World

ABUJA/MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Suspected Islamist insurgents abducted more than 100 female students in a night raid on a government secondary school in Nigeria’s northeast Borno state, a teacher said on Tuesday.

The gunmen, believed to be members of the Boko Haram Islamist group which has attacked schools in the northeast before as part of their anti-government rebellion, carried off the students from the school in Chibok late on Monday.

“Over 100 female students in our government secondary school at Chibok have been abducted,” said Audu Musa, who teaches in another public school in the area, around 140km south of the Borno state capital Maiduguri.

The raid took place on the same day as a bomb attack on the edge of the capital Abuja.

The blast killed at least 75 people, the deadliest ever attack on Abuja and raised questions about the government’s ability to protect the capital from an insurrection that risks spreading from the Islamist group’s heartland in the northeast.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has pointed the finger of suspicion for the bombing at Boko Haram, although the group, which has ties with Al Qaeda-linked militants in the Sahara, has made no statement claiming responsibility.

With elections due in February, Jonathan is under intense pressure to contain the five-year insurgency, which is posing a growing security risk to Africa’s top oil producer and its newly acquired status as the largest economy on the continent.

His government is due to host a World Economic Forum on Africa in Abuja next month to be attended by African heads of state and business leaders, and will deploy more than 6,000 police and soldiers to protect participants.

Attacks by Boko Haram, which says it wants to carve out an Islamic state, have targeted police, military and government posts as well as schools and churches, killing more than 2,000 people in the last six months alone and leaving the Nigerian military struggling to respond.

The teacher Musa said he saw eight bodies in the area of the Chibok attack on Tuesday morning, but did not identify the victims.

“Things are very bad here and everybody is sad,” he said.

The Nigerian military did not immediately comment.

Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said security agencies were investigating Monday’s bombing.

“Our security planning for the World Economic Forum on Africa is already well under way and will be the largest security operation ever mounted in this country for an international summit,” she said in a statement to participants that was seen by Reuters.

Security personnel will secure an area of 250 square kilometres around the May 7-9 event.

Nigeria’s 170 million people are split between Muslims living largely in the north and Christians mostly in the south, and Boko Haram has shown before it can strike further south.

Angry Abuja residents questioned why the government should give priority to ensuring no harm came to high-profile visitors while it was failing to guarantee daily security for Nigerians.

“They should protect us first and people will be attracted to come to Nigeria,” Ajayi Ademola, a computer operator in a business centre, told Reuters.

Local businesswoman Dorothy Ajunobi, referring to accusations that some politicians are manipulating the violence to try to serve their own narrow interests, said: “If government can protect adequately participants to a forum, they should be able to protect Nigerian citizens or otherwise it will now be clear this insecurity in Nigeria is political.”

Visiting the scene of the bombing at Nyanya on Monday, Jonathan called the threat from Boko Haram “temporary”.

But, despite a state of emergency declared last year in the northeast and an offensive involving thousands of troops backed by aircraft, the army has failed to quell the revolt.

Former vice president Atiku Abubakar, a northern politician who defected to Nigeria’s main opposition in February from Jonathan’s ruling People’s Democratic Party, urged the government to accept foreign help in fighting militants.

Boko Haram militants are increasingly targeting civilians they accuse of collaborating with the army.

PERTH, Australia — A mini-sub hunting missing Flight MH370 was set to sweep the Indian Ocean seabed again Tuesday after cutting short its first mission, as Malaysia vowed to reveal any “black box” data found.

The unmanned submarine equipped with sonar gear was deployed Monday night from the Australian ship Ocean Shield, which has spearheaded the hunt for the Boeing 777 that vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard.

But the dive by the Bluefin-21 detected nothing of interest before it automatically aborted the mission after breaching its maximum operating depth, the US navy said in a statement.

The Australian agency coordinating the search said the Bluefin-21 “exceeded its operating depth limit of 4,500 metres and its built-in safety feature returned it to the surface”.

The unmanned Autonomous Underwater Vehicle was undamaged and set for a second sonar sweep during the day, weather permitting, officials said.

US Navy Captain Mark Matthews said the vehicle had exceeded programmed operational limits and automatically resurfaced.

“In this case the vehicle’s programmed to fly 30 metres over the floor of the ocean to get a good mapping of what’s beneath,” he told CNN from Perth.

“It went to 4,500 metres and once it hit that max depth, it said ‘This is deeper than I’m programmed to be’, so it aborted the mission.”

Officials said the crew would now refine the task to cope with the depth encountered.

“To account for inconsistencies with the sea floor, the search profile is being adjusted to extend the sonar search for as long as possible,” the US Navy statement said.

Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre chief Angus Houston announced Monday officials would end three weeks of listening for signals from the plane’s black boxes and launch the submarine operation.

The mini-sub would conduct a sonar survey of the silty ocean floor for 16 hours at a time in hopes of finding some wreckage from the Malaysia Airlines flight which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The US navy estimated it would take the Bluefin-21 from six weeks to two months to scan the entire search area, which has been deduced using satellite data and the detection of electronic pulses linked to black box recorders which were last heard a week ago.

Houston has described the detections as the best lead in the hunt for the plane, and added Monday that an oil slick had also been sighted in the search area.

It would take several days to test a sample of the oil ashore, but Houston said he did not think it was from one of the many ships involved in the hunt.

The cause of the plane’s disappearance, after being diverted hundreds of kilometres off course, remains a mystery. No debris has been found despite an enormous search involving ships and planes from several nations.

It is 39 days since the plane vanished, presumably crashing into the southern Indian Ocean and the batteries powering the black box tracker beacons had a life of only around 30 days.

Ocean Shield detected four signals linked to the black boxes, but the last ping came on Tuesday last week and officials suspect the batteries are now dead.

Houston has stressed the enormous difficulties of working at great depths in such a remote location and cautioned about the difficulties of finding the black boxes.

If they are ever found, Malaysia’s transport minister pledged Tuesday to make public any data recovered, as the government battles widespread criticism over the transparency of its investigation.

“It’s about finding the truth. And when we... find out the truth, definitely we have to reveal what’s in the black box,” Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters.

“So there is no question of it not being released.”

The Malaysian government has been tight-lipped about its ongoing investigation into the disappearance of the jet, adding to the anger and frustration of relatives.

It has come under fire for a seemingly chaotic initial response, while the scarcity of official information on MH370 has prompted questions over its transparency.

Hishammuddin said at the weekend that Malaysia’s attorney general had been sent abroad to confer with the International Civil Aviation Organisation and determine which country would have custody of the black box, if it is ever found.

But he shrugged off the importance of the custody issue on Tuesday.

“I don’t think it’s important who gets custody as far as I’m concerned,” he told reporters.

Malaysian authorities insist they are hiding nothing but need to be cautious on commenting on ongoing investigations.

Hishammuddin also said an “international investigation team” that Malaysia plans to set up to probe MH370’s disappearance would be transparent and operate in accordance with international standards.

SLAVYANSK, Ukraine — Pro-Russian insurgents gained more ground on Monday in Ukraine’s separatist east while Kiev’s Western-backed leader sought a way out of the crisis by proposing a referendum and seeking UN help.

The Kremlin added an ominous tone to the rapid escalation by saying that President Vladimir Putin had received “a lot” of requests from Ukraine’s Russified rust belt “to help, to intervene in some form”.

The crystallising possibility of an invasion by some 40,000 Russian troops massed along Ukraine’s eastern border drew European calls for further sanctions against Russia and the approval of more than $2 billion in US and EU aid for Kiev’s embattled interim administration.

But the pro-Kremlin militias who have seized state buildings in coordinated raids across economically depressed eastern Ukraine appeared only to be gaining confidence while paying little heed to the “full-scale anti-terrorist operation” announced with much fanfare in Kiev.

Protesters armed with rocks and clubs smashed their way inside a police station in Gorlivka — a coal mining town straddling a highway between the regional capital Donetsk and the city of Slavyansk to the north that is now under effective militants’ control.

The unrestrained crowd whistled and cheered as they ripped away metal shields from the visibly frightened local force before raising the tricolour flag of the self-declared “People’s Republic of Donetsk”.

And Kalashnikov-wielding militants in the 300,000 strong city of Slavyansk — who are already in control of the local police station and security service office — also took command of its administration building before asking Putin to send in his troops.

“We call on Russia to protect us and not to allow the genocide of the people of Donbass (Donetsk region),” rebel leader Vyacheslav Ponomaryov told a group of reporters.

“We ask President Putin to help us.”

National referendum 

The spreading unrest is rooted in the deep mistrust in the big industrial cities that form a corridor along Ukraine’s Russian border of the new, nationalist government that enlisted Western support in toppling the Kremlin-backed authorities in February.

Pro-Kremlin protesters in rundown regions such as Donetsk and Kharkiv are now seeking local referendums on either broader rights or an option to join the Russian Federation.

Ukraine’s interim president on Monday made a dramatic about-face aimed at defusing the tensions by backing a national poll on turning the centralised nation into a loose federation in which regions enjoyed broader rights.

Washington has previously advised Kiev to devolve powers in order to remove any argument Putin might make about discrimination against Russian speakers — a charge that has fed fears that Moscow’s annexation of Crimea last month was only the start of long-term Kremlin plan to dismember Ukraine.

Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov furiously resisted the Russian-backed federalisation proposal. But he said on Monday that he was ready to put it up for a national vote to prove that most shared his view.

“We are not against holding a national referendum,” Turchynov told lawmakers. “I am certain that a majority of Ukrainians will support an indivisible, independent, democratic and united Ukraine.”

Turchynov’s announcement stops well short of meeting protesters’ calls for each Russian-speaking region to stage its own referendum and it remains unclear how the militias — or Moscow — intend to respond.

The outcome of a national vote is uncertain because polls show most in Kiev and the Ukrainian-speaking west supporting a strongly unified state.

Putin shows ‘great concern’ 

The Ukrainian leader’s office said Turchynov on Monday also asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for help “in conducting a joint anti-terrorist operation in the east” — a comment that hinted of hope in Kiev that the global body might send a peacekeeping mission into the flashpoint east.

There was no initial response to Kiev’s statement from the United Nations and Turchynov’s office failed to explain what precise help Ukraine was requesting from Ban.

The pro-Kremlin gunmen’s latest raids were especially unsettling for Kiev and Western leaders because of their remarkable similarity to events leading up to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The balaclava-clad gunmen were armed with special-issue assault rifles and scopes most often used by nation’s crack security troops. They also moved with military precision and cohesion.

Russia has vehemently denied increasingly insistent US and European charges of it being behind the unrest.

But the Kremlin on Monday did little to dispel concern in either Kiev or the West that it was planning to take a strategic hold of eastern Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, we are receiving a lot of... requests from the regions of east Ukraine, addressed personally to Putin, with a request to help, to intervene in some form,” Russian news agencies quoted Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.

“The Russian president is watching the development of the situation in these regions with great concern.”

EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday responded by announcing that was prepared to call a Ukraine crisis summit next week to toughen sanctions against Russia.

“It appears obvious that Russia bears some responsibility for this violence. We must act,” said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

“Should it be necessary, there can be a meeting next week of Europe’s heads of state and government to agree new sanctions.”

ABUJA — A morning rush hour bomb killed at least 71 people at a Nigerian bus station on the outskirts of the capital on Monday, raising concerns about the spread of an Islamist insurgency after the deadliest ever attack on Abuja.

President Goodluck Jonathan pointed the finger of suspicion at Boko Haram, although there was no immediate claim of responsibility from the Islamist militants who are active mainly in the northeast. As well as the dead, police said 124 were wounded in the first attack on the federal capital in two years.

Visiting the scene, Jonathan denounced “the activities of those who are trying to move our country backwards” by staging such an attack. “We will get over it... The issue of Boko Haram is temporary,” he said, imploring Nigerians to be more vigilant in the face of suspicious characters.

Security experts suspect the explosion was inside a vehicle, said Air Commodore Charles Otegbade, director of search and rescue operations. The bus station, 8km southwest of central Abuja, serves Nyanya, a poor, ethnically and religiously mixed satellite town where many residents work in the city.

“I was waiting to get on a bus when I heard a deafening explosion, then saw smoke,” said Mimi Daniels, who escaped from the blast with minor injuries to her arm. “People were running around in panic.”

Bloody remains lay strewn over the ground as security forces struggled to hold back a crowd of onlookers and fire crews hosed down a bus still holding the charred bodies of commuters.

“These are the remains of my friend,” said a man, who gave his name as John, holding up a bloodied shirt. “His travel ticket with his name on was in the shirt pocket.”

The attack underscored the vulnerability of Nigeria’s federal capital, built in the 1980s in the geographic centre of the country to replace coastal Lagos as the seat of government for what is now Africa’s biggest economy and top oil producer.

Boko Haram militants are increasingly targeting civilians they accuse of collaborating with the government or security forces.

‘No surprise’

“In some ways it’s not a big surprise,” said Kole Shettima, director of the Abuja office of US charitable institution, the MacArthur Foundation. “The situation has been escalating.”

“It’s a statement that they are still around and they can attack Abuja when they want, and instil fear.”

The militants, who want to carve an Islamic state out of Nigeria, have in the past year mostly concentrated their attacks in the northeast, where their insurgency started.

There had been no such violence near the capital since suicide car bombers targeted the offices of the newspaper This Day in Abuja and the northern city of Kaduna in April 2012.

Security forces at the time said that was because a Boko Haram cell in neighbouring Niger state had been broken up.

A Christmas Day bombing of a church in Madalla, on the outskirts of Abuja, killed 37 people in 2011, although the main suspect in that attack is now behind bars. Boko Haram also claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on the United Nations’ Nigeria headquarters that killed 24 people on August 26, 2011.

