At least 16 people, including three children, were killed and 25 wounded when a bomb ripped through a crowded bus in eastern Sri Lanka Monday, officials said.
   The defence ministry immediately accused Tamil Tiger rebels of setting off the parcel bomb attack, which coincided with a key Buddhist holiday, while the guerrillas denied they were responsible for the attack.
   Passengers were getting off the vehicle to be checked by troops manning a road block when the blast occurred outside the town of Ampara, 350 kilometres east of the capital Colombo, a local police officer said.
   ‘The bomb went off just at the Kondawattuwan check point,’ the police officer said. ‘We now believe that the blast was aboard the bus. It was most likely a parcel bomb.’
   The head of the main hospital there, Lankathilaka Jayasinghe, said three people were already dead when they were brought in on a day when many people were taking advantage of the week-long holiday.
   ‘Three people were dead on admission and 13 others died in hospital,’ Jayasinghe said, adding that 25 more people were being treated for injuries. Three children and 11 women, including a woman soldier, were among the dead.
   Two off-duty constables travelling home for the traditional New Year next week, were also among those killed, the police said.
   The Tigers denied involvement in the attack, the second against civilian transport since the rebels were accused of setting off bombs inside buses and killing 17 and wounding 117 on two consecutive days in January.
   ‘We have nothing to do with this blast,’ spokeswoman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Navaruban Selvy said by telephone from the rebel head office in Kilinochchi, in the island’s north.
   Her remarks came after the defence ministry said the attack was the work of Tiger rebels, who have been held responsible for similar blasts in the past.
   ‘The security forces suspect that the bomb would have been placed inside the bus by the LTTE to deliberately target civilians,’ the defence ministry said in a statement.
   The blast came as the president, Mahinda Rajapakse, visited neighbouring India to attend a two-day South Asian summit opening in New Delhi Tuesday. Officials said he wanted to discuss the threat of terrorism at the summit.
   The latest bloodshed also came as security forces tightened their grip on areas held by the LTTE, with elite police commandos making advances into jungle territory dominated by the guerrillas in the region.
   Sri Lankan jets and helicopter gunships carried out night-time bombing raids against Tiger rebel positions over the weekend.
   However, defence officials had said that the guerrillas still had the ability to stage hit-and-run attacks.
   The government has vowed to drive out Tamil Tigers from the sprawling Eastern Province, where the guerrillas maintain strongholds deep inside jungles.
   In other violence, six civilians were shot dead in Batticaloa, just north of Ampara, on Sunday night and the military and the Tigers blamed each other for the massacre.
   Another four civilians were gunned down on Sunday night in the north of the island. The Tiger rebels accused a breakaway faction allied with government forces of carrying out the attacks.
   The Tamil rebels have waged a 35-year campaign for independence that has claimed more than 60,000 lives in Sri Lanka.

Top defence officials from nuclear-armed south Asian rivals Pakistan and India are to meet later this week for talks on possible troop cuts at the world’s highest frontline, an official said Monday.
   An Indian defence ministry spokesman said the defence secretaries of the two countries would meet on Friday and Saturday, most likely in Islamabad, for fresh discussions on the 6,300-metre Siachen glacier.
   Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers are posted on the Siachen glacier–situated in northern Kashmir close to the Chinese border–where altitude, icy temperatures and accidents have claimed more lives than enemy fire.
   The two side fought regular artillery duels in the region until November 2003, when a ceasefire was agreed along the heavily-militarised Line of Control in Kashmir.
   Analysts say Siachen is of little strategic value, but the Indian army–which has occupied most of the high-altitude battlefield since 1987 – wants existing troop positions marked out to dissuade Pakistan from moving its soldiers forward in the event of a pull-out.
   Pakistan, which claims all of Kashmir, fears that drawing down its positions would be tacit acceptance of India’s claims to Siachen and the area as a whole.

