Afghanistan: Car explosion thwarts terrorism attempt

A car packed with explosives exploded in eastern Afghanistan, killing four people who apparently were planning a terrorist attack, an Afghan military official said Sunday.

Also Sunday, a loud explosion rattled the Afghan capital of Kabul not far from the U.S. Embassy and the international peacekeepers’ compound where a rocket hit last week. No injuries were reported in either incident.

Police in Kabul said Sunday’s explosion may have been caused by a rocket on the eastern edge of the city. The target was not immediately known, but it woke residents of the affluent Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, where many foreigners live.

The car blast late Saturday in Karwan Sarui, four miles east of the town of Khost, killed two unidentified Pakistani nationals and one man from Yemen, said Khial Baz, a regional commander.

Baz said the fourth man was Bacha Malkhui, a former intelligence officer for the deposed Taliban government. He was driving the car.

“They were planning some kind of terrorist attack, but we don’t know what their target was,” Baz told The Associated Press by telephone from Khost.

India: Hindu leader’s arrest renews fears of violence

A Hindu nationalist leader accused of inciting recent Hindu-Muslim rioting was arrested Sunday for defying a ban on a religious gathering, stoking fears of renewed violence, news reports said.

Pravin Togadiya, the general secretary of the World Hindu Council, was arrested near Ajmer city in Rajasthan state for presiding over the rally of 3,000 Hindu nationalists at which spears were distributed, according to the Press Trust of India.

Togadiya was accused of using inflammatory speeches to encourage religious violence last year, when Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in the western Gujarat state, killing more than 1,000 people.

Officials banned Sunday’s rally over fears that it would provoke more clashes between the groups. Ajmer city has large populations of both groups, and hundreds of police were deployed to prevent violence.

Greece: Bus crash kills 21

A bus carrying high school students crashed Sunday on a mountain road in northern Greece, killing 21 people and injuring at least 23 others, police said.

The bus went out of control after hitting a load of plywood that fell off a truck, police said.

Some of the injured were reported in serious condition. The bus was carrying 49 students and two teachers.

The students were returning to the northern Greek town of Makrohori after a field trip to Athens when the accident occurred along a main highway linking Athens with Thessaloniki.

Honduras: Restaurant shootout blamed on drug gangs

Gunmen opened fire on a restaurant in northern Honduras, killing 11 people and wounding seven others in what police said Sunday appeared to be a dispute between rival drug gangs.

Authorities found almost 11 pounds of cocaine in the back of the “Los Amigos de Clarisa” restaurant in San Pedro Sula after the eight assailants armed with AK-47 assault rifles killed nine men and two women Saturday night, police said.

The attackers fled and police said they have made no arrests.

San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city, 110 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, has been plagued by crime, kidnapping and drug trafficking for years.

It is also home to a street gang known as Mara whose members started a prison uprising in the nearby city of La Ceiba that killed 69 people a week ago.