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Families seek loved ones after Pakistan mosque blast kills 100, all but 3 police

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(Last Updated On: February 1, 2023)

Distraught relatives thronged hospitals in Pakistan’s Peshawar on Tuesday to look for their kin a day after a suicide bombing ripped through a crowded mosque in a heavily fortified area of the city, killing 100 people, all but three of them police, Reuters reported.

The attack, in the Police Lines district, was the deadliest in a decade to hit this restive, northwestern city near the Afghan border and comes amid a surge in violence against the police.

“My son, my child,” cried an elderly woman walking alongside an ambulance carrying coffins, as rescue workers stretchered wounded people to a hospital emergency unit.

At least 170 people were wounded in the blast, which demolished the upper storey of the mosque as hundreds of worshippers performed noon prayers, read the report.

Riaz Mahsud, a senior local government official, said the casualty toll was likely to rise as workers searched through the debris.

“So far, 100 bodies have been brought to Lady Reading Hospital,” a spokesman for the largest medical facility in the city, Mohammad Asim, said in a statement.

Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah told parliament that 97 of the 100 were police officials.

Authorities say they do not know how the bomber managed to breach the military and police checkpoints leading into the Police Lines district, a colonial-era, self-contained encampment in the city centre that is home to middle- and lower-ranking police personnel and their families, Reuters reported.

Given the security concerns in Peshawar, the mosque was built to allow police to pray without leaving the area. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said the bomber was in the first row in the prayer hall when he struck.

The attack is the deadliest in Peshawar since twin suicide bombings at All Saints Church killed scores of worshippers in September 2013, in what is the deadliest attack on Pakistan’s Christian minority.

Peshawar sits on the edge of the Pashtun tribal lands, a region mired in violence for the past two decades. The most active militant group in the area is the Pakistani Taliban, also called Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella group for Sunni and sectarian Islamist factions opposed to the government in Islamabad.

No group has officially owned the attack, but Sanaullah said a breakaway faction of the TTP called Khurasani had claimed responsibility.

The TTP denied responsibility, though it has stepped up attacks since withdrawing from a peace deal with the government last year, Reuters reported.

The policy to release militants under a amnesty as part of the deal has resulted in the bombing, Sanaullah said, adding that some of the militants who were set free also included some on death row.

The bombing took place a day before an IMF mission arrived in Islamabad for talks on a stalled $7 billion bailout.

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Russia says evidence links attackers to ‘Ukrainian nationalists’

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(Last Updated On: March 28, 2024)

Russian investigators said on Thursday they had uncovered evidence that the gunmen who killed more than 140 people in an attack on a concert hall near Moscow last week were linked to “Ukrainian nationalists”.

Russia has said from the outset that it is pursuing a Ukrainian link to the attack, even though Kyiv has denied it and the militant group Islamic State (Daesh) has claimed responsibility.

In a statement, the state Investigative Committee said for the first time that it had uncovered evidence of a Ukrainian link, Reuters reported.

“As a result of working with detained terrorists, studying the technical devices seized from them, and analyzing information about financial transactions, evidence was obtained of their connection with Ukrainian nationalists,” the statement said.

However, the White House has described Russia’s allegation that Ukraine was involved in the attack as “nonsense”.

National security spokesman John Kirby said it was clear that ISIS was “solely responsible.”

He added the US passed a written warning of an extremist attack to Russian security services, one of many provided in advance to Moscow.

Russia says however it is suspicious that Washington was able to name the alleged perpetrator of the attack so soon after it took place.

The head of Russia’s FSB security service said earlier this week, again without providing evidence, that he believed Ukraine, along with the U.S. and Britain, were involved.

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Spain air drops 26 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza

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(Last Updated On: March 28, 2024)

Spanish military planes air dropped 26 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip on Wednesday and Madrid called on Israel to open land border crossings to prevent a famine, the Foreign Ministry said.

The operation, carried out in coordination with Jordan and co-financed by the European Union, dropped more than 11,000 food rations to alleviate the “catastrophic levels of food insecurity” faced by up to 1.1 million people in Gaza, the ministry said in a statement.

“Spain insists on the opening of the land crossings as an indispensable measure to avoid a famine situation,” it added.

Other Western countries, including the United States, France and Germany, have also resorted to air drops to deliver aid to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza after nearly six months of war between Israeli forces and Hamas militants, Reuters reported.

Aid agencies say deliveries into Gaza, much of which has been laid to waste by Israeli bombardments, have been held up by bureaucratic obstacles and insecurity since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023.

Last week, a U.N.-backed report said a famine was imminent and likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July.

The Spanish foreign ministry also reaffirmed its commitment to supporting UNRWA, the United Nations humanitarian agency for Palestinians, and to its continued existence.

In January, major donors to UNRWA, including the U.S. and Germany, suspended funding following allegations that around 12 of its tens of thousands of Palestinian employees were suspected of involvement in the attacks on Israel by Hamas which triggered the war.

Israel says it puts no limit on the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza and blames problems in it reaching civilians there on U.N. agencies, which it says are inefficient, read the report.

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UN expert says Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, calls for arms embargo

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(Last Updated On: March 27, 2024)

A United Nations expert told the global body’s Human Rights Council on Tuesday that she believed that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since Oct. 7 amounted to genocide and called on countries to immediately impose sanctions and an arms embargo, Reuters reported.

Israel, which did not attend the session, rejected her findings.

“It is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of and to present my findings,” Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories, told the U.N. rights body in Geneva, presenting a report called “The Anatomy of a Genocide”.

“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met,” she said, citing more than 30,000 Palestinians killed among other acts.

“I implore member states to abide by their obligations, which start with imposing an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel and so ensure that the future does not continue to repeat itself,” she said, prompting a burst of applause.

The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said the use of the word genocide was “outrageous” and said the war was against Islamist group Hamas and not Palestinian civilians. It was triggered when Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 and taking 253 hostages, by Israeli tallies, read the report.

“Instead of seeking the truth, this Special Rapporteur tries to fit weak arguments to her distorted and obscene inversion of reality,” it said.

Gulf nations such as Qatar, as well as African countries including Algeria and Mauritania, voiced support for Albanese’s findings and alarm at the humanitarian situation, Reuters reported.

The seats for Israel’s ally the United States were left empty. Washington has previously accused the council of a chronic anti-Israel bias.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer, is one of dozens of independent human rights experts mandated by the United Nations to report and advise on specific themes and crises. Her views do not reflect those of the global body as a whole.

In the past, her comments on the Israel-Hamas conflict have drawn scrutiny, including from a U.S. ambassador in Geneva who said she has a history of using “antisemitic tropes”.

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