Toronto Police Say Tunnel Mystery Is Solved

OTTAWA — Toronto’s mystery tunnel has turned
out to be a place for a couple of guys to get away
from it all, more a “man cave” than a terrorist
threat.

After being stumped for more than a month by a
33-foot-long, hand-dug and carefully reinforced
tunnel to nowhere, the Toronto Police said
Monday that they had identified two men in their
20s who did the backbreaking work.

“These two guys dug a hole to hang out,” a
getaway, Constable Victor Kwong said. He added,
“Kids do it, but I’ve never seen anyone in their
20s do it.”

Because the tunnel — which was narrow, damp
and lined with plywood and lumber — was near
a tennis complex at York University, which will
host Pan American Games events this summer,
there had been speculation that the hole was
intended for some sort of a terrorist attack.

Constable Kwong said its creators’ identities were
discovered through a public appeal for
information last week. After interviewing the
men and people who know them, Constable
Kwong said, “We are comfortable that there was
no criminal intention, no nefarious reason for
the tunnel.”

The men have not been charged with a crime, so
the police are not releasing their names.

“The thing is that people think that there’s a lot
more to this than there is,” said Mark Pugash,
another police spokesman.

The men selected the heavily wooded area for its
seclusion and proximity to their neighborhood,
Constable Kwong said. The pair, he added, have
no connection to the university, the tennis
facility or the Pan Am Games.

After coming across a pile of earth from the
excavation in January, a conservation officer
discovered the tunnel entrance hidden under dirt
and leaves. In a smaller hole nearby was an
electrical power generator that operated its
lights, an air compressor and a sump pump. A
plywood cover in that hole was lined with foam,
apparently intended to muffle the sound of the
generator.

While the tunnel appeared to be expertly
reinforced with plywood and 2-by-8-inch
lumber, Constable Kwong said that the tunnelers
have no training in construction or carpentry.
The police filled in the tunnel as a safety
measure.

“It’s not that we’re saying it’s O.K. to dig a hole
anywhere,” Constable Kwong said.
But even if the tunnelers have breached
municipal bylaws or conservation regulations,
they apparently have nothing to fear. Rick
Sikorski, a spokesman for the Toronto and
Region Conservation Authority, said that given
that the police had closed their case, it did not
plan to pursue the men.

Figures From U.S.-Led Coalition Show Heavy 2014 Losses for Afghan Army

WASHINGTON — The Afghan Army lost more
than 20,000 fighters and others last year largely
because of desertions, discharges and deaths in
combat, according to figures to be released
Tuesday, casting further doubt on Afghanistan ’s
ability to maintain security without help from
United States-led coalition forces.

The nearly 11 percent decline from January to
November 2014, to roughly 169,000 uniformed
and civilian members from 190,000, is now an
issue of deep concern among some in the
American military. For example, the former No.

2 American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen.
Joseph Anderson, called the rate of combat deaths
unsustainable before he departed at the end of
last year.

Concern over how soon Afghan forces will be
ready to stand on their own is one reason that
the Obama administration is weighing whether it
should slow the withdrawal of American troops,
the bulk of whom are supposed to be out by the
end of 2016.

The newly available numbers also lay bare the
challenge faced by the 10,000 American troops
and thousands of private contractors who have
remained in Afghanistan since the end of the
combat mission in December to help prepare
Afghan forces to fight the Taliban on their own.

The American-led military coalition, citing
internal figures, said the Afghan Army’s size had
inched back up in the past few months, reaching
about 173,000 in January. But that would still put
the army at its smallest level since the fall of
2011, when the American project to build viable
Afghan security forces was still in its early stages
and the coalition did almost all the fighting
against the Taliban militants.

More than three years on, the American combat
mission is now over and the Afghan military is
supposed to be fully in charge of securing its
own country. But the army, along with the
Afghan police, struggled last year to hold back a
resurgent Taliban, and Afghan forces remain far
more reliant on American air support, logistics
and raids by Special Operations forces than the
Obama administration had intended going into
this year.

Most of the losses in the Afghan Army over the
past year appear to be due to desertion, the
coalition said in a written response to questions
about the newly declassified data. Smaller
percentages came from ordinary discharges and,
more worryingly, from deaths in combat, of
which there were more than 1,200 last year, a
record for the army.

