CR IP TI ON BS SU
MONDAY, MARCH 17, 2014
Moves to enforce ban on beach barbeques
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19 2Maid21kills 27 employer’s daughter in Sulaibikhat Suspect turns self in • MPs vent anger on Ethiopian workers By Hanan Al-Saadoun, B Izzak and A Saleh
Only 6,400 hajj pilgrims from Kuwait By A Saleh KUWAIT: Saudi authorities have informed Kuwait that the kingdom will only accept 6,400 hajj pilgrims from Kuwait this year. This was announced during a meeting of the head of Kuwait’s hajj mission and Awqaf Ministry undersecretary Adel Al-Falah and acting Saudi Hajj Ministry undersecretary Sahel AlSabban to discuss preparations for the coming hajj season. Ongoing expansion works at Makkah’s Grand Mosque has required reducing pilgrims from outside Saudi Arabia by 20 percent and those from within the country by 50 percent. Separately, MP Abdulhameed Dashti warned of the consequences of the involvement of Kuwaitis in the Syrian conflict and urged the government to take immediate and serious steps in this regard. He was commenting after a senior Kuwaiti fighter was killed in Syria late on Friday.
KUWAIT: Ethiopian maid Rabiya Mahmoud is seen after she turned herself in at Sulaibikhat police station yesterday.
KUWAIT: An Ethiopian domestic worker stabbed her employer’s teenage daughter to death in Sulaibikhat yesterday, in yet another stab-murder case in which housemaids target children of their employers in Kuwait. No reason was given for the murder, but it was reported that the maid said she had been insulted the night before. Several Kuwaiti lawmakers meanwhile vented anger on Ethiopian workers, demanding a total ban on their recruitment. The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Rabiya Mahmoud, turned herself in at Sulaibikhat police station at 5:45 am. She admitted killing 19-year-old Seham Al-Shemmari, daughter of former Kuwaiti national football team defender Hmoud Flaiteh Al-Shemmari, earlier that morning. She confirmed that the murder happened at Shemmari’s house where she worked as a housemaid, and cited conflicts with the victim as the reason. The circumstances behind the crime and the suspect’s exact motives remain unclear as of the newspaper’s publishing. The police report says that officers responded to an emergency call reporting that a door was locked in a Sulaibikhat house with a girl inside. The girl was found bleeding heavily after firefighters broke the door open with her parents present, before she was rushed to the hospital. The victim arrived dead at the Mubarak Hospital according to the medical report,
Syrian army captures rebel bastion Yabroud
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which confirmed that the death was a result of four stab wounds - two in the chest and two in the abdominal area. The suspect later turned herself in. She told officers that she stabbed the victim multiple times in the girl’s bedroom while she was asleep, then locked her inside the room before leaving her employer’s house. She also handed over the knife she used in the crime. She also confessed that she had planned the murder days earlier and that her plans had been delayed because of the presence of the victim’s younger sister. The victim’s father was a member of the Kuwait national team that participated in the 1982 World Cup. He currently serves as the Deputy Director General for Youth Affairs at the Public Authority for Youth and Sports. Shemmari confirmed the news on his Twitter account yesterday, and stated that his daughter was to be laid to rest yesterday afternoon. Seham Al-Shemmari was a freshman at Kuwait University’s Faculty or Arts, AlAan news website reported yesterday. It added that students and teaching staff were in ‘a state of shock’ following the murder. ‘Heinous crime’ The case drew an outcry in Kuwait where around 800,000 of the country’s nearly 4 million people are domestic workers. People took to social media to demand the death penalty for the suspect, which is the Continued on Page 13
100 killed in Nigeria as gunmen storm villages
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Crimea votes to join Russia ‘93%’ vote for union • West outraged
Crewmembers onboard a US Navy P-8A Poseidon aircraft assist in search and rescue operations for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean yesterday. — AP
Final words from jet came after shutdown KUALA LUMPUR: The final words from the missing Malaysian jetliner’s cockpit gave no indication anything was wrong even though one of the plane’s communications systems had already been disabled, officials said yesterday, adding to suspicions that one or both of the pilots were involved in the disappearance. As authorities examined a flight simulator that was confiscated from the home of one of the pilots and dug through the background of all 239 people on board and the ground crew that serviced the plane, they also were grappling with the enormity of the search ahead of them, warning they needed more data to narrow down the hunt for the aircraft. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur at around 12:40 am on March 8, headed to Beijing. On Saturday, Malaysia’s government confirmed that the plane was deliberately diverted and may have flown as far north as Central Asia, or south into the vast reaches of the Indian Ocean. Authorities have said someone on board the plane first disabled one of its communications systems - the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS - at 1:07 am. Around 14 minutes later, the transponder, which identifies the plane to commercial radar systems, was also shut down. The fact that they went dark separately is strong evidence that the plane’s disappearance was deliberate. Yesterday, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference that that the final, reassuring words from the cockpit - “All right, good night” - were spoken to air traffic con-
