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At least 55 Tamil Tiger rebels have been killed in land and sea battles on Sri Lanka’s northeast coast as an army offensive moves forward in a bid to end 25 years of civil war, the military said Monday.
   Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said 26 rebels were killed in a sea battle Monday off Chalai. Four boats belonging to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were sunk in the battle, which lasted about four hours before dawn.
   A leader of the Sea Tigers — the rebels’ naval wing — was among the dead while one government sailor died and three were wounded, he said.
   Heavy ground battles between the army troops and the guerrillas on Sunday left 29 rebels dead, Nanayakkara said. The fighting came after government forces broke through a fortification built by the Tigers to defend their last strip of land on Sunday.
   A military statement said another senior Sea Tiger leader, known as Uththaman, who commanded the ground battle, was also killed. Nanayakkara did not provide details of casualties suffered by army troops.
   Verification of the reports was not possible because independent journalists are not allowed into the conflict area.
   The rebels built a number of earth fortifications and ditches in an attempt to defend their key strongholds in recent months, but a series of government victories has pinned the rebels back into just 8.4 square miles of jungle and beach, which mostly includes a government declared ‘no-fire’ zone for people fleeing the fighting.
   The government says its forces are close to ending the Tamil Tigers’ separatist campaign, though there has been intense concern for the tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the war zone.
   The UN says an estimated 150,000 to 190,000 people are trapped inside the territory, resulting in dozens of deaths each day. But the government says the figure on the number of trapped is less than half the UN’s estimate.
   It accuses the rebels of holding the civilians as human shields. The statement posted Monday on the ministry of defence web site accused the rebels ‘mounting heavy artillery and mortar attacks from the government declared ‘no-fire’ Zone.’
   Tamil Tiger rebels have fought since 1983 to create an independent homeland for ethnic minority Tamils, who have faced decades of marginalisation by successive governments controlled by ethnic Sinhalese. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the violence.

The Sudanese leader, Omar al-Beshir, defying an international arrest warrant by participating in the annual Arab summit in Qatar, Monday urged Arab leaders to strongly reject his indictment.
   Beshir already enjoys strong backing from Arab countries who have repeatedly denounced the arrest warrant issued on March 4 by the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes in Darfur.
   Addressing the summit, Beshir called on fellow leaders to issue ‘strong and clear decisions rejecting this decision, and demanding those who fabricated it to annul it.’
   The Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, whose country passed Monday the presidency of the Arab League summit to Qatar, echoed calls to support Beshir against the ICC.
   ‘We are called upon today, not (just) to criticise the warrant (which)... we are all agreed is politicised, but to reject it categorically,’ Assad said.
   ‘(We should) express absolute support for Sudan at this stage of the confrontation in order to save it,’ he told the Arab heads of states.
   Beshir arrived Sunday unexpectedly in Doha after speculation had been rife that he might avoid the summit in order to spare Qatar embarrassment.
   He is on his fourth trip abroad since the ICC issued its indictment against him on March 4.
   The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, who attended the summit opening despite the presence of Beshir, urged the Sudanese authorities to reverse its decision to expel 13 aid groups from Darfur, a measure taken in response to the ICC warrant.
   ‘I urge the Sudanese authorities once again to reverse this decision,’ Ban told the meeting.
   ‘I remain extremely concerned by the government’s decision to expel key international non-governmental organisations, and suspend the work of three national NGOs that provide life-sustaining services for more than one million people,’ he said.
   Assad meanwhile charged that Arab countries do not have a partner in their efforts to achieve peace with Israel, claiming that the incoming right-wing Israeli government represent a society not wanting peace.

