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A strong, pre-dawn earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6 struck eastern Turkey on Monday, killing 57 people as it knocked down stone or mud-brick houses and minarets in at least six villages, the government said.

Turkey’s crisis center said about 100 other people were injured in the quake, which hit at 4:32 a.m. (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) in Elazig province, about 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of Ankara, the capital.

The earthquake, which caught many people as they slept, was centered near the village of Basyurt and followed by more than 50 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 5.5 and 5.3, the Kandilli seismology center said.

The worst-hit area was the village of Okcular, where some 17 people were killed and homes crumbled into piles of dirt. As relatives rushed in for news of their loved ones, authorities blocked access to Okcular so ambulances and rescue teams could maneuver on the village’s narrow roads. Villagers lit fires to keep warm.

“The village is totally flattened,” village administrator Hasan Demirdag told private NTV television.

Ali Riza Ferhat of Okcular said he was woken up by the jolt.

“I tried to get out of the door but it wouldn’t open. I came out of the window and started helping my neighbors,” he told NTV television. “We removed six bodies.”

Another 13 people were killed in the village of Yukari Demirci, Gov. Muammer Erol said, adding that by noon everyone had been removed from the rubble and there was no one left buried inside the debris.

“Everything has been knocked down, there is not a stone in place,” said Yadin Apaydin, administrator for the village of Yukari Kanatli, where he said at least three people died.

The quake was also felt in the neighboring provinces of Tunceli, Bingol and Diyarbakir, where residents fled to the streets in panic and stayed outdoors. Schools were closed for two days in the region. In Tunceli province, students were sent home after the quake caused a school’s walls to crack, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The Elazig quake follows deadly temblors in Haiti and Chile, but Bernard Doft, the seismologist for the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said there was no direct connection between the three.

“These events are too far apart to be of direct influence to each other,” he said.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kandilli Observatory’s director, Mustafa Erdik, urged residents not to enter any damaged homes, warning that they could topple from aftershocks that Erdik said could last for days.

Erdogan blamed the mud-brick constructions for the deaths and said the government was instructing its housing agency to construct quake-prone homes in the area.

Television footage showed rescue workers and soldiers at Okcular lifting debris as villagers looked on. Rescuers dug into the dirt, finding the body of an elderly man, and quickly covered him with a sheet.

Two women sat on mattresses wrapped in blankets. The temblor also knocked down barns, killing farm animals.

Turkey’s Red Crescent organization sent tents and blankets to the region. Erdogan said ambulance helicopters, prefabricated homes and mobile kitchens were also being sent.

Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, much of which lies on top of two main fault lines. In 1999, two powerful earthquakes struck northwestern Turkey, killing about 18,000 people.

In 2007, an earthquake measuring 5.7 damaged buildings in Elazig, briefly trapping a woman under debris. In 2003, an earthquake measuring 6.4 magnitude collapsed a school dormitory in the neighboring province of Bingol, killing 83 children. The collapse was blamed on poor construction. Hard money training.

John Patrick Bedell was a brilliant and seemingly gentle computer whiz, yet so withdrawn that people in this rural community where his parents and grandparents are civic leaders knew little about him — until he opened fire at the Pentagon  this week.

Family and friends now paint a portrait of a troubled man who sank deep into mental illness and anti-government rants, even as his mother — a nursing instructor — tried to seek help.

“The family tried over and over to get him into some kind of treatment, but because he was an adult, they were restricted,” said Reb Monaco, a family friend for three decades. “Patrick himself was in some sort of denial.”

It is still unclear why Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon entrance Thursday — wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot — though he had railed on the Internet about his distrust of the government and his distaste for marijuana laws.

“We may never know why he made this terrible decision,” his devastated family said in a statement Friday. “One thing is clear though — his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.”

Bedell, 36, a graduate student in electrical engineering at San Jose State University, was diagnosed as bipolar, or manic depressive, and had been in and out of treatment programs for years.

After a 2006 marijuana and resisting arrest case in Orange County, Calif., his psychiatrist said Bedell tried to self-medicate with pot, inadvertently making his bi-polar disorder symptoms more pronounced.

