Friday 7 February 2014

Death toll from Colombian prison fire climbs to 16


The death toll from a prison fire in Colombia's northern city of Barranquilla has climbed to 16, local authorities said on Thursday.

The fire on Jan. 27 at the city's Modelo Prison started when inmates set fire to mattresses after wardens used tear gas to stop a clash between members of rival gangs.

On Thursday, Alma Solano, local health secretary in Barranquilla, said the death of inmates who had been taken to hospital for injuries brought the toll to 16.

"Between yesterday and today, the death toll has climbed to 16 from 14. One of the inmates had burns over 40 percent of his body as well as (damage to) his respiratory system," she said.

Prison authorities said 15 inmates are still hospitalized and security measures have been strengthened at the hospitals after one of them attempted to escape.

Friday 07 February 2014

http://english.cri.cn/6966/2014/02/07/2941s811722.htm

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14 killed, 7 injured in western Nepal bus accident


Fourteen people were killed and seven injured when their bus plunged into a river in western Nepal, police said on Thursday.

The bus fell into a river at Chidipani village in Palpa district early on Thursday morning, Xinhua reported.

The identities of the deceased are yet to be established. The injured passengers have been rushed to a local hospital.

“We are investigating the cause of the accident and rescue operations are going on,” police officer Shiva Kumar Shrestha said.

Local residents, police and army personnel are carrying out the rescue operations.

Bus accidents take place frequently in Nepal due to poor road conditions, lack of trained drivers and overloading of passengers.

Friday 07 February 2014

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/international/2014/February/international_February142.xml§ion=international

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At least 14 dead in bus accident in northern Philippines


Fourteen people, including two foreign-tourists, were killed after a passenger bus from Manila fell into a 120-meter ravine in a mountainous area along the Banaue-Bontoc Road in sitio Paggang, Barangay Talubin in Bontoc town on Friday morning.

The crash happened in Bontoc, a resort town 280 kilometres (175 miles) north of Manila known for its mountainside rice terraces.

Thirty-one others were injured, said Police Provincial Director Oliver Enmodias.

Police reported that a Florida (TXT 872) passenger bus was negotiating a difficult part of the road in Bontoc town, near the boundary of Ifugao and Mountain Province when it plunged into the ravine.

The Office of Civil Defence said the bus from Manila had about 47 passengers on board. Fairlane Amungan, a provincial disaster response official, said authorities were still determining the exact number of people on the bus as they searched for more victims.

The bus came from its terminal in Sampaloc, Manila. The accident happened at around 7:20 a.m.

Supt. Ramir Saculles, Mt. Province deputy police director for Operations, said that most of the recovered bodies were mutilated due to the impact of the crash.

Fourteen of the passengers died on the spot including a Canadian and a Dutch national, he said.

Among the injured were a Dutch woman and the driver of the bus, who were taken to hospital, Enmodias added.

Local police spokesman Superintendent Davy Vicente Limmong said they suspect human error or a mechanical problem was the cause of the accident, as there was no traffic and the weather was clear

Saculles said that there is a possibility that the driver of the bus dosed off. He also mentioned that mechanical trouble could have also caused the accident.

Mt. Province Gov. Leonard Mayaen assured that the local government will do its best to be able to provide the needs of the victims.

Poorly-maintained buses are the backbone of land transport in the Philippines but they have been involved in frequent accidents, leading to calls for tighter regulations

Friday 07 February 2014

http://www.theprovince.com/news/crashes+ravine+Philippines+killing+injuring+including+Dutch/9478976/story.html

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Investigating genocide in Somaliland


Hargeisa, Somaliland – Frankincense wafts through the air of a quiet building on the outskirts of Hargeisa, in the self-declared republic of Somaliland. It masks the odour of the remains of 38 men, whose skeletons are packed into cardboard boxes.

The tattered containers will be opened this month with the arrival of a forensics team on February 10. Somaliland officials want to show that the men were victims of a clan-based killing spree carried out by Somalia’s government in the 1980s.

They say as many as 200,000 men, women and children were executed and buried in mass graves. They accuse Somalia’s late dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, of atrocities and want to put his alleged henchmen on trial.

