Four arrested as Bangladesh building toll rises to 341

Relatives mourn as they show a picture of a garment worker, who is believed to be trapped under the rubble of the collapsed Rana Plaza building, in Savar, 30 km (19 miles) outside Dhaka, April 26, 2013. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj

Rescue workers look for trapped garment workers in the collapsed Rana Plaza building in Savar, 30 km (19 miles) outside Dhaka April 26, 2013. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj

By Serajul Quadir and Ruma Paul

DHAKA (Reuters) - Two factory bosses and two engineers were arrested in Bangladesh on Saturday, three days after the collapse of a building where low-cost garments were made for Western brands, as the death toll rose to 341 but many were still being found alive.

As many as 900 people could still be missing, police said.

The owner of the eight-storey building that fell like a pack of cards around more than 3,000 workers was still on the run.

Police said several of his relatives were detained to compel him to hand himself in, and an alert had gone out to airport and border authorities to prevent him from fleeing the country.

Officials said Rana Plaza, on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka, had been built without the correct permits, and the workers were allowed in on Wednesday despite warnings the previous day that it was structurally unsafe.

Two engineers involved in building the complex were also arrested at their homes early on Saturday, Dhaka district police chief Habibur Rahman said. He said they were arrested for dismissing a warning not to open the building after a jolt was felt and cracks were noticed on some pillars the previous day.

The owner and managing director of the largest of the five factories in the complex, New Wave Style, surrendered to the country's garment industry association during the night and they were handed over to police.

The factory, which listed many European and North American retailers as its customers, occupied upper floors of the building that officials said had been added illegally.

"PEOPLE ARE ASKING FOR HIS HEAD"

"Everyone involved - including the designer, engineer, and builders - will be arrested for putting up this defective building," said junior internal affairs minister Shamsul Huq.

An alliance of leftist parties which is part of the ruling coalition said it would call a national strike on May 2 if all those responsible for the disaster were not arrested by Sunday.

Rahman identified the owner of the building as Mohammed Sohel Rana, a leader of the ruling Awami League's youth front.

"People are asking for his head, which is quite natural," said H.T. Imam, an adviser to the prime minister.

Wednesday's collapse was the third major industrial incident in five months in Bangladesh, the second-largest exporter of garments in the world. In November, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory nearby the latest disaster killed 112 people.

Such incidents have raised serious questions about worker safety and low wages, and could taint the reputation of the poor South Asian country, which relies on garments for 80 percent of its exports.

Anger over the working conditions of Bangladesh's 3.6 million garment workers - most of whom are women - has grown since the disaster, triggering protests.

Hundreds were on the streets again on Saturday, smashing and burning cars and sparking more battles with police, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Eyewitnesses said dozens of people were injured in the latest clashes.

Remarkably, people were still being pulled alive from the precarious mound of rubble - 21 in all since dawn on Saturday.

"We must salute the common people who dared to enter the wreckage to rescue them, as even our professionals didn't dare to take the risk," Mizanur Rahman, deputy director of the fire service, told Reuters.

Marina Begum, 22, spoke from a hospital bed of her ordeal inside the broken building for three days.

"It felt like I was in hell," she told reporters. "It was so hot, I could hardly breathe, there was no food and water. When I regained my senses I found myself in this hospital bed."

Frantic efforts were under way to save 15 people trapped under the concrete who were being supplied with dried food, bottled water and oxygen.

About 2,500 people have been rescued from the remains of the building in the commercial suburb of Savar, about 30 km (20 miles) from Dhaka.

WRONG PERMIT, ILLEGAL FLOORS

Emdadul Islam, chief engineer of the state-run Capital Development Authority (CDA), said the owner of the building had not received the proper building consent, obtaining a permit for a five-storey building from the local municipality, which did not have the authority to grant it.

"Only CDA can give such approval," he said. "We are trying to get the original design from the municipality, but since the concerned official is in hiding we cannot get it readily."

Furthermore, another three storeys had been added illegally, he said. "Savar is not an industrial zone, and for that reason no factory can be housed in Rana Plaza," Islam told Reuters.

Islam said the building had been erected on the site of a pond filled in with sand and earth, which meant its foundations were too weak.

"There were three big and very heavy generators that shook the whole building when they were operating. On that day the generators were being used and within seconds the building collapsed," Islam said.

Sixty percent of Bangladesh's garment exports go to Europe. The United States takes 23 percent and Canada takes 5 percent.

