Bangladesh: A tornado swept through nearly two dozen villages southeast of the Bangladeshi capital, killing at least 20 people, tearing roofs off houses and uprooting trees and power pylons, officials said.
The death toll could rise sharply as more than 300 people were injured when the twister struck Brahmanbaria district, more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) southeast of Dhaka.
More than 500 dwellings suffered damage. Rescue teams were dispatched to the area, but uprooted trees and wrecked vehicles closed large stretches of highway and rail lines.
Among the damaged buildings was Brahmanbaria jail, which partially collapsed, killing a guard. But officials said all inmates remained inside the facility and were safe.
“It destroyed everything I had. Nothing is left,” Mohammad Nizam, a village resident said. “We found ourselves rolling in the mud within minutes.”
French family’s death ‘not suicide’
PHNOM PENH: French and Cambodian investigators yesterday ruled out suicide in the deaths of a Frenchman and his four young children whose skeletal remains were found in a submerged car last year.
Ten French investigators, including a judge and scientific and forensic police, arrived in Cambodia earlier this month to probe the deaths of widower Laurent Vallier and his young children.
“This (investigation) has led to very significant breakthroughs which are now ruling out the possibility of a suicide,” the French embassy in Phnom Penh said in a statement.
Chhim Rithy, a Cambodian investigating judge at Kampong Speu who was working with the team, said they had found some blood stain stains inside Vallier’s house and on a rope.
Gunmen kill four prisoners in jail
JAKARTA: Unidentified gunmen forced their way into an Indonesian jail early yesterday and shot dead four prisoners awaiting trial over the death of a soldier, police said.
The prisoners were accused of beating and stabbing to death a soldier from the military’s elite Special Forces Command last Tuesday at a nightclub in Yogyakarta in central Java as he reportedly tried to break up a fight.
National police spokesman Suhardi Alius said around 15 gunmen entered the Cebongan Correctional Centre after intimidating and then beating two guards at around 01:00am Friday.
“At one o’clock, masked men carrying guns got into the prison and found the four men. They shot them in their cell and left immediately,” Alius said, adding that one of the four prisoners was a former police officer.
She said police were trying to study CCTV footage, but another police source close to the case said the gunmen had deliberately destroyed some of the cameras.
7.5m Filipinos have no birth certificates
MANILA: At least 7.5 million Filipinos have not registered their names upon birth and are therefore stripped of some civil and democratic rights such as secondary education and the right to vote.
Child-centered Plan International, a non-profit organisation in the United Kingdom, said that two of 10 children in 500 communities are not registered at birth.
It said many of the children, especially those in far-flung areas, are denied enrolment or cannot graduate from high school because they have no birth certificates to prove their age or identity.
Child-centered Plan country director Carin van der Hor said the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao has the highest rate of unregistered individuals at 62 percent or roughly 970,000 people.
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