Ammo blast kills at least 5, injures scores
TIRANA, Albania — A massive explosion at an Albanian army ammunition dump near Tirana on Saturday killed at least five people and injured 215, including many children, authorities said. The prime minister said he feared there could be many dead.
The initial blast at the depot at Gerdec village, about 6 miles north of the capital, Tirana, set off a series of explosions, and ammunition continued to detonate into the night.
The blast was heard as far away as the Macedonian capital of Skopje, 120 miles away.
The continuing explosions were hampering rescue efforts, and authorities were unable to get to the site of the main blast to assess how many casualties there were.
Police said the cause of the explosion was not clear, but terrorism was not suspected.
Slain rebel leader buried
BOGOTA, Colombia — Authorities have quietly buried the body of rebel leader Raul Reyes, Colombia’s attorney general said Saturday, two weeks after he was killed in a cross-border military raid in Ecuador.
Reyes, 59, whose real name was Luis Devia, died alongside 24 other people this month when Colombian troops struck at his camp just inside Ecuadorean territory.
36 bodies found at alleged drug house
MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials said Saturday that 36 bodies were found buried in the backyard of a house in a city across the border from El Paso, and they believe that number represents the final tally.
Mexican federal agents began digging behind a Ciudad Juarez house allegedly used by the Juarez drug cartel two weeks ago after receiving an anonymous tip, officials said.
In the raid, investigators found 3,740 pounds of marijuana in the house.
The remains date back about five years, and all but three apparently are males.
Ciudad Juarez has been plagued by violence as Mexico’s crackdown on powerful drug cartels stokes turf wars. Cartels frequently use “safe houses” in border cities to store drugs, house gunmen and dispose of dead rivals.
Bomb hits hotel in southern Thailand
PATTANI, Thailand — A bomb exploded in the parking lot of an upscale hotel in Thailand’s restive south Saturday, killing two people and wounding 14 others, police said.
The blast shattered windows as high as the eighth floor of the C.S. Pattani Hotel, the largest hotel in Thailand’s southern provinces, where a Muslim insurgency has been underway since 2004.
Police found and defused a second bomb in a hotel restroom, officials said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility, and authorities did not speculate on who was behind the attack.
Russian rocket malfunctions
MOSCOW — An unmanned Russian rocket failed to put a U.S. telecommunications satellite into its target orbit because it developed a booster rocket malfunction after lifting off Saturday from the Baikonur space facility in Kazakhstan.
A state commission will review the incident, but it may take up to a month to provide a full account of what happened, said Vyacheslav Davidenko, a deputy spokesman for the center.
Christians get own church in Qatar
DOHA, Qatar — Thousands of worshipers gathered Saturday for the consecration of Qatar’s first Christian church, ending decades of underground worship in this Sunni Muslim and deeply conservative Persian Gulf nation.
Cardinal Ivan Dias, envoy to Pope Benedict XVI, presented the new Roman Catholic parish of Our Lady of the Rosary with a chalice offered by the pope.
