Earthquake aftershock in Haiti spurs exodus from Port-au-Prince

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By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Dana Hedgpeth and Theola Labbé-DeBose
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 21, 2010; A13

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Haitians pushed and clawed onto rusty boats and dented buses by the thousands Wednesday, hoping to escape a capital city newly unnerved by the strongest aftershock since the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The death toll now stands at 75,000 and is rising, according to President René Préval. A sign that appeared outside an open mass grave at the city's largest cemetery read: "Please. The hole is filled. It can't take more bodies."

About 200,000 people are injured, 1 million are displaced and half the buildings in Port-au-Prince are destroyed, according to the Haitian Directorate for Civic Protection. A new Haitian government estimate says homeless people have congregated in more than 320 fetid encampments across the capital, where pigs and dogs scavenge in the same rotting garbage piles as naked children and their parents.

United Nations officials said an exact toll of the dead and injured may never be known because the powerful earthquake was so widespread and destroyed hospitals and morgues, which traditionally track such figures.

The scale of the tragedy has overwhelmed a country ill-prepared to cope with disaster and outstripped the capacity of international relief agencies, prompting an exodus of poor Haitians, who have no guarantee of finding shelter in the villages and cities outside Port-au-Prince.

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At a ferry wharf in Port-au-Prince's Boulva slum, Manie Felix -- a 26-year-old mother of three -- hoped to travel to Haiti's Jeremie region, abounding with fruit trees. But she had no money to pay the inflated passage rate, which was equivalent to $15. "I have all these kids. I have no idea what to do," she said. Felix was asleep at the port when Haiti was shaken by Wednesday's aftershock, which registered at a magnitude of 5.9 and collapsed buildings in the capital.

Outside the U.S. Embassy, Josue Pierre's 4-year-old daughter looked up at him when the earth started shaking and said, "Daddy, Daddy, are we going to die?" The tremor made the 33-year-old Haitian American all the more eager to get permission to fly to Boston to meet his wife. "Something else is going to happen here," he said. "It is just too scary to stay. It is time to go away."

Rayhold Phanore, a pastor, said he saw a roof collapse on two neighbors. "You think everything is done and then it keeps shaking," said Phanore, a Haitian American who is hoping to take his 4-year-old daughter to Orlando, where he has family.

Nearby, in the Cite Soleil slum, where authorities say 3,000 people died and 15,000 were injured, police girded for the reemergence of gangs that held sway there before the quake. Police chief Azistude Rosemond returned to work after losing his wife, daughter and parents in the quake. Now he must cope without 17 of his 67 officers and is worried about escapees from a collapsed jail.

"They were in a tough fight before the earthquake," Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, the top commander of U.S. military forces here, said after touring the slum with Ambassador Kenneth Merten. "The quake is like a kick in the teeth for them."

The city has seen little violence, despite persistent fears that shortages of food, water and shelter will spark unrest. Still, looting remains a problem. Haitian SWAT teams patrolled the government buildings around the National Palace to keep away looters, said police Cmdr. Simon Francois.

"The looters are looking for the government safes, computers, anything that works, and even things that don't," Francois said. "The people are stressed, and that makes it more difficult for us to protect and serve."

Many business owners have refused to reopen because they fear being overrun by desperate quake victims. But several banks opened Wednesday; long lines formed and crowds grew agitated, mirroring the emotions after the morning aftershock.

The aftershock's damage wasn't limited to Port-au-Prince -- the United Nations said that an undetermined number of people were injured and that buildings collapsed in Jacmel, a seaside city known for its international film festival. While crews spread across Jacmel and Port-au-Prince to assess damage, the USNS Comfort arrived but stayed far from shore. Navy and Army divers plunged into the waters beneath the capital's central pier to gauge whether it could withstand cargo and masses of people.

The damaged and sorely inadequate infrastructure is further delaying the arrival of desperately needed relief supplies, and putting more pressure on Port-au-Prince's congested airport, which is now handling 100 landings a day -- four times the normal rate, according to the United Nations.

The air-traffic control tower was damaged in the initial quake, and there is just one runway to handle dozens of relief agency and military flights from around the world. "More people wanted to come in here than there's space, and they wanted to come in quickly," said U.S. Air Force Col. Ben McMullen, deputy commander for the Special Operations unit tasked with improving airport operations. The airport "was running on a first come, first serve" basis initially, he said.

To unload the planes, it was mostly "a bunch of good strong backs," he said. Since then, more forklifts and loaders have arrived, and the military is now requiring flight plans, hoping that will end the hours-long holding patterns imposed early on. A U.N. official said it is unclear when commercial flights might resume.

The Haitian government has signed an agreement giving the United States formal control of the airport, so U.S. officials have had to referee disputes between relief flights. On Saturday, a French plane carrying a portable hospital was diverted because the landing space was full.

