10,000 feared dead in typhoon-hit Philippine province: police

TACLOBAN: A super typhoon is believed to have killed 10,000 people in one Philippine province, a regional police chief said Sunday.

“We had a meeting last night with the governor and based on the government's estimates, initially there are 10,000 casualties (dead),” Chief Supt Elmer Soria told reporters in Tacloban, the devastated capital of Leyte province.

Soria was referring to a meeting with the governor of Leyte.

One of the strongest typhoons ever to make landfall devastated the central Philippines, killing more than 1,000 people in one city alone and 200 in another province, the Red Cross estimated on Saturday, as reports of high casualties began to emerge.

A day after Typhoon Haiyan churned through the Philippine archipelago in a straight line from east to west, rescue teams struggled to reach far-flung regions, hampered by washed out roads, many choked with debris and fallen trees.

The death toll is expected to rise sharply from the fast-moving storm, whose circumference eclipsed the whole country and which late on Saturday was heading for Vietnam.

Among the hardest hit was coastal Tacloban in central Leyte province, where preliminary estimates suggest more than 1,000 people were killed, said Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, as water surges rushed through the city.

“An estimated more than 1,000 bodies were seen floating in Tacloban as reported by our Red Cross teams,” she told Reuters. “In Samar, about 200 deaths. Validation is ongoing.”

She expected a more exact number to emerge after a more precise counting of bodies on the ground in those regions.

Witnesses said bodies covered in plastic were lying on the streets. Television footage shows cars piled atop each other.

“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of the UN Disaster Assessment Coordination Team sent to Tacloban, referring to the 2004 earthquake and tsunami.

“This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed and the streets are strewn with debris.”

The category 5 “super typhoon” weakened to a category 4 on Saturday, though forecasters said it could strengthen again over the South China Sea en route to Vietnam.

Authorities in 15 provinces in Vietnam have started to call back boats and prepare for possible landslides. Nearly 300,000 people were moved to safer areas in two provinces alone – Da Nang and Quang Nam – according to the government's website.

The Philippines has yet to restore communications with officials in Tacloban, a city of about 220,000. A government official estimated at least 100 were killed and more than 100 wounded, but conceded the toll would likely rise sharply.

The national disaster agency has yet to confirm the toll but broken power poles, trees, bent tin roofs and splintered houses littered the streets of the city about 580 km (360 miles) southeast of Manila.

“It was like a tsunami”

The airport was nearly destroyed as raging seawaters swept through the city, shattering the glass of the airport tower, levelling the terminal and overturning nearby vehicles.

“Almost all houses were destroyed, many are totally damaged. Only a few are left standing,” said Major Rey Balido, a spokesman for the national disaster agency.

Local television network ABS-CBN showed images of looting in one of the city's biggest malls, with residents carting away everything from appliances to suitcases and grocery items.

Airport manager Efren Nagrama, 47, said water levels rose up to four metres (13 ft) in the airport. “It was like a tsunami. We escaped through the windows and I held on to a pole for about an hour as rain, seawater and wind swept through the airport. Some of my staff survived by clinging to trees. I prayed hard all throughout until the water subsided.”

Across the country, about a million people took shelter in 37 provinces after President Benigno Aquino appealed to those in the typhoon’s path to leave vulnerable areas.

“For casualties, we think it will be substantially more,” Aquino told reporters.

Officials started evacuating residents from low-lying areas, coastlines and hilly villages as early as three days before the typhoon struck on Friday, officials said. But not all headed the call to evacuate.

“I saw those big waves and immediately told my neighbours to flee,” said Floremil Mazo, a villager in southeastern Davao Oriental province.

Meteorologists said the impact may not be as strong as feared because the storm was moving so quickly, reducing the risk of flooding and landslides from torrential rain, the biggest causes of typhoon casualties in the Philippines.

Ferry services and airports in the central Philippines remained closed, hampering aid deliveries to Tacloban, although the military said three C-130 transport planes managed to land at its airport on Saturday. At least two people were killed on the tourist destination island of Cebu, three in Iloilo province and another three in Coron town in southwestern Palawan province, radio reports said.

