Region

NAIROBI — The two UN workers shot dead in central Somalia were working on the links between money transfer systems and piracy, the UN anti-drugs and crime agency said Wednesday.

Former British police officer Simon Davis, 57, and his French colleague, 28-year-old researcher Clement Gorrissen, were fatally shot by a man in uniform just after their arrival at the airport in Galkayo on Monday.

“The two men, who often worked together, were on mission in Somalia to offer technical advice and to help build local capacities in the specialised field of illicit money flows,” the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said.

UNODC gave no details of the circumstances of the attack, nor on its motive, which remains unknown.

It said the two experts had been working to ensure that the remittance networks, which replace banks in Somalia, could be used by ordinary citizens but not by criminals. Many Somalis rely on remittance companies to receive money from relatives in the diaspora.

Davis served with the Metropolitan police force, specialising in tracking financial movements, before joining UNODC in 2012. He also worked closely with the British government in the area of fighting piracy.

In addition, Davis provided training to law enforcement officials in the Horn of Africa, UNODC said.

Gorrissen first worked for UNODC in 2010 as part of the Global Programme against Money Laundering, Proceeds of Crime and the Financing of Terrorism.

In May 2011, he researched illicit money flows for the Contact Group on Piracy. He was a key contributor to the highly regarded report “Pirate Trails: Tracking the Illicit Financial Flows from Pirate Activities off the Horn of Africa”.

No one has claimed the attack in Galkayo, a town that straddles the self-proclaimed autonomous regions of Galmudug and Puntland. Al Shabab Islamists, who have been influential in the area around Galkayo, expressed their satisfaction at the killings but denied being behind them.

Galkayo is not under the control of the central government in Mogadishu and is a stronghold of the networks of pirates who stage attacks off the coast of Somalia. Several foreigners have been kidnapped in and around the town in recent years.

The 2013 report on financial transfers and piracy estimated that ransom payments totalling between $339 million and $413 million (245 million and 300 million euros) were made to pirates between April 2005 and December 2012, with between 30 and 50 per cent of the total remaining in the hands of pirate chiefs.

TUNIS — Tunisia on Tuesday announced a new international fundraising campaign to reclaim the set where numerous Star Wars scenes were filmed from the encroaching desert.

The set for Mos Espa — hometown of Anakin Skywalker, the protagonist in the blockbuster film series who later becomes Darth Vader — was built at Ong Jmel in southern Tunisia in the 1990s for the filming of “Star Wars Episode One — The Phantom Menace.”

The tourism ministry has teamed up with several organisations to launch the “Save Mos Espa” campaign, aiming to raise 300,000 Tunisian dinars (137,000 euros) for the restoration of the site, which has been damaged by shifting sand dunes.

“Mos Epsa is located in a very windy region, threatened by sand dunes which the wind moves by around 15 metres a year. One dune has already buried 10 per cent of the site,” said Nabil Gasmi, from one of the tourism groups involved in the campaign.

“We managed to remove 8,000 cubic metres of sand in 12 days. Unfortunately some of the set has already collapsed,” he told reporters.

The Tunisian state has allocated 160,000 dinars to the project, with an appeal launched on Monday on a crowdfunding website (www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-mos-espa) to raise $45,000 (33,000 euros).

The ministry hopes to secure the rest of the money from sponsors and private donations.

Fahmi Houki, an official at the ministry, explained that the sand clearance was a temporary operation, because the dunes are constantly moving, and would save the set for another eight to 10 years.

The North African country’s vital tourism industry suffered from the violence and political instability that followed the 2011 uprising that toppled a decades old dictatorship.

The new tourism minister, Amel Karboul, said last month that she wanted to improve Tunisia’s image as a holiday destination by raising awareness of areas away from the coast like Ong Jmel, which have previously attracted little attention.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is considering ending its controversial ban on sports in girls’ state schools, after its consultative council recommended the ban be lifted over vociferous opposition from traditionalists.

Following a heated debate on Tuesday, the shura council recommended that the longstanding ban, already relaxed in private schools in May last year, be ended altogether, state media reported.

The appointed body, whose 150 members are overwhelmingly male, can only pass on its recommendation to the education ministry and has no powers to impose it.

