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A huge explosion struck central Kabul on Tuesday morning, followed by gunfire. While the number of deaths was not immediately clear, at least 161 people were wounded, Afghan health officials said. The area is crowded, and ambulance sirens could be heard near the scene.

Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said a car bomb had been detonated outside the offices of an elite security force that provides protection to senior government officials. The explosion rattled windows in much of the city. 

Other police officials said that militants had entered the compound after the explosion and that Afghan security units had arrived in response.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, issued a statement that claimed responsibility for the attack. The statement said that “a truck full of explosives” had been detonated before fighters entered the compound.

Security forces in Kabul, the Afghan capital, have been on high alert since the Taliban announced their annual spring offensive last week, amid reports that suicide bombers had entered the city and were planning attacks.

NYT

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19.Apr.2016

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Hundreds of East African migrants are believed dead after their boat capsized in the eastern Mediterranean.

Witnesses and survivors told VOA Monday that the vessel overturned while carrying as many as 500 people. An unknown number swam to boats nearby and were later picked up and taken to Greece.

The incident happened April 8 but was first reported by the BBC late Sunday.

Ethiopian national Mussa Mohamed Adam said he is one of the few migrants who survived the tragedy. He told VOA's Horn of Africa Service that the boat capsized after he and about 200 other migrants came on board from a smaller boat that departed Egypt a day and a half earlier.

Adam estimated that 500 people were on board at the time, and only 30 were able to swim back to the smaller boat.

Liban Qadar Jama of Somaliland was on another boat that was approaching the rendezvous point. "I could see the bigger boat sinking," he told VOA's Somali Service. "We ran with the small boat we were in, as some migrants from the sunk boat desperately swam toward us. We could only save four of them."

Jama and other witnesses say the survivors spent about nine days drifting at sea before they were picked up by either the Greek or Italian coast guard and taken to Greece.

Unconfirmed reports on social media Monday suggested most of those who drowned were Somalis, trying to escape their war and drought-ravaged homeland.

If the death toll is confirmed, it would be the worst migrant tragedy since some 700 people drowned off the coast of Libya in April of last year.

VOA

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19.Apr.2016

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-South Africa's former Olympic track star Oscar Pistorius appeared briefly in a Pretoria court where a judge scheduled five days in June to determine his sentence for murdering his girlfriend.

The sentencing hearing for Pistorius will be held from June 13 to 17 at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria.

The 29-year-old double amputee sprinter, who was found guilty of murdering Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine's Day 2013, was greeted by a small group of vocal supporters outside the court.

The sentencing hearing will be heard by Judge Thokozile Masipa, who presided over Pistorius's trial and found him guilty of manslaughter, a verdict that was overturned by a higher court that found him guilty of the more serious charge of murder.

Pistorius appealed his murder conviction, arguing that a lower court erred when it overturned his manslaughter conviction. But at South Africa's Constitutional Court dismissed his appeal.

The minimum sentence for murder in South Africa is 15 years, although it can be reduced in some circumstances.

Pistorius is expected to argue for a lesser sentence. He has already spent one year in the hospital wing of Kgosi Mampuru II prison in Pretoria. He is currently serving the remainder of his five year manslaughter sentence under house arrest and he stays at his uncle's home in Pretoria.

Pistorius was cheered by his supporters, most of who were dressed in white, when he left the court and navigated his way through a scrum of reporters.

A leader of the supporters, Don Hassett, appealed for a lenient sentence for Pistorius.

"He knows it was wrong and he has admitted that, but the media has generated hatred against Oscar," Hasset told reporters.

Before the proceedings a group of supporters gathered inside the courtroom and prayed for the athlete.

CBS

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18.Apr.2016

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MAROUA, Cameroon- U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power's trip to Cameroon's front lines in the war against Boko Haram started horrifically Monday as an armored jeep in her motorcade struck and killed a young boy who darted into the road.

The incident occurred near the small city of Moloko, in northern Cameroon, where Power, her aides and accompanying journalists were headed to meet refugees and others displaced by the years of brutal attacks across West Africa.

All those meetings included small children.

Power said she learned of the death with "great sorrow."

She said she met with the boy's family to "offer our profound condolences and our grief and heartbreak."

Power returned to the scene of the bloody accident several hours later to meet the 7-year-old boy's mother and father, while residents of his village stood solemnly on a sandy expanse.

The motorcade was moving at a fast clip, at times exceeding 60 mph, while villagers lined up along the sides of the road. But when the boy darted onto the two-lane highway, there was no time for the sixth car in Power's convoy to react. The driver was Cameroonian.

