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Sri Lanka attacks death toll soars as curfew ceases

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Sri Lankan hospital workers transport a body on a trolley at a hospital morgue following an explosion at a church in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka on April 21, 2019. (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP)
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Sri Lankan hospital workers transport a body on a trolley at a hospital morgue following an explosion at a church in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka on April 21, 2019. (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP)
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Inside St. Sebastian's Church in Negombo. (AFP)
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The public has been told to excercise caution in the following days. (Reuters)
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Security personnel gathered outside the church premises. (AFP)
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Ambulances were also seen at the site. (AFP)
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Hotels and churches were targeted. (AFP)
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A hospital source said Americans, British and Dutch citizens were among those killed. (Reuters)
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Sri Lankan security personnel and police investigators look through debris outside Zion Church following an explosion in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka. (AFP)
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A Jesus Christ statue inside St. Sebastian's Church in Negombo. (AFP)
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An injured Sri Lankan woman is transported on a stretcher at a hospital following an explosion at a church in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka on April 21, 2019. (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP)
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Updated 22 April 2019
Arab News
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Sri Lanka attacks death toll soars as curfew ceases

  • Eight blasts ripped through churches and hotels
  • Three police killed as seven suspects arrested
Updated 22 April 2019
Mohammed Rasooldeen Arab News

COLOMBO: Seven suspects were arrested in connection with the Easter Sunday bomb attacks on eight churches and hotels in Sri Lanka that left more than 290 dead and hundreds more injured, the country’s defense minister said 10 years after the end of a civil war in which bomb blasts in the South Asian nation were common.

The string of assaults rocked the capital of Colombo and Batticaloa in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province.

Anil Jayasinghe, director general of hospitals at the Ministry of Health, told Arab News there were foreigners among the dead, while nearly 500 wounded people had been taken to various hospitals for treatment.

A police official said that 35 foreigners were among the dead and hospital sources said British, Dutch and American citizens had been killed, with Britons and Japanese also injured. A Portuguese man and two Chinese citizens were among the dead, news agencies in their countries reported.

Three police were killed during the raids on a house in Colombo on Sunday afternoon after the government announced it would impose a country-wide curfew and suspended social media.

By the early evening the death toll had reached 207, with 450 people injured.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe called a National Security Council meeting at his home. An island-wide curfew was announced.

“I strongly condemn the cowardly attacks on our people today. I call upon all Sri Lankans during this tragic time to remain united and strong,” the prime minister said in a Twitter post.

“Please avoid propagating unverified reports and speculation. The government is taking immediate steps to contain this situation.”

As of Sunday evening local time, no group had claimed responsibility for the attacks, which targeted a country that fought a decades-long war with Tamil separatists until 2009, but where there has been a lull in violence for at least a decade.

The curfew will begin on Sunday night at 6 p.m. local time (1230 GMT) and run until 6 a.m. local time (0030 GMT).

Access to major social media platforms and messaging services were suspended temporarily by the Sri Lankan government.

Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekera said the seventh blast hit a hotel in the southern Colombo suburb of Dehiwala, killing two people.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, told the New York Times that radical groups had been quietly growing in influence for years in Sri Lanka, as well as in the nearby Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the island nation of the Maldives.

Chellaney said it was unexpected that the attackers had the confidence to raid hotels in Sri Lanka, saying that such establishments had tried to provide tight security during the island’s civil war and ever since.

The first blasts took place at three churches celebrating Easter Mass on Sunday morning: St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, 20 miles north of the capital, and Zion Church in the eastern city of Batticaloa.

Saudi Arabian Airlines made an announcement in Arabic and in English on Sunday following the attacks, that there were SAUDIA crew members unaccounted for. 

“The airline’s first priority is the wellbeing and safety of its crew members and passengers.

“Most of the crew are safe, while there are two members that are unaccounted for and one is receiving hospital care. We are working closely with the Saudi Embassy in Sri Lanka and the airline’s team, around the clock.

“The SAUDIA Town Office team members and SAUDIA Sri Lanka Country Manager are all safe,” the report added.

Eyewitness reports came in from Sri Lanka of the moments leading up to the attacks.

In one case a suicide bomber waited patiently in a queue for the Easter Sunday breakfast buffet at Sri Lanka's Cinnamon Grand hotel before setting off explosives strapped to his back.

Carrying a plate, the man, who had registered at the hotel the night before as Mohamed Azzam Mohamed, was just about to be served when he set off his devastating strike in the packed restaurant, a manager at the Sri Lankan hotel said.

