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World in brief

Separate bus crashes kill 62 in India

By Wire services
Published April 21, 2006

GAUHATI, India - A bus carrying wedding guests veered off a road and plunged into a lake Thursday in northeastern India, killing at least 47 people, police said.

Another 27 passengers were injured after the bus, packed with more than 80 people, crashed into the lake near the town of Sarupeta in Assam state, said Bipin Bargohain, a police official.

The passengers were headed for a wedding in Goumura when the driver lost control of the bus and swerved off the road, Bargohain said.

It was the first of two major bus accidents in the country Thursday. Another bus driver lost control and swerved off a steep mountain road into a 330-foot gorge, killing at least 15 passengers and injuring 27, police said.

That accident occurred near the resort town of Nainital in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, said Alok Sharma, a top regional police official.

BRUSSELS - Investigations into reports that U.S. agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers have produced no evidence of illegal CIA activities, the European Union's antiterror coordinator said Thursday.

The investigations also have not turned up any proof of secret renditions of terror suspects on EU territory, Gijs de Vries told a European Parliament committee investigating the allegations.

The European Parliament's investigation and a similar one by the continent's leading human rights watchdog are looking into whether U.S. intelligence agents interrogated al-Qaida suspects at secret prisons in eastern Europe and transported some on secret flights.

But so far investigators have not identified any human rights violations, despite more than 50 hours of testimony by human rights activists and individuals who claimed to have been abducted by U.S. intelligence agents, de Vries said.

JERUSALEM - Doctors have admitted making a mistake when treating former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to a TV report broadcast Thursday, which the hospital strongly denied. Channel 2 TV quoted doctors who treated Sharon at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital as saying large doses of blood thinners given to him after a mild stroke may have caused the debilitating hemorrhagic stroke he suffered Jan. 4. He has been in a coma since. A hospital statement said the interpretation that doctors admitted a mistake was "in the imagination of the reporter."

[Last modified April 21, 2006, 01:43:55]