“Everybody is missing a relative. Fathers, mothers, brothers, cousins,” said Khadar Ahmed Like, who runs the territory’s War Crimes Investigation Commission. “It is about getting the perpetrators in court. Unless we learn lessons, heads of state can do what they want.”

This month’s post-mortems mark the latest bid to secure justice for Somaliland’s victims. The atrocities date back to when Somaliland was part of Somalia and governed by Barre from the capital, Mogadishu.

In the 1980s, his increasingly authoritarian regime cracked down on the rebel Somalia National Movement (SNM) and targeted members of the Isaaq clan from northwestern Somalia who had created the group.

National forces arrested Isaaq clansmen suspected of having links to the SNM between 1984-88, commissioners say. Men, women and children were bound and frogmarched to the edges of towns and executed.

Somalilanders recount gruesome stories of Isaaq schoolchildren being killed and having their blood drained to provide transfusions to injured soldiers.

Grisly crackdown

Yusuf Mire, 58, is still angry about what happened. He points to the amputated stump of his left arm, where he was shot by Somali national forces during a crackdown in the central Somaliland town of Burao in 1988.

“My relatives were taken from the house to be slaughtered,” he told Al Jazeera. “We want recognition that genocide took place in Somaliland. We will send this to the UN and get the right to be separated from the rest of Somalia.”

In 1988, Barre sent aircraft and troops to the SNM stronghold of Hargeisa, killing more than 40,000 people and reducing the city to rubble. But the campaign backfired and consolidated the opposition forces, which took Mogadishu in January 1991.

Four months later, Somaliland broke away from Somalia. While Somalia collapsed into more than two decades of civil war, Somaliland gradually developed better security, a livestock trade, its own currency and democratic elections.

Evidence of atrocities emerged in May 1997, when heavy rains washed away dirt to uncover skeletons from Hargeisa’s mass graves. But efforts to raise the profile of the atrocities failed to gain traction beyond the isolated region.

“We are now going to bring this to the international arena,” Somaliland’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Bihi Yonis, told Al Jazeera. “The perpetrators are hanging around, living a normal life. Those who are living in the West, we must go after them.”

This latest drive, funded by the US-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), saw the 38 bodies exhumed in September 2012. This month’s visit by an eight-person team will study the skeletons for evidence of systematic killings and will excavate a second site.

“Hargeisa is a graveyard,” said Jose Baraybar, a forensics expert who manages the team. “Some say there are 200,000 bodies under the ground. Others say 60,000. Nobody really knows. That’s why we have to get the record straight.”

Gathering evidence

They will look for bindings, close-range headshot wounds and other signs of systematic killing, said Baraybar, who has worked on probes in Haiti, Bosnia and elsewhere. Evidence that victims hailed from the same clan could indicate genocide, rather than mass-murder.

The three-year project will train locals to unearth Somaliland’s 226 known mass graves. The commission has listed 33 suspects for prosecutions. They include Barre’s son-in-law, Mohamed Said Hirsi, better known as “General Morgan”.

But there the project hits a snag, because Somaliland is not recognised by other countries.

Officials in Hargeisa lack the clout to push for a UN-backed tribunal, such as those that prosecuted the criminals of Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Legally, Somaliland is part of Somalia, which has not joined the International Criminal Court.

“They are a long way from launching prosecutions,” said Baraybar. “All of the killers have left Somaliland – they’re in Somalia, the US and Europe. Prosecution is very difficult for a country that is not a country yet.”

Down south in Mogadishu, there is little appetite for war crimes tribunals – either for Barre’s brutality in Somaliland or any other atrocity that has occurred in years of violence between rival clans, Islamists and foreign forces.

Like, a 64-year-old father-of-eight who lived in exile in the 1980s, said the suspects include members of Somalia’s government and parliament – although he declined to reveal their names for fear of repercussions.

Some live in Somalia, but others are in Kenya, Europe and the US, he said. Prosecutions must begin soon because the atrocities started almost 30 years ago, and some of the masterminds have already died.

Not all perpetrators have escaped justice. In 2012, seven Somali victims secured a $21 million judgement against Mohamed Ali Samantar, a Barre-era prime minister, for planning the torture and killing of Isaaq clansmen, in a US court.

