Sri Lanka’s rebel Tamil Tigers told peace-broker Norway Monday that government troops were preparing for a large-scale military attack and warned of a possible bloodbath.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam said security forces were massing in the northeastern district of Mullaitivu, where the guerrillas have their main military bases.
   The LTTE’s political wing leader, SP Thamilselvan, told Norwegian ambassador to Sri Lanka Hans Brattskar that the rebels were aware of a military build-up and warned that they were ready to resist.
   ‘The present soft approach of the international community towards Sri Lanka is not going to change its plans and will only contribute to a worsening situation leading to a bloodbath in the island,’ they said in a statement.
   
   Seven killed
   Seven people have been killed in Sri Lanka’s restive northern and eastern regions in clashes between security forces and Tamil Tiger rebels, the defence ministry said Monday.
   Three soldiers were killed in the northern district of Jaffna early Monday when troops traded fire with Tiger rebels, the military said, adding that security forces had also inflicted heavy damage on the guerrillas. It gave no further details.
   In the eastern district of Ampara, a police commando was killed on Sunday when forces encountered a rebel group during a foot patrol.
   Meanwhile, police said late Sunday they had found the bodies of two civilians shot dead by unidentified gunmen in the eastern district of Batticaloa.
   Elsewhere in the north, police found the body of a Tamil youth who had been shot dead tied to a lamp post.
   More than 4,000 people have been killed in clashes between security forces and Tiger rebels over the past 15 months, despite a 2002 truce arranged by peace broker Norway.
   The guerrillas are fighting for an independent homeland for the minority Tamil community in this majority-Sinhalese country. More than 60,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 1972.

Supporters of a Lok Sabha MP shot dead by suspected Maoist rebels blocked roads, damaged dozens of vehicles and uprooted power pylons in a strike on Monday to protest his killing.
   Many businesses, schools and transport services were closed during the 12-hour strike in Jharkhand where Sunil Kumar Mahato was shot dead on Sunday during a visit to a village.
   The assailants killed three others, including two of Mahato’s bodyguards and a worker of his Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party in an attack that analysts said could mark a switch in strategy to more high-profile assassinations by the Maoists.
   At least four trains were stopped on the tracks by angry protesters near the railway station at Giridih, 90 km northeast of state capital Ranchi.
   The state’s deputy chief minister, Sudhir Mahato, said all efforts were being made to find the killers.
   ‘We are in hot pursuit of the killers who seem to be Maoist rebels as they were seen shouting pro-Maoist slogans immediately after the killing,’ Mahato said, adding the slain deputy had been facing threats from the Maoists.
   Jharkhand is one of 13 states affected by the Maoist revolt which began in the late 1960s. Thousands of people have died in the conflict.
   The rebels say they are fighting for the rights of poor farmers and landless labourers and attack security forces, government officials, politicians and state property.

Nine Afghans died when NATO air and artillery hit their home north of Kabul during a battle with militants, officials said Monday, the second deadly incident involving civilians in two days.
   It came as the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, condemned the killing of up to 16 civilians Sunday when US forces opened fire following a suicide ambush.
   Five women and two children were among the dead when NATO forces responded to the overnight attack on their base in Kapisa province, deputy provincial governor Sayed Daud Hashimi said.
   An intelligence official who confirmed the death toll of nine said there were reports a militant had fired a rocket at the base of the NATO provincial reconstruction team from his home nearby.
   ‘It seems that the casualties were relatives of that Taliban,’ the Kabul-based official said. He could not say whether the suspected militant was also killed.
   Interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary confirmed there was an incident in Kapisa’s Nijrab district involving ‘some casualties’ but had no more details.
   He said the ministry had sent a delegation to investigate. There was no immediate response from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force or the US-led coalition.
   Karzai meanwhile ordered a separate investigation into Sunday’s attack in eastern Nangarhar province, during which insurgents using small arms and a suicide car bomb attacked a five-vehicle US-led coalition convoy.
   Karzai ‘strongly condemned the incident which took place due to a suicide attack on a coalition convoy and which prompted the coalition force firing on civilians that killed 10 people,’ the statement said.
   ‘The president also condemned the terrorist attack on (the) coalition convoy and said it was the work of the enemies of Afghanistan,’ the statement said, employing a phrase commonly used here to describe Taliban militants.

