Top Stories of the Week
Indonesian Jet Crash
Bad weather is more likely than a mid-air explosion to have caused the disappearance of an Indonesian passenger plane that vanished more than two weeks ago with 102 people aboard, an aviation investigator said today.
Frans Wenas, head of a government team investigating the case, said aircraft overstress or bad weather, or a combination of both, could have caused the accident.
''The aircraft may have run into an uncontrollable weather situation which got it in an unusual position,'' said Wenas, an investigator from the National Transport Safety Commission.
The airliner may have disintegrated on impact with the sea or due to underwater pressure, he added.
There had been suggestions the 17-year-old aircraft, which vanished from radar screens on New Year's Day, had exploded in mid air, but a study of pieces of the airliner found so far indicated this was probably not the case, he said.
''Looking at the pieces that we have found and where they were located, there are no indications that the plane exploded in the air,'' Wenas said by telephone, adding that the debris recovered showed no signs of burning or of an explosion.
After finding no trace of the plane for more than a week, a fisherman found the tail stabiliser of the Boeing last Tuesday snared in his nets off Lojie Beach on the west coast of Sulawesi island.
No bodies or survivors have been found.
Other small pieces of wreckage have been found in the past few days floating in the sea or washed up on beaches in the area.
Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, the head of the search mission, said on Monday that a fuel spill in the sea spotted by a search aircraft and believed to be from the doomed jet could provide a new clue.
But the slick rescue workers had not been able to locate the spill when they tried to go to the area to get a sample, officials said.
Fragments of human hair and scalp that might come from passengers were found on Sunday and had been sent for DNA testing. The process could take two or three days.
Suyanto said previously that, considering that parts of the plane found so far were mostly small, a body was unlikely to have survived the disaster in one piece.
Indonesian navy ships assisted by a US oceanographic ship have also been trying to locate the missing plane's fuselage, which could still house the flight recorder that could provide clues to explain the disaster.
The flight recorder is set up to give off a signal for 30 days to aid detection, but it is likely to be very hard to locate in waters as deep as 1,700 metres in the area.
The plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather. The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over crosswinds.
Labels: accidents, international
9/11 hijacker friend to be sentenced
A German court on Monday will sentence a Moroccan friend of the
September 11 hijackers who was found guilty last year of being an accessory to mass murder, the court said today.
Mounir El Motassadeq, a member of a group of radical Arab students in Hamburg who organised the 2001 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people died, faces up to 15 years in prison.
Germany's top appeals court in Karlsruhe had in November found Motassadeq guilty of abetting the murder of 246 passengers and crew who died on four planes that crashed on September 11, 2001.
Lawyers for the Moroccan had demanded the suspension of the first hearing in Hamburg today, at which Motassadeq was present. His lawyer accused the court of being unconstitutional because it was set up specifically for the hearing.
''We are dealing with an extraordinary court which has been formed exclusively for El Motassadeq,'' Ladislav Anisic told German broadcaster N24.
''What is happening here goes against our constitution.'' Motassadeq, 32, is one of only two people convicted of involvement in the September 11 attacks.
The other is Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a US court in May 2006.
Last November's decision overturned a 2005 ruling which convicted him of belonging to a terrorist organisation while clearing him of abetting mass murder.
Motassadeq's lawyers insist he knew nothing about the plot to fly hijacked planes into the New York and Washington targets.
Labels: accidents, international
Woman kills self, two mentally retarded children
The wife of a Jamshedpur-based industrialist
killed herself and her two mentally retarded children by driving her car into a ravine at Daravali in Mulshi taluka of Sutarwadi village, 30 km from here.
The deceased, Neha Khatan (36), drove her car with her children Nipun (12) and Chahat (3) directly into the valley. The car caught fire, killing all three occupants instantly, police said adding the bodies were beyond recognition. The identity of the deceased was established through the number-plate of the car.
The police said the incident occurred last evening. Initially, the police believed it was a case of accident. However, they recovered three suicide notes written by the deceased for her husband, who owns a factory in Bhosari industrial area in Jamshedpur and her parents in which she stated that she was committing suicide out of depression.
In her note, she said she wanted her husband to remarry and that
she had another five-year old daughter Janhavi, who was normal.
Police have registered a case of suicide and murder, sources added.