It was one of three civil cases that the CJA has helped bring against Somalis who migrated to the US, using a statute that provides civil remedies for overseas abuses. But such cases fall short of the criminal tribunal that many in Somaliland want.

‘We remember’

The bombing of Hargeisa and other atrocities cast long shadows across the breakaway region. Few Somalilanders want to rejoin Somalia, despite recent security gains under a UN-backed government in Mogadishu.

Somaliland parents tell their children stories about the cruelties. The cash-strapped government spends $50,000 on the war crimes commission each year, and is building a $300,000 museum to showcase skulls and weapons from the bloody era.

“When the former Somali government controlled the country, many Somaliland people were killed,” said Mohamed Jamal Emil, a 21-year-old who lives in a hut on the outskirts of Hargeisa. “It was a long time [ago], but we remember. My parents told me.”

Somaliland diplomats are in talks with counterparts from Mogadishu over long-term autonomy and independence. The atrocities and prospects for a tribunal could feature in the negotiations.

For Baraybar, the war-crimes sleuth, there is more to this probe than the prosecutions it may yield.

“While perpetrators die, the dead remain where they are. As long as they remain where they are, they tell us a story. That story has a healing power. Hearing that story is the right of those who survived, and of future generations,” he said.

“The grandchild must know what happened to his grandfather.”

Friday 07 February 2014

http://somalilandpress.com/investigating-genocide-in-somaliland-2-48059

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Ritual killings on the rise in Zambia


Mutilated bodies – often missing arms, tongues, lips, genitals or skin – are being found with increasing frequency in different parts of Zambia in what authorities say are ritual killings.

"We're amazed by the increased number of bodies discovered with parts missing," Police Deputy Inspector-General Solomon Jere told Anadolu Agency.

"This is a mystery we need to solve," he asserted.

"Sometimes, we're forced to agree with… people claiming that these acts are nothing less than acts of ritual killing," Jere said.

Recently, the dismembered body of a 19-year-old student, from which certain body parts and facial skin had been removed, was discovered in Lusaka.

Earlier, the body of a 70-year-old woman – from which the nipples had been severed – was found in the town of Sesheke in the Western Province.

A number of other victims in the Central Province had their hands and legs chopped off.

In the Sinazeze Township in the Southern Province, two businessmen were recently arrested after being caught attempting to purchase a cadaver – along with a number of body parts – for 45,000 kwacha (roughly $882).

In Kabwe, capital of the Central Province, another man was arrested after attempting to sell his children to a witchdoctor for $58,000.

Spiritual fortification

Professor Mubanga Kashoki, a former lecturer at the University of Zambia, said ritual killings were perceived by some as acts of "spiritual fortification."

"The use of human body parts for medicinal purposes is based on the belief that it is possible to appropriate the life-force of a person through its literal consumption by another," he told AA.

"More often than not, these crimes evade the spotlight because they're largely unreported, or recorded merely as murder," Kashoki said.

He added that perpetrators usually target vulnerable members of society – such as the poor, women, children, the disabled or albinos – whose families lack the resources to obtain justice.

Lusaka businessman Julius Mebelo, for his part, believes the crimes constitute ritualistic murder.

"I wonder why most victims are young girls whose lips, tongues, genitals and other organs have been removed," he told AA. "I agree with the people who feel the missing parts of the body are used for rituals."

Such killings have already led to violent attacks on those accused of practicing ritual murder.

Police official Jere said protests had recently been staged in different parts of the country against the troubling phenomenon.

He said that in Mansa, provincial capital of Luapula Province, three people had been burnt to death by angry residents following rumors that they had hired ritual killers to abduct children and use their body parts to make magical charms to boost their wealth.

"Not only did residents kill these businessmen, but they looted all their goods and threatened to kill anyone using human blood to get rich," Jere said.

Sanaula Ibrahim, a 51-year-old Indian business owner in Luapula, narrowly escaped with his life after angry protesters looted his chain of shops and torched his home.

He had been accused of involvement in ritual murder – a charge he vehemently denies.

"I was accused of ritual killing," he said, "but I don't want to talk about it now."



Friday 07 February 2014

http://www.worldbulletin.net/news/128344/ritual-killings-on-the-rise-in-zambia

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