Asia Cast

Asia Cast for Sunday 1st November

In this Bulletin …

- Abdullah withdraws from Afghan vote;
- Guantanamo Uighurs sent to Palau; and
- Fire at oil depot rages on in India.

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Dr Abdullah has announced in Kabul that he is withdrawing from the second round of the Afghan presidential election, claiming that his demands for ensuring a fraud-free election had not been met.

However he stopped short of calling for a boycott of next Saturday’s vote.

President Hamid Karzai had rejected his demand that election officials who presided over the first round should be dismissed.

President Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omar said the withdrawal was very unfortunate, but the election should go ahead as planned.

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Philippine authorities have hastily restored power and repaired damage after Typhoon Mirinae smashed into the storm-weary nation, killing at least 12 people.

A day after Mirinae brought heavy rains and winds, crews were clearing roads of fallen trees and power lines in capital Manila and nearby areas.

Red Cross secretary general Gwen Pang said a preventative evacuation that saw the transfer of about 115,000 people in the typhoon’s direct path to safer ground days ahead of its landfall, had meant fewer casualties compared with two recent deadly storms.

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Doubts about the refugee processing system in Indonesia should prompt the Federal Government to take in 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking, the Greens say.

There are reports the group may have spent the past five years in Indonesia and had already been accepted as refugees.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says Australia needs to urge Indonesia to sign onto the United Nations refugee convention as it is simply not working.

People are saying that they have been given refugee status. Five years later they are still languishing in detention.

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Six Chinese Uighur prisoners from the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay have been transferred to the Pacific island nation of Palau, officials say.

Palau agreed in June to take up to a dozen Uighurs who were captured during the US-led war in Afghanistan but not later classified as enemy combatants.

China wants them to be returned there, but the US says it cannot repatriate them due to the risk of mistreatment.

Beijing has frequently cracked down on Uighur dissidents, who it accuses of seeking an independent homeland in the western province of Xinjiang.

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Islamist militants blew up a girls’ school in Pakistan’s lawless Khyber tribal district on Sunday, destroying the building and wounding four people in neighbouring homes, officials say.

Two explosions ripped through the 18-room government high school for girls at Kari Gar village and a boy who watched the premises is missing, possibly kidnapped by the militants, local administration officials said.

Islamist militants, who have carved out a strong presence in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border, have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years.

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A massive fire at an oil depot in western India had left ten people dead, an official said on Sunday, as the blaze raged on after more than 48 hours.

The fire, caused by a suspected oil pipeline leak, broke out Thursday night at the Indian Oil Corp (IOC) compound on the outskirts of Jaipur in the desert state of Rajasthan.

B.L. Soni, a senior Jaipur police official, said two bodies had been spotted near the facility but that the rescuers could not retrieve them as the temperature from the fire was too high.

Firefighters abandoned earlier attempts to extinguish the blaze and expect the flames to die out in the coming days.

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