Ramban,May 04: Two persons died and five were injured in a fire at a hotel in Sanasar area of Ramban.
District Magistrate Ramban has ordered a magisterial probe into the matter.
As per reports reaching news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), fire broke out at in Hotel Maa Shanti in Sanasar tourist resort in the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday. In the incident, two people lost their lives while five people were evacuated in injured condition.
Officials said that a fire fighting operation was launched after the incident.
Meanwhile, District Magistrate Ramban has ordered an inquiry into the incident with Additional District Magistrate (Additional Deputy Commissioner Ramban) as its head.
Tehsildar Batote as well as Assistant Director Fire and Emergency Services Ramban will assist the inquiry officer, District Magistrate said—(KNO)
Rs 2L ex-gratia given to kin of girl who died by falling into open pit
Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) handed over a check of Rs 2 lakhs to the family of Mounika, the girl who recently died after falling into a pit in Kalasiguda.
Maunika’s family has been assured of from the government.
The Mayor Gadwal Vijayalakshmi on Saturday visited Kalasiguda, Secunderabad, where a 10-year-old girl fell into an open manhole and lost her life.
This is very unfortunate that 10-year-old Mounika in a bid to help her brother fell in drain & lost her life in Secunderabad.
It is definitely failure of civic body & GHMC sponsored death. Taking responsibility of series of deaths due to manholes, potholes and stray dogs,… https://t.co/8Km5yCC0jT
The incident took place when Mounica was going home with her older brother after purchasing groceries.
She fell into a manhole while trying to save her brother from falling into it. Her body was found by the GHMC DRF team and local police in a nala near Park Lane, Secunderabad.
Speaking to reporters, the mayor termed the incident unfortunate. “Action will be taken against the engineer. An ex-gratia Rs of 2 lakhs has been announced for Monica’s family,” Vijayalakshmi said.
In another incident that occurred on Tuesday, a six-year-old boy died after falling into a pit filled with rainwater.
Vivek accidentally fell into the pit while playing nearby and drowned. The incident occurred on Jubilee Hills Road Number 45.
The boy fell into a pit in an open space beside a motorbike showroom where his father was employed.
The family had shifted to Hyderabad from Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh about six years ago. The boy’s father Bheema Shankar works as a watchman in a motorbike showroom.
Ali Hussein Jaloud, a 21-year-old Iraqi who lives next to one of BP’s biggest oilfields, was meant to ask a question at the company’s annual shareholder meeting today. He was going to challenge the CEO on why his company continues to poison his neighbourhood with cancer-causing pollution. But, just a few days ago, Ali died of a form of leukaemia that has been linked to chemicals released by the burning of fossil fuels. His grieving father will ask why BP did not use its vast profits to help save his life.
Over the past two years, my fellow investigator Owen Pinnell and I got to know Ali while making a documentary for BBC News Arabic, Under Poisoned Skies, which revealed the deadly impact of gas flaring in southern Iraq, including at BP’s Rumaila oilfield where Ali lives, surrounded by oil company-patrolled checkpoints. We also found out that Rumaila has more gas flaring than any other oilfield in the world.
Routine gas flaring is a wasteful and avoidable practice used by oil companies to burn off the natural gas expelled during drilling. The process releases both greenhouse gases and dangerous air pollution. The gas could be captured instead and used to power people’s homes, saving them from dangerous emissions. But for more than a decade, BP and its partners have failed to build the necessary infrastructure. Since the Iraq war, BP has extracted oil worth £15.4bn from the country. BP said it was “extremely concerned” by the issues raised by our film (and in February said it was working to reduce flaring and emissions at Rumaila) but announced record profits from the oilfield in the year we launched the film.
A keen footballer, Ali was diagnosed with leukaemia at 15. He had to drop out of school and his football team, and embark on two painful years of treatment. His family had to sell their furniture and take donations from their community to pay for it. “Sometimes I wished I would die so that I could stop torturing my parents,” he told us. But, miraculously, Ali survived. He was too old to return to school, so he set up a small mobile phone shop.
Ali had been told by doctors that pollution had probably caused his cancer, and he quietly started advocating for a greener Iraq, one where children could breathe clean air. In his last Instagram post, just days before his death, Ali called for the oil companies to stop routine gas flaring and “save the youth of the country from kidney failure and cancer”.
