Region

BAGHDAD — Militants unleashed a wave of car bombings in Iraq on Tuesday, killing at least 34 people and sending thick, black smoke into the Baghdad skies in a show of force meant to intimidate the majority Shiites as they marked what is meant to be a joyous holiday for their sect.

The attacks came nearly two weeks after Iraqis cast ballots in the country’s first parliamentary election since the US military withdrawal in 2011. No preliminary results have yet been released, deepening a sense of uncertainty in a country strained by a resurgence of violence.

It was the deadliest day in Iraq since April 28, when militant strikes on polling stations and other targets killed 46. No group immediately claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks, most of which hit Baghdad during rush hour, but they were most likely the work of Al Qaeda offshoot known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The militant group, made up of Sunni Muslim extremists, has strengthened control over parts of western Iraq since late December. It seeks to undermine the Shiite Muslim-led government’s efforts to maintain security across the country. Coordinated car bomb attacks against Shiites, whom it considers heretics, are one of its favorite tactics.

All of Tuesday’s blasts were caused by explosives-laden vehicles parked in public areas. They coincided with the Shiite communities’ celebration of the birthday of Imam Ali, Prophet Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law and the sect’s most sacred martyr.

Two blasts hit Baghdad’s poor Shiite district of Sadr City, killing six people and wounding 13, according to police. Associated Press journalists on the scene shortly after one of the bombings saw black smoke rising as ambulances rushed to the scene, sirens wailing. Firefighters struggled to extinguish the fire as security forces sealed off the area.

A short while later, a car bomb exploded in a commercial street in the capital’s eastern district of Jamila, killing three people and wounding 10. Police said a fourth car bomb went off near a traffic police office in eastern Baghdad, killing four people and wounding seven.

Juice shop owner Haithem Kadhum was rushing home to Sadr City to check on his family after hearing of the attacks when he was struck by the explosion in Jamila. Flying shrapnel struck him in the shoulder.

“I got out of the car and I saw dead and wounded people on the ground. Everybody was in panic,” Kadhum said after being treated at a nearby hospital.

Other blasts struck commercial areas in downtown Baghdad, in the eastern districts of Ur and Maamil, and in the southern Dora district. Those attacks together killed 15 and wounded 45, according to police.

Yet another parked car bomb exploded in the afternoon in Balad, a largely Shiite town surrounded by Sunni areas some 80 kilometres north of the capital. That blast killed six and wounded 17, police said.

Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to media.

Iraqis went to the polls on April 30 in the first national-level election since American troops left the country. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, who is seeking a third term on a law-and-order platform, hailed the strong turnout as a rejection of terrorism.

It was a theme the British Embassy reiterated in condemning Tuesday’s bloodshed.

“Two weeks ago the Iraqi people showed their clear support for a peaceful, democratic process by voting in large numbers. This was a clear rejection of the terrorists seeking to destabilise Iraq,” said Britain’s charge d’affaires, Mark Bryson-Richardson.

Iraq’s Independent Election Commission has said that vote counting is still under way. It has not yet set a date to announce final results.

A coalition led by Maliki is expected to win most the seats of the 328-member parliament, but not a majority. He would have to approach other parties to cobble together a coalition to form the next government.

Iraq has seen a spike in violence since April 2013, with the death toll climbing to its highest levels since the worst of the country’s sectarian bloodletting in 2006-2008. The UN says 8,868 people were killed in 2013, and more than 1,400 people were killed in January and February of this year.

UNITED NATIONS — Lakhdar Brahimi will resign as the joint UN-Arab League envoy on Syria after a nearly two-year effort that failed to bring peace to the war-ravaged country, the UN chief announced Tuesday.

With Brahimi at his side, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said the envoy will step down May 31. Ban pledged to keep working to achieve peace.

When Brahimi took the job, replacing his longtime friend, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, he said it would be “an extremely complicated and very, very difficult mission”.

Brahimi managed to get government officials and opposition to two rounds of peace talks in Geneva, but they ended without an agreement.

Brahimi had been working behind the scenes to restart the Geneva negotiations but that effort was all but doomed when President Bashar Assad’s government announced that elections would be held on June 3. The Geneva talks were intended to lead to a transitional government.

Ban said Brahimi “faced almost impossible odds with the Syrian nation, Middle Eastern region, and ... international community that have been hopelessly divided in their approaches to ending the conflict.”

