Afghan bank in Jalalabad hit by suicide bomb attack

Gunfire could be heard as police arrived in Jalalabad

Eighteen people have been killed and more than 70 wounded in an attack on a bank in the Afghan city of Jalalabad, according to the provincial governor.

Gul Agha Shirzay said suicide attackers armed with guns and grenades carried out the attack, according to AFP.
The Taliban say they carried out the assault on the Kabul Bank, targeting police and intelligence officers who had gone to collect their salaries.
Afghan security forces are frequently targets of attacks by the Taliban.
"Unfortunately 18 of our countrymen were martyred and more than 70 injured," said Mr Shirzay, governor of Nangarhar province.
Those wounded included Alishah Paktyamwal, the province's police chief, and his deputy.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack.
"People were there doing business deals and to receive their salaries. This attack once again showed the cruel actions of the terrorists who do not want the people of Afghanistan to live in peace," he said.


Nini/bbc

'Rogue' Afghan soldier kills two German troops in north

A man in an Afghan army uniform has killed two German soldiers serving with Nato's Isaf force in the northern province of Baghlan, Nato says.

Isaf soldiers returned fire "critically injuring the shooter", Nato said.
At least eight other Germans were injured in the attack in the provincial capital, Pul-e Khumri.
Germany has some 5,000 troops stationed in Baghlan and other provinces in northern Afghanistan. Security has been worsening in the area in recent months.
"We are not sure if this was actually an Afghan National Army soldier, or just a criminal, a terrorist, wearing a uniform," said German Brig Gen Josef Blotz, a Nato spokesman in Kabul.
He said troops had been mending a vehicle on a roadside outside a coalition compound in Pul-e Khumri when the attacker opened fire.
Two senior security officials in Pul-e Khumri had earlier told the BBC's Bilal Sarwary that the Afghan soldier opened fire "all of a sudden".
The man is believed to have been serving with the second brigade of 209 Shaheen corps. German and Afghan soldiers are jointly stationed at a base outside the city, our correspondent reports from Pul-e Khumri.
Baghlan used to be among a number of relatively peaceful northern provinces which have become steadily more violent in recent months as the insurgency has spread.
The Afghan National Army (ANA) has strict security screening procedures for its recruits, but that has not prevented a number of shooting incidents in which foreign soldiers have been killed.

Nini/BBC

Cuba sets free defiant dissident journalist Hernandez

The Cuban government has freed a jailed dissident who refused to go into exile in Spain as a condition for release. 

Ivan Hernandez, a journalist who was one of 75 opponents of the government arrested in 2003, was released along with six other prisoners.

He is among a group of dissidents whose freedom was brokered by the Roman Catholic Church, and most of whom were flown to Spain upon release.

He said he meant to continue working as an independent journalist.

"A major from the interior ministry told me that since I was being released from jail, that I should stay quiet at my home," he told AFP news agency by telephone from his home in Matanzas, 100km (62 miles) east of the capital Havana.

"But I told him that I was going to keep writing and working as an independent journalist just like before they convicted me."

Church deal

Mr Hernandez, 39, was jailed for 25 years while working for the dissident news agency Patria (Fatherland).

The deal brokered by the Church last year was meant to see the release of 52 dissidents.

Forty of these were released and accepted exile in Spain, while the other 12 refused to leave Cuba.

Mr Hernandez is among six of the latter who have been released.

Of the 75 people arrested in 2003, six remain in custody.

Speaking to the Associated Press after his release on Friday, Mr Hernandez said he was in good health, though feeling stress, and he thanked the Church for its help.

"I have faith that this process will continue until all are freed," he added, referring to those dissidents still in prison.

There was no immediate comment from the Cuban government, which regards dissidents as criminals disloyal to the communist state. 

Nini/bbc

Libya: Death toll from escalating unrest 'tops 100'

Footage has emerged purportedly showing unrest in several parts of Libya

At least 104 people have been killed in Libya since anti-government protests erupted on Wednesday, the campaign group Human Rights Watch says.

It said the figure included at least 20 people who died when troops reportedly used heavy weapons in the second city, Benghazi, on Saturday.
The group said its estimates were conservative.
Thousands of people in the east of the country have been protesting against Col Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year rule.
Libya is one of several Arab countries to have experienced pro-democracy demonstrations since the fall of long-time Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was forced from power on 11 February.

• Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has led since 1969
• Population 6.5m; land area 1.77m sq km
• Population with median age of 24.2, and a literacy rate of 88%
• Gross national income per head: $12,020 (World Bank 2009)

Reports are difficult to verify as Libyan authorities have not allowed foreign journalists into the country.

In Benghazi - the main focus of the unrest - violence escalated on Saturday, when a funeral procession for victims of previous violence made its way past a major security compound.

Witnesses said troops used machine-guns, mortars, large-calibre weapons, and even a missile, against the mourners.

Opposition supporters said the attack was unprovoked, although security sources suggested some protesters threw firebombs at the compound.

Some described scenes of chaos as army snipers shot from the roofs of buildings and demonstrators fought back against troops on the ground.

One doctor told the BBC that 22 had died at one hospital on Saturday, and that many of the wounded were in a critical condition.

Another hospital source in the city said up to 47 people had been killed and 900 injured, most of them with gunshot wounds.

"Ninety percent of these gunshot wounds mainly in the head, the neck, the chest, mainly in the heart," she told the BBC.

Medical staff are said to be running out of blood and supplies, with the staff exhausted from dealing with the stream of casualties.

There are reports that Col Gaddafi's government is bringing in elite forces, as well as foreign mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa.

Another Benghazi resident said the government compound was the only part of the town still under military control.

In an appeal sent to Reuters, a group of religious and clan leaders from across Libya urged "every Muslim, within the regime" or anyone helping it: "Do NOT kill your brothers and sisters, STOP the massacre NOW!"

There have been reports of anti-government protests in other eastern cities, including al-Bayd and Dernah, as well as Misrata further west, about 200km (125 miles) from the capital Tripoli.

There is no sign of major unrest in Tripoli, Col Gaddafi's main power base.

Nini/bbc

Algerian police break up crowd at pro-reform rally

ALGIERS, Algeria — Algerian police thwarted a rally by thousands of pro-democracy supporters Saturday, breaking up the crowd into isolated groups to keep them from marching.

Police brandishing clubs, but no firearms, weaved their way through the crowd in central Algiers, banging their shields, tackling some protesters and keeping traffic flowing through the planned march route.

The gathering, organized by the Coordination for Democratic Change in Algeria, comes a week after a similar protest, which organizers said brought an estimated 10,000 people and up to 26,000 riot police onto the streets of Algiers. Officials put turnout at the previous rally at 1,500.

The new protest comes on the heels of uprisings in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt that toppled those countries' autocratic leaders.

Police presence at Saturday's march was more discrete than the week before, when huge contingents of riot police were deployed throughout the capital the night before the march. On Friday night, by contrast, the capital was calm, with police taking up their positions only Saturday morning.

Still, by breaking up the crowd, the police managed to turn the planned march into a chaotic rally of small groups.

Opposition lawmaker Tahar Besbas, of the Rally for Culture and Democracy, RCD, party, was hospitalized with an apparent head injury after he was clubbed by police. Besbas' supporters said police initially refused to take him to a hospital, though he was eventually taken away in an ambulance.

It was not immediately clear how serious Besbas' injury was.

Human rights advocate Ali Yahia Abdenour, of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, was undeterred by the police. The frail elderly man cried out, "We want democracy, the sovereignty of the people."

Another demonstrator, 23-year-old Khalifa Lahouazi, a university student from Tizi Ouzou, east of the capital, said he "came here to seek my legitimate rights.

"We're living an insupportable life with this system," said Lahouazi, a university student from Tizi Ouzou, in the Kabylie region 100 kilometres east of Algiers. "It's the departure of the system, not just Bouteflika, that we want," he said, referring to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

The new march comes amid weeks of strikes and scattered protests in the North African country, which has promised to lift a 19-year state of emergency by month's end in a nod to the growing mass of disgruntled citizens.

University students and nurses are among those who have held intermittent strikes, joined by the unemployed. Even the richest region, around the gas fields of Hassi Messaoud, was not spared as around 500 jobless youths protested Wednesday, the daily El Watan reported.

A group of communal guards -- citizens armed by the state to fight the two-decades-long Islamist insurgency -- joined the protest Wednesday in front of the governor's office in Medea, around 100 kilometres south of Algiers to demand a variety of social benefits.

