University Daily Kansan / Monday, April 11, 1988
7
NationWorld
Pakistani ammunition dump explosion kills 70, injures 800
The Associated Press
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A huge ammunition dump exploded yesterday, sending flames 500 feet into the air and grenades and anti-aircraft missiles screaming in all directions. Officials said that more than 70 people were killed and that more than 800 were wounded.
The Pakistani capital looked like a city at war after the exploding dump showered it and adjacent Rawalpindi with weapons of all shapes and sizes.
"It's the worst disaster we've ever had in Islamabad," said an emergency room doctor at the National Medical Institute.
Prime Minister Mohammad Khan
June卸职 a high-level investi-
tive
gation into the blast. Officials said that the explosion was caused by a fire but that they did not know how the fire started.
Later, the official Pakistani News Agency reported that eight people had been killed and 12 others injured yesterday afternoon when a fire broke out in a small arms manufacturing factory at Rana, near Lahore about 140 miles south of Islamabad.
The agency did not say what caused the fire and gave no further details.
Casualty counts were still unofficial yesterday in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, which have a combined population of more than 4.5 million.
Hijackers threaten 'quiet massacre' Unmet demands for more fuel lead to injury of a passenger
The Associated Press
LARNACA, Cyprus — The hijackers of a Kuwaiti jumbo jeteered yesterday offered to trade passengers for fuel and threatened to crash the plane into Kuwait's royal palace. They threatened a "slow and quiet massacre" of their hostages if their demands were not met.
A flight engineer said the hijackers, who were demanding the release of 17 pro-Iranian terrorists imprisoned in Kuwait, had started to hurt one of the passengers.
of kuwait's ruling Al-Sabah family and at least six hijackers.
In Lebanon, a pro-Iranian group threatened to kill kidnapped U.S. and French hostages if any attempt was made to storm the plane.
A statement from the Islamic Jihad terrorist group was delivered to the Reuters news agency in west Beirut, along with photographs of a纵火员 Terry A. Anderson and French journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann.
In Cyprus, the Arab hijackers, who have killed one passenger since seizing the plane Tuesday, threatened to kill their captives, but a noon deadline passed without any additional slayings.
One minute before a second deadline expired four hours later, the engineer, relaying the hijackers' messages to Larnaca Airport control tower, said, "They've already started to hurt one of the passengers." He gave no details.
Later, the hijackers offered to free 20 of the passengers in return for fuel, but the offer was rejected at Kuwait's insistence.
Senior Palestine Liberation Organization officials in Cyprus yesterday met with the hijackers four times. The PLO is believed to be a key
factor in negotiations.
The plane landed in Larnaca on Friday, Flight 422 was commandered Tuesday en route to Kuwait from Bangkok with 112 people aboard and forced to land in Mashhad in northeastern Iran, where 57 people were released.
The jet left Iran and landed in Larnaca after being refused permission to land in Lebanon and Syria. Another captive, an ailing 32-year-old Kuwait, was freed in Larnaca, apparently after PLO intervention.
The hijackers Saturday killed a 24-year-old Kuwait police border guard after a stabbing in Kuwait.
Afghan rebels down passenger plane
The Associated Press
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Afghan guerrillas downed a Soviet-built passenger plane near the Soviet border, killing all 29 people aboard, Afghanistan's official Radio Kabul reported.
The report said the Antonov-26 passenger plane was shot down by a missile yesterday while flying between Maimanhe, in Afghanistan's northwestern Faryab province, and Mazar Sharif, in the Balkh province.
The plane carried six crew members and 23 passengers, including two children, according to the report, monitored in Islamabad.
It did not say whether the plane
was a Soviet transport or a civilian airliner of the domestic Bakhtar airline. Both fly the Antonov-26. The Afghan airline also has been known to carry commercial passengers in planes with military markings.
Fair trial presents a dilemma for supremacists
Radio Kabul, quoting Afghanistani's official Bakhtar News Agency, said the guerrillas attacked with anti-aircraft rockets.
