MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — Islamic extremists have abducted 60 more girls and women and 31 boys from villages in northeast Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday.

Security forces denied the kidnappings. Nigeria's government and military have been widely criticized for their slow response to the abductions of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped April 15.

There was no way to safely and independently confirm the report from Kummabza, 150 kilometers (95 miles) from Maiduguri, capital of Borno state and headquarters of a military state of emergency that has failed to curtail near-daily attacks by Boko Haram fighters.

Kummabza resident Aji Khalil said Tuesday the abductions took place Saturday in an attack in which four villagers were killed. Khalil is a member of one of the vigilante groups that have had some success in repelling Boko Haram attacks with primitive weapons.

A senior local councilor from the village's Damboa local government told The Associated Press that abductions had occurred but insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to give information to reporters. He said elderly survivors of the attack had walked some 25 kilometers (15 miles) to the relative safety of other villages.

The Damboa council secretary, Modu Mustapha, said he could not confirm or deny the abductions and directed a reporter to the council chairman, Alamin Mohammed, who did not answer phone calls or respond to text messages.

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Members of the Abuja "Bring Back Our Girls" protest group address a sit-in demonstration o …

The new kidnappings add to Nigeria's crisis over the April kidnappings and the ongoing violence from the Islamic militant group Boko Haram.

A strategy to rescue the girls appears to have reached an impasse. Nigeria's military has said it knows where they are but fears their abductors would kill them if any military action is taken. Boko Haram has been demanding the release of detained members in exchange for its hostages but President Goodluck Jonathan has said he will not consider a swap.

Politics have bedeviled the issue, with many distracted by upcoming presidential elections in February 2015. The first lady, Patience Jonathan, and some other supporters have claimed the reports of the April abductions of the schoolgirls were fabricated to discredit her husband's administration.

Last week, a presidential committee investigating the kidnappings stressed that they did in fact happen and clarified the number of students who have been kidnapped. It said there were 395 students at the school, 119 escaped during the siege of the school, another 57 escaped in the first couple of days of their abduction, leaving 219 unaccounted for.

This year, the Boko Haram insurgents have embarked on a two-pronged strategy — bombing in cities and a scorched-earth policy in rural areas where they are devastating villages. Nigeria's capital, Abuja, the central city of Jos and the northeastern state capital of Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram, all have been bombed.

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Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan speaks about the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls as he faces …

On Monday, an explosion at a medical college in the northern city of Kano killed at least eight people and wounded 12, police said. It was the third bomb blast in four months in Kano, Nigeria's second city.

Also on Saturday, the same day as the latest abductions, scores of Boko Haram fighters attacked four other villages, near Chibok town from which the girls were kidnapped. Witnesses said at least 33 villagers were killed as well as six vigilantes and about two dozen Boko Haram fighters.

The group evolved five years ago from an Islamic sect preaching against the corruption that keeps most Nigerians impoverished despite their country's oil wealth into a violent movement that wants to enforce Islamic law across Nigeria, though half the country's 170 million people are Christians.

By Kevin Liffey

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin asked Russia's upper house on Tuesday to revoke the right it had granted him to order a military intervention in Ukraine in defense of Russian-speakers there, the Kremlin said in a statement.

The step seemed certain to be welcomed by the West as a sign that Moscow was ready to help engineer a settlement in Ukraine's largely Russian-speaking east, where a pro-Russian uprising against Kiev began in April.

Putin's spokesman said the Kremlin leader's move was aimed at assisting fledgling peace talks, which began on Monday, to end the conflict.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called it a "first practical step" following Putin's statement of support last weekend for Poroshenko's peace plan for eastern Ukraine.

Putin's chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, said Russia now expected Kiev to respond with measures of its own, without specifying what these should be. In the March 1 resolution, the Federation Council had granted Putin the right to "use the Russian Federation's Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine until the social and political situation in that country normalizes".

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Pro-Russian demonstrators shout slogans in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Monday, June 23, 2014. Leaders …

That resolution, together with Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, helped push East-West relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War and led the United States and Europe to impose sanctions on Moscow.

