The work DIGEST

Government denies report of mass graves

Burma denied Friday that there were mass graves in a village in Rakhine state, where a military crackdown has triggered the flight of nearly 690,000 Rohingya Muslims to neighboring Bangladesh.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that it had confirmed the existence of more than five previously unreported mass graves in the village of G

u Dar Pyin, through interviews with survivors in refugee camps in Bangladesh and through time-stamped cellphone videos.

The government’s Information Committee, part of the office of civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said on its Facebook page that local authorities and security officials formed a “ground team” that investigated the report.

“The ground team went to the locations that were mentioned in the AP news story as where the bodies were buried and found out that it is not true,” the statement said.

It said, however, that 19 “terrorists” had been killed when they attacked security forces in the village in late August and that their bodies had been “properly buried.”

Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations, said the agency stood by its reporting.

— Reuters

MALDIVES

Ex-president Nasheed says he will run again

The exiled former president of the Maldives said Friday that he will run again for office, hours after a surprise Supreme Court decision to free a group of political prisoners led to overnight clashes in the capital of the Indian Ocean archipelago.

President Yameen Abdul Gayoom had been set to run for reelection this year virtually unopposed, with all of his opponents either jailed or exiled.

But ex-president Mohamed Nasheed, among those whose convictions were overturned, said the court’s ruling means he will be eligible to challenge Gayoom, who has rolled back many democratic reforms since coming to power five years ago.

Nasheed was jailed in 2016 on a terrorism conviction that was widely denounced. He received asylum in Britain that year after traveling there on medical leave. He has lived in exile ever since.

Thursday’s court decision freeing the political dissidents said their guilty verdicts had been influenced by politics. It ordered new trials for all nine.

For the second night in a row, protesters who support the ruling scuffled Friday with police in the Maldives capital, Male. Several people were arrested.

— Associated Press

TURKEY

Tax office blast was a bomb, officials say

An explosion at a tax office in the Turkish capital was caused by a bomb, not a gas leak, as initially believed, authorities said Friday, adding that the suspected bomber had been killed in a police operation.

The Ankara governor’s office said police detained eight people suspected of links to the alleged bomber, whom it identified as a man who had trained with Kurdish militants in Syria.

Thursday’s explosion did not cause any casualties.

It came as Turkey’s military pushed ahead with an offensive into northern Syria to rout a Syrian Kurdish militia it says is linked to outlawed Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

— Associated Press

90 feared dead in capsizing in Mediterranean: About 90 people are feared drowned after a smugglers’ boat carrying mostly Pakistani migrants capsized off Libya’s coast, the U.N.’s migration agency said. Ten bodies washed ashore near the Libyan town of Zuwarah after the early morning tragedy, the agency said. Pakistanis are increasing among the number of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Italy and Europe via Libya, it reported.

Costa Rica wins territorial dispute with Nicaragua: Costa Rica claimed victory over Nicaragua after the United Nations’ highest court awarded Costa Rica disputed territory along the coastal border shared by the two countries. Nicaragua was ordered by the International Court of Justice in The Hague to remove a military base in the area near the San Juan River that the judges said violated Costa Rican sovereignty.

Avalanche kills 3 Indian soldiers in Kashmir: The Indian army said three soldiers were killed when an avalanche hit their Himalayan post in the Indian portion of Kashmir. It said the soldiers died in the Machhil sector near the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
One soldier was hospitalized, according to Indian media.