Families of Club Victims Seek to Identify Bodies
BUENOS AIRES -- Anguished families struggled Saturday to identify the bodies of relatives killed in a Buenos Aires nightclub fire that killed at least 175 people, including dozens of young children, and injured 714, many of them trapped inside by locked exits.
The club's owner, Omar Chaban, was being held by authorities pending an investigation into Thursday's fire.
Investigators said they believed someone set off a flare during the concert, igniting the foam ceiling of the Republica Cromagnon club while it was crowded with about 4,000 people, most of them teenagers.
Dozens of families gathered at city morgues to identify the bodies of relatives while psychologists circulated among the crowd hoping to console relatives. Some people, still searching for lost loved ones, frantically scanned lists of the injured, missing and dead posted near the morgue.
At the club site, Argentines left candles and flowers, and held hands in prayer to remember the victims.
THE MIDDLE EAST
• RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- Gunmen hoisted Mahmoud Abbas on their shoulders as thousands of Palestinians gave the presidential election front-runner a hero's welcome in a Gaza refugee camp shattered by fighting with Israel.
Abbas, running in Jan. 9 balloting to succeed Yasser Arafat, has branded violence a mistake but has wooed the late leader's militant loyalists by upholding his goal of total Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands.
• TEHRAN -- A council of appointed clerics set June 17 as the date for presidential elections that are expected to mark a major setback for the reform movement led by outgoing President Mohammad Khatami.
Conservatives trounced reformists in parliamentary elections last February after the Guardian Council banned thousands of reformist candidates on the grounds that they did not meet its moral standards.
THE AMERICAS
• LIMA, Peru -- A state of emergency was declared in the town of Andahuaylas where an armed group led by a radical former soldier stormed a police station and was holding 10 officers hostage.
Seven people were injured in a gunfight after former army Maj. Antauro Humala and about 160 followers burst into the station, 560 miles southeast of Lima, to demand the resignation of Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo. Police and army forces were dispatched to the town.
• BOGOTA, Colombia -- Marxist rebels killed 16 peasants in northeast Colombia on New Year's Eve in reprisal for cooperating with right-wing paramilitary groups, police and local authorities said. The victims, six women, six men and four children, were gathered for a New Year's Eve celebration when they were attacked, said Alfredo Guzman, the mayor of Tame, where the killings occurred.
AFRICA
• GULU, Uganda -- President Yoweri Museveni said the army would resume all-out war on rebels in northern Uganda, charging that insurgents rejected a cease-fire deal to end the 18-year civil war. Fighting resumed between Ugandan troops and rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army after a temporary truce ran out, the army said.
-- From News Services