trollers after the ACARS system was shut down. Whoever spoke did not mention any trouble on board, seemingly misleading ground control. Air force Maj Gen Affendi Buang told reporters he did not know whether it was the pilot or co-pilot who spoke to air traffic controllers. Given the expanse of land and water that might need to be searched, the wreckage of the plane might take months - or longer - to find, or might never be located. Establishing what happened with any degree of certainty will likely need key information, including cockpit voice recordings, from the plane’s flight data recorders. The search area now includes 11 countries the plane might have flown over, Hishammuddin said, adding that the number of countries involved in the operation had increased from 14 to 25. “The search was already a highly complex, multinational effort. It has now become even more difficult,” he said. The search effort initially focused on the relatively shallow waters of the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, where the plane was first thought to be. Hishammuddin said he had asked governments to hand over sensitive radar and satellite data to try and help get a better idea of the plane’s final movements. “It is our hope with the new information, parties that can come forward and narrow the search to an area that is more feasible,” he said. Malaysia is leading the multinational search for the plane, as well as the investigation into its disappearance. In the United States, Dan Pfeiffer, senior adviser Continuedon Page 13
Myth of Planet X debunked WASHINGTON: It was an elusive planet that for 200 years appeared to explain Uranus’s wobbly orbit. And there was the sister sun theorized to be near our solar system that caused asteroids to swerve toward Earth. There is just one problem: neither “Planet X” nor “Nemesis” ever existed, researchers now say. Or probably not. “The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet (“Planet X”), or a small, companion star (“Nemesis”),” concluded University of Pennsylvania astronomer Kevin Luhman, who directed the study using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. The results were published in the most recent edition of The Astrophysical Journal. Most theories had estimated Planet X to be up to four times the size of Jupiter - the biggest planet in our solar system. They suggested it would be found some 1,486 billion km from the sun, or about 10,000 times farther than the Earth’s orbit. But the images gathered by the telescope did not detect any object larger than Jupiter. Luhman doesn’t rule out the possibility that a planet is lurking somewhere in the asteroid belt. It would be hard to find if it were closely aligned with a bright star that blinds the telescope or were much smaller than had been theorized. But after this latest survey, Luhman said the odds of finding one are very unlikely: “That is like a one in a hundred chance.” — AFP (See Page 28)
SIMFEROPOL: Crimeans voted overwhelmingly yesterday in favor of joining former political master Russia as tensions soared in the east of the splintered exSoviet nation amid the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War. Exit polls cited by the Russian RIA news agency showed 93 percent of the voters in favor of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia in the most serious redrawing of the map of Europe since Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia. Another Russian agency said turnout was over 80 percent.
“I am happy. Honestly, I’m 60 and I never thought I would live to see this happy day,” said Alexander Sorokin as he strolled the waterfront of Sevastopol, home of tsarist and Kremlin navies since the 18th century and a city that like most of the peninsula is heavily Russified. Ukraine’s new pro-European leaders and the West have branded the vote as “illegal” because the strategic Black Sea peninsula has been under de facto control of Russian forces since the start of the month. Continued on Page 13
SIMFEROPOL: Pro-Russian demonstrators wave Russian flags as they gather in Lenin Square yesterday. — AFP
Saudis ban books in major crackdown RIYADH: Saudi authorities have banned hundreds of books, including works by renowned Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, as part of a crackdown on publications deemed threatening to the conservative kingdom. Saudi Arabia clamped down on dissent following the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, from which it has been largely spared, and has adopted an increasingly confrontational stance towards the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups it has long viewed as a threat to its security. The local Okaz daily reported yesterday that organisers at the Riyadh International Book Fair had confiscated “more than 10,000 copies of 420 books” during the exhibition. Local news website Sabq.org reported that members of the kingdom’s notorious religious
police had protested at “blasphemous passages” in works by the late Darwish, widely considered one of the greatest Arab poets, pressing organisers to withdraw all his books from the fair, which ended Friday. The religious police frequently intervene to enforce the kingdom’s strict conservative values, but the move to ban so many works was seen as unprecedented. Similar action was taken against works by Iraq’s most famous modern poet, Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, and another Iraqi poet, Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, as well as those by Palestinian poet Muin Bseiso. The fair’s organising committee also banned a book entitled “When will the Saudi Woman Drive a Car?” by Abdullah al-Alami, the Saudi Gazette daily reported. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women,
forced to cover in public from head to toe, are not allowed to drive. Other banned books include “The History of Hijab” and “Feminism in Islam”. Activist Aziza Yousef said the crackdown had offered “free advertising to those whose books were banned” as many “rushed to download these works from the Internet.” Organisers also banned all books by Azmi Bishara, a former Arab Israeli MP who left the Jewish state in 2007 and is now close to authorities in Qatar, where he is based, Sabq.org reported. The ban comes amid escalating tensions between Qatar and three other Gulf Arab monarchies - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain - who pulled their Continued on Page 13