Tag Archives: Death

Multiple suicide bombing targets Nigerian refugees, Boko Haram blamed

people walk at the site of a bombing attack

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Seven suspected Boko Haram militants blew themselves on the outskirts of a northeast Nigerian city on Friday, a local aid agency said, in an attack witnesses said targeted refugees preparing to return to their home villages.

The bombing took place outside Maiduguri, the population center at the heart of a government campaign to eradicate the Islamist group, whose more than seven-year insurgency has killed 15,000 people and forced some two million from their homes.

The Borno State Emergency Management Agency said eight members of a local militia, the civilian Joint Task Force, were wounded in the attack, which underscored Boko Haram’s ability to continue to operate despite the government’s insistence it has crushed the group.

Witnesses told Reuters the attackers detonated their bombs

near a large refugee camp, outside which crowds of displaced people were gathering around trucks to form convoys before trying to return home.

In December, President Muhammadu Buhari said the capture of a key camp marked the “final crushing” of Boko Haram in its last enclave in Sambisa forest, once the group’s stronghold.

But since then the group, which split into two factions last year, has stepped up its attacks.

One Boko Haram faction is led by Abubakar Shekau from the Sambisa forest and the other, allied to jihadist group Islamic State, and led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, based in the Lake Chad region.

(Reporting by Ahmed Kingimi, Adewale Kolawole and Ola Lanre in Maiduguri; Writing by Paul Carsten; editing by John Stonestreet)

Plane strike hits Yemen mourners, killing 9 women, 1 child: residents

Yemen rubble after air strike that killed women and child

SANAA (Reuters) – Warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition struck a house north of Yemen’s capital where a crowd of mourners was gathered, residents said on Thursday, killing nine women and a child and injuring dozens.

The Saudi-led coalition said it was investigating reports of civilian casualties in the area.

The air strike hit the house of a local tribal leader in Ashira, a village north of Sanaa, on Wednesday night, a resident told Reuters. Mourners had gathered there to offer condolences after a woman died.

“People heard the sound of planes and started running from the house but then the bombs hit the house directly. The roof collapsed. Blood was everywhere,” a second resident of Ashira, who gave his name as Hamid Ali, told a Reuters cameraman.

Pictures published by local media showed tribesmen searching through the rubble of a destroyed house said to belong to Mohammed al-Nakaya, a tribal leader allied with Yemen’s Houthi movement.

One showed a man kneeling in the dust cradling the body of an elderly woman.

It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the pictures.

“We are aware of media reports that Houthi rebels are claiming that Yemeni civilians were killed in an air raid overnight near Sanaa,” the coalition said in statement.

“There has been fighting between Yemeni armed forces and rebels in this area in recent days. We are investigating the reports.”

In October the alliance of mainly Gulf Arab states was heavily criticized after launching an air strike on a funeral gathering in Sanaa that killed 140 people, according to one U.N. estimate.

The death toll from that strike was one of the highest in any single incident since the alliance began military operations in March 2015 to try to restore the administration of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who the Houthis ousted.

The White House said at the time it might consider cutting its support to the Saudi-led campaign which has been providing air support for Hadi’s forces in a civil war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced millions.

The alliance, which says it does not target civilians, blamed the October funeral attack on incorrect information it said it received from the Yemeni military that armed Houthi leaders were in the area.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari; Writing by Tom Finn and Sami Aboudi,; Editing by Toby Chopra and John Stonestreet)

Two dead in Pakistan as suicide bomber targets judges

Volunteers search for remains in vehicle that was truck in bomb attack

By Mehreen Zahra-Malik

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A suicide bomber attacked a van carrying judges in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Wednesday, killing the driver and a passerby, police said, the second attack of the day in a new surge in militant violence.

Security has improved in Pakistan over the past few years but a spate of attacks in recent days, and a threat by a hardline militant faction to unleash a new campaign against the government, has raised fears of bloodshed.

