World

MURRYSVILLE, Pennsylvania — A student armed with a knife went on a stabbing and slashing spree at a high school near Pittsburgh on Wednesday morning, leaving as many as 20 people injured, including four students who suffered serious wounds, authorities said.

The suspect, a male student, was taken into custody and being questioned by police.

All of the victims were expected to survive, though a trauma surgeon at a hospital where the most seriously wounded was taken said some suffered potentially life-threatening injuries.

Not all of the 20 injured at Franklin Regional High School were cut by the knife, though most were, Westmoreland County emergency management spokesman Dan Stevens said. Some suffered scrapes and cuts in the mayhem that erupted at about 7:15am at the school in Murrysville, about 15 miles (25 kilometres) east of Pittsburgh.

One victim was an adult, authorities said, but none of the names of the victims was being released.

Dr. Chris Kaufman, the trauma director at Forbes Regional Medical Centre, the closest hospital, said two victims were in surgery and one was awaiting surgery. All three were all stabbed in the torso, abdomen, chest or back, which he called "significant injuries".

Seven teens and one adult were listed in serious condition at Forbes Hospital, West Penn Allegheny Health System spokeswoman Jennifer Davis said. They ranged in age from 15 to 60, and some were in surgery, she said. A ninth victim, a 15-year-old girl, was in good condition at another hospital, Davis said.

Twelve of the victims were sent to four hospitals, a spokeswoman said. She said hospital officials were still gathering information on their conditions and identities, including the patients' ages.

The suspect was being questioned by county detectives and police. Stevens said the suspect used a knife, though he didn't say what kind and said it wasn't immediately clear why the student attacked the others.

One student told WTAE he saw "students holding their stomachs, bleeding." That student wasn't sure how the assailant was stopped, but said at some point, a fire alarm was activated and said, "As soon as we heard the fire alarm was pulled we went outside."

Speaking outside the school, Morris Hundley said his 14-year-old daughter, Morriah, called him Wednesday morning in tears. Hundley came to the school still wearing his slippers, hoping for more information.

"My first thoughts were I think we need to home school now that this has happened," Hundley said. "The words can't describe how I feel. I'm just thinking of the victims."

Gov. Tom Corbett ordered state police to assist local investigators.

"I was shocked and saddened upon learning of the events that occurred this morning as students arrived at Franklin Regional High School. As a parent and grandparent, I can think of nothing more distressing than senseless violence against children. My heart and prayers go out to all the victims and their families," Corbett said in a statement.

School officials and Murrysville police didn't immediately return calls seeking further details, but the school issued a bulletin on its website saying: "A critical incident has occurred at the high school. All elementary schools are canceled, the middle school and high school students are secure."

PERTH, Australia — Search crews in the Indian Ocean failed to pick up more of the faint underwater sounds that may have been from the missing Malaysian jetliner’s black boxes whose batteries are at the end of their life.

The signals first heard late Saturday and early Sunday had sparked hopes of a breakthrough in the search for Flight 370, but Angus Houston, the retired Australian air chief marshal leading the search far off western Australia, said listening equipment on the Ocean Shield ship has picked up no trace of the sounds since then.

Finding the sound again is crucial to narrowing the search area so a submarine can be deployed to chart a potential debris field on the seafloor. If the autonomous sub was used now with the sparse data collected so far, covering all the potential places from which the pings might have come would take many days.

“It’s literally crawling at the bottom of the ocean so it’s going to take a long, long time,” Houston said.

The locator beacons on the black boxes have a battery life of only about a month — and Tuesday marked exactly one month since the plane vanished. Once the beacons blink off, locating the black boxes in such deep water would be an immensely difficult, if not impossible, task.

“There have been no further contacts with any transmission and we need to continue [searching] for several days right up to the point at which there’s absolutely no doubt that the batteries will have expired,” Houston said.

If, by that point, the US Navy towed pinger locator has failed to pick up more signals, the sub will be deployed. If it maps out a debris field on the ocean floor, the sonar system on board will be replaced with a camera unit to photograph any wreckage.

Earlier, Australia’s acting prime minister, Warren Truss, had said the Bluefin 21 autonomous sub would be launched on Tuesday, but a spokesman for Truss said later the conflicting information was a misunderstanding and Truss acknowledged the sub was not being used immediately.

Houston earlier said the two sounds heard Saturday and Sunday are consistent with the pings from an aircraft’s black boxes.

Defence Minister David Johnston called the sounds the most positive lead and said it was being pursued vigorously. Still, officials warned it could take days to determine whether the sounds were connected to the plane that vanished March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 on board.

“This is an herculean task — it’s over a very, very wide area, the water is extremely deep,” Johnston said. “We have at least several days of intense action ahead of us.”

Houston also warned of past false leads — such as ships detecting their own signals. Because of that, other ships are being kept away, so as not to add unwanted noise.

“We’re very hopeful we will find further evidence that will confirm the aircraft is in that location,” Houston said. “There’s still a little bit of doubt there, but I’m a lot more optimistic than I was one week ago.”