Pakistani tribesmen and foreign al-Qaeda militants traded rocket and heavy weapons fire in a tribal area bordering Afghanistan, leaving 10 people dead, officials and witnesses said.
   Fierce battles were fought between pro-government tribesmen and militants on Sunday near Wana, the main town of the lawless South Waziristan district where more than 200 people have died in fighting in the past two weeks, they said.
   The clashes since late Saturday killed five foreign fighters and five local tribesmen, while troops also shelled militants’ positions, they said.
   Militants stormed a house of local journalist Din Mohammed near Sheen Warsak, killing his father and 15-year-old brother, while three attackers died when tribesmen fought back, relatives said. Mohammed, who works for regional newspapers, is known for his links with pro-government tribesmen whom he had put in touch with journalists from other cities, they said.
   The militants took four hostages but it was not immediately known whether Mohammed was amongst them, they said.
   Another three local tribesmen and two al-Qaeda linked militants were killed in separate clashes, also in Sheen Warsak, security officials said.
   Al-Qaeda linked militants are holding some 36 local tribesmen, while two Uzbek women and a foreign militant were captured by pro-government tribesmen, officials said.
   Meanwhile, commander Mullah Nazir called a meeting of local tribes for Monday to enlist up to 300 armed men as the fighting escalates, according to a resident who heard announcements from mosques’ loudspeakers.
   The fighting comes as president Pervez Musharraf, a key US ally, faces international pressure to get tough on extremists who have regrouped in Pakistan’s tribal-run regions since 2001.
   Interior minister Aftab Sherpao said late Friday that 56 people were killed on Thursday and Friday, 45 of them foreigners, as fighting ‘intensified after peace talks failed.’

Palestinian journalists protested on Monday against the abduction of BBC journalist Alan Johnston in Gaza as the veteran reporter began a fourth week in captivity, the longest a foreigner has been held in the lawless territory.
   Around 300 journalists, their mouths tied, held a demonstration in central Gaza City in solidarity with the seasoned reporter who was forced at gunpoint from his car as he drove home from work in Gaza City on March 12.
   Carrying signs calling for Johnston’s liberation, the protestors marched to the government compound in the city. Several hundred journalists held a similar protest in front of president Mahmud Abbas’s office in Ramallah in the West Bank.
   On Sunday, Palestinian journalists announced a three-day strike to protest what they called their government’s inadequate response to Johnston’s abduction–the latest in a string of kidnappings of foreigners over the past year.
   It marked the third time that Palestinian journalists had stopped work in solidarity with the 44-year-old since his ordeal began.
   ‘Our colleague Alan Johnston’s kidnap is entering its fourth week,’ Palestinian Journalists’ union president Naim Tubasi said. ‘This makes us think there is a danger to his life and we are very worried.’

Thousands of Taliban suicide bombers have been deployed across Afghanistan to attack Western troops and the government, the group’s military chief said on Monday.
   Following last year’s violence, the worst since the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, this year is regarded as the crunch period both for the Taliban and US-led Western troops.
   Speaking to Reuters by satellite phone from an undisclosed location, Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban’s military head, also said the Islamic guerrillas had the ability and the weapons to fight foreign troops for a long time.
   ‘We have sent thousands of Taliban suicide bombers to all Afghan cities for attacks on foreign troops and their Afghan puppets,’ Dadullah said.
   ‘And we will turn our motherland into the graveyard of the US forces and their families should wait for their dead bodies. The Taliban’s war is only for the freedom of Afghanistan from the enemies of Muslims.’
   
   17 killed in Afghan unrest
   Fresh clashes in southern Afghanistan left three policemen and at least 13 Taliban dead while a man was killed Monday when farmers tried to stop police destroying their opium crops, officials said.
   Taliban fighters stormed a police checkpoint on a key road between the southern capital Kandahar and the town of Spin Boldak, on the Pakistani border, in the early hours of Monday morning, the police said.
   ‘Three police were killed and two wounded,’ Kandahar province police chief Ismatullah Alizai. ‘There have been casualties to the Taliban side as well but I cannot confirm the exact figures.’
   Six more Taliban were killed Sunday in an Afghan and NATO military sweep of the Zahri district in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the militant Taliban in the early 1990s, he said.
   Also Sunday, warplanes from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force bombed a house used by Taliban militants in the province of Zabul, a district commander said.
   Seven Taliban were killed, the commander named only Obaidullah said.
   Exchanges of gunfire erupted between opium farmers and police in three districts in eastern Nangarhar province Monday, officials said.
   Six locals and seven policemen were wounded, provincial police spokesman Ghafour Khan said.