“He has persevered with great patience and skill,” Ban said. “I regret that the parties, especially the government, have proven so reluctant to take advantage of that opportunity to end the country’s profound misery.”

The only achievement of the Geneva talks before they broke off in February was a week-long ceasefire in the central city of Homs to evacuate hundreds of civilians that have lived under a crippling army siege.

Assad’s forces earlier this week took full control of Homs following a ceasefire agreement with the rebels that allowed more than 2,000 opposition fighters to leave the city, which had been dubbed the “capital of Syrian revolution”.

The Syrian conflict started as largely peaceful protests against Assad’s rule in 2011. It turned into a civil war after some opposition supporters took up arms to fight a brutal government crackdown. Over the past year, the fighting has taken increasingly sectarian overtones, pitting largely Sunni Muslim rebels against Assad’s government that is dominated by Alawites, a sect of Shiite Islam.

Activists say more than 150,000 have been killed in the fighting.

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia has invited Iran’s foreign minister to visit, Riyadh said on Tuesday, hinting at the possibility of a thaw between the Gulf’s two biggest, most bitter rivals, who are at loggerheads over Syria’s civil war.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has adopted a conciliatory tone towards Tehran’s neighbours since taking office last year, but while Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has visited other Gulf Arab states, he has not yet been to Saudi Arabia.

Relations between Iran and most of its Gulf Arab neighbours have been improving since Tehran agreed preliminary limits on its nuclear activity last year, but ties with archrival Saudi Arabia remained chilly.

Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal told a news conference that Zarif had been given an invitation to the kingdom but that despite Iran’s past declarations of a wish to improve ties, the visit had not transpired. He did not say when Riyadh issued the invitation or if Iran had formally responded.

“Any time that [Zarif] sees fit to come, we are willing to receive him. Iran is a neighbour, we have relations with them and we will negotiate with them, we will talk with them,” he said.

Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran back opposing sides in Arab political struggles including in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, where Tehran’s ally President Bashar Assad faces an insurgency backed by Gulf Arabs.

Gulf states, like Western powers and Israel, fear Iran has been using its declared civilian nuclear energy programme as a front to covertly develop an atomic bomb capability.

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have also accused Iran of trying to meddle in their internal affairs by stirring up their Shiite communities to revolt. Iran says its nuclear programme is peaceful and denies interference in these countries’ affairs.

But since taking office in August, the moderate Rouhani has overseen a conciliatory shift in Iran’s hitherto confrontational foreign relations. The most tangible result so far was Iran’s November 24 interim nuclear deal with global powers.

Saudi officials have remained suspicious, however, and have accused Iran of being “an occupying power” in Syria, where they describe Assad as carrying out genocide against the country’s civilian population via air strikes in urban areas.

“Our hope is that Iran becomes part of the effort to make the region as safe and as prosperous as possible and not become part of the problem,” the Saudi foreign minister said.

Official visits rare

Visits by officials of each country to the other remain rare.

However, Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was regarded by Riyadh as a source of much of the tension between the countries, did meet Saudi King Abdullah at an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation summit in Mecca in 2012.

Abdullah placed Ahmadinejad at his right hand side while receiving leaders of other Muslim countries in an apparently emollient gesture aimed at showing Saudi Arabia wanted to reduce tensions with Iran and sectarian divisions in the region.

After Ahmadinejad’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, visited Riyadh in 2009 in an effort to lessen tensions, King Abdullah told US officials he had warned the Iranians that “you as Persians have no business meddling in Arab matters”, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

“Iran’s goal is to cause problems ... There is no doubt something unstable about them,” the Saudi monarch told visiting US counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, according to the cable.

THE HAGUE — A Lebanese journalist pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges of contempt for publishing witness details at a tribunal set up to try the killers of slain former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

“Our only crime is that we respected the highest standards of our profession and we highlighted some of the misconducts of this court,” Karma Al Khayat, deputy editor in chief of Al Jadeed TV, told an initial hearing at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in The Netherlands.

Khayat and the station’s parent company New TV S.A.L. have been charged with two counts of contempt and obstruction of justice for publishing details of alleged witnesses in the trial of five members of the powerful Shiite movement Hizbollah for Hariri’s 2005 slaying.

The pro-Hizbollah Al Akhbar newspaper and its Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim Mohamed Al Amin have been charged with one count of contempt and obstruction of justice.

Amin’s initial hearing it to be held on May 29 but he has not yet said whether he will attend.