Boko Haram, which in the Hausa language of largely Muslim northern Nigeria means broadly “Western education is sinful,” is loosely modeled on the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and has forged ties with Al Qaeda-linked militants in the Sahara.

Control Risks analyst Thomas Hansen said the lack of attacks in Abuja in the past two years was probably thanks to a crackdown on Boko Haram, which had largely contained the group in the northeast.

He also said that if this bomb was the work of Boko Haram, the choice of target on the outskirts of Abuja, rather than the city centre, may be a sign of constraints on its capabilities.

“The security provision in the centre appears to be much better than on the outskirts. It’s far easier to target that side of the city,” he said, but he added that the attack may be a forewarning of more ambitious strikes to come.

Sixteen buses were torched in Monday’s blast and another 24 damaged, police spokesman Frank Mba said.

PERTH, Australia — Search crews sent a robotic submarine deep into the Indian Ocean on Monday to begin scouring the seabed for the missing Malaysian airliner after failing for six days to detect any signals believed to be from its black boxes.

Meanwhile, officials were investigating an oil slick about 5,500 metres from the area where the last underwater sounds were detected, said Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia’s west coast.

Crews have collected an oil sample and are sending it back to Australia for analysis, a process that will take several days. Houston said it does not appear to be from any of the ships in the area, but cautioned against jumping to conclusions about its source.

The unmanned underwater vehicle, the Bluefin 21, was launched from the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield, the US navy said. The autonomous sub can create a three-dimensional sonar map of any debris on the ocean floor.

The move comes after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with signals from an aircraft’s black boxes, which record flight data and cockpit conversations. The devices emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but their batteries only last about a month and are now believed dead.

“Today is day 38 of the search,” Houston told a news conference. “We haven’t had a single detection in six days, so I guess it’s time to go under water.”

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott raised hopes last week when he said authorities were “very confident” the four strong underwater signals that were detected were from the black boxes on Flight 370, which disappeared March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board, mostly Chinese.

But Houston warned that while the signals are a promising lead, the public needs to be realistic about the challenges facing search crews in the extremely remote, deep patch of ocean — an area he called “new to man”.

“I would caution you against raising hopes that the deployment of the autonomous underwater vehicle will result in the detection of the aircraft wreckage. It may not,” Houston said. “However, this is the best lead we have, and it must be pursued vigorously. Again, I emphasise that this will be a slow and painstaking process.”

Houston, a retired Australian chief air marshal, called the search “one of the largest search and rescue, search and recovery operations that I’ve seen in my lifetime”.

The Ocean Shield had been dragging a US navy device called a towed pinger locator through the water to listen for any sounds from the black boxes’ beacons.

The Bluefin sub takes six times longer to cover the same area as the ping locator, and the two devices can’t be used at the same time. Crews had been hoping to detect additional signals before sending down the sub, so they could triangulate the source and zero in on where the black boxes may be.

The submarine will take 24 hours to complete each mission: two hours to dive to the bottom, 16 hours to search the seafloor, two hours to return to the surface, and four hours to download the data, Houston said. In its first deployment, it will search a 40-square-kilometre section of seafloor.

The black boxes could contain the key to unravelling the mystery of what happened to Flight 370. Investigators believe the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean based on a flight path calculated from its contacts with a satellite and an analysis of its speed and fuel capacity. But they still don’t know why.

A visual search for debris on the ocean surface continued Monday over 47,600 square kilometres of water about 2,200 kilometres northwest of the west coast city of Perth. A total of 12 planes and 15 ships joined the search.

But Houston said the visual search operation will end in the next two to three days. Officials haven’t found a single piece of debris confirmed to be from the plane, and he said the chances that any would be found have “greatly diminished”.

“We’ve got no visual objects,” he said. “The only thing we have left at this stage is the four transmissions and an oil slick in the same vicinity, so we will investigate those to their conclusion.”

Complicating matters further is the depth of the ocean in the search area. The seafloor is about 4,500 metres below the surface, which is the deepest the Bluefin can dive. Officials are looking for other vehicles that could help to retrieve any wreckage that might be located.

Searchers are also contending with a thick layer of silt on the bottom that is tens of metres deep in places, which could hide debris that has sunk.

US Navy Capt. Mark Matthews said the silt poses a challenge, but it does not make the mission impossible.

“Our experience shows that there will be some debris on top of the silt and you should be able to see indications of a debris field,” Matthews said. “But every search is different.”

A British vessel, the HMS Echo, has equipment that can help map the seafloor in the area, which is more flat and rolling than mountainous, Houston said.

VALPARAISO, Chile — A fire raging in this colorful port city has killed at least 11 people and destroyed 500 homes, President Michelle Bachelet said Sunday. More than 10,000 people have been evacuated, including more than 200 female inmates at a prison.

