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STORIES
 

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Aug 13, Colombo -- A top Norwegian intermediary met Wednesday with a key Tamil Tiger leader in northern Sri Lanka in a bid to kick-start the country's peace process, officials and rebel sources said. Erik Solheim and the Tigers' political wing leader, S.P. Thamilselvan, discussed a government proposal that would give the rebels greater autonomy in the Tamil-dominated northeast, and considered how the rebels would respond to it, a rebel source said on condition of anonymity.

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Aug 13, New Delhi -- India's Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a plea by Coca-Cola's local arm that an Indian research body's allegation about high levels of pesticide in Coke threatened the company's right to do business in the country. Several government departments and private organizations have boycotted Coca-Cola and PepsiCo products after a New Delhi-based research group said it had found dangerous levels of pesticide residue in samples of locally made Coke and Pepsi drinks.

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Aug 13, Srinagar, India -- Kashmiris on Wednesday were disillusioned by India's rejection of an offer from Pakistan to enforce a cease-fire along the disputed frontier that divides the Himalayan province between the nuclear-armed rivals. More violence in the mountainous enclave compounded their disappointment. Two civilians were killed and 37 injured in separate explosions Wednesday outside a bank and in a village, while three suspected Islamic militants were killed in gunbattles with security forces.

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Aug 13, Lucknow -- Government archaeologists will hidden a secret report later this month to a special court established to resolve a bitter, decades-old dispute over whether a Hindu temple ever stood on the site of an ancient mosque in northern India. The Archaeological Survey of India, which spent months excavating the religious site in Ayodhya, will hand over their report by Aug. 22, Narendra Prasad, a court officer, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. ``The report will be hiddented in a sealed envelope and the court willthe seal on Aug. 25,' Prasad said. Lawyers representing Hindu and Muslim groups involved in the court battle will be given copies of the report on Aug. 25 and time to file any objections, court officials said, but the report will not be released publicly.

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Aug 13, Chittagong, Bangladesh -- Police questioned seven suspects on Wednesday after a businessman was found dead in southern Bangladesh, an official said. The bullet-riddled body of Rezaur Rahman Zakir was found Tuesday in a pond near Chittagong city, said police officer Noor Ahmed Majumdar. Zakir, who owned a shipbreaking company, had not been heard from since he went to a rail station to see off his younger brother early Monday, the officer said.

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Aug 13, Lahore, Pakistan -- A bus load of Indian teenagers crossed into Pakistan for a three-day peace camp, bringing a message of hope as the bitter South Asian rivals try to improve relations. ``We have finally come to meet our Pakistani friends,' said 15-year-old Indian student Shabbir Reshamwalla upon her arrival in Pakistan late Tuesday. ``If everybody thinks like us then there will peace between Pakistan and India.'

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Aug 14 -- Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra began a 2-day official visit to Sri Lanka on Thursday, aimed at boosting bilateral trade, the state-run Channel 9 reported. The premier was quoted as saying that the trip is aimed at strengthening the relationship and searching for channels to boost the amount of bilateral trade, which remains low, as Sri Lanka generally purchases most of its goods via other countries. He said that the main Sri Lankan export to Thailand is tealeaves, while Thailand had exported several products to Sri Lanka, but the amount of exports stood at a mere 160 million US dollars a year, an extremely low figure compared to the Sri Lanka' s 20 million-strong population.

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Aug 14, Colombo -- Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga pledged Thursday to strengthen economic, religious and cultural ties between the two predominantly Buddhist nations. ``The president is extremely pleased with the talks,' Kumaratunga's spokesman, Harim Peiris, told reporters after the two leaders met, hours after Thaksin arrived for a two-day visit.

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Aug 14, New Delhi -- Suspected separatist rebels blew up a bridge on the main highway in India's northeast Thursday, killing six civilians traveling on a bus, news reports said. The attack comes a day before India celebrates its national independence. At least 11 separatist groups have called for a strike during the celebrations marking India's independence from Britain in 1947. The rebels asked citizens of the region to boycott all government functions and to refrain from any celebrations. The rebels oppose Indian sovereignty in the region and accuse New Delhi of exploiting the natural resources of the oil- and mineral-rich northeast.

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Aug 14, Colombo -- A Sri Lankan court sentenced 254 Pakistanis to one year of hard labor and fined each of them US$500 for attempting to leave the island illegally, a court official said Thursday. The Pakistanis were arrested by police during a major crackdown on people smuggling in July. They were allegedly preparing to board ships to Italy. ``If the Pakistanis fail to pay the fine, courts ordered that they will have to stay a further two months in prison,' said K.K. D. Gunesekera, registrar of the Tangalle court - where the case was heard Wednesday.