They are accused of “knowingly and wilfully interfering with the administration of justice by broadcasting and/or publishing information on purported confidential witnesses”.

In April 2013, a list of 167 names of so-called witnesses for the Hariri trial was published by a previously unknown group identified as “Journalists for the Truth”.

The group said it wanted to “unveil the corruption” of the STL.

Both Al Akhbar and Al Jadeed published the list.

“I came here today to this court of law because I did not want the press to be deprived of a fundamental right under the title of justice,” Khayat told the court, according to a translation from Arabic.

STL spokesman Marten Youssef said the court was “required to act... to ensure that there is no intimidation of witnesses”.

“The Lebanese press has made it seem that it is an attempt to silence them. This is not the case at all,” Youssef added.

The STL, established by the UN Security Council at the request of Lebanon, is trying the five Hizbollah members in absentia for the attack that killed Hariri and 22 others on February 14, 2005, in Beirut.

Hizbollah accuses the court of being part of an “Israeli-US” plot, and has yet to hand over the suspects.

The murder trial opened in a suburb outside The Hague in January, while the contempt trial will be held after motions have been handled, including about the tribunal’s jurisdiction.

CAIRO — An Al Jazeera journalist held in Egypt since August is in “critical” health and could slip into a coma after more than 100 days on hunger strike, his brother said Tuesday.

Abdullah Elshamy was arrested August 14 when police dispersed supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in Cairo, which led to clashes in which hundreds were killed.

Elshamy, who works for the Qatar-based network, went on hunger strike in January to protest his detention and has yet to face trial.

He is suffering from “anaemia, the start of kidney failure, low blood pressure and hypoglycaemia”, a brother, Mosaab, told AFP.

“He is at a critical stage and needs to be transferred to hospital,” Mosaab said, providing AFP with a copy of a blood test on his brother from last week.

At the start of his hunger strike Elshamy drank juice and other sugary drinks but has been taking only water for the past month, his brother said.

And he has shed around 40 kilogrammes over the past 112 days, he added.

“He can go into a coma if he doesn’t take perfusions [drips] and if his blood sugar remains low... It is the start of the most dangerous period,” he added.

Mosaab added that his brother had been recently moved from his prison cell to an unknown location. “Surely he is still in jail but we don’t know where and we cannot communicate with him.”

Elshamy’s lawyer, Shaaban Saeed, told AFP he was accused of joining a “terrorist group” and spreading false news.

“My client is paying the price for working for a channel that opposes the ruling regime,” Saeed said.

The military-installed authorities have been incensed by Al Jazeera’s coverage of their crackdown on Morsi’s supporters since July when the army ousted him.

On May 3, a court remanded Elshamy into custody for another 45 days, and Elshamy appeared in court looking gaunt.

“I haven’t seen my lawyer. We are 15 people in a cell of 12 square metres,” he told reporters from the dock.

His wife Jihad Khaled, meanwhile, was also on hunger strike, her mother Houda Abdelmoneim told AFP.

“Jihad began her hunger strike from March 14 to express solidarity with her husband,” Abdelmoneim said, adding that her daughter fell unconscious on Monday and was taken to a hospital as she too had been taking “only water”.

Three other Al Jazeera journalists, who work for the network’s English-language channel, are held in Egypt and on trial for defamation and supporting Morsi’s blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.

Their trial of Australian Peter Greste, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, and 17 other co-defendants, has sparked an international outcry.

GAZA CITY — A senior official from Palestinian party Fateh arrived in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Tuesday, ahead of reconciliation talks aimed at forming a unity government between the bitter rivals.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation, which is dominated by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fateh, signed a surprise reconciliation agreement in late April after years of political infighting and a seemingly unbridgeable split.

“I will meet over the next two days with Hamas leaders to discuss forming a government,” senior Fateh official Azzam Al Ahmed told AFP after he arrived in the besieged Strip through the Israeli-controlled Erez border crossing.

Under the terms of the April 23 deal, the two sides would work together to form an “independent government” of technocrats, to be headed by Abbas, that would pave the way for long-delayed elections.

Representatives from both Fateh and Hamas have met several times for talks on a final line-up for the government to end their division after Hamas violently routed Fateh from Gaza in 2007.

The reconciliation agreement incensed Israel, putting the final nail in the coffin of faltering US-led peace talks between Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority.

