Saudi Arabia

Five agents killed as pilgrimage begins

Five Saudi security agents were killed in a shootout with terror suspects Thursday in the Saudi capital, as nearly 2 million Muslims from around the world began the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca amid heightened security after a year of terror attacks in the kingdom.

Bombings killed 51 people, including eight Americans, at housing compounds for foreigners in 2003; Saudi and U.S. officials have blamed the al-Qaida network of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile.

Suspected terrorists exchanged fire with Saudi security forces raiding a house Thursday in Riyadh, and the Interior Ministry said five Saudi agents and the father of a suspect were killed. Several suspects were detained.

Mexico

Police questioned about border deaths

Authorities questioned 13 state police Thursday about drug trafficking and the murders of at least a dozen people, feeding fears that officers in the gritty border city of Ciudad Juarez take part in the crime they should be fighting.

The 13 officers were detained Wednesday. Their commander and three fellow officers were being sought.

A state police spokesman acknowledged officials have been unable to clean up the force despite firing about 300 officers in the past two years. Thousands of other local, state and federal lawmen in Mexico have been dismissed in recent years.

Hundreds of murders have gone unsolved in Ciudad Juarez, including the cases of dozens of young women who were strangled and dumped in the desert outside of city.

State police said the 13 officers focused on drug cases and were not involved in the investigations of the slain women, but they were linked to the bodies of 12 men found this weekend in the back yard of a house in a middle-class neighborhood.

Iraq

U.S. commander warns of al-Qaida presence

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq warned Thursday that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network was trying to gain a foothold here, citing the arrest of an operative who reported directly to one of the Sept. 11 masterminds.

U.S. military officials have generally played down the role of foreign or al-Qaida fighters, but Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez indicated that idea might be changing with the arrest of Hassan Ghul, a top al-Qaida operative.

Ghul was arrested by U.S.-allied Kurdish forces while trying to enter Iraq from Iran. Officials in Washington reported his arrest Saturday, describing him as a senior recruiter for al-Qaida who reported directly to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the architects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks who was captured in March.

Sanchez refused to say whether U.S. intelligence has identified active al-Qaida cells in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq.

Taiwan

Taiwan orders slaughter for bird flu threat

Health officials ordered the killing of thousands of ducks and chickens Thursday in central and southern Taiwan to control the latest outbreak of a bird flu that has swept across Asia, devastating poultry stocks and claiming the lives of at least 10 people.

The officials ordered the immediate slaughter of about 27,000 ducks and chickens after the virus was detected among birds at four farms between 20 and 100 miles from the central city of Taichung. A six-month quarantine also was placed on poultry farms within a two-mile radius of the affected birds.

Thursday’s announcement marked the latest known outbreak of the virus that was first reported among commercially sold birds last month in South Korea. The disease, which has hit countries in Southeast Asia especially hard, has been detected in 10 nations from Pakistan to Japan.

London

Cancer risk for X-rays near 2%, study says

The risk of cancer from common X-rays and increasingly popular CT scans ranges from less than 1 percent to about 3 percent, according to a new study.

The small risk posed by X-ray radiation is well-known, but the study by researchers from Oxford University and Cancer Research U.K. makes the most thorough effort to estimate it precisely, the scientists said.

Experts not involved in the study wrote in the journal The Lancet, which published the findings, that the benefits of X-rays and CT scans far outweigh the risk.

The American figure nearly doubled a 1981 estimate that about 0.5 percent of U.S. cancer cases were linked to X-rays. The new 0.9 percent estimate translates into 5,695 cases per year, the researchers said.