Such optimism was overshadowed by anguish at a hotel in Beijing where around 300 relatives of the flight’s passengers — most of whom were Chinese — wait for information about the plane’s fate.

One family lit candles on a heart-shaped cake to mark what would have been the 21st birthday of passenger Feng Dong, who had been working in construction in Singapore for the past year and was flying home to China via Kuala Lumpur. Feng’s mother wept as she blew out the candles.

A family member of another passenger said staying together allowed the relatives to support one another through the ordeal. “If we go back to our homes now it will be extremely painful,” said Steve Wang. “We have to face a bigger pain of facing uncertainty, the unknown future. This is the most difficult to cope with.”

Investigators have not found any explanation yet for why the plane lost communications and veered far off its Beijing-bound course, so the black boxes containing the flight data and cockpit voice recorders are key to learning what went wrong.

“Everyone’s anxious about the life of the batteries on the black box flight recorders,” said Truss, who is acting prime minister while Tony Abbott is overseas. “Sometimes they go on for many, many weeks longer than they’re mandated to operate for — we hope that’ll be the case in this instance. But clearly there is an aura of urgency about the investigation.”

The first sound picked up by the equipment on board the Ocean Shield lasted two hours and 20 minutes before it was lost, Houston said. The ship then turned around and picked up a signal again — this time recording two distinct “pinger returns” that lasted 13 minutes. That would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

The black boxes normally emit a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz and the signals picked up by the Ocean Shield were both 33.3 kilohertz, US Navy Capt. Mark Matthews said.

Houston said the frequency heard was considered “quite credible” by the manufacturer and noted that the frequency from the Air France jet that crashed several years ago was 34 kilohertz. The age of the batteries and the water pressure in the deep ocean can affect the transmission level, he said.

The Ocean Shield is dragging a pinger locator at a depth of 3 kilometres. It is designed to detect signals at a range of 1.8 kilometres, meaning it would need to be almost on top of the recorders to detect them if they were on the ocean floor, which is about 4.5 kilometres deep.

The surface search for any plane debris also continued Tuesday. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometres of ocean, said the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is overseeing the operation.

KIEV/DONETSK, Ukraine — Pro-Moscow protesters in eastern Ukraine seized arms in one city and declared a separatist republic in another, in moves Kiev described on Monday as part of a Russian-orchestrated plan to justify an invasion to dismember the country.

Kiev said the overnight seizure of public buildings in three cities in eastern Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking industrial heartland were a replay of events in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow seized and annexed last month.

“An anti-Ukrainian plan is being put into operation ... under which foreign troops will cross the border and seize the territory of the country,” Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said in public remarks to his Cabinet. “We will not allow this.”

Pro-Russian protesters seized official buildings in the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk on Sunday night, demanding that referendums be held on whether to join Russia like the one that preceded Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.

Acting President Oleksander Turchinov, in a televised address to the nation, said Moscow was attempting to repeat “the Crimea scenario”. He added that “anti-terrorist measures” would be deployed against those who had taken up arms.

Police said they cleared the protesters from the building in Kharkiv, but in Luhansk the demonstrators had seized weapons.

In Donetsk, home base of deposed Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, about 120 pro-Russia activists calling themselves the “Republican People’s Soviet of Donetsk” seized the chamber of the regional assembly.

An unidentified bearded man read out “the act of the proclamation of an independent state, Donetsk People’s Republic” in front of a white, blue and red Russian flag.

“In the event of aggressive action from the illegitimate Kiev authorities, we will appeal to the Russian Federation to bring in a peacekeeping contingent,” ran the proclamation.

The activists later read out the text by loud hailer to a cheering crowd of about 1,000 outside the building.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on March 1, a week after Yanukovych was overthrown, that Moscow had the right to take military action in Ukraine to protect Russian speakers, creating the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

The United States and EU imposed mild financial sanctions on some Russian officials over the seizure of Crimea and have threatened much tougher measures if Russian troops, now massed on the frontier, enter other parts of Ukraine.

Western European governments have hesitated to alienate Russia further, fearing for supplies of Russian natural gas, much of which reaches EU buyers via pipelines across Ukraine. Ukraine’s own dependence on Russian gas gives Moscow strong leverage, especially over Ukraine’s eastern industrial areas.

Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom said it had received no payments from Ukraine for money owed for gas. It has given Kiev until midnight (2000 GMT) to reduce a $2.2 billion gas debt, although it has not said what it will do if Kiev misses the deadline. In previous years, gas disputes between Moscow and Kiev have hurt supplies to Europe.

In Vienna, Russia did not attend a meeting on Ukraine of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The US envoy to the OSCE, Daniel Baer, said Moscow needed to explain why tens of thousands of its troops were massed on the border.

NATO has halted cooperation with Russia. The Western military alliance announced on Monday it would now restrict access to its headquarters by Russian diplomats apart from Moscow’s ambassador, his deputy and two support staff.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Monday the main regional administration building in Kharkiv had been cleared of “separatists”. But police in Luhansk said protesters occupying the state security building there had seized weapons. Highway police closed off roads into the city.

