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Thursday, July 19, 2012
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Pak court summons official on Musharraf arrest warrant issue
hindustantimes
Press Trust Of India
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court conducting the trial of suspects charged with involvement in the 2007 assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto has summoned a senior official to explain why authorities have been unable to serve an arrest warrant for former President Pervez Musharraf. Judge Rana Nisar Ahmed of the Rawalpindi-based court summoned Federal Investigation Agency Director Wajid Zia to explain the non-compliance of the warrant issued for Musharraf during proceedings conducted at Adiala Jail yesterday.
Criticising the inordinate delay in serving the warrant, the judge asked Zia to appear before him with an explanation at the next hearing on April 9. Zia is the chief of the joint investigation team probing Bhutto's assassination.
During the last few hearings of the case, the judge has repeatedly asked the FIA to serve the arrest warrant for 68-year-old Musharraf, who has been living in self-exile in Britain since 2009.
The Express 24/7 news channel reported that the British government had refused to extradite Musharraf to Pakistan, citing the absence of an extradition treaty between the two countries.
The FIA handed over to the anti-terrorism court a report received from the British Home Department, the channel reported.
The anti-terrorism court issued an arrest warrant for Musharraf in February after investigators declared him an "absconder" and told the judge that the former military ruler was not cooperating in the probe into the assassination. Investigators have alleged that Musharraf's regime had failed to provide adequate security to Bhutto after she returned to Pakistan from self-exile in 2007.
During yesterday's proceedings, which were held behind closed doors, FIA Deputy Director Khalid Rasool told the judge that authorities had sent a letter to the British High Commission asking it to send back Musharraf’s arrest warrant. "We have sent them a fresh letter requesting the British authorities to send back the arrest warrants, whether served or not," he was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune newspaper.
FIA prosecutor Chaudhry Azhar said it seemed that there "is a Musharraf sympathiser...in the Foreign Office who may be impeding" the serving of his arrest warrant, the report said. The FIA has so far submitted three separate charge-sheets in the assassination case.
Press Trust Of India
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court conducting the trial of suspects charged with involvement in the 2007 assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto has summoned a senior official to explain why authorities have been unable to serve an arrest warrant for former President Pervez Musharraf. Judge Rana Nisar Ahmed of the Rawalpindi-based court summoned Federal Investigation Agency Director Wajid Zia to explain the non-compliance of the warrant issued for Musharraf during proceedings conducted at Adiala Jail yesterday.
Criticising the inordinate delay in serving the warrant, the judge asked Zia to appear before him with an explanation at the next hearing on April 9. Zia is the chief of the joint investigation team probing Bhutto's assassination.
During the last few hearings of the case, the judge has repeatedly asked the FIA to serve the arrest warrant for 68-year-old Musharraf, who has been living in self-exile in Britain since 2009.
The Express 24/7 news channel reported that the British government had refused to extradite Musharraf to Pakistan, citing the absence of an extradition treaty between the two countries.
The FIA handed over to the anti-terrorism court a report received from the British Home Department, the channel reported.
The anti-terrorism court issued an arrest warrant for Musharraf in February after investigators declared him an "absconder" and told the judge that the former military ruler was not cooperating in the probe into the assassination. Investigators have alleged that Musharraf's regime had failed to provide adequate security to Bhutto after she returned to Pakistan from self-exile in 2007.
During yesterday's proceedings, which were held behind closed doors, FIA Deputy Director Khalid Rasool told the judge that authorities had sent a letter to the British High Commission asking it to send back Musharraf’s arrest warrant. "We have sent them a fresh letter requesting the British authorities to send back the arrest warrants, whether served or not," he was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune newspaper.
FIA prosecutor Chaudhry Azhar said it seemed that there "is a Musharraf sympathiser...in the Foreign Office who may be impeding" the serving of his arrest warrant, the report said. The FIA has so far submitted three separate charge-sheets in the assassination case.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
CIA contractor Ray Davis freed over Pakistan killings (BBC)
A Pakistani court has freed a US CIA contractor after acquitting him of two counts of murder at a hearing held at a prison in Lahore, officials say.
Raymond Davis, 36, was alleged to have shot dead two men in the eastern city of Lahore in January following what he said was an attempted armed robbery.