But no matter the reasons, the numbers cast a
harsh spotlight on one inescapable fact: The
army, the centerpiece of the American-led
campaign to stabilize Afghanistan, is losing
people far faster than it can replace them. The
rate of decline, if not reversed, could leave the
army effectively incapable of fighting the Taliban
across much of Afghanistan within the next year
or two, according to some American military
officials and analysts.

The data being released on Tuesday — a month
after the American military abruptly reversed its
decision to keep data about the Afghan security
forces classified — is being published by the
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction, an American government
watchdog agency that puts out quarterly reports
on American spending in Afghanistan.

Until late last year, the inspector general’s
reports regularly included details about Afghan
forces, such as the size of the army and the
police. Then the American military command in
Afghanistan decided to classify most of the basic
data it had been supplying about the Afghan
Army and police. It argued that the public
release of the data would imperil Afghan and
coalition forces.

That decision provoked sharp criticism from
Congress and within the command itself when it
became public in January. The military reversed
itself about a week later, saying that, upon
further review, it could safely release the
information.

The American command has not elaborated
further on its decision. But ahead of the release
of the data on Tuesday it said that it was working
with the government of Afghanistan to make
leadership changes in the Afghan Army in an
effort to stem the desertion rate, which has been
a problem for years.

The coalition said it was also helping to improve
the Afghans’ ability to evacuate wounded soldiers
from the battlefield and get them properly
treated, and training and equipping Afghan
forces to better find and neutralize improvised
explosive devices, which remain the most deadly
weapon in the Taliban’s arsenal.

Since the United States and its allies began
building Afghan forces in earnest in 2009, the
size of the Afghan Army has oscillated,
sometimes falling by thousands of troops from
month to month. Desertion has been a persistent
problem, and the army has never reached its
target strength, which currently stands at 195,000
people.

But the long-term trend appeared to be generally
upward until the start of 2014, when Afghan
forces took on the lead combat role across the
country — and the army’s numbers started what
would become an 11-month decline.

The report, which was provided to The New York
Times ahead of its release, was supposed to be
published last week. But a day before its
scheduled release, the coalition command in
Afghanistan quietly informed the inspector
general that it had been supplying incorrect data
on the size of the Afghan Army through all of last
year.

The incorrect data overestimated the strength of
the army by thousands of troops. At one point
last year, the incorrect data counted nearly
14,000 more Afghan troops than there now
appears to have been at the time.

The coalition attributed the problem to what it
called an accounting error, and offered no
further explanation, the inspector general’s
report said. It remains unclear whether data for
years before 2014 was similarly corrupted.

Bus Driver in Delhi Gang Rape Blames Victim

NEW DELHI — In the months after a young
woman was brutalized and gang-raped on a
moving bus in New Delhi in 2012, thousands of
politicians, activists and ordinary citizens
crowded onto India’s airwaves and into its public
spaces to say their piece about the crime.

But there was no comment from the six slight,
ordinary-looking men accused of her murder.
Whisked in and out of the courtroom past
shouting crowds of journalists, they listened
impassively to testimony and offered
monosyllabic answers on the stand. Courtroom
guards said they hummed Bollywood tunes under
their breath. Their opinions were anyone’s guess.

Now, in his first in-depth interview, one of the
men, Mukesh Singh, has told a British filmmaker
that the young woman invited the rape because
she was out too late at night.

“You can’t clap with one hand,” said Mr. Singh,
who drove the bus during the crime but denied
taking part in the assault. “It takes two hands. A
decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at
night. A girl is far more responsible for rape
than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal.

Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not
roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong
things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent
of girls are good.”

The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student,
had been to see “Life of Pi” with a male friend,
and they both boarded the private bus without
realizing that the six men aboard had been
driving the streets in search of a victim. After
knocking her friend unconscious, they took her
to the back of the bus and raped her, then
damaged her internal organs with an iron rod.

An hour later, they dumped the pair out on the
road, bleeding and naked. She died two weeks
later of her injuries.

In the interview, for a film that will air Sunday
on the BBC , Mr. Singh said the woman had
provoked the deadly assault by resisting the rape.
“When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back,” he
told the filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, according to a
transcript provided by the BBC. “She should just
be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have
dropped her off after ‘doing her,’ and only hit
the boy.”