“Unidentified people who are in the building have broken into the building’s arsenal and have seized weapons,” police said in a statement. Nine people had been hurt in the disturbances in Luhansk.

Mainly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, densely populated and producing much of the country’s industrial output, has seen a sharp rise in tension since Yanukovych fled the country, and Kiev has long said it believes Moscow is behind the unrest.

Pro-Russian protesters briefly held public buildings in the east early last month and three people were killed in clashes in mid-March. But trouble had subsided until Sunday.

Unlike in Crimea, where ethnic Russians form a majority, most people in the east and south are ethnically Ukrainian, although they speak Russian as a first language. Eastern oligarchs who once backed Yanukovych have thrown their weight behind the government in Kiev, and the unrest there is a test of their ability to assert control.

Yanukovych call

Yanukovych, in exile in Russia, has called for referendums across Ukrainian regions on their status within the country.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said a Russian marine had shot and killed a Ukrainian naval officer in Crimea on Sunday night. The 33-year-old officer, who was preparing to leave Crimea, was shot twice in officers’ quarters. Ukraine has said it is pulling its troops out of Crimea after Russian forces seized it.

Yatseniuk said that though much of the unrest had died down in eastern Ukraine in the past month there remained about 1,500 “radicals” in each region who spoke with “clear Russian accents” and whose activity was being coordinated abroad. But he said Ukrainian authorities had drawn up a plan to handle the crisis.

Avakov accused Putin on Sunday of orchestrating the “separatist disorder” and promised that disturbances would be brought under control without violence. Russia’s foreign ministry complained about Avakov’s remarks and said Moscow should not be blamed for Ukraine’s internal problems.

Russia has been pushing internationally a plan proposing the “federalisation” of Ukraine in which regions of the country of 46 million would have broad powers of autonomy.

Ukraine, drawing up its own plan for “de-centralisation” in which municipalities would retain a portion of state taxes, says the Russian proposal is aimed at carving it up.

“It is an attempt to destroy Ukrainian statehood, a script which has been written in the Russian Federation, the aim of which is to divide and destroy Ukraine and turn part of Ukraine into a slave territory under the dictatorship of Russia,” Yatseniuk said.

“I appeal to the people and the elites of the east: Our common responsibility is to preserve the country and I am sure that no one wants to be under a neighbouring country,” he said.

“We have our country. Let’s keep it.”

DIBRUGARH, India — Indians began voting Monday in the world’s biggest election, which is set to sweep the Hindu nationalist opposition to power at a time of low growth, anger over corruption and warnings about religious unrest.

The 814-million-strong electorate is forecast to inflict a heavy defeat on the Congress Party which has ruled for 10 years and elect hardliner Narendra Modi from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Voting began at 7:00am (0130 GMT) in six constituencies in tea-growing and insurgency-racked areas of the northeast.

“I want the government to reduce poverty and do something for the future of my children,” said 30-year-old tea plantation worker Santoshi Bhumej at a polling station in Dibrugarh in the state of Assam.

Men and women were packed tightly into separate queues when polls opened, shuffling slowly into tightly guarded booths to press the button for their candidates on electronic voting machines.

The marathon contest, to be held over nine phases until May 12, got under way after a bad-tempered campaign which reached new levels of bitterness at the weekend.

Religious tensions, an undercurrent to the contest which has mostly focused on development until now, burst into the open on Friday when the closest aide of Modi was accused of incitement.

Amit Shah faces a judicial investigation after he reportedly told supporters to see the election as “revenge” against a “government that protects and gives compensation to those who killed Hindus”.

Rahul Gandhi, leading Congress into his first national election as scion of the famous dynasty, said Sunday a victory for Modi threatens India’s religious fabric.

“Wherever these people [the opposition BJP] go they create fights. They’ll pit Hindus and Muslims against each other,” he said.

The BJP said talk of “revenge” was normal ahead of an election and the other remarks were taken out of context.

Prime ministerial front-runner Modi, the hawkish son of a tea seller whose rise has split his party, is a polarising figure due to his alleged links to anti-Muslim riots in 2002.

Releasing the party’s delayed manifesto on Monday, which mixed promises for economic development and the protection of Hindu interests, Modi promised to improve the national mood.

“Today the country has become stagnant. It is drowned in pessimism. It needs momentum to move forward,” he said.

He has urged voters to give him a majority in the 543-seat parliament, in defiance of surveys which repeatedly show the BJP will need coalition partners when results are published on May 16.

Disgruntled voters 

In Assam, a Congress stronghold, some disgruntled voters told AFP they had been swayed by his promises of better infrastructure, strong leadership, jobs and a clean administration.

“I believe that Modi will give us a corruption-free government,” Deepa Borgohain told AFP as she complained bitterly about price rises during Congress’s rule.

Over the last decade, growth has averaged 7.6 per cent per year, yet inflation has also been high, and a sharp economic slowdown since 2012 has crippled the public finances and led investment to crash.

