KARACHI: A student died and seven others were injured when unknown persons riding on four motorcycles opened fire on them at a roadside hotel opposite the Federal Urdu University in Gulshan-i-Iqbal.

Police said that at the time of the incident several members of th e Pukhtoon Students Federation were sitting at the hotel when the unidentified culprits sprayed them with bullets. Continue Reading

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PLUMERVILLE (Arkansas) – A WOMAN whose car plunged off a dead-end road into a lake in rainy, dark weather reportedly told the sheriff she tried to rescue her three young sons from the vehicle but lost her grip on them in the water.

The sheriff, who said the boys drowned, said on Monday that investigators were checking her story. Continue Reading

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PESHAWAR: Three people were killed Sunday in a suspected US missile attack targeting a militant hideout in Pakistan’s tribal area bordering Afghanistan, officials said.

‘It was a drone attack,’ local administration official Shahab Ali Shah told AFP. He said two missiles hit a house in Gangi Khel town in the tribal South Waziristan district. Continue Reading

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NEW DELHI – AN 11-YEAR-OLD Indian schoolgirl died after a teacher allegedly made her stand in the baking sun as punishment for not doing her homework, reports said on Friday.

Shanno Khan started bleeding from the nose and fainted after hours in the searing New Delhi heat on Wednesday, and slipped into a coma after being taken to hospital. She died on Friday, the NDTV news channel reported. Continue Reading

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BERLIN – A GUNMAN killed two people, probably including himself, and critically wounded two others in a court house in the southern German town of Landshut on Tuesday, police and politicians said.

Police spokesman Leonard Mayer told N-TV television he believed the gunman had gone from room to room in the building but the shooting spree was over and authorities believed the gunman was among the dead.

‘According to my information there are two people dead,’ Mr Mayer said. ‘The situation is now all under control and the shooter is not on the loose. He probably killed himself but that is not yet confirmed.’ Continue Reading

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TOKYO – MORE than 32,000 people killed themselves in Japan last year, police reported on Thursday, as experts warned that suicides may go up amid the country’s worst recession since World War II.

Last year’s total of 32,249 suicides was 2.6 per cent lower than in 2007 amid increased counselling services and other government efforts to deter people from taking their own lives.

But suicides rose in the first two months of this year as the global economic slump has hit the Asian powerhouse, squeezing household budgets and leading companies to cut tens of thousands of jobs.

‘We don’t consider the suicide situation to be easing when looking at the data,’ said Yasuyuki Shimizu of Tokyo based non-profit group Life Link, after the rate topped 30,000 for an 11th straight year.

‘We think the number still remains at a high level despite the measures that have been taken.’ Japan’s unemployment rate hit a three-year high of 4.4 per cent in February, the government said on Tuesday, with 2.99 million people without jobs, up 330,000 from a year ago.

‘The government has taken employment support and other measures, but they have not yet proved effective to help people get out of depression,’ Mr Shimizu told AFP.

The police agency said in a statement that it released its survey about two months early this year ‘because of the increasing public concern about suicides amid the recent downturn’ of the economy.

Japan has one of the world’s highest suicide rates, behind only a group of former Soviet bloc countries, says the World Health Organisation. — AFP

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MANSEHRA: Three female workers and a driver of a USAID-funded Project Rise International were killed by unidentified gunmen here at Kund Bangla area on Monday.

Local people suspect the involvement of militants in the occurrence which took place in the jurisdiction of Shinkiari police station. The incident took place at around 4.30 p.m near a deserted spot.

The deceased include a social mobilizer of the Rise International, Sadif Yar Mohammad of Shabkadar (Charsadda); an assistant education officer, Aujum Zab of Mansehra, who was attached with the NGO; another unidentified female worker and their driver Saifullah Khan, hailing from Pabbi (Nowshera).

They were on their way back to Mansehra from a mountainous Kund Bangla area of the District when some unknown assailants killed all of them by spraying their bodies with the bullets.

‘The team had gone there to mobilize the local community to send their children to schools,’ said Shahzad Ahmad, the project coordinator of Rise International which works in the field of education jointly with the education department in 18 union councils of Mansehra Tehsil.

He said that the NGO had not received threats from any quarter. He added that they had set up the Parent Teacher Associations at the village level and their female staff works for the female students of the community.

At the scene of occurrence the body of the driver was found at some distance from the vehicle in which the bodies of three female workers were laying in pool of blood.

‘The scene was gruesome. The bodies were in bad shape as the assailants had sprayed them with bullets,’ said an eye witness who had seen the bodies.

After getting information about the incident the Police reached there and shifted the bodies to Rural Health Centre, Shinkiari from where they were shifted to King Abdullah Teaching Hospital in Mansehra for autopsy. So far no one has claimed the responsibility for the occurrence.

The Mansehra district police officer Akhtar Hayyat Khan said that he was not in a position to say any thing about the incident. He added that after the post mortem and preliminary investigation he would be in a position to give some information about the occurrence.

On Feb 25, 2008, unidentified gunmen had attacked the office of another NGO, Plan International, and killed four of its staffers. Few days ago the police had defused an improvised explosive device aimed at targeting some CD centers here.

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A father killed his five children before shooting himself after learning that his wife was leaving him for another man, police in Washington state said yesterday.