“I never thought the winds would be that strong that they could destroy my house,” LynLyn Golfan of Cebu said in a television interview while sifting through the debris.

By Saturday afternoon, the typhoon was hovering 709 km west of San Jose, in southwestern Occidental Mindoro province, packing winds of a maximum 185 kph, with gusts of up to 220 kph.

The storm lashed the islands of Leyte and Samar with 275-kph wind gusts and 5-6 metre (15-19 ft) waves on Friday before scouring the northern tip of Cebu province. It weakened slightly as it moved west-northwest near the tourist island of Boracay, later hitting Mindoro island.

Haiyan was the second category 5 typhoon to hit the Philippines this year after Typhoon Usagi in September. An average of 20 typhoons strike every year, and Haiyan was the 24th so far this year.

Last year, Typhoon Bopha flattened three towns in southern Mindanao, killing 1,100 people and causing damage of more than $1 billion.

US, India eye joint efforts against extremist funding

WASHINGTON: The United States and India agreed on Sunday to step up cooperation to prevent the financing of violent extremist movements linked to Pakistan, officials said.

In annual talks between top economic officials, India and the United States spoke of “expanding cooperation on countering illicit financing, including targeting the financial networks and fund-raising activities of terrorist organizations,” Indian Economic Affairs Secretary Arvind Mayaram said.

Mayaram said in a statement that efforts would target groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba and the affiliated Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which investigators blame for the 2008 siege of Mumbai that killed 166 people.

The statement did not provide more details on how the two sides would expand cooperation. India has been seeking to pressure the group which operates virtually in the open in Pakistan.

Mayaram also mentioned action against another Pakistan-linked movement, the Haqqani network. The group, blamed for attacks on the Indian embassy and US forces in Afghanistan, was designated last year as a terrorist group by the United States.

The talks, in Washington following annual IMF-World Bank meetings, involved US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, along with their Indian counterparts Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan.

The two countries agreed to keep working on a bilateral investment treaty, which President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have supported as a way to boost trade.

US companies have increasingly criticized India on trade issues including the developing economy's support of generic drugs, which advocates say are affordable for the world's poor but which Western businesses say violate patents.

The two sides, who also discussed the fiscal crisis in the United States, called for “sound macroeconomic policies, structural reforms and strong prudential frameworks” to support economic growth and market stability, Mayaram said.

Red Cross says seven missing aid workers in Syria kidnapped

GENEVA: The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday that six of its aid workers and a member of the Syrian Red Crescent had been kidnapped by gunmen in Syria.

“Six ICRC staff members and one member of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent have been abducted in Idlib in northwestern Syria,” ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told AFP at the organisation's Geneva base.

“We don't know who took them. It was unidentified armed men,” he added, when pressed on whether the kidnappers were thought to be from Syria's rebel side or militias loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

“We're calling for their immediate, unconditional and safe release,” he said.

Earlier on Sunday, Syrian state television reported that “armed terrorist gangs” attacked the ICRC convoy and kidnapped its members.

The neutral humanitarian organisation, which specialises in helping victims of war, strives not to be drawn into the politics of conflict zones where its staff serve.

“We're going to activate all networks in an effort to find out what happened and bring them back safely,” Watson said.

ICRC and Red Crescent staff in Idlib and the city of Aleppo were scrambling to locate and secure the release of the kidnapped aid workers.

“We work on both sides of the front lines, trying to deliver aid. This type of incident unfortunately can undermine our capacity to reach those in need,” said Watson.

He explained that the aid workers were abducted after setting off back to the Syrian capital Damascus, having been in Idlib province to deliver health supplies to hospitals in two cities and to carry out an assessment of health needs in the area.

Large parts of the province are under the control of rebel groups, including militants, who are fighting to oust Assad's regime. The conflict has killed more than 115,000 people in two and a half years.

Watson said that he could not immediately confirm the names and nationalities of the kidnapped ICRC staff, in part because the humanitarian organisation wanted to be sure their families were informed first.