Coupled with a widespread perception that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second term was largely lost to indecision and scandal, Modi has tapped into a groundswell of discontent.

The election will be the biggest in history and is a mind-boggling feat of organisation as voters travel to nearly a million polling stations.

In 2009, officials walked for four days through snow to deliver voting machines in the Himalayas, while yaks, camels and even elephants were pressed into service elsewhere in the vast country.

Such is India’s population growth that 100 million people have joined the electoral rolls since the last vote five years ago. More than half of the country is aged under 25.

Modi, 20 years older than Gandhi at 63, is still expected to score strongly among the young thanks to his message of aspiration and skills over the left-leaning Congress’s pitch of welfare and fair development.

“He [Rahul Gandhi] was born with a golden spoon whereas I grew up selling tea on railway platforms. He has a well-known lineage whereas I am honest,” Modi told a campaign rally Monday.

SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia, — An Australian ship searching for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has picked up signals consistent with the beacons from aircraft black box recorders, in what search officials said on Monday was the most promising lead yet in the month-long hunt.

The US Navy “towed pinger locator” connected to the Australian ship Ocean Shield picked up the signals in an area some 1,680km northwest of Perth, which analysis of sporadic satellite data has determined as the most likely place Boeing 777 went down.

“I’m much more optimistic than I was a week ago,” Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search, told a news conference in Perth, while cautioning that wreckage still needed to be found.

“We are now in a very well defined search area, which hopefully will eventually yield the information that we need to say that MH370 might have entered the water just here.”

If the signals can be narrowed further, an autonomous underwater vehicle called a Bluefin 21, will be sent to attempt to locate wreckage on the sea floor to verify the signals, said Houston, who noted that the potential search area was 4.5kms deep, the same as the Bluefin range.

The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished off radar on March 8, and flew thousands of kilometres off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route.

Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the plane’s disappearance but say evidence, including loss of communications, suggests it was deliberately diverted.

The first “ping” signal detection was held for more than two hours before the Ocean Shield lost contact, but the ship was able to pick up a signal again for around 13 minutes, Houston said.

“On this occasion two distinct pinger returns were audible. Significantly, this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,” he said.

Depth is at the edge of search capability

The black boxes, thought to be lying on the ocean floor, are equipped with locator beacons that send pings but the beacons’ batteries are thought to be running out of charge by now, a month after Flight MH370 disappeared.

“We are right on the edge of capability and we might be limited on capability if the aircraft ended up in deeper water. In very deep oceanic water, nothing happens fast,” said Houston.

“This is not the end of the search. We still have got difficult, painstaking work to do to confirm that this is indeed where the aircraft entered the water.”

Alec Duncan, expert in underwater acoustics at Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology said the lead was promising but impossible to verify without confirmed wreckage from the aircraft.

“It’s a difficult business, operating underwater and trying to detect anything in the sort of water depth that this search involves, and its impossible to be 100 per cent sure of anything until the wreckage is actually on the deck of the ship,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

A second search area was being maintained in waters where a Chinese vessel had also picked up “ping” signals during the weekend in an area more than 300 nautical miles from the latest signals.

Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 reported receiving a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, consistent with the signal emitted by flight recorders, on Friday and again on Saturday.

Houston said the Chinese and Australian discoveries of pings were consistent with work done on analysing radar and satellite data but the Ocean Shield’s leads were now the most promising.

Houston on Sunday said he was comfortable with the level of cooperation between search countries, following criticisms that Australia only became aware of the Chinese find at the same time as the Xinhua state news agency filed a story from a reporter on board the Haixun.

“I’m very satisfied with the consultation, the coordination that we are building with our Chinese friends,” Houston said.

However, he added that language was sometimes an issue and he had arranged for a Chinese liaison officer to join the Australian-led coordination centre.

Malaysian authorities have faced heavy criticism, particularly from China, for mismanaging the search and holding back information. Most of the 227 passengers were Chinese.

KABUL — A bigger-than-expected turnout in Afghanistan’s presidential election and the Taliban’s failure to derail the vote has raised questions about the capacity of the insurgents to tip the country back into chaos as foreign troops head home.

The Taliban claimed that they staged more than 1,000 attacks and killed dozens during Saturday’s election, which they have branded a US-backed deception of the Afghan people, though security officials said it was a gross exaggeration.

There were dozens of minor roadside bombs, and attacks on polling stations, police and voters during the day. But the overall level of violence was much lower than the Taliban had threatened to unleash on the country.

And, despite the dangers they faced at polling stations, nearly 60 per cent of the 12 million people eligible to vote turned out, a measure of the determination for a say in their country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power, as President Hamid Karzai prepares to stand down after 12 years in power.

“This is how people vote to say death to the Taliban,” said one Afghan on Twitter, posting a photograph that showed his friends holding up one finger — stained with ink to show they had voted — in a gesture of defiance.