"Everybody thinks their plane is a priority," said Maj. Nathan Miller, who helps coordinate air operations. Lionel Isaac, the airport's director, said that crowding has been a problem and that planes need to do a better job of alerting authorities about cargoes and arrival times. "They don't do it," he said. "They just fly in."

Once the planes are on the runway, they are Air Force Tech. Sgt. Adrian Jezierski's problem. "They tell me the size, and I figure out where to park it," said Jezierski, who is among those directing planes. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle."

Staff writers William Booth, Mary Beth Sheridan and Scott Wilson in Port-au-Prince and Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Study Finds 3,000 Pakistanis Killed in Militant Attacks

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By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The number of Pakistani civilians killed in militant attacks rose by a third in 2009, compared with the previous year, according to a new research report, a toll that was driven higher by a surge of suicide bombings against civilian targets.

The report, released this week by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an independent research group based in Islamabad that tracks security issues, found that 3,021 Pakistanis were killed in insurgent attacks, 33 percent more than in 2008.

Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said the number of deaths totaled 1,674, lower than the institute’s count, but its director, Muhammad Amir Rana, argued that its data is more comprehensive, drawing on local media reports, which its employees double check, as well as official sources. The reports provide one of the few comprehensive analyses of civilian casualties in Pakistan, a growing concern as the insurgency here grinds into another year.

Militants carried out 87 suicide attacks in 2009, up from 63 the previous year, according to the institute, with civilian centers increasingly a target, including mosques, a university, and public markets. The bombings, which tend to inflict harm over a wide area, helped account for the 60 percent rise in injuries to 7,334.

The institute began issuing the reports in 2006, Mr. Rana said, an effort to give a clearer picture of militancy in Pakistan. Since then, the number of Pakistanis killed in militant attacks has more than tripled.

Image by Ammar Abd Rabbo via Flickr

While Pakistan has long had problems with violence, including sectarian fighting throughout the 1990’s, it was not until after 9/11 that major terrorist attacks began to intensify. In 2005, attacks increased dramatically, and have risen every year since, with their numbers doubling between 2005 and 2007, Mr. Rana said.

The overwhelming majority of the suicide bombings last year were in the Northwest Frontier Province, a populous area in the western of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas, where the militants are strong.

In a counter trend, the tribal areas, where the military has opened operation against the militants, saw a drop in bombings from militants — seven, compared to 16 the previous year.

Punjab, the most populous province and the military and political heart of the country, suffered 15 suicide attacks, the second-highest number in the country, up from eight in 2008, but far below the 52 that militants conducted in the Norh West Frontier Province.

Punjab, ethnically distict from the border regions in the mountainous west, had been relatively untouched by violence until recently. The surge in bombings last year shocked Pakistanis and helped turn public opinion and media coverage against the Taliban, though anger at the government and the United States also spiked.

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The number of sectarian attacks jumped by 86 percent compared with 2008, according to the report, with the highest concentration in Dera Ismail Khan, a city in the Northwest Frontier Province whose Shiite minority has been targeted by militants.

In all, researchers counted 12,632 deaths from violence in 2009, of which about half were deaths associated with the Pakistani military’s campaigns against Taliban militants throughout 2009. The military keeps specific tallies of its own dead, though militant casualties are more difficult to track and are often based on estimates and not body counts in the field. Battlefields are rarely accessible to journalists.

Also included in the tally were 667 people — mostly civilians — killed in American drone strikes, the report said. Another 2,000 were killed in non-militant violence, including political violence and tribal fighting.

Though the civilian toll, which includes police officers and other civilian law enforcement agencies, seems high, it is still far lower than the 3,000 civilians killed per month in Iraq — a country with a population a fraction of Pakistan’s — in 2006.

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Documents Show Officials Covered Up Deaths in Immigrant Deaths

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By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: January 9, 2010

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

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Nery Romero, who died in immigration detention in 2007.

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Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The family of Nery Romero in Elmont, N.Y., in 2007, after he was found hanging in his detention cell.

Boubacar Bah, who suffered fatal head injuries in an immigration jail the same year.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.

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Suicide bomber attacks CIA base in Afghanistan, killing at least 8 Americans

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By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 31, 2009; A01

A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency's history, U.S. officials said.

The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted -- Forward Operating Base Chapman -- is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda's home base.

U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians and said they believed that most, if not all, were CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian also was killed, the sources said.

It is unclear exactly how the assailant managed to gain access to the heavily guarded U.S.-run post, which serves as an operations and surveillance center for the CIA. The bomber struck in what one U.S. official described as the base's fitness center.

In addition to the dead, eight people were wounded, several of them seriously, U.S. government officials said.

While many details remained vague Wednesday, the attack appears to have killed more U.S. intelligence personnel than have died in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began in late 2001. The CIA has previously acknowledged the deaths of four officers in fighting in Afghanistan in the past eight years.

"It is the nightmare we've been anticipating since we went into Afghanistan and Iraq," said John E. McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director who now serves on a board that supports children of CIA officers slain on the job. "Our people are often out on the front line, without adequate force protection, and they put their lives quite literally in jeopardy."