THE HAGUE — The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor said Tuesday she has reopened an initial probe into allegations of war crimes committed by British soldiers after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Fatou Bensouda said in a statement from the ICC, based in The Hague, that the initial investigation was reopened after new allegations of prisoner abuse were submitted.

“The new information... alleges the responsibility of officials of the United Kingdom for war crimes involving systematic detainee abuse in Iraq from 2003 to 2008,” Bensouda said.

Bensouda’s office in early January received documents from the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights together with the Birmingham-based Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) alleging British involvement in torture, based on interviews with more than 400 Iraqi detainees.

Bensouda is now to decide whether to ask ICC judges permission to launch a full-blown investigation.

The world war crimes court’s previous chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo in 2006 said he would not open a full probe in Iraq because he did not have enough evidence.

“Based on an initial assessment of the information received, the January 10, 2014, communication provides for further information that was not available to the office in 2006,” the statement said.

Britain’s Attorney General Dominic Grieve rejected the allegation that British troops had carried out “systematic abuse” in Iraq.

“Where allegations have been made that individuals may have broken those laws, they are being comprehensively investigated,” he said in a statement.

“The UK government has been, and remains a strong supporter of the ICC and I will provide the office of the prosecutor with whatever is necessary to demonstrate that British justice is following its proper course.”

The dossier submitted in January by the ECCHR and PIL alleged that Iraqi victims suffered severe physical and psychological abuse at the hands of British forces.

British troops at “military detention facilities and other locations” allegedly used sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions as well as beatings, burning and electrocution against Iraqi detainees, the dossier said.

Detainees were threatened with rape and death, sexually assaulted and subjected to “forced exposure to pornography and sexual acts between soldiers”, the ECCHR said.

“Between them, these victims make thousands of allegations of mistreatment amounting to war crimes of torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” the ECCHR said.

Those who bear responsibility are “situated at the highest levels, including all the way up the chain of command of the UK army, and implicating former secretaries of state for defence and ministers for the armed forces personnel”.

The rights group said that the British government “has remained unwilling to genuinely investigate and prosecute low-level perpetrators”.

TEL AVIV — An Israeli court Tuesday sentenced ex-premier Ehud Olmert to six years in prison for bribery, making him the most senior politician in the country’s history to face jail for corruption.

Tel Aviv District Court Judge David Rosen also handed Olmert a fine of 1 million shekels ($290,000/210,000 euros) for his involvement in one of Israel’s worst-ever corruption scandals, a transcript of the verdict said.

His lawyer, Eli Zohar, told reporters outside the courtroom that his client would appeal.

“You heard what Ehud Olmert said at the pre-sentence hearings. He did not take a bribe, did not receive a bribe and as far as he feels he still sees himself as innocent.”

“With us he will go to the supreme court to appeal.”

The 68-year-old, who was convicted six weeks ago on two charges of taking bribes, is the first former prime minister of Israel looking at a prison term for corruption.

“This is someone who stood at the pinnacle, the defendant served as prime minister of Israel,” Rosen said.

“From the highest and most respected post... he fell to the level of someone convicted of contemptible crimes,” the judge said in passing sentence Tuesday.

“A public official who accepts bribes is tantamount to a traitor,” he said, adding a finding of “moral turpitude” — moral unfitness to hold public office.

Following a two-year trial, Olmert was convicted on March 31 of bribes to the tune of 560,000 shekels (now $160,000/116,000 euros) with the judge also saying he had committed perjury.

Even after his conviction, Olmert protested his innocence, saying he had never taken bribes. His lawyers were expected to appeal the sentence.

Rosen said the prison sentence would begin on September 1.

“It is a difficult day when a former prime minister is sentenced,” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who served as Olmert’s deputy premier and foreign minister, told reporters.

“I have complete trust in the court and law enforcement officials, and the public should as well.”

The trial of Olmert and 15 other defendants, which lasted more than two years, was linked to the construction of Jerusalem’s massive Holyland residential complex when Olmert served as the city’s mayor.

In 2010, Olmert was named the key suspect in what came to be known as the Holyland affair on suspicion he received hundreds of thousands of shekels for helping developers get the project past various legal and planning obstacles.

The towering construction project, which dominates the city’s skyline, is seen as a major blot on the landscape and widely reviled as a symbol of high-level corruption.

 ‘Not a regular criminal’ 

Wearing a royal blue shirt and khaki chinos, Olmert looked tired and subdued as he entered the court room.