North American and European chains, including British retailer Primark and Canada's Loblaw, a unit of George Weston Ltd, said they were supplied by factories in the Rana Plaza building.

Loblaw, which had a small number of "Joe Fresh" apparel items made at one of the factories, said on Saturday that it was working with other retailers to provide aid and support.

It said it was sending representatives to Bangladesh and was also joining what it described as an urgent meeting with other retailers and the Retail Council of Canada.

(Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Paul Tait and Jeremy Laurence)

Muslim-Christian relationship fuels row in Egypt

Egyptian protesters pose next to a police vehicle set alight during clashes outside the presidential palace in Cairo, Friday, April 26, 2013. Dozens of mostly masked protesters hurled stones and firebombs in clashes with riot police at Egypt’s presidential palace in a Cairo suburb. Protests have become a weekly routine in Egypt, as the country has plunged in turmoil during most of the past two years since 2011 uprising which ousted longtime president Hosni Mubarak out of power. (AP Photo/Hussein Tallal)

An Egyptian protester holds a cross and a copy of Islam's holy book, the Quran, during a protest in Tahrir Square, the focal point of Egyptian uprising, during a protest to support judicial independence in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, April 26, 2013. Egypt's Islamist-led parliament on Wednesday pushed ahead with a law that could force into retirement many of the nation's most senior judges, despite an uproar by the judiciary over fears the president's allies want to control the courts.(AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

CAIRO (AP) — An alleged romance between an Egyptian Muslim college student and a Coptic Christian man heightened sectarian tension on Friday in a small rural Egyptian town where police fired tear gas to disperse stone-throwing Muslims who surrounded a Coptic church in anger over the inter-faith relationship, a security official and priest said.

The Muslim protesters accuse Saint Girgis Church of helping 21-year-old Rana el-Shazli, who is believed to have converted toChristianity, flee to Turkey with a Coptic Christian man.

Stories of conversions to Christianity or Islam, inter-faith romances and the illegal building and expanding of churches have caused a series of deadly sectarian incidents in recent years. Since Islamists rose to power after Egypt's 2011 uprising that forced out longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak, Christians have grown more fearful of intimidation and violence from fellow Egyptians, especially ultraconservative Salafis.

The alleged romance has been fueling sectarian tension for nearly two months in Wasta, a rural town in Beni Suef province, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) south of Cairo.

Muslims have attacked churches there and forced Christians to close their shops for nearly eight days last month and members of the Christian man's family have been arrested, including his mother and father, after a prosecutor accused them of collaborating in hiding the woman. The woman's family issued an ultimatum for the church to bring her back early this month, but when it didn't, violence erupted anew.

On Friday, ultraconservative Salafis distributed flyers accusing the church of "proselytizing Christianity," according to a copy of the flyer posted on a social networking site. It called on residents to rally inside a mosque located meters (yards) from the church to "rescue a Muslim soul and bring her back from the deviant path."

Father Bishoy Youssef of the church said he heard loudspeakers from the adjacent mosque calling on worshippers to join a march to the church for the sake of the girl. He said churches in Wasta had been forewarned about "threats to attack the churches" and scheduled early morning masses that would be finished before Friday prayers at the mosque.

"God protect us," he said. "We have nothing to do with this whole story,"

Clashes erupted when protesters hurled stones at security forces that had cordoned off streets leading to the church. Police fired tear gas, according to a security official, who added that police arrested five people, including the girl's uncle. According to the security official at the scene, two people were injured by gunshots and others suffered breathing problems from the tear gas.

Last month, another priest from the same church told Coptic Christian Karama TV network that protesters set his car on fire.

Like previous incidents, sessions to foster reconciliation were held with elders from the town, but extremists seemed intent on escalating the tension, Youssef said.

Abu Islam, a well-known extremist cleric who was tried in an Egyptian court for insulting Christianity, appeared last month on his television program, which is broadcast on The Nation TV, calling on Muslims to take action against any church network that seeks to convert Muslim women to Christianity.

"This girl is not coming back," he said. "The Christians mess with our honor and faith."

Also on Friday, a Christian girl disappeared in the southern ancient city of Luxor. A security official said the family of 20-year-old Rania Manqaryous filed a complaint with police accusing a Muslim man, who was a neighbor, of abducting their daughter.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

In the past, similar incidents have triggered deadly sectarian violence.