There was a palpable sense in Kabul on Sunday that perhaps greater stability is within reach after 13 years of strife since the fall of the Taliban’s hardline Islamist regime in late 2001. The insurgency has claimed the lives of at least 16,000 Afghan civilians and thousands more soldiers.

“It was my dream come true,” said Shukria Barakzai, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament. “That was a fantastic slap on the face of the enemy of Afghanistan, a big punch in the face of those who believe Afghanistan is not ready for democracy.”

And yet this could be the beginning of a long and potentially dangerous period for Afghanistan as it will take weeks if not months to count votes and declare the winner in a country with only basic infrastructure and a rugged terrain.

Although the Taliban failed to pull off major attacks on election day itself, some fear insurgents are preparing to disrupt the ballot-counting process which kicked off on Saturday night.

In the first such attack since polling closed, a roadside bomb killed two Afghan election workers and one policeman and destroyed dozens of ballot papers on Sunday, police and an election official said.

Too soon to write off the Taliban

Observers believe it is too early to conclude from the Taliban’s failure to trip up the vote that it is now on a backfoot.

More than 350,000 security forces were deployed for the vote, and rings of checkpoints and roadblocks around the capital, Kabul, may well have thwarted Taliban plans to hit voters and polling stations.

It is possible the Taliban deliberately lay low to give the impression of improving security in order to hasten the exit of US troops and gain more ground later. After all, they managed to launch a wave of spectacular attacks in the run-up to the vote, targetting foreigners, security forces and civilians.

Indeed, they remain a formidable force: estimates of the number of Taliban fighters, who are mostly based in lawless southern and eastern areas of the country, range up to 30,000.

Borhan Osman of the independent Afghan Analysts Network argues that for now the insurgency does not appear to be winning, though the Taliban might argue it has already exhausted the United States’ will to fight.

In a report late last month Osman wrote that support for the Taliban was fading in regions where they had previously counted on help from villagers, and they appeared to lack the strength to besiege major towns or engage in frontal battles.

“So far, they have rather focused efforts on hit-and-run attacks, among other asymmetric tactics, which can bleed the enemy but usually not enough to knock it down,” Osman said.

There could, though, be an opportunity for the Taliban to reassert themselves if — as happened in 2009 — the election is marred by fraud and Afghans feel cheated of a credible outcome.

Early reports would suggest that this election was far smoother than the last one. Still, there were many instances of ballot-stuffing and attempts to vote with fake cards.

Around 14 per cent of polling centres did not open, most of them in the southeast and southern provinces where the Taliban presence is strongest.

There is also a risk that if a final result is delayed for several months, a strong possibility if there has to be a run-off between the top two candidates, this would leave a political vacuum that the Taliban could exploit.

“An ambiguous electoral outcome breeds uncertainty and confusion, which can grow the gap between the government and its citizens and leave a bigger opening for the Taliban to cause trouble,” Diplai Mukhopadhyay, an Afghanistan expert at Columbia University in New York, said in an e-mail comment to Reuters.

Threat from across the border

In 2003, the then-US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld suggested that the war in Afghanistan was in a “clean-up phase”. It was soon clear, however, that the back of the insurgency was far from broken and the Taliban bounced back.

Indeed, Taliban attacks were muted during Afghanistan’s first election in 2004, when Karzai obtained a mandate for a presidency he had held on an interim basis since 2002. By early 2005, US generals were saying that the militants were on the run, only to regret their optimism later as casualties mounted.

Karzai has repeatedly accused neighbour Pakistan of being behind Taliban attacks in Afghanistan and impeding efforts by his government to thrash out a peace deal with the insurgents.

Islamabad denies that it aids insurgents fighting Kabul and says it has its hands full battling the Pakistan Taliban. But it is widely believed that the shadowy intelligence arm of Pakistan’s military has long had a relationship with militant groups, including those active in Afghanistan.

Carlotta Gall, a journalist who reported from the region for years, argued in a new book that the United States has been fighting the wrong enemy, and that it is in Pakistan where the training and funding of the Taliban and support of the Al Qaeda network has occurred.

Underlining the threat from across the border, military chiefs and security officials in the region told Reuters last month that the Taliban from both countries had secretly agreed to focus on carrying out operations in Afghanistan.

PERTH, Australia — Ships searching the vast Indian Ocean for a Malaysian airliner have detected three separate underwater signals, and more ships and planes were diverted Sunday to investigate whether they could have come from its “black box”.

Angus Houston, head of the Australian search mission, said the detections were being taken “very seriously” as time ticked down on the battery life of the black box’s tracking beacons.

He said China’s Haixun 01 has twice detected an underwater signal on a frequency used for the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders — once for 90 seconds on Saturday and another more fleeting “ping” on Friday a short distance away.

A third “ping” was also being scrutinised, 300 nautical miles away in the Indian Ocean.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

“This is an important and encouraging lead but one which I urge you to continue to treat carefully,” Houston told reporters.

“We are working in a very big ocean and within a very large search area.”

“Speculation and unconfirmed reports can see the loved ones of the passengers put through terrible stress, and I don’t want to put them under any further emotional distress at this very difficult time.”

