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Tag: car bombing
More Than 90 People Die, About 50 Injured In Afghan Attacks

More Than 90 People Die, About 50 Injured In Afghan Attacks

By Hafiz Ahmadi, dpa

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nearly 100 people were killed Tuesday and around 50 others were wounded in two separate attacks in Afghanistan, officials said.

Eighty-nine people, mainly civilians, were killed when a suicide car bomb exploded in the eastern province of Paktika, Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi said.

“The attack also left 42 wounded,” Azimi told dpa, adding that the ministry sent two helicopters and eight ambulances to transport the injured to military medical facilities.

The attack took place at 10:30 a.m. near a police checkpoint in a crowded bazaar in Orgun district, district governor Mohammad Reza Kharoti said.

It was the deadliest single attack in Afghanistan this year, and came in the middle of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“The explosion was so powerful that it shook the entire area. Hundreds of shops and other business places were damaged,” Kharoti said.
“Two police officers were also among the dead.”

The hospital is overcrowded with the victims, he added.

Local media quoted officials as saying that children were among the victims.

Taliban militants denied involvement in the attack.

Paktika shares a porous border with Pakistan’s tribal regions, where the country’s military has launched an operation against the Pakistani Taliban hideouts.

Separately, two employees of the presidential office were killed by a roadside bomb in Kabul.

President Hamid Karzai’s office said five were wounded.

Karzai condemned the attacks.

“These attacks are against all religious and human values, and cannot be justified by any means,” Karzai said in a statement. “Targeting innocent civilians in the holy month of Ramadan is an unforgivable act and pouring Muslims’ blood is a big crime.”

Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, and said they had targeted a vehicle of the president’s press office.

AFP Photo/Massoud Hossaini

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Lebanon Car Bomb Attack Kills 2, Shatters Months Of Relative Calm

Lebanon Car Bomb Attack Kills 2, Shatters Months Of Relative Calm

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — A suicide car bomb that may have targeted Lebanon’s internal security chief exploded Friday on the Beirut-Damascus highway, killing at least two people and wounding dozens, according to official and media accounts.

It was the first such attack after several months of relative calm in Lebanon and raised fears that the sectarian-fueled violence that has lately erupted in Iraq could be reverberating in this vulnerable Middle Eastern nation. Lebanon has long experienced episodes of spillover violence from the war in neighboring Syria.

According to various accounts of Friday’s attack, a booby-trapped four-wheel drive vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded close to a military checkpoint along the highway east of Beirut, the capital.

Lebanon’s internal security chief, Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, was quoted in local media as saying that the explosion detonated moments after his convoy passed through the checkpoint.

Ibrahim heads Lebanon’s powerful General Security directorate. He has been a key player in an ongoing crackdown against Sunni Muslim extremists blamed for bombings in Lebanon, and has also helped negotiate the release of Shiite and Christian hostages held by Sunni rebels in neighboring Syria.

The two dead in Friday’s bombing included at least one security official, media reports indicated. Most of the victims appeared to be civilians traveling in a passenger vehicle.

The attack occurred after a reported security raid at a Beirut hotel that targeted terrorism suspects.

The Daily Star, an English-language Lebanese newspaper, quoted a security source saying that officials had received word that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was plotting a suicide attack in Lebanon.

ISIS, an al-Qaida breakaway faction made up of Sunni fighters from various nations, is battling to topple governments in Syria and Iraq. Last week, the group made global headlines when its forces grabbed large swaths of land in northern and central Iraq, threatening the central government in Baghdad.

In recent months, Lebanese security forces have cracked down hard on militant Sunni factions, some linked to al-Qaida, blamed for deadly bombings and other attacks in Lebanon during 2013 and early 2014. Friday’s blast broke a period of several months that featured an absence of car bomb attacks in Lebanon.

Lebanon, like neighboring Syria, is composed of a combustible mix of religious and ethnic groups. Lebanon experienced its own sectarian-fueled, 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Lebanon’s fragile democracy faces severe threats from extremists inflamed by sectarian and geopolitical currents roiling the Middle East.

Photo via WikiCommons

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China Holds Mass Sentencing Of 55 People At Football Stadium

China Holds Mass Sentencing Of 55 People At Football Stadium

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — In a spectacle designed to show their resolve against terrorism, Chinese authorities held a public sentencing in a football stadium in the northwestern Xinjiang region of 55 people convicted of violent crimes.

More than 7,000 people filled the stadium stands in Yili prefecture during Tuesday’s sentencing and videos were distributed by police Wednesday to Chinese media. It was an unusually public display in a country where court proceedings are normally closed to the public.

The sentencing follows the car bombing last week in the northwestern city of Urumqi in which 43 people died, the deadliest attack in China in nearly five years.

From the names of the defendants provided by authorities, they appeared to be ethnic Uighurs. Uighurs are a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people from northwestern China.

Li Minghui, the deputy secretary of the local Communist Party, was quoted by the New China News Agency predicting that religious extremists and separatists would soon become “as unpopular as rats crossing the street.”

The defendants were convicted of crimes including homicide, membership in terrorist organizations, harboring criminals and secession, which in China refers to ethnic minorities coveting their own state.

Details of the crimes were not released except in one case: the murder in April 2013 of a family of four, including a 3-year-old child, who were killed with hatchets and knives in their rented apartment. The family had recently moved from central China, and the implication was that they were killed because they were ethnic Han, the Chinese majority.

The three men convicted of the murder were given death sentences, according to state media.

China is on high alert after a cluster of bombings and stabbings of increasing sophistication and lethality. In last week’s attack, two SUVs crashed through a barricade into a crowded pedestrian market while their occupants hurled bombs through the car windows.

Last month, passengers at the Urumqi train station were attacked with knives and bombs on the same day that President Xi Jinping was visiting the region.

Jacob Zenn, an analyst with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, said terrorism might come to dominate Xi’s leadership in much the same way it did for President George W. Bush.

“Terrorism might come to mark the first five years of Xi Jinping’s term, and it’s not an easy battle to win because you are judged,” Zenn said. “Every attack is a loss for you. It’s going to be hard to be foolproof on this.”

More than 200 people have been arrested in Xinjiang in recent weeks. On Tuesday, local authorities said they had busted a bomb-making gang out of Hotan in the Xinjiang region and confiscated 1.8 tons of explosives.

Chinese authorities said the plotters had been inspired and instructed by jihadist videos.

Photo: Akasped via Flickr
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