Many women devastated by the 2004 tsunami continue to face violence and impoverishment at relief camps in South Asian nations like India and Sri Lanka, according to a new report.
   Conducted by the Alliance Of Women Effected By Tsunami, the report covers India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. It was released in New Delhi on Saturday ahead of a summit of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation.
   The alliance was create by the Sri Lanka-based Action Aid International.
   The alliance’s members include more than 170 non-governmental organizations and women’s groups working in the tsunami-hit areas of India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
   Women who lost their livelihoods after the tsunami have been forced to take extreme measures to secure the survival of their families and themselves, said Sriyani Perera, a spokeswoman for the alliance.
   The report highlighted the plight of one woman, forced to sell her kidney to make money.
   ‘We were shifted to a place where there is no work, no food to feed our children. I sold my kidney and got a small amount. They did not give me the promised amount.
   Now I am suffering with heavy abdominal pain. I cannot work,’ the report quoted Kalpana, a woman living in a camp in India, as saying.
   Under normal circumstances there is a high incidence of violence against women in South Asian countries, but tsunami-affected women reported that violence intensified and continues even two years after the disaster struck them, the report said. It didn’t include any statistics on such violence.
   Discussions with over 7,500 tsunami affected women in five countries reveal that failure to involve women and girls in
   decision making on relief and rehabilitation fuelled an increase in violence against them, it said.
   Government compensation and rehabilitation programs most often recognize men as the heads of households, which results in women – particularly single, older or disabled women – being left out of such efforts, the report stated.

Pakistani authorities placed a top Islamist MP under house arrest Monday ahead of planned protests against president Pervez Musharraf’s removal of the country’s top judge, officials said.
   Qazi Hussain Ahmed, chief of Pakistan’s main coalition of fundamentalist parties, has been detained for two days at his residence in Islamabad, a spokesman for Ahmed’s Jamaat-i-Islami party said.
   ‘The government has confined our leader but our workers will take part in Tuesday’s protest with full vigour. If the government stops us, the law and order situation will be its responsibility,’ spokesman Shahid Shamsi said.
   Interior minister Aftab Sherpao said he had ‘no knowledge’ about Ahmed’s arrest.
   Military ruler Musharraf suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on March 9 over allegations of misconduct and abuse of power, sparking a political crisis and a series of nationwide protests against his rule.

Islamic militants from a group linked to al-Qaeda in Indonesia held armed training exercises on the slopes of a volcano on the island of Java, a report said Monday.
   The militants from southeast Asian group Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed for a series of bloody attacks including the Bali bombings, held at least two training exercises high up on the 3,371-foot Mount Sumbing, the Tempo magazine said.
   The intelligence came
   from two men taken into
   custody by Indonesian anti-terror police during blitzes last month that uncovered large quantities of explosives, killed one suspect and led to seven arrests.

Attorney general Meni Mazuz notified president Moshe Katsav’s lawyers on Sunday that he is considering adding a second rape charge to the draft indictment he is preparing against the president, the justice ministry said.
   The same woman who initially accused Katsav of rape brought new allegations against him, the ministry said in a release. Katsav underwent more than two hours of police questioning at his Jerusalem residence last week in connection with the new charges.
   It was not immediately clear why the latest allegations are emerging now.
   In January, Mazuz announced his intention to indict the president on charges of rape, sexual assault and fraud involving four women who used to work for him. Katsav, who denies all wrongdoing, has taken a leave of absence from his ceremonial position, but has refused to resign.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, drew widespread criticism on Monday for saying he was willing to meet Arab leaders to discuss a Saudi-drafted plan for peace in the Middle East.
   ‘I invite all the heads of the Arab states, including of course the Saudi king whom I consider a very important leader, to hold talks with us,’ Olmert told a joint news conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Jerusalem late on Sunday.
   ‘If the Saudi king initiates a meeting of moderate Arab states and invites me and the head of the Palestinian Authority in order to present us the Saudi ideas, we will come to hear them and we will be glad to voice ours,’ he said.
   But the call by the increasingly unpopular premier drew jeers from the Palestinians, the Saudis themselves and across the political spectrum in Israel.