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Aug 14, Karachi, Pakistan -- Gunmen shot and killed an ethnic-based party activist in the violence-prone port city of Karachi, police said Thursday. Ejaz Kamal, a worker of the Mutahida Qami Movement (United People's Movement), was killed Wednesday, said Karachi police superintendent Sanaullah Abbasi. When Kamal, 40, answered a knock on his door, he was shot and killed, the neighbors said. The assailants fled on a motorcycle.

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Aug 14, Quetta, Pakistan -- Attackers threw a grenade at a school in Quetta, causing no injuries, and a rocket was fired on the outskirts of the southwestern city, the state-run news agency reported Thursday. It was not immediately clear if the two incidents were related. Both occurred late Wednesday and no one claimed responsibility. Unidentified assailants tossed a grenade at the school, which was closed at the time. It landed in anspace, shattering windows of nearby classrooms, the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

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Aug 14, Srinagar, India -- Thousands of police with automatic weapons and mine detectors searched homes, cars and a soccer stadium Thursday in Indian-controlled Kashmir ahead of Independence Day celebrations, hoping to avert a threat by Islamic militants. Police are looking for four suicide squads that, according to intelligence reports, allegedly entered Srinagar to carry out terror attacks during Friday's soldiers' parade celebrating the day in 1947 when India gained independence from Britain. Nearly 9,000 police and paramilitary troops have been deployed for the event.

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Aug 14, Colombo -- The government on Thursday urged the Tamil Tiger rebels to leave a disputed military camp, saying their refusal to do so further hurt the island's faltering peace process. European monitors of a February 2002 truce ruled last month that the rebel camp in eastern Sri Lanka was on government territory. The rebels, however, refuse to dismantle the camp, saying it is on rebel-controlled land. ``It is of greatest conceivable importance that both sides honor the rulings of the monitoring mission,' Cabinet spokesman Gamini Peiris told reporters. His comments came a day after Norwegian peace broker Erik Solheim met with the rebels and discussed the camp, which monitors say seriously threatens peace efforts.

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Aug 13, Islamabad -- Pakistan's president Wednesday linked a ceasefire in Kashmir to what he called reciprocity by India. The offer was made during a meeting with five dozen Indian Members of Parliament and journalists. The Calcutta Telegraph reported Pervez Musharraf said: "Reciprocity can be demonstrated by cessation of atrocities in India-occupied Kashmir, reduction in troops level, allowing political activity and the detained people to travel freely around the globe."

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Aug 13, Karachi, Pakistan -- A Pakistani court on Wednesday acquitted the jailed husband of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of charges that he ordered the killing of a business leader, his attorney, Shahadat Awan, said. Asif Zardari was charged last year with ordering the murder of Sajjad Hussain, former chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills. Hussain was shot to death by unidentified assailants in the southern city of Karachi in 1998. The killing's motive was never made clear.

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Aug 14, Islamabad -- Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has appealed a Swiss magistrate's decision sentencing her to a six-month suspended prison term for allegedly laundering $11 million through Swiss bank accounts, her spokesman said Thursday. Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who received the same sentence, also was expected to appeal the July 31 decision by Swiss investigating magistrate Daniel Devaud. Bhutto's appeal was filed by her lawyers in Switzerland on Wednesday, her spokesman Nazir Dhoki told The Associated Press in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

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Aug 13 -- Ahmed Amin just wants to play football. He's 17, and Cupertino High's starting tight end. His older brother Hassan, 19, would rather chase girls around the DeAnza College campus. But Ahmed has to miss school and practice every third Wednesday to report to the INS office an hour away. And Hassan recently spent a night in jail for immigration violations. Last February, the boys went with their mother to an INS office in compliance with a new special registration policy. The policy requires males over 16 from a handful of countries -- mostly Arab and Muslim -- to report to the INS and have their paperwork scrutinized. Initially, Hassan didn't have a problem complying.

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Aug 14, New Delhi -- Tae Min Hun, the dour captain of the North Korean freighter Kuwolsan, glared icily from the bridge as tempers around him soared in the midday heat. On June 30, 1999, as customs agents in India's northwestern port city of Kandla waited impatiently to board the vessel, Tae received urgent instructions from Pyongyang: At all cost, let no onethe cargo boxes.

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Aug 14, Newark -- A London-based arms dealer was ordered held without bond yesterday on charges of trying to sell a shoulder-fired Russian antiaircraft missile on U.S. soil to an agent for a group that he believed would use it against a U.S. commercial airplane. Hemant Lakhani's buyer was an FBI informant, however, and Russian counterterrorism investigators posing as weapons suppliers disarmed the sophisticated SA-18 Igla surface-to-air missile before shipping it to the United States.

