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Two suicide bombings strike in Lebanon

Beirut (AFP) - Twin suicide bombings rocked a busy shopping street Thursday in a Beirut stronghold of Lebanon's Shiite movement Hezbollah, killing 41 people and wounding more than 200 in the worst such attack in years.

Health Minister Wael Abou Faour, speaking from the scene on a street of shops where vendors also sell from stalls, said many of the injured were in serious condition.

The army said the body of a "third terrorist" was found at the scene of one of the blasts after he apparently failed to blow himself up.

The attacks were the deadliest to hit a Hezbollah stronghold since the group entered the conflict in neighbouring Syria in 2013 in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

A string of them targeted areas where the group is popular throughout 2013 and 2014. In the most recent one in the southern suburbs of Beirut in June of last year, a suicide car bomb killed a security officer.

Police said two men on foot set off suicide vests Thursday in Burj al-Barajneh, a largely impoverished suburb of the city home to a mostly Shiite Muslim population.

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Lebanese army and civilians gather near the site of a twin suicide attack in Burj al-Barajneh, south …

The neighbourhood is bordered by the Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp.

An AFP photographer saw extensive damage to buildings around the site of the blast and bodies inside some of the nearby shops.

There was blood on the streets, and security forces were trying to cordon off the scene and keep people from gathering.

Local television stations showed footage of wounded people being carried away by emergency services and civilians.

"I'd just arrived at the shops when the blast went off. I carried four bodies with my own hands, three women and a man, a friend of mine," a man who gave his name as Zein al-Abideen Khaddam told local television.

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Emergency personnel inspect debris at the site of a twin suicide bombing in Burj al-Barajneh near Be …

- 'Thought world ended' -

Another described the sound of the blasts.

"When the second blast went off, I thought the world had ended," he said.

The wounded were evacuated to several hospitals in the area, including the Bahman hospital in neighbouring Haret Hreik.

"We've received dozens of wounded people and they're continuing to arrive," a doctor there told AFP.

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Emergency personnel gather at the site of a twin suicide bombing in Burj al-Barajneh, in the souther …

Prime Minister Tammam Salam announced a national day of mourning for Friday, local media reported.

And former premier Saad Hariri, who leads a political bloc opposed to Hezbollah and its allies, condemned the blast as "vile and unjustified".

Between July 2013 and February 2014, there were nine attacks on Hezbollah throughout Lebanon, mostly claimed by Sunni extremist group.

Despite ostensibly targeting Hezbollah, the victims of the attacks have been overwhelmingly civilians.

The deadliest in southern Beirut was in 2013, when 27 people were killed by a car bomb in the Rweiss district.

The attacks were claimed by several different Sunni groups, but all cited Hezbollah's role in the conflict in Syria.

Hezbollah is a staunch ally of Assad's regime and is backed by Iran, another key supporter of the government in Damascus.

In early 2013, it dispatched its fighters to back government forces against a Sunni-dominated uprising that with anti-regime demonstrations in March 2011.

Since then, the group has become deeply involved in the conflict, dispatching fighters throughout the country to bolster Assad's troops on a range of battlefields.

It has devoted particular attention to the Qalamun region along the two countries' border, but its fighters have also reportedly been key in government advances elsewhere including, on Thursday, in the northern Aleppo province.

At least 971 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

MOSCOW (AP) — Details of a new Russian submarine-launched nuclear torpedo have been shown on state-controlled TV, a secret the Kremlin said should never have been aired. Some observers, however, saw it as a deliberate leak.

The airing of the video on television channels under tight Kremlin control raised suspicions that it was done intentionally to scare the West at a time when its ties with Russia are at the lowest point since the Cold War.

NTV and Channel One showed a large document — filmed over a general's shoulder during a meeting with Putin — with drawings and details of a prospective weapons system called Status-6.

The system developed by St.Petersburg-based Rubin design bureau includes nuclear submarines carrying massive long-range underwater drones shaped like torpedoes, which could create "extensive zones of radioactive contamination" that would make enemy coastal areas "unsuitable for military, economic, business or other activity for a long time," the document said.

The channels later removed the footage, which was shot during a meeting on Monday in Sochi.

"It's true that some secret information was caught by the camera and therefore it was subsequently removed," Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said late Wednesday. "We hope this will not happen again."

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FILE In this Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015 file photo Russian President Vladimir Putin, centre, chairs a me …

Independent experts noted, however, that it would be hard to imagine cameramen of state TV stations doing a close up on any documents on the table during a Kremlin meeting on military issues. Most saw the incident as a deliberate leak intended to warn Washington and its allies that Russia is working on a new devastating weapon that would tip the scales in case of conflict.

