Killing of PTI worker: Another JIT, another ‘clean chit’ to PML-N

Mohammad Saleem

FAISALABAD: A Joint Investigation Team (JIT) has absolved the PML-N leaders of convening any meeting at the outhouse of former Punjab law minister Rana Sanaullah to “teach a lesson” to PTI workers during their protest demonstration on Dec 8 last, it is learnt.

The JIT claims to have established it through the cell phone data locations of State Minister for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali, Rana Sanaullah, District Coordination Officer Noorul Ameen Mengal, MPA Tahir Jamil and others.

PTI district president Rana Raheel said the party would not accept investigation of the JIT and protest outside the Press Club on Jan 27.

The Punjab government had formed the JIT to investigate the killing of PTI worker Haq Nawaz at Novelty Bridge on Dec 8. Nawaz suffered a stray bullet injury on his chest and breathed his last on way to hospital.

Sources told Dawn the JIT had looked into all aspects of the case registered against Abid Sher Ali, Rana Sana, the DCO, Tahir Jamil and others. In the FIR, applicant Atta Khan, brother of Nawaz, had mentioned that his brother had breathed his last in his hand.

However, the investigation officers through the photographs and videos detected that the applicant was not on the spot when Nawaz was being shifted to the hospital. His call data had revealed that Atta and some other persons (he claimed were on the spot) were somewhere else.

The applicant further told the police that the PML-N leaders including Abid Sher and DCO held a meeting at the outhouse of Rana Sanaullah on Dec 7 as they had been tasked with “teaching a lesson” to the PTI workers.

To check veracity of the claim, the JIT obtained their cell phones data and concluded that Abid Sher and Tahir Jamil were in Lahore at that time. Rana Sana’s location was detected at Circuit House and the DCO house during the time of the meeting on Dec 7, sources said. They said the presence of Mengal also had not been proved at the outhouse of Rana Sana.

After submitting the challan of the Novelty Bridge case, the police would take up the cases registered with other police stations in connection with the PTI workers’ protests.

During interrogation, the police also detected that Ilyas Wattoo, the prime accused in the case who carried Rs5 million bounty on his head, had no affiliation with the PML-N. “He is neither a resident of Samanabad nor a PML-N voter.”

The PTI district head told Dawn that they did not appear before the JIT because of distrust. He said three of the five JIT officers had connections with Rana Sana. He said it was the responsibility of an investigation agency to find out truth by probing the case and circumstantial evidence, and not the phone data, would fix responsibility on the accused.

“There is no doubt about who tried to stop the demonstration, who brought the armed people to Novelty Bridge and who was the beneficiary of the chaos,” he said.

He said the PTI had different options like filing of a private complaint against the accused and seeking termination of the JIT through court.

“We will demonstrate outside the Press Club on Jan 27 to protest the government’s efforts to save its skin through the JIT report,” he added.

A police officer told Dawn that it was a case of sensitive nature and no aspect had been ignored. He said it had been established through evidence that the case got registered by the PTI lacked strength to fix responsibility on the nominated people.

The JIT would submit challan of the case in the last week of this month, he added.

Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2015

Protest leader quits in 'Hitler' row

The head of German "anti-Islamisation" movement Pegida, Lutz Bachmann, has resigned after a photo of him apparently posing as Hitler emerged.

Mr Bachmann stepped down just as tens of thousands of people were expected to rally in the eastern city of Leipzig for the latest Pegida rally.

Prosecutors are investigating insulting comments about refugees attributed to him by German newspapers.

A Pegida spokeswoman sought to play down the Facebook photo as a "joke".

But the German government condemned the photo. Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told Bild: "Anyone in politics who poses as Hitler is either a total idiot or a Nazi. Reasonable people do not follow idiots, and decent people don't follow Nazis."

Pegida focused on Leipzig after police banned a protest by the movement in Dresden on Monday over reports of an assassination plot against the movement's leaders.

Pegida supporters have been gathering in Leipzig

What is Pegida?

• Founded in Dresden by Lutz Bachmann in October 2014

• Acronym for Patriotische Europaer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West)

• Umbrella group for German right wing, attracting support from mainstream conservatives to neo-Nazi factions and football hooligans

• Holds street protests against what it sees as a dangerous rise in the influence of Islam over European countries

• Claims not to be racist or xenophobic

• 19-point manifesto says the movement opposes extremism and calls for protection of Germany's Judeo-Christian culture

What is Pegida?