In 2010, the ultraconservative Muslim Salafis claimed that Camilla Shehata, a Coptic Christian wife of a priest, had converted to Islam, but was abducted by the church to force her to return to Christianity. Iraq's branch of al-Qaida used the incident as justification for an attack on a Baghdad church that killed 68 people, and threatened to conduct similar attacks in Egypt until the church released her. On Dec. 31, 2011, a suicide bomber killed at least 21 Christians at a church in the port city of Alexandria — an attack linked to the Shehata case.

In May 2011, at least 12 people were killed and a Cairo church was burned in clashes after a Christian woman had an affair with a Muslim man. When she disappeared, the man alleged that Christian clergy had snatched her and were holding her prisoner in a local church because she had converted to Islam.

Separately, dozens of mostly masked protesters hurled stones and firebombs in clashes with riot police at Egypt's presidential palace in a Cairo suburb. Protests have become a weekly occurrence in Egypt with unrest continuing since the 2011 uprising.

Muslims see little backlash after Boston bombing

NEW YORK (AP) — It looked like the backlash was starting even before the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslim.

Hours after the explosions, a Bangladeshi man told police he was dubbed an "Arab" and beaten in New York. A veiled Muslim woman in a city near Boston said she was struck in the shoulder and called a terrorist. When the public learned days later that the FBI was pursuing two Muslim men of Chechen descent, American Muslims feared the worst.

But the worst didn't happen.

Muslim civil rights leaders say the anti-Islam reaction has been more muted this time than after other attacks since Sept. 11, which had sparked outbursts of vandalism, harassment and violence.Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which monitors bias and hate crimes against Muslims, said his organization has seen no uptick in reports of harassment, assaults or damage to mosques since the April 15 bombings. Leaders noted a larger, broader chorus of Americans warning against placing collective blame.

The change may only reflect the circumstances of this particular attack. The two suspects are white and from an area of the world, Russia's turbulent Caucasus region, that unlike the Mideast, Americans know little about. Investigators say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who had lived in the U.S. for about a decade, carried out the bombings, although it's not clear why.

But U.S. Muslims also credit a new generation of leaders in their communities with helping keep tempers in check after the attack. Many are the American-born children of immigrants who saw the impact of the 2001 terror attacks on their faith and have strived ever since to build ties with other Americans.

"There seems to be a much more mature, sophisticated response to this tragedy than in the past 12 years," said Wajahat Ali, 32, an attorney and co-author of "Fear, Inc.," a report by the Center for American Progress on the strategies of anti-Muslim groups in the United States. "We really do see a palpable shift."

No one is suggesting Islam has been fully accepted in the U.S. Activists and commentators who have long considered the religion itself a threat to national security took to the Web and the airwaves to say Boston proved them right. The frantic search for the perpetrators led to some very public misidentifications of Arab or South Asian men that made them potential targets for retribution.

Yet, American Muslim groups — only a decade ago, more inward looking than publicly engaged — pushed back in a more confident way.

As they have after any national tragedy since Sept. 11, Muslim groups issued a flurry of statements condemning the attack, organized blood drives and thanked law enforcement for protecting the country. The Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, in the city's Roxbury section, held vigils and formed medical teams to help with the wounded. On his Facebook page, Imam Suhaib Webb, who leads the mosque, posted a black ribbon and banner across his Facebook page with the statement, "We're Bostonians — We mourn with the city."

"I offered my home to house stranded runners, spread information on fundraising for the victims through social media, and attended a candlelight vigil in Harvard Yard," said Zeba Khan, who lives in Cambridge. "That is exactly where I am focusing my attention — on the victims and on the safety of my neighbors and my city."

Non-Muslims echoed the message. Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley said in his Sunday sermon after the tragedy, "The crimes of the two young men must not be the justification for prejudice against Muslims and against immigrants." Online, a post by comedian and actor Patton Oswalt went viral, calling the attack "beyond religion or creed or nation."

"When you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, 'The good outnumber you, and we always will,'" Oswalt wrote.

The Boston explosions also inadvertently underscored a point Muslims have been making for years: More are monitoring their own communities for signs of extremism.

Leaders of the Islamic Society of Boston, a mosque in Cambridge that is affiliated with Webb's mosque in Roxbury, said Tamerlan Tsarnaev occasionally attended Friday prayers, but had protested the community's moderate approach. Family members said Tamerlan was steered toward a radical strain of Islam by a friend they didn't know, began opposing the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and turned to websites and literature claiming the CIA was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and Jews controlled the world.