Britain’s HMS Echo and the Australian ship Ocean Shield — both equipped with black box locators — and Australian air force planes were being diverted to the area to help discount or confirm the Chinese signals, Houston said.

Ocean Shield was also investigating the signal it detected on Sunday in its current location, about 300 nautical miles north of Haixun 01, in waters far off Australia’s west coast.

Houston said the Chinese finding was more promising.

“I think the fact that we’ve had two detections, two acoustic events in that location, provides some promise which requires a full investigation,” he said.

Time running out 

The hunt for the jet was refocused on the southern end of the search zone Sunday after corrected satellite data showed it was more likely the plane entered the water there.

Houston said the Haixun 01 was already operating in that more southerly zone.

Some analysts greeted the acoustic detections with optimism, saying a 37.5kHz signal can only be transmitted by an emergency beacon. But others were sceptical and said it was vital to find supporting evidence.

Houston said Haixun 01 was in waters about 4.5 kilometres deep, meaning “any recovery operation is going to be incredibly challenging and very demanding, and will take a long period of time” if the plane is found there.

Houston said time was critical.

“This is Day 30 of the search and the advertised time for the life of the batteries in the beacon is 30 days. Sometimes they last for several days beyond that — say eight to 10 days beyond that — but we’re running out of time in terms of the battery life of the emergency locator beacons.”

Up to 10 military planes, two civil aircraft and 13 ships were scouring the remote waters on Sunday, concentrating on about 216,000 square kilometres of the Indian Ocean around 2,000 kilometres northwest of Perth.

Houston insisted that China was “sharing everything that’s relevant to this search” with the lead authority and sidestepped questions over the Haixun 01’s location far from the other lead vessels in the search.

“China has seven ships out there, that’s by far the largest fleet of ships out there. I think we should be focusing on the positives,” he said.

Hope, scepticism over signal 

In Kuala Lumpur more than 2,000 people including relatives held an emotional mass prayer Sunday for the safety of the passengers.

Orange-robed Buddhist monks chanted mantras for almost two hours, before about two dozen tearful relatives left the event.

Some family members still cling to hope in the absence of wreckage from the plane and are desperate for leads.

But Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor of Flightglobal publication, based in Singapore, said he was sceptical that the Chinese ship had picked up a pulse.

“There have been a lot of false leads in this story and we need to be extremely cautious with any information that comes,” he told AFP.

“I am very sceptical that the Chinese have found something so soon, given the vastness of the search area.”

Ravi Madavaram, an aviation analyst with Frost & Sullivan based in Kuala Lumpur, said most beacons used in the maritime and aviation industry had the same frequency and the ping could “likely” be from flight MH370.

“But the Chinese have not said exactly where the ‘ping’ is originating and where they detected it,” he said.

“The Chinese had previously given false alarms, so we need to verify from others before we can confirm that we have a ping.”

Malaysian authorities believe satellite readings indicate MH370 crashed in the Indian Ocean after veering dramatically off course for reasons that remain unknown.

A criminal probe has focused on the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or psychological problems among passengers or crew, but there is no evidence yet to support any of the theories.

KABUL — Afghans celebrated a largely peaceful election on Saturday, as turnout exceeded predictions despite Taliban threats to disrupt the vote to choose President Hamid Karzai's successor.

Long queues of voters waited throughout the day outside many of the 6,400 polling centres before the prolonged process of counting began, with preliminary results not due until April 24.

Whoever emerges victorious must lead the fight against the Taliban without the help of US-led combat troops, and also strengthen an economy reliant on declining aid money.

The country faces a politically-testing few months as it undergoes its first democratic transfer of power, and many Afghans fear a repeat of the fraud scandals that marred the last presidential election in 2009.

If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the vote in the first round a run-off is scheduled for late May.

There were no major terror attacks during polling, and organisers hailed the election a major success, despite complaints that a shortages of ballot papers had denied some citizens to right to vote.

"Today, I can claim that the enemies of Afghanistan have failed in their plan to disrupt the election process," Interior Minister Omar Daudzai told reporters.

"People's participation in the election was unprecedented and it was a huge success."

The final turnout could exceed seven million, the head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, said, though this was a preliminary estimate and may change. Initial predictions in 2009 proved inaccurate.

Around 13.5 million people were eligible to vote, putting the estimated turnout above 50 per cent — a significant increase on 2009, when only around a third of voters cast ballots.

Open race

There was no clear favourite among the front-runners to succeed Karzai — former foreign minister Zalmai Rassoul, Abdullah Abdullah, who was runner-up in the 2009 election, and former World Bank academic Ashraf Ghani.

The open nature of the race coupled with a massive security operation to thwart Taliban attacks may have contributed to the high turnout.

The Taliban had urged their fighters to target polling staff, voters and security forces, but there were no major attacks reported during the day.

In Kabul, hit by a series of deadly attacks during the election campaign, hundreds of people lined up outside polling centres to vote despite heavy rain and the insurgents’ promise of violence.

