Nigeria

Police find 50 bodies in shrines, arrest 30

Police in eastern Nigeria discovered body parts, skulls and more than 50 corpses, some partly mummified, in shrines where a secretive cult was believed to have carried out ritual killings, officers said Thursday. Some victims may have died after swallowing poison to prove their innocence.

Two religious leaders and 28 others have been arrested in connection with the cult, which was feared and obeyed by people living near wooded areas — one known as “the evil forest” — where the 20 shrines were located, police said.

Investigators are searching near the town of Okija for more possible remains, police spokesman Kolapo Shofoluwe said. “We must go around the forest. As extensive as it is, it may take days,” he said.

New Delhi

Asia’s monsoon season death toll tops 1,880

Heavy rain inundated villages in western India, collapsing houses, washing away telephone lines and killing at least 24 people just a week after farmers prayed for rain to end a prolonged dry spell.

Rescue workers also found 10 more bodies as floodwaters receded in eastern Bihar state, relief officer Upendra Sharma said Thursday.

In Bangladesh, 22 people were reported dead from drowning, diarrhea, dysentery and snakebites Wednesday and Thursday.

The new deaths raised the toll from six weeks of monsoon floods in South Asia to 1,883, according to official figures compiled by The Associated Press. More than 1,000 of those deaths occurred in India, mostly from drownings, mudslides and waterborne diseases.

Afghanistan

Suspect charged with killing four journalists

Authorities have charged a man in the 2001 killings of four foreign journalists who were pulled from their vehicles and shot as they rushed to the Afghan capital after the collapse of the Taliban, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Reza Khan faces trial in the slaying of one victim and the rape of another, crimes he confessed to in an interview broadcast this week on state television.

The journalists were traveling in a convoy from the eastern city of Jalalabad when a group of armed men stopped them Nov. 19, 2001, six days after the Taliban militia abandoned Kabul in the wake of heavy U.S. bombing.

Those killed were Australian television cameraman Harry Burton; photographer Azizullah Haidari of Reuters new agency; Maria Grazia Cutuli of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera; and Julio Fuentes of Spanish daily El Mundo.

Mauritania

Locust plague sweeps south, swarming city

Clouds of locusts swarmed Nouakchott Thursday, crunching underfoot, blurring people’s vision and causing traffic accidents as sub-Sahara’s biggest plague of the insects in more than a decade swept south from the desert.

Burning bonfires of tires and trash, the people of Nouakchott tried to fight back the onslaught of the crop-eating bugs — estimated by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization to be moving as fast as 60 miles a day and settling at a rate 200,000 locusts per acre. The insects covered houses and roads.

“It’s beautiful to see and funny, the locusts on parade in the sky,” said Aicha Bint Sadibouh, of Noaukchott. “But when they invade the streets and homes, it’s disastrous.”

West Bank

Israel begins road for housing expansion plan

Israeli bulldozers churned across a West Bank hill Thursday gouging a rough road needed for a government plan to build housing in an area it hopes to make a permanent part of the Jewish state, despite strong objections from both the Palestinian leadership and the Bush administration.

The road would link the sprawling Jewish settlement of Maaleh Adumim to Jerusalem, four miles away, and officials confirmed Thursday that they foresee thousands of new homes along the route.

In another development, Israeli officials decided to allow Palestinian police to carry weapons again, which could help shore up the prestige of Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.