A 12-year-old opened fire on Tuesday at a school outside the Finnish capital Helsinki injuring three other children, police said, adding that the attacker was in custody.
The school in Vantaa has around 800 pupils and 90 staff. Children in grades one to nine, or aged seven to 15, attend the school.
“There are people injured in the shooting incident”, police said shortly after 10am (7am GMT).
Police were alerted to the scene at 9:08am and later specified that the suspect and the injured were all 12 years old.
The city of Vantaa’s crisis group was activated following the shooting, local media reported. Images from the scene showed a large number of police at the school.
Police officers talk to family members of pupils at the Viertola comprehensive school in Vantaa, Finland on April 2. — Reuters
In an update around 11:30am, police said the suspect, who was carrying a gun at the time, had been arrested in an area of Helsinki in a “calm manner”. Parents of pupils attending the school told the media that the shooting had occurred in a classroom.
Police urged the public to stay away from the area and remain indoors. “Do not open the door to strangers,” they said in a statement.
Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen said in a post on X that the day had started in a “shocking way”.
“I can only imagine the pain and worry that many families are experiencing at the moment,” she said.
Nine children were killed in a blast in southeastern Afghanistan caused by a landmine, laid during the country’s decades of conflict, a provincial official said on Monday.
The mine went off as a group of young boys and girls were playing with it in the Geru district of Ghazni province on Sunday, said the provincial head of the information and culture department, Hamidullah Nisar.
“An unexploded mine left over from the time of the Russian invasion went off when they were playing with it,” Nisar told AFP. “Unfortunately, it killed nine children.”
Ghazni police said the children — five girls and four boys — were aged from four to ten years old.
Swathes of Afghanistan are littered with unexploded mines, grenades and mortars from decades of conflict, spanning from the Soviet invasion in 1979, the civil war that followed, and the 20-year Taliban insurgency against foreign-backed governments.
Violence has reduced dramatically since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, ending their insurgency.
Unexploded ordnance and mines, however, still claim lives regularly, with the International Committee of the Red Cross saying children are the main victims.
Also on Sunday, another child died and five other people were wounded when unexploded ordnance went off in Herat province, local police said on social media platform X.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conceded defeat on Sunday in the country’s local elections, saying the vote was a “turning point” for his party after two decades in power.
Partial results from across the nation of 85 million people showed major advances for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) at the expense of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Istanbul’s mayor, the opposition’s Ekrem Imamoglu, claimed re-election with nearly all ballot boxes opened, telling a euphoric crowd of supporters: “Tomorrow is a new spring day for our country.”
Final results are expected to be released on Monday (today) by the country’s electoral commission.
Erdogan, 70, had launched an all-out personal campaign to win back Istanbul, the economic powerhouse where he was once mayor. Rampant inflation and an economic crisis have, however, hit confidence in the ruling party.
Large crowds filled the square outside the opposition party’s Istanbul city headquarters waving Turkish flags and lighting torches to celebrate the result.
After casting his vote, Imamoglu emerged to applause and chants of “Everything will be fine”, the slogan he used when he first took the city hall from the AKP in 2019.
The 52-year-old is increasingly seen as the biggest rival to Erdogan’s AKP ahead of the next presidential election in 2028.
In Ankara, mayor Mansur Yavas — also of the CHP — claimed victory in front of large crowds of supporters, declaring “the elections are over, we will continue to serve Ankara”.
“Those who have been ignored have sent a clear message to those who rule this country,” he added.
Yavas led with 58.6 per cent of the vote to 33.5pc for his AKP opponent, with 46.4pc of ballot boxes opened.
Opposition supporters celebrated victory in Izmir, Turkiye’s third-largest city, as well as in the southern city of Antalya.
Some AKP stronghold towns were at risk of being lost, results indicated. “Voters have chosen to change the face of Turkiye,” said CHP chairman Ozgur Ozel as the results emerged.