The CIA has declined to comment publicly on the attack until relatives of the dead are notified. A former senior agency official said it was the worst single-day casualty toll for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983.

"I know that the American people will appreciate their sacrifice. I pray that the government they serve does the same," said the official, who insisted on anonymity because the agency has not yet publicly acknowledged the deaths.

The CIA has been quietly bolstering its ranks in Afghanistan in recent weeks, mirroring the surge of military troops there. Agency officers coordinated the initial U.S.-led attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, and have since provided hundreds of spies, paramilitary operatives and analysts in the region for roles ranging from counterterrorism to counternarcotics. The agency also operates the remote-control aircraft used in aerial strikes on suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the lawless tribal provinces on the Pakistan side of the border. The campaign of strikes in Pakistan has not been officially acknowledged, but it has escalated rapidly in the past two years.

Intelligence experts who have visited U.S. bases in the region say the CIA officers at Chapman would have focused mainly on recruiting local operatives and identifying targets.

"The best intelligence is going to come from the field, and that means working closely with the Afghans," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

The loss of experienced CIA field officers would be particularly damaging to U.S. efforts in the area "because they know the terrain," Hoffman said. "Every American death in a theater of war is tragic, but these might be more consequential given these officers' unique capabilities and attributes."

The bomber and those who aided him must have had very good intelligence to gain access to the secure base without arousing suspicion, he said.

Ninety CIA deaths are memorialized by stars on a wall in the agency's Langley headquarters. The inscription on the memorial reads: "We are the nation's first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go."

U.S. military officials and diplomats confirmed Wednesday's attack and the eight civilian deaths. "We mourn the loss of life in this attack," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said.

The number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan this year has reached 310, the highest one-year total since the start of the war. Twelve U.S. troops have been killed since Dec. 1.

Khost has been the scene of several major attacks this year. In May, an attack killed 13 civilians and injured 36 others. Seven Afghan civilians were killed and 21 were wounded by an improvised explosive device detonated outside the main gate of Forward Operating Base Salerno on May 13.

Also Wednesday, NATO announced that four Canadian troops and a journalist from Canada were killed in an explosion in Kandahar province, one of the most dangerous areas of southern Afghanistan.

The international coalition said the journalist was traveling with the troops on a patrol near Kandahar city when they were attacked Wednesday.

Kandahar is a hotbed of the insurgency. On Dec. 24, eight people, including a child, were killed when a man driving a horse-drawn cart laden with explosives detonated the cache outside a guesthouse frequented by foreigners. The day before, another Canadian soldier was killed by a homemade bomb in the province.

According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the latest casualties bring to 32 the number of Canadian forces killed in Afghanistan this year.

Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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Bomb attack on Shia march in Pakistani city of Karachi

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At least 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in a suicide bombing on a Shia Muslim march in the Pakistani city of Karachi, officials say.

The attacker had been walking amidst a procession with tens of thousands of people, said the interior minister.

After the explosion, marchers turned their anger on ambulance workers, security forces and journalists.

Pakistan's security forces have been on high alert as Shia Muslims marked the holy month of Muharram, or Ashura.

Monday was the climax of the holy period, which commemorates the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson.

Blood-stained walls

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, which comes amid an upsurge of attacks by Taliban militants in Pakistan.

“ I am hearing people are clashing with police and doctors, that is what terrorists want, to see this city again on fire ”
Mustafa Kamal Karachi Mayor

Karachi has a long history of sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis.

There have been numerous attacks on such processions across the country over the last few days, says the BBC's Aleem Maqbool.

On Sunday, eight people were killed when a suicide bomber targeted a Shia march in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik blamed Monday's blast on extremists who wanted to destabilise Pakistan.

"Whoever has done this, he cannot be a Muslim. He is worse than an infidel," he told reporters.

Karachi police chief Waseem Ahmed said the severed head of the bomber had been found, reports Reuters news agency.

One survivor, Naseem Raza, told AP news agency: "I saw walls stained with blood and splashed with human flesh. I saw bloodstained people lying here and there."

Fleeing the scene of the blast, another mourner told AFP news agency: "My sister, her husband and children are dead."

The bombing unleashed further pandemonium as angry Shia mourners fired shots in the air.

Smashed ambulances

Rioters torched dozens of shops and vehicles, while members of the security forces who had been guarding the procession were pelted with stones.

TV footage showed smashed police vehicles and ambulances.

Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal appealed for calm.

"I am hearing people are clashing with police and doctors. Please do not do that," AP news agency quoted him as saying.

"That is what terrorists are aiming at. They want to see this city again on fire."

Our correspondent says an incident like this was feared by the authorities. Stringent security measures had been put in place across the country over the last month.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in bomb attacks in recent months as Pakistan's army pursues an offensive against Taliban militants in South Waziristan and surrounding areas.