The fire began Saturday afternoon in a forested area above ramshackle housing on one of the city’s many hilltops, and spread quickly as high winds rained hot ash over wooden houses and narrow streets in the city of 250,000. Electricity failed as the fire spread and towering, sparking flames turned the night sky orange over the darkened remains of entire neighborhoods.

“It’s a tremendous tragedy, perhaps the worst fire” in the city’s history, said Bachelet. She announced that 11 people had been killed, and warned that the toll of death and damage would rise.

It was already the worst fire to hit the picturesque seaside city since 1953, when 50 people were killed and every structure was destroyed on several of the city’s hills.

Bachelet declared the entire city a catastrophe zone, putting Chile’s military in charge of maintaining order. “The people of Valparaiso have courage, have strength and they aren’t alone,” Bachelet said.

Valparaiso, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2003, is known for colorful neighborhoods hugging hills so steep that people have to use staircases rather than streets. About 120 kilometres northwest of the capital, Santiago, it has a vibrant port and is home to Chile’s national legislature.

But many homes in poorer areas above the city centre have been built without water supplies or access points would enable firefighters to intervene, so much of the fight was from the air. Chile mobilised 17 helicopters and planes to drop water on hotspots Sunday.

“This is the worst catastrophe I’ve seen,” said Ricardo Bravo, the regional governor. “Now we have to make sure the fire doesn’t reach the city centre, which would make this emergency much more serious.”

While 1,250 firefighters, police and forest rangers battled the blaze, 2,000 Chilean sailors in combat gear patrolled streets to maintain order and prevent looting.

Shelters were overflowing and hospitals treated hundreds of people for breathing problems provoked by the smoke.

As fires were contained in some areas, some people managed to return to discover that their homes had been destroyed.

“It’s frightening, everything is burned,” said Francisca Granados, who had spent the night with friends in the neighboring city of Vina del Mar.

Thick clouds of smoke surrounded the city’s prison, where nine pregnant inmates were transferred to a detention facility in the nearby city of Quillota. Another 204 female inmates were being evacuated to a sports arena. More than 2,700 male inmates will remain at the prison for now, prison guard commander Tulio Arce said.

KIEV/SLAVIANSK, Ukraine — Ukraine’s armed forces plan to launch a “full-scale anti-terrorist operation” against pro-Russian separatists, acting President Oleksander Turchinov said on Sunday, raising the risk of a military confrontation with Moscow.

Angered by the death of a state security officer and the wounding of two of his comrades near the flashpoint eastern city of Slaviansk, Turchinov gave rebels occupying state buildings until Monday morning to lay down their weapons.

He blamed Russia, which opposed a pro-Europe uprising that forced Moscow-backed former president Viktor Yanukovych to flee, for being behind the rash of rebellions across Russian-speaking towns in eastern Ukraine.

“The blood of Ukrainian heroes has been shed in a war which the Russian Federation is waging against Ukraine,” he said in an address to the nation. “The aggressor has not stopped and is continuing to sow disorder in the east of the country.”

Russia’s foreign ministry called the planned military operation a “criminal order” and said the West should bring its allies in Ukraine’s government under control.

“It is now the West’s responsibility to prevent civil war in Ukraine,” the ministry said in a statement.

It said it would put an urgent discussion of the situation in eastern Ukraine on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council.

With East-West relations in crisis, NATO described the appearance in eastern Ukraine of men with specialised Russian weapons and identical uniforms without insignia — as previously worn by Moscow’s troops when they seized Crimea — as a “grave development”.

Though the Ukrainian military did not resist the Russian takeover of Crimea with force, Turchinov threatened robust action against the rebels in the east.

“The National Security and Defence Council has decided to launch a full-scale anti-terrorist operation involving the armed forces of Ukraine,” he declared.

Ukraine has repeatedly said the rebellions are inspired and directed by the Kremlin. But action to dislodge the armed militants risks tipping the stand-off into a new, dangerous phase as Moscow has warned it will protect the region’s Russian-speakers if they come under attack.

One Ukrainian state security officer was killed and five were wounded on the government side in Sunday’s operation in Slaviansk, interior minister Arsen Avakov said. “There were dead and wounded on both sides,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

The Russian news agency RIA reported that one pro-Moscow activist was killed in Slaviansk in clashes with forces loyal to the Kiev government. “On our side, another two were injured,” RIA quoted pro-Russian militant Nikolai Solntsev as adding.

Russian TV broadcast grainy footage of what it said was the body of the militant. The images, which Reuters could not verify independently, showed a man in black clothes, slumped against the door of a car, with a pool of blood between his legs. A rifle lay next to him.

