. Officials have been bracing for attacks on Americans or United States assets since Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan.

On Friday, American officials said files belonging to Bin Laden and captured in the Seal raid had discussed the idea of hijacking oil tankers and blowing them up at sea in the hopes of sending oil prices skyrocketing and rattling the world’s economy.

The bombings of the trucks follow a pattern in Pakistan, where Taliban insurgents and criminals attack vehicles carrying supplies for American and NATO troops. The supplies typically arrive in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi and travel overland to neighboring Afghanistan.

The Abdullah Azzam Brigade, a militant group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for both the Friday and Saturday attacks.

On Saturday, the opposition politician Imran Khan was also hoping to disrupt the shipment of supplies to NATO troops by organizing a sit-in in Karachi. Mr. Khan, a former cricket player turned politician, said he was staging the sit-in to protest continuing drone attacks by the United States. He said he hoped to hold up the trucks until Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Khan has emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the of the drone strikes, which he calls violations of the country’s sovereignty. The United States has used the strikes to kill militants, including those who use Pakistan as a base to attack NATO troops in Afghanistan. The drone campaign has become increasingly unpopular among Pakistan’s politicians.

An earlier sit-in organized by Mr. Khan’s political party Tehreek-e-Insaaf , or Justice Party, in Peshawar in April, drew only a few thousand people, contrary to the expectations of the organizers.

Jamal Siddqui, a spokesperson for the party in Karachi, said that by Saturday evening at least 10,000 people had gathered for the protest.?Mr. Siddqui said the local authorities had suspended the movement of NATO trucks from the city as a result.

View the original article here

Mexico drugs shoot-out kills 13

 10 May 2011 Last updated at 07:05 ET  The drugs cartel camp was on an island in Falcon Lake Mexican marines have killed at least 12 suspected members of the Zeta drugs cartel after stumbling upon a camp at a lake on the Mexico-US border.

A soldier was also killed in the gunbattle on Sunday.

The camp was on an island in Falcon Lake, a dammed section of the Rio Grande, in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas.

The authorities believe the gang used the base for smuggling marijuana into the United States by speedboat.

Turf war

The Mexican navy said the gunmen opened fire first, when a marine patrol discovered their encampment.

The authorities seized more than 20 guns after the shootout, including several assault rifles.

Falcon Lake is where the American citizen David Hartley is thought to have been chased and gunned down last September. His body has not been found and Mexican investigators have reported no progress in the case.

The Zetas are locked in a fierce turf war with the Gulf cartel that has turned much of Tamaulipas state into a virtual war zone.

Last month security forces discovered more than 40 graves containing 183 bodies. Many of the victims had apparently been pulled off passenger buses by Zetas gunmen trying to recruit them.

Suicide Bomber Kills 8 at Iraqi Market

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber on Saturday attacked a group of Iraqi soldiers at an entrance of a large market in the northern city of Mosul, killing 5 soldiers and 3 other people and wounding 19, according to an Iraqi security official.

Women and children were among the wounded, the official said.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to important information.

Around 6:30 p.m., the bomber attacked the group of soldiers as the market was closing and shoppers were leaving, the official said.

The soldiers typically stand at the market’s entrances as a safety precaution. The market, which sells food and clothing, is one of the largest in Mosul.

Just a few months ago, a merchant at the market was killed by a gunman. There have been several other attacks on the market in recent years.

There was other violence in Iraq on Saturday.

In Baghdad, gunmen dressed in military uniforms stormed the house of an employee of the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, killing the employee and his daughter. One of the gunmen was killed by the employee’s neighbors.

Also in Baghdad, gunmen stormed the home of a local judge, killing the judge and one of his bodyguards. The gunmen then blew up the judge’s house. An army colonel was also assassinated in Baghdad.

In Najaf, a homemade bomb was detonated near an American convoy, although no deaths were reported.

Violence has decreased significantly in Iraq over the past few years, although there has been a spike of violence — particularly assassinations — in recent weeks. It’s unclear what has caused the increase.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Parliament voted to pay $400 million to Americans who said they were tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Many of the victims were working in oil fields in Kuwait at the time.

The payments are part of settlement with the victims that Iraqi and American officials negotiated last year.

Iraqi officials said that by paying the victims, the Iraqi government would be prevented from similar suits in the future, which could cost the government significantly more money.

“If Iraq did not pay this settlement it would face major problems,” said Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, adding that the country’s profits from oil and other sectors would have been exposed to lawsuits if the government did not reach the agreement with the victims.

 

Qaddafi Is Said to Survive NATO Airstrike That Kills Son

 

The son, Seif al-Arab Muammar el-Qaddafi, 29, and the grandchildren, all said to be younger than 12, were possibly the first confirmed casualties in the airstrikes on the Libyan capital. And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

It is the second airstrike in seven days to hit a location intimately close to the Libyan leader, following a midnight attack last week that destroyed an office building in his compound where he and his aides sometimes work.