Pakistan also has a long history of violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims that is estimated to have killed several thousand people in the last three decades alone.

Some radicals in the Sunni majority regard Shias - who make up about 20% of the population - as heretics.

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Anti-government protests turn deadly in Tehran

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By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 27, 2009; 2:57 PM

TEHRAN -- Security forces opened fire at crowds demonstrating against the government in the capital on Sunday, killing at least five people, including the nephew of opposition political leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, witnesses and Web sites linked to the opposition said.

"Ali Mousavi, 32, was shot in the heart at the Enghelab square. He became a martyr," the Rah-e Sabz Website reported.

In the heaviest clashes in months, fierce battles erupted as tens of thousands of demonstrators tried to gather on a main Tehran avenue, with people setting up roadblocks and throwing stones at members of special forces under the command of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They in turn threw dozens of teargas and stun grenades, but failed in pushing back crowds, who shouted slogans against the government, witnesses reported.

A witness reported seeing at least four people shot in the central Vali-e Asr Square. "I saw a riot cop opening fire, using a handgun," the witness said. "A girl was hit in the shoulders, three other men in their stomachs and legs. It was total chaos."

Fights were also reported in the cities of Isfahan and Najafabad in central Iran.

The protests coincided with Ashura, one of the most intense religious holidays for Shiite Muslims. The slogans were mainly aimed at the top leaders of the Islamic republic, a further sign that the opposition movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June election victory is turning against the leadership of the country.

At the Yadegar overpass, protesters shouted slogans such as "Death to the dictator" and "long live Mousavi." They fought running battles with security forces until a car filled with members of the paramilitary Basij brigade drove at high speed though the makeshift barriers of stones and sandbags that the protesters had erected.

About a dozen members of the Revolutionary Guards fired paintball bullets, teargas and stun grenades. When reinforcements arrived, they managed to push back the hundreds of protesters gathered at the crossing.

Similar scenes could be seen at several crossings of the central Azadi and Enghelab streets, witnesses reported. Large clouds of black bellowing smoke rose up as people honked their cars in protests.

"This is a month of blood. The dictator will fall," people shouted, referring to the mourning month of Muharram. Young men erected a flag symbolizing the struggle of the Shiite's third Imam Hussein, whose death was commemorated Sunday.

On Saturday, security forces clad in black clashed with protesters in northern Tehran after a speech by opposition leader and former president Mohammad Khatami. After the police intervened, thousands of protesters fanned out through the area.

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The roads were clogged with cars, many honking their horns in support of the protesters. About 50 armed government supporters attacked a building used as an office by the household of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic, according to witnesses and the Parlemannews Web site, which is critical of the government.

"There are so many people on the streets, I am amazed," a member of the riot police said to his colleagues as he rested on his motorcycle in a north Tehran square. Two women in traditional black chadors flashed victory signs to passing cars, egging them on to honk in support of the opposition.

Earlier, hundreds of police officers supported by dozens of members of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and the paramilitary Basij force clashed with small groups of protesters along Enghelab (Revolution) Street, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, at times beating people in an effort to disperse them.

The protests, which followed anti-government demonstrations in other Iranian cities in recent days, come as Iran observes the 10 days of Muharram, a mourning period for Imam Hussein, the Shiite saint whose death in the 7th century sealed the rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims over the succession of the prophet Muhammad. On Sunday, Shiites worldwide commemorate the day of his death during Ashura.

Special Correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie contributed to this report.

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Death toll from Indonesia quake officially put at 1,117 - Xinhua

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JAKARTA, Oct. 14 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia's West Sumatra province on Wednesday officially put the final death toll of the 7.9-magnitude earthquake on Sept. 30 at 1,117.

West Sumatra's Governor Gamawan Fauzi said that the latest data is final and he assured that casualty would not increase. However, figures for remote areas will not be verified until October 20.

The data was announced at 4 p.m. local time (0900 GMT) by the governor at the disaster integrated commando post in Padang City after holding coordination meeting with all apparatus of local governments hit by the earthquake.

"The final data showed that casualties are 1,117 and two people are declared missing. As many as 210 missing people at Padangpariaman regency are declared as victims. Meanwhile, the two missing people are still declared missing because their relatives are against their being declared dead," said Gamawan.

Other data showed that 1,214 people are heavily injured and 1,688 got light injuries.

Meanwhile, 135,448 houses are seriously damaged and 78,604 are lightly damaged.

Also damaged were 2,163 classrooms, 51 health facilities, 1,001worship houses, 21 bridges, 178 roads and 130 irrigation infrastructures.

Furthermore, Gamawan said that the data will be presented on Thursday to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Jakarta so that the central government will be able to decide the emergency response period.

Gamawan said he personally hopes that the period will be ended sooner than later.

"Prolonged emergency response will cause bad psychological effect to people," he said.

Gamawan intended to oblige all buildings to be fortified.

