HEADLINES
 

STORIES
 

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July 17, Islamabad -- Eleven Pakistanis freed from the U.S. military prison holding terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have arrived in Pakistan, a senior Pakistani Interior Ministry official said Thursday. The identities of the men were not immediately disclosed. ``We were expecting that the U.S. officials will free 13 Pakistanis, but they have sent 11 people to Pakistan,' Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, head of the National Crisis Management Cell at the ministry, told The Associated Press. He said there was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy in numbers. Cheema said Pakistani security officials plan to interrogate the men for a few days before allowing them to return to their homes.

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July 17, New Delhi -- U.S relations with India have never been so close, despite New Delhi's refusal to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq, the American ambassador said Thursday. Robert Blackwill, winding up a two-year stint as ambassador, said the two countries are working together on every front, although there are differences, including on Iraq. Earlier this week, the Indian government rejected a U.S. request for troops to participate in stabilizing postwar Iraq. India has said the United Nations, not the United States, must lead Iraq's reconstruction. Local news reports said Thursday that U.S. officials met with the Indian ambassador in Washington to convey their displeasure over New Delhi's decision on the troops.

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July 18, Colombo -- A bomb scare grounded a Cathay Pacific aircraft for more than six hours Friday at Colombo's international airport, an airport official said. Bomb squads were called in to search the Hong Kong-bound flight at the Bandaranaike International Airport, after an anonymous caller warned of a bomb minutes before takeoff, said Gamini Abeyratne, executive director operations at the airport. Nothing was found. Some 360 passengers and the 12-member crew were evacuated, Abeyratne said. The airliner later took off. Airport authorities and police are conducting an investigation.

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July 17, Gilgit, Pakistan -- A crudely made bomb exploded at a U.N.-funded government office in a remote northern region in Pakistan early Thursday, shattering window panes, a local police official Abdul Mobin said. No one was injured in the blast at the office of Northern Areas Development Project in Chilas, 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Pakistan's mountainous Gilgit region, he said. The project, a joint venture of United Nations Development Program and the International Fund for Agriculture Development, is working to provide better health and education facilities to the people.

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July 17, Quetta, Pakistan -- Unknown gunmen shot and killed a former Taliban commander Thursday, according to one of Pakistan's pro-Taliban lawmakers. Maulana Noor Mohammed, a member of Pakistan's federal Parliament, identified the dead leader as Raz Mohammed. ``He was a long-time, brave commander of the Taliban,' he said. ``We are sad about his death.' Maulana Noor Mohammed belongs to an alliance of six religious parties that makes up the main opposition in Parliament. The religious alliance rules in two of Pakistan's four provinces. It forms the government in the North West Frontier Province and shares power in southwestern Baluchistan province, of which Quetta is the capital.

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July 17, Algiers, Algeria -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said during a visit to Algeria on Thursday that the two nations were important to the global fight against terrorism and pledged to continue the effort. Musharraf's visit was aimed at reviving a decade of stagnant ties linked to Pakistan's role as a training ground for thousands of Algerian Islamic extremists who then came home to join a bloody insurgency. The president said he and his Algerian counterpart, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, had converging points of view on ``all the current questions.'

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July 18, Srinagar, India -- A police woman was shot to death as she boarded a bus and a policeman claimed to have accidentally shot and killed a teenage boy Friday in India's troubled Jammu-Kashmir state. Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a security guard, while Indian soldiers killed a suspected Islamic guerrilla in a gunfight early Friday, police said, bringing the day's death toll to four. Constable Amarjeet Kaur was shot from close range by an unknown assailant as she boarding a bus to the town of Tral, where she worked, an officer said on condition of anonymity.

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July 18, New Delhi -- A hardline Pakistani Islamic leader denounced guerrilla violence in India's portion of Kashmir, saying he favored a political solution to the dispute over the Himalayan province. Maulana Fazl-ur Rahman, who is visiting India, also supported New Delhi's long-held stance that a 1972 agreement between India and Pakistan be the framework for the South Asian nuclear rivals to resolve the Kashmir issue, the Times of India reported Friday. The agreement called upon both countries to respect the cease-fire line in Kashmir as ``the recognized position of either side.'

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July 17, New Delhi -- In this vast country where ballot boxes are sometimes delivered by elephants, the Election Commission has an ambitious plan— to install electronic voting machines nationwide ahead of next year's election. ``The whole country would be covered entirely' by the machines for the September-October 2004 voting, Election Commissioner B.B. Tandon was quoted as saying Thursday by the Press Trust of India. He said the 1 million machines are needed for a national election, which is held in stages over several weeks. The commission already has 600,000 electronic voting machines, and has been using them in state elections.

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July 18 -- Perspective on international issues depends to a great extent on in whose boots one is standing. In general geopolitical terms the visit last month of the prime minister of India to China, and the resulting apparent improvement in relations between the two Asian behemoths, was an entirely positive development. The two neighbors, with a combined population of 2.3 billion, agreed among other subjects to retrade routes through the long-disputed territories of Sikkim and Tibet. That was a watershed event, reducing long-standing friction between the two. No one can argue that it isn't better for China and India, both nuclear powers who have fought in the past, to get along with each other. But then there is Nepal, a sometimes troubled kingdom of 23 million sandwiched between the two giant neighbors and obliged to get along with both. To a degree, the Nepalis must please and sometimes appease both New Delhi and Beijing to get things done and even to survive in Asian geopolitics. And that is precisely what Nepal, beset with continuing political instability and an 8-year-old Maoist insurgency itself, is trying to do.

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July 18 -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was in the U.S. last month to reassure his interlocutors about his pro-American bona fides, his own chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Committee, Gen. Mohammed Aziz Khan, said, at a public meeting, "America is the No. 1 enemy of the Muslim world and is conspiring against Muslim nations all over the world." As the Army Chief of Staff, Mr. Musharraf outranks Gen. Aziz Khan. Backed as he is by other Islamist generals in the army, Gen. Aziz Khan must have felt sufficiently secure to, in effect, challenge the president for his pro-American policies. Clearly referring to his chief of army staff, Gen. Aziz Khan said politics should not be practiced while in "uniform." Sensing Mr. Musharraf, with President Bush's financial sweetener, is looking for a way out of the Kashmir morass, he added that even with a solution to the long-running dispute, India and Pakistan could never be friends.

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              --- South Asian News, July 18, 2003 ---

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