According to leaders of the Cambridge mosque, Tamerlan once stood up during a sermon and objected when a preacher told worshippers it would be appropriate to celebrate national holidays such as Thanksgiving or Independence Day because it went against Islam. A couple of months later, Tamerlan objected when a preacher praised the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He called the speaker a hypocrite and accused of him contaminating people's minds. In response, worshippers shouted at him and told him to leave the service.

The mosque offered these accounts in a detailed written statement released after Tamerlan was killed and Dzhokhar was apprehended.

"Trust me — no group of people wants to stamp out radicalism more than Muslims, who have seen it soil their faith and define its image," said Khurram Dara, 24, author of "The Crescent Directive," a well-known e-book urging U.S. Muslims to more fully integrate into American society. "They're vigilant of radicalism in their communities."

The message was driven home by a case this week in Canada. Investigators there said they thwarted a plan by two men, guided by al-Qaida in Iran, to derail a train between New York City and Montreal because a local Muslim leader alerted them to the threat. The leader, Muhammad Robert Heft, said the father of one of the two suspects had come forward with concerns about his son's intolerant religious views. A 2011 study of American Muslim terrorism by the Triangle Center for Terrorism and Homeland Security found U.S. Muslims were the largest single source of tips to law enforcement that year for terrorist plots.

Sheila Musaji of St. Louis, editor of TheAmericanMuslim.org, which she founded as a community magazine in 1989, said more Muslims are online and actively countering extremist preachers. "There are these crazy groups out there. It's hard to know when they cross some sort of line into something else that involves violence," Musaji said.

"They need to be countered," she said, "but also the lslamophobes need to be countered."

Because along with progress in recent years, Muslims can point to better organized efforts to condemn their religion.

For example, in Murfreesboro, Tenn., opposition to a mosque has become an ideological and religious conflict that has dragged on for more than three years and spilled over into local public schools. Since 2010, bills have been proposed in more than 30 state legislatures that would restrict consideration of religious law or foreign law in local courts. The bills are similar or identical to a model drafted by activists who contend Muslims, by stealth, want to replace the American legal system with Islamic law, or shariah.

____

Sheriff: Remains are 13-year-old missing 2 years

SNYDER, Texas (AP) — Remains found in a remote West Texas location last month are those of a 13-year-old middle school cheerleader missing since December 2010, authorities announced Friday.

An unidentified person contacted authorities after finding the remains near Lake J.B. Thomas inScurry County on March 16, more than two years after Hailey Darlene Dunn's mother reported her daughter missing.

The girl's disappearance and the cause of her death remain under investigation, Scurry County Sheriff Trey Wilson said at a news conference Friday. The Scurry County District Attorney's Office received written confirmation of the identity of the remains on Friday, he said.

Texas Rangers informed the girl's mother, Billie Jean Dunn, on Friday afternoon at her Austin home, said her attorney, John Young. Dunn will be driving to West Texas to arrange her daughter's funeral, he said.

The body was found about 20 miles northwest of the girl's hometown of Colorado City. The girl had been the subject of months of intensive searches in and around Colorado City and surrounding fields and landfills after her mother reported her missing on Dec. 28, 2010. More than 100 billboards featuring her picture and information about the case were set up along interstates in Texas and other states.

Shawn Adkins, who was Billie Dunn's boyfriend when Hailey went missing, has said the girl told him on Dec. 27, 2010, that she was going to her father's home nearby and then on to spend the night at a friend's home. She did neither.

Authorities had named Adkins as a person of interest in the girl's disappearance, but he has not been charged. Authorities later accused the girl's mother of lying about the whereabouts of Adkins, who was found at her home. Billie Dunn pleaded no contest in June 2011 to making a false report to law enforcement and received a suspended 90-day jail term with probation.

The mother and Adkins have denied involvement in Hailey's disappearance. Billie Dunn broke off her relationship with Adkins last year, Young said.

Freda Radcliff, who led Hailey's Angels, an organization dedicated to finding the girl, attended Friday's news conference.

"We've been searching for her for two years, and it's like losing a child of your own. I hate it. I wish we could have brought her back," Radcliff said.

Hailey's paternal grandmother, Connie Jones, said that "At least now we can get some closure."

"We can bury her. She can go home to her maker. She can be at peace."