“They want to open the door to a new political climate in our country.”
‘Respect the decision’
Erdogan acknowledged the electoral setback in a speech to supporters at the headquarters of his party.
“Unfortunately, we have not obtained the results that we wanted,” he told a subdued crowd.
“We will of course respect the decision of the nation. We will avoid being stubborn, acting against the national will and questioning the power of the nation,” he added.
Erdogan has been president since 2014 and won a new term in May last year.
He had called Istanbul the national “treasure” when launching his campaign to retake the city.
But while he dominated the campaign, his personal role did not help overcome the widespread concerns over the country’s economy.
“Everyone is worried about the day-to-day,” said 43-year-old Istanbul resident Guler Kaya as she voted.
“The crisis is swallowing up the middle class. We have had to change all our habits,” she said. “If Erdogan wins, it will get even worse”.
Although opposition parties had been fractured ahead of the poll, analysts predicted a stormy political future for the AKP and its allies.
Berk Esen, an academic at Sabanci University, said that the CHP had pulled off “the biggest election defeat of Erdogan’s career”.
“Despite an uneven playing field, government candidates have lost even in conservative strongholds. This is the CHP’s best results since the 1977 elections,” Esen said on his social media account.
Unrest in southeast
“Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkiye,” Erman Bakirci, a pollster from Konda Research and Consultancy, recalled Erdogan once saying.
The election was held with the country reeling from an inflation rate of 67pc and having seen the lira currency slide from 19 to a dollar to 32 to a dollar in one year.
Clashes were reported in Turkiye’s Kurdish-majority southeast, leaving one dead and 12 wounded, a local official told AFP.
The pro-Kurdish DEM party said it had identified irregularities “in almost all the Kurdish provinces”, in particular through suspicious cases of proxy voting. Observers from France were refused access to a polling station in the region, according to the lawyers’ association MLSA.
About 61 million people were eligible to vote for mayors across Turkiye’s 81 provinces, as well as provincial council members and other local officials.
Last week, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb reported “very good progress” on privatising loss-making Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and outsourcing three airports.
Meanwhile, the Privatisation Commission of Pakistan is reportedly busy devising a new three-phase strategy to privatise state-owned entities (SOEs), barring those considered of national or strategic importance.
The current privatisation list focuses on loss-making public enterprises and prioritises entities like PIA and power distribution companies to reduce the government’s involvement and haemorrhage of taxpayers’ money.
The massive annual losses of Rs500 billion incurred by the SOEs, which form a part of growing public expenditure, have become a major drag on the national budget, with their accumulated losses topping Rs2.5 trillion or nearly $9bn. Moreover, the financial burden of these resource-guzzlers, apart from haemorrhaging government budgets, has also become a source of systemic risk for the financial sector.
‘Haste can do more damage than good, with the risk of oscillating towards creating a private sector monopoly in lieu of a public sector’
The World Bank has pointed out in a report that the profitability of SOEs in Pakistan had been declining and turning into losses for about a decade. Things have come to a stage now where “the profitability of Pakistan’s federal SOEs is the lowest in the South Asian Region” as their aggregate profit at 0.8 per cent of GDP in 2014 turned into losses worth 0.4pc of GDP in 2020 and, growing, thus becoming a major driver of fiscal deficit and source of substantial fiscal risk.
But successive governments, despite being cash-strapped, have gladly bankrolled these SOEs with borrowed money. However, many believe that with little easy money available to continue financing their losses through borrowings, the government has no option but to eliminate them.
The current privatisation initiative, undertaken under the army-backed Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), aims to sell shares of certain public assets to investors from friendly Gulf countries.
The authorities expect a massive investment of more than $50bn from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia alone over the next five years. So far, however, only a fraction of the investment has been made by investors from these two countries in Karachi Port and a private oil marketing company.
