World Digest
Rwandan leader tied to fatal plane crash

	Paul Kagame
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The French daily Le Monde said the investigation into President Juvenal Habyarimana's death also implicates 10 other prominent members of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front, the former Tutsi rebel movement that has been in power since July 1994.

The April 6, 1994, attack unleashed the slaughter of more than 500,000 Rwandans. Mainly minority Tutsis and politically moderate members of the Hutu majority were killed. The 100-day slaughter ended when rebels led by Kagame overthrew the extremist government in July 1994.

Salvadoran president accuses China of interference in vote

MIAMI — With polls showing the race tightening in El Salvador's March 21 elections, President Francisco Flores accused China of intervening by aiding leftist presidential candidate Shafik Handal.

In addition, Flores told The Miami Herald that Handal's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been receiving large caches of weapons in recent weeks from Latin American leftist groups that he declined to identify.

Flores' government-backed right-of-center candidate Tony Saca is leading in the polls, but analysts say a small turnout could hurt his chances. The followers of Handal, a former guerrilla commander whose group laid down its weapons in a 1992 peace agreement, are widely seen as committed voters likely to vote on election day.

Senior FMLN officials admit to having received campaign donations from China but deny they tried to import weapons. According to the Salvadoran government, China's Economic Cooperation Center, a branch of the ruling Communist Party, has delivered two containers filled with computers, cameras, 76,440 FMLN-emblazoned T-shirts, caps and other trinkets to the Handal campaign. The first container arrived Nov. 26 at the Salvadoran port of Acajutla, and the second arrived in January, Salvadoran officials say.

Colombian troops attack leftist rebels, paramilitaries

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombian troops clashed with leftist rebels and outlawed paramilitaries in separate offensives, killing 20 fighters and capturing 57 others, the army said yesterday.

The fiercest fighting took place Tuesday in a rural area near Zetaquira, 80 miles northeast of Bogotá, in which nine members of the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were killed.

Among the dead was a regional FARC leader, Arcesio Angarilla, accused of carrying out attacks on energy targets and bridges, planting land mines and ordering several kidnappings, said the commander of the army's Fifth Division, Gen. Hernan Alonso Ortiz.

Candle ignites Nigerian fire that destroys shantytown

	PIUS UTOMI EKPEI / AFP/GETTY IMAGES A couple sit among the debris of the Ebute-Metta sawmill and surrounding area that was gutted by fire in Lagos, Nigeria, yesterday.

LAGOS, Nigeria — An overturned candle ignited a fire that raged through a shantytown in Nigeria's commercial capital, destroying hundreds of ramshackle homes and leaving thousands of impoverished shack-dwellers homeless, officials said yesterday.

Although the casualty toll remained unclear, hospitals treated residents for serious burns.

Residents said the blaze began late Tuesday when a candle tipped inside a home in Okobaba, a warren of shacks and sawmills along the edge of a lagoon in Lagos.

Within minutes, tin-roofed structures of roughhewn boards and wood-chip pathways were ablaze, with 60-foot-high flames.

Some residents faulted the sporadic supply of electricity, saying that forced residents to use more hazardous candles and kerosene lamps.

Others blamed the fire department, which they alleged sent a firetruck without any water.

A state official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said fire engines had not been able to get close enough to the congested area.

Youth held in decapitation in 1997 is freed in Japan

TOKYO — A youth who decapitated a boy and bludgeoned a girl to death at age 14 — one of Japan's most notorious juvenile crimes — was freed yesterday after 6-1/2 years in a reformatory.

The killing in the western city of Kobe in 1997 stunned the country and prompted lawmakers to lower the age juveniles could be prosecuted for crimes from 16 to 14.

The youth, now 21, never has been publicly identified by authorities.

He was freed on probation from a juvenile reformatory near Tokyo after a review board decided he was no longer a threat to society, justice official Tetsuo Obata said.

Also ...

An airline pilot, reported by passengers for flying his Boeing 737 erratically, was fined more than $1,800 yesterday after a breath test showed he had been drinking, German police said. ... The only son of Albanian President Alfred Moisiu died after his car plunged into icy river waters in the south of the country yesterday, police said. ... Thousands of rabbis were on strike in Israel yesterday, threatening to lock cemetery gates and refusing to ritually slaughter livestock to protest months of salary delays and government moves to curb their authority. ... The partially clad body of a woman was found in the desert yesterday outside Ciudad Juarez, where hundreds of young women and girls have been killed over the past decade.

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