“A suicide bomber on a motor bike rammed into an official van in which some judges were traveling,” senior superintendent of Peshawar police, Sajjad Khan, told media.

He said three female judges and one male judge had been taken to a nearby hospital while the driver of the van and a passerby had been killed.

The attack took place in a wealthy neighborhood of the northwestern city, where Taliban gunmen attacked a military-run school in December 2014 and killed 134 children and 19 adults.

Former cricket star Imran Khan, Pakistan’s main opposition leader, was due to visit the nearby hospital. Media reported that he was unharmed.

Khan’s party rules Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of which Peshawar is capital.

In a separate attack on Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a government office in the northwestern Mohmand Agency, killing five people.

There was no immediate claim for the Peshawar attack but the Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the Mohmand blast.

The same group claimed an attack in the city of Lahore on Monday in which 13 people, five of them policemen, were killed.

The group said the Lahore attack was the beginning of a new campaign against the government, security forces, the judiciary and secular political parties.

Separately on Monday, a bomb squad commander was killed along with another policeman while they were trying to defuse a bomb in the southwestern city of Quetta.

The spate of attacks has underlined the threat militants pose to the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif despite an army offensive launched in 2014 to push them out of their northwestern strongholds.

Pakistan had announced a 20-point National Action Plan after the Peshawar school massacre in 2014, the main thrusts of which included expanding counter-terrorism raids, secret military courts and the resumption of hangings.

(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in Peshawar; Writing by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Turkey arrests Frenchman suspected of helping plan New Year nightclub attack

memorial for those killed in Turkey nigh club attack

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish authorities have arrested a Frenchman suspected of helping plan a New Year’s Day shooting in an Istanbul nightclub which killed 39 people, the state-run Anadolu news agency said on Tuesday.

The man, a 22-year-old French citizen of Turkish descent, was caught in Istanbul, Anadolu said. A police official said he had been detained weeks ago and formally charged last week. His detention had not previously been made public.

Islamic State claimed the nightclub attack and said it was revenge for Turkish intervention in Syria. A court on Saturday remanded in custody Uzbek national Abdulgadir Masharipov, who is accused of carrying out the shooting.

The private Dogan news agency said the French suspect had lived in France since 2009, but it was not clear when he came to Turkey.

He was caught carrying the rental contract of the Istanbul house where Masharipov was staying when he was captured on Jan. 16, Dogan said. It said authorities had been seeking the Frenchman over alleged links to Islamic State.

NATO member Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State and launched an incursion into Syria in August to drive the jihadist group and Kurdish militia fighters away from its borders.

Islamic State has been blamed for at least half a dozen attacks on civilian targets in Turkey over the past 18 months, including a triple suicide bombing and gun attack on Istanbul’s main airport last June, which killed 42 people.

Authorities on Tuesday prepared an indictment for the airport attack, demanding for the 45 suspects to be sentenced to jail time between 2,132 years and 3,342 years, Anadolu said.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Daren Butler, Nick Tattersall and Alison Williams)

North Korean leader’s half brother killed in Malaysia: source

North Korean half brother to Kim Jong Un

By Ju-min Park and Joseph Sipalan

SEOUL/KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – The estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been killed in Malaysia, a South Korean government source told Reuters on Tuesday.

Kim Jong Nam, the older half brother of the North Korean leader, was known to spend a significant amount of his time outside the country and had spoken out publicly against his family’s dynastic control of the isolated state.

He was believed to be in his mid-40s.

Police in Malaysia told Reuters on Tuesday an unidentified North Korean man had died en route to hospital from Kuala Lumpur airport on Monday. Abdul Aziz Ali, police chief for the Sepang district, said the man’s identity had not been verified.

An employee in the emergency ward of Putrajaya hospital said a deceased Korean there was born in 1970 and surnamed Kim.

South Korea’s TV Chosun, a cable television network, said that Kim was poisoned at Kuala Lumpur airport by two women believed to be North Korean operatives, who were at large, citing multiple South Korean government sources.