In a letter to the court in 2008, Bedell explained: “I was experiencing an episode of mental illness… which subsequently led to psychiatric hospitalization. I do not have any record of threatened or actual violence prior to this incident, and I am deeply sorry…”

Bedell lived here with his parents in a gated golf course community. His mother Kaye is director of the nursing program at Gavilan College. His father, Oscar John Bedell Jr., is a private financial adviser.

“In my opinion, they are the typical American Family,” said Pat Loe, a county supervisor who has known the family for 30 years.

But John Bedell disappeared at least twice recently from his parents’ home.

On Jan. 3, a Texas Department of Public Safety officer stopped him for speeding near Amarillo, smelling of marijuana and saying he was heading to the East Coast. Bedell acted strangely, sitting on his knees by the roadside and turning off his cell phone whenever it rang.

After his mother called, the officer asked to speak to her. A patrol spokesman declined to reveal the conversation Friday but said Bedell was cited for possessing drug paraphernalia and released.

Bedell’s mother told Monaco, the family friend, that she had wanted her son taken to a mental institution. “But they couldn’t because he is an adult and he refused,” Monaco said.

The next morning, fearing for their son’s well-being, Bedell’s parents filed a missing person’s report.

Within days, Kaye Bedell found a message on her son’s computer indicating he had spent $600 at a gun store or shooting range in El Dorado County, east of Sacramento. She was afraid he had purchased a gun or ammunition, said San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill.

When Bedell returned to his parent’s home Jan. 18, he would not say where he had been, Hill said. Then he left for parts unknown.

On Feb. 1, authorities say he was arrested in Reno, Nev., with more than two ounces of marijuana in his car but no weapons.

Internet postings suggested Bedell was fascinated with conspiracy theories, computer programming, libertarian economics and the science of warfare.

In a 28-page document, Bedell proposed in 2004 that the Pentagon fund his research on smart weapons that might “provide significant new capabilities for the Department of Defense and the individual warfighter.”

On the day of his Pentagon attack, the six-foot tall, blue-eyed software devotee approached the entrance, then opened fire with a 9 mm handgun, wounding two officers. He was mortally wounded.

Bedell seemed an unlikely gunman to David Parent, a professor of electrical engineering at San Jose State University, who knew him as a gentle, star student — “somebody seeking to help others.” Hard money training.

A string of three deadly suicide bombings killed 30 people in the former insurgent stronghold of Baqouba on Wednesday, including a blast from a suicide bomber who rode in an ambulance with the wounded before blowing himself up at a hospital, police said.

The bombings — Iraq’s deadliest in weeks — come as Iraq is preparing for March 7 parliamentary elections. The crucial balloting will decide who will oversee the country as U.S. forces go home and help determine whether Iraq can overcome the deep sectarian tensions that have divided the nation since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned repeatedly that insurgents were expected to launch such attacks in an attempt to disrupt the crucial vote. A man purporting to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi — the leader of an al-Qaida front group in Iraq — has vowed to violently disrupt the vote.

The bombings could also affect the candidacy of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who came to power in 2006 and oversaw a return to relative stability in 2008 and 2009. Al-Maliki has continued to bill himself as the best candidate to assure security in Iraq.

A police spokesman in the volatile Diyala province, Capt. Ghalib al-Karkhi, said the blasts struck in quick succession in Baqouba, 35 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad, and also wounded 48 people.

First, a suicide car bomb targeted a local government housing office next to an Iraqi Army facility. Within minutes, another suicide bomber blew up a vehicle about 200 yards (meters) down the street from the first blast at an intersection near the provincial government headquarters where many police and army personnel were located, al-Karkhi said.

A third suicide bomber, wearing an explosives vest, rode in an ambulance with the wounded to the city’s emergency hospital and blew himself up as rescuers and victims from the first two blasts were being rushed in for treatment, he added.

Most of the victims came from the blast at the hospital, al-Karkhi said. Police later safely detonated a fourth car bomb about 220 yards (200 meters) from the hospital.

