Rough weather was apparently to blame for the crash of a helicopter in which 11 soldiers sent to take part in the war on drug traffickers were killed in northern Mexico, the government said on Saturday.
Preliminary information indicates the Bell 412 crash on Friday night near Santiago Papasquiaro in Durango state “was due to bad weather conditions in the area,” the defence secretariat said in a statement.
The troops were among the 50,000 deployed nationwide as part of efforts to derail spiralling violence by drug cartels, the office said. The federal government clampdown however has failed to curb the violence that has killed around 23,000 people in three and a half years.
***
Dense fog grounds 115 flights in South Korea
Seoul : Dense fog on Sunday forced the cancellation of 115 flights in and out of South Korea’s southern resort island of Jeju, airport officials said.
It prevented 2,200 mostly domestic passengers from flying in or out of the popular holiday island.
“It is very rare to cancel flights en masse like this due to abnormal weather conditions here,” Son Yi-Ja, who handles traffic at Jeju airport, told AFP.
Thick fog shrouded the airport from morning to late afternoon and caused extremely low visibility, the official said. Operations began returning to normal early in the evening, he added. —AFP
***
Iran hangs leader of Sunni group
Tehran : Iran hanged the convicted leader of a Sunni rebel group for his involvement in deadly attacks in the Islamic state, state television reported.
Predominantly Shia Iran arrested Abdolmalek Rigi in February, four months after his Jundollah (God’s soldiers) group claimed a bombing which killed dozens of people, including senior officers of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.
Iran grapples with ethnic and religious tension in the south-eastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan where authorities have responded to attacks by Sunni rebels with a spate of hangings, widely criticised by rights groups and the West. A Tehran Revolutionary court sentenced Rigi to death and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence. —Reuters
***
LA airport evacuated after threat
Los Angeles : Parts of a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport were briefly evacuated when a man made threats that turned out to be false. LAX spokesman Albert Rodriguez said that a man walked into the Tom Bradley International Terminal shortly after 5 pm on Saturday and made threatening statements, prompting a partial clearing of the terminal’s upper departures level.
Rodriguez says only the sections outside security were affected. The airport police took the man into custody, conducted a security sweep and found nothing. Passengers returned to the terminal less than a half-hour later. Rodriguez says there were few if any delays to outbound flights.
—AP