“There was utter chaos,” said the manager.

The Taprobane restaurant at the hotel was having one of its busiest days of the year for the Easter holiday weekend.

“It was 8:30 a.m. and it was busy. It was families,” the manager said.

“He came up to the top of the queue and set off the blast,” he added.

“One of our managers who was welcoming guests was among those killed instantly.”

The bomber also died. Parts of his body were found intact by police and taken away.

Other hotel officials told how the bomber, a Sri Lankan, checked in giving an address that turned out to be false, saying he was in the city for business.




A relative of a Sri Lankan victim of an explosion at a church weeps outside a hospital in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka on April 21, 2019. (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP)

There were also explosions at three five-star hotels in Colombo: The Shangri-La, the Cinnamon Grand and the Kingsbury. A fourth blast was reported at another Colombo hotel late in the afternoon.

Samanthi Samarakone, of the Colombo National Hospital, said the death toll had been rising throughout the day as people were brought in with a range of injuries, including many who were in a critical condition.

Western Province Gov. Azath Salley called the attacks “barbaric,” saying they were carried out to tarnish the image of Sri Lanka internationally. “The country was peaceful and calm during the past 10 years after the end of the ethnic conflict,” he said.

Parliament, which was prorogued for the April holidays, was summoned for Tuesday, while government schools, which were scheduled to be opened on Monday, will now be shut until Wednesday. Kataragama, a pilgrimage town that is sacred to Buddhists, Hindus and the indigenous Vedda people of Sri Lanka, will remain closed indefinitely.

Security officials said security had been tightened around Colombo airport.

The Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Ranjith, said the style and nature of the attacks indicated an organized plan and urged the government to take immediate action to apprehend the culprits.

The blast at St Anthony's Shrine, an historic Catholic Church, was so powerful that it blew out much of the roof, leaving roof tiles, glass and splintered wood littering the floor that was strewn with bodies.

A hospital source said Americans, British and Dutch citizens were among those killed in the blasts.

World leaders have also expressed solidarity with Sri Lanka, condemning the terrorist attacks.

The public has been told to excercise caution in the following days.

As the attacks were happening news broke that the country’s police chief had made a nationwide alert 10 days before the attacks that suicide bombers had planned to hit “prominent churches,” according to a document seen by AFP.

Police chief Pujuth Jayasundara sent an intelligence warning to top officers on April 11 setting out the threat.

“A foreign intelligence agency has reported that the NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) is planning to carry out suicide attacks targeting prominent churches as well as the Indian high commission in Colombo,” said the alert.

The NTJ is a radical Muslim group in Sri Lanka that came to notice last year when it was linked to the vandalization of Buddhist statues.

A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at least 42 people were killed in Colombo, where three hotels and a church were hit.

“A bomb attack to our church, please come and help if your family members are there,” read a post in English on the Facebook page of the St. Sebastian’s Church at Katuwapitiya in Negombo.




Inside St. Anthony's Shrine where one of the bombings took place. (AFP)

An official at one of the hotels, the Cinnamon Grand Hotel near the prime minister’s official residence in Colombo, told AFP that the blast had ripped through the hotel restaurant. He said at least one person had been killed in the blast.

An official at the Batticaloa hospital told AFP more than 300 people had been admitted with injuries following the blast there.




(Reuters)

“Emergency meeting called in a few minutes. Rescue operations underway,” Sri Lanka’s Minister of Economic Reforms and Public Distribution, Harsha de Silva, said in a tweet on his verified account.

He said he had been to two of the attacked hotels and was at the scene at St. Anthony’s Shrine, and described “horrible scenes.” “I saw many body parts strewn all over,” he tweeted, adding that there were “many casualties including foreigners.”

“Please stay calm and indoors,” he added. Photos circulating on social media showed the roof of one church had been almost blown off in the blast.

The floor was littered with a mixture of roof tiles, splintered wood and blood. Several people could be seen covered in blood, with some trying to help those with more serious injuries. The images could not immediately be verified.

Christian groups say they have faced increasing intimidation from some extremist Buddhist monks in recent years, the Reuters news agency reported.

Last year, there were 86 verified incidents of discrimination, threats and violence against Christians, according to the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka (NCEASL), which represents more than 200 churches and other Christian organizations.

So far this year, the NCEASL has recorded 26 such incidents — including one in which Buddhist monks allegedly attempted to disrupt a Sunday worship service — with the last one reported on March 25.