The South Korean government source who spoke to Reuters did not immediately provide further details.

South Korea’s foreign ministry said it could not confirm the reports, and the country’s intelligence agency could not immediately be reached for comment.

Kim Jong Nam and Kim Jong Un are both sons of former leader Kim Jong Il, who died in late 2011, but they had different mothers.

Kim Jong Nam was believed to be close to his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who was North Korea’s second most powerful man before being executed on Kim Jong Un’s orders in 2013.

In 2001, Kim Jong Nam was caught at an airport in Japan traveling on a fake passport, saying he had wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He was known to travel to Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.

He said several times over the years that he had no interest in leading his country.

“Personally I am against third-generation succession,” he told Japan’s Asahi TV in 2010, before his younger had succeeded their father.

“I hope my younger brother will do his best for the sake of North Koreans’ prosperous lives.”

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Se Young Lee in SEOUL and Joseph Sipalan And Emily Chow in KUALA LUMPUR; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Two die as winter storm wallops northeastern United States

Pedestrians walk in Times Square as heavy snow falls

By Scott Malone and Jonathan Allen

BOSTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The fiercest snowstorm of the winter slammed the northeastern United States on Thursday, leaving a foot (30 cm) of snow in places, canceling thousands of flights and shutting down schools. At least two deaths were blamed on the storm.

The storm, which came a day after temperatures had been a spring-like 50 to 60 degrees (10 to 16C), had wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour (80 kph) and left roads and sidewalks dangerously slick in densely populated cities such as New York, Boston and Hartford, Connecticut.

The storm’s winds reached as far south as Virginia, where a truck driver died after his tractor-trailer was blown off the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Tom Anderson, the facility’s deputy director, said in a phone interview.

A New York City doorman died while shoveling snow as he slipped and fell down a flight of stairs, crashing into a window that cut his neck, police reported.

Some areas experienced “thunder snow,” violent bursts of weather featuring both snow and lightning.

Nearly two-thirds of the flights into or out of the three major New York-area airports were canceled, as were 69 percent of those at Boston Logan International Airport, according to Flightaware.com.

Nationwide, about 4,000 flights were canceled and 5,700 delayed.

“The roads are dangerous,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters. “I don’t care if you have a four-wheel-drive car and you think you’re a super hero … if you don’t have to be out, don’t be out.”

David Hassan, 50, attested to the ugliness of the weather as he packed up his mobile coffee cart in New York’s Times Square.

“I don’t like coming out in this weather but I have three kids going to school and I have to work,” Hassan said as he prepared for the two-hour trip back to his home in Parsippany, New Jersey.

New York received about a foot of snow, while Boston was braced for up to 20 inches.

Many schools systems were closed in the area, and Boston schools would remain closed on Friday, Mayor Marty Walsh said.

Many government offices also were shuttered with Massachusetts and Connecticut ordering non-emergency workers to stay home.

Blizzard warnings were in effect for the New York’s eastern Long Island suburbs, southern Connecticut and Rhode Island, as well as the Massachusetts coast.

Temperatures were expected to fall to single-digit Fahrenheit levels overnight in the Boston area.

(Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus and Daniel Trotta in New York, Ian Simpson in Washington and Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Providence, Rhode Island; Editing by Larry King and Bill Trott)

Venezuelan girl’s diphtheria death highlights country’s health crisis

a mother who lost her child in Venezuela due to disease and health crisis

By Alexandra Ulmer and Maria Ramirez

PARIAGUAN, Venezuela (Reuters) – Eliannys Vivas, 9, started to get a sore throat on a Friday last month in this languid Venezuelan town where papaya trees shade poor cinder-block homes.

Five days later, Eliannys was dead, likely a victim of diphtheria, a serious bacterial infection that is fatal in 5 to 10 percent of cases and particularly lethal for children.