Privatisation of loss-making public entities and improvements in the governance of others are also major goals of the ongoing International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue loan as part of structural reforms. They will also be major conditions of the next medium-term bailout Pakistan is seeking from the lender of last resort. According to reports, the IMF wants early privatisation of PIA, Pakistan Steel Mills, RLNG power plants, and electricity distribution companies.
According to Muslim Commercial Bank Limited chairman Mian Mohammad Mansha and former State Bank of Pakistan Governor Shahid Kardar, successive regimes have overstretched the mandate of the Pakistani state, burning huge holes in its budget.
“This has resulted in its inability to perform, efficiently and effectively, what should be its core functions — security of life and property of its citizenry, and provide justice and some basic social services, responsibilities that it must pay for and provide.
“This private behaviour is rational since these choices are being made based on service quality. But they resist privatisation because there would be reduced opportunities for ‘patronage’ [an appropriate all-embracing term in our context] or earnings as fees or junket trips as directors of these publicly owned entities,” they have argued in a joint op-ed for this paper.
Pakistan started privatisation of the state-owned enterprises in the late 1980s under the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) when the first Benazir Bhutto government offloaded 15pc shares of PIA through the stock exchange. The privatisation transactions have returned a gross value of Rs650bn (approximately $2.36bn) to the government during the last three decades.
In addition, it has saved recurring losses of billions of rupees per annum and brought in efficiency and profitability in several privatised SOEs, if not all of them.
The privatisation of banks, the telecom industry, and electronic media is often underlined as huge success stories that must encourage policymakers to disinvest the remaining SOEs to save taxpayers’ money, improve efficiency, create more market competition, and encourage greater private sector investment and participation in the economy.
However, people like former investment minister Haroon Sharif think the government must decide as to why it wants to privatise SOEs. “Before heading into privatisation, the government and SIFC should clearly state and communicate the reasons for their decision to choose this path.
“Do they want to get rid of loss-making entities because they can’t manage them? Or have they determined, in principle, that it is not the government’s job to run these businesses? There is a difference between the two,” Mr Sharif told Dawn.
“They must spell out a clear-cut policy. Otherwise, these transactions would not only not fetch the desired revenues but also risk ending up in litigation [as has happened in the past in many cases],” he concluded.
He is of the view that privatisation is only one tool to transfer management to private investors — it has produced mixed results in different countries. “There are other solutions as well to invite private participation in the management of SOEs without the typical sale of shares, whether it be concessions, franchise or management contract.
“The authorities must consult widely and involve professionals to make the process a success. The ultimate goal should be to stop the bleeding of public money.”
The World Bank has also raised concerns over Pakistan’s approach to privatising its SOEs. The bank has identified economic volatility, judicial activism and resistance from trade unions, litigation, fears of monopoly creations, weak political commitment, and perceptions of corruption cost post-2007 as key factors leading to unsuccessful privatisation efforts.
In its Public Expenditure Review 2023, the lender cautioned the government of looming litigation in divestments to foreign states under government-to-government contracts and instead advised public offerings through stock exchanges followed by privatisation under the transparent oversight of a special joint committee of the parliament.
“Such a move (under government-to-government contracts) could lead to litigation, raise questions about transparency and full disclosure and may slow down the privatisation process further.
“Judicial decisions in the Pakistan Steel Mills privatisation and Reko Diq mining contract cases badly hurt Pakistan’s image as an untrustworthy country where international contracts are not honoured, and businesses always run the risk of falling victim,” the Bank said.
It has also advised revamping the privatisation commission by staffing it “with able professionals who can prepare a financial model for each entity to be privatised” and ensuring that privatisation promotes efficiency and competition in the economy.
Zafar Masud, the president/CEO of the Bank of Punjab, believes that sustainable growth is impossible without a thriving private sector, for which the starting point is a Private-Public Partnership (PPP). He also cautions that privatisation — awarding concessions or ownership transfer— must be undertaken with extreme care.