Out of Sri Lanka’s total population of about 22 million, 70 percent are Buddhist, 12.6 percent Hindu, 9.7 percent Muslim and 7.4 percent Christian, according to the country’s 2012 census.

In its 2018 report on Sri Lanka’s human rights, the US State Department noted that some Christian groups and churches reported that they had been pressured to end worship meetings after authorities classified them as “unauthorized gatherings.” The report also said Buddhist monks regularly tried to close down Christian and Muslim places of worship, citing unidentified sources.

(With Agencies)

Topics: Sri Lanka Sri Lanka attack

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Floods strike thousands of houses in northern Philippines

Updated 3 sec ago
AFP
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Floods strike thousands of houses in northern Philippines

  • Typhoon Man-yi drenched swaths of the Philippines over the weekend
  • Man-yi was the sixth major storm in a month to strike the Philippines
Updated 3 sec ago
AFP
Manila: Floodwaters reaching more than four meters high swamped thousands of houses in the storm-battered northern Philippines on Tuesday after rivers overflowed following heavy rain and a dam release.
Typhoon Man-yi drenched swaths of the Philippines over the weekend, swelling the Cagayan river and tributaries, and forcing the release of water from Magat Dam.
The Cagayan broke its banks, spilling water over already sodden farmland and communities, affecting tens of thousands of people.
Buildings, lamp posts and trees poked through a lake of brown water in Tuguegarao city in Cagayan province where provincial disaster official Ian Valdepenas said floodwaters reached more than four meters (14 feet) in some places.
“We experienced very heavy rains two days ago, but the flood just started to rise when Magat Dam started releasing huge volumes of water,” Valdepenas told AFP.
“Plus, our land is already saturated because of the consecutive typhoons hitting the area.”
Man-yi was the sixth major storm in a month to strike the Philippines, which have left at least 171 people dead and thousands homeless, as well as wiped out crops and livestock.
About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the Southeast Asian nation or its surrounding waters each year, killing scores of people, but it is rare for multiple such weather events to take place in a small window.
Roofs of houses
In the neighboring province of Isabela, Jun Montereal of the Ilagan city disaster preparedness committee said 30,000 people were still affected by flooding.
But the situation was slowly improving.
“The flood is subsiding now little by little, it’s slower because the land is already saturated but we are way past the worst,” Montereal told AFP.
“We are really hoping that the weather will continue to be fair so the water can go down. I think the water will completely subside in three days,” he said.
“I can now see the roofs of houses that I wasn’t able to see before because of the floods.”
Carlo Ablan, who helps oversee operations at Magat Dam, said three gates were open as of Tuesday morning to release water from the dam.
“If the weather continues to be good, we are expecting that we will only have one gate open this afternoon,” Ablan said.
Ablan said flooding in Tuguegarao city was not only caused by water from Magat Dam — other tributaries of the Cagayan river were also likely to blame.
Valdepenas said authorities in Tuguegarao were waiting for floodwaters to subside more before sending people back to their homes.
“This might start subsiding within today,” he said.
More than a million people fled their homes ahead of Man-yi, which struck the Philippines as a super typhoon before significantly weakening as it swept over the mountains of the main island of Luzon.
Man-yi dumped heavy rain, smashed flimsy buildings, knocked out power and claimed at least eight lives.
Climate change is increasing the intensity of storms, leading to heavier rains, flash floods and stronger gusts.

24 hours in Ukraine: A single day shows the reality of life as war hits 1,000 days

Updated 19 November 2024
AP
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24 hours in Ukraine: A single day shows the reality of life as war hits 1,000 days

  • The Associated Press fanned out across Ukraine to chronicle 24 hours of life just as the country prepared to mark a grim milestone Tuesday: 1,000 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 20
Updated 19 November 2024
AP