Rising food prices led to five days of riots in Algeria last month that left three people dead.

The second march comes as the pro-democracy fervor sweeping the Arab world is gaining ground, moving from neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, where longtime autocratic leaders were forced from power, to protests in Yemen, Bahrain and Libya.

In Algeria, Bouteflika has promised the lifting of a state of emergency by the end of the month. The measure, put in place to combat a budding insurgency by Islamist extremists, bans large public gatherings.

Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia acknowledged Wednesday that Algeria "cannot ignore events taking place in Arab and Islamic countries."

Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci, on a visit to Madrid, said Friday the march has not been officially banned, but only because no one has requested authorization to hold it. He praised the work of police a week earlier, noting that they did not carry firearms and that no one was injured.

He said in a French radio interview earlier this week that the protesters were only a minority.

"Algeria is not Tunisia. Algeria is not Egypt," he said in an interview with France's Europe 1 radio.

Algeria does have many of the ingredients for a popular revolt. It is riddled with corruption and has never successfully grappled with its soaring jobless rate among youth despite its oil and gas wealth. Still, experts say that this country's brutal battle with Islamist extremists that peaked in the mid-1990s, but continues with sporadic violence, has left the population fearful of a new confrontation. The violence left an estimated 200,000 people dead.

Nini/Ctv

Libyan forces fire on mourners at funeral, killing 15

CAIRO — Moammar Gadhafi's forces fired on mourners leaving a funeral for protesters Saturday in the eastern city of Benghazi, killing at least 15 people and wounding scores more as the regime tried to squelch calls for an end to the ruler's 42-year grip on power.

Libyan protesters were back on the street for the fifth straight day, but Gadhafi has taken a hard line toward the dissent that has ripped through the Middle East and swept him up with it. Government forces also wiped out a protest encampment and clamped down on Internet service throughout Libya

Snipers fired on thousands of people gathered in Benghazi, a focal point of the unrest, to mourn 35 protesters who were shot on Friday, a hospital official said.

A hospital official said 15 people were killed, including one man who was apparently hit in the head with an anti-aircraft missile. The weapons apparently were used to intimidate the population.

"Many of the dead and the injured are relatives of doctors here," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "They are crying and I keep telling them to please stand up and help us."

The official said many people were shot in the head and chest. The hospital was overwhelmed and people were streaming to the facility to donate blood.

Like most Libyans who have talked to The Associated Press during the revolt, the hospital official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Before Saturday's violence, Human Rights Watch had estimated at least 84 people have been killed.

Just after 2 a.m. local time in Libya, the U.S.-based Arbor Networks security company detected a total cessation of online traffic in the North African country. Protesters confirmed they could not get online.

Information is tightly controlled in Libya, where journalists cannot work freely, and activists this week have posted videos on the Internet that have been an important source of images of the revolt. Other information about the protests has come from opposition activists in exile. Egyptian officials briefly tried to cut Internet service during the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11, but that move was unsuccessful.

Libya is more isolated, however, and the Internet is one of the few links to the outside world. The Cairo-based Arabic Network for Human Rights Information released a report back in 2004 that said nearly 1 million people among Libya's population of about 6 million had Internet access at the time. That was just three years after Internet service had been extended to the public.

About 5 a.m. Saturday, special forces attacked hundreds of protesters, including lawyers and judges, camped out in front of the courthouse in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city.

"They fired tear gas on protesters in tents and cleared the areas after many fled carrying the dead and the injured," one protester said over the phone.

Doctors in Benghazi said Friday that 35 bodies had been brought to the hospital following attacks by security forces backed by militias, on top of more than a dozen killed the day before. Standing in front of Jalaa Hospital morgue, a witness said that the bodies bore wounds from being shot "directly at the head and the chests."

Residents of the city set up neighbourhood patrols on Saturday, after police left the streets.

"We don't see a single policeman in the streets, not even traffic police," a lawyer in Benghazi said. People regarded the disappearance of the police as an ominous sign, fearing that pro-government forces would soon follow up the encampment raid with house-to-house attacks.

Switzerland-based Libyan activist Fathi al-Warfali said that several other activists had been detained including Abdel-Hafez Gougha, a well-known organizer who was being held after security forces stormed his house in a night raid.