In footage from the film, Mr. Singh tonelessly
narrates the assault, saying that he heard her
screaming for help but that his brother instructed
him to keep driving as they “dragged her to the
back” and “went turn by turn.” Afterward, he
said, he saw the youngest of the assailants, who
was 17 at the time of the crime, withdraw
something from her body.

“It was her intestines,” Mr. Singh said. “He said,
‘She’s dead. Throw her out quickly.’ ”
He called the killing “an accident.”

Ms. Udwin, at a news conference in New Delhi,
said the film crew interviewed Mr. Singh for 16
hours and saw no sign of remorse. “He is almost
like a robot,” she said. “I tried every trick to get
a tear in his eye, but nothing. No tear.”

Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday
demanded an explanation from the Tihar Jail,
where Mr. Singh is incarcerated, as to why they
had allowed the interview while the case was
pending trial.

The prison authorities in Tihar told The Indian
Express, a daily newspaper, that they are in the
process of filing a legal notice against the BBC for
violating its agreement to submit the footage for
approval. The filmmakers said that they
submitted the footage, and that it was approved.

According to police records, the six men divided
the pair’s possessions: Mr. Singh took one mobile
phone, and Vinay Sharma, a 20-year-old gym
instructor, took the other. Pawan Gupta took the
man’s watch and 1,000 rupees cash, a little less
than $20. Akshay Kumar Singh, a bus cleaner,
took the woman’s rings. The juvenile was given a
bank card and some cash from the spoil.

Mr. Singh’s brother, Ram Singh, hanged himself
with his bedsheet in his prison cell months before
the trial. The juvenile defendant, whose identity
was never made public in accordance with
Indian law, was sentenced to three years in a
detention center — the heaviest sentence possible
in India’s juvenile justice system. The remaining
four men pleaded not guilty; they are appealing
their death sentences.

Mr. Singh told the filmmaker that he believed the
harsh sentences, instead of acting as a deterrent,
would drive more rapists to kill their victims in
the future. “Now, when they rape, they won’t
leave the girl like we did,” he said. “They will kill
her. Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her
alone. She won’t tell anyone.’ Now, when they
rape, especially the criminal types, they will just
kill the girl. Death.”

Indian State Passes Beef Ban Championed by Right-Wing Hindus

MUMBAI, India — The western state of
Maharashtra this week became the first Indian
state to ban the possession and sale of beef,
imposing fines and up to five years in prison for
violations.

The ban, which was passed on Monday, came as
an amendment to a 1972 law prohibiting the
slaughter of cows, which has been expanded to
ban the slaughter of bulls, bullocks and calves.

The slaughter of water buffaloes will still be
allowed under the new law, subject to permission
from the authorities. The populous western state
includes Mumbai, the Indian financial capital.

The Maharashtra Animal Preservation
(Amendment) Bill, championed by right-wing
Hindu organizations, was first passed in 1995
but languished for two decades under a governing coalition between the Indian National Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party. The
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won a
clear majority in state elections last October,
after Narendra Modi, the party’s leader, took
office as prime minister in May.

The law, which allows a fine of 10,000 rupees,
about $162, took effect Monday night after
approval from President Pranab Mukherjee.
Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra
Fadnavis, gave the president credit and
expressed his thanks over Twitter.

“Our dream of ban on cow slaughter becomes a
reality now,” he wrote.
The move was far less popular with those who
run Mumbai’s restaurants, and some retailers
warned that it would eliminate jobs and send the
price of other meats spiraling upward.

“This is extremely sad to hear,” Glyston Gracias,
brand chef at Smoke House Deli in Mumbai, told
The Indian Express, a daily newspaper. “I will
have to go to another country.”

“A lot of our foreign clientele, such as Japanese
and Europeans, will miss beef on the menu,” he
said. “I will find it difficult to do international
cuisine.”

The protection of cows is a volatile subject in
India, where the animal is revered by the
majority-Hindu population. Nearly all of India’s
states already have legal provisions restricting or
banning cow slaughter. The B.J.P.’s election
manifesto included promises to work toward “the protection and promotion of cow and its progeny.”

