Baghdad (AFP) - The Islamic State group has released a video in which militants can be seen using rifles and sledgehammers to destroy artefacts at the ancient city of Hatra in Iraq.

Destruction at the UNESCO world heritage site had already been confirmed by the UN's cultural agency a month ago.

The latest, undated video was released on April 3, a day after the IS group lost the city of Tikrit to government and allied forces, its biggest military setback yet in Iraq.

"The Islamic State has sent us to these idols to break them because they are worshipped instead of God," says one of two militants speaking to the camera.

"Some apostate organisations have said that destroying such antiquities is a war crime, so we will destroy them," he said.

The video shows militants knocking sculptures off the walls of a building, shooting at them with an assault rifle and hacking away at a statue with a pickaxe.

The destroyed artefacts as seen on the video have metal rebar inside them, leaving it unclear whether they are reconstructed originals or recent replicas.

Hatra is an extremely well-preserved city with a unique mix of eastern and western architecture, located in a desert area about 60 miles (100 kilometres) southwest of the northern jihadist hub of Mosul.

The destruction there began around a month ago and came after IS militants also damaged the site of Iraq's ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and destroyed dozens of pieces from the museum in Mosul.

UNESCO has condemned IS' systematic campaign against Iraq's rich heritage as a war crime.

In a tweet posted after the release of the latest video, UNESCO said: "We must stand up against forces that seek to divide Iraq. They attack the humanity we all share."

A general view of debris, seen in this picture made available to the media by the French Interior Ministry April 1, 2015, from the wreckage of a Germanwings Airbus A320 which crashed, near Seyne-les-Alpes. REUTERS/French Interior Ministry/DICOM/Y. Malenfer/Handout

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Lufthansa said on Monday it was not required to inform German aviation authorities about Andreas Lubitz's former depression because he qualified as a pilot before stricter reporting rules went into effect in 2013.

Lubitz, a co-pilot at Lufthansa's budget division Germanwings, is believed to have deliberately crashed a plane into the French Alps and killed 150 people.

The question of what Lufthansa knew about any psychiatric problems may be a factor in its liability in the crash. Germany's Allianz estimates that insurers will end up paying $300 million in claims and costs related to the crash.

Lubitz broke off pilot training for several months in 2009. When he resumed his training, he told the Lufthansa pilot instructors by email he had overcome a period of severe depression. He was first certified to fly commercial planes in 2012.

Under European regulations, pilots with psychiatric conditions should be referred to the licensing authority by aeromedical examiners, who may then decide to restrict the pilot’s licence.

The Luftfahrtbundesamt (LBA), the relevant German authority, on Sunday said it had "no information at all" before the crash about Lubitz's depression.

Lufthansa said that a provision in the new regulation, introduced in Germany in April 2013, safeguarded certain pre-existing fit-to-fly certificates and medical certificates issued by specialized aviation doctors.

Aeromedical centers or aviation doctors could therefore issue extensions to such medical certificates even after the new rules came into effect, the airline said.

"A general and separate duty to refer to the LBA did not therefore arise as a result of the change in the legal position," Lufthansa said.

(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle; Editing by Larry King)

United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council on Monday demanded access for life-saving humanitarian aid to reach refugees trapped in Syria's Yarmuk camp after it was partly seized by the Islamic State group.

Islamic State fighters have captured large swaths of the Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus in an offensive launched on April 1 and hundreds of families have been evacuated.

The 15-member council called "for the protection of civilians in the camp for ensuring a humanitarian access to the area including by providing life-saving assistance," said Jordan's Ambassador Dina Kawar, who chairs the council this month.

Kawar told reporters after a closed-door council meeting that there was deep concern over the "grave situation" for the 18,000 refugees in the camp and demanded safe passage for the evacuation of civilians.

The council is ready to consider "further measures to provide necessary assistance," said Kawar, but she did not provide details.

The council received a report from Pierre Krahenbuhl, of the Palestinian UNRWA relief agency, who described the situation in the camp as "more desperate than ever."

Krahenbuhl told reporters that he appealed to countries with influence in Syria to act "for civilian lives to be spared and for humanitarian access to be given."

The UNRWA chief said he was unable to verify that IS had carried out beheadings in the camp.

Jihadists from IS first attacked the camp, just seven kilometers (four miles) from central Damascus, on Wednesday.

The camp is encircled by government forces and was under a tight siege for more than a year.

The UNRWA chief said refugees were living on rations of some 400 calories per day, well below the minimum average of 2,000 set by the World Health Organization.

"What civilians in Yarmuk are most concerned about right now is bare survival," he said.

Palestinian refugees who leave Yarmouk will face relocation to some other area of Syria, Krahenbuhl said.

UN: 'Beyond inhumane' refugee situation in Syria

Clashes between Palestinians and Islamic State militants at a refugee camp leave civilians without food or water.
IS taking over

Associated Press Videos
Raw: First Look Inside University Since Attack

Garissa (Kenya) (AFP) - Scattered books and dark blood stains on the floor: the bodies have been collected but an abbatoir-like stench permeates the Kenyan university where Islamist gunmen massacred 148 people last week.

In the now quiet grounds, police and soldiers stand under the shade of trees, where students once sat studying or chatting with friends.

Papers and pens lie in the dust, apparently dropped by students as they fled when gunmen from Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab launched their killing spree, hurling grenades and firing automatic rifles.

The massacre in Garissa, Kenya's deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.

On Monday, four days since the day-long violence spree, journalists were briefly allowed for the first time into the campus.

The bullet-scarred buildings remained closed, but peering through the doors and windows, a sense of the carnage and the fury of the violence was clear.

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A security officer tries to keep a crowd of spectators back as they gather to see the bodies of susp …

At the three-storey Elgon A hostel, where the worst killings took place, shards of glass from the doors smashed by bullets cover the entrance.

Inside, where the gunmen gathered students together before carrying out their day of slaughter, dark stains of blood cover the floors, showing the magnitude of the massacre.

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Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers arrive at a hospital to escort the bodies of the attackers to be …

- Scraps of flesh -

Reuben Nyaora, a clinical officer working for the aid agency International Rescue Committee (IRC), and one of the first frontline medics into the halls, described seeing "bodies everywhere in execution lines... people whose heads had been blown off, bullet wounds everywhere, it was a grisly mess."

Now the rooms are empty, but in places the blood is smeared in long lines, suggesting where a wounded student crawled away in agony in a desperate effort to escape.

Belongings of the students still lie around: a single shoe, a pair of sandals, torn and bloody clothes, some books.

Survivors described scenes of total carnage: piles of bodies and pools of blood running down the corridors as laughing gunmen taunted their victims.

Nyaora described how he witnessed three women apparently dead, covered head to toe entirely in blood but in fact physically unharmed, pick themselves up from a pile of corpses.

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Unidentified US government employees leave Garissa mortuary after examining the bodies of suspected …

They told him how gunmen ordered them to "swim in the blood", as though they were making fun of them, playing games and apparently enjoying the killing.

Local government commissioner Njega Miir, who stopped journalists taking photographs from inside the halls as a mark of respect to the dead, said buildings would remain locked, and the property of the students left sent on to survivors.

"We have secured all doors to all buildings in the college to ensure that, items left behind by the students remain safe, and delivered to their respective owners," he said.

New images show interior of Kenya's beseiged university campus (video)