Karachi

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - U.S. law enforcement agencies have been working in tandem with the U.S. military in Pakistan in an unusual and sustained effort to hunt down fighters with al-Qaida who fled their sanctuaries in Afghanistan and are struggling to revive their group. In Pakistani cities, agents of the FBI are helping the local police and providing information - in rare instances even personnel - to break up what senior U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials regard as a depleted but dangerous network.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- A suicide bomber blew himself up yesterday in a hotel restaurant popular with Afghans, killing at least 22 people and injuring scores in what might be a sign of the Afghan conflict spilling over into Pakistan's cities. The explosion in Peshawar, a provincial capital close to the lawless tribal areas that straddle the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, came one day after a U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush on the Pakistan side of the border - a rare Western combat casualty inside Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - In a country rife with extremism and anti-American rage, officials here not only fear new terrorist acts - they expect them. After a suicide assault on May 8 in Karachi that killed 11 French workers and three others, Pakistani intelligence officials told President Pervez Musharraf that the country's most militant Islamic groups, including the remnants of al-Qaida, had agreed to join forces to launch fresh attacks against American targets....

Land mines make Senegal province unusable, report saysDAKAR -- Land mines have made 80 percent of land in Senegal's fertile southern province of Casamance unusable, a local human rights watchdog said yesterday.The RADDHO (African Grouping for Human Rights) said that the anti-personnel mines, blamed mainly on separatist rebels, had killed or wounded close to 500 people this year through August, including 61 soldiers.The Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance took up arms in 1982, accusing the former French colony's central government of neglecting the province.

At least 30 killed in Pakistani stampede ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- At least 30 people were killed in a stampede at the end of a religious gathering for women in the southern port city of Karachi, police and hospital officials said yesterday. Scores of women and children were also injured. About 10,000 women had gathered at an Islamic center, Faizan-e-Madina, in the Sabzi Mandi neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which will be celebrated tomorrow.

Islamic extremists burned down the U.S. embassy in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, in 1979, killing two Americans. Nonetheless, in the 1980s the CIA helped Pakistan's directorate general of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) train and arm such people to fight Russians and Communists in Afghanistan. President Zia ul-Haq was assassinated along with U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel and leading Pakistani generals in 1988 when a military airplane carrying them exploded.In January 1993, an assassin killed two CIA employees going to work at headquarters in Langley, Va., and got away.

KARACHI, Pakistan - The trial of four men accused in the kidnapping and killing of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, began yesterday with an hour of legal maneuvering and then was adjourned for a week. The chief defendant, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, 28, dressed in white and with his beard neatly trimmed, stood impassively behind a wall of iron bars as his lawyer demanded more documents and the judge issued a warrant for the arrest of seven missing defendants, said two of the lawyers.

KARACHI, Pakistan - The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a referendum to be held Tuesday to extend the presidency of Pervez Musharraf is constitutional and can proceed as planned. The court unanimously rejected three petitions from opposition parties and a lawyers association that argued against the constitutionality of what amounts to election by referendum. Musharraf, a general who seized power in 1999, announced the referendum as a way of extending his term for five more years. The Supreme Court has rarely ruled against a military leader.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of ousted Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was arrested yesterday in Karachi on charges of kidnapping a British businessman in April and extorting $800,000 from him.Mr. Zardari was denied bail by the Sind High Court, according to news agency reports.Mr. Zardari, a polo-playing businessman from a relatively obscure family in Sind province, where the Bhuttos are a powerful landowning clan, has emerged over the past year as Ms. Bhutto's gravest political liability.

Mohammad Akram Bhatti, the owner of an Edgewater gas station and convenience store, died of cerebral meningitis Nov. 9 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was 68 and lived in Crofton. Born in Nabah, India, he moved with his family to the Punjab province in Pakistan as a child. He earned a degree from Islamia College in Lahore, Pakistan. He worked briefly for Lever Brothers in Karachi, Pakistan. Family members said that in 1969, with only some pocket money, he immigrated to Florida, where he studied at Florida Memorial College.