‘In Iraq, the law states that gas flaring shouldn’t be closer than 10km (6 miles) from people’s homes.’ Excess gas is burned off near workers at the Rumaila oil field, south of Basra. Photograph: Atef Hassan/REUTERS
Rumaila, the town where Ali was living, is heavily guarded and journalists are denied access, so we asked Ali to record video diaries documenting his daily life. In the first scene of our film, he opens his front gate to reveal a towering black cloud of smoke, just a few hundred metres away, beneath which children play hopscotch. In Iraq, the law states that gas flaring shouldn’t be closer than 10km (6 miles) from people’s homes.
“These children are happily playing, they’re not aware of the poison that is coursing through their veins,” he says over the video. In the next shot, he loads his cute five-year-old nephew, Abyas, on to the front of his motorbike and they scoot off, passing the primary school, which is also engulfed in thick black smoke, before arriving at a spot by the canal where gas flares punctuate the skyline in every direction.
When we showed that footage to David Boyd, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, he called it “a textbook example of a modern sacrifice zone, where profit is put above human life and the environment”.
Ali helped us uncover high levels of the cancer-causing chemical, benzene, produced by gas flaring, in the air and bodies of children living in his community. Benzene is known to cause acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) – the cancer from which Ali and many other children we met were suffering. After our documentary appeared, the Iraqi government acknowledged, for the first time, the link between the oil industry’s pollution and the local population’s health problems.
In December 2022, we found out Ali’s leukaemia had returned. His doctor in Iraq said that his only option was palliative care. But his father, who described Ali as his best friend, refused to accept this. He found a doctor at Columbia University who said that Ali could be eligible for experimental T-cell therapy. A supporter of the film, Callum Grieve, began a fundraising campaign to try to raise the £70,000 needed to send him to India. The donations were steady, but relied on the generosity of ordinary people with only small sums to give.
I began to notice in our calls with Ali that his face looked bloated, and his cheekbones hidden because of the effects of steroids. But I had no idea we would lose him so soon. On Friday 21 April, the first night of Eid, we received the terrible news that Ali had died. We had already lost to cancer three of the children we got to know while making this film.
A Guardian investigation found that nine million people a year die as a result of air pollution. Getting to know Ali helped to make that feel like much more than a statistic.
Despite the barren and apocalyptic landscape Ali grew up in, he was a keen gardener. He used to send us videos of him watering the tiny, sparse patch in his front yard where he grew a handful of small palms and some unusual species like the “bambara” or white mulberry tree. When we showed him pictures of the countryside in England, he marvelled at the greenery and the clear skies. It contrasted so starkly with the constantly orange and acrid sky he was used to.
Companies like BP are still breaking Iraq’s law by gas flaring illegally close to people’s homes. If you are looking down on us now, Ali, please know that your death will not be in vain. Britain’s biggest pension fund, Nest, and other investors are launching a shareholder rebellion against BP for rolling back on its climate targets. They told us their actions were partly inspired by our film. And this story could help secure justice for the thousands of lives put at risk by pollution from fossil fuel companies.
Jess Kelly is a documentary film-maker and journalist. Owen Pinnell also contributed to this piece.
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At least 150 civilians may have been killed and many more injured in an attack allegedly perpetrated by Burkina Faso’s security forces, the UN high commissioner for human rights has said.
In a statement on Tuesday, the commissioner, Ravina Shamdasani, called for a prompt, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into what it called the “horrific killing of civilians” in the village of Karma, in northern Yatenga province.
On Monday, Burkina Faso’s prosecutor said it had opened an investigation into the killings but put the death toll at 60, less than half the number estimated by the UN and local people.
According to a statement released on Tuesday by locals from Karma, the attack last Thursday began when a large group of armed men in military fatigues entered the town on motorcycles and armoured pickup trucks.
“Some villagers, happy to see ‘our soldiers’, came out of their houses to welcome them. Unfortunately, this joy was cut short when the first shots rang out, also causing the first casualties,” said the statement from the villagers.
Jihadi fighters linked to al-Qaida and Islamic State have waged a violent insurgency in Burkina Faso for seven years. The violence has killed thousands of people and divided the country, leading to two coups last year.
Since Capt Ibrahim Traore seized power in September 2022 during the second coup, extrajudicial killings of civilians have increased, according to rights groups and residents.
This incident – one of the deadliest against civilians by security forces – comes amid mounting allegations that the military is committing abuses against those it believes to be supporting the jihadis.