All education in Saudi Arabia is strictly single-sex, but sports in girls schools remains a sensitive issue in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom where women have to cover from head to toe when in public.

Opponents argued that girls’ state schools lacked sports facilities and rejected supporters’ claims that sports provision would help combat rising childhood obesity, an aide to the shura council chairman said.

But the council finally approved the recommendation after agreeing that it did not run counter to the strict version of Sharia Law imposed in the kingdom, Fahad Al Ahmad told the official SPA news agency.

The council cited a ruling by the kingdom’s late top cleric, or grand mufti, Sheikh Abdel Aziz Bin Baz, that women were entitled to play sports “within the limits set by Islamic law”.

The issue of Saudi women in sport came under the spotlight at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, when the kingdom bowed to international pressure and sent female athletes to compete for the first time.

The International Olympic Committee agreed to allow the two Saudi women — a judo player and a middle-distance runner — to compete with their heads and bodies covered in deference to the Islamic dress code enforced in Saudi Arabia.

But despite the two athletes’ participation, Human Rights Watch says that millions of Saudi women remain effectively barred from sports.

Saudi authorities shut down private gyms for women in 2009 and 2010, and women are effectively barred from sports arenas by strict rules banning men and women mixing in public.

VIENNA — Iran will never slow down its nuclear research programme, its supreme leader said on Wednesday as negotiators from Tehran and six world powers struggled to narrow “significant gaps” that the United States warned might be insurmountable.

The stakes in a deal are high on both sides. Western powers, along with Russia and China, want to prevent chronic tensions in the Middle East from boiling over into a wider war or triggering a regional nuclear arms race. Iran, for its part, is keen to be rid of international sanctions hobbling its oil-based economy.

Clerical supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the Islamic republic’s negotiating team in Vienna should not yield to issues “forced upon them”.

“These negotiations should continue,” he told nuclear scientists in Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported. “But all should know that negotiations will not stop or slow down any of Iran’s activities in nuclear research and development.”

Tehran denies suspicions that it has used its declared civilian atomic energy programme as a front for covertly developing the means to make nuclear weapons, maintaining that it seeks only electricity from its enrichment of uranium.

Negotiators from Iran and the so-called P5+1 — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — plan after their two days of talks in Vienna to start drafting a long-term agreement on settling their decade-old nuclear dispute by a self-imposed deadline of July 20.

They will begin their next round of talks in the Austrian capital on May 13, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, coordinating the talks for the powers, told reporters while standing next to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif.

“A lot of intensive work will be required to overcome the differences,” she said after the April 8-9 meeting ended. “We will aim to bridge the gaps in all the key areas.”

A senior US administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters: “Now we are set to start drafting. At this point we don’t know if we’ll be successful in bridging those gaps.”

Russia’s chief negotiator, however, suggested progress had been achieved on how to resolve concerns about Iran’s planned Arak research reactor. Tehran says is a facility designed to produce radio-isotopes for medical treatments; the West suspects it will be geared to yielding plutonium for atomic bombs.

“The possibility of a compromise on this issue has grown,” Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying. “Centimetre by centimetre, drop by drop, we are moving forward. In general there is a positive dynamic.”

Zarif said more than half of the issues had been sorted out.

“We have agreement over 50 to 60 per cent of the [final] draft ... but the remaining parts are very important and contain various issues,” Zarif told reporters.

The US official, however, had a somewhat different view: “The only thing that matters at the end of the day is to get to the agreement... Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

‘Sense of urgency’

Iran says that its ballistic missile programme, banned under sanctions the UN Security Council imposed over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, would not be discussed in the talks. But the US official, asked if the missile programme came up, said “every single issue you can imagine” had been raised.

“The Iranians clearly have a sense of urgency to get a deal done, as does the P5+1 [the six powers],” a senior diplomat close to the talks said, but “there are still some significant gaps”.

The toughest issues to be tackled are Iran’s future uranium enrichment capacity, nuclear facilities that Western powers believe have little or no civilian value, future nuclear research as well as the sequencing of steps to remove the international sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.

Despite Khamenei’s pledge to the contrary, US and European officials say they will insist on limits to Iran’s efforts to develop more efficient enrichment technology that would enable Tehran to produce sensitive nuclear material at a faster pace.

