Tag Archives: Bombs

U.S. Russia work on Syria truce as Islamic State blasts kill dozens

Syrian army soldiers and civilians inspect the site of two explosions that hit the Arzouna bridge area at the entrance to Tartous

By Lisa Barrington and Roberta Rampton

BEIRUT/HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) – The United States and Russia will work in the next few days on a deal to curb fighting in Syria and build cooperation in the fight against terrorism, their leaders said on Monday, as blasts claimed by Islamic State killed dozens across the Arab nation.

The former Cold War enemies have been trying to broker a new truce after a ceasefire agreed in February unravelled in weeks, with Washington accusing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces – which are backed by Russia – of violating the pact.

U.S. President Barack Obama described talks with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as tough but productive after their meeting at the G20 summit in China. Putin said the two men had understood each other and an agreement on ways to significantly reduce the violence in Syria could be reached in days.

“We have had some productive conversations about what a real cessation of hostilities would look like, that would allow us both, the United States and Russia, to focus our attention on common enemies, like ISIL and Nusra,” Obama said, referring to Islamic State and the hardline Nusra Front.

“We haven’t yet closed the gaps in a way where we think it would actually work,” he said, but added that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov would “keep working at it over the next several days”.

Putin told journalists there was a convergence of views between Russia and the United States. He said it was premature to give details about the terms of an agreement, but that the two nations would strengthen cooperation on fighting terrorism.

Truce talks were complicated on Sunday as government forces and their allies laid siege to the rebel-held eastern side of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war which Assad is determined to fully recapture. His gains have relied heavily on Russian air support since September last year.

Adding to the carnage, six blasts on Monday hit west of Damascus and the government-held cities of Homs and Tartous, as well as the Kurdish-controlled northeastern province of Hasaka, state media and a monitoring group said.

Islamic State fighters carried the out suicide attacks, its Amaq news agency said on Monday.

CONFLICTING AGENDAS

More than five years of civil war have cut Syria into a patchwork of territories held by the government and an often competing array of armed factions, including Kurdish militia fighters, a loose coalition of rebels groups, and Islamic State.

Obama and Putin discussed getting humanitarian aid into the country, reducing violence, and cooperating on combating militant groups, the U.S. administration official said.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he was working with the U.S.-led coalition and Russia to try to establish a ceasefire in Aleppo before the Eid al-Adha religious holiday expected to start around Sept. 11.

But in talks earlier on Monday, Kerry and Lavrov were unable to come to terms on a truce for the second time in two weeks, with U.S. officials stressing they would walk away if a pact could not be reached soon.

Russia says it cannot agree to a deal unless opposition fighters, backed by the United States and Middle East allies, are separated from al Qaeda-linked militants they overlap with in some areas. For Washington, the priority is stabilising Syria so as to destroy Islamic State.

NATO Turkey ally on Sunday said rebels it was backing had gained control of all areas on its border that had been held by the jihadists, depriving the ultra-hardline Islamist group of its main route to the outside world.

The announcement came some 10 days after Turkey launched its first major military incursion into Syria since the start of the war in 2011, an operation aimed as much at preventing further Kurdish territorial gains as at driving back Islamic State.

“Syrian citizens in our country and those would want to migrate from Syria can now live more peacefully in their own land,” Erdogan said, adding the Turkish incursion posed no threat to Syria’s territorial integrity.

He renewed calls for an internationally-policed “no-fly zone” to protect displaced civilians and help stem refugee flows. But the idea, which he also raised at a G20 summit in Turkey a year ago, has failed to gain traction with Western allies who fear it would mean a deeper military commitment.

DOZENS KILLED

Two of the explosions on Monday hit the Arzouna bridge area at the entrance to the Mediterranean city of Tartous, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and state news agency SANA said. The Observatory and a city hospital put the death toll at 35.

