Explosion rocks Brussels train station, cops kill suspected bomber

Agencies
June 21, 2017

Brussels, Jun 21: Belgian soldiers shot and killed a suspected “terrorist” bomber after an explosion rocked a central Brussels train station Tuesday in the latest attack to hit Europe.

Brussels

Witnesses said the suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) before setting off the blast, which triggered a small but intense ball of flames in the station hall.

There were no other casualties apart from the suspect, who was confirmed dead by prosecutors hours after the attack.

Crying rail passengers fled the station after the explosion, with memories still fresh of last year’s metro and airport suicide attacks in the city that hosts the EU’s headquarters.

“This is considered as a terrorist attack,” federal prosecutor’s office spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt told a news conference outside the station.

The blast in Belgium came a day after a man mowed down Muslims near a mosque in London, and a suspected Islamist on a terror watchlist rammed a car laden with weapons into a police vehicle in Paris.

Brussels has been on high alert since suicide bombers struck the Zavantem Airport and Maalbeek metro station near the EU headquarters in March 2016, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds more.

The Islamic State group claimed the attacks, which were carried out by the same Brussels-based cell behind the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

Initial reports said the blast at Central Station could have come from an explosive belt, but subsequent accounts pointed to the blast coming from a suitcase.

Van Der Sypt said that at about 1830 GMT there was a “small explosion at Central Station here in Brussels.” “The suspect has been neutralised by the military that were present at the scene immediately after the explosion,” he said.

The incident happened well after rush hour, but hundreds of passengers were still evacuated from one of Belgium’s busiest stations. The nearby Grand Place, a major tourist destination, was also cleared.

“There were people crying, there were people shouting,” said Elisa Roux, a spokeswoman for the Belgian rail company SNCB. “There was a movement of panic.”

Hours after the incident the suspect’s body remained at the scene of confrontation as bomb squads searched the area. An AFP journalist reported that a controlled explosion was heard several hours after the attack.

Ball of fire

Social media images showed an intense yet contained ball of fire in a nearly empty underground arrival hall.

“I went down to the mezzanine level, someone was shouting. Then he yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’, and he blew up a wheeled suitcase,” Nicolas Van Herringer, a railway sorting agent, told reporters. “I was behind a wall when it exploded. I went down and alerted my colleagues to evacuate everyone. He (the suspect) was still around but after that we didn’t see him.”

Van Herrewegen added: “It wasn’t exactly a big explosion but the impact was pretty big. People were running away.”

He described the suspect as well-built and tanned with short hair, wearing a white shirt and jeans. “I saw that he had something on him because I could see wires emerging, so it may have been a suicide vest,” Van Herrewegen said.

Prosecutors told Libre Belgique that the individual was carrying a backpack and an explosive belt, before being shot down.

‘Under control’

About an hour after the events, the situation was “under control”, the federal crisis centre said in a tweet. It said it was keeping the country’s terror alert at level 3, the second highest.

“The centre of Brussels is calm,” mayor Philippe Close said in a tweet.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel hailed the “courage” of security forces and said he would chair a security council meeting on Wednesday morning.

Gare Centrale is largely underground, located in the heart of Brussels, a few blocks from the Grand Place and the Manneken Pis statue.

It appeared that the suspect was shot by soldiers deployed at railway stations and landmark buildings since the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, when a link to Brussels was first established.

Belgium suffered another shock last August when a machete-wielding man shouting “Allahu akbar” attacked two policewomen in the industrial town of Charleroi, before being shot dead.

The country’s law enforcement agencies and intelligence services came under intense scrutiny for apparently missing a series of leads after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers.

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Agencies
March 25,2020

Moscow, Mar 25: An earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale struck off Russia's Kuril Islands on Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

The magnitude of the quake, which occurred at 2:49 am (UTC), was registered at a depth of 56.7 kilometres, about 219 kilometres southeast of the Russian town of Severo-Kuril'sk, the USGS said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage to the property as a result of the quake.
Further details are awaited.

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Agencies
February 23,2020

Wuhan, Feb 23: Ninety-seven more people died in China due to coronavirus, taking the death toll to 2,442, officials said on Sunday, as a team of WHO experts visited the worst-affected Wuhan city in Hubei province.

By the end of Saturday, a total of 2,442 people had died of the disease and 76,936 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus infection had been reported in 31 provincial-level regions, China's National Health Commission (NHC) said in its daily update on Sunday.

Ninety-six deaths were reported from Hubei province and one from Guangdong province on Saturday besides 648 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infections, it said.

Hubei province, where the virus first emerged in December last, reported 630 new confirmed cases, taking the total confirmed cases in the hard-hit province to 64,084, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The NHC also said China's daily number of newly cured and discharged novel coronavirus patients has surpassed that of new confirmed infections for the fifth consecutive day, indicating that cases of infections are coming down.

Saturday saw 2,230 people walk out of hospital after recovery, much higher than the number of the same day's new confirmed infections, which was 648, Xinhua reported.

A total of 22,888 patients infected with the novel coronavirus had been discharged from hospital after recovery by the end of Saturday, NHC said.

Meanwhile, a team of public health experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) visited Wuhan on Saturday to conduct a detailed probe about the virus which reportedly originated from a seafood market in the city in December last year.

The NHC said WHO experts along with their Chinese counterparts who formed a joint investigation team have held talks with the local health authority in Wuhan and visited relevant healthcare institutions.

The UN team comprises specialists from the United States, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore and South Korea, Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported.

The 12-member team, which arrived in China on Monday, was initially designated to visit only Beijing, Guangdong and Sichuan provinces, while the worst-affected Hubei province and its capital Wuhan were missing from the list.

However, the team was finally given permission to visit Wuhan by the Chinese government.

Besides controlling the spread of the virus, a major task for the WHO team along with their Chinese counterparts was to come up with standard medicine to cure the disease.

The NHC said on Saturday that the team had met top Chinese respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan in Guangdong, and visited the centre for disease control and prevention in Guangdong and the city of Shenzhen, and Sichuan.

The specialists also discussed quarantine measures, the wild animal trade and community prevention measures with their Chinese counterparts, it said.

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News Network
March 16,2020

Manila, Mar 16: The Philippines has detected an outbreak of avian flu in a northern province after tests showed presence of the highly infectious H5N6 subtype of the influenza A virus in a quail farm, the country's farm minister said on Monday.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the bird flu virus, the same strain that hit some local poultry farms in 2017, was detected in Jaen municipality in Nueva Ecija province, where about 1,500 quails had died on one farm alone.

A total of 12,000 quails have been destroyed and buried to prevent further infections, Dar said, citing field reports.

"We are on top of the situation," he said. "Surveillance around the 1-km and 7-km radius will be carried out immediately to ensure that the disease has not progressed around the said perimeter."

Animal quarantine checkpoints have also been set up to restrict the movement of all live domestic birds to and from the quarantine area, he said.

"We would like to emphasise that this is a single case affecting one quail farm only," Dar said.

Dr. Arlene Vytiaco, technical spokeswoman for avian flu at the agriculture department, said that while there is a possibility of transmission to humans through excretion and secretion, "the chances are very slim".

"There is also zero mortality rate," she said.

Dar said his department and the local government were jointly conducting an investigation and contact-tracing to determine the source of infection.

To ensure steady domestic supply of poultry, he said the transport of day-old chicks, hatching eggs and chicken meat will be allowed provided the source farms have tested negative for bird flu.

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