Hindu youth call shots on streets
Girls fight cyber crime
UNNAO, India, April 18, (Agencies): One recent afternoon, dozens of young Hindu men, swords drawn and saffron scarves draped around their necks, rode motorcycles through a Muslim neighbourhood near the capital of India’s most populous state and chanted “Hail Lord Ram!”
In the preceding weeks they and their peers had acted as informers, police officials say, helping them identify thousands of Muslim-run butchers’ shops that have since been shut and urging officers to stop Muslim youths talking to Hindu girls in the street.
Their organisation is the Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Force), a private militia set up in 2002 by Yogi Adityanath, a local priest and politician, to assert the dominance of India’s main religion which he felt was being eroded by minority faiths.
Since Adityanath’s promotion last month to chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, home to 220 million people of which a fifth are Muslims, the group has become emboldened, openly proclaiming its Hindu roots and putting pressure on police.
The appointment of the 44-year-old, known for his fiery anti-Muslim rhetoric and a campaign against “Love Jihad” — or the conversion of Hindu women to Islam — has shocked some Indians, who say it undermines the country’s secular status.
They worry that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “development for all” agenda will be overtaken by radical, Hindu-first policies with the potential to stoke communal tensions that have erupted sporadically through India’s 70-year history. Adityanath declined to be interviewed for this article. “Blood can be shed,” Pankaj Singh, a senior leader of the Hindu Youth Force, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the rally in Unnao, an hour’s drive southwest of the capital Lucknow.
Adityanath
Girls train to fight cyber crime:
Bangladesh on Tuesday began training thousands of teenage girls to fight cyber crime, citing an “alarming” rise in social media-related abuses mostly targeting adolescents.
Police said online harassment had grown alarmingly with the rise in smart phone use in Bangladesh, and teenage girls were the main targets.
More than 10,000 school-age girls will take part in government workshops around the country in April and May to teach them what to look out for and how to respond.
“Every day, we have 10-12 complaints of cyber crimes. Some 90 percent of these victims are pre-teen and teenage girls,” Nazmul Islam, a deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, told AFP.
Police said girls were being tricked into posing for intimate photographs and video footage that were later posted on social media or used for trolling.
On some occasions, hidden cameras were used to secretly film young people having sex, with the footage later posted online.
“Sometimes these photos and videos are being used by boyfriends to emotionally blackmail the girls or their families,” said Islam.
Bangladesh in 2013 set up a special trial court to deal with social media-related crimes and since then more than 450 cases have been heard.
Pakistan questions senior militant:
Pakistani authorities are questioning a senior militant who they say voluntarily surrendered, presenting it as a major setback for an Islamic extremist group that has carried out several attacks in recent years.
Military officials confirmed Tuesday that Ahsanullah Ahsan, a former spokesman and senior figure in the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar group, had surrendered recently, without providing further details.
They say he split with the main Pakistani Taliban four years ago and joined the breakaway faction, which claimed a March 31 car bomb near a Shiite mosque that killed at least 24 people.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, said information gleaned from Ahsan led to other arrests and the location of a weapons cache.
Arrests highlight struggle with extremism:
Pakistani authorities said Monday they have arrested 22 people involved in the lynching of a university student who was accused of blasphemy and detained a teenage woman who had been recruited by the Islamic State group for a foiled attack on a church.
Word of the arrests came as US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser arrived for talks on combatting militants in South Asia, highlighting Pakistan’s struggle with Islamic extremism.
The 16 students and six university employees are believed to have incited or taken part in the mob that killed 23-year-old Mohammad Mashal Khan, provincial police chief Salahuddin Mehsud said. The student was beaten and shot to death at a university in the northwestern city of Mardan on Thursday.
Mehsud said no evidence has been found to indicate Khan committed blasphemy against Islam, which is punishable by death in Pakistan. The mere suspicion of blasphemy is enough to incite deadly riots in the deeply conservative country.
Pakistan had recently vowed to combat the sharing of blasphemous material on social media, and has tried to enlist Facebook and Twitter in the campaign.
Garbage landslide toll 30:
Hundreds of tonnes of rotting garbage piled up in Sri Lanka’s capital Tuesday after the main rubbish dump was shut following an accident that killed at least 30 people.
Authorities sealed the massive 300-foot (90-metre) rubbish mountain on the northeastern edge of Colombo after it collapsed Friday, destroying 145 homes nearby and burying victims in a garbage landslide.
Military spokesman Roshan Seneviratne said hundreds of troops were still searching for six people missing since the accident, but authorities were not hopeful of finding any survivors four days on.
The Colombo Municipal Council was scrambling for new locations to dump the roughly 800 tonnes of garbage produced every day in the capital, as crows and stray dogs picked through bags of reeking garbage left on city streets.
The council sought permission Tuesday from a local magistrate to access another tip outside the city limits, promising it would clear the four-day backlog of trash within 24 hours.