A round-up of other world news in brief
Chinese quake activist jailed for subversion
BEIJING – A Chinese activist who sought to document shoddy construction that contributed to deaths in China’s devastating 2008 earthquake has been sentenced to five years in jail for subversion, his lawyer has said.
Tan Zuoren was formally accused of inciting subversion of state power in e-mailed comments about the bloody crackdown on June 4th, 1989, on pro-democracy demonstrators around Tiananmen Square.
Mr Tan’s supporters and Amnesty International say however that he was detained because he planned to issue an independent report on the collapse of school buildings during the Sichuan earthquake. – (Reuters)
'Pilot error' caused Ethiopian air crash
BEIRUT – Pilot error caused the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft off the coast of Lebanon last month which killed all 90 people on board, a source familiar with the inquiry into the incident said yesterday.
“The investigation team has reached an early conclusion that it was pilot error, based on the information from the black box,” the source said.
An investigation team had gone to France on Monday with the flight recorders, commonly known as “black boxes”, for analysis.
The Boeing 737-800 crashed minutes after taking off from Beirut in stormy weather on January 25th. – (Reuters)
Air force officer on murder charges
OTTAWA – Canadian police are considering reopening cold cases of murdered women after laying murder charges against the commanding officer of the country’s largest military air base.
Col Russell Williams (46) was charged on Sunday with the murder of two women, one of them a soldier at his air force base in Trenton, Ontario.
He is also charged with the sexual assault of two other women after breaking into their homes. For now he has been relieved of his duties.
A police spokeswoman said investigators would be looking at other cases that come to their attention and seeking similarities. – (Reuters)
Pirates free ship after ransom paid
MOGADISHU – Somali pirates said they received a $3.1 million (€2.25 million) ransom yesterday and had freed a Panama-flagged ship, the MV Al Khaliq, which they hijacked in October.
“Our friends have disembarked and the ship set off into the ocean,” one of the pirates, Hassan, said by phone from the coastal pirate base of Haradheere.
The MV Al Khaliq was thought to be carrying 24 Indians and two Burmese crew members. Negotiations for its release had been going on for weeks.
Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers Assistance Programme said it was heading to Mombasa port in Kenya. – (Reuters)