International/Local News
Scotsman drowns in whisky vat
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A manager at the Glenfiddich distillery has drowned in a giant vat of whisky.
Brian Ettles, 46, allegedly threw himself into a 16ft wooden tank filled with water and yeast on Saturday night.
Firemen and paramedics tried to rescue him from the 50,000-litre container, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The father of two had worked at the site in Dufftown, in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, for 22 years.
The tragedy came a day after his wife, Irene, had celebrated her 54th birthday.
The Glenfiddich Distillery, which is a popular tourist attraction, was closed on Monday as a mark of respect to Mr Ettles.
Grampian Police said they were not treating the death as suspicious.
Twenty dead in Pakistan bombing
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Twenty dead in Pakistan bombing – A bomb exploded close to a bus in northwest Pakistan today, killing 20 people in the deadliest blast in the country in several months, a government official said.
The motive for the attack in the Khyber region, close to the Afghan border, was not known, but in the past Islamist militants have shown no hesitation in targeting civilians. Khyber is home to several extremist factions that are fighting the government.
Most of the victims were passengers on the bus, said local government official Iqbal Khan. The blast wounded at least 24 other people.
He said that the device was likely detonated by remote control.
Islamist militants with links to al-Qaida have carried out hundreds of bombings in Pakistan since 2007.
Many hundreds of soldiers, police, government officials and civilians have been killed.
The Pakistani army has carried out offensives against the militants in their strongholds in tribally administered regions like Khyber, but the insurgents have proven to be a resilient foe. The violence has triggered fears in the West that nuclear-armed Pakistan may be buckling under extremism.
The frequency of large-scale attacks outside of the northwest has decreased over the last 18 months.
The last major bombing was in September close to the Swat Valley, when a suicide bomber hit a funeral of a tribal elder opposed to the Taliban, killing 31
UK security forces tracked car of alleged IRA man
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DUBLIN—A prosecutor says British anti-terror agents placed an electronic surveillance device on a car used by an alleged Irish Republican Army dissident charged with killing a Northern Ireland policeman.
The claim came on Monday’s opening of the murder trial of John Wootton and Brendan McConville.
Both men deny fatally shooting policeman Stephen Carroll through the head in a March 2009 ambush claimed by the Continuity IRA splinter group. Carroll was the first policeman killed in Northern Ireland since 1998, the year of the territory’s peace accord.
State prosecutor Ciaran Murphy told Belfast Crown Court that police could connect both defendants to the killing partly because a tracking device hidden in Wootton’s car placed him at the scene of the attack.
Iran sentences American ‘spy’ to death
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AN American ex-Marine, who also holds Iranian citizenship, has been sentenced to death by an Iran judge for spying for the CIA, the Fars news agency reports.
Amir Mirzai Hekmati, 28, was “sentenced to death for co-operating with a hostile nation, membership of the CIA and trying to implicate Iran in terrorism”, the verdict said, according to Fars today.
Hekmati, who was born in the United States to an Iranian immigrant family, was shown on Iranian state television in mid-December saying in fluent Farsi and English that he was a Central Intelligence Agency operative sent to infiltrate the Iranian intelligence ministry.
He had been arrested months earlier.
Iranian officials said his cover was blown by agents for Iran who spotted him at the US-run Bagram military air base in neighbouring Afghanistan.
But Hekmati’s family in the United States told US media he had travelled to Iran to visit his Iranian grandmothers and he was not a spy.
In his sole trial hearing, on December 27, prosecutors relied on Hekmati’s “confession” to say he tried to penetrate the intelligence ministry by posing as a disaffected former US soldier with classified information to give.
The United States has demanded Hekmati’s release.
The State Department said Iran has not permitted diplomats from the Swiss embassy – which handles US interests in the absence of US-Iran ties – to see Hekmati before or during his trial.
Meanwhile Iran says it has arrested an unidentified number of “spies” who allegedly sought to carry out US plans and disrupt an upcoming parliamentary election, intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi said.
“Those arrested were after carrying out American plans and operations to disrupt the parliamentary election using cyber space and social networks,” Moslehi told reporters after a cabinet session on Sunday, state media reported.
Moslehi did not say when or how many people were arrested, nor did he reveal their nationalities.
But he said they were also in contact with people abroad, through the internet, as Iran braces to hold a legislative election on March 2, its first poll since the disputed 2009 presidential election.
Immigration bungle sees US teenager deported
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A Texas teenager who was deported to Colombia after claiming to be an illegal immigrant was reunited with her family in the United States yesterday.
The 15-year-old girl is at the centre of an international mystery over how a minor could be sent to a country where she is not a citizen.
Her family has asked why US officials didn’t do more to verify Jakadrien Lorece Turner’s identity. They say she is not fluent in Spanish and had no ties to Colombia. US and Colombian officials have pointed fingers over who is responsible.
Immigration experts say cases of mistaken identity are rare, but people can slip through the cracks, especially if they don’t have legal help or family members working on their behalf. But they say US immigration authorities had the responsibility to determine if a person is a citizen.
Jakadrien’s saga began when she ran away from home in November 2010. Houston police said when the girl was arrested, on April 2 last year, for misdemeanour theft she claimed to be Tika Lanay Cortez, a Colombian woman born in 1990. It was unclear if she has been living under that name.
When her name was run through a database to determine if she was wanted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the results were negative and the county sheriff’s office booked her on the theft charge.
A search of all available databases and interviews to establish her identity and immigration status in the country yielded nothing, so a sheriff’s office employee recommended that an immigration detainer be put on her, and upon her release from jail, she was returned to ICE custody.
US immigration officials insist they found nothing to indicate that the girl wasn’t a Colombian illegal immigrant. An official said she claimed to be Cortez throughout the criminal and ensuing deportation process.
11 Syria troops killed in clashes with deserters
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HEAVY clashes have broken out between the Syrian army and deserters, leaving 11 of its soldiers dead, human rights activists said.
Another 20 soldiers were wounded in the fighting in Daraa province, south of the capital, while nine soldiers defected to join the rebel troops, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
In addition to the deadly clashes in the village of Basr al-Harir, the Britain-based watchdog also reported heavy machinegun exchanges between the army and deserters in the Daraa town of Dael. There was no immediate word on any casualties.
Cradle of the protests against President Bashar al-Assad that erupted in March, Daraa has been one of the provinces hardest hit by the deadly crackdown unleashed by his regime.
The latest deaths came as Arab League foreign ministers prepared to meet in Cairo to review the record of a widely criticised observer mission to Syria, in the face of growing calls for the bloc to cede to the United Nations the lead role in trying to end the bloodshed.
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