WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama, seeking to turn the page on more than a decade of war, announced plans Tuesday for greatly reducing US forces in Afghanistan by the end of the year and then ending the US military commitment by the end of 2016. He said American forces, first sent within a month of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, have struck significant blows against al Qaeda’s leadership, eliminated Osama bin Laden and prevented Afghanistan from being used as a base against the US. “We have now been in Afghanistan longer than many Americans expected,” Obama acknowledged during an appearance in the White House Rose Garden.

DUBAI: Islamic scholars and human rights officials of the world’s largest Muslim organisation on Thursday denounced the mass kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by the militant group Boko Haram as “a gross misinterpretation of Islam”. The statements from a research institute and human rights committee of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) echoed denunciations of the radical Islamist group by religious leaders and officials in Nigeria and several Muslim countries. Boko Haram says it wants to establish a “pure” Islamic state in Nigeria and its leader Abubakar Shekau declared in a video on Monday that “Allah has instructed me to sell … on the market” the more than 200 girls abducted from their school on April 14.

NEW YORK: British hate preacher Abu Hamza told his US terror trial Thursday that his hands were blown off during a Pakistan army explosives experiment in Lahore in 1993. The device was prepared by an Arab with the same name as an expert alleged to have taught al Qaeda recruits in Afghanistan in 2000-01.  Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, 56, better known in Britain as Abu Hamza al-Masri has pleaded not guilty in New York to 11 kidnapping and terror counts that pre-date 9/11. He is charged over the 1998 kidnapping in Yemen of 16 Westerners, conspiracy to set up a jihad training camp in Oregon in 1999, of providing material support to al Qaeda, of assisting the Taliban and of sending recruits for terror training in Afghanistan.

Three Kashmiri students from a private university in India’s Greater Noida city of Uttar Pradesh were allegedly beaten up and forced to shout pro-Indian and anti-Pakistani statements at the common hostel they were staying at, according to a report on The Hindustan Times website. At least six students, who were allegedly intoxicated, forced their way into the room of the Kashmiri students attacking them and made them shout anti-Pakistan slogans. Around 150 students staged protests on Monday, claiming that their university administration and local police had turned a deaf ear to their grievances and had failed to respond on time to their complaints when the incident took place.