Region

MOGADISHU — Islamist militants said on Saturday their attack on the Somali president’s compound, in which at least 11 people died, was an attempt to kill or abduct him.

Al Shabaab fighters blasted through a gate with a car bomb on Friday and fought a gunbattle with guards at the heavily fortified compound known as Villa Somalia. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was unharmed in the assault.

“The main objective of attacking the palace on Friday was to assassinate the so-called Somali president or kidnap him,” Al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told Reuters on Saturday.

“We sent well-trained mujahedeen from our special forces to bring us the president dead or alive.”

In the past few weeks, the capital Mogadishu has been hit by a series of suicide bomb attacks claimed by Al Shabaab, who were pushed out of the city in mid-2011 but have continued to wage a guerrilla campaign.

The strike was another reminder of the threat still posed by the rebels and how Somalia’s fragile government is struggling to impose order more than two decades after the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre tipped the country into chaos.

Police said the attackers wore uniforms similar to those of the presidential guards, and some wore suicide vests during the well-coordinated attack.

The chief of staff of the office of the prime minister and a former chief of intelligence were killed, along with all nine militants who staged the attack, the government said.

“In 2006, Ethiopian troops came but we chased them and by then we were weak,” said Rage. “But now we are strong and determined to fight back and eliminate the Ethiopian troops.”

President Mohamud said on Friday the attack would not stop his government’s work to rebuild Somalia and called Al Shabaab a “marginal group on the brink of extinction”.

The president’s spokesman said the rebels would be defeated.

“These are the death throes of a dying animal. Al Shabaab has been driven out of Mogadishu, Kismayo and many other areas. Our military campaign against them is going to remove them entirely,” Abdirahman Yarisow told Reuters.

BAGHDAD — A mortar attack struck a busy area in a mainly Shiite town south of Iraq’s capital Thursday, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 50, authorities said.

The five mortar rounds slammed into a busy market, a residential building and a parking lot around 7pm (1700 GMT, 11am EST) as people returned home from work and shopped in Musayyib, police and hospital officials said.

Police said it appeared the rounds came from the nearby Sunni-dominated town of Jurf Al Sakr, though it wasn’t immediately clear who fired them.

The officials gave the casualty toll and details on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to release information to journalists.

Musayyib, about 60 kilometres south of Baghdad, is in an area that holds a volatile mix of Sunnis and Shiites and was a flashpoint for some of the worst sectarian violence in past years. 

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Thursday opened the trial of Al Jazeera journalists that has sparked an international outcry, as an Australian reporter said from the caged dock that justice would prevail.

The Cairo court adjourned the trial to March 5 to provide a translator for the Australian correspondent Peter Greste and to hear prosecution witnesses.

Al Jazeera expressed disappointment that the journalists were not freed and called for a “day of action” on February 27 in support of them.

“What is going on in Egypt right now is a trial of journalism itself, so it is critical that we remain resolute in calling for freedom of speech, for the right for people to know, and for the immediate release of all of Al Jazeera’s journalists,” it said.

The trial of journalists with the Qatar-based channel comes against the backdrop of strained ties between Cairo and Doha, which backed deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, ousted by the army in July, and his now-banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The journalists are accused of supporting the Brotherhood and broadcasting false reports, after police shut down Al Jazeera’s Cairo offices following Morsi’s overthrow.

Eight out of 20 defendants are in custody, with the rest on the run or abroad.

“I love my family. I’m strong,” Greste told reporters from the dock with the other seven defendants in court. “The physical conditions [of prison] are good but I’m psychologically drained.”

“We know we have done nothing wrong. We have confidence that justice will set us free.”

Greste, a former BBC correspondent, and Canadian-Egyptian Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, who worked with CNN before joining Al Jazeera, were arrested in a Cairo hotel in December.

Greste is the only arrested foreign journalist. The other foreigners listed in the indictment are abroad and being tried in absentia.

Prosecutors charge the defendants falsely portrayed Egypt as being in a state of “civil war”, possibly a reference to the broadcaster’s coverage of a crackdown in which more than 1,000 Morsi supporters have been killed in street clashes.

The government has designated the Brotherhood a “terrorist organisation”, although the group denies involvement in a spate of bombings since Morsi’s overthrow.

Al Jazeera, which says only nine of the defendants are on its staff, has denied the charges.

The other foreigners are Britons Sue Turton and Dominic Kane and Dutch journalist Rena Netjes, who was indicted even though she does not work for the channel.

Turton, an award-winning journalist who formerly worked for Britain’s Sky News and Channel 4 channels, told AFP she hoped the court would throw out the charges.