"At least, for public service (buildings), there would not be a bargain. They should obey the (quake) standard. For example, in Padang with assumption of 8 Richter scale quake, building should have three floors at maximum," he said.

Gamawan also said that careless local government officials in the construction regulation will be punished.

Suicide blast kills 17, injures 63 in Kabul - Dawn

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KABUL: A suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle outside the Indian Embassy in the bustling centre of the Afghan capital on Thursday, killing 17 people in the second major attack in the city in less than a month.

The blast occurred a day after the war entered its ninth year and as President Barack Obama was deliberating a request by the top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal for up to 40,000 more troops. Opponents of a troop increase want to shift focus to missile strikes and special operations against al-Qaeda-linked groups in Pakistan.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack – the second against the Indian Embassy in the past two years – and specified that the Indians were the target.

In New Delhi, India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said the driver of the sport utility vehicle ‘came up to the outer perimeter wall of the embassy in a car loaded with explosives.’ Three Indian paramilitary guards were wounded by shrapnel, Rao said.

Rao did not say who the Indians believed was responsible for the attack, which occurred about 8:30 a.m. along a commercial street that is also home to the Interior Ministry.

However, the Afghan Foreign Ministry said the on Thursday attack ‘was planned and implemented from outside of Afghan borders’ by the same groups responsible for the July 2008 suicide bombing at the Indian Embassy that killed more than 60 people.

The ministry statement made no mention of Pakistan. However, the Afghan government blamed Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence for the 2008 bombing at the Indian Embassy as well as involvement in a string of attacks in the country.

US officials suspected the 2008 embassy bombing and other high profile attacks were carried out by followers of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a long-time Afghan militant leader whose forces are battling US forces in eastern Afghanistan from sanctuaries in the border area of Pakistan.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Abdul Basit, condemned Thursday’s bombing.

‘Whenever terrorist activity occurs it should strengthen our resolve to eradicate and eliminate this menace,’ he said. Basit called allegations of a Pakistani role in the Kabul bombing ‘preposterous.’

The Taliban did not say why it targeted the Indian Embassy. India and Pakistan, archrivals since the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, are competing for influence in Afghanistan among rival ethnic groups. India maintains close ties with the Tajik community, and Pakistan with the Pashtuns, who form the majority of the Taliban.

Thursday’s blast was the deadliest attack in Kabul since Sept. 17, when a suicide bomber killed 16 people, including six Italian soldiers and 10 Afghan civilians, on a road in the centre of the capital.

The Interior Ministry said 15 civilians and two Afghan police officers were killed in Thursday’s blast. At least 76 people were wounded, the ministry said. President Hamid Karzai, the US Embassy and the United Nations mission all condemned the attack.

After months of relative calm, the Afghan capital has been shaken recently by an increasing number of suicide attacks and roadside bombings that began in the run-up to the country’s disputed Aug. 20 election. The attacks usually target international military forces or government installations, but Afghan businesses and civilians are also often killed or injured.

Police sealed off the area after the blast.

The Indian news channel CNN-IBN cited Jayant Prasad, India’s ambassador in Kabul, as saying the blast caused ‘extensive damage to the chancery.’ He said the bomb was so powerful that it blew off some of the embassy’s doors and windows.

The explosion also damaged a line of shops between the embassy and the Interior Ministry, shattering glass and rattling buildings more than a mile away. A huge brown plume of smoke was visible in the air as ambulances raced to the scene and carried away the wounded.

A European police officer assigned as an adviser to the Interior Ministry and an Afghan interpreter were slightly wounded by flying glass, training spokesman Andrea Angeli said.

A 21-year-old Afghan man, who gave his name only as Najibullah, said he had just opened his shop when the explosion went off, knocking him unconscious. When he awoke, he said, he couldn’t see anything because of dust and debris.

‘Dust was everywhere. People were shouting,’ Najibullah said. ‘You couldn’t see their faces because there was so much dust.’

Ketsana Death Toll Rises to 38 in Vietnam - Thanh Nien Daily

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At least 38 people have died and 10 people are missing in central Vietnam after typhoon Ketsana hit the region Tuesday afternoon, according to the national flood and storm control committee.

Another 73 people have been injured, and over 100,000 houses with at least 90 boats were damaged or submerged, the committee said on Tuesday evening.

Ketsana, which strengthened from a tropical low on Saturday and killed at least 246 people in the Philippines before heading for Vietnam, has since weakened into a low.

The central provinces had managed to evacuate over 370,000 residents to safe areas before the storm touched land, local authorities said.

“Different from other storms that often cause heavy rains after their landfall, the ninth storm [to hit the East Sea this year] has caused much heavier rains over a large area before and during its arrival in Quang Nam – Quang Ngai provinces,” said Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Dao Xuan Hoc.

“[This] has caused especially severe flooding and some rivers have risen to record levels,” Hoc said.