Syrian state television said the first explosion was a car bomb and the second a suicide belt detonated as rescue workers arrived. The blasts hit during a summer festival at Tartous, whose beaches recently featured in a government tourism video.

A car bomb meanwhile struck the city of Homs, around 80 km (50 miles) east of Tartous. The Observatory said the explosion hit an army checkpoint and four officers were killed.

West of Damascus, there was an explosion near the town of al Saboura, killing one person and injuring three, according to a police commander quoted by state media.

A motorbike also exploded in the centre of the northeastern city of Hasaka, which is controlled by the Kurdish YPG militia. The Observatory said the blast killed three members of a YPG-affiliated security force and that a percussion bomb also went off in the province’s Qamishli city.

The Kurdish YPG militia, a critical part of the U.S.-backed campaign against Islamic State, took almost complete control of Hasaka city in late August after a week of fighting with the government.

The YPG controls swathes of northern Syria where Kurdish groups have established de facto autonomy since the start of the Syrian war, much to the alarm of neighbouring Turkey, which fears the creation of a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria would fuel Kurdish separatist ambitions at home.

Ankara has demanded that Kurdish militia fighters remain east of the Euphrates river, something Washington has promised they will do. Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, visited Syria last week and emphasised “the need for strict adherence to prior commitments, a State Department spokeswoman said.

(Additional reporting by Kinda Makieh in Damascus and Ahmed Tolba in Cairo, Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed in Washington, Vladimir Soldatkin in Hangzhou, Humeyra Pamuk and Edmund Blair in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Giles Elgood and Anna Willard)

Series of blasts hit resort towns in southern Thailand

Line of police looking for bombs

By Prapan Chankaew

HUA HIN, Thailand (Reuters) – A series of blasts hit three of the most popular tourist resorts as well as towns in southern Thailand on Thursday and Friday, killing four people and wounding dozens, days after the country voted to accept a military-backed charter in a referendum.

Four bombs exploded in the upscale resort of Hua Hin, about 200 km (125 miles) south of Bangkok on Thursday evening and Friday morning, killing two people and wounding at least 24.

Other blasts hit the tourist island of Phuket, a resort town in Phang Nga province, and Surat Thani, a city that is the gateway to islands such as Koh Samui in Thailand’s Gulf.

Hua Hin is home to the Klai Kangwon royal palace, which translates as “Far from Worries Palace”, where King Bhumibol Adulayadej, the world’s longest reigning monarch, and his wife, Queen Sirikit, have often stayed in recent years, until both were hospitalized.

Friday was a public holiday in Thailand to mark the queen’s birthday, which is celebrated as Mother’s Day.

No group has claimed responsibility, though suspicion could fall on groups fighting an insurgency in Muslim-majority provinces in southern Thailand.

SEVEN ATTACKS

Police had intelligence an attack was imminent, but had no precise information on location or timing, national police chief Chakthip Chaijinda told reporters in Bangkok on Friday.

“We just didn’t know which day something would happen,” he said.

Since Sunday’s referendum on the constitution, there have been attacks in seven provinces using improvised explosive devices and firebombs, Chakthip said.

The devices were similar to those used by separatist insurgents in southern Thailand, but that did not conclusively show they were the perpetrators, he said.

Police ruled out any links to international terrorism, as did Thailand’s Foreign Ministry, which said in a statement on Friday: “The incident is not linked to terrorism but is an act of stirring up public disturbance.”

Thai authorities beefed up security at tourism spots, airports and on public transport in Bangkok, while Thai junta chief and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha expressed frustration about the motives for the attacks.

“Why now when the country is getting better, the economy is getting better, and tourism is getting better? We have to ask why and who did it,” he told reporters.

TRAVEL ADVISORY

The attacks are bad news for Thailand’s tourist sector, which has been one of the few bright spots in a sluggish economy.

Tourism accounts for about 10 percent of gross domestic product and Thailand was expecting a record 32 million visitors this year.