KYIV: The clock on her wall stopped almost as soon as the day began, its hands frozen by the Russian bomb that hit the dormitory serving as home for Ukrainians displaced by war.
It was 1:45 a.m. in an upstairs room in the eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, Natalia Panasenko’s home for just shy of a year after the town she thinks of as her real home came under Russian occupation. The explosion blasted a door on top of her, smashed her refrigerator and television and shredded the flowers she’d just received for her 63rd birthday.
“The house was full of people and flowers. People were congratulating me ... and then there was nothing. Everything was mixed in the rubble,” she said. “I come from a place where the war is going on every day. We only just left there, and it seemed to be quieter here. And the war caught up with us again.”
Nov. 11 was a typical day of violence and resilience in Ukraine. The Associated Press fanned out across Ukraine to chronicle 24 hours of life just as the country prepared to mark a grim milestone Tuesday: 1,000 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
The day opened with two Russian bombings — one that hit Panasenko’s apartment and another that killed six in Mykolaiv, including a woman and her three children. Before the day was even halfway done, a Russian ballistic missile shattered yet another apartment building, this time in the city of Kryvyi Rih.
Swimmers braved the Black Sea waters off Odesa, steelworkers kept the economy limping along, a baby was born. Soldiers died and were buried. The lucky ones found a measure of healing for their missing limbs and broken faces.
About a fifth of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory is now controlled by Russia. Those invisible geographical lines shift constantly, and the closer a person is to them the more dangerous life is.
In the no-man’s-land between Russian and Ukrainian forces, there’s hardly any life at all. It’s called the Gray Zone for good reason. Ashen homes, charred trees and blackened pits left by shells exploding over 1,000 days of war stretch as far as the eye can see.
Odesa, 6:50 a.m.
The waters of the Black Sea hover around 13 degrees Celsius (55 Fahrenheit) in late fall. The coastline is mined. Dmytro’s city is regularly targeted by drones and missiles.
But Dmytro — who insisted on being identified only by his first name because he was worried for the safety of his family — was undaunted as he plunged into the waves with a handful of friends for their regular swim.
Before the war, the group numbered a couple of dozen. Many fled the country. Men were mobilized to fight. Some returned with disabilities that keep them out of the water. His 33-year-old stepson is missing in action after a battle in the Donetsk region.
For Dmytro and fellow swimmers, the ritual grounds them and makes the grimness of war more bearable. He said the risks of his hobby are well worth the reward: “If you’re afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest.”
Zaporizhzhia, noon
Managing the Zaporizhstal steel mill during wartime means days filled with calculations for Serhii Saphonov.
The staff of 420 is less than half its pre-war levels. Power cuts from Russian attacks on electricity infrastructure require an “algorithm of actions” to maintain operations. Russian forces are closing in on the coke mine in Pokrovsk that supplies the plant with coal. And the city is under increasing attack by Russia’s unstoppable glide bombs.
Right outside his office, a bulletin board displays the names of 92 former steelworkers who have joined the army. Below are photos of the dead. Staff hold fundraisers for supplies for colleagues on the front, including two bulletproof vests sitting in the corner near his desk.
“The old workers, they carry everything on their shoulders. They are hardened. They know their job,” Saphonov said. “Everyone knows that we have to endure, hold out, hoping that things will get better ahead.”
Chernihiv, 1 p.m.
Dr. Vladyslava Friz has performed more reconstructive surgeries in the past 1,000 days than she did in the previous decade of her career. And the injuries are like nothing she had ever seen before.
Her days start early and end late. In the first months of the war, she said, the hospital was admitting 60 people per hour, and eight surgeons worked nonstop. They’re still catching up, because so many of the injured need multiple surgeries.
On Nov. 11, she was rebuilding the cheek and jaw of a patient injured in a mine explosion.
“Appearance is a person’s visual identity,” she said. “There is work to be done; we are doing it. We have no other options. There are medicines, equipment and personnel, but there are no metal structures for reconstruction. There is no state funding for implants.”
She said she will not abandon her patients but worries that the world will abandon Ukraine as the war approaches its fourth year.
“The global community continues to lose interest in the events in Ukraine while we lose people every day,” she said. “The world seems to have forgotten about us.”
Odesa, 6 p.m.
Yulia Ponomarenko has brought two babies into the world in the past 1,000 days, including Mariana on Nov. 11. Her husband, Denys, is fighting at the front.
Their hometown, Oleshky, was submerged by flooding after the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam. But by then, she’d long since fled the occupying Russian forces, who target the families of Ukrainian soldiers.
Mariana, born healthy at 3.8 kilograms and 55 centimeters (8 pounds, 6 ounces and 21 inches), will grow up with an older brother and sister and a menagerie of two cats and two dogs.
“This child is very expected, very wanted. We now have another princess,” Ponomarenko said.
Kyiv, 9 p.m.
The actors can’t perform in their home theater in Kharkiv — too many bombs, too few people willing to gather in one place. So they’ve moved to the Ukrainian capital, where they played to a nearly full house on Nov. 11 as guests of the Franko Theater.
“Because of the war, the Kharkiv theater cannot play on its stage. We play underground. It is literally underground art. There are only two to three places in Kharkiv where we can play, and that’s it,” said Mykhailo Tereshchenko, one of the principal actors of the Taras Shevchenko Academic Ukrainian Drama Theatre, named for Ukraine’s most famous writer.
Yevhen Nyshchuk, director of the Franko, said the theater paused production for a few months after the war started. Now, it’s packed nearly every night there is a play, and the lengthy applause when curtains close is deafening.
The reason goes beyond the quality of a performance at this point, he believes, and expresses “this inner realization that in spite of everything, we will create, we will live, we will come, we will meet, we will applaud each other.”