Despite the proposal to withdraw Soviet troops, the Afghan guerrillas have said they will continue to fight Najib's government until it is deposed. The civil war began 10 years ago when a communist coup brought to power a government friendly to the Soviet Union.
Ferraro will appeal son's conviction
RUTLAND, VL. — Former vicepresidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro said that she blamed herself in part for her son's cocaine conviction and that the family would appeal the verdict to the Vermont Supreme Court.
The Associated Press
"We still believe he was set up," said Ferraro of her 24-year-old son, John Zaccaro Jr.
A Vermont District Court jury deliberated for slightly more than
At a news conference after the verdict, Ferraro blamed her son for possessing cocaine, as well as herself in candidacy for making my son a lava.
two hours Saturday before finding Zaccaro guild of selling one-quarter gram of cocaine to an undercover police officer two years ago while Zaccaro was a senior at Middlebury College.
She also criticized a Middlebury police officer "for setting my son up".
The Associated Press
FORT SMITH, Ark. — Thursday's aquittals of a white supremacist leaders accused of plotting to overthrow the government poses a dilemma for them and their followers: how to justify their opposition to a government that treated them fairly.
inson, who won racketeering convictions against leaders of an Arkansas-based supremacist group called the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, was not as optimistic that the movement would lose credibility because of that contradiction.
Some of those familiar with the movement said that the verdict acquitting all 13 defendants of sedition and other charges effectively neutralized the supremacists,
whereas conviction would have made them martyrs.
But others feared that the verdicts by the all-white federal jury only would encourage the extremists in their campaign of violence, aimed particularly against blacks and Jews.
"I always said that a conviction would pretty much put an end to violence by these hate groups," he said. "I am afraid of them will look at this acquittal as a license to their hate and violence."
Kirk Lyons, a Houston attorney who represented defendant Louis Ray Beam Jr., agreed. The supremacists' view of conviction would be that "they were shanghaied," he said, but the outcome proved that "they got a fair trial in the U.S. court," which they had obtained in程
"They were protesting about the federal government and now they've been treated fairly by the federal government," said TV producer Peter Lake, who testified about his
experiences as an undercover reporter at an Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. "That's going to have a telling effect."
Former U.S. Attorney Asa Hutch-
News Roundup
MIXON BELIEVES IN PARDON: Richard M. Nixon said that President Reagan should pardon former White House aides John M. Poindexter and Oliver L. North if he believed they took part in the Iran-contra affair to serve his presidency. The former president, who resigned in 1974 for his role in the Watergate scandal, also said he should have pardoned his former aides John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldenman. Both were convicted on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice and served time in prison.
'PRESIDENT' JACKSON WOULDN'T SEE ARAFAT: Democrat Jesse Jackson said yesterday that as president he would not sit down with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to discuss an end to fighting
between Israel and the Palestinians. While rejecting direct talks with Arafat, Jackson said the United States should talk with Palestinians in the search for a peace in the region.
1,000 ARRESTED IN DRUG SWEEP: More than 1,000 people were arrested in a weekend police blitz in Los Angeles against drug dealers and street gangs responsible for waves of violence that have claimed hundreds of lives a year in the city. It was the department's biggest attack ever on gangs, which specialize in the cocaine trade and are blamed for 205 killings last year. Gang killings in all of Los Angeles County reached 387 last year.
SANCTIONS HURT PANAMA: Doctors and pharmacists said yesterday that a lack of
money caused by U.S. economic sanctions was causing a shortage of medicines and cuts in hospital services in Panama. Meanwhile, Ricardo Arias Calderon, president of the Christian Democrat Party, said that the foreign leaders who asked the Roman Catholic Church to mediate Panama's political crisis should consider organizing an international boycott to oust the nation's strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega.
THIRD WORLD DEBT: Finance officials from 151 nations began a week of closed-door sessions today, continuing the search for ways to cut the Third World's trillion-dollar debt.
23rd and Ousdahl