World news in brief
Australia: lawyers lodge charges against Suu Kyi
The Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi faces an attempt to privately prosecute her in Australia for crimes against humanity. Lawyers lodged an application at a court in Melbourne to charge the 72-year-old civil leader of Myanmar with forcing more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims out of their homes. The prosecution – which requires the consent of the Attorney General to go ahead – alleges Ms Suu Kui is criminally responsible for the military attacks on the Rohingya since 25 August last year.
Ms Suu Kyi is in Australia to attend a three-day summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) which has been marked by protests against the regimes of Myanmar and Cambodia. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said he will raise the issue of Rohingya persecution with Ms Suu Kyi, who has been widely criticised for failing to address allegations of ethnic cleansing.
The application for a private prosecution was filed in Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday by solicitor Daniel Taylor, who represents members of the Rohingya community in Australia.
Family killed during artillery battle in Kashmir
Five members of a family were killed and at least eight other people injured yesterday in cross-border shelling between Indian and Pakistani soldiers in disputed Kashmir, officials said.
The five were killed after a shell fired by Pakistani soldiers hit their home in the Poonch region of Indiacontrolled Kashmir along the militarised Line of Control that divides the Himalayan territory between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, said Shesh Paul Vaid, the region’s police chief.
A police statement said the dead included a 35-year-old man and his 32-year-old wife and three of their children – two young boys and a teenage boy. Two of the couple’s daughters, one aged seven and the other 12, were among the injured. India’s army said its soldiers were responding to what it called an unprovoked violation of the 2003 ceasefire agreement between the two countries.
Authorities in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir said at least six civilians, including five women, were wounded in the Indian firing and shelling along the frontier.
Bangladesh: militants from Isis-linked group to be executed
A court in Bangladesh sentenced seven Islamist militants to death yesterday after finding them guilty of killing a shrine worker in 2015, court officials said. Shrine caretaker, Rahamat Ali, 60, was hacked to death in November 2015 in the northern district of Rangpur. Six others accused of the attack were acquitted by the court.
The convicted men were members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh group, public prosecutor Rathish Chandra Bhowmik told reporters. Police believe the same group, which has pledged allegiance to Isis, was responsible for the most recent serious attack, when gunmen stormed a restaurant in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka in July 2016, killing 22 people, most of them foreigners.
Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country of 160 million people, is facing what appears to be a growing threat of Islamist militant violence and has seen a string of incidents in recent years. Reuters
Three dead in Philippines hotel fire
A fire at a hotel and casino complex in the Philippine capital yesterday killed at least three employees, trapped two others and forced the evacuation of more than 300 guests. Police said it remains unclear if the fire at the Manila Pavilion Hotel and Casino, which was still raging after seven hours, started in the casino in the lower floors or in an area of the hotel that was under renovation. Johnny Yu, who heads Manila’s disaster response agency, told reporters that at least six other people were overwhelmed by heavy smoke and brought to a hospital. Among the dead were two security guards and a treasury officer, he said. “The smoke is very heavy and, second, there’s the wind that we’re trying to overcome,” Mr Yu said. “Our firefighters are having a lot of difficulty.”