18/03/2026

WEDNESDAY | MAR 18, 2026

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23 DEAD, 100 HURT IN NIGERIA BLASTS MAIDUGURI: Coordinated explosions tore through a busy market and other areas in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Maiduguri, killing at least 23 people and wounding more than 100 others, police said yesterday. The three blasts detonated on Monday evening striking a main market, the entrance of the city’s largest teaching hospital and a post office axis, in one of the worst recent attacks on the capital of Borno state. The military blamed the blasts in the city of around 1.2 million people on suspected Boko Haram militants. It came after an attack on a military post on Sunday night. Maiduguri is the town where Boko Haram originated. The group launched its campaign to establish a caliphate in 2009. Their campaign has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around two million. – AFP SEVEN HELD FOR TRAINING REBELS NEW DELHI: Investigators have arrested seven foreigners, including six Ukrainians and an American, on suspicion of illegally crossing into Myanmar to train armed militia groups, All India Radio (AIR) reported yesterday. On Monday, a closed court in New Delhi remanded the seven foreign nationals in custody for 11 days of interrogation after they allegedly illegally entered sensitive Mizoram state without an official permit. The seven then allegedly passed from Mizoram into Myanmar, where they were “training ethnic war groups ... associated with insurgent groups in India”, according to AIR. They are also suspected to have illegally transported a “huge consignment of drones from Europe” into India for use in Myanmar. – AFP

BR I E F S

A displaced Lebanese holds his son as they receive assistance at a medical aid point in Beirut. – REUTERSPIC

Key Iran leaders killed

TEHRAN: Israel said yesterday it had killed Iran’s powerful national security chief, Ali Larijani, in what would be a huge blow to the Islamic republic as fresh strikes rocked the Middle East from Tehran to Baghdad. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Larijani was “eliminated last night”, although this has not been confirmed by Iran. Earlier yesterday, Israel’s military said Gholamreza Soleimani, head of the Basij paramilitary force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was killed on Monday in a strike on Tehran. Reports of their deaths come less than three weeks after US-Israeli strikes on Feb 28 killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, triggering a war that has engulfed the region. He was replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose whereabouts and health is the subject of much speculation. US President Donald Trump said Monday that “we don’t know ... if he’s dead or not”. Hundreds of people have been killed and millions have been displaced because of the war. BRUSSELS: A Brussels court is to decide whether a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat should stand trial over the 1961 killing of Congolese independence icon Patrice Lumumba. Etienne Davignon, a one-time EU commissioner, is the only one still alive among 10 Belgians accused by the Congolese leader’s family of complicity in the murder. If the prosecutors’ request that he answer in court is accepted, he would become the first Belgian official to face justice in the 65 years since Lumumba was executed and his body dissolved in acid. Lawyers for Davignon, who denies all charges, argued in a closed-door January hearing that too much time had passed since the events, according to multiple sources. Lumumba’s relatives conversely

o Ali Larijani dead, says Israeli minister

through which a fifth of global crude oil passes, have also all but closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has called on world powers to help and on Monday demanded US allies join quickly and with “great enthusiasm” an armada to escort tankers through the strait. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said London was working with allies to craft a “viable” plan to reopen the strait, but ruled out a Nato mission. Berlin also said it “has been clear at all times that this war is not a matter for Nato”. EU foreign ministers meeting on Monday showed “no appetite” for extending their Red Sea naval mission to help reopen Hormuz, the bloc’s top diplomat said. Analysts said it was not surprising that America’s partners were unenthusiastic about joining a war they were not consulted on, after a year of tensions with Washington on aged just 35, in the southern region of Katanga, with the support of Belgian mercenaries. His body was never recovered. Davignon, who went on to become a vice-president of the European Commission in the 1980s, was a novice diplomat at the time of the assassination. After entering the diplomatic service in 1959, Davignon rose through the ranks after his early involvement in Congolese independence talks. Christophe Marchand, a lawyer for Lumumba’s family, described the accused as “a link in the chain” of a “disastrous state-sponsored criminal enterprise”. The court’s decision is subject to appeal. Were a trial to be held, Marchand has said he hoped it would take place early next year. – AFP

PARIS: All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu , scientists said. The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu , suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system. One theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago. The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility. In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300- million-km mission to land on Ryugu , a 900m-wide asteroid. It successfully managed to collect two samples of rocks weighing 5.4gm each and bring them back to Earth in 2020. Research in 2023 showed that these samples contained uracil, everything from tariffs to Greenland. The United States had “launched a war without consulting allies, expecting them to mop up the mess, and that’s not going fly”, said Erwan Lagadec of George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Trump on Monday admitted he was “shocked” at Iran’s response to the US-Israel attacks. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. Those missiles were set to go after them,” he said. “So, they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.” The Gulf has borne the brunt of Iran’s attacks in response to US Israeli strikes, with Tehran targeting US assets but also civilian infrastructure. – AFP

An AFP reporter had earlier yesterday reported blasts in Tehran, after a night of heavy bombardment mixed with thunder and rain. Israel’s army said it had launched a wave of strikes “against Iranian terror regime infrastructure across Tehran”, as well as strikes in Lebanon. Lebanese media reported Israeli strikes at dawn hit a residential building in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. In retaliation for the US-Israel attacks, Iran has targeted US interests, energy facilities and civilian infrastructure of its energy rich neighbours. Its threats and attacks on tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, maintained that the time is ripe for a long-overdue legal reckoning. “We are counting on the Belgian justice system to do its job and shed light on history,” Yema Lumumba, 33, a granddaughter of the late Congolese prime minister, said earlier this year. Prosecutors accuse Davignon of “participation in war crimes” over his role in the “unlawful detention and transfer” of Lumumba, as well as “humiliating and degrading treatment”. A fiery critic of Belgium’s colonial rule, Lumumba became his country’s first prime minister after it gained independence in 1960. But he fell out with the former colonial power and with the United States and was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office. He was executed on Jan 17, 1961,

Building blocks of life found in asteroid samples

Belgian court to decide on trial over 1961 Congo leader’s murder

which is one of the four bases that make up RNA. While DNA, the famed double helix, functions as a genetic blueprint, single-strand RNA is an all important messenger, converting the instructions contained in DNA for implementation. On Monday, a new study by a Japanese team of researchers in Nature Astronomy demonstrated that the samples contained all the “nucleobases” for DNA and RNA. These included uracil as well as adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. This “does not mean that life existed on Ryugu ”, said the study’s lead author, Toshiki Koga. “Instead, their presence indicates that primitive asteroids could produce and preserve molecules that are important for the chemistry related to the origin of life,” said the biochemist from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. – AFP