World in brief: Gang-driven riot kills 20 inmates
Rival gang members battled each other with homemade weapons and shovels in a riot that erupted in a maximum- security prison in western El Salvador and left 17 inmates dead, officials said Saturday.
The riot was sparked late Friday at the prison in Apanteos, 40 miles west of San Salvador, when a jailed gang member got into an argument with a guard as inmates were going into their cells to go to sleep, authorities said.
The prisoner grabbed the guard and rival gang members around them began fighting each other and tearing down six of the prison’s flimsy interior walls to get at other cellblocks.
The guards then fled as hundreds of prisoners battled, mostly with homemade weapons, shovels and pieces of broken wall.
Deputy police director Luis Tobar Prieto said Saturday officials regained control of the prison and found 17 inmates dead and several injured. But a second outbreak of fighting later on Saturday claimed three more lives, officials said.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
Bus blast kills 15, blamed on rebels
A bomb on a Sri Lankan passenger bus killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens more Saturday, officials said, blaming Tamil Tiger rebels for the country’s second bus bombing in as many days.
The blast, which police suspect was triggered by a female suicide bomber, appeared to signal an escalation of the bloody ethnic conflict ravaging the island nation off southern India.
Police blamed Tamil Tiger rebels for the bus attack in the coastal town of Meetiyagoda, 60 miles south of the capital, Colombo, and near a number of popular resort towns.
Though violence has risen sharply in Sri Lanka over the past year, most of it has occurred in the ethnic Tamil-dominated north and east, where the rebels run their own de facto state.
About 65 passengers had been on bus, senior police official Upul Ariyaratne said, and some 40 had been admitted to hospitals.
The Tigers denied any role in Saturday’s bloodshed.
Paris
Judge rules against group’s pork soup
A top French judge ruled that an extreme-right group cannot serve pork soup to the needy, saying the charitable handouts aim to discriminate against Muslims and Jews who don’t eat pork because of their faith.
Judge Christian Vigouroux of the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative body, said late Friday that such giveaways by the far-right group Solidarity of the French threaten public order.
His ruling approved a decision by Paris police to refuse permits to the group on the grounds that such handouts could spark angry reactions.
France is home to more than 5 million Muslims and some 600,000 Jews. Both Islam and Judaism prohibit eating pork, and Vigouroux said the group had shown “a clearly discriminatory goal” with its charity.