Cable TV operators in Kashmir suspended three English-language channels on Monday after Muslim militants threatened to attack broadcast installations to protest what they called obscene programmes.
   ‘After threats from militants, we have decided to stop Star Movies, Star World and Sony Pic,’ Mushtaq Ahmad, the owner of a leading cable company in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, said on Monday.
   Two militant groups Al-Badr and Al-Madina Regiment, which are battling Indian rule in Kashmir, called for the end to obscenity on cable television. The groups did not specify what programs they were criticising.
   Last year, cable operators in Muslim-majority Kashmir suspended operations after militant groups threatened to launch suicide attacks on their centres. The operators later resumed broadcasting.
   Cable TV provides the main form of entertainment for most people in Kashmir, where tens of thousands have died since a separatist revolt broke out over 17 years ago.
   About 50 channels, including three Islamic ones, are usually available, showing news, films and other entertainment in Hindi and English. Some channels also broadcast in the Kashmiri language.
   Militants closed cinemas, liquor shops, and beauty parlours in the Kashmir Valley immediately after a separatist revolt against India’s rule broke out in 1989.
   A few alcohol shops, a cinema hall and dozens of beauty parlours have reopened in Srinagar and other parts of the region after violence started to decline in 2004.

A diplomatic row threatened to erupt between Israel and Egypt on Monday over claims that an Israeli unit had killed Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
   The claims, aired in a public television documentary in Israel, have been vehemently denied by the unit commander Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, now national infrastructure minister.
   But they have raised a storm of controversy in Egypt, where the affair has dominated the front pages for two days, sparked an angry debate in parliament, and led the foreign ministry to summon the Israeli ambassador in Cairo.
   ‘A Massacre’ thundered Egypt’s mass-selling state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper.
   ‘The affair is in the process of becoming a major diplomatic incident,’ a senior Israeli official said. ‘The relations between the two countries are compromised.’
   The row forced Ben-Eliezer on Monday to cancel a planned visit to Cairo this week, where he was due to discuss Israeli natural gas imports from Egypt, one of only two Arab countries to have signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state.
   ‘Following unfounded information published in Egypt on this affair and the current atmosphere not being favourable, the two parties decided to postpone to another date Ben-Eliezer’s visit,’ his press advisor Moshe Ronen said.
   ‘The Shaked Spirit’ documentary which aired a week ago claimed that the unit commanded by Ben-Eliezer during the June Six-Day war had killed 250 Egyptian PoWs in the El-Arish area of the Sinai peninsula.
   On Sunday Ben-Eliezer–a Labour party minister, a reserve general and former defence minister–denied the charges, saying his unit had killed Palestinian fighters in combat, not PoWs.
   ‘In fact, in one clash during this war, soldiers of a battalion of Palestinian Fedayeen operating from the Gaza Strip against Israel, particularly against the unit I commanded, were killed,’ Ben-Eliezer said in a statement.
   ‘These soldiers were not executed as it was said, they were killed in combat.
   ‘Maybe the confusion is due to the fact that two days before this incident, the Shaked commando came across an Egyptian battalion that had stopped fighting, and men from the unit helped them by providing food and water,’ it said.
   But the denial has done little to ease Egyptian ire and on Sunday the foreign ministry summoned Israeli ambassador Shalom Cohen to protest and called for ‘clarification’ on the events.
   Egypt asked Cohen to convey its concerns to Israel of the ‘consequences in neglecting this event, the need to investigate the matter in the light of new information and witness statements which were exposed during the documentary, and presenting the accused before the courts.’

