Havana hotel blast: Death toll rises to 26
Agencies
HAVANA: The death toll after an explosion ripped through a luxury hotel in central Havana climbed to 26 people including a Spanish tourist, state television reported on Saturday, one day after the powerful blast due to a suspected gas leak.
Rescuers were still combing through what remained of the prestigious Saratoga Hotel looking for survivors. On Friday, officials had said up to 50 people were wounded in the blast.
“Tragic news has reached us from Cuba. A Spanish tourist has died and another Spanish citizen is seriously injured after the explosion at the Saratoga Hotel,”
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said on Twitter.
“All our love to their families and those of all the victims and injured. Our support also to the Cuban people,” he added.
The search is now focusing on the interior of the hotel and the basement, the television station said. “It is very regrettable what happened, the destruction, especially the loss of life, and also the people injured, but once again I want to highlight the speed with which the population and institutions mobilised,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-canel tweeted.
“Solidarity has prevailed. #Fuerzacuba,” he added, alluding to the many Cubans who rushed on Friday to donate blood to help the wounded.
ROME: Archaeologists in Sardinia have unearthed the torsos of two more limestone statues of boxers within the Iron Age necropolis of Mont’e Prama, Italy’s culture ministry said on Saturday. Culture minister Dario Franceschini called the find at the archaeological site in Cabras, western central Sardinia, an “exceptional discovery” that should shed more light on the ancient Mediterranean culture whose tombs and statuary have been slowly uncovered since the 1970s.
The naked torsos and other fragments have been identified as boxers, due to a shield that wraps around their bodies, and are similar to another two sculptures unearthed a few metres away in 2014 and now on display at the museum in Cabras, the ministry said.
Archaeologists working on the southern part of the sprawling necropolis - first discovered in 1974 by local farmers - also found the continuation of the site’s funerary road on a northsouth axis, along which have been found tombs dating back to between about 950 BC to 730 BC. While small and mediumsized fragments are being documented and recovered from the earth, “the two large and heavy blocks of torsos will need time to be freed from the sediment surrounding them and to be prepared for safe recovery”, said the culture ministry’s superintendent for southern Sardinia, Monica Stochino.
The site is believed to be part of the Nuragic civilisation that controlled the island of Sardinia for centuries beginning in the Bronze Age.
“Just because you have a powerful government job, you do not get a right over our bodies,” she added.
For now, the SHO, four gang rape suspects, and the survivor’s aunt — accused of abetting the child’s abduction — have been arrested. While there are five men accused of rape, the mother is particularly angry with the SHO. “The police are known to recover bodies from under water. Here, no one even cared to trace my living daughter for over a week.”
She said that her complaints about a similar case involving her daughter in November 2021 went unheeded. This attitude, she said, created the latest situation where the girl was kidnapped and repeatedly raped.
In the previous case being referred to by the mother, she told the court that her daughter was allegedly gang raped by two men when she was visiting the fields to relieve herself on November 7. The mother alleged that her child was gang raped at knife point by Chandan Aharwar and Mahendra Chaurasia – local villagers who
LALITPUR VICTIM
are also accused in the latest case.
“They approached the local police, but the SHO refused to register an FIR and didn’t get the child medically examined,” the family’s lawyer, Hardayal Singh Lodhi, summed up the complaint.
On November 24, the mother approached the court to file an FIR. Her complaint named not only the rape suspects, but accused the SHO of being hand-inglove with the alleged assaulters.
The court sought the police’s response on the allegations. In his response to the court, a copy of which is with HT, a sub-inspector said no evidence was found in support of the allegations and accused the child’s mother of being a “habitual” complainant. “Based on this response, the court rejected our appeal for an FIR. But, as per procedure, it asked for the girl’s statement to be recorded in court on April 25,” said Lodhi.
Amid all this, both parties filed additional complaints against each other.
“The child’s mother had falsely implicated my older son (Jagannath) too of rape, nine years ago.
Jagannath spent two months in jail and was freed of the charges only after we gave in to the woman’s blackmail and paid her ₹50,000,” said Dayalu Aharwar, father of Raj Bhan, who is now in jail in the latest gang rape case. The police could not immediately confirm his claim.
A case was also filed by the survivor against her parents, accusing them of compelling her to file “fake cases” against others. “My child was misled by the SHO to file that FIR,” said the girl’s stepfather.
The woman denied allegations of any such blackmail.
Nikhil Pathak, Lalitpur superintendent of police, said a committee has been formed to look into all the complaints filed by the victim’s family. The committee is also probing why an FIR in the November gang rape case wasn’t filed.
Ahead of recording her statement in court on April 25, the girl was abducted on April 22.
Two senior police officers privy to the probe said on condition of anonymity that call detail records revealed the SHO was in contact with the alleged abductors during the period of her disappearance.