“Basically [the charges] relate to me aiding and abetting a terrorist organisation by providing money and equipment,” she said in a telephone interview.

“I was extremely upset when the boys were put in prison,” she said of the jailed journalists. “We were all just thinking the authorities would realise what a huge mistake they made.”

The trial has prompted an international campaign by journalists calling for their release.

 ‘Almost zero tolerance’ 

Human Rights Watch said the trial was part of a crackdown on dissent by the interim government.

“Egyptian authorities in recent months have demonstrated almost zero tolerance for any form of dissent, arresting and prosecuting journalists, demonstrators, and academics for peacefully expressing their views,” it said.

The United States, press freedom groups and scores of journalists have protested against the detention of the reporters.

Greste himself, in a letter written from prison last month, described what he sees as a lack of press freedom in Egypt.

“The state will not tolerate hearing from the Muslim Brotherhood or any other critical voices,” he wrote. “The prisons are overflowing with anyone who opposes or challenges the government.”

None of those arrested appeared to have been working with press accreditation, and Egyptian authorities say they welcome accredited foreign journalists.

Officials insist the channel has been working for the benefit of Qatar, a strong supporter of the Brotherhood that has hosted some of its members who fled the crackdown.

Al Jazeera, especially its Arabic-language service, has often come under criticism in the past for allegedly biased reporting in the Arab world.

TRIPOLI/BEIRUT — Two people were killed in the Lebanese city of Tripoli on Thursday including a military commander from the Alawite minority shot dead on his way to work, security sources said, the latest spasm of violence linked to the Syrian civil war.

In Beirut, a Palestinian man was named as one of two suicide bombers who blew themselves up near the Iranian cultural centre in the capital’s southern suburbs on Wednesday, killing at least four other people in other Syria-related violence.

The three-year-long civil war in neighbouring Syria has exacerbated tensions in Lebanon between groups sympathetic to the rival sides, posing a major security challenge to a new government that is seeking to stabilise the fragile state.

In Tripoli, the Syria war has fuelled tensions between Alawites loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s government and Sunni Muslim groups sympathetic to the uprising against him. Assad is also an Alawite, a religion derived from Shiite Islam.

On Thursday morning, gunmen killed Abdel Rahman Youssef, a military leader in the pro-Syrian Arab Democratic Party from Tripoli’s Jabal Mohsen district, a day after three other people were wounded in clashes, security and party sources said.

The other man killed was Sunni, the sources said, the circumstances of his death were not immediately clear.

The city, Lebanon’s second largest, was tense after the shooting, with schools shutting their doors and many people keeping away from sites of potential clashes, a witness said.

The twin suicide bomb attack in Beirut on Wednesday was the seventh such bombing in the city’s predominantly Shiite Muslim southern suburbs since last July.

A Sunni militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, describing it as a reprisal for the intervention of Hizbollah and Iran in Syria.

Investigators used DNA samples to identify one of the suicide bombers as Nidal Al Mugheyir, a Palestinian man who security sources said was in his early 20s and had been a follower of hardline Lebanese Sunni cleric Ahmad Al Asir.

Mugheyir was a resident of the mainly Shiite village of Beisareya in southern Lebanon, where villagers torched his family home on Wednesday following reports he was behind the bomb attack.

THE HAGUE — Syria will miss a UN-backed June 30 deadline to destroy its chemical arsenal, possibly by several months, sources said Thursday, amid growing Western frustration with Damascus’ perceived delays.

With just 11 per cent of Syria’s chemicals out of the country after a series of missed deadlines, an Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) meeting on Friday will hear calls for Syria to do more.

Because of the missed deadlines, Syria has submitted a new 100-day timeframe that sees all its chemicals removed from the country by the last week of May, a source close to the matter told AFP.

The chemicals must then be taken from Syria’s main port Latakia by Western warships to a US vessel, the MV Cape Ray, aboard which they will be broken down at sea using hydrolysis, a process expected to take 90 days.

That would put the destruction well beyond the June 30 deadline agreed by Russia and the US last year as part of a plan to avert US-backed military strikes in the wake of deadly chemical attacks outside Damascus blamed by the West on President Bashar Assad’s regime.

“The Syrians said they could complete getting the agents out of the country by the end of May, that’s unacceptable,” said the source.

The UN Security Council on February 6 called on Syria to move faster, transporting chemicals and agents to Latakia “in a systematic and sufficiently accelerated manner”.

Western diplomats at an OPCW Executive Council meeting last month expressed frustration with the repeatedly delayed process, accusing Syria of unilaterally changing the June 30 destruction deadline into a deadline for the chemicals to have left the country.