The acquittal came when relatives of the dead men pardoned him in court.
They confirmed to the judge overseeing the case that they had received compensation - known as "blood money".
Under Pakistani law, relatives of a murder victim can pardon the killer.
Reports say about 18 family members of the two dead men were in court on Wednesday and confirmed that they wanted Mr Davis to be freed and pardoned because they had received "blood money".
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Tsunami death toll likely over 10,000
TAGAJO: The death toll in Japan's earthquake and tsunami will likely exceed 10,000 in one state alone, an official said Sunday, as millions of survivors were left without drinking water, electricity and proper food along the pulverized northeastern coast.
Although the government doubled the number of soldiers deployed in the aid effort to 100,000, it seemed overwhelmed by what's turning out to be a triple disaster: Friday's quake and tsunami damaged two nuclear reactors at a power plant on the coast, and at least one of them appeared to be going through a partial meltdown, raising fears of a radiation leak.
The police chief of Miyagi prefecture, or state, told a gathering of disaster relief officials that his estimate for deaths was more than 10,000, police spokesman Go Sugawara told The Associated Press. Miyagi has a population of 2.3 million and is one of the three prefectures hardest hit in Friday's disaster. Only 379 people have officially been confirmed as dead in Miyagi.
The nuclear crisis posed fresh concerns for those who survived the earthquake and tsunami, which hit with breathtaking force and speed, breaking or sweeping away everything in its path.
"First I was worried about the quake, now I'm worried about radiation. I live near the plants, so I came here to find out if I'm OK. I tested negative, but I don't know what to do next," Kenji Koshiba, a construction worker, said at an emergency center in Koriyama town near the power plant in Fukushima.
According to officials, at least 1,200 people were killed — including 200 people whose bodies were found Sunday along the coast — and 739 were missing in the disasters.
In a rare piece of good news, the Defense Ministry said a military helicopter on Sunday rescued a 60-year-old man floating off the coast of Fukushima on the roof of his house after being swept away in the tsunami. He was in good condition.
The U.S. Geological Survey calculated the initial quake to have a magnitude of 8.9, while Japanese officials raised their estimate on Sunday to 9.0. Either way it was the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan. It has been followed by more than 150 powerful aftershocks.
Teams searched for the missing along hundreds of miles (kilometers) of Japanese coastline, and hundreds of thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centers that were cut off from rescuers and aid. At least 1.4 million households had gone without water since the quake struck and some 2.5 million households were without electricity. Temperatures were to dip near freezing overnight.
Trade Minister Banri Kaeda said the region was likely to face further blackouts and that power would be rationed to ensure supplies go to essential needs.
Large areas of the countryside remained surrounded by water and unreachable. Fuel stations were closed and people were running out of gasoline for their vehicles.
Public broadcaster NHK said around 380,000 people have been evacuated to emergency shelters, many of them without power.
In Iwaki town, residents were leaving due to concerns over dwindling food and fuel supplies. The town had no electricity and all stores were closed. Local police took in about 90 people and gave them blankets and rice balls but there was no sign of government or military aid trucks.
At a large refinery on the outskirts of the hard-hit port city of Sendai, 100-foot (30-meter) -high bright orange flames rose in the air, spitting out dark plumes of smoke. The facility has been burning since Friday. A reporter who approached the area could hear the roaring fire from afar, and after a few minutes the gaseous stench began burning the eyes and throat.
At a small park near the refinery, trees and large swaths of grass were covered in thick black crude oil. Two large tanker trucks were jammed sideways among the trees, their gas tanks crumpled.
Mayumi Yagoshi, an office worker at the refinery, said she had taken the day off Friday because she had slipped and hurt her back.
"I was lucky, but I feel really bad. My mobile phone doesn't work and I have no idea what happened to everyone else," she said.
In the small town of Tagajo, near Sendai, dazed residents roamed streets cluttered with smashed cars, broken homes and twisted metal.
Residents said the water surged in and quickly rose higher than the first floor of buildings. At Sengen General Hospital the staff worked feverishly to haul bedridden patients up the stairs one at a time. With the halls now dark, those that can leave have gone to the local community center.