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Washington -- Just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, Hemant Lakhani began talking about selling a shoulder-fired missile to shoot down airliners in the United States with a man who said he represented a Somali terrorist group, officials said Wednesday. Over the next year and a half, Lakhani, 68, a British national born in India and living in London, had 150 conversations, mostly in Hindi or Urdu, with the terrorists' representative about the sale of one Russian-made missile followed by 50 more in a $5 million deal, prosecutors and FBI officials said.

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              --- South Asian News, August 14, 2003 ---

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SOUTH ASIA NEWS

     US NEWS SOURCES -August 15, 2003

HEADLINES
 

STORIES
 

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Aug 14, Islamabad -- President Pervez Musharraf told the U.S. ambassador Thursday he expects action to be taken against the U.S. troops who killed two Pakistani soldiers earlier this week while they patrolled near the Afghan border, the Foreign Ministry said. ``The president stated that the incident was unacceptable,' a Foreign Ministry statement said. Musharraf demanded that ``an immediate inquiry be conducted and action initiated against those responsible for the incident,' according to the news release. The ministry reported that Nancy Powell, the U.S. envoy, expressed regret and assured Musharraf that an inquiry was already underway.

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Aug 14, Gauhati, India -- Suspected tribal rebels killed 18 Bengali settlers in two attacks Thursday in a remote part of northeastern India plagued by tensions between local tribes and recent migrants. Several other settlers were wounded in the attacks in Tripura state, where several tribal groups have been fighting to evict tens of thousands of migrants from Bangladesh and the neighboring state of West Bengal. No group immediately claimed responsibility, but police blamed the attack on the All Tripura Tiger Forces, an outlawed rebel group that has been fighting for a separate tribal homeland.

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Aug 15, New Delhi -- Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee called on old enemy Pakistan on Friday to walk the road of peace but said Islamabad must end what he called cross-border terrorism. "On the occasion of our Independence Day anniversaries, I invite Pakistan to join us on the road for peace," he said in an address to the nation from the 17th century Red Fort in the old quarter of New Delhi. "The path ahead is rocky, there are minefields, but if we work together, the obstacles will go away," Vajpayee said from within a three-sided cabin of bullet-proof glass. "We have been fighting for 50 years, how much more blood shall we spill?"

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Aug 14, Kathmandu -- The United States urged Nepal's government and Maoist rebels on Thursday to seek a peaceful end to a long-running conflict that has claimed more than 7,200 lives. ``Only a political process, involving sincere deliberations in a spirit of democratic compromise, can bring peace, political stability and economic growth back in Nepal,'' the U.S. Embassy in Nepal said in a statement. Later this week talks are due to resume between the government and the rebels, who have been fighting to topple the constitutional monarchy and set up a communist state in the mountainous nation.

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Aug 14, Islamabad -- A council of hard-line Islamic clerics issued an edict Thursday that said Pakistan should not send troops to Iraq and that Pakistani soldiers who die there won't be eligible for martyrdom or an Islamic funeral. The edict, or fatwa, increases pressure on the government, which has yet to agree to send troops to help U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq. Officials have said they favor deploying soldiers under the auspices of an international body like the United Nations. At a rally in the capital, Islamabad, the dozen clerics issued the edict that said sending troops to Iraq would violate the tenets of Islam.

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Aug 14, New Delhi -- Indian President A.P.J. Kalam on Thursday urged rival Pakistan to adopt a wider vision of cooperation to solve problems that are common to the South Asian nuclear neighbors. Kalam, whose position is mostly ceremonial, said the conflict over Kashmir — the Himalayan enclave that both countries claim as their own — will become insignificant and unwarranted as nations experience acute shortages of water and energy in the next two decades. ``No single nation will be able to handle this situation by itself,' Kalam said in his annual address on the eve of Indian Independence Day.

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Aug 14, Peshawar, Pakisan -- Police raided a suspected al-Qaida hideout in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday night and exchanged gunfire with people inside, killing one of the suspects, police said. Officers went to the home in the city of Peshawar after informants told them that al-Qaida suspects were in the residence, said a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official did not provide further details about the suspects. After surrounding the home and firing tear gas into it, police — with automatic rifles and body armor — were able to enter the first floor of the two-story house. The gunfire stopped shortly before midnight but the officers were still waiting to raid the second floor.

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Aug 15, Peshawar, Pakistan -- Pakistani authorities were hunting a suspected al Qaeda operative on Friday who escaped a raid on a house in which a man was killed and a woman arrested, a senior security official said. The official said the man who escaped was believed to be an Egyptian national called Suleman. He added that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation had offered $100,000 for information leading to his capture.

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Aug 14, Lucknow, India -- Members of upper and lower Hindu castes clashed over land in a northern city leaving at least 60 people wounded, authorities said Thursday. The clash took place Wednesday near Mau town in the northern Uttar Pradesh state. The melee was between the upper caste Thakurs and Dalits, who occupy the lowest rung in the Hindu social hierarchy and were once referred to as ``untouchables.' ``The Thakursd fire (and) 60 Dalits were injured, seven of them seriously,' the state's home secretary Raja Ram said in Lucknow, the state capital.