“They’re going to be several months over the destruction deadline, but they’re saying if it’s all out of the country by June 30 then so what?” a diplomatic source said.

An OPCW-UN Operational Planning Group has come up with an alternative that would reduce the 100-day Syrian plan by 63 days, but the June 30 deadline would still not be met, said a source close to the matter.

Diplomats nevertheless want to keep the mid-2014 deadline, however unrealistic.

“As long as the June 30 date hasn’t passed, it must be kept as a target,” said the source.

 ‘No question of haggling’ 

Most countries at the OPCW’s Executive Council are frustrated with the delays, although Russia, China, Iran and India do not want to put more pressure on Damascus, the source said ahead of Friday’s “intense” talks.

“There’s no question of haggling, the deadlines have been agreed and they must be respected,” the source said.

Syria has said it does not have the right material to transport the chemicals and that it has been hampered by the security situation in the war-torn country.

So-called Priority 1 chemicals were supposed to be destroyed by March 31 but “they won’t even be out of Latakia by then”, a diplomatic source said.

Syria is supposed to have completely destroyed its chemical weapon production facilities by March 15, with another OPCW Executive Council meeting to be held before then.

Syria has declared around 700 tonnes of most dangerous chemicals, which were supposed to have left the country by the end of 2013, 500 tonnes of less dangerous precursor chemicals, which were supposed to have left the country by February 5, and around 122 tonnes of isopropanol.

So far just three small shipments have left Latakia, to be taken to Italy and transferred for destruction onto the US ship MV Cape Ray.

Syria’s isopropanol is to be destroyed by March 1, according to the internationally-agreed timetable, and that task is 93 per cent completed, a diplomatic source said, with the remaining 7 per cent “in a currently inaccessible location”.

UN Security Council Resolution 2118 was passed after a massive chemical weapon attack that killed hundreds in several opposition areas around Damascus in August.

Rebels and the regime exchanged blame for that attack.

PARIS — US Secretary of State John Kerry and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held more than two hours of “constructive” talks on Israeli-Palestinian peace on Thursday, their second session in as many days, a senior US official said.

“As they did last night, they discussed all of the core issues and agreed to stay in close touch over the phone and through their teams on the ground in the coming days and weeks,” said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks resumed on July 29 after a nearly three-year break. At the time, Kerry said: “Our objective will be to achieve a final status agreement over the course of the next nine months.”

As that deadline has approached, US officials appear to have scaled back their ambitions, saying they are trying to forge a “framework for negotiations” as a first step though they still hope to hammer out a full agreement by April 29.

Such a framework could sketch the outlines of an accord to resolve the more than six-decade-old conflict, whose main issues include borders, security, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

LONDON — Britain and Iran on Thursday officially resumed diplomatic relations which were severed by London after students stormed its Tehran embassy in November 2011.

“The UK has agreed with Iran that from today bilateral relations will be conducted directly through non-resident charge d’affaires and officials,” a Foreign Office spokesman told AFP.

Britain had ordered the closure of Iran’s embassy in London after shuttering its own in Tehran when hundreds of Islamist students stormed the compound.

The students — protesting against Western sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme — ransacked the building as well as the ambassador’s residence in north Tehran.

Since then, the Swedish embassy in Tehran has represented Britain’s interests there, while the Omani embassy in London has done the same for Iran.

The Foreign Office spokesman said: “We will no longer have formal protecting power arrangements in place. This is the next stage of the step-by-step process of taking forward our bilateral relationship with Iran.”

As regards reopening Britain’s embassy in Tehran, he said no decision had been taken.

“We have made it clear that the issue of compensation [for the damage caused] needs to be addressed,” the spokesman said.

A pristine Iranian flag was flying Thursday outside its embassy in the plush Prince’s Gate terrace overlooking London’s Hyde Park, for the first time in more than two years.

The London embassy was officially open again for the first time since 2011 but is not yet operational as no diplomats have been allocated yet.

The six-storey terrace was the scene of the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, when six gunmen stormed the building, taking hostages. It ended five days later with a British special forces raid.

Around 400,000 Iranians live in Britain.

DUBAI — Emirati security authorities have allowed all passengers on an Etihad Airways flight that had suspicious lavatory fires to leave after several were temporarily detained for questioning by police, the airline said Thursday.

Passengers on board the Boeing 777-300ER flight from Melbourne, Australia, to the United Arab Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi said Tuesday’s fires sent smoke into the cabin and appeared to have been deliberately set.

