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Sri Lanka’s military and the Tamil Tiger rebels opened a new front after an earlier fierce battle killed 129 soldiers, casting a shadow over peace talks planned for late October.
   Troops and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam blamed each other for the new flare-up in the eastern district of Ampara, which followed heavy fighting on the northern Jaffna peninsula on Wednesday.
   ‘LTTE terrorists launched artillery and mortar shells towards the police Special Task Force defences,’ at Kandjikudiaru in Ampara, the defence ministry said.
   ‘The Liberation Tigers fighters were engaged in defensive clashes with the STF troopers, according to the Tiger political chief of Ampara district,’ the pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website said.
   There were no reports of casualties in the overnight artillery exchanges which began late Thursday.
   The LTTE meanwhile handed over 74 bodies of government soldiers killed in the Jaffna battle. The government said 129 soldiers were killed.
   ‘The handover took place yesterday evening at 8 p.m. local time at Omantai checkpoint on the A-9 road,’ said the International Committee of the Red Cross, which acted as an intermediary.
   Omantai, 260 kilometres (160 miles) north of Colombo, is on the de facto border separating government and rebel-held territory.
   Reporters were not allowed to witness the military receiving the bodies, which were transported from rebel-held territory and handed over by the ICRC.
   The military casualties were the worst suffered by troops in a single battle since a Norwegian-brokered truce agreed in February 2002 but which is almost in tatters.
   The military claimed it killed over 200 Tigers but the guerrillas said they lost 22 men, revising up their earlier claim of 10 dead.
   The heavy bloodshed cast a shadow over peace talks planned to be held in Switzerland in late October. Britain, Sri Lanka’s former colonial power, urged both sides to resume negotiations.
   ‘Our firm view is that dialogue, not violence, is the only viable route to resolving the conflict,’ the British High Commission said in its annual human rights report released Thursday. The report also accused both the government and the Tamil Tigers of killing civilians.
   Meanwhile, two men were shot dead in the government-held town of Vavuniya on Friday, police said.
   Scandinavian truce monitors began probing the killing of the unidentified men in the de facto border town, which has seen a spate of similar murders.
   Despite the ongoing violence, diplomats said Norway, the top peace broker in Sri Lanka, was planning to dispatch special envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer to work out details for the peace talks set for October 28 and 29.
   ‘They have now agreed on a time and venue, but there is the question of logistics and a lot of details to be sorted out,’ a diplomat said.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest authority, said on Friday the United States was encouraging sectarian strife in Iraq.
   Iraq has been gripped by violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims since the bombing of a revered Shia Muslim shrine in February. The United Nations estimates 100 Iraqis die violently every day.
   ‘Making Sunnis and Shias suspicious of one another ... is the policy of the Americans in Iraq,’ Khamenei told worshippers at Friday prayers, broadcast live on state television.
   ‘Our Iraqi brothers need to stand united–and beware that the enemy plans to turn people against the people,’ he said.
   Worshippers chanted ‘Death to America’ before the service.
   Shias are a majority in Iraq, as they are in neighbouring Iran where Shia Islam is the official state religion.
   The United States accuses Iran of backing guerrillas in Iraq and encouraging the unrest, a charge Iran denies.
   A US security advisor said Thursday that violence in Iraq forces the interior ministry to budget a loss of 25 police officers each day to death or permanent injury.
   ‘We budgeted for 10 Iraqi policemen killed every day and 15 wounded in action to the point where they had to be retired from action’ in 2006, Gerald Burke, National Security Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior said.

Three Hamas militants were killed Friday in an Israeli air strike as the army pressed on with a deadly offensive in the Gaza Strip amid deadlocked efforts on forming a Palestinian unity government.
   The deaths brought to 13 the number of Palestinians killed by the military in Gaza since the army launched its latest ground incursion early on Thursday, concentrated in the southern part of the territory.
   The three militants loyal to ruling Islamist movement Hamas– including a local leader in the military wing–were killed in an air strike on their vehicle in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, a local medic and witnesses said.
   The Israeli military confirmed an attack on a vehicle it said was transporting weapons. Medics said another five Palestinians were wounded.
   Hamas’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades was one of three groups to claim the June 25 abduction of an Israeli soldier that sparked a wider four-month offensive in the Gaza Strip where around 250 Palestinians have died since then.
   On Friday, a 29-year-old woman was shot dead by soldiers operating in the south and another Palestinian died overnight from wounds suffered during an air strike against the house of a Hamas militant. The army has said its latest operation was targeting ‘tunnels and other terror threats’.
   A spokesman said troops had killed one of two gunmen in southern Gaza, but when questioned about the death of a woman, he said only that the army had ‘heard such claims’ and was ‘checking’.
   Israel’s prolonged operations in Gaza have the stated goals of retrieving captured Corporal Gilad Shalit and stopping militant rocket attacks on the Jewish state.
   Since the offensive began on June 28, around 250 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers have died in the Gaza Strip, according to an AFP count.
   Internal Palestinian tensions have also soared amid deadlocked efforts to form a national unity government as a means to ending unprecedented financial and political crisis since Hamas formed a government last March.
   The violence–at a time of increased tensions between rival Palestinian factions–came one day after an officer in the intelligence service loyal to Abbas and a Hamas official were shot dead.