Enriched uranium provides the fuel for civilian nuclear power stations but also, if refined to a high degree, the fissile core of a nuclear bomb.

Background tensions over Russia’s involvement in Ukraine and Western threats of further sanctions against Moscow and over the US denial of a visa for Iran’s proposed new UN envoy in New York have so far not harmed the nuclear talks, diplomats say.

The US official reiterated that Russia’s delegation continued to play a “constructive, focused role”. Asked if the dispute over Iran’s UN ambassador nominee was having an impact on the negotiations, the official only repeated the White House statement that the nominee is “not viable”.

‘Red lines’ 

The six powers’ immediate goal in the talks is to extend as much as possible Iran’s so-called breakout” period — the time it would need to develop a nuclear weapon. US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday the current Western assessment of Iran’s capability in this regard is two months.

Khamenei, who has the last say on Iran’s affairs of state, has repeatedly said that the OPEC member’s “red lines” are that it will never give up enrichment or shut any nuclear complex.

Among the global powers’ most pressing concerns are Iran’s centrifuge research and development programme, the size of its uranium stockpiles, the future of the Arak reactor project and of the future of the Fordow underground enrichment plant, a secret site until Western intelligence uncovered it in 2009.

Iran’s priority is an end to sanctions that have drastically reduced its oil income and virtually barred it from the international financial system. Tehran also wants to regain what it regards as its rightful place as a leading regional power.

The Vienna talks are building on a preliminary deal that Iran and the powers reached in Geneva last November. That agreement provided Iran with limited sanctions relief in exchange for a six-month suspension of some nuclear activities, including higher-grade enrichment, that began on Jan. 20.

The UN nuclear agency said on Wednesday that Iran was complying with the November interim deal. The US official said Washington was also fulfilling its commitments regarding the limited sanctions relief promised to Tehran under that accord.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli and Palestinian negotiators ended another US-mediated session on Tuesday with no sign of a breakthrough in efforts to save peace talks from collapse, but an Israeli official said they had agreed to meet again.

In a statement about the latest discussions, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: “Gaps remain, but both sides are committed to narrow the gaps.”

The US-brokered negotiations, which began in July, plunged into crisis last week after Israel, demanding a Palestinian commitment to continue talking beyond an April 29 deadline for a peace deal, failed to carry out a promised release of about two dozen Palestinian prisoners.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas responded by signing 15 global treaties, including the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war and occupations, on behalf of the State of Palestine, a defiant move that surprised Washington and angered Israel.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking on Israel Radio on Tuesday, said Abbas would have to reverse that step in order for the prisoner release to be re-addressed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened unspecified retaliation in response to what Israel views as a unilateral statehood move by Abbas. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al Malki said Abbas would appeal at an Arab League meeting in Cairo on Wednesday for political and economic support in the event of Israeli punitive measures.

Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour said on Tuesday that the Palestinians were prepared to join more international groups if Israel retaliated. As a UN non-member state, Palestinians can join 63 international agencies and accords.

“If they want to escalate further and try to illegally punish us for doing something legal, we are ready and willing to send the second barrage, the third barrage and more of what legally we could do,” Mansour told the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

As part of the US-led bid to salvage the talks, Israeli chief negotiator Tzipi Livni and Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat, along with US mediator Martin Indyk, reconvened late on Monday after what the United States had described as a “serious and constructive” meeting on Sunday.

“The atmosphere was business-like and the sides agreed to meet again to try to find a solution to the crisis,” said an Israeli official, who asked not to be identified, after the latest talks wrapped up in the early hours of Tuesday.

The official did not say when the next meeting would be held. There was no immediate Palestinian comment about any future session.

Stumbling blocks

Expectations among the Israeli and Palestinian public of a peace deal have been low from the start. The talks have stalled over Palestinian opposition to Israel’s demand that it be recognised as a Jewish state, and over settlements built on occupied land Palestinians seek for a country of their own.

Looking ahead to possible Israeli economic sanctions, Malki said that at the Arab League session, Abbas would voice concern Israel might again withhold tax revenues it transfers to the Palestinian Authority.

Interim peace deals task Israel with collecting taxes and customs duties for the PA amounting to around $100 million a month, on goods imported into the Palestinian territories. Israel has previously frozen the payments during times of heightened security and diplomatic tensions.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who has signalled he may scale back his mediating efforts due to “unhelpful actions” by both sides, was due to meet President Barack Obama on Tuesday, with the state of the peace negotiations high on the agenda.