‘Undermining elections’

The separatists are holed up in the local headquarters of the police and of the state security service, while others have erected road blocks around Slaviansk, which lies about 150km from the Russian border.

However, details of the fighting remain sketchy. A statement from the administration of the eastern Donetsk region indicated the security officer may have been killed between Slaviansk and the nearby town of Artemivsk. Putting the number of wounded at nine, it said “an armed confrontation” was going on in the area.

An eyewitness in Slaviansk said a gunman walked up to a car in the city centre and fired four or five shots into it. Video footage from the scene later showed a man being pulled out of the car, either seriously wounded or dead. It was not clear what links the shooting had with the unrest in the town.

Kiev accuses the Kremlin of trying to undermine the legitimacy of presidential elections on May 25 that aim to set Ukraine back onto a normal path after months of turmoil.

However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Kiev was “demonstrating its inability to take responsibility for the fate of the country” and warned that any use of force against Russian speakers “would undermine the potential for cooperation”, including talks due to be held on Thursday between Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union.

Well-organised attackers

Relations between Russia and the West are at their worst since the Cold War due to the crisis that began when Moscow-backed Yanukovych was pushed out by popular protests in February.

Moscow then annexed Crimea from Ukraine, saying the Russian population there was under threat. Some Western governments believe the Kremlin is preparing a similar scenario for eastern Ukraine, something Moscow has strenuously denied.

In Kramatorsk, about 15km south of Slaviansk, gunmen seized the police headquarters after a shootout with police, a Reuters witness said.

The attackers were a well-organised unit of over 20 men, wearing matching military fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, who had arrived by bus. Video footage showed the men taking orders from a commander. Their identity was unclear.

Their level of discipline and equipment was in contrast to the groups who have occupied buildings so far in Ukraine. They have been mostly civilians formed into informal militias with mismatched uniforms.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed concern about similarities in some of the rebels’ appearance to that of the Russian troops who seized control in Crimea.

Calling on Russia to pull back its large number of troops, including special forces, from the area around Ukraine’s border, he said in a statement: “Any further Russian military interference, under any pretext, will only deepen Russia’s international isolation.”

NATO has effectively ruled out military action over Ukraine, which lies outside the Western alliance. However, Washington and NATO leaders have made clear they would defend all 28 member states, including former Soviet republics in the Baltic that are seen as the most vulnerable to Russian pressure.

NATO allies have beefed up their air and sea firepower in eastern Europe. The alliance has also cut off cooperation with Russia and stepped up work with Ukraine, including advising its military on reforms and promising to increase joint exercises.

With EU foreign ministers due to discuss the crisis on Monday, Britain called on Moscow to disown the rebels. “Assumptions that Russia is complicit are inevitable as long as Moscow does not publicly distance itself from these latest lawless actions,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.

Moscow insists its troops near the Ukrainian border are on normal manoeuvres, and Lavrov accused the Western-leaning government in Kiev, viewed by the Kremlin as illegitimate, of stoking the tensions.

Gas war risk

The crisis over Ukraine could trigger a “gas war”, disrupting supplies of Russian natural gas to customers across Europe. Moscow has said it may be forced to sever deliveries to Ukraine — the transit route for much of Europe’s gas — unless Kiev settles its debts.

For now, though, the focus of the crisis was in eastern Ukraine, the country’s industrial heartland, where many people feel a close affinity with neighbouring Russia.

In the eastern city of Kharkiv, supporters of the revolution that brought the Kiev leadership to power clashed with opponents who favour closer ties with Russia. Police said 50 people were hurt, 10 of whom received hospital treatment.

In another eastern town, Zaporizhzhya, Interfax news agency said 3,000 pro-European supporters turned out in a unity rally and faced off with several hundred pro-Moscow supporters, many of them waving the Russian flag.

“We are ready to defend ourselves,” said separatist Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, who said he had taken over leadership of Slaviansk after the city’s mayor fled.

KIEV — Pro-Russian militants raised their flags over official buildings in two eastern Ukrainian cities on Saturday, deepening a stand-off with Moscow which, Kiev warned, was dragging Europe closer to a "gas war" that could disrupt supplies across the continent.

At least 20 men armed with pistols and rifles took over the police station and a security services headquarters in Slaviansk, about 150km from the border with Russia.

Officials said the men had seized hundreds of pistols from arsenals in the buildings. The militants replaced the Ukrainian flag on one of the buildings with the red, white and blue Russian flag.

Some local residents helped the militants build barricades out of tyres in anticipation that police would try to force them out, a Reuters photographer at the scene said.

But it was not clear how the authorities would tackle the militants after the police chief for the region quit.

Kostyantyn Pozhydayev came out to speak to pro-Russian protesters outside his offices in the regional capital, Donetsk, and told them he was stepping down "in accordance with your demands". Some of his officers left the building.