Her death and a wider Venezuelan outbreak of diphtheria, once a major global cause of child death but increasingly rare due to immunizations, shows how vulnerable the country is to health risks amid a major economic crisis that has sparked shortages of basic medicines and vaccines.

Eliannys’ story is also one of misdiagnoses and missed signals worsened by government secrecy around the disease. Her family had never heard of diphtheria and local doctors did not immediately suspect it, despite the infection having affected hundreds of people just a few hours away in Bolivar.

After Eliannys was taken to a local hospital, doctors, thinking the disease was asthma, used a sort of inhaler on her.

But the usually chatty girl – “a little parrot,” in the words of her day-laborer father — kept weakening, so doctors transferred her to a larger government hospital once an ambulance became available hours later.

At El Tigre hospital, all the devices to examine throats had broken three years ago, so no one checked her properly, according to a nursing assistant.

“They said it was asthma, asthma, asthma,” said her mother, Jennifer Vivas. But as Eliannys struggled to speak, she was rushed to a third and then a fourth hospital in neighboring Bolivar state.

There, doctors discovered with horror Eliannys suffered from grossly inflamed throat membranes – the classic symptom of diphtheria.

But even the fourth hospital lacked adequate treatment for the infection, so she received only a half dose of antitoxins and no penicillin at all, according to a medical professional who treated her there.

As Eliannys’ airwaves blocked up, she suffered two successive heart failures and died on Jan. 18.

“If the diphtheria diagnosis had been made earlier and she had gotten antitoxins, she would have had a chance of surviving,” the source who treated her said, asking to remain anonymous because the government has banned health professionals from speaking to the media.

DIPHTHERIA RETURNS

Venezuela controlled diphtheria in the 1990s, but it reappeared in the vast jungle state of Bolivar in mid-2016.

At least two dozen children died last year, doctors say, and cases are now thought to have spread to a half-dozen other states.

Shortages of basic drugs and vaccines, emigration of underpaid doctors, and crumbling infrastructure have made it easier for diseases to spread, medical associations said.

Many poor and middle-class Venezuelans also have weakened immune systems because they are no longer able to eat three meals a day or bathe regularly due to product scarcity, reduced water supply and raging inflation.

Government secrecy has compounded the problem.

“The fact people don’t know (about diphtheria) helps the bacteria spread,” said Caracas-based epidemiologist Julio Castro, who has been tracking the diphtheria outbreak and who showed photos sent to him of patients with thick white membranes coating their throat.

The unpopular leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro said in October there were no proven cases of diphtheria and admonished those seeking to spread “panic.”

It has since informed the World Health Organization of 20 confirmed diphtheria cases and five deaths, and emphasized there is a major vaccination drive under way, but has yet to provide a full national picture of the disease’s effects amid a generalized clampdown on data.

The Information and Health Ministries, as well as the Venezuelan Social Security Institute, which is in charge of some drug distribution and hospitals, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Eliannys’ case and diphtheria more generally.

The only other country in the region with a significant number of confirmed diphtheria cases last year was Haiti with 33, the WHO said in December.

MORE ILLNESS AHEAD?

Doctors think diphtheria first spread from the rough-and-tumble illegal gold mines in Bolivar state, which is attracting poor Venezuelans as the minimum monthly wage languishes around $30.

After Eliannys’ family was forced to start skipping dinner in December, her father, Tulio Medina, decided to work in Bolivar’s yucca and yams plantation where he made more money but might have brought the infection home.

The disease has already spread to capital Caracas, where doctors say a 32-year-old mother died last year, and could yet affect more states.

With the Venezuelan pharmaceutical association estimating that roughly 85 percent of drugs are unavailable at any given time and in light of the short supply of vaccines, doctors are bracing for further increases in illnesses like malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Venezuela’s rate of immunization with the pentavalent vaccine, which protects children from five major infections including diphtheria, had slipped to 78 percent between January and November 2016, according to Health Ministry figures leaked to former Health Minister José Felix Oletta and seen by Reuters.