A senior official in Abbas’ Fateh Party said that in order for the talks to continue, Palestinians would need a written commitment from Israel recognising a Palestinian state within all of the territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip captured in the 1967 Middle East war, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Israel has described those West Bank borders as indefensible and considers East Jerusalem as part of its capital, a claim not recognised internationally. Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, now ruled by Hamas Islamists, in 2005.

The Fateh official said Palestinians were also demanding a cessation of settlement activity and a prisoner release.

Palestinians fear settlements, viewed as illegal by most countries, will deny them a viable state and have condemned a series of Israeli construction projects announced while talks have been under way.

GENEVA — A looming drought in Syria could push millions more people into hunger and exacerbate a refugee crisis caused by years of civil war, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Syria’s breadbasket northwestern region has received less than half of the average rainfall since September and, if it stays dry up to wheat harvest time in mid-May, the country — already reliant on aid for millions of people — will need to import even more food.

“A drought could put the lives of millions more people at risk,” Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN aid agency World Food Programme (WFP), told a news briefing.

Based on rainfall data and satellite images, and with the smallest area planted with wheat in 15 years, output of the cereal is likely to be a record low of between 1.7 million and 2 million tonnes, as much as 29 per cent less than last year and about half of pre-conflict levels, the WFP said.

Barley and livestock production are also being hit.

In addition to the worst drought since 2008, three years of civil war have ravaged infrastructure, leaving long-term damage to irrigation due to damaged pumps and canals, power failures and a lack of spare parts, the agency said.

This will have “long-lasting effects on Syria’s agricultural production” even after peace is restored, it said.

The threat posed by drought meant the number of Syrians in need of emergency rations could rise to 6.5 million, up from 4.2 million now, Byrs said.

The WFP, which reached a record 4.1 million people with rations in March, said on Monday that it had to cut the size of food parcels to hungry Syrians due to a shortage of funds from donors.

WFP, which feeds hungry people around the world, says the operation in Syria is its biggest and most complex, costing more than $40 million a week.

The funding figure includes the feeding of 1.5 million of the 2.6 million registered Syrian refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries, mainly Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

“We can expect more refugees to leave if on top of the conflict they feel that their lives are in danger because there is no food. But it’s hard to say obviously because they could also move to other parts of Syria,” Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba, spokeswoman of the UN refugee agency, told reporters.

Overall, the United Nations has received just 16 per cent of the $2.2 billion sought for its aid operations inside Syria this year, with the United States the largest donor at $108 million, followed by the European Commission at $53.7 million and the United Arab Emirates at $50 million.

WASHINGTON — A threatened, but averted, American missile strike to punish Syria’s government for a chemical weapons attack last summer would not have been powerful enough to change the course in the Syrian civil war, Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday, in an attempt to deflect criticism that the US hasn’t done enough to stem the violence there.

Under pointed questioning by a Senate panel he used to chair, Kerry said the scrubbed strike would have been limited, and would have been aimed only at preventing Syrian President Bashar Assad from delivering more chemical weapons to his forces.

“It would not have had a devastating impact by which he had to recalculate, because it wasn’t going to last that long,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Here we were going to have one or two days to degrade and send a message. ... We came up with a better solution.”

That solution, Kerry said, was to negotiate an agreement with Russia to lean on Assad to ship out and destroy his government’s chemical weapons stockpiles, considered to be one of the largest in the world. 

That agreement came after a frantic few days after President Barack Obama initially threatened to launch a missile strike in response to the August 21 chemical weapons attack. Obama pulled back because he decided congressional approval was necessary first.

Obama had earlier threatened that Assad would face consequences if he crossed a “red line” by launching deadly chemical weapons against his own people. The US says more than 1,400 Syrians were killed in the August 21 attack, although human rights groups have reported a lower death toll of below 1,000.

An estimated 140,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war that is now in its fourth year — including 60,000 since last August, said Sen. Bob Corker, the panel’s top Republican.

“We didn’t take actions at a time when we could have made a difference; so many on this committee wanted us to do that,” Corker said.

