COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s security authorities are searching for 30,000 army deserters nearly five years after ending a decades-long separatist war with Tamil Tiger guerrillas, the military said yesterday.
Police across the country have been told to track down deserters who failed to accept several offers of leniency, military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya said.
“Out of nearly 60,000 listed as deserters, about half have responded and we are looking for the others,” Wanigasooriya said. “Steps are being taken to arrest them.”
Soldier, three radicals killed
JAKARTA: An Indonesian soldier and three armed “radicals” were killed in two related shoot-outs in the country’s restive Papua region, an army official said yesterday.
A team of soldiers were conducting a raid in the mountainous Puncak Jaya area, a known hideout for armed Papuan separatists, after receiving intelligence on a “radical group”, army spokesman Andika Perkasa said.
The soldiers seized a rifle from the gunmen and three were killed in an extended shoot-out, Perkasa said, adding it was unclear who opened fire first in the incident on Friday.
Bangla plant victim kills self
DHAKA: A female garment worker committed suicide in Bangladesh on Friday, nine months after she suffered a serious head injury in the country’s worst industrial disaster, police said.
The body of 27-year-old Salma, who uses one name, was found hanging by a scarf at her home in the Bamner Tek neighbourhood of Dhaka where she had been living for the last few months after being discharged from hospital, police inspector Mostofa Hossain said.
Salma was rescued from the ruins of the Rana Plaza garment factory compound in April last year, four days after the nine-storey building collapsed with the loss of at least 1,135 lives.
Agencies