“I’m not afraid of Taliban threats, we will die one day anyway. I want my vote to be a slap in the face of the Taliban,” housewife Laila Neyazi, 48, told AFP.

One blast in Logar province, south of Kabul, killed one person and wounded two, according to Mohammad Agha district chief Abdul Hameed Hamid.

Interior Minister Daudzai said four civilians, nine police and seven soldiers had been killed in violence in the past 24 hours, and added that many attacks had been foiled, without giving further details.

Attacks or fear of violence had forced more than 200 of a total 6,423 voting centres to remain closed.

The day before the poll, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus was shot dead by a police commander in eastern Khost province.

She was the third journalist working for international media to be killed during the election campaign, after Swedish journalist Nils Horner and Sardar Ahmad of Agence France-Presse.

Challenging future 

Afghans have taken over responsibility for security from US-led forces, and this year the last of the NATO coalition’s 51,000 combat troops will pull out, leaving local forces to battle the resilient Taliban insurgency without their help.

In the western city of Herat, a queue of several hundred people waited to vote at one polling station, while in Jalalabad in the east, voters stood patiently outside a mosque.

Voters also lined up in Kandahar city, the southern heartland of the Taliban, with some women among the crowd in contrast to the 2009 election, when turnout was very low due to poor security.

The country’s third presidential election brings an end to 13 years of rule by Karzai, who has held power since the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

Massive fraud and widespread violence marred Karzai’s re-election in 2009, and a disputed result this time would add to the challenges facing the new president.

The election may offer a chance for Afghanistan to improve relations with the United States, its principal donor, after the mercurial Karzai years.

Relations fell to a new low late last year when Karzai refused to sign a security agreement that would allow the US to keep around 10,000 troops in Afghanistan to train local forces and hunt Al Qaeda.

KIEV — Ukraine on Saturday rejected Russia’s latest gas price hike and threatened to take its energy-rich neighbour to arbitration court over a dispute that could imperil deliveries to western Europe.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Russia’s two rate increases in three days were a form of “economic aggression” aimed at punishing Ukraine’s new leaders for overthrowing a Moscow-backed regime last month.

Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom this week raised the price of Ukrainian gas by 81 percent -- to $485.50 (354.30 euros) from $268.50 for 1,000 cubic metres -- requiring the ex-Soviet state to pay the highest rate of any of its European clients.

The decision threatens to further fan a furious diplomatic row over Ukraine’s future between Moscow and the West that has left Kremlin insiders facing sanctions and more diplomatic isolation than at any stage since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

“Political pressure is unacceptable. And we do not accept the price of $500 (per 1,000 cubic metres of gas),” Yatsenyuk told a cabinet meeting called to get a handle on the economic crisis that threatens to escalate tensions in the culturally splintered nation of 46 million.

“Russia was unable to seize Ukraine by means of military aggression. Now, they are implementing plans to seize Ukraine through economic aggression.”

Yatsenyuk said Ukraine was ready to continue purchasing Russian gas at the old rate of $268.50 because this was “an acceptable price”.

But he added that Ukraine must prepare for the possibility that “Russia will either limit or halt deliveries of gas to Ukraine” in the coming weeks or months.

Gazprom’s western European clients saw their deliveries limited in 2006 and 2010 when the gas giant -- long accused of raising the rates of neighbours who seek closer ties to the West -- halted supplies to Ukraine due to disagreements over price.

The state gas company supplies about a third of EU nations’ demand despite efforts by Brussels to limit energy dependence on Russia amid its crackdown on domestic dissent and increasingly militant foreign stance.

Nearly 40 percent of that gas flows through Ukraine while the remainder travels along the Nord Stream undersea pipeline to Germany and another link through Belarus and Poland.

Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuriy Prodan said Kiev was ready to take Gazprom to arbitration court in Stockholm if Moscow refused to negotiate over a lower price.

“If we fail to agree, we are going to go to arbitration court, as the current contract allows us to do,” Prodan warned.

The budding gas war adds another layer of concern to a crisis that has seen Russia mass tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border after annexing its Black Sea peninsula of Crimea last month.

The Unites States has responded by boosting NATO’s defence of eastern European nations and trying to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin on the world stage.

US Vice President Joe Biden vowed on Friday to work with Ukraine and other allies to prevent Russia from using energy as a “political weapon”.

And both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Saturday that Europe -- once divided in the face of Putin’s new expansionist streak -- was ready to impose broader economic sanctions against Russia if it pushed any harder against Ukraine.

“If the territorial integrity of Ukraine continues to be violated, then we will have to introduce economic sanctions,” said Merkel.

“Might does not make right,” she told a congress of her Christian Democratic Party.

Ashton also proclaimed that Europe was “prepared to take measures” against Russia.

“We are united to deal with threats against Ukraine,” she told an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Athens.

Yatsenyuk said he was busy trying to seal agreements with Ukraine’s western neighbours on gas deliveries that would cost about $150 per thousand cubic metres less than the price charged by Gazprom.