"I have a feeling it was shown in order to scare the world," said Alexander Golts, an independent Moscow-based military analyst. "It's an attempt to offer an asymmetrical answer to the U.S. missile defense."

Putin has held four meetings on defense issues in as many days this week, reflecting the close attention he is paying to military modernization at a time of heightened tensions with the United States and Europe over the crisis in Ukraine.

The Russian leader described NATO's U.S.-led missile defense program as an attempt to break nuclear parity and warned that Moscow would counter it by deploying new strike weapons capable of piercing the shield.

Military experts and commentators traced the nuclear torpedo concept to the 1950s, when it was first offered by Andrei Sakharov, the father of Soviet thermonuclear bomb who later came to defy the Soviet system and won a Nobel Peace Prize. He proposed targeting the U.S. with high-yield nuclear torpedoes that would create huge tsunami waves and high levels of radioactivity to render large coastline areas uninhabitable.

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FILE - In this Monday, Nov. 9, 2015 file photo Russian President Vladimir Putin heads a meeting on m …

The proposal was rejected, partly because naval technology of the era wouldn't allow a Soviet submarine to approach the U.S. shore undetected.

The Status-6 appears to be a new reincarnation of the old idea, said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst.

"The plan is to deliver a 100-megaton nuclear bomb to the U.S. shores," he said. "It would cause a highly radioactive tsunami."

The details of the new weapon shown on Russian state TV indicated that the torpedo, described as a "self-propelled underwater craft" should have a trans-ocean range of 10,000 kilometers (5,400 miles), something military experts considered hardly possible.

But while the torpedo's real range could be much shorter, its relatively small size, a purported operational depth of 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) and a speed of 105 kilometers (65 miles per hour) appear realistic, making it difficult to spot and destroy, some observers said.

"Detecting it could be significantly different from detecting a submarine,"said Pavel Podvig, an independent analyst based in Geneva, where he runs his research project focusing on Russian nuclear forces.

The government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta alleged that in order to achieve the stated purpose of "extensive radioactive contamination" of coastal areas, the project could envisage using the so-called cobalt bomb, a nuclear weapon designed to produce enhanced amounts of radioactive fallout compared to a regular atomic warhead.

Podvig said the apparent deliberate leak of the Status-6 details looks menacing, irrespective of how realistic the project is from the technological viewpoint.

"The whole thing just strikes me as crazy," he said. "This is the way they believe they could show their strength and resolve. It's basically very unsettling that this kind of project appears anywhere near a meeting with the president."

Russian TV airs ‘secret’ nuclear torpedo plans

The Kremlin says details of the new submarine-launched weapon should never have been revealed.
Skeptics doubt it was accidental

Abuja (AFP) - Nigerian troops killed four suspected Boko Haram suspects and set free 61 people, mainly women and children, held by the jihadist group in the flashpoint northeastern Borno state, the army said Thursday.

In an operation, troops under air cover cleared Boko Haram camps "and in the process rescued 61 persons abducted and held captive by the Boko Haram terrorists," the army said in a statement.

"The rescued persons were mainly women and children," the military said, adding that troops also "killed four terrorists and arrested one."

The Nigerian army had last October 28 also said it freed more than 330 people, mostly women and children, from Boko Haram's Sambisa forest stronghold in an operation in the volatile northeast.

Of those survivors, 192 were children while 138 were women.

There was no independent confirmation of the army claims.

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A handout picture provided by the Nigerian army shows some of the 338 people who were held by Boko H …

There has also not been any indication that any of the more than 200 schoolgirls seized by the Islamists in April last year in Chibok town, Borno state, was among those rescued so far.

Their kidnapping of the schoolgirls from their dormitory sparked international anger, with strong condemnation of then president Goodluck Jonathan for his slow response to the girls' plight.

The Nigerian military has in recent months claimed a string of successes against Boko Haram in its quest to end the hardline Islamist group's six-year insurgency.

In early August, the army said it had freed 178 people, including more than 100 children, following an operation near Aulari town, about 70 kilometres (44 miles) south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to power in May on a pledge to crush Boko Haram, has given his military commanders until the end of December to defeat the rebels.

Boko Haram violence has killed at least 17,000 people and forced more than 2.5 million to flee their homes since 2009.

The group has also carried out deadly cross-border attacks in neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.