Topics: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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UK farmers plan to protest at Parliament over a tax hike they say will ruin family farms

Updated 58 min 26 sec ago
AP
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UK farmers plan to protest at Parliament over a tax hike they say will ruin family farms

  • The Labour Party government says only a small number of farms each year will be affected
  • Some farmers have welcomed those moves, but many feel goodwill was squandered through missteps by successive governments
Updated 58 min 26 sec ago
AP

LONDON: With banners, bullhorns, toy tractors and an angry message, British farmers are descending on Parliament on Tuesday to protest a hike in inheritance tax that they say will deal a “hammer blow” to struggling family farms.
UK farmers are rarely as militant as their European neighbors, and Britain has not seen large-scale protests like those that have snarled cities in France and other European countries. Now, though, farmers say they will step up their action if the government doesn’t listen.
“Everyone’s mad,” said Olly Harrison, co-organizer of a protest that aims to flood the street outside Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office with farmers. He said many famers “want to take to the streets and block roads and go full French.”
Organizers have urged protesters not to bring farm machinery into central London on Tuesday. Instead, children on toy tractors will lead a march around Parliament Square after a rally addressed by speakers including former “Top Gear” TV host and celebrity farmer Jeremy Clarkson. Another 1,800 farmers plan to hold a “mass lobby” of lawmakers nearby, organized by the National Farmers’ Union.
Volatile weather exacerbated by climate change, global instability and the upheaval caused by Britain’s 2020 departure from the European Union have all added to the burden on UK farmers. Many feel the Labour Party government’s tax change, part of an effort to raise billions of pounds to fund public services, is the last straw.
“Four out of the last five years, we’ve lost money,” said Harrison, who grows cereal crops on his family farm near Liverpool in northwest England. “The only thing that’s kept me going is doing it for my kids. And maybe a little bit of appreciation on the land allows you to keep borrowing, to keep going. But now that’s just disappeared overnight.”
The flashpoint is the government’s decision in its budget last month to scrap a tax break dating from the 1990s that exempts agricultural property from inheritance tax. From April 2026, farms worth more than 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) face a 20 percent tax when the owner dies and they are passed on to the next generation. That is half the 40 percent inheritance tax rate levied on other land and property in the UK
Starmer’s center-left government says the “vast majority” of farms – about 75 percent — will not be affected, and various loopholes mean that a farming couple can pass on an estate worth up to 3 million pounds ($3.9 million) to their children free of tax.
Supporters of the tax say it will recoup money from wealthy people who have bought up agricultural land as an investment, driving up the cost of farmland in the process.
“It’s become the most effective way for the super-rich to avoid paying their inheritance tax,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed wrote in the Daily Telegraph, adding that high land prices were “robbing young farmers of the dream of owning their own farm.”
But the famers’ union says more than 60 percent of working farms could face a tax hit. And while farms may be worth a lot on paper, profits are often small. Government figures show that income for most types of farms fell in the year to the end of February 2024, in some cases by more than 70 percent. Average farm income ranged from about 17,000 pounds ($21,000) for grazing livestock farms to 143,000 pounds ($180,000) for specialist poultry farms.
The last decade has been turbulent for British farmers. Many farmers backed Brexit as a chance to get out of the EU’s complex and much-criticized Common Agricultural Policy. Since then, the UK has brought in changes such as paying farmers to restore nature and promote biodiversity, as well as for producing food.
Some farmers have welcomed those moves, but many feel goodwill was squandered through missteps by successive governments, a failure of subsidies to keep up with inflation and new trade deals with countries including Australia and New Zealand that have opened the door to cheap imports.
National Farmers’ Union Deputy President David Exwood said the tax hike was “the final straw in a succession of tough choices and difficult situations that farmers have had to deal with.”
The government has “completely blown their trust with the industry,” he said.
The government insists it will not reconsider the inheritance tax, and its political opponents see an opportunity. The main opposition Conservative Party – which was in government for 14 years until July — and the hard-right populist party Reform UK are both championing the farmers. Some far-right groups also have backed Tuesday’s protest, though the organizers are not affiliated with them.
Harrison says the demonstration is intended as “a show of unity to the government” and an attempt to inform the public “that farmers are food producers, not tax-dodging millionaires.”
“It’s every single sector, whether you’re a landowner or a tenant, whether you’re beef, dairy, milk, cereals, veg, lettuce — you name it, everyone has had a hammer blow from this,” he said.
“Every farmer is losing.”