Rosen described Olmert as “very bright” and “personable” but said he and a fellow city official also convicted of receiving bribes had worked to “line their own pockets” but were “not regular criminals”.

Olmert was fifth in line to be sentenced, with three earlier defendants convicted of giving bribes, receiving lower sentences than demanded by the prosecution.

But the city’s former engineer, who like Olmert accepted bribes, received seven years of jail time.

In July 2012, a Jerusalem court found Olmert guilty of breach of trust but cleared him on two more serious charges related to the alleged receipt of cash-stuffed envelopes and multiple billing for trips abroad.

He was fined $19,000 and given a suspended jail sentence for graft.

The conviction related to favours that Olmert granted a former colleague while serving as trade and industry minister.

Born south of the port city of Haifa, he was elected to parliament in 1973 and became mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003, after which he served as a Cabinet minister, holding the trade and industry portfolio as well as several others.

He became premier in 2006, leading the centre-right Kadima Party into government, but resigned in September 2008 after police recommended that he be indicted in several graft cases.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel is placing increasing numbers of arrested Palestinian children in solitary confinement, an international children’s rights group said in a report issued Monday.

The report came just months after Israel’s army, under international pressure to introduce reforms, agreed to test alternative treatment for children it detains in the West Bank.

In more than one in five cases recorded by Defence for Children International (DCI) in 2013, children detained for questioning by the army reported “undergoing solitary confinement,” DCI said in a statement.

This was a 2-per cent rise on 2012 figures, it said.

“Use of isolation against Palestinian children as an interrogation tool is a growing trend,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish of DCI in the Palestinian territories.

“This is a violation of children’s rights and the international community must demand justice and accountability,” he said.

“Globally, children and juvenile offenders are often held in isolation either as a disciplinary measure or to separate them from adult populations,” DCI said.

“The use of solitary confinement by Israeli authorities does not appear to be related to any disciplinary, protective, or medical rationale.”

DCI’s research included 98 sworn affidavits from Palestinian children aged 12 to 17.

In October, the UN children’s fund (UNICEF) said Israel had agreed to test alternative treatment for Palestinian children arrested in the West Bank.

These included issuing summons instead of arresting children at their homes at night.

But UNICEF said that “ongoing” violations by the army were rife and included physical violence and verbal abuse.

Over the past decade, Israeli forces have arrested, interrogated and prosecuted around 7,000 children between 12 and 17, mostly boys, UNICEF found, noting the rate was equivalent to “an average of two children each day”.

DAMASCUS — Syrian rebels have agreed to free 1,500 families in exchange for food and the release of jailed opponents of President Bashar Assad, a newspaper close to his regime said Monday.

The reported agreement involves the release of families held by rebels in Adra, a flashpoint town northeast of Damascus currently under siege by government troops.

Under the deal, food supplies would be allowed into Adra, and an unspecified number of people held in regime jails would be set free, in exchange for the release of the 1,500 families held in the town, said Al Watan.

In a first phase and as a gesture of goodwill, “a family of eight people would be released in exchange for food for civilians in Adra,” said the newspaper.

Afterwards, “the exchange would involve the release of one family held hostage in Adra per each detainee released” from government jails, it reported.

While the edges of Adra are under government control, the interior of the town, which has Sunni, Alawite and Christian communities, is in rebel hands.

It is strategically located on the northeastern entrance to Damascus, and has in the past been used as a launching pad for attacks on the edges of the capital.

Today it is totally under army siege, while the interior of the town is under rebel control.

When the rebels took Adra in mid-December, they prevented thousands of people — many of them from Syria’s Alawite and Christian minorities — from leaving.

An activist in Adra told AFP via the Internet he could not confirm whether any deal was in the making, but he said the humanitarian situation for people in the town was dire.

“A kilo of rice is sold here at $8. Today, a little child died as a result of the food shortages,” said Abul Baraa.

The deal reported by Al Watan was being discussed with religious leaders in Douma, a rebel bastion near Adra.

National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar told AFP: “I don’t want to discuss this question with the press before the talks are completed.”

At the end of December, at the height of the fighting around Adra, the regime said it had evacuated more than 5,000 residents who had been blocked from leaving by rebels, according to state news agency SANA.

The rebels control Adra’s workers’ city, once home to workers of all religious groups who travelled to the Damascus outskirts for work. The army is still in control of the rest of Adra.