In fact, with the rainfall measuring up to 1,300 millimeters in some localities like Thua Thien – Hue on Tuesday evening, water levels in the Tra Bong River reached 5.58 meters, 0.19 meters higher than the historic flood peak in 1964.

Floods on the Po Ko River in Kon Tum province also made a record at 5.56 meters, 2.26 meters higher than the record set in 2006, according to Bui Minh Tang –director of the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting (NCHMF).

The flood waters will continue rising on Wednesday, NCHMF said on its website yesterday morning.

Meanwhile, power blackouts and severed traffic had isolated some localities like Thua Thien Hue, Quang Ngai, and Quang Nam.

Over 2,000 people on Nhon Chau Island in Binh Dinh Province were also totally cutoff from the mainland.

“The greatest challenge is not only food supply but also the spread and treatment of diseases,” said Ngo Van Quy, chairman of Nhon Chau People’s Committee said.

“Difficult births and appendicitis can be fatal if patients aren’t transferred to the mainland [for proper treatment]. Local people have to wait for at least another three days before accessing the mainland, in case the weather is good.”

According to the national forecast center, the fierce storm weakened into tropical low and reached the south of Laos with winds blowing at 31-96 kilometers per hour on Tuesday night.

The low will reach the northwest of Thailand on Wednesday, it added.

However, the center warned that the low pressure would still affect Vietnam, causing torrential rains, flash floods and landslides in the central and central highlands provinces.

On Tuesday afternoon Nguyen Van Thanh, deputy director of Saigon Railway Station, said the storm has caused them to cancel many trains from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to central provinces.

The cancellation and shortening of train routes will continue on Wednesday, he added.

Also on Tuesday, national carrier Vietnam Airlines announced it would resume flights from Hanoi and HCMC to the central region from Wednesday at 7 a.m., and add more flights on the routes.

US pullout in doubt after day of slaughter on streets of Baghdad

Extremists struck at the Iraqi Government with a wave of bombings and mortar attacks, killing at least 95 people and injuring more than 560 and raising new doubts about the withdrawal of US soldiers from the country.

The bombings were directed against the main centres of power, including the ministries of finance, foreign affairs, health, education and housing, as well as the parliament and cabinet buildings.

A lorry packed with explosives that went off within 30ft of the Foreign Ministry is reported to have killed up to 59 people and injured 250. The ministry’s compound wall was flattened and the ten-storey building all but destroyed. Cars and buildings in the vicinity were devastated and houses five miles away were shaken.

The bomb left a crater in the road 10 feet deep and 25 feet wide; it was filled with charred bodies. The heat of the ensuing fire melted debris into the torn asphalt. Dozens of buildings were damaged, including the Rasheed Hotel, on the edge of the fortified green zone. John Tipple, a British solicitor, said: “The windows were blown out — even the door frames went. If I had been in my room I would have been seriously injured or worse. Everything is locked down now. Nobody can move anywhere.”

No group has said that it was behind the attack but it is likely to have been the work of Sunni radicals trying to undermine the Shia-led Government, to reignite sectarian warfare of two years ago. Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, said: “These attacks represent a reaction to the opening of streets and bridges and the lifting of barriers inside the residential areas.”

The date of the attacks was symbolic: today was the sixth anniversary of the bombing of the United Nations compound in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including the UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. That atrocity prompted the UN to suspend its operations in Iraq and signalled a deadly increase in the insurgency.

Since US troops began to pull out of the cities, a rise in attacks has led to fears of a resurgence of violence before the elections to be held by the end of January.

In a reference to the party of Saddam Hussein, Major-General Qassim Atta, the spokesman for the Iraqi Army’s Baghdad operations, said “We accuse the Baathist alliance of executing these terrorist operations.”

Today Baghdad was again enveloped by chaos and fear. Abu Mazen, a 39-year-old police officer, said: “I came home and found all my neighbours crying and my wife crying, then I saw the kids. They were injured in the heads and hands.”

A bystander, Abu Mohammed, 45, said: “I saw a body fly through the air and land next to me. I saw 40 burnt bodies being taken out of the Foreign Ministry — they needed an industrial vehicle with a big shovel to remove them. The bodies were still burning and we poured water on them. There is blood everywhere.”

A woman staggered past him outside the Foreign Ministry, bleeding from the head but insistent that she did not need help. Apartment blocks hundreds of metres away showed cracks in the walls.

Faris, a 28-year-old resident, said: “This is the biggest explosion we have seen since the invasion. I fear we are returning to the bad old days.”

Like many others he blamed careless Iraqi security guards who replaced US soldiers: “How can you drive a lorry filled with explosives right up to the entrance of the ministry?”

Blast walls that might have limited the damage were removed two months ago as part of “normalisation” by the Iraqi Government after US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities on June 30.

Conflict Casts Long, Lethal Shadow in Eastern Congo

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 2, 2009

WALIKALE, Congo -- Death came quietly for Bahanuzi Mihigo.