The children, aged 7 to 16, were found shot dead on Saturday in the family’s mobile home in Graham, 15 miles southeast of the city of Tacoma. The father, identified locally as James Harrison, 34, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot, in Auburn, about 30 miles south of Seattle.

Mr Harrison and his daughter, 16, had found his wife with another man at a convenience store in Auburn on Friday night, Pierce County Sheriff spokesman Ed Troyer told The News Tribune of Tacoma. Mr Troyer said the woman told her husband that she was leaving him for the man with her at the store. “He was devastated,” Mr Troyer said.

Investigators believe Mr Harrison later killed his children and returned to the area near the store looking for his wife. His body was found near the store, Mr Troyer said. He left no suicide note.

In a separate mass shooting on Saturday in Pittsburgh, a man donned a bulletproof vest and killed three police officers after he had been driven into a murderous rage by an argument with his mother over a dog.

According to court papers, Richard Poplawski — who had recently been dishonourably discharged from the US Marines — had been arguing with his mother about the dog urinating inside their home early on Saturday morning when she threatened to evict him. When the argument escalated, she called the police. By the time a patrol car turned up at after 7am, Mr Poplawski, 23, had armed himself with an assault rifle, a long-arm rifle, a pistol and several rounds of ammunition.

When Mr Poplawski’s mother opened the door to police, the first two officers were killed instantly by shots to the head. Mrs Poplawski survived by fleeing to the basement for cover. A third officer was killed during a subsequent four-hour standoff.

Mr Poplawski gave himself up after he was shot in the legs. It is not yet known what happened to his grandmother, who lives at the same address.

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THE gunman who shot 13 people dead at an immigration centre in upstate New York was a loner who loved guns but believed that “America sucks” and fantasised about assassinating the president.

He took out his rage on those who were still striving for the American dream, oblivious to his own disappointment, before killing himself.

Jiverly Voong, 41, had lost his job at the Shop Vac assembly plant in Binghamton, a largely white working-class town 175 miles north of New York, when the plant shut last November.

He often mentioned that his wife and children had left him, a neighbour recalled.

“He once said to me, ‘I did everything good for everybody, but nobody ever did anything good for me’,” said Mahmoon Shafi, 53.

Binghamton had missed out on the boom years and had nothing left to give when recession struck.

Yet it still held out the hope of a better life to immigrants who came to the one-storey American Civic Association, surrounded by boarded-up shops, to learn English and study for their citizenship tests.

On Friday morning Voong drove to the association in his father’s car, barricaded it against the back door so nobody could flee, and began to shoot people at 10.31am.

Armed with a 9mm pistol and a .45 calibre hand-gun, with ammunition in a satchel slung around his neck, he burst through the front of the building and shot dead the receptionist.

Her colleague, Shirley DeLucca, pretended to be dead but managed to crawl underneath the desk and dial 911 as Voong entered the first room and opened fire on a classroom of immigrants taking their citizenship test. As the wounded and dying fell to the ground, survivors in other classes hid in the boiler room and cowered in cupboards.

It took just two minutes for Voong to carry out the worst US gun massacre since Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.

The police arrived almost immediately but three hours passed before they secured the building and found Voong’s body with a hunting knife stuffed in the waistband of his trousers.

There were about 50 people at the civic centre that day from almost every continent: Russians, Kurds, Chinese, Arabs, Laotians and others. “The people were trying to better themselves, trying to become citizens,” said Joseph Zikuski, the police chief.

Voong had become depressed and disillusioned with America. Kevin Greene, a former coworker at the vacuum plant, recalled asking him if he liked the New York Yankees baseball team. “No,” Voong replied. “I don’t like that team. I don’t like America. America sucks.” Another former employee said that Voong “kept to himself but made some off-the-wall comments like he wanted to kill the president”.

Voong’s family was originally from Vietnam. His sister, who did not give her name, said he was an American citizen who had lived in the country for 28 years. She said her brother could not have been the killer. “How? He didn’t have a gun,” she said. “I think he got shot by somebody else.”

Greene recalled that Voong had been obsessed with guns: “He went to target practice on Saturday. He said he had two guns, one in his glove compartment. He was always talking about his guns.” The two Beretta pistols used for the killings were licensed by the New York state.

Voong used to go to the civic association for English classes but had been skipping them recently, according to Priscilla Pease, 64, who survived the attack. One of the victims, Roberta King, 72, was a substitute teacher who had come in that day to teach his class. “She was a wonderful person . . . a mother of 10 children who just loved teaching international students,” Pease said.

Voong’s father was a model citizen who worked at IBM and had served in the south Vietnamese army. He helped members of the community with forms and translation, said Thanh Huynh, 45, a high school teacher. He said Voong’s father had volunteered at the American Civic Association in the past.

Christopher Voss, an FBI profiler, said Voong would have targeted the civic association because he knew it. “We have something we call the double-whammy,” he said. “It might be a job loss coupled with some other personal loss. My guess is that additional losses will be uncovered.”

The names of the victims were not immediately released. Omri Yigal, 53, said his wife Doris, also 53, was among the missing. She was from the Philippines and had been taking English classes in the hope of finding a job.

- A man shot at police responding to a domestic disturbance call in Pittsburg yesterday, killing three officers before barricading himself in the home. He was arrested.

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