Indian Kashmir’s chief minister has voiced opposition to any move to cut troop levels in the Himalayan state, saying it would ‘directly help’ Islamic militants.
   ‘Chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad strongly ruling out any demilitarisation or reduction of security forces in the state has erased all false impressions created by vested interests for political mileage,’ an official statement said on Sunday.
   The statement came two days after India set up a panel to review a possible cut in troop levels in insurgency-racked Kashmir. The announcement on Friday came after demands by a regional ally of the federal ruling Congress party, which also governs Kashmir, to reduce troop numbers in the state.

Thai police have arrested more than 50 North Koreans who entered the kingdom illegally, a senior immigration police officer said Monday, and plan to send the migrants back home.
   A group of 14 North Koreans, mostly women and children, were arrested Sunday in northern Chiang Rai province near the infamous Golden Triangle where Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet, colonel Jetsada Yaisoon said.
   Another 38 have been arrested in small groups at different locations in Chiang Rai since March 25, he said, highlighting Thailand’s increasing popularity as a transit country for defectors.
   Jetsada said the migrants had crossed into Thailand from neighbouring Laos, after they fled North Korea via China.
   He said that all 52 migrants were brought to a court in Chiang Rai and charged with illegal entry.

At least 39 people including six US soldiers were killed in as guerrillas stepped up their fight military and hospital sources said on Monday.
   Suspected Sunni militants executed 21 Shia workers north of Baghdad and killed 12 people in Kirkuk on Monday.
   Travelling in three minibuses, the 21 Shia workers drove straight into an ambush on the main road out of Baghdad to neighbouring Diyala province, now the second most dangerous part of the country in the ever shifting warfare.
   The 21 Shias, together with six Kurdish colleagues who were also snatched but who are still missing, worked in Baghdad’s popular Shorja market where 60 people were killed in a double suicide bombing last Thursday.
   Officials said they were snatched late Sunday and driven away to an unknown destination. Medics said their handcuffed and blindfolded bodies were found near a water treatment plant in Morariyah village in Diyala after daybreak.
   Meanwhile, guerrillas killed six US soldiers in twin bombings over the weekend, the military said, undermining assessments by visiting congressmen that the Baghdad security crackdown is making progress.
   Two coordinated roadside bomb attacks in the capital killed six soldiers overnight Saturday to Sunday, four of them in the second blast targeting a response team scrambled to the site of the first deadly explosion.
   The latest deaths took to 3,250 the US military’s losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
   March was one of the deadliest months for the US military with 87 personnel killed, almost double the Iraqi armed forces’ losses of 44.
   The six soldiers were killed just hours before four visiting congressmen hailed progress in the Baghdad security plan– Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing Law) launched on February 14.
   On Monday, at least seven more civilians and a policeman were killed in rebel attacks, two of them in the capital on a car bombing near a south Baghdad court house, security officials said.
   
   Half of new US troops deployed
   About half of the additional 30,000 US troops despatched by the president, George W Bush, to quell the raging violence in Iraq have been deployed in the war-torn country, a military spokesman said Sunday.
   The bulk of these troops are being deployed in Baghdad where a brutal insurgency and sectarian violence have killed tens of thousands of civilians.
   ‘About half of US troop reinforcements are currently in place with the remainder expected to be in place by early June,’ Rear Admiral Mark Fox told reporters in Baghdad.
   He said the rest of the troops are either ‘in or approaching Kuwait’ from where they will enter Iraq.
   Some of the new troops are also being deployed in the western Sunni province of Anbar where a fiery insurgency has inflicted a heavy toll on US military in the four years since the invasion.
   About 80,000 US and Iraqi troops are currently patrolling the streets of Baghdad to curb the violence as part of the security crackdown Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing Law) launched on February 14.