An official in the Diyala police department who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media confirmed the death toll.

Insurgents often spread out bomb attacks as a way to maximize damage as rescuers and others rush to the scene to help or ferry the victims to hospital for treatment.

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but such attacks have been the hallmark of al-Qaida in Iraq. Police said they arrested four suspects and imposed an open-ended curfew on the city as they search for more suspects.

One witness in Baqouba described being thrown against a nearby wall by the first blast and said that immediately after the explosion, Iraqi security forces began firing their weapons. The witness said she hid in a nearby building, then when the situation appeared to have calmed down, went outside only to hear another blast go off seconds later.

“The place was covered with dust and the smell of TNT powder was all over the area, where panicked people were running and cars were colliding with one another,” said the witness. She spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.

The provincial police chief, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Hussein al-Shimari, was in the hospital at the time of the blast, but was unharmed, al-Karkhi said.

Deputy Interior Minister Iden Khalid said at a press conference later Wednesday in Baghdad that security forces expect further attempts to carry out attacks, but that the security situation will not interfere with Sunday’s vote.

Wednesday’s bombings were the deadliest since the start of February, when a female suicide bomber detonated her explosives inside a way station for Shiite pilgrims marking an important Shiite religious occasion, killing 54 people. At the time, Baghdad’s top security official said extremists were adopting new methods to outwit bomb-detection squads such as stashing explosives deep inside the engines and frames of vehicles.

In January, a two-day wave of suicide car bombers struck three hotels in Baghdad and the city’s main crime lab, killing at least 63 people.

Iraqi authorities have vowed tight security in the capital and the rest of the country in the run-up to the election and on voting day. Generally a vehicle ban is imposed across Iraq, the airport will be shut down on Sunday and hundreds of thousands of police and army troops dispersed across the country.

Baqouba is a mixed Shiite-Sunni city and Diyala’s provincial capital. Both the city and the province were flashpoints of the insurgency, although they have quieted since the height of attacks in 2006 and 2007. Hard money training.

The 40 retirees enjoying summer vacation at a seaside campground nestled under pine trees knew they had to move fast after Chile’s powerful earthquake struck.

They didn’t make it. The tsunami came in three waves, surging 200 yards into this Pacific Ocean resort town and dragging away the bus they’d piled into, hoping to get to high ground. Most of those inside were tourists, and only five of their bodies had been found by Monday, firefighters and witnesses said.

Pelluhue’s horror underscored the destruction wrought by Saturday’s pre-dawn 8.8-magnitude quake and the tsunami that ravaged communities along Chile’s south-central coast — those closest to the quake’s epicenter. Chile’s death toll reached 723, and most died in the wine-growing Maule region that includes Pelluhue.

Survivors here found about 20 bodies, and an estimated 300 homes were destroyed. Most residents were aware of the tsunami threat; street signs pointed to the nearest tsunami evacuation route. The ruins of homes, television sets, clothes, dishwaters and dead fish cover the town’s black sand beaches.

“We ran through the highest part of town, yelling, ‘Get out of your homes!’” said Claudio Escalona, 43, who fled his home near the campground with his wife and daughters, ages 4 and 6. “About 20 minutes later came three waves, two of them huge, about 18 feet each, and a third even bigger. That one went into everything.”

“You could hear the screams of children, women, everyone,” Escalona said. “There were the screams, and then a tremendous silence.”

Destruction is widespread and food scarce all along the coast — in towns like Talca and Cauquenes, Curico and San Javier. In Curanipe, the local church served as a morgue. In Cauquenes, people quickly buried their dead because the funeral home had no electricity.

President Michelle Bachelet said authorities were flying hundreds of tons of food, water and other basics into the region.

After the quake rocked the gritty port town of Talcahuano, Marioli Gatica and her extended family huddled in a circle on the floor of their seaside wooden home, listening to the radio by a lantern’s light.

They heard firefighters urging citizens to stay calm and stay inside. They heard nothing about a tsunami — until it slammed into their house with an unearthly roar. Gatica’s house exploded with water. The family was swept below the surface, swirling amid loose ship containers and other heavy debris that smashed buildings into oblivion all around them.