The United Nations Development Programme has suspended operations in North Korea following US claims that its funds were being diverted to prop up the communist regime.
   In January the US delegate to the UN Mark Wallace charged that North Korea had, since 1998 and with the complicity of UNDP, ‘systematically perverted’ the aid programme ‘for the benefit of the Kim Jong Il regime, rather than the people of North Korea.’
   The UNDP said in a statement seen Monday on its website: ‘As of March 1, 2007, UNDP has no choice but to suspend its operations in North Korea as the necessary conditions set out by the executive board on January 25 have not been met.’ The agency’s measures include ending all payments in hard currency to Pyongyang and discontinuing sub-contracting of local staff via government recruitment as of March 1, it said.
   The agency said its position ‘could be reconsidered if these circumstances change.’
   Following the US claims, which were angrily denied by the North, UN chief Ban Ki-moon called for an audit of UN programmes and funding in countries such as North Korea.
   The UNDP had earlier suspended 17.9 million dollars in its 2007-09 budget for its operations in North Korea pending the outcome of the inquiry and said it would stop paying workers in hard currency from March 1.
   Meanwhile, North Korea is willing irreversibly to shut down its nuclear plants as part of a six-nation deal, a senior South Korean official said Monday.
   The communist’s state chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-Gwan has reaffirmed that disabling the plants would be an ‘irreversible process,’ the official told reporters.
   Kim was speaking during a meeting with his South Korean counterpart Chun Yung-Woo in New York on Saturday, said the official, quoted by Yonhap news agency. Under the agreement reached in Beijing on February 13, the nuclear-armed North agreed to ‘disable’ its plants in return for economic aid and diplomatic benefits.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, held inconclusive talks on forming a unity government with the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, on Sunday and officials said the process may take longer than expected.
   Haniyeh’s ruling Hamas faction and Fatah headed by Abbas signed a power-sharing deal last month in Saudi Arabia that stemmed factional fighting but failed to meet Western conditions to rescind a financially crippling aid embargo.
   ‘We have not completed the consultations today. They will continue over the coming days,’ Ghazi Hamad, a cabinet spokesman with Hamas, told reporters after the leaders met for several hours in Gaza City.
   Hamad said officials hoped to meet a constitutional deadline of March 21, the end of a five-week period allotted for negotiations. Earlier forecasts had suggested the process could be finished by the end of this week.

A court in Indonesia gave the go-ahead Monday for a lawsuit against the president and other officials for human rights violations over the slow response to a disastrous ‘mud volcano.’
   The lawsuit, which also names the firm held responsible for triggering the toxic mudflow, alleges the tardy response breached human rights because it contributed to loss of life and impoverished the local population.
   The steaming sludge swamped entire villages in Sidoarjo, near Indonesia’s second largest city of Surabaya, displacing 15,000 people last year. Workers are still struggling to staunch the flow, which could continue for years.
   Some 13 people died when a gas pipeline burst following subsidence blamed on the mud eruption.

Thailand’s army-installed prime minister Surayud Chulanont on Monday brushed aside speculation that he might resign amid concerns over divisions within his cabinet.
   Thai media have reported that Surayud had considered stepping down following the sudden resignation of finance minister Pridiyathorn Devakula last week, which raised worries of a rift within his government.
   ‘If I were too discouraged to work any more, I would not be here today,’ Surayud said when asked about the rumours.
   Surayud gave no indication of who he might name as the new finance minister but said he would not make a major cabinet reshuffle.

Malaysian authorities detained 108 Myanmar nationals for entering the country illegally after they were found on a fishing boat with no food or water, officials and a news report said Monday.
   ‘We were informed by fishermen who sighted the boat and we went out to intercept them. They are now being held at the police station,’ officer Fadziya Mat said.
   ‘We will turn them over to immigration officials as they don’t have any documents,’ Fadziya said. They were intercepted on Sunday. The men were found crammed into a boat meant for 10 people, the New Straits Times reported. It quoted police saying that the men had been without food or water.

