LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY “I believe we are moving toward a more militarized and repressive confrontation. Things are going to get worse.” Ahmad Bakhshayesh, a political science professor at Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabaei University, after more bloody protests Article, 2AChina executes Brit for drug smuggling
BEIJING - The Chinese government executed a 53-year-old British citizen today for drug smuggling, ignoring international pleas for clemency and claims by supporters that he was mentally ill, the British Foreign Office said.
Akmal Shaikh, a father of three with no criminal record, was the first European to be executed in China in half a century, activists say.
He was executed in Urumqi, in China’s far northwest Xinjiang province - where he was caught in 2007 on a plane with nearly 9 pounds of heroin - after a flurry of final-hour pleas to save his life. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had also spoken to China’s prime minister about the case.
Shaikh reportedly learned of his fate during a visit by two cousins Monday. It was the first time that family was allowed to visit the condemned man in two years.
While many parts of China are switching to lethal injections, Shaikh was probably shot in the head, activists said.
N. Korea says it’s detaining American
SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said today it has detained an American man who illegally entered the country last week, after reports that a 28-year-old missionary from Arizona went to the communist nation on a mission to improve its human-rights record.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a brief dispatch that the American was detained and under investigation after illegally entering through the North Korea-China border last Thursday. It didn’t identify the American man.
However, the report comes as South Korean activists say American missionary Robert Park, 28, slipped across the frozen Tumen River into North Korea from China last week with letters calling for a change in North Korea’s leadership and an end to political prison camps.
The Rev. John Benson, the pastor of Life in Christ Community Church in Park’s hometown of Tucson, Arizona, said he was happy to hear Park was alive.
“To hear it confirmed is great,” Benson said. “I pray he comes back in one piece. That would be the best case scenario.”
Jo Sung-rae of the Seoul-based activist group Pax Koreana said today that guards apparently detained Park as soon as he entered the communist nation.
Iranians on prison hunger strike in Iraq
BAGHDAD - Around 40 Iranians held in an Iraqi prison are on a hunger strike to demand meetings with Iranian officials about their cases, an Iraqi government official said Monday.
Lawyer Mohammed Radhi said the strike has been peaceful since its start on Sunday. Radhi works for the state-run Human Rights Commission.
The prisoners are being held in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad. A police official said the prisoners have not been allowed to talk to the Iranian Embassy.
The prisoners were convicted of illegally crossing the border to commit terrorist acts and were sentenced to between five and seven years behind bars, the police official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
A spokesman for the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad was not available Monday.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 12/29/2009