"There is still no water or power, and we've got some very sick people in here," said hospital official Ikuro Matsumoto.
One older neighborhood sits on low ground near a canal. The tsunami came in from the canal side and blasted through the frail wooden houses, coating the interiors with a thick layer of mud and spilling their contents out into the street on the other side.
"It's been two days, and all I've been given so far is a piece of bread and a rice ball," said Masashi Imai, 56.
Police cars drove slowly through the town and warned residents through loudspeakers to seek higher ground, but most simply stood by and watched them pass.
Dozens of countries have offered assistance. Two U.S. aircraft carrier groups were off Japan's coast and ready to provide assistance. Helicopters were flying from one of the carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan, delivering food and water in Miyagi.
Two other U.S. rescue teams of 72 personnel each and rescue dogs were scheduled to arrive later Sunday, as was a five-dog team from Singapore.
In Sendai, firefighters with wooden picks dug through a devastated neighborhood. One of them yelled: "A corpse." Inside a house, he had found the body of a gray-haired woman under a blanket.
A few minutes later, the firefighters spotted another — that of a man in black fleece jacket and pants, crumpled in a partial fetal position at the bottom of a wooden stairwell. From outside, the house seemed almost untouched, two cracks in the white walls the only signs of damage.
The man's neighbor, 24-year-old Ayumi Osuga, dug through the completely destroyed remains of her own house, her white mittens covered by dark mud.
Osuga said she had been playing origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into figures, with her three children when the quake stuck. She recalled her husband's shouted warning from outside: "'GET OUT OF THERE NOW!'"
She gathered her children — aged 2 to 6 — and fled in her car to higher ground with her husband. They spent the night huddled in a hilltop home belonging to her husband's family about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.
"My family, my children. We are lucky to be alive," she said.
"I have come to realize what is important in life," Osuga said, nervously flicking ashes from a cigarette onto the rubble at her feet as a giant column of black smoke billowed in the distance. (AP)
Although the government doubled the number of soldiers deployed in the aid effort to 100,000, it seemed overwhelmed by what's turning out to be a triple disaster: Friday's quake and tsunami damaged two nuclear reactors at a power plant on the coast, and at least one of them appeared to be going through a partial meltdown, raising fears of a radiation leak.
The police chief of Miyagi prefecture, or state, told a gathering of disaster relief officials that his estimate for deaths was more than 10,000, police spokesman Go Sugawara told The Associated Press. Miyagi has a population of 2.3 million and is one of the three prefectures hardest hit in Friday's disaster. Only 379 people have officially been confirmed as dead in Miyagi.
The nuclear crisis posed fresh concerns for those who survived the earthquake and tsunami, which hit with breathtaking force and speed, breaking or sweeping away everything in its path.
"First I was worried about the quake, now I'm worried about radiation. I live near the plants, so I came here to find out if I'm OK. I tested negative, but I don't know what to do next," Kenji Koshiba, a construction worker, said at an emergency center in Koriyama town near the power plant in Fukushima.
According to officials, at least 1,200 people were killed — including 200 people whose bodies were found Sunday along the coast — and 739 were missing in the disasters.
In a rare piece of good news, the Defense Ministry said a military helicopter on Sunday rescued a 60-year-old man floating off the coast of Fukushima on the roof of his house after being swept away in the tsunami. He was in good condition.
The U.S. Geological Survey calculated the initial quake to have a magnitude of 8.9, while Japanese officials raised their estimate on Sunday to 9.0. Either way it was the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan. It has been followed by more than 150 powerful aftershocks.
Teams searched for the missing along hundreds of miles (kilometers) of Japanese coastline, and hundreds of thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centers that were cut off from rescuers and aid. At least 1.4 million households had gone without water since the quake struck and some 2.5 million households were without electricity. Temperatures were to dip near freezing overnight.
Trade Minister Banri Kaeda said the region was likely to face further blackouts and that power would be rationed to ensure supplies go to essential needs.
Large areas of the countryside remained surrounded by water and unreachable. Fuel stations were closed and people were running out of gasoline for their vehicles.
Public broadcaster NHK said around 380,000 people have been evacuated to emergency shelters, many of them without power.