Smoke was detected in two toilets after takeoff from Melbourne on Monday, prompting a precautionary diversion to Jakarta, Indonesia, and again in a toilet as the plane made its way to its destination of Abu Dhabi, according to the government-backed airline.

None of the 254 passengers and crew was removed from the flight in Indonesia. Several passengers said that decision was unnerving given the fears that the fires were started by someone on board.

Twelve people were detained upon arrival in Abu Dhabi as authorities investigated the case. A young woman who had attracted the suspicions of some passengers was among those initially detained, witnesses said.

“The real story is: Who was the idiot woman trying to burn a plane down, and why,” passenger Mark Sinclair, 45, said by e-mail. “She should be in jail for a very long time.”

The 12 passengers held for additional questioning were offered hotel accommodation but opted to stay together and were kept in the airline’s first-class lounge, according to Etihad. It said consular officials from Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland visited them.

By Thursday morning, all had been allowed to continue on their journeys.

“In the absence of any conclusive incriminating evidence, no arrests have been made at this time,” the airline said in an e-mailed statement.

Etihad described the investigation as ongoing, and said it is cooperating with authorities.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy in respect to people who threaten the safety and security of passengers and crew or our aircraft,” the airline said.

Officials at the Abu Dhabi police department, which is leading the probe, could not be reached for comment.

The UAE’s aviation regulator, the General Civil Aviation Authority, said it is involved in the investigation and confirmed that no arrests have been made.

Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) said Thursday that responsibility for any safety investigation resides with the regulator in the UAE. Any security issues would be investigated by national security agencies, CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said.

CASA expects to be notified of the results of any safety investigation because Etihad has approval to fly into Australia.

“If it involves any safety issues, we would expect to receive some information from Etihad in due course,” Gibson said.

Etihad is the UAE’s national carrier and is based in Abu Dhabi. It and Gulf competitors Emirates and Qatar Airways have been rapidly expanding their operations in recent years, turning their desert bases into major intercontinental transit hubs.

Its Australian destinations are Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. It also has a minority stake in Virgin Australia.

TRIPOLI — Libyans trickled to the polls on Thursday to elect an assembly to draft a constitution, with the paltry turnout reflecting deep political disillusion with the chaos pervading Libya since Muammar Qadhifi’s 42-year rule ended in 2011.

Only 360,000 people had cast ballots by the late afternoon, the election commission said, out of one million who had registered to vote — a number far lower than the three million who had registered before the 2012 parliamentary election.

Live footage from Libyan television cameras in some main polling stations showed mostly empty rooms.

Dawn explosions rocked five polling stations in the eastern town of Derna, an Islamist stronghold, but no one was hurt.

Gunmen forced one Derna voting centre to shut by firing in the air and shouting “voting is haram [forbidden]”, an election official said. Derna polling stations stayed shut and insecurity prevented some voting centres in two other towns from opening.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the Derna attacks but residents said the bombers had scrawled “There is no constitution but Islamic law” on a wall near the scene of one blast, suggesting radical Islamists were responsible.

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s government is struggling to assert its authority over militias which helped topple Qadhafi but kept their weapons and have become major political players.

Two of the strongest militias threatened on Tuesday to dissolve the General National Congress (GNC), the interim parliament, accusing it of paralysing Libya with its endless infighting.

Libya desperately needs a viable government and system of rule so that it can focus on reconstruction and on healing the divisions exposed by the NATO-backed campaign against Qadhafi.

Soldiers guarded polling stations in the capital Tripoli, as helicopters circled overhead. In the eastern city of Benghazi, gunmen threw a bag full of explosives into a voting centre, but the devices did not go off, a security source said.

“God willing, this is the starting point for democracy and freedom, which is what we came for,” Hatem Al Majri said as he voted in Benghazi.

Berber boycott

The 60-strong constitutional committee, drawn equally from Libya’s three regions of Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east and Fezzan in the south, will have 120 days to draft the charter.

Libya used a similar model for the committee that drafted a pre-Qadhafi constitution that was implemented when the country, then a monarchy, gained independence in 1951.

The new document’s authors will need to take into account political and tribal rivalries, as well as demands for more autonomy for the east, when deciding what political system Libya will adopt. Their draft will be put to a referendum.

In the east, armed protesters have occupied major oil ports since the summer to demand a greater share of energy wealth and political autonomy, crippling vital oil exports. The protest group has dismissed Thursday’s vote as fake.

The election was also boycotted by the Amazigh, or Berber, minority which lives in the west near oil installations.

Its leader, Ibrahim Makhlouf, has rejected the vote because the Amazigh wanted a bigger say in the body and guarantees that their tongue will become one of Libya’s official languages.