South Korea and the United States expressed renewed concern at North Korea’s upcoming rocket launch, saying it seems linked to a nuclear weapons drive rather than a space programme as Pyongyang claims.
   A satellite photo taken Sunday clearly showed a missile on the launch pad at Musudan-ri on the northeast coast, just days before the scheduled blast-off.
   The communist state says it will launch a satellite for peaceful space research between April 4-8. The United States, Japan and South Korea say this is a pretext for testing its intercontinental missile, the Taepodong-2.
   The South Korean president, Lee Myung-Bak, in an interview published Monday by Britain’s Financial Times, said the North’s stated plan would cause no qualms if it had no nuclear programme.
   ‘But the truth of the matter is North Korea does have a desire to develop nuclear weapons, so this does precisely make it a very serious concern for them to acquire the technology to deliver nuclear weapons,’ he was quoted as saying.
   The North tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006. Six-nation nuclear disarmament talks are currently stalled.
   The planned launch is ‘a very serious concern,’ Lee said.
   The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said Sunday it was North Korea’s ‘long-term intent’ to arm such a missile with a nuclear warhead but he believed it was not currently able to do so.
   Gates, speaking on ‘Fox News Sunday,’ said the launch appears imminent but the US would not shoot the rocket down.
   ‘I think if we had a missile that was heading for Hawaii, that looked like it was headed for Hawaii or something like that, we might consider it. I don’t think we have any plans to do anything like that at this point,’ Gates said.

Monday’s assault on a police school and a wave of spectacular attacks underlines Pakistan’s weakness and the danger posed by militants to the future of the nuclear-armed nation, analysts said.
   The commando-style assault on the training ground transformed a normally peaceful commuter belt near Pakistan’s cultural capital Lahore into a war zone, leaving at least 20 people dead in pitched battles with security forces.
   Analysts said the attack was a firm message to the US president, Barack Obama, who has put Pakistan at the heart of the fight against al-Qaeda, tripling US aid in a strategy aimed at reversing the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
   Such is the scale of violence in the Muslim nation that Obama called al-Qaeda and its allies ‘a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within’ and urged Islamabad to demonstrate its commitment to eradicating extremists.
   ‘Terrorists want to tell Obama and his Western allies that they cannot be contained as Obama desired and are still as powerful and strong as they have been for years now,’ said Mutahir Shaikh, an international relations expert.
   ‘The attack also proves the weakness of state institutions and shows that a mere half a dozen professionally trained terrorists can take anyone hostage and occupy any establishment they like,’ he added.
   Monday’s attack mimicked the March 3 assault on Sri Lanka’s cricket team in Lahore, where assailants on foot carrying back packs of high-energy food and hand weapons killed eight Pakistanis and wounded seven members of the squad.
   ‘Urban terrorism is now in vogue in our major cities,’ said Shaikh, a professor at the University of Karachi.
   Extremists opposed to the Pakistan government’s decision to side with the United States in its ‘war on terror’ have carried out a spate of bombings and other attacks that have killed nearly 1,700 people in less than two years.
   ‘This is further evidence of the growing threat of terrorism to Pakistan’s state and society,’ security analyst Hasan Askari said after Monday’s assault.
   ‘These groups want to paralyse the system of state in order to have greater freedom to pursue their ideological and political agenda inside and outside Pakistan,’ he said.
   ‘An isolated Pakistan will be easily overwhelmed by terrorists, which the world should not allow them to do.’
   Much of the unrest has been concentrated in the northwest, where the army has been fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda. On Friday, a suicide bomber ripped through a packed mosque near the Afghan border, killing around 50 people.
   But the second attack in the Lahore area this month will fan fears that the net of violence is spreading.

A US sergeant became on Monday the second non-commissioned officer to be convicted of murder for the summary executions of four bound and blindfolded prisoners in Iraq in 2007.
   Sergeant First Class Joseph P Mayo told a court martial in Germany that the men of Middle Eastern appearance were shot in the back of the head with nine-millimetre pistols and their bodies dumped in a Baghdad canal.
   ‘I thought it (the executions) was in the best interests of my soldiers,’ Mayo told the court in Vilseck, Germany after pleading guilty to murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
   He said that the men had been arrested after a number of attacks on their unit, and that in the same building troops had found two sniper rifles, AK-47 assault rifles and a duffel bag full of ammunition. According to documents quoted by the New York Times, the US soldiers were told by superiors to release the men for lack of evidence.
   Mayo, 27, is one of seven soldiers implicated in the case, and one of three non-commissioned officers to be tried for murder. Master Sergeant John E Hatley, the most senior soldier present, is to stand trial charged with murder in Germany on April 13, an army statement said last week.
   Co-defendant Sergeant Michael P Leahy, an army medic, was sentenced in February to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Mayo faces the same minimum sentence.