The protesters were occupying the ground floor of the Donetsk police headquarters and the black and orange flag adopted by pro-Russian separatists flew over the building, in place of the Ukrainian flag, a Reuters reporter said.

The occupations are a potential flashpoint because if protesters are killed or hurt by Ukrainian forces, that could prompt the Kremlin to intervene to protect the local Russian-speaking population, a repeat of the scenario in Crimea.

Moscow denies any plan to send in forces or split Ukraine, but the Western-leaning authorities in Kiev believe Russia is trying to create a pretext to interfere again. NATO says Russian armed forces are massing on Ukraine’s eastern border, while Moscow says they are on normal manoeuvres.

Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytsia, said he had spoken in a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and demanded Moscow stop what he called “provocative actions” by its agents in eastern Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine have been in confrontation since protests in Kiev forced the Moscow-backed president from office, and the Kremlin sent troops into Crimea.

Bad solution

While the crisis within Ukraine itself is still unresolved, the gas dispute threatens to spread the impact of the row to millions of people across Europe.

A large proportion of the natural gas which EU states buy from Russia is pumped via Ukrainian territory, so if Russia makes good on a threat to cut off Ukraine for non-payment of its bills, customers further west will have supplies disrupted.

Russia is demanding Kiev pay a much higher price for its gas, and settle unpaid bills. Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom and its Ukrainian counterpart, Naftogaz, are in talks, but the chances of an agreement are slim.

“I would say we are coming nearer to a solution of the situation, but one in the direction that is bad for Ukraine,” Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuri Prodan said in an interview with the German newspaper, Boersenzeitung

“We are probably steering towards Russia turning off its gas provision,” he was quoted as saying.

That raised the spectre of a repeat of past “gas wars”, when Ukraine’s gas was cut off, with a knock-on effect on supplies to EU states.

The scope for compromise narrowed after the Naftogaz chief executive told a Ukrainian newspaper Kiev was suspending payments to Gazprom pending a conclusion of talks over a new deal.

Ukraine has de facto stopped payments already because it failed to make an instalment of over $500 million due earlier this month to Russian state gas giant Gazprom.

Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov, asked by Reuters about the statement by the Naftogaz chief, said: “What does suspending mean? They’ve not paid at all,” since mid-way through last month.

Moscow says it does not want to turn off Ukraine’s gas if it can be avoided, and that it will honour all commitments to supply its EU customers.

Kiev and Brussels are working out ways to keep supplies flowing to EU states, and for those countries to then pump the gas to Ukraine by reversing the flow in their pipelines.

Cold War

The crisis has been seized upon by some right-wing nationalists in the EU who are campaigning for next month’s European Parliament elections. They blame Brussels for antagonising Russia.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front was in Moscow on Saturday and met the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, one of the people on an EU sanctions list.

“I am surprised a Cold War on Russia has been declared in the European Union,” Russian media quoted her as saying.

The EU and the United States imposed sanctions on Russian officials and leading business figures in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, which is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet and was part of Russia until 1954.

Moscow has so far scoffed at the Western measures and warned that, in the long run, the EU and Washington will come off worse by losing out on trade with Russia.

Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire oil and gas trader who is on the US list of people subject to asset freezes and visa bans, joined the chorus of Russian defiance.

“The fact that I was included in the list was a little surprising maybe, but it was quite an honour for me,” he said in an interview with the state-run Rossiya television station to be broadcast later on Saturday.

He said Russian natural gas would increasingly be sold to Asia, as part of a strategy of turning away from a Europe which the Kremlin considers unfriendly.

“It seems to me they [the Europeans] just don’t understand. The politicians are behaving... in a very short-sighted way.”

PATNA, India — Indian Maoist rebels killed 14 people in two separate attacks in the central state of Chhattisgarh on Saturday as they continue a campaign of violence aimed at disrupting a five-week national election.

Five election officials and two bus drivers were killed when a landmine exploded under their vehicle in Bijapur district, where voting is due to take place next week, said the police director general, A.N. Upadhyay.

After the explosion, the rebels opened fire on the bus. Five people were also injured in the attack and were being treated in a hospital, Upadhyay said. The rebels fled into the surrounding forest when paramilitary forces began firing back.

In another attack Saturday, the rebels killed five paramilitary soldiers and two civilians in an ambush on the soldiers’ vehicle in the remote Darbha Forest in the south of the state, Police Inspector General R.K. Vij said. Three soldiers were injured in that attack.

The rebels, who say they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting for more than three decades for a greater share of wealth from the area’s natural resources and more jobs for the poor.