Australia issued a travel advisory saying Australians should “exercise a high degree of caution” and warned: “Further explosions in any part of Thailand are possible.”

Two blasts on Friday morning in Hua Hin came after twin explosions on Thursday. One of those was near a bar in a narrow alley in the town late on Thursday, killing one Thai woman and wounding 21 people, Krisana said.

Ten of those injured in the Hua Hin blasts were foreigners, Krisana said, and eight of them were women.

The two explosions in Hua Hin late on Thursday were detonated by a mobile device, police said. The first took place 20 minutes earlier and about 50 meters from the second, but injured nobody.

Such twin blasts are common in the three Muslim-majority southernmost provinces of Thailand, where a long-running insurgency intensified in 2004, with more than 6,500 people killed since then.

The three provinces near the border with Muslim-majority Malaysia soundly rejected the referendum on the new military-backed constitution, which passed convincingly in most of the rest of the country in Sunday’s vote.

Violence has occasionally spilled over to areas outside the three provinces, which were part of a Malay sultanate until it was annexed by Buddhist-majority Thailand a century ago.

Hua Hin, Phuket and Phang Nga are far from the usual conflict zone, where attacks are typically aimed at the security forces and government representatives, not tourists.

In a separate incident on Friday, media reported two bombs had exploded in the southern province of Surat Thani, killing one person and wounding five. That came after a blast in Trang, also in the south, on Thursday, in which one person died and six were wounded.

No one was killed or seriously wounded on Friday in two blasts in the beach town of Patong on Phuket island or the two explosions in the beach province of Phang Nga. Authorities also defused two explosive devices in Phuket on Wednesday, police said.

The head of Interpol in Thailand, Police Major General Apichat Suriboonya, told Reuters it appears the bombs were meant more to send a message rather than cause death and destruction. “But the thing is, if you observe the bombs, they are not targeted to kill people but to send a message to some groups. It could be a domestic issue.”

Small bombs have been used frequently for attacks during periods of unrest over the past decade of political turmoil but have been rare since the military seized power in a 2014 coup in Thailand.

The latest bombings came almost a year after an attack on a Hindu shrine, crowded with tourists in central Bangkok, killed 20 people and wounded more than 120. Police have accused two ethnic Uighur Muslims from China for the Aug. 17, 2015, attack.

(Additional reporting by Orathai Sriring, Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Panarat Thepgumpanat, Surapan Boonthanom and Kitiphong Thaichareon; Writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Paul Tait and Bill Tarrant.)

North Korea may be ‘significantly’ upping nuclear bomb output

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gives field guidance to the newly built Ryugyong Kimchi Factory

By David Brunnstrom and Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – North Korea may be significantly expanding its nuclear weapons production and could have added six or more weapons to its stockpile in the last 18 months, a U.S. research institute said on Tuesday.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) estimated last year that North Korea had 10 to 16 nuclear weapons at the end of 2014. It based that conclusion on an analysis of the country’s production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium recovered from spent nuclear fuel.

In revised estimates contained in a report provided to Reuters, the institute’s David Albright and Serena Kelleher-Vergantini said North Korea may have added another four to six weapons since then, for a total of 13 to 21 or even more today.

The report said the 13 to 21 estimate did not take into account the possible production of additional highly enriched uranium at a second centrifuge plant thought to exist in North Korea.

“Nonetheless, this exercise, despite not being comprehensive, shows that North Korea could be significantly increasing its nuclear weapons capabilities,” the report said, adding that most of the increase could be attributed to the production of weapons-grade uranium.

The report came a week after a senior U.S. State Department official told Reuters that North Korea had restarted production of plutonium fuel, indicating that it planned to pursue its nuclear weapons program in defiance of international sanctions that followed its fourth nuclear test in January.

Plutonium also can be used to make nuclear weapons.

The institute’s report said the group independently confirmed activity inside the radiochemical laboratory at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear site.