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Aug 14, New Delhi -- India's main opposition party in Parliament on Thursday moved a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government — though there was no threat to its survival. The Congress party made the symbolic gesture after an impasse over the Defense Ministry's refusal to disclose a report by the Central Vigilance Commission, which probed corruption allegations in military purchases during a mini-war with Pakistan in 1999.

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Aug 14, Islamabad -- The leaders of India and Pakistan said on Thursday they wanted to end decades of distrust and feuding, as the nuclear-armed nations separately marked their anniversaries of freedom from British colonial rule. ``Our forefathers did not lay the foundation of a new country to create enmity,'' Pakistan Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali said at an Independence Day ceremony ahead of India's celebration on Friday. ``I will also say to Bharat (India), if it wants to see the region free from the clutches of hardship, it has to settle its fundamental differences with Pakistan.''

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Aug 15 -- A federal judge has thrown out the eight-year-old convictions of two defense company executives who sold technology that helped India build better nuclear missiles, finding that even though their conduct was "reprehensible," it was not criminal. In a stunning finale to a decade-long drama, US District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock overturned the jury convictions last month of Walter Lachman of Concord and Maurice Subilia of Kennebunkport, Maine, but sealed the decision until yesterday. The top executives of two related high-tech companies were found guilty of violating Department of Commerce export rules, intended to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, by shipping a device without a special license. The jury found that the men believed they needed a permit, but Woodlock said he was persuaded by the defense lawyers' argument. In a 66-page decision, Woodlock found that the men's actions were morally wrong, but not criminal.

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Aug 15 -- Federal officials say a suspected terrorist, who worked as a taxi driver in Philadelphia, managed to slip out of the country last month, allegedly with help from his ex-wife and another cabdriver. The fugitive, Agha Ali Abbas Qazalbash, also known as Hussain Ali, drove an Olde City Taxi at times and lived in Upper Darby. He'd entered the country on a visitor's visa on Oct. 18, 2000, and should have left by April 17, 2001. Qazalbash allegedly fled to Pakistan, his native country, on July 12, just as anti-terrorism agents were closing in on him, authorities contend.

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Aug 15 -- A prominent Islamic preacher named in court papers as a co-conspirator with members of an alleged Virginia jihad network is expecting to be indicted in the case, his attorney said yesterday. Martin McMahon, who represents Ali Al-Timimi and contends that he has done nothing wrong, said federal prosecutors have told other defense lawyers involved in the case that his client will be indicted by a federal grand jury. Prosecutors declined to comment but said at a court hearing yesterday that additional indictments are likely by the end of this month. Sources said investigators have been seeking information about Timimi from other people who are cooperating in the case. Prosecutors in June unsealed an indictment charging 11 men with training with and fighting for Lashkar-i-Taiba, a group trying to drive India from Kashmir that has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. The government calls the case a major step in its war on terrorism, although many Muslims feel the men are being unfairly targeted.

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Aug 15, Srinagar, India -- Authorities in Indian Kashmir said thousands of people on Friday attended the main function of India's independence day celebrations first time since a rebellion broke out in the Himalayan region 14 years ago. Most of those who turned out were brought by the state government on buses and under heavy security. "At least 15,000 to 20,000 people participated in the celebrations. This is highest number since 1989," said Kulbushan Jandial, a spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir government. Witnesses put the number at about 10,000 in the heavily guarded stadium in Srinagar, the summer capital of a state torn by separatist violence that has killed 38,000 people since 1989.

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Aug 14, Agartala, India -- Militants fighting Indian rule in the remote northeast killed 34 people in bomb blasts and shootouts as the nation tightened security on the eve of Independence Day celebrations, officials said on Thursday. In two incidents in the volatile state of Tripura, armed militants fired indiscriminately, killing 11 people in Kamal Nagar and 14 in Krishnapura village. A remote-controlled bomb earlier went off just as a bus was crossing a bridge in neighboring Manipur, killing six passengers and wounding 13, a police spokeswoman said.

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Aug 15 -- Arnold Schwarzenegger has farther to go than he thinks. He may become governor of California, but he can't become God. That privilege is reserved for the Indian movie-star-turned-politician N. T. Rama Rao, who played so many mythological heroes in so many hit films that fans built a temple to him. NTR, as he was popularly known, traded his divine celebrity for the dross of office by founding his own political party in 1980 and romping to victory in state elections. That made him chief minister, the equivalent of a governor, of Andhra Pradesh, a state which then had 50 million people (California is home to a scant 34 million).

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              --- South Asian News, August 15, 2003 ---

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