Unconscious from a soaring fever, his body full of infection, the 36-year-old farmer lay under a white hospital tent in this tiny village, a place that floats like an island in a vast sea of roadless jungle.

It was a cool evening, and the fighting that had chased Mihigo from his home was far away now. Still, its aftermath surrounded him in the tent, where ants crawled up the wooden posts of beds occupied by others weak or dying from their own jungle odysseys: three babies listless with malaria; a woman wheezing from tuberculosis; another with a raging infection ballooning her left arm.

Justin Balaluka, Mihigo's friend, sat with him into the night, noticing how he had changed. He looked old, exhausted. Just before 11 p.m., Mihigo trembled slightly and, as Balaluka put it, "lost the spirit."

Though doctors listed the cause of death as suspected typhoid fever, Balaluka, 26, who fled through the jungle for weeks with Mihigo, named another.

"I blame the war," he said.

By some estimates, at least 5 million Congolese have died in more than a decade of conflict touched off by the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, which sent a flood of militiamen across the border into mineral-rich eastern Congo. Although the conflict has surged, receded and changed over time -- at some points involving eight countries and at others breaking into smaller conflicts among a mess of armed groups -- the cumulative death toll in eastern Congo is the largest since World War II.

For the most part, though, people in eastern Congo have not died in a blaze of bullets or in large-scale massacres. More often, the conflict has set off a chain reaction of less spectacular consequences that begins with fleeing through an unforgiving jungle and ends with a death such as Mihigo's. In eastern Congo, people die from malaria and diarrhea, from untreated infections and measles, from falling off rickety bridges and slipping down slopes, from hunger and from drinking dirty water in the hope of surviving one more day.

Arguably, people die because of the wider social impact of the conflict. Entire villages have been scattered across hundreds of miles, atomizing extended family networks that people depend upon in difficult times. The conflict has overwhelmed already-dysfunctional government hospitals and left roads rutted and overgrown, isolating people in villages like Walikale from help.

At the moment, the conflict in eastern Congo is surging once again. Since January, at least half a million people have fled a U.N.-backed Congolese army operation targeting Rwandan rebels, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss in a visit to Congo this month. The rebels are retaliating against villagers with whom they have lived for years.

In early May, one of those attacks ravaged the village of Busurungi, where Mihigo lived with his wife and three children, about 75 miles from here. In many ways, the story of his death -- pieced together from interviews with neighbors, doctors and nurses who treated him -- begins there.

Despite the occasional menace of rebels who lived in the village, Mihigo led a relatively healthy life. He ate decently, drank from spring water taps and could go to a local health clinic for basic medicine. He was known as one who shared what he had, and as a mentor to young men tempted to take up the AK-47.

"He would tell us we'd have a better life farming," said Amisi Tumusifu, 22, a neighbor. "He was a good man."

When the military operation began this year, soldiers chased the rebels from Busurungi but soon abandoned the village. U.N. peacekeepers mandated to protect civilians did not fill the void, and the rebels returned in a fury, burning hundreds of houses and shooting people as they fled. Mihigo saw his wife and children killed, but he managed to escape with about 20 others, including Tumusifu and Balaluka. He ran off only with the clothes he was wearing: a pair of jeans, a plaid button-down shirt and flip-flops.

The group spent days walking along muddy, rocky footpaths or clearing new ones through tangles of green, at times silently, afraid the rebels might hear. They crossed rivers and eased down slopes, scraping bare arms and ankles. At night, they often slept on leaves.

"We got bitten by so many mosquitoes," Tumusifu said. "When it was raining, we got wet and cold. We were eating like pigs."

If they were lucky, they ate roots and cassava leaves and drank river water. They came upon tiny villages where people would help with a meal, and some in the group would stay behind. After a while, the group dwindled to three -- Tumusifu, Balaluka and Mihigo. They were all getting thinner, especially Mihigo.

"He looked so tired," Tumusifu said. "He was talking about so many things: the war, his children, his wife. To lose your wife and children, it's not simple. I think that created pains in his heart."

Mihigo began complaining of headaches and fatigue, but the three pressed on, finally reaching the village of Ndjingala, about 25 miles from Walikale, in mid-June. A family offered them an 8-by-8-foot room, where they rested a few days. But with no money or family for support, Mihigo, who could not even afford aspirin, decided they had to find work quickly.

"We had no soap, no clothes -- nothing," Balaluka said. "We were tired, but we had no choice."

In this area, one of the few readily available jobs is hauling 100-pound loads of sugar, beer and other supplies on a two-day trek to a huge mining pit, and hauling out loads of the mineral cassiterite, used in cellphones, the illicit profits from which have fueled Congo's conflict for years. And so, for a few dollars per trip, the three exhausted men returned to the jungle as porters.

Mihigo managed for a week or so but was soon too sick to walk. His headaches worsened. He complained of pains in his chest and abdomen. His fever soared until he finally fell unconscious.