It said commercial satellite imagery from June 8 did not show direct signs, but noted “indirect signatures associated with plutonium-separation” there.

These included the removal of tanks previously spotted in front of the laboratory’s reception building and signs that a coal-fired steam generation plant may have been active on June 8.

The report also noted signs of external activity at a site the institute identified as a possible isotope-separation facility that could be used to produce tritium for thermonuclear weapons that North Korea has said it intends to develop.

North Korea vowed in 2013 to restart all its nuclear facilities, including the main reactor and a smaller plant at Yongbyon, which was shut down in 2007 as part of an international disarmament-for-aid deal that later collapsed.

North Korea announced at a rare congress of its ruling Workers’ Party last month that it would strengthen its nuclear weapons capability.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Richard Chang)

Authorities Investigating Batches of Suspicious Cell Phone Purchases in Missouri

The FBI is investigating multiple reports of bulk purchases of prepaid cell phones in Missouri.

According to various local media reports, law enforcement officials in at least six Missouri towns reported that customers bought a large quantity of the prepaid phones at local Walmart stores.

Prepaid cell phones are popular for a number of reasons, including that they can be bought with cash and don’t require a contract or a credit check like many wireless plans. People can pay for the minutes as they use them, and buy more calling time whenever they need it. But the phones are also attractive in other circles because they’re difficult to trace and can be easily disposable.

Criminals have been known to use prepaid phones, often called burners, to avoid police detection because they can be purchased anonymously and don’t require disclosing a lot of personal information. Terrorists have also been known to use cell phones to detonate explosives.

The first batch of bulk cell phone buys was on Dec. 5, when buyers reportedly went to a Walmart in Lebanon around 4 a.m. and bought 59 cell phones. Law enforcement officials in Macon, Ava, Jefferson City, Columbia and Cape Girardeau also reported similar phone buys on that weekend. Fox News reported that more than 200 prepaid cell phones were purchased in total at the stores.

The purchases came days after a husband and wife killed 14 people and injured 21 more in a Dec. 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in what has been called an act of terrorism.

The American public has been on high alert since that attack.

Searches for concealed carry permits, which allow people to carry hidden handguns in public, have surged to record levels, and a Public Religion Research Institute survey released last week found 47 percent of all Americans fear they or someone in their family will be a terrorism victim.

Americans have long been encouraged to report any kind of suspicious activity through the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. That’s exactly what the Walmart stores and local law enforcement authorities appear to be doing.

Speaking to the Kansas City Star, FBI spokesperson Bridget Patton said law enforcement officials were “acting out of an abundance of caution” in alerting the FBI about the phone buys.

“We have seen similar purchases of bulk cell phones in the past, and it has been concluded that these transactions were unrelated to terrorism,” Patton told the newspaper.

The Kansas City Star also spoke to law enforcement officials in Macon. Sheriff’s Sgt. Curt Glover noted that people have been known to purchase burner phones and resell them at higher prices.

“I do not feel there’s an immediate threat to the community,” Glover told the newspaper. “This has been going on for the last 15 years. They sell them and make a whole lot more money.”

There weren’t any arrests this month because buying a lot of cell phones at once isn’t illegal, and retired FBI Agent Jeff Lanza told the Kansas City Star that a link to terrorism appears unlikely.

“If you were planning to use those in a terrorist act, you wouldn’t be buying in bulk and attracting attention to yourself,” Lanza told the newspaper. “It would be a stupid way to start buying things to be used as bomb detonators because the first thing people do is call the police.”

The FBI has also been notified about a theft of propane canisters in Kansas City, Patton told the Kansas City Star, but the bureau is leaving the investigations of those thefts to local authorities.

The fact that propane can be used in improvised explosive devices raised some alarm bells, particularly because they reportedly occurred around the time of the prepaid phone purchases. But there’s currently no evidence suggesting the propane thefts and phone buys were related.

Americans are asked to remain vigilant and tell police if they notice suspicious activity.