Ukraine has already received small quantities from Poland and Hungary despite the displeasure voiced over such shipments by Russia.

Yatsenyuk said he was also keen to secure an agreement with Slovakia -- a country that receives all its gas from Russia and has been unwilling to complicate relations with Gazprom in the past.

He added that Ukraine’s energy minister would hold talks on Tuesday in Brussels about so-called “reverse flow” deliveries of gas to Ukraine.

“We need specifics from our European partners,” said Yatsenyuk.

Gazprom chief Alexei Miller responded by warning that Russia would be looking closely at any independent deals its client states reached with Ukraine.

“European companies that are ready to provide reverse flow deliveries to Ukraine should take a very careful -- very careful -- look at the legitimacy of such sorts of operations,” said Miller.

“A pipeline cannot work in forward and reverse flow regimes at the same time,” he told Russian state television.

But Ukraine’s energy minister insisted that Kiev had no intention of diverting Gazprom deliveries intended for its European clients.

“There will be no theft,” Prodan said.

PERTH, Australia — A Chinese ship involved in the hunt for the missing Malaysian jetliner reported hearing a “pulse signal” Saturday in Indian Ocean waters with the same frequency emitted by the plane’s data recorders, as Malaysia vowed not to give up the search for the jet.

Military and civilian planes, ships with deep-sea searching equipment and a British nuclear submarine scoured a remote patch of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast, in an increasingly urgent hunt for debris and the “black box” recorders that hold vital information about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s last hours.

After weeks of fruitless looking, officials face the daunting prospect that sound-emitting beacons in the flight and voice recorders will soon fall silent as their batteries die after sounding electronic “pings” for a month.

A Chinese ship that is part of the search effort detected a “pulse signal” in southern Indian Ocean waters, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. Xinhua, however, said it had not yet been determined whether the signal was related to the missing plane, citing the China Maritime Search and Rescue Centre.

Xinhua said a black box detector deployed by the ship, Haixun 01, picked up a signal at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second), the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, confirmed that the frequency emitted by Flight 370’s black boxes were 37.5 kilohertz and said authorities were verifying the report. The Australian government agency coordinating the search would not immediately comment on it.

John Goglia, a former US National Transportation Safety Board member, called the report “exciting”, but cautioned that “there is an awful lot of noise in the ocean”.

“One ship, one ping doesn’t make a success story,” he said. “It will have to be explored. I guarantee you there are other resources being moved into the area to see if it can be verified.”

The Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. So far, no trace of the jet has been found.

Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defence minister and acting transport minister, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that the cost of mounting the search was immaterial compared to providing solace for the families of those on board by establishing what happened.

“I can only speak for Malaysia and Malaysia will not stop looking for MH370,” Hishammuddin said.

He said an independent investigator would be appointed to lead a team that will try to determine what happened to Flight 370. The team will include three groups: One will look at airworthiness, including maintenance, structures and systems; another will examine operations, such as flight recorders and meteorology; and a third will consider medical and human factors.

The investigation team will include officials and experts from several nations, including Australia — which as the nearest country to the search zone is currently heading the hunt — China, the United States, Britain and France, Hishammuddin said.

A multinational search team is desperately trying to find debris floating in the water or faint sound signals from the data recorders that could lead them to the missing plane and unravel the mystery of its fate.

Finding floating wreckage is key to narrowing the search area, as officials can then use data on currents to backtrack to where the plane hit the water and where the flight recorders may be.

Beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries last for only about a month.

Officials have said the hunt for the wreckage is among the hardest ever undertaken and will get much harder still if the beacons fall silent before they are found.

“Where we’re at right now, four weeks since this plane disappeared, we’re much, much closer,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com. “But frustratingly, we’re still kilometres away from finding it. We need to find some piece of debris on the water; we need to pick up the ping.”

If it doesn’t happen, the only hope for finding the plane may be a full survey of the Indian Ocean floor, an operation that would take years and an enormous international operation.

Hishammuddin said there were no new satellite images or data that can provide new leads for searchers. The focus now is fully on the ocean search, he said.

Two ships — the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield and the British HMS Echo — carrying sophisticated equipment that can hear the recorders’ pings returned Saturday to an area investigators hope is close to where the plane went down. They concede the area they have identified is a best guess.

Up to 13 military and civilian planes and nine other ships took part in the search Saturday, the Australian agency coordinating the search said.

Because the US Navy’s pinger locator can pick up signals to a depth of 6,100 metres, it should be able to hear the plane’s data recorders even if they are in the deepest part of the search zone — about 5,800 metres. But that’s only if the locator gets within range of the black boxes — a tough task, given the size of the search area and the fact that the pinger locator must be dragged slowly through the water at just 1 to 5 knots (1 to 6 mph).

Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the joint agency coordinating the operation, acknowledged the search area was essentially a best guess and noted the time when the plane’s locator beacons would shut down was “getting pretty close”.

The overall search area is a 217,000-square-kilometre zone in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,700 kilometres northwest of the western Australian city of Perth.