16 more die of hunger in syria
KARACHI: Pakistan Rangers, Sindh claimed to have arrested Uzair Baloch, a notorious leader of the Lyari gang war and chief of proscribed Peoples Amn Committee (PAC), in a targeted operation on the outskirts of Karachi on Saturday.
Rangers arrested Baloch in a targeted operation outside Karachi late on Friday while he was attempting to enter the city, said a press release issued by the paramilitary force.
Baloch was arrested in Dubai by the Interpol in December 2014 while he was crossing into the United Arab Emirates from Oman by road, the Pakistani consulate in Dubai had confirmed at the time.
A four-member special police team which was in Dubai for a month to seek Baloch’s custody from UAE authorities had returned empty-handed in March 2015.
Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah while denying any association with Uzair Baloch in August last year had expressed ignorance about his status.
“He [Uzair Baloch] was caught in Dubai,” said Shah at the time. “Then our police team went there to gain his custody but it could not materialise for unknown reasons. Now I don’t know if he is still in custody in Dubai or has been released.”
It is not clear when and how Baloch arrived in Pakistan from UAE.
Once known for his loyalty to the Pakistan Peoples Party and close contacts with the party’s leaders and senior members in the Sindh cabinet, eg former home minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza, Uzair Baloch took over as leader of Peoples Amn Committee in Aug 2009 when the notorious Abdul Rahman Baloch alias Rahman Dakait was killed in an encounter more than a year after the PPP government came to power.
Though the committee is presented as community group by its leaders, it is blamed for its criminal activities which included killings, extortion and drugs business both by police and rival parties of the PPP. PAC was banned on October, 2011. Baloch’s relations with the PPP started souring after April 2012 when the police launched ‘Lyari operation’. The twoweek siege came to an end without any major arrest, but left a number of people, including policemen, dead.
A foster brother of PPP Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari, MNA Owais Muzaffar — better known as Tappi — wanted to contest elections from Lyari, which was refused by Uzair.
The ensuing rift within the PPP-PAC relations called for a hastily put together operation in April 2012, which insiders say was based on completely political reasons.
Almost 40 people drowned and 75 were rescued after a boat carrying migrants to Greece sank off Turkey’s western coast on Saturday, according to local officials and the Turkish Dogan news agency.
More than one million refugees and migrants arrived in the European Union last year and some 3,600 died or went missing, forcing the EU to mull suspending its Schengen open-borders area for up to two years.
The Turkish coast guard was continuing search and rescue efforts where the 17-metre boat carrying at least 120 people sank off the coast of Ayvacik, a town across from the Greek island of Lesvos, the Dogan news agency reported.
“I am afraid the numbers will rise as divers continue the search,” Mehmet Unal Sahin, the mayor of Ayvacik, told the CNNTurk news channel by phone.
“Local people woke up to the sound of screaming mi- grants and we have been carrying out rescue work since dawn. We have an 80-kilometre-long coast just across from Lesbos, which is very hard to keep under control.”
At least five of those who died were children, Dogan reported, while rescued migrants were hospitalized with hypothermia symptoms. It said the migrants were of Syrian, Afghan and Myanmar origin.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who opened Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war last summer, is under mounting pressure to halt the inflow.
Merkel told a meeting of a members of her Christian Democratic Union party on Saturday that despite efforts to help refugees, it was important to stress that they had only been given permission for a limited stay.
“We need ...to say to people that this is a temporary residential status and we expect that once there is peace in Syria again, once IS has been defeated in Iraq, which you go back to your home country.”
Around 500,000 refugees from the five-year-old war in Syria traveled through Turkey and then risked their lives at sea to reach Greek islands in 2015.
Under pressure from the DAMASCUS: At least 16 people died of starvation as a result of the siege of the rebel-held town of Madaya in Syria, a US-based humanitarian organisation said on Saturday. “Residents of the besieged Syrian town of Madaya continue to die of starvation despite the provision of aid by convoys,” said the Doctors Without Borders. European Commission about delays, Greece expects to have four of five “hot spot” centers for processing migrants operational in about two weeks, its migration minister said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday. “We are behind schedule on the installation of these hot spots,” Greece’s Yiannis Mouzalas told Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “Four of the five will be operational from mid-February.”