Bangladesh army says foils coup attempt

DHAKA: The Bangladesh army has foiled a coup planned against the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, a military spokesman said on Thursday. Bangladesh has a history of coups with army generals running the impoverished South Asian nation for 15 years until the end of 1990. “Specific information has been unearthed that some officers in military service have been involved in the conspiracy to topple the system of democratic governance,” Brigadier General Muhammad Masud Razzaq told reporters. He said the officers had been identified. Some had been detained and would be presented before a military court. Intelligence officials had repeatedly warned that “fanatic” religious militants with links to the military may try to...

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Posted in: INTERNATIONAL

Nearly 1.3 million at risk from Afghanistan minefields

KABUL: Nearly 1.3 million people are at risk from mines buried across Afghanistan during past conflicts that remain despite 20 years of international clearance efforts, UN officials said Wednesday. “We know exactly where these minefields are. They are all over the country,” said Alan Macdonald, programme director for the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan, a UN body. The explosives were buried during three recent conflicts: the 1980s war against the Russians, the early 1990s civil war, and during fighting between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban before it was ousted from power in 2001. “There have been three key wars fought here. In all three of those wars, mines were laid in significant number,” said Macdonald. “By...

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Snubbed by Pakistan, US envoy goes to India

WASHINGTON: A US envoy on a mission to discuss post-war Afghanistan will head on a previously unscheduled trip to New Delhi after India’s rival Pakistan refused his visit, officials said Wednesday. US officials said Pakistan informed them that it did not want to receive special envoy Marc Grossman until Islamabad completes an ongoing review of relations with Washington, which have sunk to rock-bottom in recent months. The State Department said Grossman would head Friday to India, whose support for Afghanistan and President Hamid Karzai is deeply resented by many Pakistanis who accuse New Delhi of trying to use the issue against Islamabad. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the United States was not trying...

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Avalanches kill 29 in northeastern Afghanistan

KABUL: Avalanches have killed at least 29 people in Afghanistan’s mountainous northeast as rescuers struggled to reach the worst-hit areas cut off by heavy snows, officials said. The Afghan National Disaster Management Agency said Thursday that at least 40 more people have been injured in a series of avalanches since Monday in Badakhshan province. Roads outside the provincial capital of Faizabad are blocked by at least six feet of snow, the agency said. Afghanistan’s harsh winters and mountainous terrain in the north make avalanches a danger each year. In February 2010, an avalanche killed at least 171 people near the Salang Pass, a major route through the Hindu Kush mountains that connects the capital of Kabul to the...

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Norway security chief quits in Pakistan agents row

OSLO: Norway’s internal security chief resigned late on Wednesday after revealing confidential information that the country had intelligence agents in Pakistan, government officials said. Janne Kristiansen, already under fire for missing signs that a far-right extremist was preparing attacks that killed 77 people in July, said the small Nordic nation had operatives in Pakistan during a parliamentary hearing earlier on Wednesday. Kristiansen, the head of the agency in charge of Norway’s internal security (PST), did not say why the agents were there. But Norway, a close ally of the United States, has hundreds of troops in the Nato-led operation in Pakistan’s neighbour Afghanistan. “PST head Janne Kristiansen has informed the...

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Posted in: INTERNATIONAL