“At this rate, we’re going to see more illnesses, more deaths, more doctors leaving the country,” said pediatrician Hugo Lezama, the head of Bolivar’s doctors association, who himself earns only a handful of dollars a month.

“Those of us who stay are going hysterical trying to perform miracles so our patients don’t die.”

(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Christian Plumb and Matthew Lewis)

Aid ship to help Rohingyas arrives in Myanmar, greeted by protest

people protest aid ship from malaysia

By Simon Lewis and Aye Win Myint

YANGON (Reuters) – A small group of protesters greeted a ship from Malaysia when it docked in Myanmar on Thursday carrying aid bound for the troubled state of Rakhine, where many members of the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority live.

The ship docked on the outskirts of the commercial hub, Yangon, where it was due to unload 500 tonnes of food and emergency supplies, with the rest of its 2,200 ton cargo bound for southeast Bangladesh.

Almost 69,000 Rohingyas have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh in the past four months from a security force crackdown.

The aid shipment from mostly Muslim Malaysia has stirred opposition in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where many see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Malaysia has been an outspoken critic of Myanmar over the crisis in Rakhine state, which erupted after nine policemen were killed in attacks on border posts on Oct. 9 claimed by Rohingya militants.

U.N. officials working with refugees in Bangladesh have told Reuters the death toll in the Myanmar security sweep could be more than 1,000.

Refugees have given journalists, human rights groups and U.N. investigators detailed accounts of troops firing on civilians, burning villages, beatings, detention and rape.

The Myanmar government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has rejected the reports of abuse, saying many were fabricated. It insists the strife is an internal matter.

Underlining the controversy surrounding the aid for the Rohingya, several dozen Buddhist monks and nationalists demonstrated outside the port terminal on Thursday.

They held signs rejecting the use of the name Rohingya – the name most Muslims in northern Rakhine state use to describe themselves, which Myanmar rejects.”We don’t mind that they want to support people who are suffering,” Buddhist monk U Thuseiktha told Reuters.

“But we don’t want political exploitation of this issue by calling them Rohingya. The name Rohingya doesn’t exist.”

‘CONFIDENCE’

Myanmar officials have also accused Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak of tapping into the Rohingya cause “to promote a certain political agenda”.

The Muslim groups and aid organizations behind the aid shipment had hoped to deliver the supplies directly to Rohingyas in Rakhine State, but were instead forced to hand the aid over to the Myanmar government in Yangon.

Myanmar has also insisted that it be distributed equally between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine State.

Abd. Aziz Sheikh Fadzir, a lawmaker from Najib’s ruling party who attended the docking, said the organizations behind the shipment had been delivering aid to other crises around Asia and the Pacific.

Any suggestion of political expediency was “speculation”, he said.

Najib has called Myanmar’s military operation “genocide” and saw off the shipment when it left Malaysia last Friday.

Reezal Merican Naina Merican, Malaysia’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, who was also at the port, praised Myanmar for agreeing to accept the delivery, saying it built confidence between the international community and Myanmar.

Win Myat Aye, Myanmar’s minister for social welfare, relief and resettlement, said Rakhine was “the second-poorest state in Myanmar, is a natural disaster-prone area by geographical location, and it is compounded by communal conflicts unfortunately”.Myanmar has been criticized for hampering the work of agencies including the U.N. World Food Program trying to feed people in area where malnutrition rates were high before the conflict .The government had been delivering aid to affected people in northern Rakhine “without discrimination”, Win Myat Aye said, adding Myanmar would “arrange the distribution of this aid to the communities in the affected areas at the soonest possible time”.

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

At least one dead in numerous car crashes in icy New England

connecticut state police

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) – An unexpected bout of icy weather on Wednesday morning caused scores of accidents around New England, with 55 vehicles colliding in a series of crashes outside Boston and a man killed in a separate incident.

