Ten bodies found on Japan coast

TOKYO: The badly decomposed remains of ten people have been found on Japan’s coast across the sea from North Korea, along with the wreckage of two boats, officials said on Monday.

The discovery comes just days after a group of eight fishermen, who said they were from North Korea, washed up on the same shore.

Police said two cadavers were found in separate places on the edge of the surf on Sado island, which lies around 750 kilometres (450 miles) from North Korea across the Sea of Japan (East Sea).

The bodies had begun to putrefy, and had nothing to identify them, senior local police official Hideaki Sakyo told AFP. However, he added, there were boxes of North Korean tobacco as well as boat parts and life jackets with Korean script nearby.

A wrecked wooden boat with squid-fishing equipment was also found on the coastline. Separately, coastguard officials spotted eight bodies inside a battered wooden boat off northern Akita prefecture.

High waves had prevented officials from investigating since the boat was first spotted on Friday, they said.

Television footage showed a wrecked vessel with an eightdigit number on it, which washed up on Oga peninsula on Sunday.

“Nothing else was found on the beach nearby, and so far we haven’t found anything” that suggests a definite link with North Korea, a coastguard spokeswoman told AFP.

Dozens of North Korean fishing vessels wash up on Japan’s coast every year. Sometimes the boats’ occupants have already died at sea, a phenomenon local media refer to as “ghost ships”. Japan and North Korea have a tense relationship, with Pyongyang routinely issuing verbal threats as well as firing missiles near or above Japan. DHAKA: The Bangladesh High Court today upheld the death sentence of 139 and the life imprisonment of 146 convicted soldiers over the massacre of 74 people, including 57 Army officers, in a 2009 mutiny, in the country’s biggest-ever criminal case.

The judgement comes after the court started delivering the verdict yesterday in the death sentence of the total 152 convicted soldiers of the then Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) for the brutal killing at the border guards’ headquarters here.

“One thirty nine will have to walk to gallows and 146 will be imprisoned for life,” Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told a media briefing, quoting the long verdict delivered by a three-judge High Court bench.

The judgement comes four years after a lower court in Dhaka handed down capital punishment to 152 and life term to 158 soldiers of the BDR. The bench on Sunday started reading out the entire judgement on the death sentence and appeal hearing of the trial of what is said to Bangladesh’s biggest ever criminal case.

A Dhaka court had awarded death penalty to 152 jawans and non-commissioned officers of the BDR, which was renamed as the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), in November 2013.

“It appears from discussions and reviews before and after the BDR mutiny that it was a conspiracy by a quarter with vested interest to hamper the stability of the state and socioeconomic safety,” said the bench in its observation part of the judgement.

The bench observed that it was “an attempt to destroy a trained and skilled professional force through conspiracy”.

The BDR jawans had been accused of masterminding the mutiny plots, torturing and killing their officers, looting their belongings or keeping their family members captive during the rebellion.

The mutiny was a challenge for the newly elected government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.