Hundreds of thousands of Somalis refugees in Kenya suffer extortion and abuse by corrupt and violent police, a human rights watchdog said on Monday.
   Human Rights Watch also accused the Kenyan authorities of forcibly deporting hundreds of asylum seekers trying to reach the camp, according to a new report ‘From Horror to Hopelessness: Kenya’s forgotten Somali Refugee Crisis.’
   More than quarter of a million refugees live in Dadaab’s three overcrowded camps in the arid, poverty stricken northeast of Kenya — the world’s largest refugee settlement.
   Aid agencies expect 100,000 arrivals this year as a tide of Somalis flee an Islamic insurgency waged against the new moderate government in Mogadishu.
   ‘People escaping the violence in Somalia need protection and help, but instead face more danger, abuse and deprivation,’ the report said.
   The two-year Islamic insurgency has killed more than 17,000 civilians, forced more than a million to flee their homes and left a third of the population — more than three million people — dependent on emergency food aid.
   The pro-al-Qaeda militant group al Shabaab, which controls large swathes of southern and central Somalia, is the main obstacle for Somalia’s new president, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, who is trying to restore peace after 18 years of violence.
   HRW gathered testimonies from dozens of refugees and documented cases of corrupt police officials routinely demanding cash from Somalis as they entered or moved from the camps to other parts of Kenya.
   The Kenyan government closed its porous, desert frontier in January 2007 following the US-backed fall of the Islamic Courts Union group. The United Nations and aid agencies denounced the move at the time as a violation of human rights.
   In its report, HRW said it recognised Kenya’s legitimate security concerns but said the closure had failed to stem the influx of tens of thousands of refugees and instead given rise to the proliferation of people-smuggling groups.

A suicide attacker walked into a district government office in southern Afghanistan and blew himself up on Monday, killing nine people and wounding eight, the police said.
   The Taliban-style attack in Kandahar province came as authorities announced that three policemen and five militants were killed in bomb blasts elsewhere in the war-ravaged country, which is battling an extremist insurgency.
   The suicide bomber attacked a citizen registration office in the government headquarters of Dand district, about 10 kilometres south of the city of Kandahar, officials said.
   ‘In this incident, five policemen and four civilians were martyred,’ the interior ministry said in a statement, updating earlier tolls issued by other officials. ‘Two policemen and six civilians were wounded.’
   It blamed the attack on the ‘enemies of Afghanistan’, a term often used by Afghan officials to refer to Taliban and other insurgents behind a wave of violence that is also mounting in neighbouring Pakistan.
   ‘The suicide attacker was on foot and he entered the citizen registration department and detonated,’ said the police commander for southern Afghanistan, General Ghulam Ali Wahdat.

The police in Thailand on Monday threatened to disperse supporters of fugitive ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, raising tensions as the protesters blockaded the seat of government for a fifth day.
   The police warned that it was illegal for the demonstrators to prevent the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, or members of his administration from entering Government House in downtown Bangkok.
   Thousands of red-clad protesters have surrounded the sprawling complex since Thursday, fired up by repeated video addresses by the exiled Thaksin, who was ousted in a coup in 2006.
   ‘Police would like leaders and protesters to stop obstructing the entrances once you hear this statement,’ said the statement issued by the Bangkok metropolitan police.
   ‘If not, the police will control the crowd step by step, using only shields in the beginning,’ it added.

The Libyan leader, Moamer Gaddafi insulted Saudi King Abdullah on Monday but told him he was ready to exchange visits with him before walking out of the opening session of the annual Arab summit in Doha.
   After Qatar’s emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the summit’s host, spoke, Gaddafi addressed the Saudi king saying, ‘It has been six years since you have been avoiding a confrontation with me.’
   ‘You are always lying and you’re facing the grave and you were made by Britain and protected by the United States,’ he said in front of 16 other leaders gathered for the two-day meeting.
   The two countries have had tense relations since the publication in June 2004 of a press article in the United States and Saudi accusing Gaddafi of plotting the assassination of King Abdullah, then crown prince.
   ‘I am ready to visit you and for you to visit me,’ Gaddafi later said.