At the moment of impact, a man could be seen running up the embankment, with his arms held high, to the street to try to stop the child. A Cameroonian helicopter traveling overhead as part of a large security contingent saw the collision.

The vehicle that hit the boy initially stopped, but was ordered by American security forces to continue traveling through the unsecured area. An ambulance in the U.S. caravan immediately attended to him.

The boy was rushed to a local hospital, though his condition was already hopeless, according to people familiar with the incident, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Several U.S. officials were visibly affected, with one Power aide turning away to cry as his boss met with refugee children shortly afterward.

The motorcade moved at a significantly slower pace for the rest of the day.

Officials did not immediately identify the boy. U.S officials wouldn't comment immediately on any plans for compensation to the boy's family.

CBS

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18.Apr.2016

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Explosion on bus in Jerusalem, 20 casualties - Israel radio

Cameroon Concord is  working on this story and will update it as soon as more information becomes available

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Jackson Tantoh

18.Apr.2016

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Former child soldiers from Sierra Leone have been employed by a private British military company to provide security for American bases in Iraq as part of a 2,500-strong contingent hired for the job, a new Danish documentary has revealed.

According to investigation based on contract documents, UK’s Aegis Defense Services contracted by US Department of Defense employed some 2,500 mercenaries to provide security force for the Pentagon-administered Project and Contracting Office (PCO) in Iraq.

Part of the security force, according to a documentary, titled Børnesoldatens Nye Job (The Child Soldier’s New Job) included child soldiers from Sierra Leone who were paid only $16 a day.

“When war gets outsourced, then the company tries to find the cheapest soldiers globally. Turns out that that is former child soldiers from Sierra Leone. I think it is important that we in the West are aware of the consequences of the privatization of war,” said the film’s director, Mads Ellesøe, as quoted by the Guardian.

Aegis was hired by Washington starting from 2004 to provide security for American bases in Iraq. The firm initially employed British, American and Nepalese personnel to do the job. But from 2011, the firm started to employ fighters from Africa to cut costs.

James Ellery, who was a director of Aegis Defense Services between 2005 and 2015, acknowledged that Aegis recruited personnel from Sierra Leone because they were cheaper than Europeans. Yet he stressed that the UK firm has never bothered to check whether the security force had employed any former underage combatants.

While agreeing that it would have been better to recruit Brits, Ellery told the Guardian, that “it can’t be afforded... I’m afraid all we can afford now is Africans.”

Sierra Leone proved to be a perfect place for recruitment as the country had just emerged from the ashes of the atrocious civil war (1991-2002), tarnished with crimes against humanity and the widespread use of child soldiers to carry out the fighting.

Speaking with the British publication Ellery revealed that child soldiers cannot be prosecuted for war crimes under international law.

“They are, once they reach 18, in fact citizens with full rights to seek employment, which is a basic human right. So we would have been completely in error if, having gone to Sierra Leone, we excluded those people,” he explained.

One of the only things Aegis cared for was strict adherence to physical health requirements.

The moment they [recruitment agents] start sending us people who are blind in one eye or have Aids, that’s it. Contract over,” Ellery said. “Because those sort of things, although they sound facetious, are big problems in Africa, because you don’t want people dying after you’ve put them through expensive training and then they die because they’ve got Aids and so on.”

Founded in 2002 by Tim Spicer, the former Scots Guards officer, notorious for supplying weapons in Sierra Leone to support the local government, Aegis Defense Services is now chaired by Sir Nicholas Soames, a Tory MP and a grandson of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

In 2015 the operations of Aegis were taken over by a Canadian security company, GardaWorld. Contacted by the Guardian into the alleged allegations in the documentary, Graham Binns, Aegis’s former CEO and GardaWorld’s senior managing director shifted the blame onto the contractor's respected country of origin which provided the British company with their personnel.

“We worked very closely with our audited, vetted and authorised agents to recruit, vet and screen our professionals. Our agents were authorised [as was the employment of individuals] by the relevant national government of the countries from which we recruited,” he said.

The documentary shot in the US, UK, Sierra Leone and Uganda will be broadcasted on Denmark television on Monday, April 18.

The use of child soldiers became widespread during the civil war in Sierra Leone where the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), in addition to state forces and state-supported militias widely recruited children for combat. An estimated 10,000 children took part in the conflict. Some of the child soldiers were also girls, who had been reportedly subjected to repeated abuse and rape. Most children were required by their superiors to commit war crimes such as murders, rapes, sexual slavery, mutilations and other forms of human rights abuses.

RT

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Elangwe Pauline

18.Apr.2016

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