As India’s beef trade is largely controlled by
Muslim traders, a religious minority in the
country, the issue has become a point of
contention between the two religious groups, and
it is particularly politicized during elections.

Last month, beef traders in Maharashtra
complained that they were being harassed by
right-wing Hindu groups that were attacking
vehicles transporting cattle to abattoirs, seizing
the animals by force and beating the drivers. In
February, beef traders across the state went on
strike for over a week until the chief minister,
Mr. Fadnavis, assured them protection.

India is a top exporter of meat from buffaloes,
which are more common and less revered in
India than cows. India’s exports of beef,
including buffalo meat, have been rising steadily.

Ahead of the state elections, Satpal Malik, a vice
president of the farmers’ wing of the B.J.P., said
that if elected, the party would “crack down on
beef exports” and “review the subsidy the
government gives for beef or buffalo meat
exports,” according to a report by Reuters.

Reduce Embassy Staff. Venezuela Tells U.S

CARACAS, Venezuela — With diplomatic relations
fraying rapidly between the United States and
Venezuela, the government of President Nicolás
Maduro has given the American Embassy here 15
days to come up with a plan to drastically shrink
its staff, Venezuela’s foreign minister announced
Monday.

Mr. Maduro has repeatedly accused the United
States of supporting a plot to overthrow him, and
on Saturday he announced a series of diplomatic
measures that he said were intended to halt
American meddling.

He said the United States would have to reduce
the number of officials at its embassy to a
number similar to the staff at the Venezuelan
Embassy in Washington. He said there were 100
American officials here and just 17 Venezuelan
officials in Washington, although those numbers
have not been verified by the State Department.

“Regarding the reduction to 17 officials with
which the Embassy of the United States in
Venezuela must operate, they were given 15 days
to present a plan as to the classification and rank
of the officials that will remain,” the foreign
minister, Delcy Rodríguez, said at a news conference.

She said the change was in keeping with “the
reciprocity that should govern relations between
sovereign states.” The United States denies Mr.
Maduro’s claim that it is involved in any plan to
overthrow him, saying he is seeking to deflect
attention from the country’s worsening economic crisis.

Mr. Maduro also said Saturday that Americans
traveling to Venezuela would now need visas to
enter the country and that they would have to
pay a fee equal to what Venezuelans pay for a
visa to the United States.

Mr. Maduro’s anti-Washington language was
tamped down for several weeks after the
surprise diplomatic opening between the United
States and Cuba, a close ally of the Caracas
government.

But last month, as pressure grew on Mr. Maduro
to address the country’s many economic ills, he
once again stepped up accusations against the
United States.

For the U.S. and China, a Test of Diplomacy on South Sudan

A United Nations camp for displaced people in Bentiu,
South Sudan, where civil war has forced two million people from their homes. Peace talks are underway, but are not seen as promising.

UNITED NATIONS — The United States may have
midwifed the birth of South Sudan , the world’s
youngest nation. But China has quickly become
among its most important patrons, building its
roads and pumping its oil.

Now, more than a year after South Sudan’s
leaders plunged their country into a nasty civil
war, the nation has become something of a test of
diplomacy between the United States and China,
raising the question: Can Washington and
Beijing turn their mutual interests in South
Sudan into a shared strategy to stop the bloodshed?

To pressure the warring sides toward peace, the
United States has circulated a draft Security
Council resolution, dangling the threat of
sanctions and setting up the possibility of an
arms embargo somewhere down the road. The
measure could come up for a vote as early as Tuesday.

China, which has long espoused a policy of not
interfering in its partners’ domestic affairs, has
not revealed its hand. The Chinese foreign
minister, Wang Yi, signaled to diplomats here last
week that his government could be persuaded to back appropriate punitive measures against South Sudan.   

The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Liu Jieyi, then publicly questioned the “logic” of proposing sanctions while the two sides are talking. China could
abstain from voting on Tuesday and let the measure pass.

Peace talks — funded by both Beijing and Washington — are underway in Ethiopia this week between factions loyal to President Salva Kiir and his rival former Vice President Riek Machar. Yet prospects for a breakthrough by a Thursday deadline set by the mediators appear slim. Mr. Kiir, for his part, has refused to show up.