“While it’s an absolute must, its pursuit in haste can do more damage than good, with the risk of oscillating towards creating a private sector monopoly in lieu of a public sector. Therefore, we need to do at least two things before we embark on privatisation. Firstly, regulators should be made independent and stronger, with the appointment of top professionals on merit and on market terms to protect people.
“Secondly, transaction structure and selection criteria of successful private parties shall be such that it would promote competition and have a broader view of long-term economic prosperity rather than myopic bottom-line approach. Investors with a private equity mindset, backgrounds, for example, shall be discouraged and prohibited,” he told this correspondent.
However, the authorities have decided to move ahead with their privatisation plans, and it is amply clear that progress will remain chaotic at best without extensive reforms and greater transparency.
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, April 1st, 2024
LONDON: Son Heung-min’s late winner fired Tottenham Hotspur into the Premier League’s top four with a 2-1 win over Luton Town as Chelsea twice blew a lead against 10-man Burnley in a 2-2 draw on Saturday.
An action-packed afternoon also saw Newcastle United come from 3-1 down to stun West Ham United 4-3 and Fulham hit back for a 3-3 draw at bottom-of-the-table Sheffield United.
Spurs have now come from behind to win in four of their last five home games and needed another second-half turnaround to keep their challenge for a return to the Champions League next season on track.
Tahith Chong’s strike after just three minutes gave Luton a shock lead, but the Hatters ended the day in the relegation zone as their winless run extended to 10 games.
An Ange Postecoglou half-time substitution again made an impact for Tottenham as Brennan Johnson’s cross was turned into his own net by Issa Kabore just six minutes after the Welsh international’s introduction.
Son had missed a number of chances earlier in the game but finally got some fortune when his deflected effort trickled past Thomas Kaminski for his 15th goal of the season.
Chelsea boss Mauricio Pochettino was met with another backlash at Stamford Bridge after his side failed to make the most of an extra man for the entire second half against second-bottom Burnley.
The Blues appeared on course to cruise to victory after Lorenz Assignon was harshly sent-off for pulling down Mykhailo Mudryk inside the area.
Burnley boss Vincent Kompany was also shown a red card for taking his protests too far.
Cole Palmer coolly chipped in the resulting penalty, but the 10 men levelled two minutes into the second half thanks to Josh Cullen’s super finish from outside the box.
Raheem Sterling had been booed off in Chelsea’s FA Cup quarter-final win over Leicester a fortnight ago but thought he had set up the winner in style with a flick that Palmer stroked into the far corner.
Chelsea, though, failed to hold out again as Dara O’Shea headed in a corner nine minutes from time to leave Pochettino’s men still in the bottom half of the table.
Newcastle closed to within one point of West Ham in seventh after a remarkable fightback at St. James’ Park.
Goals from Michail Antonio, Mohammed Kudus and Jarrod Bowen wiped out the advantage given to Newcastle by Aleksander Isak’s early penalty.
However, a second Isak spot-kick 13 minutes from time sparked the turnaround before substitute Harvey Barnes struck twice to send Eddie Howe scurrying down the touchline in celebration.
Newly-capped England international Anthony Gordon had been involved in three of the four Newcastle goals but was then sent-off in stoppage time for kicking the ball away.
“A lot of emotions in that game, we were swinging all over the place,” said Howe. “The last 10 minutes was amazing to be part of.”
Everton’s winless run stretched to 12 Premier League games after a 2-1 defeat at Bournemouth to leave the Toffees still perilously placed just three points above the relegation zone.
Nottingham Forest edged out of the bottom three on goal difference in their first match since receiving a four-point deduction as Chris Wood salvaged a 1-1 draw against Crystal Palace.
Sheffield were denied just their fourth win of the season by Fulham’s late fightback at Bramall Lane.
Ben Brereton Diaz struck twice as the Blades led 3-1 with four minutes of the 90 left only for Bobby DeCordova-Reid and Rodrigo Muniz to snatch a point for the visitors.