At least 67 people were killed and 21 wounded in the war-torn Dafur region of western Sudan, according to African Union spokesman and victims’ relatives on Monday.
   An African Union spokesman said Monday Five African peacekeepers were killed by gunmen in Darfur.
   ‘The AMIS (African Mission in Sudan) protection force soldiers were attacked by armed men as they guarded a watering point in Umm Barru in northwest Darfur,’ Nureddin Mezni said.
   The attack near the Chadian border took place late Sunday.
   Meanwhile, 62 people were killed and 21 wounded in an attack on an Arab tribe in the war-torn Dafur region of western Sudan, according to a toll given by the victims’ relatives on Sunday.
   ‘Two new bodies were left at the hospital in Nyala,’ the South Darfur provincial seat, Abdel Rahman Hasaballah of the targeted Torjam tribe told AFP by telephone.
   Tribal chief Mohammed Hammad Jalali initially told AFP that 60 people were killed by gunmen riding camels and donkeys that swooped down on villages to steal livestock.
   ‘We buried 23 people on Saturday,’ he said at the time, with the rest still at the hospital morgue. Thirteen wounded villagers are being treated in the provincial capital of Nyala and another eight in the nearby town of Kas, he said.
   Families initially refused to collect the bodies from the hospital in protest.
   They finally agreed to do so after setting three conditions for the authorities–an impartial investigation to identify the perpetrators, better protection and compensation for the victims’ families.
   The Torjam are blaming the attack on the government-backed Janjaweed militia, often used by the Sudanese authorities to suppress a rebellion raging in the region for the past four years.
   But local officials quoted by the press blamed the killings on a rival Arab tribe in the region, the Rzigat Aballa–which in the past had provided recruits for the Janjaweed.
   ‘We think the Rzigat Aballa is responsible for the attack because it occurred in the area of recent clashes between the two tribes,’ said Mohammed al-Ajeb, adding that some 500 heads of cattle had been seized and driven northwest.

The US president, George W Bush, took a fresh blow Sunday as a former top aide who helped him get elected publicly criticised his leadership amid mounting political rows and sagging poll ratings.
   Matthew Dowd, a key advisor to Bush in two election victories, became the first member of the president’s inner circle to publicly break ranks, voicing disappointment over his strategy in Iraq in a New York Times interview.
   His comments came as Democrats pressed efforts to withdraw US forces from Iraq and amid accusations of wrongdoing by Bush’s top justice official, attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, in the firing of federal prosecutors.
   Dowd accused Bush of ignoring the will of the American people on Iraq, the newspaper reported. He said Bush’s Democratic rival for the presidency in 2004, John Kerry, was right to call for US withdrawal from the country.
   ‘I really like him (Bush), which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,’ Dowd told the newspaper.
   Bush’s camp reiterated his refusal to bow to the Democrats’ bid to pull out the troops. One of his senior advisers, Dan Bartlett, branded it a political manoeuvre that would leave Americans open to attack.
   ‘A precipitous withdrawal, if we were to step back now ... would weaken the United States’ interests in the region and in the world. It would make us more vulnerable to attack,’ Bartlett said Sunday on ABC News.
   Lawmakers last week passed Democrat-sponsored bills in the House of Representatives and the Senate that would tie the withdrawal of troops in 2008 to a major war funding package. Bush has vowed to veto any bill that sets a timetable for a pullout.