Killer Indian cyclone wreaks havoc, 1 million evacuated

Cyclone Phailin left a trail of destruction along India's east coast and at least seven people dead Sunday, after the biggest evacuation in the country's history helped minimise casualties.
As emergency teams began assessing damage from the country's biggest cyclone in 14 years, a massive relief effort went into full swing to distribute food to an estimated one million evacuees, clear roads and help the injured.
Most of the local population spent the night huddled in shelters and public buildings as deafening winds flattened flimsy homes, uprooted trees, and sent glass and asbestos strips flying through the air.
The worst affected area, around the town of Gopalpur in Orissa where the eye of Phailin came ashore packing winds of 200 kilometres an hour (125 miles per hour), was still without power and communications were down.
Roads strewn with fallen trees were at least open, as emergency services rushed to reach people living there.
Raj Kishor Muduli, a delivery driver who lives just outside Orissa's state capital Bhubaneswar, said the whole of his village had spent the night hunkering down in a communal shelter.
"We were all afraid, the whole village was afraid, we didn't know how strong the winds would be," the 43-year-old told AFP in the morning, when the winds had died down and heavy overnight rainfall had ceased.
"Everyone was awake the whole night to see what the size of (the) storm would be and to be on guard."
Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, Orissa's special relief commissioner, said that seven people were known to have died.
"We can confirm seven deaths in Orissa, mostly due to falling branches from trees," he told AFP in Bhubaneswar.
"Our rescue workers and state officials are working tirelessly to sort things out.
"Electricity and water will be restored everywhere by this evening, except for the district of Ganjam, which has been very badly affected. We are coming up with a separate plan to address the situation in Ganjam."
More than 8,000 people were killed in 1999 when a cyclone hit the same region, devastating crops and livestock. The area took years to recover.
This time round, a massive evacuation operation, which officials said was the biggest in Indian history, appeared to have succeeded in minimising casualties.
"I think we have been successful in minimising the loss of precious lives," Orissa's Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik told reporters in Bhubaneswar.
Some 600,000 people were left homeless after the ferocious storm swept through 14,000 villages mainly in coastal districts, Mohapatra told AFP.
Families, many clutching bags of possessions, or holding their children, returned to what was left of their homes to assess the damage after spending the night in the shelters.
"I lost my house and also a small shaving shop, I lost everything," Janardan, 32, who uses one name, said from inside his tiny dwelling in Gopalpur. The cyclone collapsed the roof, leaving Janardan and his wife to sift through the debris and begin the clean up.
High-sided trucks lying on their sides were witness to the strength of the winds on the main highway south of Gopalpur, which was littered with uprooted trees and other debris.
Despite the damage, there was a general sense of relief that things could have been a lot worse in Orissa and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
"We were preparing for a super cyclone, but Phailin did not turn into a super cyclone," spokeswoman for the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Tripti Parule, told AFP.

Muslim pilgrims throng Mina as annual hajj starts

MINA: Some two million Muslims thronged Mina Valley from the holy city of Mecca to start the annual hajj pilgrimage Sunday, with numbers down on fears of the MERS virus and Saudi cuts.

Authorities announced at noon that all the pilgrims had reached Mina from nearby Mecca, following in the footsteps of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) some 14 centuries ago.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef said the number of pilgrims from outside the country totalled 1,379,531 million, down 21 per cent on last year's 1.75 million.

Around 1.29 million of them had flown to Saudi Arabia from 188 countries, he said, without giving a figure for pilgrims residing in the kingdom whose number is believed to have been halved.

The kingdom cut by 20 per cent the quotas for pilgrims allowed in from abroad over fears of MERS and because of massive projects to expand the capacity of the Grand Mosque, Islam's holiest place of worship.

Saudi Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabia told reporters late Saturday the authorities had so far detected no cases among the pilgrims of the MERS virus which has killed 60 people worldwide, 51 of them in Saudi Arabia.

Authorities have stepped up measures to curb illegal pilgrims who infiltrate into Mecca through desert roads.