The UN refugee agency will urge Muslim nations to boost multilateral cooperation to support the Islamic world’s nine million refugees at a meeting in Pakistan next month, a senior official said.
   Wider collaboration would help the UNHCR deal with crises such as the Lebanon war, the Pakistan earthquake and the Asian tsunami, Indrika Ratwatte, UNHCR assistant representative in Pakistan, said in an interview.
   The conference of ministers from the 57-state Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest grouping of Muslim countries, is being jointly convened by the UNHCR from November 27-29 in Islamabad.
   ‘Refugees and displacement issues in the OIC region are not going to go away. It is going to require a strategy,’ Ratwatte said.
   ‘I think all the participants would like to see a platform to foster some multilateral cooperation.’
   The conference is the first held by the OIC to focus exclusively on the problem of refugees in the Muslim world.

The Taiwanese president, Chen Shui-bian, on Friday survived a second parliamentary vote aimed at ousting him when the opposition failed to garner enough support to pass the motion.
   The People First Party’s bid to push Chen out of office required approval of two-thirds of the country’s 220 legislators, or 147 votes.
   But only 116 cast ballots in favour while all 85 lawmakers from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party boycotted the vote.
   The 12 members of DPP’s ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, and one independent cast invalid ballots. Another independent cast a ‘no’ vote.
   TSU lawmakers shouted ‘Opposing second recall motion’ and wrote the phrase on their ballots before voting, but legislators from Kuomintang, the main opposition party, chanted ‘National referendum on A-Bian’s future,’ using Chen’s nickname.
   The motion would have triggered a national referendum on Chen’s fate in three months if it had passed.
   Security was tightened ahead of the vote as scores of protesters rallied outside parliament demanding DPP lawmakers support the motion. Several protesters who tried to block a road were removed by police.

Russia on Thursday formally introduced a draft resolution in the Security Council urging Georgia to withdraw troops perceived as threatening the breakaway province of Abkhazia and said it hoped for a vote Friday.
   Russian ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said he was pleased with the text, adding: ‘It is our plan to go to a vote tomorrow.’
   ‘We are satisfied with it and it certainly contains all the main messages which we want to have initially,’ he added.

A suicide car bomb exploded close to a NATO convoy in Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar Friday, killing between five and eight Afghans, police and the alliance said.
   Two soldiers from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force were wounded in the blast, a spokesman for the NATO-led force said.
   ISAF said it had reports of five civilians killed. A police spokesman at the scene said eight were dead.
   ‘A suicide car bomb attack against NATO troops in Kandahar city killed eight civilians and three are wounded,’ local police officer Badula Wasay said at the site.

Bangkok’s new airport to beef up security
Bangkok’s new international airport, which opened three weeks ago, will install an additional 200 closed-circuit cameras to beef up security against terror attacks, an official said Friday. Transport Minister Thira Haocharoen, who was sworn in Monday as part of a military-backed government after last month’s coup, made the announcement after inspecting security operations at Suvarnabhumi airport. ‘Amid global fears over terror attacks, we found security checks at Suvarnabhumi airport were not strict enough,’ said Chaisak Angsuwan, director-general of the aviation department at the transportation ministry.

Nepal bus crash
kills 10
An overcrowded bus plunged into a river killing 10 people and injuring 46 on Friday near Nepal’s capital, police said. ‘Eight people died on the spot and two others died while undergoing treatment at Bir Hospital (in Kathmandu),’ said an officer who asked not to be named. The bus skidded 200 metres off the road in Dhading district, 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of the city. Nepal’s mountainous roads and badly-maintained vehicles cause hundreds of fatalities each year.
— AFP