Xmas letdown: Woman is not activist’s lost granddaughter
Powerful quake jolts Afghanistan, Pakistan
BUENOS AIRES: In a Christmas gift gone awry, a woman thought to be the lost granddaughter of an activist who searches for babies stolen during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship turned out to be someone else. Two genetic tests showed that the 39 year-old woman in question is not the granddaughter of Maria “Chicha” Mariani, the government said Friday. Mariani, 92 and nearly blind, is one of the best known Argentine rights activists, and the Christmas Eve news that she had finally found her granddaughter was the feel-good story of the season. President Mauricio Macri even congratulated her on Twitter.
She is one of the founders of the Grandmothers of the Plaza del Mayo, a human rights group seeking to find children stolen or illegally adopted during Argentina’s so-called “Dirty War.” Babies born in captivity to political prisoners or orphaned by assassinations were given to families sympathetic to the regime or even taken in by their parents’ killers. Mariani’s granddaughter, Clara Anahi Mariani, was abducted as a three-month-old infant when regime agents killed her mother.
On Christmas Eve a statement from the Anahi Foundation, which Mariani created in KABUL: A 6.3-magnitude earthquake centred in the Hindu Kush jolted Afghanistan and Pakistan, damaging homes and leaving dozens of people injured just two months after a killer quake rattled the same mountainous region. The tremor late Friday hit at a depth of 203.5 km, the US Geological Survey said, sending people fleeing shaking buildings into a bitterly cold night and prompting fears of aftershocks.
The epicentre of the quake, which was felt as far away as New Delhi, was in the remote Afghan province of Badakhshan, close to the Pakistani and Tajik borders. A pregnant woman was killed when a boulder fell on her house in Peshawar and up to 50 others were left injured in the northwestern Pakistani city, officials said. Initial information suggested at least 45 houses were damaged in Badakhshan where communication with 1989 after stepping down as president of the Grandmothers group, said DNA testing had confirmed “with 99.9 percent” certainty that the woman identified as Clara Anahi was Mariani’s granddaughter. That DNA test was carried out privately by the woman, who has not been named. However two DNA tests-one in early 2015 and the other made public Friday show no relationship between the two women, said Pablo Parenti, head of the government office that searches for children kidnapped during the dictatorship.
The second test was carried out by the National Genetic Data Bank (BNDG), the institution that provides official results for such cases. “Both reports are conclusive in showing that there is no relationship between the genetic profile of this young woman and the Chicha Mariani family group, nor with the other families that are still looking for abducted children,” read the statement. Mariani urged “caution” in a separate statement, saying that the results of the second test needed to be confirmed. Mariani will hold a press conference on Saturday to explain what happened, her biographer Juan Martin Ramos Padilla said in a statement. — AFP remote, mountainous villages is typically slow, and 12 people were injured in the Afghan province of Nangarhar. USGS had initially reported the quake’s magnitude at 6.2.
In October, a 7.5-magnitude quake in the same region ripped across Pakistan and Afghanistan, killing nearly 400 people and flattening buildings in rugged terrain. For many in Pakistan, October’s quake brought back traumatic memories of a 7.6-magnitude quake that struck in October 2005, killing more than 75,000 people and displacing some 3.5 million. Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, especially in the Hindu Kush mountain range, which lies near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. In Nepal a quake in April and a strong aftershock in May killed more than 8,900 people. — AFP