The European Union laid into the United States and Australia, the only two major industrialised countries to reject the Kyoto Protocol, as UN scientists prepared a report likely to issue grim warnings about climate change.
   European environment commissioner Stavros Dimas pointedly characterised the United States as ‘number one emitter’ of fossil-fuel pollution in the world. ‘Its own approach doesn’t help in reaching international agreement,’ Dimas said as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting got underway.
   Dimas upbraided Australia, accusing it of having ‘a negative attitude on international negotiations’ and of rejecting the UN’s emissions-cutting pact on the grounds of politics rather than economics.
   ‘I can really not understand why Australia has not ratified Kyoto. If you ratify Kyoto it will cost you one third of what it costs you now... it’s purely political.’
   The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said at the opening that ‘unpopular measures are unavoidable’ to avoid wrenching damage to Earth’s climate system. ‘It’s up to the politicians–all politicians of all countries–to take those measures, because you can’t let this happen.’
   The 400-member IPCC is to issue a 1,400-page report on Friday on the impacts of climate change, along with a key ‘summary for policymakers’. It will list the shifts that have been seen in Earth’s climate system in the past decades as a result of global warming and make predictions about further changes this century.

The fourth straight day of heavy fighting left a trail of devastation in the Somali capital on Sunday as Ugandan peacekeepers reported their first death and clan elders called for a ceasefire.
   Frightened residents fled their homes with anything they could carry while others were too terrified to move on the streets where Islamist rebels, clan gunmen and Ethiopian troops exchanged weapons fire.
   The Ugandan army said one of its soldiers was killed and five others wounded when mortar shells pounded the presidential palace Saturday, marking the first death among African Union peacekeepers deployed in Somalia.
   ‘We are not surprised by what took place, we expect those people (guerrillas) to do more of such things. We are not in any fear at all,’ Ugandan military spokesman Major Felix Kulayigye said in Kampala.
   Residents were pouring out of Mogadishu’s Ali Kamin neighbourhood and the stadium area, where the fighting between the Ethiopian army and Islamist guerrillas has been fierce.
   In Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said some 10,000 people have fled the fighting over three days alone, bringing the number of people displaced since February to nearly 100,000.
   Up to 56,000 people fled the city in March, most of them since March 21, while an estimated 40,000 had already fled Mogadishu in February, UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said.

Hillary Clinton obliterated fundraising records by raking in 26 million dollars so far this year and stuffed her White House campaign war chest with 10 million more from her Senate account.
   In a daunting challenge to her rivals in what is tipped to be the most expensive US election campaign ever, the New York Democrat smashed previous marks for first-quarter fundraising and total receipts.
   Clinton’s delighted campaign managers were first to announce results of a frenzied fundraising drive up to an accounting deadline Saturday, which saw 2008 hopefuls criss-cross the country.
   Fellow Democrat John Edwards also broke records, raising more than 14 million dollars, nearly double his take in the corresponding period ahead of the 2004 election, his campaign said.

US House speaker Nancy Pelosi said in Lebanon on Monday that her planned visit to neighbouring Syria was important and a good idea, despite the deep anger it has raised from the White House.
   Asked about engaging Syria, Pelosi told journalists in Beirut that ‘We think it’s a good idea, that’s why we’re doing it,’ following talks with Lebanese parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri.
   ‘Our trip to Syria is one that is important to us, it is also important to the Iraq Study Group which encourages such diplomacy and engagement,’ she said, referring to a bipartisan US group that last year recommended engaging US foes Syria and Iran in order to calm war-torn Iraq.
   ‘The purpose of this trip is a part of our responsibility for the national security of the United States,’ Pelosi said.

Argentina brushed away British diplomatic overtures and accused London of ‘arrogance’ as the two countries on Monday marked the outbreak of their war over the Falkland Islands 25 years ago.
   While the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, voiced ‘continuing regret’ over the loss of life on both sides of the conflict in the South Atlantic, her Argentinian counterpart condemned what he described as the insensitive military triumphalism of London’s commemorative plans.
   ‘What they want to do is not what called a commemoration, but a triumphant military parade, a typical gesture of arrogance,’ the foreign minister, Jorge Taiana, said.