Topics: UK Great Britain

Seven policemen abducted by armed gunmen in northwest Pakistan amid militancy surge

Updated 19 November 2024
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Seven policemen abducted by armed gunmen in northwest Pakistan amid militancy surge

  • Police data shows 75 police officials have been killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province this year
  • Pakistan blames surge in militancy on neighboring Afghanistan whose Taliban rulers deny the accusations
Updated 19 November 2024
WASIM SAJJAD

PESHAWAR: Unidentified gunmen abducted seven policemen from a check post on Monday in Pakistan’s northwestern district of Bannu, police said, as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province battles a rise in militant attacks on cops and other government officials. 

Pakistan’s northwest has seen a rise in militant attacks in recent months, which Islamabad says are mostly carried out by Afghan nationals and their facilitators and by Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other militant groups who cross over into Pakistan using safe haven in Afghanistan. 

The Taliban government in Kabul says Pakistan’s security challenges are a domestic issue and cannot be blamed on the neighbor.

Police data shows 75 policemen have been killed and 113 injured in militant attacks and targeted assassinations in 2024 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan.

“Armed men abducted seven police personnel from the Rocha checkpoint in the jurisdiction of Utmanzai Police Station in Bannu district,” District Police Officer (DPO) Zia Uddin told Arab News, saying up to 40 gunmen first surrounded the checkpoint in the mountainous area of Sub-Division Wazir on Monday evening.

“The armed men abducted seven police personnel from the Rocha checkpoint in the jurisdiction of Utmanzai Police Station in Bannu district.”

The militants also took away all weapons and equipment at the checkpoint. 

 “Four police personnel escaped as they were not present at the location at the time,” the DPO added. 

The Pakistani government and security officials have said repeatedly that such attacks have risen in recent months, many of them claimed by the TTP and launched from Afghan soil.

The TTP is separate from the Afghan Taliban movement, but pledges loyalty to the Islamist group that now rules Afghanistan after US-led international forces withdrew in 2021.

Islamabad says TTP uses Afghanistan as a base and says the ruling Taliban administration has provided safe havens to the group close to the border. The Taliban deny this.

Topics: Pakistan Taliban attack

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Toxic smog persists over India’s north; Delhi pollution remains severe

Updated 19 November 2024
Reuters
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Toxic smog persists over India’s north; Delhi pollution remains severe

Updated 19 November 2024
Reuters

NEW DELHI: Residents in India’s northern states woke up to another day of poor air quality on Tuesday, as a layer of dense fog shrouded most of the region, and pollution in the capital Delhi remained severe.
India battles air pollution every winter as cold, heavy air traps dust, emissions, and smoke from farm fires started illegally in the adjoining, farming states of Punjab and Haryana.
The air quality index (AQI) touched a peak of 491 in Delhi on Monday, forcing the government to introduce restrictions on vehicle movement and construction activities, and schools to conduct classes online.
On Tuesday, Delhi’s 24-hour air quality index (AQI) reading was at 488 on a scale of 500, India’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) said, and at least five stations in the capital reported an AQI of 500.
CPCB defines an AQI reading of 0-50 as “good” and above 401 as “severe,” which it says is a risk to healthy people and “seriously impacts” those with existing diseases.
Swiss group IQAir ranked New Delhi as the world’s most polluted city with air quality at a “hazardous” 489, although that was a significant improvement from Monday’s 1,081 reading.
Experts say the scores vary because of a difference in the scale countries adopt to convert pollutant concentrations into AQI, and so the same quantity of a specific pollutant may be translated as different AQI scores in different countries.
India’s weather department said a shift in the fog layer toward the northern state of Uttar Pradesh had helped improve visibility over Delhi.
Visibility dropped to zero meters in Uttar Pradesh’s capital Agra, which lies southeast of Delhi. The Taj Mahal, India’s famed monument of love, has been obscured by toxic smog for nearly a week.
The strict measures to mitigate the impact of high pollution have hurt production at more than 3.4 million micro, small and medium enterprises in the nearby states of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, local media reported.

Topics: India Pollution Smoke

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