Suspected militants in a Pakistani tribal area shot dead two tribesman accused of spying for US forces operating in neighbouring Afghanistan, officials said Monday.
   The body of 30-year-old Qayyum Shahmiri was found early Monday south of Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan tribal district, a security official said.
   Shahmiri had been shot in the head and chest and a note found near his body said that he was an ‘American spy,’ the official said.
   Security officials said another body was recovered later from a drain in Manzar Khel town, 25 kilometres south of Miranshah.
   The bullet-riddled body of 40-year-old local tribesman Reham Din was found with a note claiming that he was working as an ‘America spy,’ they said.
   Pro-Taliban militants last week decapitated an Afghan cleric accused of spying for US forces and making recordings of anti-Taliban speeches in neighbouring South Waziristan.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, facing expected harsh criticism of his government’s response to Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel last year, on Sunday strongly criticised the state comptroller who drew up the report.
   Israeli media said Olmert, in a letter two days before the report is due to go to a parliamentary committee, condemned the comptroller’s office for a series of leaks.
   Writing to Dalia Yitzik, the speaker of parliament, Olmert said: ‘The comptroller has revealed the report to the media before even transmitting it to those involved, as procedure demands.’
   The report by state comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss follows a long inquiry into the government’s handling of the north’s rocket-battered residents both before and during the 34-day offensive in Lebanon and war with Hezbollah.

The Sun newspaper said Monday it had been stopped from printing details about alleged corruption in party funding, two days after the British government obtained an injunction against the BBC.
   The best-selling tabloid said the government’s most senior legal adviser, attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith, asked it not to print an email said to have been sent between two of the prime minister Tony Blair’s closest aides.
   Goldsmith successfully sought a High Court injunction against the BBC on Friday to prevent them broadcasting an item about the ‘cash for honours’ affair for fear of prejudicing a year-long investigation.
   The item was also about the alleged email. In its first edition Monday, The Sun said it agreed to abide by the request.
   The Mail on Sunday said it, too, had been asked by Goldsmith’s office not to publish details.
   The Times on Monday said Goldsmith and Scotland Yard detectives will seek further gagging orders against any publication that planned to go to press with leaked documents.
   Pressure for a media blackout has prompted speculation that a significant development is expected in the 11-month inquiry.
   Police are probing whether Blair’s governing Labour Party and other parties offered wealthy businessmen seats in Britain’s unelected upper chamber of parliament the House of Lords in return for financial donations.
   Detectives are also considering whether there was any breach of a law which requires donations and non-commercial loans to parties to be publicly declared.
   Scotland Yard detectives have interviewed all members of Blair’s Cabinet while the prime minister himself has been quizzed twice as a witness, rather than a suspect.
   But two of his closest aides–director of government relations Ruth Turner and his Middle East envoy Lord Michael Levy–have both were arrested on suspicion of breaching the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.
   They have also been quizzed about alleged conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, which has fuelled speculation of an alleged cover-up at the heart of government.
   Both Turner, whose job involves liaising between government and the Labour Party, and Levy, nicknamed ‘Lord Cashpoint’ because of his key fund-raising role for the centre-left party, have not been charged and are on police bail.

Opposition Democrats said Sunday they will seek to narrow the scope of the US military mission in Iraq, as a top US commander said the new security crackdown in Baghdad was slowly progressing.
   Democrats have struggled to reach consensus since taking control of Congress on legislation to force the president, George W Bush, to change his Iraq strategy, but top senators said they were getting close to a new measure limiting US troop involvement.
   Democratic Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a binding resolution was being worked up to modify the war authorisation approved by the then Republican-controlled Congress in 2002.
   Levin said the bill’s goal would be to take US troops ‘out of the middle of a civil war’ and shift their focus on combating terrorists and supporting Iraqi forces.
   ‘It will be a transition to a more limited mission of supporting the Baghdad army, training and logistics of that army,’ Levin told CBS television.
   ‘And we will, of course, have a limited presence for a targeted counterterrorism mission, as well as trying to see if we can provide some support for the borders of Iraq,’ he said.
   In the Senate where they hold a narrow 51-49 majority, Democrats have failed in their efforts to pass a non-binding resolution criticising Bush’s decision to deploy 21,500 extra US troops to Iraq, which he announced January 10. The House of Representatives passed the bill last month.
   Some Democrats have offered other measures against the war, including capping troop levels, setting a date for their withdrawal by March 2008 or repealing the 2002 war authorisation.
   But Democrats, who took control of Congress in November elections marked by voter discontent over the war, have yet to find a binding measure that will win wide enough support to pass both chambers.