A spokesman for state prosecutors in Dresden, the east German city which has been the focus of Pegida rallies this winter, told Reuters news agency that preliminary proceedings had been opened over comments attributed to Mr Bachmann.

"The suspicion is of incitement to popular hatred," the spokesman said.

Bild and another newspaper said Mr Bachmann had called asylum seekers "animals" and "scumbags".

Mr Bachmann has denied he is a racist,

Kathrin Oertel, a fellow founder of the Pegida movement, confirmed the resignation of Mr Bachmann, saying it related to online comments and not the photo.

"Pegida will go on," she added.

The movement has forced its way on to the political agenda in Germany with rallies that have attracted tens of thousands of people.

Deadly attacks by Islamist militants in Paris this month have fuelled anti-Muslim feeling.

In Leipzig, Pegida supporters gathered under German flags as riot police stood by.

BBC © 2015

Islamist cyber attacks' hit France

By Kevin Rawlinson

BBC News

Vice Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere warned of thousands of cyber attacks by Islamist groups a day before the media sites went down

Numerous French media websites have gone down a day after warnings of a wave of Islamist cyber attacks.

The sites of Le Parisien, Marianne and 20 Minutes were among those affected, although most were soon restored.

The French government said some 20,000 sites had been targeted after terror attacks in Paris left 17 dead.

The media sites' web host said that it was investigating whether it was one of them but it has ruled out an external distributed denial of service attack.

On Thursday, the head of cyber security for the French military, Vice Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere, said that "structured" groups and "well known Islamist hackers" were behind the attacks against the 20,000 sites, but did not elaborate.

The outage among the media websites began the following day. It is not yet known if the two are linked.

Le Parisien: an unexpected error has occurred, please try again later (Our team has been informed)

The web host Oxalide told the BBC that no line of enquiry was being dismissed, but that its initial investigations had ruled out the possibility of an external distributed denial of service attack.

Such an attack involves flooding servers with requests to render the target site, thereby causing it to fail to load.

The company told the BBC it was still in the process of determining who was behind the attack.

It said it would release a report in the early afternoon on Friday. None was forthcoming at the time of publication.

'Attacks'

That came after the vice admiral said he believed the first wave of attacks was a retaliation against Sunday's solidarity march in Paris, itself held in response to the Paris terror attacks.

According to to Agence France-Presse (AFP), he said "people who do not adhere to a certain number of values" expressed on that march were to blame.

Vice admiral Coustilliere added that some of the first wave of cyber attacks involved French army regiments and that the defence ministry "has decided to boost its security vigilance".

Besides the three named above, AFP reported that Friday's outage affected the websites of L'Express, Mediapart and France Info.

Those for France Inter, Slate and ZDNet were also among those affected from around 8am GMT on Friday.

High demand

The BBC checked the sites over the next five hours and most were quickly restored. Le Parisien and 20 Minutes remained down for a longer period but were available again by around 1pm.

The news came as it was announced that Charlie Hebdo, the magazine whose headquarters were attacked with the loss of 12 lives, has released its latest edition as a smartphone app to meet demand.

The magazine's front cover featured a weeping Muhammad and the message "all is forgiven". Millions of copies were printed - many times more than its usual circulation of around 60,000.

The print magazine went on sale in the UK on Friday. Many French outlets sold out within minutes and queues began forming in Britain early in the morning.

The app was available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

French Muslims feel deeply torn by viral ‘I am Charlie’ slogan

By Anthony Faiola

GENNEVILLIERS, France — Rather than fall quiet as requested during a national minute of silence last week, three boys in Hamid Abdelaali’s high school class in this heavily Muslim suburb of Paris staged an informal protest, speaking loudly through all 60 seconds.

Across France, they were not alone. In one school in Normandy, some Muslim students yelled “God is great!” in Arabic during that same moment. In a Paris middle school, another group of young Muslims politely asked not to respect the minute, arguing to their teacher, “You reap what you sow.”

Abdelaali, a 17-year-old high school senior who did observe the quiet minute, said he did so only because he was outraged by the killings in the name of his religion that were carried out at Charlie Hebdo — the satirical French newspaper attacked by Islamist extremists. But he also said he feels disgusted by a newspaper whose provocative cartoons had used the image of the prophet Muhammad for satire — and which continued to do so in its tragicomic first edition hitting newsstands Wednesday morning. “I know some kids who agreed with the attack,” he said. “I did not, but I also cannot say that I support what Charlie Hebdo is doing.”

