DarkTimes - 24Hr Global News Blog

KARACHI (AFP) — Pakistani authorities on Tuesday arrested 24 men at an Afghan refugee camp on suspicion of involvement in recent riots that killed 35 people and injured more than 200, officials said.

"We have arrested 24 men who were either directly involved in the violent acts or harboured the criminals," Sohail Zafar Chattha, a senior police official, told AFP.

Police and paramilitary forces also seized weapons and ammunition from the suspects in the operation aimed at securing Pakistan's largest city, which was gripped with violence from Saturday until Monday.

The incidents were mainly blamed on activists from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP). Leaders from both the parties denied their members were involved in the violence.

"Most of the suspects we have arrested are Afghan refugees. Some of them are locals," Chattha said.

During the two days of deadly disturbances, troops were authorised to use guns to quell the violence in which rioters set shops and houses on fire.

Police and paramilitary Rangers were still patrolling the city streets and affected areas to maintain peace Tuesday evening, paramilitary spokesman Major Mohammad Ali told AFP.

Karachi has experienced unrest in the past from tensions between the influential MQM and Pashtuns from the North West Frontier Province, who have settled in Karachi for jobs.

If the problem of 'soft on terror' stance of India has to be traced to roots, it may not be just Congress politicians as the BJP and other political parties are alleging now. We might as well start with cells in the Indian media.

A media portal SAWF (sawf.org), appears to be symptomatic of this. Just recently, the portal 'reported' the Jihadi 'fidayeen' attacks on India as 'tragedy' while lambasting the likes of Ajay Devgan and Raveena Tandon for calling out the failure of the basic government infrastructure that any government is hired to provide (national and domestic security). The latter group has been merely echoing the frustration and anger of the hundred of millions of Indians and people worldwide.

Maybe Sawf type media do not understand language very well so let us help them out. Hamlet was a tragedy. This is not. Or to put it more subtly, tragedy is what happens when these media people get run over by a speeding Indian army truck. That might be tragic. Tragedy however is not Jihadis from Pakistan or Middle-East, using local support, managing to infiltrate Mumbai, starting seizing city landmarks and slaughtering innocent people there. What happened in Mumbai was no tragedy.


Terrorism is mass murder of unarmed civilians with intention to terrorize the rest into gradual submission. And Islamic Terrorism is an offensive, escalating worldwide problem which in India is neither a 'tragedy' nor an 'accident'. It is designed to create murderous panic via symbolic attacks to drive subsequent mental surrender of the infidel civilian population who the terrorists tend to target in the first place.

The least Bollywood and Hindi cinema figures then could do is to raise the call on behalf of themselves and for the country they have gotten so much from and which has made them what they are, not to mention where public safety at public places like movie theaters is essential for their profession to sustain. So that's what number of them are doing.

That's more than what some others are showing however, including elements of the Indian media.

Calling terrorism 'tragedy' is like calling cold-blood murder an 'unseemly incident'. Many in media do this deliberately to reframe the situation and problem as one of 'helplessness' and 'no source' and 'no solutions' as if it is a tragedy (like the cyclone), then it must not be a deliberate mass targeted crime against the country, its institutions and its people.

Which of course is exactly what it is.

It is ridiculous that as the operation to flush out the attackers was going on, the Indian security authorities had already determined that the attackers had come from Pakistan. This is an absurd and illogical approach which will not help the ongoing CBMs between the two countries. Also, we should not send our ISI chief to India just because their prime minister made the request. This will send the wrong signals across the border and to the Pakistani public.

Ihtesham Kayani

Rawalpindi

(2)

India blaming Pakistan for a terrorist act on its soil is not something new. India has always jumped to such hasty conclusions — and usually without offering any evidence — without the consideration that it will help the enemies of peace between the two countries.

Surely, India knows that it has dozens, nay hundreds, of groups on its own soil which can, and have in the past, take up arms against the state. Besides, Pakistan itself of late has been a victim of terrorist acts, so what could it possibly stand to gain by doing something similar on Indian soil?

Kamran Kiani

Islamabad

The Large Hadron Collider is ready to start smashing its first particles together early next week, after glitches with the £3.6 billion “big bang machine” were fixed by engineers.

Although scientists had hoped that the successful creation of the particle accelerator’s first beams last Wednesday would clear the way for trial collisions this week, the timetable has had to be delayed because of power failures that affected its cooling system.

The problems were resolved finally yesterday and the team was planning to resume circulating beams of protons around the 17-mile (27km) ring last night. The success should allow the two beams to be fired in opposite directions early next week, and then crashed together inside the vast detectors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Although the energy of these first collisions will be only 6 per cent of the maximum the LHC will achieve eventually, they will be a critical step forward. Their results will enable scientists to calibrate and test the detectors, before collisions at about 70 per cent of the accelerator’s capacity begin next month. It is then that the LHC will start to provide data that could prove the existence of the Higgs boson — the so-called God particle — and answer other questions about the nature of the Universe.