Labels: accidents, national
Updates on Princess Diana
A three-year police inquiry into the death of Princess Diana will issue its long-awaited report Thursday amid hopes it would finally halt the speculation about her fatal Paris car crash in 1997. John Stevens, the former head of London's Metropolitan Police, led the investigation of the deaths of Diana, 36, and her companion, Dodi Fayed, 42. They were killed along with chauffeur Henri Paul when their Mercedes crashed in the Pont d'Alma tunnel in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997, while the couple were being chased by media photographers.
Rumors and conspiracy theories continue to swirl around Diana's death, despite a French judge's 1999 ruling that the crash was an accident. An investigation later concluded that Paul had been drinking and was driving at high speed.
Stevens and the Metropolitan Police have refused to discuss the findings of his inquiry, although it is widely expected to conclude that Diana's death was an accident and that Paul was drunk.
from :
Wjla.comLabels: accidents, international
Five killed in Infosys campus
Five labourers were killed and five others injured in a mishap in the campus of Information Technology bellwether Infosys while they were working on a repair of a portion of building here this morning.
City Police Commissioner N Achuta Rao, who visited the spot, talking to newsmen, said the mishap occured when the centring structures and huge glass panes came down on the workers engaged in building work below. The deceased belonged to Raichur district, he added.
He said five labourers, who sustained injured, were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment immediately.
Labels: accidents, national, others
China mine bosses jailed after blast
A Chinese court jailed two managers of a state-owned coal mine today for negligence two years after a gas explosion killed 166 miners, Xinhua news agency said.
The blast, one of the worst in China in decades, hit the Chenjiashan coal mine in Tongchuan in the northwestern province of Shaanxi just days after the pit had caught fire. Mine manager Liu Shuangming was jailed for five and a half years and his deputy and chief engineer, Wang Youjun, was jailed for five years, Xinhua said.
''After the fire was put out, (they) ordered the miners to risk their lives resuming production without sufficient safety measures,'' Xinhua said. ''Their action was extremely outrageous.'' China has the world's deadliest coal mining industry with fatal accidents almost on a daily basis as safety regulations are ignored and production is pushed beyond limits in the rush for profit.
Four coal mine accidents killed at least 88 people across the country just over the weekend. Nearly 6,000 coal miners died in about 3,300 floods, blasts and other accidents in 2005, and the death toll for the first 10 months of 2006 stood at 3,726.
Officials say small and privately run coal mines that fall short of safety standards account for most of the casualties, but large state-owned mines report the higher death tolls. A gas blast in a state coal mine killed 214 in the northeastern province of Liaoning in February 2005, while 171 died in a similar accident in Heilongjiang province last November.
Labels: accidents, breaking news, international
Fire accidents in world
At least nine people were killed and 12 critically injured in a devastating fire that broke out at an illegal leather factory at Topsia in the Eastern fringes of the metro late last night.
According to official sources the fire broke out at around 0230 hours in the night and quickly engulfed the factory that was on the second floor of the building. To make matters worse, in the chaos that resulted, the keys to the only exit was lost.
It was only after the fire brigade arrived at around 0400 hours that the door was pulled down and the rest rescued. Official sources said that nine people had died, that included women working in the factory, and 12 were battling for life at National Medical College Hospital with 90 per cent burn injuries.
Another story, Polish officials said today they feared the worst as rescuers battled to reach 15 miners trapped in a deep coal mine after an explosion that killed at least eight others.
More than 70 rescuers worked through the night and tried to pump air into a tunnel to help them overcome ''hell'' conditions in the mine beneath the town of Ruda Slaska, about 300 km southwest of the capital Warsaw, after yesterday's blast.
A spokesman for the state-run Kompania Weglowa coal group said it could take several hours to ventilate the underground area and that it was impossible to say if the rescuers would reach the 15 in time. Seven badly burned bodies have been hauled from the mine, and an eighth miner has been confirmed dead.
''The rescuers have reached the eighth man but were forced to withdraw due to the threat the methane will explode again,'' said Madej. ''Ventilating the shaft may last up to 8-9 hours. It is difficult to say what barriers we will meet (after that).'' Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski flew to the mine to watch rescue efforts and promised help for the families of the miners.
The Halemba mine is one of the oldest in Poland and has been in operation since 1957.
Labels: accidents, international, others
Anna Nicole's son died
Anna Nicole Smith's 20-year-old son died of a “massive heart attack” while visiting his mother and newborn sister in their hospital room over the weekend, according to media reports. Daniel Smith had flown to the Bahamas on Saturday to join his mother and was in her hospital room Sunday when he suddenly collapsed.
Labels: accidents, international
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