Turk airstrikes target rebel group in Iraq
IRBIL, Iraq -- Turkish airstrikes inside Iraq targeting members of an outlawed Kurdish rebel group have killed at least four minority Yazidi fighters allied with the rebels, an Iraqi army official said Thursday.
The strikes, which took place Wednesday, hit a military pickup in the northern town of Sinjar in Nineveh province, said the army official, speaking on condition of anonymity under regulations.
The pickup was carrying members of the Iraqi Yazidi militia known as the Shingal Resistance Units, affiliated with the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, which is fighting an insurgency in Turkey and has been outlawed by Ankara.
Kurdish television channels in northern Iraq reported that Yazidi commander Zardasht Shingali was among the dead and that another five fighters were wounded in the strikes.
In Baghdad, Iraq's joint operations command said five people were killed in the attack in Sinjar. The different casualty tolls could not immediately be reconciled.
Turkey has repeatedly struck the Yazidi militia positions in Sinjar in efforts to cut supply routes of the PKK.
Coronavirus case confirmed in Japan
TOKYO -- Japan's government said Thursday that a man treated for pneumonia after returning from China has tested positive for the new coronavirus identified as a possible cause of an outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The man developed a fever and cough on Jan. 3 while in Wuhan, returned to Japan on Jan. 6 and was hospitalized four days later as the symptoms persisted, with his X-ray image showing signs of pneumonia, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said.
Tests conducted Tuesday found the same coronavirus as had been detected in other patients in the Wuhan outbreak, the ministry said.
The man has since been released from the hospital after his condition improved. He was identified only as a man in his 30s in Kanagawa prefecture, west of Tokyo, and Kyodo News agency said he is Chinese. His family and the medical staff who treated him have not been sickened.
Officials in Wuhan said last weekend that 41 people had pneumonia caused by the new coronavirus and a 61-year-old man had died -- China's first known death from the virus. The World Health Organization also has said it was consulting with Thai and Chinese health authorities after a case was reported in Thailand of a Chinese traveler.
Afghan officials among car blast deaths
KABUL, Afghanistan -- A roadside bomb struck an Afghan government car in southern Zabul province Thursday, killing the driver and four passengers in the vehicle, officials said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack though the provincial police spokesman, Mohammadullah Amiri, accused the Taliban of placing a mine on the road in the Shahr-e-Safa district that destroyed the car.
The driver and one of the passengers in the car were employees of the Afghan ministry for energy and water resources. The other three passengers killed in the bombing, two Afghans and a Pakistani, were employees of the private Netrokon KEC engineering company.
Last week, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a roadside bombing that killed two U.S. service members and wounded two others in southern Afghanistan.
Religious ritual fatal to 7 Panamanians
PANAMA CITY -- Seven people were killed in a bizarre religious ritual in a jungle community in Panama, in which indigenous residents were rounded up by about 10 lay preachers and tortured, beaten, burned and hacked with machetes to make them "repent their sins."
Police freed 14 members of the Ngabe Bugle indigenous group who had been tied up and beaten with wooden cudgels and Bibles.
On Thursday, prosecutor Rafael Baloyes described the chilling scene that investigators found when they made their way through the jungle-clad hills to the remote Ngabe Bugle indigenous community near the Caribbean coast Tuesday.
Alerted by three villagers who escaped and made their way to a local hospital for treatment, police were surprised by what they found at an improvised "church" at a ranch where a little-known religious sect known as "The New Light of God" was operating.
"They were performing a ritual inside the structure. In that ritual, there were people being held against their will, being mistreated," Baloyes said.
"All of these rites were aimed at killing them, if they did not repent their sins," he said. "There was a naked person, a woman" inside the building, where investigators found machetes, knives and a ritually sacrificed goat.
About a mile from a church building, authorities found a freshly dug grave with the corpses of six children and one adult. The dead included five children as young as a year old, their pregnant mother and a 17-year-old female neighbor.
-- Compiled by Democrat-Gazette staff from wire reports
A Section on 01/17/2020