Tumusifu and Balaluka carried him to a local health center, which treated him for malaria. But his condition worsened, and nurses transferred him to the government hospital in Walikale. His friends pooled money for transportation and, around noon one recent Monday, carried his frail body into the tent annexed to the hospital: a one-story, whitewashed building shaded by palms and relatively unchanged from when it was built in 1977.

Since February, the hospital has been overwhelmed with thousands of displaced people pouring into Walikale from surrounding villages. They have been treated for free, but by the time Mihigo arrived, the hospital was nearly out of supplies.

The hospital director has been pleading for more medicine, but the government has not yet provided any, and the resupply route is daunting. The most direct route between Walikale and the provincial capital of Goma is one deep, muddy trench after another, often crawling with rebels; though the distance is only 250 miles or so, the journey can take as long as a month. Instead, trucks travel a 2,500 mile, four-day horseshoe route.

Last month, the hospital's doctors -- most of whom scrape by on charity, having never been paid by the government during their employment there -- began telling patients to buy their own medicine.

Salumu Luhembwe, the doctor who examined Mihigo, quickly suspected advanced typhoid fever, probably acquired from drinking water contaminated with feces. His intestines had holes and his abdomen was full of puss. "We needed to operate on him," said Luhembwe, 35. "But we didn't have all the materials."

If Mihigo's friends could find it, they needed to buy fuel for a generator, anesthesia, antibiotics, rehydration fluid, blood and a long list of other items whose cost totaled more than $200.

"For displaced people, it's impossible," said Luhembwe, who has bought medicine for patients but could not manage this time. "Usually in these cases, family would collect money to help. He had no family. Really, it was very sad."

And so three days passed, Mihigo got worse, and Balaluka could only watch when his friend trembled and faded away, becoming part of an increasingly staggering statistic.

"He died from an association of so many things -- because he left his farm, because he got sick in the jungle, because he reached an area without any means," Luhembwe said. "Even if he died from typhoid fever, the genesis was fleeing."

There was no money for a funeral, so a hospital worker dug a grave amid the tall grass and palms behind the hospital, where there were many other freshly dug mounds. In the early morning, Balaluka and Tumusifu offered a prayer before Mihigo's unmarked grave, some words, Tumusifu recalled, about "finishing the trip peacefully."

Their friend was buried in the same clothes in which he had fled two months before.

Afghan Civilian Deaths Increase

The number of civilians killed in the conflict in Afghanistan so far this year has risen 24% compared with the same period last year, the UN says.

More than 1,000 people were killed in the first six months of 2009, according to a UN report.

The UN blamed insurgents for using increasingly deadly modes of attack. It also said air strikes by government-allied forces were responsible.

There has been widespread concern in Afghanistan about civilian death tolls.

In June the US military called for better training in an effort to reduce the numbers of civilian deaths.

See civilian casualties in graphics

Gen Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of US and Nato-led troops in Afghanistan, said civilian casualties were "deeply concerning" and something he "would love to say we'd get to zero".

"We're trying to build into the culture of our force tremendous sensitivity that everything they may do must be balanced against the possibility of hurting anyone," he said in an interview with the BBC.

The Taliban also issued a new code of conduct earlier this week which says fighters should minimise civilian casualties.

But the UN warned more civilians may be killed in the coming weeks as militants fight back against a major offensive by US forces ahead of key elections next month.

Civilian targets

The report, by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), says insurgents were responsible for more deaths than government-allied forces.

But it also notes that two-thirds of the deaths caused by government-allied forces came in air strikes.

The rising death toll was partly due to the fact that militants were deliberately basing themselves in residential districts, the report's authors concluded.

The increasingly sophisticated tactics used by insurgents were also highlighted.

There has been a particular rise in co-ordinated attacks, the report says - using suicide bombers and explosives to target government offices.

In those attacks, civilians were always singled out and killed.

In the most recent of these attacks, gunmen and suicide bombers targeted Gardez and Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, killing five people.

Presidential elections

The report also noted that militants increasingly bombed the cars of civilians who work with government or international troops.

Shops selling music and goods deemed to be "immoral" have also been increasingly targeted.

Civilian deaths rose every month this year compared with 2008, except for February. May was cited as the deadliest month, with 261 civilians killed.

The BBC's David Loyn, in Kabul, says that even the large increase recorded by the UN is likely to be an underestimate, as many deaths are not counted.

The importance of the report lies in the upward trend, our correspondent says.

This is the third year the UN has counted civilian deaths and the numbers have risen each year.

Elections are due to take place amid tight security on 20 August, when President Hamid Karzai is hoping to secure a second term.

However, in the past week alone there have been two attacks on Afghan election campaigns.

On Tuesday a campaign manager for presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah was wounded when his vehicle was attacked in Laghman province.

Two days earlier there was an assassination attempt on Mohammed Qasim Fahim, a running mate of Mr Karzai.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8177935.stm