So far, neither Washington nor Beijing has advanced a comprehensive strategy to stop the civil war. Both nations have been hesitant to substantially defang the kingpins of the war, including imposing an arms embargo or limiting how oil revenues might be used to fund the conflict. Both measures are among the
recommendations of a recent International Crisis Group report on South Sudan.

“The ability of the United States and China to work toward a common strategy for peace in South Sudan is a test case for their ability to work together on the continent and beyond,” said Casie Copeland, the Crisis Group’s South Sudan expert. She described both countries as “sort of walking in a circle.”

That is not for a lack of interest — or even because of opposing interests. Although China and the United States have stubbornly been on opposing sides of the issue of Darfur, the long-suffering Sudanese region, the
two superpowers share a lot of common ground on South Sudan.

China has strong economic stakes in the country; the United States is heavily invested politically.

They both have an interest in restoring stability to the country and avoiding disruptions to its oil flow. Both capitals have also opted to go slowly. Obama administration officials have deep emotional ties to South Sudan, and so far they have resisted taking any steps, like an arms embargo, that would weaken the government in Juba. As the administration’s former South Sudan envoy, Princeton Lyman, put it this week,
“The position is hardening in the administration, but it has taken a while.”

All the while, fighting between forces loyal to Mr. Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, and Mr. Machar, an ethnic Nuer, has killed tens of thousands, displaced two million people, brought the country to brink of famine and left a trail of rape and killing. The United Nations children’s agency last week said school children had been conscripted by a militia loyal to Mr. Kiir’s forces.

The United States and China have vastly different
histories there. The United States championed its
independence from Sudan, whose president, Omar al-Bashir, it loathed, and whom it referred to the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide in Darfur.

China, by contrast, was one of Mr. Bashir’s most
important allies — and still is. But when South Sudan split off, it took vast amounts of oil with it, so China soon courted the new government in Juba and kept its stake in the oil fields.

That helps explains why China has taken an
unusually active role, considering its traditional policy of noninterference. It has dispatched its own soldiers to the United Nations peacekeeping mission there and
persuaded the Security Council to include a most unusual mandate for the mission: Peacekeepers there are tasked with protecting not just civilians, but also the country’s oil installations, which have been attacked. China has also stopped shipping arms to the government in Juba.

The American-drafted resolution would impose travel bans and asset freezes on individuals who threaten the peace and security of South Sudan, including those who are accused of committing serious rights abuses, using child soldiers, and attacking United Nations personnel. It would set up a committee to evaluate who should fall on the sanctions list. The measure would raise the possibility of an arms embargo further in the future.

Crucial to the effectiveness of these measures are South Sudan’s neighbors, including Uganda and Ethiopia, which have ties to the rival parties. Only if the countries in the region agree to punitive measures, like sanctions and an arms embargo, Mr. Lyman pointed out, will China give its consent on the Council.

Asked why it has taken so long to propose a draft
resolution on the Security Council, an American official said: “There are a lot of actors in this situation. We’ve been waiting for the right moment.”

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of diplomatic protocol. “Everyone is sort of rowing in the same direction,” he added. A wild card is what to do about the potential war crimes committed by both sides in the conflict.

The African Union has completed its own investigation into human rights abuses, but refused to make it public while peace talks are continuing. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has urged the
organization to release it.

United Nations investigators have chronicled a litany of horrors since fighting broke out in December 2013. “In Juba, I met people whose whole families have been executed, primarily due to their ethnicity, and women and girls who were taken as sex slaves after their husbands were killed,” the United Nations assistant secretary general for human rights, Ivan Simonovic, told the Council last week, urging the panel to ensure accountability for the victims.

The next question will be whether China or the
United States agrees to send its friends to the
dock.

Nemtsov funeral: Slain Russian opposition leader laid to rest, mourners queue to pay respects

Thousands of people, including prominent
Russian and foreign politicians and
activists, have pay their last respects to
Boris Nemtsov - an opposition leader, who
was assassinated in Moscow last week.

People stood in a kilometer-long queue to
get to the memorial service, which took
place in the Sakharov Center in Moscow.
Not all were able to get inside.

From there Nemtsov’s coffin was taken to
the Troekurovskoye cemetery, where about
600 people attended the funeral, Interfax
estimates.