SOUTHEAST ASIA

POLICE DETAIN MAN IN BALI PROBE

BALI, Indonesia – Investigators have arrested a man who shared a rented house with the Bali suicide bombers in what could be the first major breakthrough in this month’s deadly attacks on three crowded restaurants, police said yesterday.

The arrest Sunday of a 45-year-old construction worker, identified only as Hasan, was the first since the October 1 attacks that killed 23 people, including the bombers. The man had been living with the three bombers on the outskirts of the Bali capital Denpasar for about a month, but disappeared days before the blasts, said national police spokesman Brigadier General Sunarko Artanto.

– Associated Press

WEST AFRICA

LIBERIANS VOTE IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

MONROVIA, Liberia – Liberians stood in long lines under a broiling sun to vote yesterday as this West African nation held its first presidential elections since the end of a civil war in 2003.

At one station, people started lining up at 2 a.m., six hours before polls opened.

Twenty-two candidates are vying for the top job in Liberia, in tatters after 14 years of nearly continuous civil war that ended with a peace deal in August 2003. A transitional government has arranged the vote and 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers are keeping the calm. Candidates are promising to keep the peace, while rebuilding government-run water and electricity plants and creating jobs in a country where less than a quarter of the population is employed.

– Associated Press

SOUTH AMERICA

COLOMBIAN SENATOR SURVIVES CAR BOMB ATTACK

BOGOTA, Colombia – A senator allied to President Uribe in his offensive against Colombia’s rebel groups survived a car bomb attack on his convoy that wounded nine people, including three of his bodyguards.

The explosion took place late Monday in northern Bogota near the offices of Caracol radio where Senator German Vargas – who has previously been targeted by leftist rebels – had participated in a radio talk show. He was in his bulletproof car when the bomb went off and was unhurt. Mr. Uribe rushed to the scene minutes after the attack, walking across the debris-strewn boulevard to inspect the damage. He said two of Mr. Vargas’s bodyguards were injured lightly and one more seriously. Police said nine people were hurt.

– Associated Press

MIDDLE EAST

AK-47S USED IN SAUDI ATTACK TRACED BACK TO YEMEN

SAN’A, Yemen – Two AK-47 assault rifles used in a deadly attack on the American consulate in Saudi Arabia have been traced to Yemen’s Defense Ministry, according to Western and Yemeni officials, raising new fears that the country isn’t doing enough to fight terrorism. The disclosure comes five years after Al Qaeda-linked terrorists bombed the USS Cole destroyer on October 12, 2000, at the port in San’a, the capital, killing 17 sailors.

In other worrying developments, Yemeni militants are believed to be among foreigners fighting American-led coalition forces in Iraq, American and Iraqi officials have said.

– Associated Press

SHARP RISE IN HAMAS FEMALE BOMB MAKERS

TULKAREM, West Bank – Hamas’s first female bomb maker is a 22-year-old university graduate who was recruited in Gaza and sent to the West Bank to teach others to assemble explosives, Israeli security officials said, noting a sharp rise in the use of women by militant groups in the past two years.

The male-run Hamas insisted yesterday it is not promoting women into central roles, while relatives of the suspected bomb maker, Samar Sabih, said the newlywed rarely left home and had no contact with militants.

Ms. Sabih was arrested at her home in the West Bank town of Tulkarem in late August, in a nighttime raid involving more than a dozen jeeps and a helicopter, said her father-in-law, Jaber Sabih. Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced the arrest on Monday, after lifting a gag order.

The Shin Bet said Ms. Sabih was recruited by Hamas in Gaza’s Jebaliya refugee camp, where she grew up, and was taught to build bombs. Ms. Sabih, a graduate of Arab language studies at Gaza City’s Islamic University, was engaged to her 22-year-old cousin, Rasmi, a construction worker in Tulkarem, and obtained a rare permit from Israel to move to the West Bank in order to join him.

– Associated Press

CENTRAL ASIA

TALIBAN REBELS KILL 19 POLICE OFFICERS

KABUL, Afghanistan – Suspected Taliban rebels ambushed a police convoy traveling on a mountain road in southern Afghanistan, killing 19 officers in the deadliest attack ever on the fledgling police force, officials said yesterday.

Five other officers were missing and feared dead or kidnapped after the attack late Monday on the convoy of 150 police as they drove on a dirt road along the side of a mountain in Helmand province, an Interior Ministry spokesman, Yusuf Stanikzai, said. Dozens of insurgents opened fire on the convoy, sparking a gun battle that lasted until early yesterday, when the militants fled into the mountains, he said.

– Associated Press

CENTRAL EUROPE

IRAN SIGNALING COMPROMISE TO AVOID SECURITY COUNCIL REFERRAL

VIENNA, Austria – Iran has signaled it may grant access to sites linked to possible work on nuclear weapons and other demands from the U.N. atomic watchdog agency to avoid referral to the Security Council, diplomats said yesterday.

The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive negotiations, said a high-ranking delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency was in Tehran yesterday to discuss details of a possible Iranian offer.

– Associated Press

SCIENCE

ANTHROPOLOGISTS UNCOVER JAWBONE OF ANOTHER ANCIENT ‘HOBBIT’

Scientists digging in a remote Indonesian cave have uncovered a jaw bone that they said adds more evidence that a tiny prehistoric Hobbit-like species once existed.

The jaw is from the ninth individual believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a wet cave on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian archipelago, near Australia.

– Associated Press