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| 16 January 2005 | Sunday | 05 Zilhaj 1425 |
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Welcome to DAWN, Pakistan's most widely circulated English language newspaper. Updated round-the-clock, with a major update before 10:00 PST (05:00 GMT).
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Court: 80 Afghans to Be Freed From Cuba - KABUL, Jan 16: About 80 Afghans held at Guantanamo Bay have been brought back to their country and will be freed today, the Afghan Supreme Court said. A court spokesman said the group has been brought to Bagram Air Base, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan. From there they will be moved to the capital Kabul, then allowed to return to their homes, spokesman Wahid Mozhda said. Mozhda said the prisoners were all Afghan, but had no further details. American military officials in Kabul said they had no information about any release and referred questions to the U.S. Department of Defense. Officials at Bagram could not be immediately reached. (Reuters) (Posted @ 13:10 PST) 
U.S. Forces Carry Out Raids in Mosul : BAGHDAD, Jan 16: U.S. forces carried out a series of raids in city of Mosul, the military said today, as American and Iraqi authorities scramble to prepare for elections there in the face of mass resignations of polling staff and police. U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the security threat to the Jan. 30 election was worse than in last October's nationwide balloting in Afghanistan and that it was impossible to guarantee ``absolute security'' against the ``extraordinary intimidation that the enemy is undertaking.'' In the Mosul area, the U.S. Army's Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained 11 suspected insurgents, including an alleged cell leader, and seized weapons and bomb making material in several weekend raids - part of the military's strategy to try to secure the city short of launching an all-out offensive. East of Mosul, a Katyusha rocket slammed into a home near the Kurdish regional parliament building in Irbil where leaders of the two main Kurdish parties were meeting to discuss the election, a police official said Sunday. U.S. and Iraqi officials are scrambling to recruit new police and election workers in Mosul after thousands of them resigned in the face of rebel intimidation. A new police chief was appointed a week ago to command a force of barely 1,000 police. Last November the city had 5,000 police. Similar mass resignations are believed to have occurred in other Sunni Muslim areas of northern, central and western Iraq. Also Sunday, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol south of Baghdad, injuring two guardsmen, one of them critically, police Lt. Adnan Abdul-Allah said. West of the capital, in the city of Ramadi, five explosions rocked a joint U.S.-Iraqi National Guard base, sending columns of smoke rising above the area, witnesses said. Sporadic clashes were reported in the city center. Elsewhere, U.S. troops fired on a car that sped toward them near the central city of Samarra today, wounding two people, the military said. A spokesman said ground troops fired warning shots before aiming directly at the vehicle. The driver and a passenger were wounded. Iraqi police and several witnesses, however, reported that four people were killed and that the vehicle was hit by tank fire. A major insurgent group claimed responsibility Sunday for kidnapping 15 Iraqi National Guard members who were reported missing last week. The 15 guardsmen had been pulled from a bus near their base in the town of Hit, 90 miles west of Baghdad. A statement posted on an Islamic Web site took responsibility on behalf of Ansar al-Sunnah. (Guardian) (Posted @ 17:50 PST)
Sharon Gives Military Free Rein Against Militants: JERUSALEM , Jan 16: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said today he was giving Israel's army free rein to battle militants in Gaza and accused the new Palestinian leadership he now shuns of doing nothing to stop attacks on Israelis. Palestinian officials said President Mahmoud Abbas would try again this week to win over fighters defying his calls for an end to a 4-year-old armed uprising so as to allow talks, but Israel suspects his approach is doomed to fail. "Despite the change in Palestinian leadership, we have yet to see them taking any action against terror," Sharon told his cabinet, two days after cutting off all ties with Abbas because of a militant attack that killed six Israelis. "The Israeli military and security apparatus have been instructed to take any action needed without restriction to stop terror and they will continue to do so ... as long the Palestinians do not lift a finger." Israeli media said the army might consider resuming assassinations of top militant leaders and could set up "security zones" in the Gaza Strip to prevent mortar and rocket fire aimed into Israel or at Jewish settlements. Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said Abbas would go to Gaza on Wednesday to "resume discussions for peace." Abbas, he said, would press militant groups to agree to a cease-fire that would have to be reciprocated by Israel and also try to persuade them to participate in parliamentary elections on July 17. "We have to try. If we are willing to talk with our occupiers, shouldn't we talk to our brothers? We have to continue. This is not an easy task," Shaath said. (Reuters) (Posted @ 17:50 PST)
Report: U.S. Conducting Secret Missions Inside Iran: WASHINGTON , Jan 16: The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported today. The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites. Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible." One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign." The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran," Dan Bartlett, a top aide to President Bush, told CNN's "Late Edition." (Reuters) (Posted @ 23:55 PST)
Mesic re-elected Croatian president: Exit Poll - ZAGREB, Jan 16: Croatian President Stipe Mesic is cruising for victory and a second five-year term after a runoff vote today in the former Yugoslav republic, according an exit poll. A poll for RTL private television station gave centrist Mesic 71 percent of the vote compared to 25.5 percent for his rival, Deputy Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor of the ruling conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). (AFP) (Posted @ 23:30 PST)
27 killed, 29 injured as bus, truck collide in Colombia: BOGOTA, Jan 16: Twenty-seven people were killed and 29 others injured in a head-on collision between a passenger bus and a truck in northern Colombia, highway patrol said today. Rafael Lara, head of the Santander province highway patrol, said the bus slammed into the truck when the bus driver tried to pass another vehicle without being able to see oncoming traffic in the opposite lane. At least eight of the injured are minors, he said. (AFP) (Posted @ 23:35 PST)
  Editor: Tahir Mirza The DAWN Group of Newspapers Haroon House, Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed Road, Karachi 74200, Pakistan. Phone:+92 (21) 111-444-777 Fax: +92 (21) 568-3188 webmaster@dawn.com Make sure to reload these pages so you're viewing the current version. |
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