Kerry said more than half of Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile — 54 per cent — has so far been shipped out of Syria. He also said the US is sending increased assistance to moderate Syria opposition forces — something they have long pleaded for — but refused to offer any details about what the aid would consist of or where it would go. The US has resisted sending heavy weapons and massive lethal aid to Syrian rebels for fear it would fall into the hands of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups who are also fighting Assad in pockets across the country.

Kerry predicted that the war will end only through a negotiated political agreement — not a military strike by outside forces.

Sen. John McCain, a Republican who has long pushed for more lethal aid for Syrian rebels, scoffed.

“Any objective observer will tell you that Bashar Assad is winning on the battlefield,” McCain said.

GAZA CITY — Israel has barred 30 runners, including an Olympic athlete, from leaving the Gaza Strip to participate in a marathon later this week, highlighting Israel’s tight restrictions on travel in and out of the Hamas-ruled territory, Palestinian officials said Tuesday.

In the case of the Olympic runner, Nader Masri, the travel ban was upheld Tuesday by Israel’s supreme court. Masri, 34, participated in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Separately, 36 young musicians requested to leave Gaza for a week-long music competition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but were also denied permission, organisers said. An Israeli defence official said a final decision has not been made. The competition begins Wednesday.

The cases underscored Israel’s restrictions on Gaza, which human rights activists argue amount to collective punishment and are often arbitrary. They say the travel ban is part of an Israeli attempt to sever ties between Gaza and the West Bank, territories that lie on opposite ends of Israel and are sought by the Palestinians for a future state, along with East Jerusalem.

Israel and Gaza’s other neighbour, Egypt, have severely limited access to Gaza since the territory was seized by the Islamic Hamas in 2007. Virtually all exports from Gaza are banned and most of Gaza’s 1.7 million people cannot travel abroad. Israel considers Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks, a terrorist group.

The Palestinian Olympic Committee said it had asked Israel for permits for the 30 runners to leave Gaza so they could attend the second annual international marathon in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Friday.

Itidal Al Mugrabi, a senior official in the committee, said all requests were denied last month. She said the Bethlehem event, which will also include shorter races, was expected to draw some 700 runners from Europe in addition to local athletes.

After being denied a permit, Masri approached the Israeli rights group Gisha, which appealed to Israel’s Supreme Court.

The judges ruled Tuesday that they could not intervene in the defence minister’s policy considerations, but suggested the military consider more exemptions from the travel ban.

Masri said he was disappointed.

“The ban no doubt limits my ability to challenge other champions from elsewhere,” Masri said. He said he trains daily in the streets and three times a week in a local gym.

Ostensibly, Masri should have stood a good chance of getting the exit permit even under Israel’s stringent criteria.

Those permitted to leave Gaza, at least in principle, include members of the Palestinian Olympic team and the Palestinian football team, according to guidelines published in 2011 by the branch of Israel’s military dealing with implementing the policy towards Gaza.

According to that list, exceptions are also made for Gaza residents seeking to attend events in the West Bank sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, the self-rule government of Hamas’ political rival, President Mahmoud Abbas.

Maj. Guy Inbar, an Israeli defence official, said Masri’s request was denied because it “does not meet the rules for exceptions for sports events”.

Inbar said the Bethlehem marathon sponsored by the Palestinian Authority “has political overtones”, but did not elaborate. He initially said that others who applied for permits were support staff, but then said he needed to check that information.

Eitan Diamond, the head of Gisha, said underlying Israel’s policy is an attempt to “create a divide between the West Bank and Gaza, to remove Gaza from the consciousness of the Israeli public, to push Gaza away”.

ALGIERS — A protest group, founded just two months ago when ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika controversially decided to seek re-election, has livened up a lacklustre campaign from which the incumbent has been entirely absent.

Activists of the Barakat (Enough) movement have made their mark by daring to argue publicly that the 77-year-old Bouteflika, who is too sick to take to the campaign trail himself, is unfit to govern.

Around 40 of them were briefly detained by the security forces when they did so at a rally in central Algiers last month.

Co-founder Amina Bouraoui says the movement was born out of a desire to establish a genuine democracy in Algeria, and frustration at an “archaic” system that has shown “contempt for the people”.