Within France’s Muslim community of some 5 million — the largest in Europe — many are viewing the tragedy in starkly different terms from their non-Muslim compatriots. They feel deeply torn by the now-viral slogan “I am Charlie,” arguing that no, they are not Charlie at all.

Many of France’s Muslims — like Abdelaali — abhor the violence that struck the country last week. But they are also revolted by the notion that they should defend the paper. By putting the publication on a pedestal, they insist, the French are once again sidelining the Muslim community, feeding into a general sense of discrimination that, they argue, helped create the conditions for radicalization in the first place.

Unemployment and poverty remain far higher among France’s Muslims than in the nation overall. 

Joblessness and poverty are particularly high in heavily Muslim Paris suburbs such as Gennevilliers, an area of sprawling, dense apartment blocks where at least one of the gunmen — Chérif Kouachi, 32 — lived. On the streets here, Charlie Hebdo remains something different, a symbol of what some, such as Mohamed Binakdan, 32, describe as the everyday humiliation of Muslims in France.

“You go to a nightclub, and they don’t let you in,” said Binakdan, a transit worker in Paris. “You go to a party, they look at your beard, and say, ‘Oh, when are you going to Syria to join the jihad?’ Charlie Hebdo is a part of that, too. Those who are stronger than us are mocking us. We have high unemployment, high poverty. Religion is all we have left. This is sacred to us. And yes, we have a hard time laughing about it.”

There were also sharp differences Tuesday about the cover of Charlie Hebdo in its first edition since last Wednesday’s attack, which leaked late Monday. In it, Muhammad sheds a tear and holds one of the now-omnipresent signs saying “Je Suis Charlie” under a headline reading “All Is Forgiven.”

“I wasn’t shocked by this cartoon, it’s not as obscene as others might have been,” said Binakdan. “It was rather well done, way softer than what was published previous. At least they are not showing the prophet making love with a goat.”

Others in the Muslim community were less impressed. “My first reaction was angst, this does nothing to make things better,” said Nasser Lajili, 32, a Muslim city councilor and youth group leader in Gennevilliers. “I want to make clear that I completely condemn the attack on Charlie Hebdo. But I think freedom of speech needs to stop when it harms the dignity of someone else. The prophet for us is sacred.”

Some insisted there is a double standard in freedom of speech and expression here that is bias against Islam. They cite the 2010 so-called burqa ban in France that forbade “concealment of the face” in public, and which Muslim critics say was clearly aimed at devout Islamic women. They also point to the 2008 firing of a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist — Maurice Sinet, known as Siné — after he declined to apologize for a column that some viewed as anti-Semitic. Such action was not taken, Muslim groups note, after their protests over the paper’s Muhammad cartoons.

Almost 4 million people across France turned out Sunday in support of free speech. Yet, on Monday, for instance, a 31-year-old Tunisian-born man was sentenced to 10 months in jail after verbally threatening police and saying an officer shot in last week’s attack “deserved it.” Also on Monday, a Paris prosecutor opened an investigation against an anti-Semitic French comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, for a post on his Facebook page calling himself “Charlie Coulibaly” — a reference to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunmen who killed four people Friday inside a Paris kosher market.

The comedian — whose comedy show, which featured an explicit skit mocking the Holocaust, was banned last year for inciting hate — suggested that he was a victim of a double standard.

“My only goal is to make people laugh, and to laugh at death, since death makes fun of us all, as Charlie very well knows,” he wrote in a second Facebook post. He concluded by saying, “They consider me to be Amedy Coulibaly when I am no different from a Charlie.”

French Muslim officials are decrying an unprecedented wave of anti-Islamic incidents — at least 54 since last Wednesday, including arson attacks on mosques. Yet, some argue, French troops meant to ensure safety on French streets have been disproportionately deployed, putting emphasis on protecting Jewish synagogues and schools.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls sought to calm fears in the Muslim community, saying that “to attack a mosque, a church or a place of worship, to desecrate a cemetery, is an offense to our values. Islam is the second religion of France. It all has its place in France.”

Over the past few days, these societal divisions, in increasingly stark terms, have confronted the French. Virginie Artaud, a 44-year-old art teacher in the Paris suburbs, said her predominantly Muslim class of high school-aged students initially balked Friday when she proposed that they design posters and banners to be displayed at Sunday’s unity march against terrorism.

