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| Suicide bomber attacks security police in Kazakh city Posted: 17 May 2011 06:13 AM PDT ASTANA, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - A suicide bomber wounded two bystanders in the Kazakh city of Aktobe when he blew himself up inside the offices of the state security services on Tuesday, a spokesman for the prosecutor-general said. The spokesman, Zhandos Umiraliyev, said the explosion was not a terrorist act. He identified the bomber as a 25-year-old member of a criminal group in the northwestern Kazakh city who was already under suspicion of other crimes. "(Rakhimzhan) Makatov used a self-activated, low-powered explosive device," Umiraliyev told a news briefing. "As a result of the explosion, Makatov died at the scene. Two people in the vicinity received minor injuries." The explosion was the first known suicide bombing in Kazakhstan. Central Asia's biggest economy, where 70 percent of the 16.4 million population are Muslim, has to date avoided the Islamist violence that has occurred in its ex-Soviet neighbours. Authorities were quick to deny that the explosion was linked to terrorism. Asked whether the bombing was a terrorist act, Umiraliyev replied: "No". A local photographer told Reuters by telephone from Aktobe, an industrial city about 100 km (63 miles) from the Russian border, that the bomber detonated the device at the regional headquarters of the National Security Committee, Kazakhstan's domestic security police. Reinforced police units had cordoned off the area, he said. The local Emergencies Ministry office in Aktobe declined to comment and calls to the National Security Committee were not answered. Umiraliyev said the prosecutor's office had opened a criminal case. ISLAMIST THREAT President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan for 20 years, was re-elected by a landslide in April on a platform of economic growth and stability. He prides himself on lasting peace among the 140 ethnic groups that call Kazakhstan home. But media reports in recent months have identified several Kazakhstani citizens among radical groups operating in Russia's North Caucasus region and other republics of Central Asia. Analysts have long warned that Central Asian militants, after years fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are filtering back across the region's porous borders to their homelands. Tajikistan's army has been fighting insurgents in the country's mountainous east since an attack on a military convoy killed 28 troops last September, shortly after suicide car bombers attacked a police station in the country's second city. Several radical Islamist groups have stated their objective of creating a Muslim caliphate incorporating large swathes of Central Asia, a region twice the size of Saudi Arabia. "Not a single country in the region is immune," said Lilit Gevorgyan, analyst at IHS Global Insight. "Secular governments are their number one enemy." But Gevorgyan said that, in contrast with poorer republics in Central Asia, militant groups were unlikely to find a groundswell of support in relatively prosperous Kazakhstan. "The Kazakh population is not largely supportive of such movements," she said. "There will be less justification than for example in Tajikistan, where attackers could find a sympathetic ear among the more impoverished and more religious people." (Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov and Robin Paxton; Editing by Angus MacSwan) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. | ||
| Japan keeps Fukushima shutdown target despite setbacks Posted: 17 May 2011 06:13 AM PDT TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan unveiled new plans on Tuesday to contain the crisis at a crippled nuclear plant after admitting it faced greater challenges than first disclosed but it kept to a goal of bringing the reactors under control by January.
More than two months after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a deadly tsunami set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, officials say the risk of another explosion at the Fukushima plant has receded but each step towards gaining control has been matched by new setbacks. The crisis has prompted a blank-slate review of Japan's national energy policy, which had included a goal of generating half of the nation's power from nuclear plants by 2030. From the start, the timetable for stabilizing Fukushima, announced just over a month ago, has faced scepticism from experts and the Japanese public, but any changes in the original target were seen as too costly politically for the government. Tokyo Electric Power Co, the plant's operator, said it had dropped an initial plan to stabilise the reactors by flooding them with water after last week's discovery of a large leak in the main vessel of the plant's No. 1 reactor. Instead, the embattled utility said it would now try to cool the reactors by circulating the radioactive water that has pooled throughout the Fukushima complex. Most of the water is within the reactor buildings but some is outside in trenches . The new approach will involve costly steps to decontaminate tens of thousands of tonnes water and the construction of a large storage area for the remaining low-level waste. In a move that acknowledged a risk that it had previously downplayed, Tokyo Electric also said it would step up its monitoring of radiation in nearby seawater and study what could be done to prevent contamination of groundwater. The utility, also known as Tepco, said it still aimed to complete initial steps to limit the release of further radiation from the plant 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo and to shut down its three unstable reactors by January 2012. "We know that there are a lot of defining factors and risks, but we still want to complete the first steps by July and the remainder of the plan within nine months," Sakae Muto, a Tepco vice president said at a news conference. He added it was impossible to estimate how much the clean-up of Fukushima, which has six reactors in total, would cost. "It's something we will have to study over time." "BETRAYAL" Aware of growing public frustration over the protracted crisis, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said that the government would support those who had been displaced and lost work because of the nuclear crisis. That included aiming to start paying out on damage claims from the Fukushima crisis that has displaced some 80,000 people. Outside analysts have said compensation costs could range up to $130 billion. The government also sought to allay fears that the Japanese public may end up footing a sizeable part of that bill, with trade minister Banri Kaieda saying the situation where taxes or electricity tariffs would have to go up had to be avoided. "Japan must deal head-on with the feeling of betrayal that the people who lived near the plant are experiencing, having long shown understanding for Japan's nuclear power policy believing that it was safe," Kaieda told a news conference. Kan's government has been under fire for its response to the quake and tsunami, which left almost 25,000 dead or missing, and 116,000 still without homes. Tepco has also drawn ire for downplaying the severity of the situation. The utility said only this week that it believed three of the reactors had suffered a meltdown, where the fuel rods at the core of the reactor melted, leading to a larger release of radiation. Still, in an endorsement of Japan's efforts, the U.S. State Department revised its travel advisory, saying it was the "unanimous opinion" of American experts that it was now safe to travel through the Fukushima evacuation zone by train and on a major highway. "While the situation remains serious, and there is still a possibility of unanticipated developments, cooling efforts are ongoing and successful, power, water supply, and back-up services have been partially or fully restored, and planning has begun to control radioactive contamination and mitigate future dangers," it said on Monday. The updated plan sketched out the new methods which would in particular focus on how to clean up the large amount of water contaminated by radiation. SHUTDOWN Bringing the reactors to a state of "cold shutdown", where the uranium fuel at the core is no longer capable of boiling off the water used as a coolant, would allow officials to move on to cleaning up the site and eventually removing the fuel from the site. That process could take more than a decade. New details about the state of the plant released in the past week by its operator have made it clear that the reactors suffered far more serious damage than previously disclosed. Uranium fuel rods in three reactors - Nos. 1, 2 and 3 - were uncovered for between six to 14 hours after the quake. They heated up rapidly and went into an uncontrolled meltdown, officials now say. Because of the damage from the quake, a series of hydrogen explosions and the core meltdowns, the reactors are leaking most of the water being pumped in to keep them cool. The resulting growing pool of radioactive water at the site -- enough to fill 36 Olympic-sized polls -- is now the major focus of the revised plan of attack. Almost 80,000 people have had to evacuate their homes near the Fukushima plant because of the health risk. Farmers south of Tokyo in Kanagawa have been forced to destroy an early tea crop because of risky levels of cesium. Last week, government workers began to kill an estimated 1,500 cows and pigs in the 20-km "no-go" zone around Fukushima. Burning the bodies could spread radiation, so they are being covered with blue tarps and lime and left to decay, officials say. (Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka and Shinichi Saoshiro, additional reporting by Mari Saito, writing by Kevin Krolicki and Tomasz Janowski) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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