Tag: Evening Edition

The Taliban said it sprung the inmates out of the prison in Kandahar through a one-kilometre tunnel that took five months to dig, and claimed all those who escaped belonged to the militia, including over 100 commanders.

The daring breakout in the Taliban’s heartland, the second from the prison in three years, threatens to undermine recent gains claimed by NATO forces in the area after a US-led troop surge, just as the annual fighting season begins.

In a hospital of Misrata, where at least 12 were reported killed in fresh fighting, two captured pro-Kadhafi soldiers told AFP that loyalist forces were losing their grip in the battle for the western port.

“Many soldiers want to surrender but they are afraid of being executed” by the rebels, said Lili Mohammed, a Mauritanian hired by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi’s regime to fight insurgents in the country’s third city.

The United States said it carried out the first drone strike in the more than month-old conflict.

At least 25 people were killed and 100 wounded in street battles on Saturday in the western port city of Misrata, a doctor said, on a day on which NATO air raids struck near a compound in Tripoli where Kadhafi resides.

A day after President Bashar al-Assad scrapped decades of emergency rule, his forces fired live rounds at demonstrators in several towns and cities nationwide, witnesses and activists told AFP by telephone.

The official SANA news agency said security forces intervened using only tear gas and water cannon to “prevent clashes” between protesters and passers-by.

While Martelly, a former singer and carnival entertainer, courted vital foreign investment in the United States, violence erupted in several towns back home following the announcement overnight of definitive poll results.

Demonstrators burned vehicles and blocked roads, and at least one person was killed in protests linked to legislative results confirming the ruling Unity party’s long-time grip on parliamentary power.

In the besieged city of Misrata, Tim Hetherington, an Oscar-nominated British film director and war photographer, was killed and three colleagues were wounded by mortar fire, the local hospital said.

Vanity Fair, for which Hetherington was working, confirmed the death of the 41-year-old from Liverpool, the second journalist killed covering Libya’s two-month-old conflict.

In what was the first request by any insurgents for boots on the ground, a senior member of Misrata’s governing council, Nuri Abdullah Abdullati, said they were asking for the troops on the basis of “humanitarian” principles.

Previously, he told journalists, “we did not accept any foreign soldiers in our country, but now, as we face these crimes of Kadhafi, we are asking on the basis of humanitarian and Islamic principles for someone to come and stop the killing.”

Officials said the bombings occurred at around 8:30 am (0530 GMT) at the western gate into the Green Zone, which houses the offices of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s parliament and the US and British embassies.

A queue of cars was waiting to enter the Green Zone when the vehicles exploded, a security official said.

It was the deadliest single incident this year against foreign forces in war-torn Afghanistan and comes amid a wave of suicide attacks on security targets, three months before foreign forces start a limited pullback.

The latest strike was at an army base in the Gambiri desert area in Laghman province, near Jalalabad city, the de facto capital of Afghanistan’s east.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) gave Ante Gotovina 24 years and co-accused Mladen Markac 18 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity but acquitted third defendant Ivan Cermak.

The court infuriated Zagreb by backing the prosecution claim of a “joint criminal enterprise” with late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, aimed at driving Croatian Serbs out of their “ancestral homelands” in the western Krajina region.