In the past, Amazigh have backed their demands by blockading oil installations such as the Mellitah oil and gas complex, co-owned by Italy’s ENI, as well as pipelines.

Attempts to write a constitution have been delayed by political infighting in the GNC, elected in July 2012 for an 18-month term in Libya’s first free poll in nearly 50 years.

The GNC agreed this week to hold elections this year after an outcry over its plan to extend its mandate beyond February 7.

Qadhafi ostensibly ruled Libya under a bizarre set of laws prescribed in his Green Book. In practice he and his family ran a totalitarian state where no political opposition was tolerated and rival tribes were paid off or played off against each other.

VIENNA — Six world powers and Iran made a “good start” in talks in Vienna towards reaching a final settlement in the decade-old stand-off over Tehran’s nuclear programme, but conceded their plan to get a deal in the coming months was very ambitious.

By late July, Western governments hope to hammer out an accord that would lay to rest their suspicions that Iran is seeking the capability to make a nuclear bomb, an aim it denies, while Tehran wants a lifting of economic sanctions.

Wide differences remain on how this could be achieved, although the two sides said on Thursday they agreed during meetings this week in the Austrian capital on an agenda and timetable for the talks on such an accord.

“We have had three very productive days during which we have identified all of the issues we need to address in reaching a comprehensive and final agreement,” European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told reporters.

“There is a lot to do. It won’t be easy but we have made a good start,” said Ashton, who speaks on behalf of the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany.

Senior diplomats from the six nations, as well as Ashton and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, will meet again on March 17, also in Vienna, and have a series of further discussions ahead of the July deadline.

Tehran denies that its nuclear programme has any latent military purposes and has signalled repeatedly it would resist dismantling its nuclear installations as part of any deal.

“I can assure you that no one had, and will have, the opportunity to impose anything on Iran during the talks,” Zarif told reporters after the Vienna meeting.

A senior US official who asked not to identified cautioned that their exchanges would be “difficult” but the sides were committed to reach a deal soon.

“This will be a complicated, difficult and lengthy process. We will take the time required to do it right,” the official said. “We will continue to work in a deliberate and concentrated manner to see if we can get that job done.”

As part of the diplomatic process, Ashton will go to Tehran for talks on March 9-10.

A diplomatic source clarified that the two sides did not produce a text of the agreed framework for future negotiations or detailed agenda for upcoming meetings, rather only agreeing a broad range of subjects to be addressed in coming months.

While modest in scope, the arrangement is an early step forward in the elusive search for a settlement that could ward off the danger of a wider war in the Middle East, reshape the regional power balance and open up big new trade opportunities with Iran, an oil-producing market of 76 million people.

For Iran, a halt to sanctions imposed by the United States, European governments and the United Nations, would end years of isolation and lift its battered economy.

Vast differences

The six powers’ overarching goal is to extend the time Iran would need to make enough fissile material and assemble equipment for a nuclear bomb, and to make such a move easier to detect before it became a fait accompli.

They will want to cap uranium enrichment at a low fissile concentration, limit research and development of new nuclear equipment, decommission a substantial portion of Iran’s centrifuges used to refine uranium and allow more intrusive UN non-proliferation inspections.

The Vienna talks followed a groundbreaking interim accord between Iran and the six powers in November under which Tehran suspended higher-level enrichment until late July in return for limited relief from sanctions.

That deal was made possible by the election of relative moderate President Hassan Rouhani, replacing bellicose hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a last year on a platform of rebuilding the OPEC member state’s foreign relations.

Iran’s unfinished heavy water Arak reactor, which could yield plutonium for bombs, and its underground Fordow uranium enrichment site will be among key sticking points in the talks.

“We have begun to see some areas of agreement as well as areas in which we will have to work though very difficult issues,” the senior US official said.

The official declined to respond specifically to Iran’s suggestions that its ballistic missile programme, which the West worries could be a way to deliver an atomic bomb to its target, would not be up for negotiation.

“All of the issues of concern to the international community regarding Iran’s nuclear programme are on the table,” the official said. “And all of our concerns must be met in order to get a comprehensive agreement ... Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

Iranian ballistic missile work is banned under UN Security Council sanctions targeting the nuclear programme.

Zarif said, according to the official IRNA news agency: “Nothing except Iran’s nuclear activities will be discussed in the talks with the [six powers], and we have agreed on it.”

A US delegation will be visiting Israel and Saudi Arabia shortly to discuss the negotiations with Iran, the US official. Both countries are upset about signs of a possible Western rapprochement with their common adversary.