Gadhafi is facing the biggest popular uprising of his autocratic reign, with much of the action in the country's impoverished east.

The nation has huge oil reserves but poverty is a significant problem. U.S. diplomats have said in newly leaked memos that Gadhafi's regime seems to neglect the east intentionally, letting unemployment and poverty rise to weaken opponents there.

The British Foreign Office on Saturday warned against all but essential travel to five cities in eastern Libya where demonstrations have been concentrated, including Benghazi.

A female protester in Tripoli, the capital city to the west, said it was much harder to demonstrate there. Police were out in force and Gadhafi was greeted rapturously when he drove through town in a motorcade on Thursday. "People are under siege and those who dare to show up are arrested," she said.

Earlier in the week, forces from the military's elite Khamis Brigade moved into Benghazi, Beyida and several other cities, residents said. They were accompanied by militias that seemed to include foreign mercenaries, they added. Several witnesses reported French-speaking fighters, believed to be Tunisians or sub-Saharan Africans, among militiamen wearing blue uniforms and yellow helmets.

The Khamis Brigade is led by Gadhafi's youngest son Khamis Gadhafi, and U.S. diplomats in leaked memos have called it "the most well-trained and well-equipped force in the Libyan military." The witnesses' reports that it had been deployed could not be independently confirmed.

Nini/ctv

Tension eases in Bahrain as protest sweeps region

The military has been ordered off the streets in Bahrain, offering demonstrators there a glimmer of hope amidst the chaos of anti-government protests that continue to flare in hotspots across North Africa and the Middle East.
Jubilant Bahrainis returned to the site of a bloody confrontation between protesters and riot police Saturday, after the royal family ordered security forces to withdraw from the streets of the capital city.
Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa -- who has been delegated by the island nation's Sunni royal family to open a dialogue with the increasingly vocal Shiite opposition -- issued the directive in a brief address on state TV Saturday.
"The sooner we return to calm, the sooner we can reach our goals," Salman said. "Citizens of Bahrain, let's work together with all political blocks to help return the security situation to normal so we can announce a day of mourning for those we've lost."
While the head of the opposition Waad Society Ibrahim Sharif said that removing the military presence alone was not enough to kickstart talks, the streams of defiant protesters returning to Manama's central Pearl Square were nowhere near as cautious.
Chanting "We are victorious!" and "The people want the removal of the regime," the crowd swept in as the tanks retreated and immediately set about erecting their own security barriers, sound system and a makeshift field hospital.
As the military left, an Associated Press photographer reported witnessing riot police firing tear gas on the demonstrators before they too returned to their vehicles and left.
Scores of protesters had occupied the central square earlier in the week, but were dispersed after riot police launched a deadly assault that left five people dead and another 200 injured on Thursday. Another 50 protesters were reported injured on Friday, as army units defended their barbed wire cordon around the square with live fire.
The protest in Bahrain began with calls for the Sunni royal family to cede some power to the country's Shiite majority, but has since turned against the entire political system.
"Of course we don't trust them," 23-year-old civil servant Ahmed al-Shaik told the AP. "They will probably attack more and more, but we have no fear now."
Bahrainis are not the only ones emboldened by the 18-day uprising that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
In other regional developments Saturday:

• At least one person was killed and another five injured after riot police opened fire on a large group of protesters in the Yemeni capital Sanaa. As anti-government protests there stretch into the tenth day, embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh is blaming the unrest on a foreign plot.
• Just hours after special forces in Libya's second-largest city Benghazi attacked a two-day-old encampment of protesters demanding the ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, police seemed to completely disappear from the streets. Human Rights Watch reports that violent crackdowns last week claimed at least 84 lives across the country.
• Using clubs and shields, but no bullets, Algerian police dispersed a planned march by pro-democracy supporters before they could rally in central Algiers.
• The day after unprecedented calls for regime change left two dead in Djibouti, authorities there detained three top opposition leaders.
• Riot police in Kuwait used tear gas to quell the second day of protests by stateless Arabs demanding citizenship and other rights.
• Responding to opposition plans for new rallies to mourn the deaths of two victims of recent unrest in Iran, Tehran warned dissenters to expect a harsh crackdown.
• Anti-regime rallies in Jordan turned violent for the first time, as a baton-wielding mob attacked protesters in Amman, injuring eight.

Nini/ctv