Hailey's paternal grandfather, Bill Dunn, died in 2011, six months after the girl went missing. His widow, Spicy Dunn of Ponca City, Okla., said her husband spent much of the last months of his life trying to learn what became of his granddaughter.

"He was very, very hurt, and was on the computer all the time looking and trying to find anything that had to do with Hailey," she said Friday. "Anything."

She said family members made a point not to change their phone numbers so that law enforcement officials could reach them in case of any developments, even years later.

"It is a relief to know that she's at peace," Spicy Dunn said. "She doesn't have any more suffering."

She later added, "I hope the family comes to a closure. I know it's very hard."

Is gun control primed for a huge comeback?

The NRA won round one, but proponents of tougher gun laws haven't lost hope yet

Despite months of intense lobbying and significant public support, lawmakers failed to advance any gun control legislation through theSenate earlier this month. One by one, amendments came up for a vote in rapid succession, and one by one, they all failed. The hope that any gun bill would emerge from Washington seemed to go down with them.

Yet now, some lawmakers are quietly looking to revive the issue. According to the New York Times, at least two groups of senators are working independently on gun bills that would address separate issues: Background checks and gun trafficking.

SEE MORE: The speech Bill Clinton never gave

Given that gun legislation uniformly lost last time around, what do gun control proponents hope to achieve by circling back to the issue? Here's the Times' Jeremy W. Peters:

Drawing on the lessons from battles in the 1980s and '90s over the Brady Bill, which failed in Congress several times before ultimately passing, gun control supporters believe they can prevail by working on a two-pronged strategy. First, they are identifying senators who might be willing to change their votes and support a background check system with fewer loopholes.

Second, they are looking to build a national campaign that would better harness overwhelming public support for universal background checks — which many national polls put at near 90 percent approval — to pressure lawmakers. [New York Times]

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) are trying to breathe new life into their bipartisan background-check bill, searching for ways to attract the measly handful of votes by which it fell short the last time around. The Senate voted, 54-46, against that proposal earlier this month, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) joining the opposition solely so, through procedural rules, he could bring it back for another vote at a later date. Manchin told the Times he was considering tweaking the bill's language in a way that would give it the 60 necessary to override a filibuster from some of the GOP's more conservative members.

SEE MORE: Is Beyonce breaking new ground by debuting her songs in commercials?

Aiding Manchin will be the intense lobbying efforts of several high-profile gun control groups. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's (I) political action committee, has threatened to oppose Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) — one of only four Democratic senators to buck the party on background checks — when he comes up for re-election, in the hope that the threat will convince him to switch his stance. President Obama's Organizing for America hasvowed to do the same with other Democratic lawmakers who vote no on bills to tighten the nation's gun laws.

Meanwhile, Americans for Responsible Solutions has already gone up with an ad targeting Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.) That group, created by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was critically wounded and nearly killed in a mass shooting in Arizona, has focused its efforts solely on Republican senators for now.

SEE MORE: The best seats on Broadway

At the same time, new polling data may also help stricter gun bills gain newfound support. A Public Policy Polling survey released this week found that Ayotte's approval rating had fallen by 15 points since October, settling at 44 percent. That offered some encouragement to gun control supporters who've said they believe a voter backlash will convince dissenting senators to change their minds.

On the flip side, a recent Quinnipiac poll found Toomey's approval rating rising amid his push for the background check bill, with 70 percent of voters in his home state saying they "strongly support" that measure. That's significant because polling in Pennsylvania can, to some degree, be extrapolated to other purple states.

SEE MORE: Are $100,000 cancer drugs unethical?

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent explains:

Pennsylvania is an interesting test case with broader implications. While it does lean blue, it has a deep gun culture, and it is home to the sort of suburban district — represented by Republicans — where gun reformers still hope to pick up unexpected GOP support.

Indeed, one notable finding is that Pat Toomey’s approval rating is now at 53 percent among suburban voters — in a state where the Philadelphia suburbs are key to statewide races. Hopefully other Republicans who represent rapidly suburbanizing states (such as Kelly Ayotte) or suburban House districts will take note. [Washington Post]

While none of this means gun control bills are destined to ultimately pass, it shows that the debate is at least far from over. If nothing else, the Senate leadership has said they plan to readdress the issue this year.

SEE MORE: Latest shots in the austerity debate: Krugman vs. Reinhart and Rogoff

"I think we're going to bring this bill back before the end of the year and I think you may find some changes," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday.

View this article on TheWeek.com Get 4 Free Issues of The Week