Anti-Taleban militiaman killed

KHAR, Pakistan: Local officials say gunmen attacked anti-Taleban militiamen in Pakistan’s volatile tribal area near the Afghan border, killing one and wounding another. Official Jawed Khan says Monday’s attack took place as the militiamen manned a security post in the Bazai section of Mohmand tribal area. Khan says authorities also found the bullet-riddled body of another anti-Taleban militiaman in a nearby area Monday, two days after he was kidnapped.

Turkmenistan’s gold statue to go

ASHGABAT: Turkmenistan’s president has ordered the removal of a rotating golden statue of former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, his most decisive move yet to dismantle one of the world’s most eccentric personality cults. Niyazov ran the former Soviet Central Asian republic for 21 years before his death in 2006.Known as Turkmenbashi, or the leader of all Turkmen, he renamed calendar months after members of his own family and forced all students to study his sayings. Since taking power in 2007, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has reversed some of Niyazov’s more bizarre reforms, such as a ban on circuses, and removed some signs of his predecessor’s personality cult.

2 Muslims slain in southern Thailand

PATTANI, Thailand: Suspected insurgents have killed two Muslims in separate incidents in Thailand’s violent south, police said Monday. In Pattani province on Sunday night, four gunmen opened fire with M-16 rifles on a 31-year-old male Muslim villager outside his home, where he died. Soon afterwards a 36-year-old dessert vendor was killed in a drive-by shooting while he was traveling home from a tea shop in the same province. Also on Sunday evening a Buddhist woman, aged 42, was injured when two suspects traveling by motorcycle threw a hand-made bomb into the karaoke bar where she worked in Pattani, police said. More than 4,100 people have been killed and thousands more wounded since an insurgency erupted in the southern region six years ago, but the shadowy militants have never publicly stated their goals.

Kenya to deport cleric in two days

NAIROBI: A Muslim cleric whose detention in Nairobi caused deadly riots on the streets of the capital is expected to be put on a plane back to Jamaica in the next two days, Kenya’s foreign minister said on Monday. Initial efforts to deport Sheikh Abdullah Al-Faisal to his native Jamaica had been hampered by other nations’ unwillingness to let him transit through their airports. “We have managed to get a direct flight for Faisal back to Jamaica and he should be out of Kenya by 48 hours,” Moses Wetangula told reporters. Police earlier arrested a prominent activist, Al-Amin Kimathi, chairman of Kenya’s Muslim Human Right Forum, in chaotic scenes as seven suspects appeared at Nairobi’s High Court accused of involvement in the riots that rocked the capital on Friday.

Another 150 suspects, including some members of the Somali parliament, were charged in another court with being in the country illegally, a day after security forces raided a mainly Somali suburb of the city and arrested scores of people.

— Compiled from agencies