Ops kill 77 in Afghanistan

More bloggers charged in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, March 25, (Agencies): At least 77 rebels, including 22 fighters of so-called Islamic State (IS), have been killed and 16 others wounded in operations by security forces in different parts of Afghanistan in past 24 hours, said Afghan Ministry of Defense (MoD) on Friday.

According to a statement by MoD, the operations had been conducted in Kapisa, Logar, Khost, Paktia, Kandahar, Faryab, Farah, Herat, Kunduz and Helmand provinces of Afghanistan.

It further said that 23 rebels, including seven foreigners, were killed and three others wounded in the Pashtonkot district of Faryab, adding that 15 motorcycles, machine guns and anti-aircraft guns were seized.

At least 22 more rebels were killed in Nesh district of Kandahar, as many IS rebels were killed in Nangarhar’s Nazyan district and three were killed in Kunduz. Four more insurgents were killed in Laghman, the statement added.

A man carrying a bomb blew himself up in front of a police checkpoint near Bangladesh’s international airport on Friday, in a blast claimed by Islamic State.

The militant group said it killed many officers and wounded others, an account not confirmed by authorities.

The blast was the third incident involving explosives in the capital in a week.

Police shot and killed a suspected militant who tried to cross a security checkpoint on a motorcycle armed with explosives in Dhaka’s Khilgaon

Efrain Antonio Campo Flores had argued in a motion challenging their conviction that they were entrapped in a sting operation and that their trial was tainted by a witness who

Maduro

Flores

area on Saturday.

A day before that, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security forces base, again near Dhaka’s airport, injuring two police officers.

Police in eastern India have arrested eight men involved in smuggling human bones and recovered 18 skeletons from them, police said Friday.

The men were arrested last week after police received a tip about a smuggling ring involved in removing bones from decomposing bodies taken from graveyards in Burdwan district of West Bengal state.

Police also found chemicals the smugglers would use to clean the bones, after which they would wire the bones together to make whole skeletons.

Three more bloggers were accused of blasphemy Friday in an Islamabad anti-terrorism court, while elsewhere in the city hundreds of security forces prevented a radical cleric from holding a protest to condemn another five bloggers, who were earlier charged with insulting Islam — an offense punishable by death in this Islamic country.

Police and government officials said the newest charges were laid against two bloggers from Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi and one from the federal capital.

They were arrested earlier this week. One of the three used the alias, Allama Ayaz Nizami, and had over 12,000 followers on line, said a police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give details of the cases against the three men.

perjured himself.

But US District Judge Paul Crotty in Manhattan rejected those arguments.

“The Court is not in any better a position than the jury was to find the facts of this case, nor do the interests of justice require that the verdict be set aside,” he wrote.

Attorneys for Flores de Freitas and Campo Flores did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Flores de Freitas, 31, and Campo Flores, 30, were convicted by a Manhattan jury in November of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. The two men are nephews of Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Days later, Maduro blasted the conviction in a speech as an instance of “US imperialism.” (RTRS)