Iraqi militants claim victory

BAGHDAD — Black-clad Sunni militants of al-Qaida destroyed the Fallujah police headquarters and mayor’s office, planted their flag atop other government buildings and decreed the western Iraqi city to be their new independent state Friday in an escalating threat to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose forces were struggling to retake control late into the night.

The advances by the militants — members of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant — came after days of fighting in Fallujah, Ramadi and other areas of Iraq’s Anbar province. The region is a center of Sunni extremism that has grown more intense in reaction to Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and the neighboring civil war in Syria.

Assertions by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant fighters that they were in complete control of Fallujah were disputed by government security forces and an alliance of tribal leaders who have joined them.

Al-Qaida leader identified

BEIRUT — DNA tests confirmed that a man in government custody is the alleged leader of an alQaida-linked group that has conducted attacks across the Middle East before shifting its focus to Syria’s civil war, Lebanese authorities said Friday.

The suspected militant, Majid al-Majid, is the purported commander of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and one of the 85 mostwanted individuals in his native Saudi Arabia.

The brigades have claimed responsibility for attacks throughout the region. The most recent attack claimed by the group was the double suicide bombing in November outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.

Rescue ship threatened

BEIJING — One day after a Chinese icebreaker played a central role in the rescue of 52 passengers from an icebound research vessel in Antarctica, crew members on the Chinese ship said it might itself become trapped by ice, according to Australian officials Friday.

A helicopter from the Chinese vessel, the Snow Dragon, was part of a dramatic operation Thursday, plucking the passengers from a makeshift landing zone on the ice near the Russian research ship that had been lodged in ice for more than a week.

Police seize tons of meth

BEIJING — More than 3,000 police officers equipped with helicopters and motorboats and accompanied by dogs descended on a southern Chinese village notorious for making crystal meth, seizing 3 tons of the drug and 23 tons of raw materials and arresting 182 people.

The massive raid targeted Boshe village in Guangdong province, a difficult-to-reach hamlet of 14,000 people near the city of Lufeng.

Provincial anti-drug official Qiu Wei told the staterun Xinhua news agency that more than one-fifth of the village’s 2,000 households were connected to the drug trade and that the town had been providing a third of the crystal meth made in China over the last three years.

Putin visits Olympics site

MOSCOW — With terrorist strikes in the region clouding the run-up to the Winter Olympics, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Sochi on Friday to inspect the site of the Games and started his tour by taking several runs down a ski slope.

Mr. Putin arrived in Sochi after visiting Volgograd, an industrial center about 400 miles to the northeast, which was hit this week by two bombing attacks that left about 30 people dead and scores injured.

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