Security officials have said that as many as 31,000 Saudi and expatriate pilgrims were turned back for not carrying legal permits, while around 12,600 others were arrested.

The pilgrims moved to Mina by road, by train or on foot, the men wearing ihram, the seamless two-piece white garment that rituals require, the women covered up except for their faces and hands.

In Mina, a small site with 45,000 fire-resistant tents that can accommodate two million people, they will pray and rest before moving on to Mount Arafat on Monday for the climax of the pilgrimage rituals.

A newly-constructed electric railway transported around 400,000 of the pilgrims taking part in the world's largest annual gathering.

Saudi Arabia has deployed more than 100,000 troops to ensure the safety of the pilgrims and has warned it will tolerate no demonstrations or disturbances.

Security forces are monitoring the holy sites in and around Mecca with 4,200 hi-tech cameras, some of which can cover a distance of 60 kilometres (37 miles).

Authorities said more than 20,000 buses are ferrying the pilgrims to Mina, using 58 tunnels under Mecca's mountains.

But some pilgrims, like Egyptian Mustafa Abu el-Wafa, decided to walk the 10-kilometre distance despite the heat and humidity.

“I am so excited that I finally managed to perform the hajj and come to the areas that the Prophet (Mohammed) had once been to,” Wafa said as he walked towards Mina.

From Mina, pilgrims will head to nearby Mount Arafat, where they spend Monday in prayer until sunset.

The oil-rich kingdom has also mobilised huge medical and civil defence resources to ensure the smooth movement of the pilgrims.

The fact that the kingdom accounts for the overwhelming majority of MERS cases reported around the world has raised concerns pilgrims could be infected and return to their homelands carrying the virus.

But authorities have voiced confidence the hajj will pass without incident.

This year's minor pilgrimage season, called the “umrah”, during the fasting month of Ramadan in July-August, passed off without any MERS outbreak even though millions of Muslims took part.

The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam that every capable Muslim must perform at least once.

Despite being marred by deadly incidents in the past, including floods, stampedes and fires, the hajj has in recent years been almost incident-free, thanks to multi-billion-dollar projects by Saudi authorities.

Bomb blasts across Iraq kill ten: police

BAGHDAD: A series of bombs killed at least ten people in mostly Shia Muslim provinces of Iraq on Sunday ahead of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha, police and medical sources said.

Altogether 11 bombs were detonated by remote control. The deadliest attack took place in the city of Hilla, 100 km south of Baghdad, when two car bombs blew up in quick succession, killing at least five people, police said.

It was not immediately clear who was behind Sunday's attacks, which appeared to be coordinated, but Sunni Islamist and other insurgents, including Al Qaeda, have been regaining ground this year.

More than 6,000 people have been killed in acts of violence so far in 2013, reversing a decline in sectarian bloodshed that climaxed in 2006-07.

In Kut, four car bombs exploded separately, one of them near a primary school and another near a restaurant, killing at least two people and wounding 31, police said.

Two car bombs went off simultaneously near a vehicle repair workshop, killing two people in the city of Samawa, and a civilian was killed when a car bomb blew up in a commercial street on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, police said.

According to residents and police, leaflets signed by Al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate have been distributed on the streets of Baquba in recent days, telling residents not to send their children to school or they will be killed.

Last week, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the playground of a primary school in northern Iraq and blew himself up, killing 14 children along with their headmaster.

“The surge of violence in Iraq spares no one and no place,” said a statement from the United Nations following that attack.

Forced underground in 2007, Al Qaeda's Iraqi wing has been re-invigorated by the civil war in neighboring Syria and growing resentment among the country's Sunni minority towards the Shia-led government.

The affiliate, which merged with its Syrian counterpart this year to form the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has claimed responsibility for attacks on both sides of the border.

Afghan in uniform shoots US soldier

KABUL: A man wearing an Afghan army uniform shot at US soldiers in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least one serviceman on Sunday, local officials and the Nato-led coalition said.

