News In Brief

Man shoots dead 7 family
members in Iran
AP, Tehran
Iranian media says a man has shot dead seven members of his wife’s family in the southwestern city of Dezful. The state-owned IRNA news agency said Sunday the shooter wielded a Kalashnikov rifle killing five men and two women, before shooting himself.
The agency reported the shooter survived and is in hospital, but did not release his name. Gun violence is rare in Iran, where citizens are only allowed to own licensed hunting rifles.

Philippine police kill 14 rebels
AP, Bacolod
Philippine police said Sunday that 14 suspected communist rebels were killed after they opened fire during raids in a central province, but rights groups countered that the men were farmers and the latest victims of extrajudicial killings.
Dozens of police, backed by army troops, were to conduct court-authorized home searches Saturday in a city and two towns in Negros Oriental province when the 14 men violently fought back, police officials said. A police officer was shot in the leg and wounded in the anti-insurgency and criminality sweep that also led to the arrests of 15 other suspects, they said.

4 executed by Al-Shabab
AP, Nairobi
Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamic extremist group says it has executed four men accused of spying for the British, Djibouti and Somali intelligence agencies. Al-Shabab announced the killings on its Andalus radio station on Sunday, saying they were carried out by a firing squad in a public square in Kamsuma, a town in the Lower Jubba region.

China plant blast kills seven
Reuters, Beijing
A plant explosion in China’s Jiangsu province has killed seven people, state media reported on Sunday, 10 days after a blast at a pesticide plant killed 78 people in the province and triggered a nationwide safety inspection campaign. Sunday’s blast involved a container of scrap metal that caught fire in a metal-molding plant in a bonded area in the city of Kunshan, state news agency Xinhua said.