COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s military has demolished a fortified underground bunker used by Tamil Tiger supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was killed in a final offensive four years ago, an official said yesterday. Security forces set off a blast on Thursday that collapsed the complex as part of a wider operation to clear possible landmines and remove the “ghosts of terrorists”, military spokesman brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya said. He said the fortified underground structure, 50 metres deep, was removed along with similar structures in the former war zone in Puthukkudiriruppu, where Prabhakaran was killed in May 2009. He said more than 100 bunkers of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as well as the security forces had been dismantled.
Vietnam army giant dies
HANOI: General Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of Vietnam’s victories over France and the US, died yesterday, aged 102, family members said. He was one of Vietnam’s best known 20th century figures, ranked by historians among such military giants as Montgomery, Rommel and MacArthur. He considered the mastermind of the historic defeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and the communist victory over US-backed South Vietnam 21 years later. He died after several years in a hospital.
China polluting Mt Fuji: Study
TOKYO: A Japanese study is claiming that toxic air pollution from China is to blame for high mercury levels atop the country’s beloved Mount Fuji. “Whenever readings were high, winds were blowing from the continent (China),” Osamu Nagafuchi, the lead scientist of the study, said yesterday. Fuji was chosen “because it’s a place unaffected by urban pollution”, said Nagafuchi, an environmental science professor at the University of Shiga Prefecture.
Tattoo forum opens in HK
HONG KONG: Visitors flocked yesterday to a Hong Kong tattoo convention, the first to be held in the southern Chinese city where tattoos were once seen as a sign of triad gang membership. It aims at challenging “that old-fashioned notion that it’s just gangsters and sailors” who get tattoed, co-organiser Jay Foss Cole said. Agencies