The so-called “insider attack” in Paktika province is the fourth in less than a month and is likely to strain already tense ties between coalition troops and their allies, with most foreign troops scheduled to withdraw by the end of next year.

A Reuters tally shows Sunday's incident was the tenth this year, and took the death toll of foreign personnel to 15.

“A man wearing an Afghan army uniform shot at Americans in Sharana city, the provincial capital, near the governor's office,” said an Afghan official, adding that two soldiers had been hit by the gunfire.

The Nato-led coalition confirmed one soldier had been shot by a man in security forces uniform, but did not comment on his nationality or whether the Afghan was wearing an army uniform.

Insider attacks threaten to further undermine waning support for the war among Western nations sending troops to Afghanistan.

A similar flurry of attacks last year prompted the Nato-led force to briefly suspend all joint activities and take steps to curb interaction between foreign and Afghan troops.

That has cut down the number of incidents, but some soldiers say the measures have further eroded the hard-won trust painstakingly nurtured between the allies over more than 12 years of war.

Late on Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced they had reached preliminary agreement on a bilateral security pact that now depends on the approval of Afghanistan's tribal leaders.

Three confirmed dead in Indian cyclone: state official

BHUBANESWAR: At least three people died in cyclone Phailin which lashed India's east coast overnight and nearly a million people were evacuated, a state official told AFP on Sunday.

“We have confirmed three casualties, three deaths. We don't have confirmed reports of injuries yet,” Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, special relief commissioner for the state of Orissa, said by telephone.

He said that an estimated 860,000 people had been evacuated in Orissa, which added to at least 100,000 in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state.

“We almost cleared out the danger zone. In the end, we cleared more than 8.61 lakh (861,000) people. It might be India's biggest evacuation ever,”Mohapatra added to AFP.

“We decided we would not take any chances, any compromise.” Orissa was hit by a stronger storm in 1999 which killed more than 8,000 and the state government has been keen to stress its preparedness this time round.

Winds of about 200 kilometres an hour (125 miles per hour) and heavy rain pounded the impoverished east coast of India overnight, knocking out power for millions and causing widespread damage to property and crops.

200 refugees saved after boat sinking off Malta

VALLETTA, Oct 12: Rescuers plucked 200 refugees from the sea on Saturday after their boat capsized, killing 31 in yet another migrant tragedy that prompted Malta to warn the Mediterranean was turning into a cemetery.

Their boat went down off Malta on Friday near the Italian island of Lampedusa, packed with 230 to 250 men, women and children, the Maltese navy said.

“The latest figure we have is 31” dead, a Maltese government spokesman said.

The Italian navy earlier gave the figure of 34 dead.

Exhausted after a 10-hour journey from the wreck site, about 143 survivors arrived in Valetta morning aboard a Maltese naval vessel. They were helped onto buses to be driven to shelters.

Among the 146 survivors questioned by the Maltese authorities so far, 117 said they were from war-torn Syria and 27 from the Palestinian territories, an interior ministry spokesman said.

Fifty-six more survivors were being escorted to Porto Empedocle in Sicily on an Italian naval vessel. Another nine were airlifted to Lampedusa, including a couple with a nine-month-old baby whose three-year-old brother drowned, emergency services said.The captain of the Maltese patrol boat which was first to reach migrants at sea soon after their boat capsized recounted what he described as the toughest rescue of his career.

“I have been doing this job for nearly 10 years and this must have been the most difficult operation I was involved in. There were hundreds of people at sea. Some we could see floating, lifeless,” he told the Times of Malta daily.

The sinking came just over a week after the deadliest refugee disaster to date in the region prompted the European Union to call for sea patrols to cope with the flood of migrants knocking on its doors.

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta called the latest tragedy “a new and dramatic confirmation of the state of emergency”.

“We are just building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea,” his Maltese counterpart, Joseph Muscat, warned at a press conference on Friday, calling for more help from the rest of Europe.

Both the Maltese and Italian navies dispatched rescue ships and helicopters to the area, around 100 kilometres south of Lampedusa and 110 kilometres from Malta.—AFP