Once the two beams had been inserted into the LHC ring last Wednesday, the next task was to “capture” them so that protons could be fired in neat pulses or “bunches”. One of the beams had been captured by Friday, but work was then interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system, which chills the LHC’s superconducting magnets to 1.9C above absolute zero.

Laurent Tavian, head of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) cryogenics group, told The Times yesterday that the faults had now been fixed. Engineers could proceed with “capturing” the second beam, allowing for collisions within days. “The plan is now to capture the second beam, and once both beams are ready and captured we can start to do collisions,” Dr Tavian said.

The first collisions will involve beams with an energy of 0.45 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which previous accelerators have been capable of reaching since the 1980s. The aim is to check that the detectors are working properly. The next goal will be to produce beams with energies of 5TeV, which would smash the 1TeV world record, held by the US Tevatron in Illinois. This is scheduled to happen by October 12, in time for the LHC’s formal inauguration ceremony on October 21.

Over the winter the LHC will be shut down for further fine-tuning. Next year it will be boosted to its maximum energy of 7 TeV to produce results that should shed light on some of the most important and enduring questions in physics.

|sources timesonline.co.uk|

Islamabad lashes out at 'grave provocation' that killed at least 15 people just as Prime Minister escapes apparent assassination attempt

ISLAMABAD -- U.S. troops raided a Taliban base in Pakistan yesterday, U.S. officials acknowledged, killing at least 15 people and raising the ire of one of Washington's most import allies in the war on terror.

It's the first known U.S. ground attack in Pakistan, prompting an angry response from Islamabad, which accused the troops of killing civilians.

Relations between Islamabad and Western forces in neighbouring Afghanistan had been improving, before the setback from what Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs described as a "grave provocation."

The deaths, just inside Pakistan, in its Waziristan tribal area, occurred amid growing controversy in Afghanistan over the killing of civilians by Western forces, after an aerial bombardment last month that claimed as many as 90 civilian lives in western Afghanistan.

Separately, Islamic extremists near Islamabad opened fire on Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's car, in an apparent assassination attempt. The assailants, firing from a roadside embankment, hit the driver's side window twice. Mr. Gilani was not in the car at the time. The armoured Mercedes-Benz was on its way to collect him from the airport outside Islamabad.

Mr. Gilani's son and a government minister were reportedly in the motorcade.

"This was a warning," a top security official in Islamabad said. "They're saying, 'we can get you.' If they could fire bullets, they could also fire a rocket-launcher."

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was a protest against military operations in the northwest valley of Swat.

"We will continue such attacks on government officials and installations," Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said.

Last week, gunmen opened fire on the car of U.S. diplomat Lynne Tracy, who escaped unhurt. Extremists assassinated Benazir Bhutto, leader of Mr. Gilani's Pakistan Peoples Party, in December of last year, and staged at least three assassination attempts against former president Pervez Musharraf - two of which came close to killing him.

In a speech yesterday, Mr. Gilani, without any hint of irony, said, "I am happy to state that the law and order situation is, God willing, returning to normalcy."

Details were murky about the predawn raid by U.S. forces into South Waziristan, part of the tribal area that NATO believes is used as a haven by insurgents operating in Afghanistan.

A U.S. official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of cross-border operations, said the raid occurred about 1.6 kilometres inside Pakistan. The official, based in Washington, didn't provide details on casualties.

Islamabad has called for international forces to share intelligence on the tribal belt so that it can deal with militants there, but U.S. and NATO commanders have often mistrusted their Pakistani counterparts, believing that elements of the military and intelligence sympathize with the insurgents.

Owais Ghani, the provincial governor in charge of the tribal belt, put the death toll from the incident at a village in the Angoor Adda area as high as 20 civilians, including three women and four children. The Pakistan army put the death toll at 15, including seven civilians.

"This is a direct assault on the sovereignty of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan expect that the armed forces ... would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country and give a befitting reply," Mr. Ghani said.

Habib Khan Wazir, an area resident, said he heard helicopters, then firing. "Later, I saw 15 bodies inside and outside two homes. They had been shot in the head," Mr. Wazir told The Associated Press, adding that all the dead were civilians. "There was darkness at the time when the Americans came and killed our innocent people," he said. "We would have not allowed them to go back alive if they had come to our village in daylight."

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry lodged official protests. It is thought that the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, Anne Patterson, was summoned to the ministry.

There have been frequent U.S. missile strikes in the tribal territory, some of which have killed top al-Qaeda leaders who have been uneasily tolerated by Pakistan. But the acknowledged use of ground forces is unprecedented and appears to be more than Islamabad is willing to tolerate.

"We reserve the right of self-defence and retaliation to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression," said Major-General Athar Abbas, a spokesman for the Pakistan army.