Police in Needham, Massachusetts, said a vehicle struck and killed a 63-year-old man who had been trying to help another motorist stuck on the ice in the suburb about 18 miles (29 km) west of Boston.

“It appears as though the vehicle was sliding on the ice and was unable to stop before striking the victim, pinning him between the two vehicles,” the Needham Police Department said in a statement. It did not identify the victim.

North of Boston, some 55 cars were involved in a series of crashes in the suburb of Wakefield, Massachusetts, with multiple motorists injured, though none seriously, state police said.

It was the start of a forecast whipsaw of weather over 48 hours. Temperatures around Boston are expected to pass 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10°C) on Wednesday before dropping back below freezing overnight, when a snowstorm is expected to begin.

The National Weather Service was forecasting 8 to 14 inches (20-36 cm) of snow on Thursday.

Wednesday’s ice, the result of an overnight rainstorm, may have caught commuters off-guard since earlier forecasts had anticipated temperatures would rise above freezing before the snow begins, said National Weather Service meteorologist Bill Simpson.

The result was chaos on roads around Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire.

Photos from the Wakefield area showed vehicles spun at strange angles and entirely blocking the roadway, with emergency responders having trouble maintaining their footing on icy roads.

The Massachusetts State Police had not yet counted the total number of traffic collisions around the state, a dispatcher said.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker ordered a two-hour opening delay for state offices.

“Exercise extreme caution,” Baker said, “as driving is very difficult due to icy conditions.”

Farther north, all but one lane of a major interstate highway in Maine was closed after a tractor-trailer that ran off the road and flipped on its side due to the ice. Work crews were removing its cargo, bags of potatoes, before attempting to lift the vehicle off its side, a state police spokesman said.

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Kiev and Kremlin trade blame over surge in east Ukraine fighting

Russian/Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov gives news briefing on Ukraine situation

KIEV/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Ukraine and Russia blamed each other on Tuesday for a surge in fighting in eastern Ukraine over recent days that has led to the highest casualty toll in weeks and cut off power and water to thousands of civilians on the front line.

The Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists accuse each other of launching offensives in the government-held industrial town of Avdiyivka and firing heavy artillery in defiance of the two-year-old Minsk ceasefire deal.

Eight Ukrainian troops have been killed and 26 wounded since fighting intensified on Sunday – the heaviest losses for the military since mid-December, according to government figures.

“The current escalation in Donbass is a clear indication of Russia’s continued blatant disregard of its commitments under the Minsk agreements with a view of preventing the stabilization of the situation and achieving any progress in the security and humanitarian spheres,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

The peace deal was agreed in February 2015, but international security monitors report ceasefire violations on a daily basis, including regular gun and mortar fire.

The latest clashes mark the first significant escalation in Ukraine since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose call for better relations with Moscow has alarmed Kiev while the conflict remains unresolved.

Ukrainian authorities said they were prepared for a possible evacuation of Avdiyivka’s 16,000 residents, many of whom have little or no access to electricity or water after shelling from the separatist side hit supply infrastructure.

Meanwhile Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukrainian government troops had launched a deadly attack on pro-Russian rebels across the Avdiyivka front line on Monday.

“Such aggressive actions, supported by the armed forces of Ukraine, undermine the aims and the task of realizing the Minsk accords,” he said, accusing the Ukrainian authorities of organizing the offensive as a ruse to try to distract attention from domestic and other problems.

Close to 10,000 people have been killed since fighting between Ukrainian troops and rebels seeking independence from Kiev erupted in April 2014.

Ukraine and NATO accuse the Kremlin of supporting the rebels with troops and weapons. The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia over the conflict, as well as for its annexation of Crimea.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets in Kiev, Katya Golubkova in Moscow; Writing by Alessandra Prentice in Kiev and Andrew Osborn in Moscow; Editing by Christian Lowe and Mark Trevelyan)