European Union foreign ministers on Monday held out the prospect of further sanctions if Russia did not do more to support a peace process in eastern Ukraine, and also asked it to revoke the March 1 resolution.

CEASEFIRE

Since then, rebels in eastern Ukraine have agreed to a temporary ceasefire to give time for peace talks in a forum where Russia is represented alongside the Kiev government and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Poroshenko's welcome for Putin's move was tempered by his announcement that one Ukrainian serviceman had been killed and seven others wounded in what he said were eight ceasefire violations by rebels overnight into Tuesday.

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German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier shakes hands with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshen …

Russian shares rose strongly, with the dollar-denominated RTS index <.IRTS> up 2.5 percent at levels not seen since mid-January, before the Ukraine crisis flared up in earnest.

The rouble was up 0.8 percent against the dollar, which fell below 34 rubles for the first time since January.

"The president has filed a proposal to the Federation Council on cancelling ... the resolution on the use of Russia's Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine," the Kremlin said in a statement on its website.

Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said the chamber would discuss Putin's request on Wednesday.

The deputy head of the chamber's international affairs committee, Andrei Klimov, said he expected the resolution to pass, according to the RIA Novosti agency.

Petro's Peace PlanPlay Video

Russia has already pulled back tens of thousands of troops that it had moved close to border earlier in the crisis, adding to Western fears that it was ready to follow its forcible annexation of majority-Russian Crimea with intervention in its ex-Soviet neighbor.

Those troops had also provided an unspoken threat to support the well-equipped but sometimes poorly coordinated rebels in eastern Ukraine against government forces trying to wrest back the towns and administration buildings they had seized.

Like many of eastern Ukraine's Russian speakers, Moscow was infuriated by the toppling in January of President Viktor Yanukovich after he pulled out of an association agreement with the EU in favor of closer ties with Moscow.

NEW PRESIDENT

Russia denies Kiev's charges that it has helped foment the separatist unrest and knowingly allowed military equipment to cross into Ukraine or built up forces along the 1,900 km (1,200 mile) joint border.

However, the election last month of billionaire businessman Poroshenko as president appears at least to have reduced fears in Moscow and eastern Ukraine that the country was being run by far-right nationalists ready to trample over the rights of the large Russian-speaking minority in the east.

Since then, the rebels have been gradually losing ground in a conflict where scores have been killed on both sides.

Russia's Foreign Ministry accused the EU on Tuesday of taking a biased view of the crisis in Ukraine. It said the EU had conveniently ignored the fact that Kiev's military action had caused the deaths of tens of children and driven thousands of civilians to continue to seek refuge on Russian territory.

On Friday, Poroshenko is set to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union - the very pact that Yanukovich rejected in January under heavy pressure from Russia, which had wanted Ukraine's 45 million people to join its own Eurasian Economic Union.

Russia is certain to respond by raising trade barriers to Ukrainian exports in order to protect its markets, adding further strain to an economic relationship already badly soured by Ukraine's refusal to accept an increase in the price of Russian gas, imposed after Yanukovich was toppled.

Russia's Gazprom has now cut off the gas, and its CEO Alexei Miller repeated on Tuesday in Vienna that it must settle $1.95 billion of its debt and pay up front for future supplies before the taps could be reopened.

(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel and Gabriela Baczynska, writing by Kevin Liffey; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Putin renounces right to send troops to Ukraine

The Russian leader's move could help end conflict in the neighboring country's east region.

'First practical step'

Khartoum (AFP) - A Sudanese Christian woman was arrested Tuesday at Khartoum airport a day after a court annulled her death sentence for apostasy and released her from prison, a source familiar with the incident said.

"The National Security took her and Daniel," said the source, referring to Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, 26, and her American husband Daniel Wani.

The status of their two young children, one a baby born in prison before Ishag's release, was not immediately known.

The couple were detained, for reasons that are unclear, at about 1100 GMT as they tried to leave the country, said the source.

Sudan frees death penalty woman

"She has the right to leave the country," the source said.

