PERSIAN GULF

IRAN, RUSSIA: CLOSE TO NUCLEAR-FUEL DEAL

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran and Russia said yesterday they were close to finalizing a long-delayed protocol on returning spent nuclear fuel to Russia, paving the way for the launch of a Russian-built nuclear power plant in southern Iran in 2006. Russia has said it will not ship nuclear fuel to Iran until both countries sign an agreement under which all spent fuel would be returned to Russia. The agreement is intended to prevent Iran from using spent fuel to make nuclear weapons.

“The agreement on returning spent nuclear fuel is in the final stage,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told reporters in Tehran. “I think it will be signed soon.”

The signing has been delayed repeatedly by what both countries say are mainly financial details. Iran says it doesn’t have facilities to store the spent fuel. Moscow wants to pay in order to take back the fuel to Russia.

The fuel agreement will pave the way for the inauguration in 2006 of Iran’s first light-water 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor being built by Russia in Bushehr, southern Iran. It was not immediately clear exactly when the agreement would be signed. The $800 million Bushehr contract has drawn years of protests from America, which says the project could help Tehran build nuclear weapons.

Mr. Lavrov, who arrived yesterday on an official visit, also called on Iran to implement a demand from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, that it freeze all work on uranium enrichment activities, including uranium reprocessing, a technology that can be to produce nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons. Iranian counterpart Kamal Kharrazi swiftly rejected the call.

– Associated Press

SOUTH ASIA

DEATH TOLL FROM RAINS IN INDIA RISES TO 177

GAUHATI, India – Rescuers searching through knee-deep water found 33 more bodies in India’s remote northeastern state of Assam yesterday, bringing the death toll from unseasonably heavy rains in South Asia to 177. Four days of devastating rainstorms triggered landslides in some parts of Assam and battered large areas of eastern India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, flattening mud houses and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless, officials said. In the hardest-hit district of Goalpara in Assam, receding waters yesterday revealed the bloated carcasses of thousands of cows, buffaloes, goats, and poultry, said local administrator Anil Mazumdar. Soldiers were helping villagers clear the carcasses to prevent the spread of disease, he said.

Rescue workers in rubber dinghies searched flooded villages and pulled out 33 more bodies. Rescue workers already recovered 61 bodies from scores of villages on Saturday as the flood waters began to recede. House collapses and drownings claimed at least 39 lives earlier in Goalpara, Gauhati, and the neighboring state of West Bengal. In the northern parts of neighboring Bangladesh, tornadoes and heavy rains killed 39 and injured hundreds. Five people were killed in landslides in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal on Saturday.

– Associated Press

FOUR DEAD IN BLAST AT SHIITE MOSQUE

LAHORE, Pakistan – A suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque yesterday in this eastern city killed four people, including two security guards who lost their lives confronting the attacker and preventing a far greater number of deaths.

About 70 to 80 people were inside the mosque for evening prayers when a man carrying a briefcase tried to enter but was blocked by the security guards, officials said. A bomb in the briefcase exploded after a scuffle, during which one of the guards opened fire.

“Our two security guards were martyred and the suicide bomber was killed,” said witness Sajjad Bhutta. The other dead man was a passer-by.

A Punjab province law minister, Raja Basharat Illahi, said four people, including the bomber, were killed at the Husainia Hall mosque during prayers. Eight others were wounded. Meanwhile, thousands of people mourned two Sunni Muslim clerics who were gunned down in Karachi on Saturday and authorities rounded up scores of people with links to militant groups to forestall more attacks.

The mosque bombing was the third this month against a religious target in Punjab in apparent rising strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

– Associated Press

EAST AFRICA

ARMY OFFICER ELECTED PRESIDENT OF SOMALIA

NAIROBI, Kenya – Members of Somalia’s transitional Parliament yesterday elected former army officer Abdullahi Yusuf as interim president for the war-torn Horn of Africa nation, the Parliament speaker said.

Mr. Yusuf won with 189 votes in a third round of voting, Shariif Hassan Sheik Aden told the 275-member transitional Parliament and regional foreign affairs ministers, who observed the vote. The former finance minister, Abdullahi Addow, garnered 79 votes in the last round, which narrowed the race to two candidates after none of the original 28 won a majority, Mr. Aden said. The vote – the final step in a peace plan to end a 13-year war – was held in Kenya because of a lack of security in Somalia, where the country is divided into fiefdoms controlled by warlords. Thousands of people have been killed in the war.

President-elect Yusuf will nominate Somalia’s prime minister, who then will name a Cabinet. The members of the transitional Parliament have an unwritten agreement to fill key government and legislative posts along clan lines. Mr. Yusuf is a member of one of Somalia’s four biggest clans, the Darod. He is expected to choose a prime minister from another big clan, the Hawiye, which controls Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

– Associated Press

CARIBBEAN

PEACEKEEPERS WOUNDED IN HAITI

GONAIVES, Haiti – Two U.N. peacekeepers were wounded in shootouts with supporters of Haiti’s ousted president in the capital and storm survivors in flood-ravaged Gonaives, the first casualties of the 4-month-old U.N. mission, officials said yesterday.

Relief workers from Doctors of the World also came under attack in Gonaives, and the French group said it was evacuating its staff of seven until security improves. Outside a memorial Mass for flood victims of Tropical Storm Jeanne, an Argentine soldier was shot in the arm Saturday night after protesters shouted abuse at visiting leaders of Haiti’s American-backed government, accusing them of not doing enough to help.

Heavy gunfire erupted in Port-au-Prince on Saturday as about 150 Brazilian troops in armored vehicles and 150 Haitian police in trucks rolled into the volatile slum of Bel Air, where armed young men have barricaded themselves behind torched vehicles and bonfires, demanding the return of Mr. Aristide from exile in South Africa. A Brazilian soldier was wounded in the foot, the first casualty among some 3,000 Brazilian-led peacekeepers, U.N. spokesman Toussaint Kongo-Doudou said. He said it appeared some gunmen were wounded.

The clashes came a day after the beheaded bodies of a father and son were found in the Port-au-Prince slum of La Saline.

– Associated Press