Hope fades for survivors in Indonesia quake
HOPES of finding survivors faded in quake-devastated Lombok island in Indonesia on Wednesday as a humanitarian crisis for 156 000 left homeless looms with a shortage of clean water, food, and medicine.
Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency put the death toll from Sunday’s magnitude 6.9 earthquake at 131, including two on the western neighbouring island of Bali. The agency said the figure was expected to rise. Nearly 2 500 people have been hospitalised with serious injuries. Rescue workers were finding some hamlets hard to reach because bridges and roads were torn up by the major earthquake.
“Teams are speaking of coming across ghost towns, villages that have essentially been abandoned,” said Matthew Cochrane of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He added 80 percent of buildings had been damaged or destroyed.
Rescuers dug through the rubble of a mosque yesterday where an unknown number of people were suspected buried. A woman’s body was recovered, said rescue worker Bagusa Ngurah. “We stood still when we first felt the earthquake, but the sway grew stronger so we tried to run before the mosque collapsed,” Muhammad, a worshipper who managed to escape, told the Metro TV.“Some of us had to smash glass windows to get out,” he said.
Thousands of tourists have left Lombok fearing further earthquakes. Lombok had already been hit by a magnitude 6.4 earthquake on July 29 that killed 17 people. Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by major temblors. In 2004, a quake-driven tsunami off of Aceh province killed 226 000 people in 13 countries across the Indian Ocean, including more than 120 000 in Indonesia. — Al Jazeera PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday threatened to kill corrupt police, including those accused of involvement in illegal drugs and other crimes, in an expletives-laden encounter on live TV.
More than 100 policemen, many of them facing administrative and criminal complaints including rape, kidnapping and robbery, were escorted to the presidential palace to meet Duterte, police officials said.
e national police, which Duterte once called “corrupt to the core,” have been undergoing an internal cleansing since they were removed twice from the president’s crackdown on illegal drugs last year due to reports of abuses. Duterte later allowed them to rejoin drug raids, partly because the small lead anti-narcotics agency lacks personnel and firepower to quell the drug menace.
“If you’ll stay like this, son of a bitch, I will really kill you,” Duterte told the policemen in the dressingdown broadcast by local TV networks.
The cases of some of the policemen will be reviewed, but Duterte warned, “I have a special unit which will watch you for life and if you commit even a small mistake, I’ll ask that you be killed.”
Addressing the policemen’s families, Duterte said, “If these sons of bitches die, don’t come to us yelling ‘human rights, due process’ because I warned you already.”
Such public threats, along with the more than 4500 mostly poor drug suspects who have been killed in gunbattles with police under Duterte’s antidrug crackdown, have triggered alarm by Western governments and human rights watchdogs since he rose to power in mid-2016. — AFP