The world, her students told her, hardly takes notice when Palestinian or Syrian children are killed. Why all the attention for a humor magazine that openly mocks Islam’s prophet?

“I let them all express themselves, even though they were saying the worst things they had to say,” she said. “Everyone listened to each other, and at the end, they decided to make peaceful banners.”

But, she said, she was unsure whether any had attended the historic march. Artaud herself had a banner: a shiny silver placard she held aloft Sunday reading “All United, All Charlie,” along with blue facepaint spelling out the words “Freedom is non-negotiable.”

Griff Witte, Virgile Demoustier and Cléophée Demoustier in Paris contributed to this report for Washington Post 

نیند کی پراسرار بیماری سے لوگ نقل مکانی پر مجبور

 

ابھی تک ڈاکٹرز اس بیماری کی تشخیص نہیں پائے ہیں

 

وسطی ایشیا کے ملک قزاقستان کے ایک گاؤں کے رہائشیوں کو نیند کی ایک عجیب اور پراسرار بیماری کی وجہ سے دوسری جگہ منتقل کیا جا رہا ہے۔

 

قزاقستان کے شمال میں واقع گاؤں کلاچی کے رہائشیوں کو گذشتہ دو سال سے نیند کی ایک ایسی بیماری کا سامنا ہے جس کی وجوہات کے بارے میں ڈاکٹروں کو تاحال کوئی اندازہ نہیں ہو سکا ہے۔

 

اس بیماری میں لوگ اچانک سو جاتے ہیں اور پھر کئی کئی دن تک نہیں جاگتے۔

 

بیماری کا شکار افراد یادداشت میں کمی کی شکایت بھی کرتے ہیں جبکہ بعض کیسوں میں ہذیان کی شکایات بھی سامنے آئی ہیں۔

گاؤں میں ایک سو کے قریب ایسے کیس سامنے آ چکے ہیں اور اس بیماری کو’Sleepy Hollow‘  

 

یا کثرتِ خواب کا نام دیا گیا ہے اور اس میں بعض افراد ایک سے زائد بار متاثر ہوئے ہیں۔

 

 خبر رساں ایجنسی انٹرفیکس کے مطابق اب ہمسایہ اضلاع کے حکام نے اس گاؤں کے رہائشیوں کو پیشکش کی ہے کہ وہ ان کے علاقے میں آ کر آباد ہو سکتے ہیں اور ملازمتیں کر سکتے ہیں۔

 

 انٹرفیکس کے مطابق ضلع ایفیلے کے سربراہ ساؤلے اگیمباییوا نے کہا ہے کہ دوسری جگہ بسانے میں ترجیح ایسے خاندانوں کو دی جائے گی جن میں بچے اور عورتیں شامل ہوں۔

 

 اطلاعات کے مطابق 582 افراد، جو گاؤں کی آبادی کا نصف بنتے ہیں، ان کو دوسری جگہ منتقل کرنے کا منصوبہ ہے۔

 

اس بیماری سے بچے اور بڑے دونوں متاثر ہوتے ہیں۔

 

 اگور سیموسینکی کا بیٹا اس بیماری سے متاثر ہوا ہے۔ انھوں نے رشیا ٹو ڈے کو بتایا کہ ’اگر آپ اس کو اٹھانے کی کوشش کرتے ہیں، تو ایسا لگتا ہے کہ وہ آنکھیں کھولنا چاہتا ہے لیکن ایسا کر نہیں پاتا۔‘

 

 ابھی تک ڈاکٹر اس بیماری کی تشخیص نہیں کر پائے ہیں جبکہ بعض نے اسے بڑے پیمانے پر ذہنی عارضہ قرار دیا ہے۔

 

بعض دوسرے لوگوں کے خیال میں چونکہ گاؤں یورینیئم کی سابقہ کان کے نزدیک واقع ہے اور اس وجہ سے یہ بیماری لاحق ہو رہی ہے۔

 

 اس کان کو دو سال پہلے بند کر دیا گیا تھا تاہم اس واقعے کے بعد گاؤں کی مٹی اور پانی کے نمونوں کی جانچ کی گئی لیکن ان میں کسی قسم کی تابکاری یا کوئی اور مسئلہ سامنے نہیں آیا۔

BBC