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Friday, April 11, 2014
Colombia ( Colombia to Extradite Accused Killers of U.S. DEA Agent )
BOGOTA – President Juan Manuel Santos announced Thursday that he signed the order to extradite to the United States the seven Colombians accused of the June 2013 kidnapping and murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.
Santos made the announcement in an interview with La FM radio, eight days after Colombia’s Supreme Court authorized the extraditions after determining that James Terry Watson was a protected person in the United States.
“I already signed it,” the president responded to a question on the matter without making any further comment.
The measure affects Andres Alvaro Oviedo Garcia, Hector Leonardo Lopez, Julio Stiven Garcia Ramirez, Edgar Javier Bello Murillo, Wilson Daniel Peralta Bocachica, Omar Fabian Valdes Gualtero and Edwin Gerardo Figueroa Sepulveda, and now it only remains to set the date on which the transfer will be made.
Watson was killed on June 20, 2013, in a leisure area in northern Bogota by a gang of robbers who specialized in staging “millionaire” kidnappings, whereby they force their victim to remove money from ATMs.
The DEA agent took a taxi after leaving a restaurant and immediately members of the band tried to rob him, but Watson resisted, which led to a struggle in which he was stabbed several times and injured with electric shocks.
Although Watson managed to get out of the taxi alive, he died a few hours later at a Bogota hospital.
A few days later, the Colombian police identified and arrested the seven members of the gang and a U.S. federal grand jury in Virginia handed down indictments against them last July.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Pittsburgh ( Student Stabs 22 People at Pittsburgh-Area High School )
WASHINGTON – Twenty-one students and an adult were injured, at least two of whom are in critical condition, when a teenage boy dressed in black and armed with knives attacked students and staff at a high school in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, officials said.
“A critical incident has occurred at the high school. All elementary schools are canceled, the middle school and high school students are secure,” said the Westmoreland County school district in a statement posted on its Web site.
A 16-year-old boy – identified by authorities as Alex Hribal – was arrested after the incident at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Pittsburgh, and police said he is the attacker and is a student at the school, the spokesman for the county’s Emergency Department, Dan Stevens, told reporters.
He added that the attack began shortly before the first class of the day, lasted only minutes and the attacker wielded two knives 20 and 25 centimeters (8 and 10 inches) long.
The suspect was later questioned by police and taken to a hospital for minor head injuries.
Initial reports broadcast by local television say that the attacker went through the high school’s halls acting “crazy” and stabbing as many students as he could before he was overpowered.
Several of the injured were taken to medical centers by helicopter with eight of them being transported to the Forbes Regional Hospital in Monroeville with stab wounds, Pittsburg’s Channel 4 TV reported.
Forbes Hospital physician Mark Rubino said that three of the students required surgery and two are in critical condition. Other medical authorities said that at least seven people were seriously injured with cuts and penetrating wounds in the chest and abdomen.
Murrysville police chief Thomas Seefeld said that the school’s assistant principal, Sam King, was the person who grabbed and subdued the knife-wielding teen before police arrived but not before a security guard who had confronted the attacker was stabbed in the abdomen.
U.S. President Barack Obama sent a message of solidarity to the relatives and victims of the attack from Texas, where he is attending the funeral services for the victims of the shooting attack last week that left four people dead and 16 wounded on the Fort Hood military base.
Franklin High School has about 1,200 students.
ISLAMABAD ( 16 Dead in Blast on Train in Pakistan )
ISLAMABAD – At least 16 people died and 40 were wounded Tuesday in an explosion aboard a passenger train in the southwestern town of Sibi, Pakistani police told Efe.
The blast occurred about 1:30 p.m. inside a passenger car where more than 80 people were riding, according to Mohammed Akbar, a spokesman for the police in Sibi, which is in Baluchistan province.
The train was headed north from Quetta, the provincial capital, to Rawalpindi.
The explosion and subsequent fire could have been produced by a bomb that was detonated long-distance, according to sources cited by the daily Dawn.
Some of the injured are in critical condition.
The blast occurred after on Monday at least 22 insurgents died in combat with members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in Baluchistan.
Three people have been killed and more than 60 wounded so far this year in attacks on Pakistan’s rail network.
Several of the attacks were in Baluchistan, a region that is very much affected by insurgent violence linked to Islamist groups and independence-minded Baluchi organizations.
Mexico City ( More Missing Persons Located in Mexico Children’s Shelter Scandal )
MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said it has located three people who went missing six years ago from a children’s shelter in this capital, two of whom are now adults.
It said in a statement that its organized crime unit and the local branch of the AG’s office in the central state of Puebla located the three individuals on April 2.
The AG’s office noted that 15 kids went missing in 2008 from the Casitas del Sur children’s refuge in Mexico City and two other private shelters for minors in northern and southeastern Mexico, prompting the Federal District Attorney’s Office to raid the Mexico City establishment and arrest its administrators.
The AG’s office also launched a search for the youths and members of the evangelical Restored Christian Church who operated the shelters and “were responsible for removing the minors and giving them to other members of the same congregation,” the statement said.
To date, the AG’s office’s organized crime and people-trafficking units have recovered 12 of the 15 missing persons, who have been fully identified and reunited with their relatives, the statement said.
The scandal erupted in 2008 when a woman reported that her granddaughter had disappeared from the Casitas del Sur shelter.
At least seven people – including Restored Christian Church leader Antonio Domingo Paniagua Escandon, a dual Spanish-Mexican citizen – are currently being prosecuted for the disappearance of the minors.
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