Typically they target government and law enforcement officials in hit-and-run ambushes before disappearing into remote and poorly surveyed jungles within a wide swath of central India. Though they have a presence in 20 of India’s 28 states, they are most active from their strongholds in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal.

Thousands have died on both sides in the conflict. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called them India’s greatest internal security threat, though none of India’s major political parties has said much about the rebel threat during this year’s election campaign.

The multiphase election runs for five weeks and ends May 12, with results for the 543-seat lower house of parliament announced May 16. Voting took place Saturday in the west coast resort state of Goa as well as some parts of the northeastern states of Assam, Tripura and Sikkim.

The main Hindu opposition Bharathiya Janata Party has strong momentum on promises of a surge in economic growth and is threatening to unseat the governing Congress Party after 10 years in power.

Vowing to prevent the rebels from disrupting the vote, the government has deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary soldiers to guard polling booths in insurgency-wracked areas. But the rebels have only stepped up their attacks while also asking citizens to boycott the vote.

PERTH, Australia — There was no let-up in the air and sea search for the missing Malaysian airliner off Australia on Saturday as Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned that locating Flight MH370 would still likely take a long time.

Abbott appeared to step back from his comments Friday when he voiced great confidence that signals from the black box had been detected — his most upbeat assessment so far that triggered speculation that a breakthrough was imminent.

Retired air chief marshal Angus Houston who heads the hunt from Perth, had quickly issued a statement clarifying that there had been no breakthrough.

On Saturday, Abbott repeated his confidence in the search, but put the accent on the challenges ahead.

“We do have a high degree of confidence the transmissions we have been picking up are from Flight MH370,” Abbott said on the last day of his visit to China.

But he added, “no one should under-estimate the difficulties of the task ahead of us.”

“Yes we have very considerably narrowed down the search area but trying to locate anything 4.5 kilometres beneath the surface of the ocean about a thousand kilometres from land is a massive, massive task and it is likely to continue for a long time to come.”

The Australian-led search for the Boeing 777, which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is racing to gather as many signals as possible to determine an exact resting place before a submersible is sent down to find wreckage.

On Saturday’s operations, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said: “Australian defence vessel Ocean Shield continues more focused sweeps with the towed pinger locator to try and locate further signals related to the aircraft’s black boxes.”

‘No major breakthrough’ 

Ocean Shield has picked up four signals linked to aircraft black boxes, with the first two analysed as being consistent with those from aircraft flight recorders.

The beacons on the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders have a normal battery lifespan of around 30 days. MH370 vanished on March 8.

AP-3C Orion surveillance aircraft were also carrying out acoustic searches in conjunction with Ocean Shield, the statement said, adding that the British oceanographic ship HMS Echo was also working in the area.

Saturday’s total search zone covers 41,393 square kilometres and the core of the search zone lies 2,330 kilometres northwest of Perth.

“This work continues in an effort to narrow the underwater search area for when the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is deployed,” JACC said.

In Kuala Lumpur, a report citing unnamed investigators said MH370’s co-pilot had tried to make a mid-flight call from his mobile phone just before the plane vanished.

The call ended abruptly possibly “because the aircraft was fast moving away from the [telecommunications] tower”, The New Straits Times quoted a source as saying.

But the daily also quoted another source saying that while Fariq Abdul Hamid’s “line was reattached”, there was no certainty that a call was made.

The story — headlined a “desperate call for help” — did not say who he was trying to contact.

Fariq and Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have come under intense scrutiny after the plane mysteriously disappeared.

Investigators last month indicated that the flight was deliberately diverted and its communication systems manually switched off as it was leaving Malaysian airspace, triggering a police investigation that has revealed little so far.

The fate of Flight MH370 has been shrouded in mystery, with a number of theories put forward including a hijacking or terrorist attack and a pilot gone rogue.

There have been unconfirmed reports in the Malaysian media of calls by the captain before or during the flight.

Speaking on Friday in China, home to two-thirds of the 239 people on board the flight, Abbott suggested the mystery might soon be solved.

“We have very much narrowed down the search area and we are very confident the signals are from the black box,” Abbott said, although the transmissions were “starting to fade”.

“We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres,” Abbott had said.

Abbott later met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Houston struck a much more cautious note just afterwards, saying “there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370”.

Abbott said that he hoped to update Xi on MH370 developments again before leaving China later Saturday.

No floating debris from the plane has yet been found, the JACC said again on Saturday, despite three weeks of searching in the area by ships and planes from several countries.

Up to 10 aircraft and 14 ships were taking part in the hunt on Saturday.

Houston has stressed the need to find the wreckage to be certain of the plane’s fate, and has repeatedly warned against raising hopes for the sake of victims’ relatives, whose month-long nightmare has been punctuated by false leads.