Pre-emptive military strikes on Iran could accelerate rather than hinder Tehran’s production of atomic weapons, a report by a British global security think-tank warned Monday.
   Backed by the former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, the Oxford Research Group said Iran could respond to an attack by launching a ‘crash programme’ to develop a crude nuclear device within months.
   ‘If Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapons capacity it is doing it relatively slowly, most estimates put it at least five years away,’ said one of the report’s authors, leading British nuclear scientist Frank Barnaby.
   ‘However attacking Iran–far from setting back their progress towards a bomb–would almost certainly lead to a fast-track programme to develop a small number of nuclear devices as quickly as possible.
   ‘It would be a bit like deciding to build a car from spare parts instead of building the entire car factory. Put simply, military attacks could speed Iran’s progress to a nuclear bomb.’
   The report suggests air strikes, like those reportedly being considered by the United States and Israel, would harden Iranian attitudes and political resistance to outside pressure to stop uranium enrichment.
   The Islamic republic would then focus on manufacturing one or two nuclear devices, leading to a nuclear-armed Iran within one or two years, it added.
   Blix, who headed the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in Iraq and the International Atomic Energy Agency, backs the report’s assessment.
   He wrote in the report’s foreword: ‘Armed attacks on Iran would very likely lead to the result they were meant to avoid–the building of nuclear weapons within a few years.’
   The report argued that military action would probably result in a high number of civilian casualties, as a surprise attack would inevitably catch many people unawares and unprotected.
   Air strikes would have to hit many well-protected targets across Iran, including the Kalaye Electric Company, which produces components for gas centrifuges used in uranium enrichment.
   But the report said there was a ‘real possibility’ Iran had built secret facilities elsewhere as well as ‘false targets’ in anticipation of air strikes.
   ‘With inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely that it would be possible to identify and subsequently destroy the number of targets needed to set back Iran’s nuclear programme for a significant period,’ it said.
   The report suggested that Iran could salvage enough material for a bomb from the reactor at Bushehr after any attack, or turn to the black market, where small amounts of uranium or plutonium would be easy to smuggle.
   Alternatively, the Iranians may already have set up clandestine facilities with centrifuges that could escape an attack.

US Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama took to separate church pulpits here Sunday, using a civil rights commemoration to battle for support among the country’s crucial black electorate.
   Speaking at churches less than a block apart, Clinton and Obama both credited the seminal Selma, Alabama march against racial segregation 42 years ago with opening the door to their own political careers, as they vie for the Democratic nomination next year.
   ‘I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me,’ said Obama, who hopes to become the nation’s first black president.
   For her part, Clinton, explaining that the movement opened doors to women in many areas as well, said: ‘I know where my chance came from, and I am grateful to all of you, who gave it to me.’
   They then laid aside the already-growing enmity between their campaigns, and—together with Hillary’s husband, former president Bill Clinton—led thousands of people in a symbolic march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troops and police in 1965 brutally beat hundreds of demonstrators marching for voting rights for disenfranchised blacks.
   With the brutality, shown nationwide on television, turning into a national scandal, later that year president Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act to ensure blacks were no longer prevented from voting.
   Obama won standing ovations as he paid homage in his church speech to the ‘giants’ who led the civil rights movement.