In Iwaki town, residents were leaving due to concerns over dwindling food and fuel supplies. The town had no electricity and all stores were closed. Local police took in about 90 people and gave them blankets and rice balls but there was no sign of government or military aid trucks.
At a large refinery on the outskirts of the hard-hit port city of Sendai, 100-foot (30-meter) -high bright orange flames rose in the air, spitting out dark plumes of smoke. The facility has been burning since Friday. A reporter who approached the area could hear the roaring fire from afar, and after a few minutes the gaseous stench began burning the eyes and throat.
At a small park near the refinery, trees and large swaths of grass were covered in thick black crude oil. Two large tanker trucks were jammed sideways among the trees, their gas tanks crumpled.
Mayumi Yagoshi, an office worker at the refinery, said she had taken the day off Friday because she had slipped and hurt her back.
"I was lucky, but I feel really bad. My mobile phone doesn't work and I have no idea what happened to everyone else," she said.
In the small town of Tagajo, near Sendai, dazed residents roamed streets cluttered with smashed cars, broken homes and twisted metal.
Residents said the water surged in and quickly rose higher than the first floor of buildings. At Sengen General Hospital the staff worked feverishly to haul bedridden patients up the stairs one at a time. With the halls now dark, those that can leave have gone to the local community center.
"There is still no water or power, and we've got some very sick people in here," said hospital official Ikuro Matsumoto.
One older neighborhood sits on low ground near a canal. The tsunami came in from the canal side and blasted through the frail wooden houses, coating the interiors with a thick layer of mud and spilling their contents out into the street on the other side.
"It's been two days, and all I've been given so far is a piece of bread and a rice ball," said Masashi Imai, 56.
Police cars drove slowly through the town and warned residents through loudspeakers to seek higher ground, but most simply stood by and watched them pass.
Dozens of countries have offered assistance. Two U.S. aircraft carrier groups were off Japan's coast and ready to provide assistance. Helicopters were flying from one of the carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan, delivering food and water in Miyagi.
Two other U.S. rescue teams of 72 personnel each and rescue dogs were scheduled to arrive later Sunday, as was a five-dog team from Singapore.
In Sendai, firefighters with wooden picks dug through a devastated neighborhood. One of them yelled: "A corpse." Inside a house, he had found the body of a gray-haired woman under a blanket.
A few minutes later, the firefighters spotted another — that of a man in black fleece jacket and pants, crumpled in a partial fetal position at the bottom of a wooden stairwell. From outside, the house seemed almost untouched, two cracks in the white walls the only signs of damage.
The man's neighbor, 24-year-old Ayumi Osuga, dug through the completely destroyed remains of her own house, her white mittens covered by dark mud.
Osuga said she had been playing origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into figures, with her three children when the quake stuck. She recalled her husband's shouted warning from outside: "'GET OUT OF THERE NOW!'"
She gathered her children — aged 2 to 6 — and fled in her car to higher ground with her husband. They spent the night huddled in a hilltop home belonging to her husband's family about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.
"My family, my children. We are lucky to be alive," she said.
"I have come to realize what is important in life," Osuga said, nervously flicking ashes from a cigarette onto the rubble at her feet as a giant column of black smoke billowed in the distance. (AP)
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Japan earthquake: Wave forecast map
Tsunami warnings were issued for coastal areas across the Pacific basin - from Hawaii to Chile - as a result of the waves triggered by the Japan earthquake.
This map shows the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center's "tsunami forecast model" of wave heights above normal sea level across the region and how long after the 0546 GMT earthquake they were expected.
The tsunami was triggered by the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan since records began. The tremor, measured at 8.9 by the US Geological Survey, hit at 1446 local time (0546 GMT) at a depth of about 24km.
The impact has been devastating, with cars, ships and buildings swept away by a wall of water.
This map shows the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center's "tsunami forecast model" of wave heights above normal sea level across the region and how long after the 0546 GMT earthquake they were expected.
The tsunami was triggered by the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan since records began. The tremor, measured at 8.9 by the US Geological Survey, hit at 1446 local time (0546 GMT) at a depth of about 24km.
The impact has been devastating, with cars, ships and buildings swept away by a wall of water.
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