Ishag's case sparked an outcry from Western governments and rights groups after a lower-court judge sentenced her to death on May 15.

Almost one million people appealed to save her life on the Change.org petition website.

Born to a Muslim father and an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother, Ishag was convicted under Islamic sharia law that has been in force in Sudan since 1983 and outlaws conversions on pain of death.

When Ishag was five, her father abandoned the family, and she was raised according to her mother's faith.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Khartoum said she joined the Catholic church shortly before she married.

"She has never been a Muslim in her life," a statement said.

- Fears for her life -

After the appeal courts quashed the earlier verdict, Ishag went into hiding, fearing for her life because of death threats, one of her lawyers said.

"She is in a safe place. I will not tell you where," Mohanad Mustafa, told AFP on Monday night.

"The main reason is that we are concerned about her life."

Mustafa said Wani had been reunited with his wife, newborn baby and the couple's 20-month-old son who had been incarcerated with his mother.

"Now she is with her husband and their children in the safe place," said the lawyer.

He and other members of Ishag's legal team have also received death threats.

Twelve days after the lower court issued its death sentence, Ishag gave birth to her baby daughter at the women's prison in Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman, where she was shackled during pregnancy, Mustafa said.

Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), said the group was delighted that "the unjust, inhumane and unwarranted sentences have been annulled."

But he said the British-based group, which works for religious freedom, was appalled at the "threats and hate speech."

"Her alleged brother has publicly stated the family would carry out the death sentence should the court acquit her," CSW said.

Muslim extremist groups had lobbied the Islamist government over Ishag's case, prominent newspaper editor Khalid Tigani has said.

Amnesty International said she was released under international pressure, but Rabbie Abdelatti Ebaid, a senior official in Sudan's ruling National Congress Party, denied that.

Muslim scholars have divergent opinions on the issue of changing religion, and "jurisprudence in Islam is very broad," allowing for a solution, he told AFP.

Wochit

UN: At Least 1,075 Killed In Iraq In June

Most of the fatalities were civilians, and others included soldiers who weren't resisting.
Kidnappings continue

At least 18 people were killed when gunmen stormed a village in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna overnight, a police spokesman said on Tuesday, the latest in daily bloody attacks that have racked Africa's most populous country.

The gunmen raided the village in southern Kaduna - part of Nigeria's volatile "middle belt" where the mostly Christian south and largely Muslim north meet - late on Monday night, spokesman Aminu Lawan told Reuters.

"There was an attack and by our records 18 people were killed," he said.

Security forces are also investigating a possible mass kidnapping of villagers in the northeast state of Borno where Boko Haram Islamist militants abducted more than 200 schoolgirls two months ago, a security source told Reuters.

If confirmed, the abduction would fuel public frustration over the government's inability to quell Boko Haram's five-year campaign to carve out an Islamist state in the north.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the killings in Kaduna, 560 km (350 miles) southwest of Borno state, which demonstrate once again the inability of the government to protect rural areas from suspected militants.

Extremists Abduct 91 More People In NigeriaPlay Video

Boko Haram, which has killed thousands in bomb and gun attacks, initially focused on government and security targets, as well as churches and Muslim leaders that rejected its brand of Islam.

But recently it has increasingly targeted civilians, emboldened by global publicity after it kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in the remote Borno village of Chibok in April.

Military officials are looking into reports that suspected Islamist insurgents over the weekend raided at least three villages in Borno, the security source said.

Two residents of the Borno village of Lassa, which wasn't attacked, told Reuters they spoke to people who reportedly fled as militants killed men and kidnapped "many" women and children.

Nigerian media reported that as many as 91 villagers had been abducted, most of them women and young girls. Reuters was unable to verify these accounts independently.

Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates as "Western education is sinful" has killed thousands since 2009. Amnesty International estimates about 1,500 people have been killed in northeast Nigeria in the first three months of this year.

At least eight people were killed and 20 wounded by an explosion at a college campus in the heart of the northern city of Kano during school hours on Monday.

(Reporting by Nigeria bureau, additional reporting by Isaac Abrak; writing by David Dolan; Editing by Alison Williams)