“This year, we saw politicians calling on the president to seek a fourth term, even though he is very sick and has been in power for 15 years,” said Bouraoui, a 38-year-old gynaecologist, in an interview with the openDemocracy website.

She said the same politicians had “violated” the constitution by controversially amending it to allow Bouteflika to seek and win a third term in 2009.

“Both physically and mentally, he is in no condition to govern. So, we decided with activist friends to go out into the street and to say ‘no’.”

Barakat has branches in 20 of Algeria’s 48 provinces and has organised eight demonstrations since March 1, Bouraoui says.

The movement is campaigning for a boycott of the April 17 election, which it describes as a “masquerade” and “another affront to the Algerian people”.

Made up mostly of activists in their 20s and 30s, the movement has so far failed to draw large crowds to its rallies, and is unlikely to prevent the expected re-election of the incumbent.

But it remains a surprise factor and an irritant for the president’s campaign team, who have responded with allegations that the new group is a tool of foreign powers.

Citizens’ movement 

Barakat has also attracted the suspicion of opposition parties, who see in it a possible rival, even though it has no detailed blueprint for a post-Bouteflika Algeria.

“We are a citizens’ movement... We do not want to be a political party,” said Bouraoui, whose youthful, feminine looks contrast with those of the country’s ageing, mostly male politicians.

Bouteflika himself has rarely appeared in public at all since a minor stroke confined him to hospital in Paris for three months last year.

Growing up in the poor Algiers neighbourhood of Bab Al Oued the daughter of a cardiology professor, Bouraoui traces her political awareness back to the bloody riots of 1988, which some Algerians refer to as their “Arab Spring”.

“I was 12 years old in October 1988 when a young protest movement was violently suppressed,” Bouraoui recalls.

The social unrest led the government to end Algeria’s single-party system and paved the way for multi-party elections in 1991, which Islamists were poised to win.

The army’s decision to cancel the poll triggered a devastating civil war, in which up to 200,000 people were killed as Islamist groups battled troops in the country’s “black decade”.

Bouteflika, who came to power in 1999, is credited by his supporters with helping end the civil war through a policy of national reconciliation.

But Bouraoui says his reputation as a peacemaker is undeserved, pointing to the “Black Spring” of 2001 in which security forces, acting on Bouteflika’s orders, crushed Berber protests in the Kabylie region, east of the capital, at the cost of 126 lives.

Tensions boiled over in the Kabylie city of Bejaia on Saturday, when a crowd of demonstrators stormed a planned rally by Bouteflika representatives, attacking a television crew covering the event and torching portraits of the president.

Bouteflika’s campaign team cancelled the rally, blaming the violence on “fascists” from the Barakat movement, accusations the group strongly rejected on Monday.

Mustapha Benfodil, another Barakat cofounder, insisted it was a non-violent movement committed to peaceful reform, after the experience of the civil war of the 1990s which left Algerians “profoundly traumatised”.

JEDDAH — The main public hospital in the Saudi city of Jeddah has closed its emergency room after a rise in cases of the MERS virus among medical staff, the health ministry said Tuesday.

A Jeddah paramedic was among two more people Saudi health authorities reported on Sunday had died from the SARS-like disease, bringing the nationwide death toll to 66.

On Monday, the health ministry reported four more MERS cases in Jeddah, two of them among health workers, prompting authorities to close the emergency department at the city’s King Fahd Hospital.

Patients were being transferred to other hospitals while the department was disinfected in a process expected to take 24 hours, the ministry said.

It reassured residents that the situation remained “stable” and “all precautionary measures are being taken to deal with the virus”.

But the closure caused widespread public concern, fuelled by rumours on social networks.

“I’m afraid to send my children to school,” said Jeddah resident Bassem Ben Ali, 33.

Jeddah accounts for just 11 of the 175 cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome reported by Saudi authorities since the disease first appeared in the kingdom in September 2012.

Of those, two have died, six have recovered and three are still undergoing treatment.

The MERS virus is considered a deadlier but less-transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, 9 per cent of whom died.

Experts are still struggling to understand the disease, for which there is no known vaccine.

A study has said the virus has been “extraordinarily common” in camels for at least 20 years and may have been passed directly from the animals to humans.

The World Health Organisation said at the end of March that it had been told of 206 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS infection worldwide, of which 86 had been fatal.