Psychological torture, including some of the techniques reportedly used on Guantanamo Bay detainees, appears to inflict the same kind of long-term mental damage as physical abuse, a study released Monday said.
   Researchers who evaluated the mental health of soldiers and civilians tortured during the 1990s Balkan wars found that victims of psychological abuse were just as likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression as victims of classic physical torture methods.
   The researchers also reported that the torture victims rated some techniques such as stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding as distressing as most physical torture methods.
   ‘Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychological manipulations, humiliating treatment, and forced stress positions, does not seem to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the severity of mental suffering they cause,’ the study’s authors wrote.
   ‘Thus, these procedures do amount to torture, thereby lending support to their prohibition by international law,’ they wrote in the journal of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
   The investigators said their findings undermine moves by the US government to narrow its definition of torture in order to free interrogators to use certain psychological methods aimed at breaking a prisoner’s resistance.
   In 2003, lawyers for the US Justice Department and a Pentagon working group report on detainee interrogations made the case for a narrow definition of torture that excludes procedures such as blindfolding and hooding, forced nudity, isolation and other psychological manipulations.
   The Justice Department memorandum argued that the scope of the term torture should be limited to those acts which could be shown to result in ‘prolonged mental harm,’ according to the study.
   The development followed allegations of human rights abuses at US detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
   However, the authors of this paper said that based on their analysis of the experiences of torture victims from the modern Balkans conflict, the US appears to be drawing a distinction without a difference.
   They said their analysis of 279 Bosnian, Croatian and Serb torture survivors showed that the individuals who suffered psychological abuse had the same rates of depression, PTSD, and social and work-related problems as others who had endured beatings, burnings, sexual abuse and other forms of physical punishment at the hands of their captors.
   They suggested that the trauma is the same, because regardless of the form of aggression, the effect is to create fear or anxiety in the detainee while at the same time removing any form of control from the person in order to create a state of total helplessness.
   ‘The distinction between torture and degrading treatment is not only useless, but also dangerous,’ said Steven Miles, professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in an accompanying editorial in the journal of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
   The study was written by Metin Basoglu, head of trauma studies at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, with help from colleagues at the department of psychiatry at the Clinical Hospital Zvezdara in Belgrade.

An American soldier serving in Iraq has been jailed for five years for keeping child pornography on his laptop computer, the US military said on Monday.
   Specialist Paul Strathmann of the 2/150th Field Artillery was convicted at court martial at Camp Victory outside Baghdad on Saturday after pleading guilty to downloading indecent images of children, a statement said.
   ‘While assigned to Forward Operating Base Diamondback Iraq, Specialist Strathmann downloaded 10 still pictures and 15 digital video movies onto his personal laptop between June and November 2006,’ it added.
   In addition to a five-year jail term, Strathmann will be demoted to the army’s lowest pay grade and given a dishonourable discharge.

Demolition crews under police protection on Monday began tearing down a Copenhagen youth centre after three days of rioting sparked by the eviction of squatters from the building.
   Almost 650 people have been arrested during the disturbances that rocked the Danish capital.
   Workers had their faces covered to protect their identities as they began demolishing the Ungdomhuset, ‘the youth house’, which had been a haven for punks and squatters since the 1980s.
   Violence first erupted on Thursday in the Noerrebro and Christianshavn neighbourhoods when police evicted squatters from the building.

Britain has prepared a crack Special Air Service team to rescue five Britons feared kidnapped in Ethiopia, if diplomatic efforts to release them fail, press reports said Monday.
   Some 60 SAS troops have already been dispatched to neighbouring Djibouti, the Daily Mirror reported, while the Times talked of a ‘substantial’ team and the Guardian said Special Forces were already in Ethiopia itself.
   The missing people, all linked to Britain’s embassy in Addis Ababa, were kidnapped last Thursday in the remote Afar desert region near the Eritrean border, according to the Ethiopian state news agency.
   A British Foreign Office spokesman said it was believed all five were British nationals.
   The Mirror said that the crack troops preparing to go in if necessary are from the SAS’s