Earlier this month, Burkina Faso’s government announced it was opening other investigations into allegations of human rights abuses by its security forces, after a video surfaced that appeared to show the extrajudicial killing of seven children in the country’s north.
The Associated Press this month published its own findings about the video. AP’s investigation determined that Burkina Faso’s security forces killed the children in a military base outside the town of Ouahigouya.
Days before last week’s attack, about 40 security personnel were killed near Ouahigouya. Survivors said the soldiers accused them of being jihadi accomplices, by letting them pass through their town, according to the statement from the villagers.
Since the violence, people in the community have not been able to bury their relatives as an army roadblock prevented them reaching the village, said the statement.
Conflict analysts said the alleged abuses would create a backlash against Burkina Faso’s junta and drive people into the hands of the jihadis.
“The reported human rights abuses advance the playbook of militants, it gives them talking points against the security forces and helps their recruitment efforts in the north. This is an awful recipe of consequences,” said Laith Alkhouri, the CEO of Intelonyx Intelligence Advisory, which provides intelligence analysis.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Geneva: The World Health Organization (WHO) said that 413 people have died in the current Sudan conflict, while the UN children’s agency said children are paying a high price, with at least nine reportedly killed in the fighting and more than 50 badly injured, Turkish News Agency Anadolu reported.
WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris told in a UN press conference that according to figures from the government in Sudan, 413 people have died and 3,551 injured in the conflict.
The fighting is part of ongoing clashes between the country’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). She said there had been 11 verified attacks on health facilities, including 10 since April 15.
“According to the Ministry of Health in Sudan, the number of health facilities that have stopped working is 20. And also, according to Ministry of Health numbers, the number of health facilities at risk of stopping is 12,” said Harris.
“So this means that all those people who need care, and this is not only the people who’ve been injured hearings, terrible fighting, but that the people who were needing treatment before and continuing treatment,” are impacted, said the WHO spokesperson, Anadolu reported.
At the same press conference, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said, “Clearly, as ever, the fighting takes a devastating toll on children.
“We now have reports of at least nine children killed and at least 50 injured. Those numbers will continue to rise as long as fighting continues,” he added.
Elder said large numbers of people are trapped and do not have access to electricity, Anadolu reported. “They’re terrified of running out of food, water, and medicines,” he said, adding, “One of our grave concerns is around hospitals that have come under fire.”
Elder said Sudan already had one of the world’s highest malnutrition rates among children. “And we’ve now got a situation where critical life-saving support for around 50,000 children is at risk,” said the UNICEF spokesperson.
The fighting also puts at risk “the cold chain” in Sudan, including over USD 40 million worth of vaccines and insulin, due to breaks in the power supply and the inability to restock generators with fuel, said Elder.
UNICEF also has reports of children sheltering in schools and care centres while fighting rages around them and of children’s hospitals forced to evacuate as shelling moves closer, Anadolu reported.
Elder said before the escalation in violence in Sudan, the humanitarian needs of children in the country were high, with three-quarters of children estimated to live in extreme poverty.
At the same time, 11.5 million children and community members needed emergency water and sanitation services, 7 million children were out of school, and more than 600,000 children suffered from severe acute malnutrition.
Fighting erupted last Saturday between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the capital Khartoum and its surroundings, Anadolu reported.
Sudan has been without a functioning government since October 2021, when the military dismissed Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s transitional government and declared a state of emergency in what political forces called a “coup.” (ANI)
Srinagar,April 19: Two Pulwama residents have died when shooting stone hit their truck on the Srinagar-Jammu national highway near Digdole area of Ramban on Wednesday.
An official told that due to incessant rains shooting stones hit truck Truck (JK13D-1730) near Digdole, Ramban after which both driver and helper got trapped in the truck.
On getting information, police team along with QRT volunteers immediately rushed to the spot and started rescue operation.
However, during rescue operation both were found dead in the truck, he said.
The duo has been identified as Maqsood Ahmad son of Abdul Rehman Lone, a resident of Hall Mughalpora Pulwama and Naveed Ahmad son of Ghulam Mohammad Dar, a resident of Nikas Pulwama.
Meanwhile, legal-medico formalities have been started after which bodies will be handed over to legal heirs.
Kochi: On Monday, all roads led to the uncompleted house at Vengara in Malappuram of a couple who died in a massive fire that broke out in a residential building in Dubai killing 16 people, on Saturday.