In a news conference early Sunday morning in Tripoli, a Qaddafi government spokesman called the strike an illegal attack. “This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country,” said the spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim. ?“This is not permitted by international law. It is not permitted by any moral code or principle.” He said that the colonel and his wife, who were staying at the house along with “friends and family,” were not hurt.

American and NATO officials have said they are not seeking to kill Colonel Qaddafi, and some have suggested it might not be very easy. But frustrated by the evasion and resilience of Colonel Qaddafi’s military, NATO has pledged to step up its strikes on the broader instruments of his power, including state television facilities and command centers in the capital.

In a news release, the NATO mission’s operational commander, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, said he was aware of the reports of Qaddafi family deaths but called them unconfirmed. He added: “All NATO’s targets are military in nature and have been clearly linked to the Qaddafi regime’s systematic attacks on the Libyan population and populated areas. We do not target individuals.”

A NATO official in Naples, Italy, reached by e-mail and responding on condition of anonymity, said that allied planners had not known Qaddafi family members were in the building that was attacked, which the official described as a command and control center. The official would not specify the nationality of the aircraft or pilots that carried out the strike.

In a video broadcast by the satellite channel Al Jazeera, Libyan officials showed reporters what they said was the destroyed house, a large crater, crumbled concrete and twisted metal, and someone dusting off what appeared to be an unexploded bomb.?

It is not the first time Colonel Qaddafi has survived such a close call. In 1986, the United States struck his compound in retaliation for a terrorist attack on a German nightclub frequented by American service members. Colonel Qaddafi has incorporated his survival into his cult of personality, preserving the wreckage of the building as a “Museum of Resistance” and erecting a statue of a giant fist grabbing an American warplane.

Although several of Colonel Qaddafi’s seven sons and one daughter play major roles in the Libyan economy and government (including an older brother with a similar name, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi), the son reported killed had been considered a black sheep, believed to spend much of his time in Munich. Many Libyans said they had never seen his picture.?In 2007, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that he had been briefly detained by the Munich police after getting into a fight with a nightclub bouncer; no charges were filed.

In Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital in eastern Libya, and in Misurata, a western city that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces have besieged for months, celebratory gunfire rang out and explosions could be heard.

But even then, doubts lingered in Benghazi about whether the news was true:? in interviews, residents said they were happy but suspected a ploy by Colonel Qaddafi to win sympathy.?Ramadan el-Sheikhy, who said his brother was killed in one of Colonel Qaddafi’s prisons, said any sympathy was misplaced.? “I was truly happy at the news,” he said.?“Hopefully, he felt the pain of having a relative killed.”?

Earlier Saturday, NATO officials had rejected an offer by Colonel Qaddafi to call a cease-fire and negotiate as false. The proposal was delivered in a rambling and often defiant speech, broadcast over Libyan state television, in which Colonel Qaddafi insisted he would never leave Libya.

“Come France, Italy, U.K., America, come, we’ll negotiate with you,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “You lie and say I’m killing my own people. Show us the bodies.”

Kareem Fahim reported from Benghazi, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Misurata, Libya, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

 

Suicide Bomber Kills 8 at Iraqi Market

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber on Saturday attacked a group of Iraqi soldiers at an entrance of a large market in the northern city of Mosul, killing 5 soldiers and 3 other people and wounding 19, according to an Iraqi security official.

Women and children were among the wounded, the official said.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to important information.

Around 6:30 p.m., the bomber attacked the group of soldiers as the market was closing and shoppers were leaving, the official said.

The soldiers typically stand at the market’s entrances as a safety precaution. The market, which sells food and clothing, is one of the largest in Mosul.

Just a few months ago, a merchant at the market was killed by a gunman. There have been several other attacks on the market in recent years.

There was other violence in Iraq on Saturday.

In Baghdad, gunmen dressed in military uniforms stormed the house of an employee of the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, killing the employee and his daughter. One of the gunmen was killed by the employee’s neighbors.

Also in Baghdad, gunmen stormed the home of a local judge, killing the judge and one of his bodyguards. The gunmen then blew up the judge’s house. An army colonel was also assassinated in Baghdad.

In Najaf, a homemade bomb was detonated near an American convoy, although no deaths were reported.

Violence has decreased significantly in Iraq over the past few years, although there has been a spike of violence — particularly assassinations — in recent weeks. It’s unclear what has caused the increase.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Parliament voted to pay $400 million to Americans who said they were tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Many of the victims were working in oil fields in Kuwait at the time.

The payments are part of settlement with the victims that Iraqi and American officials negotiated last year.

Iraqi officials said that by paying the victims, the Iraqi government would be prevented from similar suits in the future, which could cost the government significantly more money.

“If Iraq did not pay this settlement it would face major problems,” said Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, adding that the country’s profits from oil and other sectors would have been exposed to lawsuits if the government did not reach the agreement with the victims.