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ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. airstrike in Pakistan targeted al Qaeda's number two, U.S. sources said, but Ayman al-Zawahri was away at the time, according to a senior Pakistani official on Saturday. The strike on Friday killed at least 18 people, including women and children, and three houses were destroyed in a village near the Afghan border, residents said. Pakistan condemned the airstrike and regretted the loss of civilian lives, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said, add ...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgium is testing a man, probably a journalist, for deadly bird flu after he felt ill when he returned from the Turkish province worst hit by the disease, the Health Ministry said on Saturday. The man was undergoing tests to determine whether he had contracted H5N1 avian flu, ministry spokesman Karim Ibourki said, adding results were expected later in the day. There was con ...

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, was not in a village near the Afghan border that was hit by a U.S. airstrike early on Friday morning, a senior Pakistani government official said on Saturday. "Al-Zawahri was not there at the time of the attack," the official told Reuters, after U.S. intelligence sources in Washington had earlier said the airstrike that killed at least 18 people in northern Pakistan had targeted Osama bin Laden's deputy.

LONDON (Reuters) - Defence firm BAE Systems is to inject more than 600 million pounds into its main pension scheme to reduce a 2.4-billion-pound deficit in the fund, The Independent said on Saturday. A BAE spokesman said talks are ongoing between the company and members of the scheme, but declined to comment on details. "It's a complicated process," he said. The Independent said BAE employees wi ...

By Alastair Macdonald BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Confusion rippled around the court trying Saddam Hussein on Saturday after the chief judge made clear he wanted to step down, casting an already turbulent process into further disarray. "He wants to withdraw," a source close to Judge Rizgar Amin told Reuters 10 days before the next hearing due on January 24. "He will oversee the next sitting and then announce his reasons for withdrawing," the source said late on Friday. Asked why the Kurdish judge, b ...

LONDON (Reuters) - A political storm triggered after a minister admitted he had cleared a registered sex offender to work as a teacher gathered pace on Saturday after a newspaper reported a number of similar cases. The Times newspaper said there were several instances of sex offenders working in schools despite government assurances earlier this week that such men are barred from working with chi ...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Former Syrian vice president Abdel-Halim Khaddam, a fierce critic of President Bashar al-Assad, told a German magazine he was forming a government in exile and believed Assad would be forced from power this year. Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, told the weekly Der Spiegel on Saturday that Assad was facing growing pressure from economic problems at home and the international in ...

NAIVASHA, Kenya (Reuters) - Kenyan police have arrested two people over the murder of a British filmmaker and naturalist, a police official said on Saturday. Joan Root was shot three times with an AK-47 rifle in her bedroom at her home in Naivasha, about 90 km (56 miles) northwest of the capital Nairobi. The attackers broke through Root's bedroom window and shot the 69-year-old at point-blank ra ...

ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. airstrike in Pakistan targeted al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, but it was unclear if he had been killed, U.S. sources knowledgeable about the strike said in Washington. CNN quoted sources as saying the CIA had ordered the airstrike on buildings after receiving intelligence that Zawahri was in a village near the border with Afghanistan. ABC News quoted Pakistani military sources as saying five of those killed were "high-level" al Qaeda fig ...

(CNN) -- A CIA airstrike on a building in Pakistan may have killed Osama bin Laden's most-trusted aide, sources said. The building where Ayman al-Zawahiri was thought to be is in Damadola, a small village near the Afghan border. There has been no confirmation that al-Zawahiri, 54, was killed in the attack Friday. However, sources say there was intelligence suggesting he was in the building at the time of the strike. (Watch how al-Zawahiri was targeted -- 5:39) Pakistani officials were at th ...