When the fire broke out the couple was busy preparing a feast for their friends who were observing the Ramzan fast.
Their bodies arrived here in the wee hours of Monday and were brought to their soon to be completed house at Vengara, which they were getting ready to live in from June.
Rijesh Kalangadan, 38 was working in a travel agency in Dubai, while his wife Jeshi Kandamangalath, 32 was a teacher at a local school in Dubai.
Since morning hundreds of local residents filed past the bodies with tears in their eyes.
“Rijesh was a great soul and was at the forefront of helping people here whenever anyone needed help. He was a very nice human being and we are all heartbroken and have nothing more to say,” said a close friend of Rijesh.
Sixteen people were killed and nine injured in the blaze in the Al Ras area, which Dubai Civil Defence attributed to a lack of compliance with building security and safety requirements.
The fire broke out on the fourth floor of the building on Saturday at 12.35 p.m. and soon spread to other areas.
Abu Dhabi: An Indian couple who died in a massive fire that broke out at a residential building in Dubai killing 16 people, was preparing an iftar meal for their neighbours, according to a media report.
38-year-old Rijesh Kalangadan, and his wife Jeshi 32-year-old Kandamangalath, were preparing Vishu sadhya, a festival meal, for their neighbours to end their fast on Saturday evening, the Gulf News reported.
At least 16 people were killed and nine others injured in the blaze in Al Ras area, which Dubai Civil Defence attributed to a lack of compliance with building security and safety requirements.
Hailing from Kerala, Kalangadan worked as a business development manager with a travel and tourism company, and his wife Kandamangalath was a schoolteacher.
According to Gulf News, the couple had invited their Muslim neighbours, a group of bachelors from Kerala, for an iftar meal.
“They had invited us during Onam and Vishu lunches earlier also. This time, they told us to come for iftar as it is Ramzan,” Riyas Kaikambam, who lived with seven roommates in apartment number 409, said.
The couple lived in 406 — adjacent to flat 405 where the fire started.
Calling them a “friendly couple”, Kaikambam said he last saw them outside their apartment.
“I could see the teacher was crying,” he recalled.
“There was no response to calls later. I could see Rijesh’s last seen status on WhatsApp at 12.35 p.m. I just can’t believe the man who helped me book my flight ticket, the man who invited me for iftar, is gone,” he said.
The couple was scheduled to fly home for the house-warming of their home next month, a family member from Kerala told Gulf News.
The fire broke out on fourth floor of the building on Saturday at 12.35 p.m. and soon spread to other areas.
Dubai Civil Defence Operations Room was informed about the inferno after which fire engines were rushed to the spot.
The fire was controlled around 2.42 p.m.
The building has been sealed for safety reasons.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Hyderabad: In a tragic incident, three members of the same family died allegedly of asphyxiation after a fire broke out at a timber depot at Kushaiguda on Sunday early hours.
The deceased are identified as Suresh, Suma, and Babu. The family is a native of Warangal. The fire started in the timber depot around 3 a.m. The thick smoke spread into the adjacent building and blocked the exit of the building occupants.
The family staying on the second floor in their attempt to escape came down. The family got trapped and allegedly died due to asphyxiation. The fire and DRF personnel rushed into the building upon coming to know about the presence of the family.
On the first floor, the bodies were found. The escape route into the building was blocked due to thick smoke and at the building entrance, there was fire raging. ‘After we doused the fire we went inside and found the bodies’, said ACP Kushiaguda Y Venkat Reddy.
SRINAGAR: The Muslims on Friday helped perform last rites of a Hindu who was on leave to attend first death anniversary of his brother killed by militants last year in Kakran area of south Kashmir’s Kulgam district.
Balbir Singh (55), son of Surinder Singh, who was working in Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) died last evening by cardiac arrest at his home in Karkan area of Kulgam.
He was posted at Amritsar but was on leave to attend death Anniversary of his brother who was killed by militants last year.
Balbir’s family is the only Hindu Rajput family living in the village, and today his friends and the neighbours from the Muslim community took it upon themselves to help perform the last rites.
They also shouldered his coffin and arranged wood for the cremation. “He was one of us. We never thought of him as a Rajput Hindu. We arranged everything needed for the cremation,” said Abdul Jabbar, a local resident.
Meanwhile, officials of Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) paid floral tributes to Balbir.