BELGRADE: Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo and Beatrice Chebet of Kenya successfully defended their world cross country titles in Belgrade on Saturday.
It’s just the fifth time in history that both the senior men’s and women’s champions have retained their titles at the championships — the first since Ethiopian duo Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba did in (2005/06).
Kiplimo, 23, made it three successive world crowns for Uganda — Joshua Cheptegei winning the 2019 edition — timing 28 minutes 09 seconds over the 10,000m trip.
Kiplimo joins legends Bekele and Paul Tergat in defending the title, although he has still to go some way to equal their achievements of winning five in a row.
“It actually feels more exciting to successfully defend my title than to win the first one,” said Kiplimo. “But it was also tougher. I came here expecting I could win again, but the field was really strong. The course was fine, a little challenging with the obstacles. It was a little tough running in the heat, but that wasn’t a major issue.”
Kiplimo said the title was a perfect boost for his morale after missing the outdoor World Athletics Championships last year due to a hamstring injury.
“I was hungry for medals after missing Budapest last year,” said Kiplimo, who is the world half marathon record holder. “I was in good shape, but then the injury happened and I had to get treatment, but I am back now. My goal this year is to do what Joshua Cheptegei did and win an Olympic gold. My main focus is the 10,000m, but I’m not sure yet if I want to double.”
The 5,000m and 10,000m Commonwealth titleholder finished three seconds clear of Berihu Aregawi of Ethiopia, who also took silver last year in Bathurst, Australia.
Kenya’s Benson Kiplangat took bronze, two seconds adrift of Aregawi — Cheptegei finished a disappointing sixth, 15 seconds off his compatriot’s winning time.
Chebet had earlier become the first female runner since Ethiopian great Dibaba (2005/06) to successfully defend her title leading home a Kenyan medals clean sweep.
The 24-year-old was only fourth in the Kenyan trials for the championships but she came home three seconds clear of Lilian Rengeruk.
Margaret Kipkemboi took bronze, a second adrift of Rengeruk and two other Kenyans filled fourth and fifth spots.
Chebet’s victory was the ninth successive win for Kenya in the women’s race.
“We won the team title, that showed very strong teamwork,” said Chebet. “After trials we trained together, we eat the same food. We were a team and being together helped us achieve the best result here.
“It is not easy to come to a world championship and defend your title, there is a lot of pressure. My target was to be on the podium. I felt I was stronger with about 500m to go.”
MUZAFFARGARH: Two nine-year-old girls were raped in separate incidents at the District Headquarters Hospital Layyah and Kot Addu.
A mentally challenged minor girl was raped at the DHQ Hospital, Layyah, on Thursday evening.
The nine-year-old girl belonged to Chak 515-TDA of Kot Addu who was visiting the hospital with her family.
A CCTV footage showed the victim child being taken away by the suspect, identified as a 15-year-old resident of the General Bus Stand.
According to a police spokesperson, the suspect was a sweets vendor and he lured the girl by giving her toffees. He raped the victim within the boundary wall of the hospital.
After the incident, City police arrested the suspect with the help of modern technology and CCTV footage.
Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz had taken notice of the incident and ordered the inspector general of police (IGP) and the South Punjab additional IG to take immediate action and submit a report to her.
On her instructions, Layyah District Police Officer Asadul Rehman formed a special team to trace the suspect and arrest him. The suspect was arrested within hours of the incident.
The Layyah City Police Station registered a case.
In the other incident, another nine-year-old girl was raped in the limits of the Kot Addu Police Station.
The girl child was going to a shop to buy food items where the suspect raped her.
The City SHO registered a case and ordered the Gender Crime in-charge Saeeda Khaliq to arrest the suspect.
A team, led by Ms Khaliq, arrested the facilitator of the suspect who revealed the identity of the main suspect.
The police are conducting raids to arrest the main suspect.