“We were sitting there one moment and the next I looked up into the water and saw cables and furniture floating,” Gatica said.

Two of the giant containers crushed Gatica’s home. A third grounded between the ocean and where she floated, keeping the retreating tsunami from dragging her and other relatives out to sea. Her 11-year-old daughter, Ninoska Elgueta, clung to a tree as the wave retreated.

All the family survived except Gatica’s 76-year-old mother, Nery Valdebenito, Gatica said. “I think my mother is trapped beneath” the house.

Firefighters with search dogs examined the ruins of her home. The group leader drew his finger across his neck: No one alive there.

Close to 80 percent of Talcahuano’s 180,000 people are homeless, with 10,000 homes uninhabitable and hundreds more destroyed, Mayor Gaston Saavedra said.

“The port is destroyed. The streets, collapsed. City buildings, destroyed,” Saavedra said.

In Concepcion, the biggest city near the epicenter, rescuers drilled through thick concrete to look for survivors trapped inside a toppled 70-unit apartment building. Firefighters had pulled 25 survivors and nine bodies from the structure.

Chile’s defense minister has said the navy made a mistake by not immediately activating a tsunami warning. He said port captains who did call warnings in several coastal towns saved hundreds of lives.

In the village of Dichato, teenagers drinking on the beach were the first to shout the warning when they saw a horseshoe-shaped bay empty about an hour after the quake. They ran through the streets, screaming. Police joined them, using megaphones. Hard money training.

The Afghan government took official control of the southern Taliban stronghold of Marjah on Thursday, installing an administrator and raising the national flag  while U.S.-led troops rooted out final pockets of militants.

The ceremony occurred in a central market as U.S. Marines and Afghan troops slogged through bomb-laden fields in northern parts of the town. Some 700 residents gathered to see Abdul Zahir Aryan formally appointed as the top government official in Marjah, according to U.S. officials at the event.

Aryan and a team of advisers held their first meeting in the town Monday and have been staying overnight in a building there since Tuesday, said Marlin Harbinger, the senior U.S. government representative for Helmand province, which contains Marjah.

“Today’s event was the civilian Afghan government re-establishing itself officially in front of the local residents,” Harbinger said. The Afghan army had previously raised the country’s green-and-red flag nearby, but that was only a claim of military control over that neighborhood, he said.

The ceremony opened with a reading from the Quran, and then Aryan and the Helmand governor pledged to those gathered that they were ready to listen to their needs and eager to provide them with basic services that they didn’t have under the Taliban.

After the ceremony, the generals and high-level officials departed in helicopters, but Aryan remained.

The mass assault in southern Helmand province, with 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops, is the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001.

NATO’s strategy is to rout Taliban militants from the town, which had served as a logistical base and drug trafficking hub, restore the Afghan government’s presence, and rush in public services in a bid to win over the confidence of local communities.

In the north Thursday, the Marines’ progress was slowed by difficult terrain with no roads, few tracks and many hidden mines, but there was no gunfire by midmorning. Several armored vehicles fell into irrigation canals while others were damaged by roadside bombs.

About 100 fighters are believed to have regrouped into the 28-square mile (45-square kilometer) area known as Kareze, according to commanders with the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment. The Marines and their Afghan partners are working to secure the area, believed to be the last significant pocket of Taliban insurgents in town.

The last few days have been relatively calm throughout Marjah, with limited engagement by insurgents, as troops secured areas they had already taken and moved into position to tackle the final insurgent holdouts.

NATO said in a statement that while there are still occasional gunfights in the town, the number of residents returning has increased in recent days and shops have opened to sell telephones and computers alongside fresh fruits and vegetables.

In a sign that NATO’s push to win over the population may be gaining traction, bomb tips from residents have increased by nearly 50 percent, the alliance said.

As the offensive closes in on its second week, 13 NATO troops and three Afghan soldiers have been killed, according to military officials. Eighty NATO troops have been wounded, along with eight Afghans.

At least 28 civilians have been killed, including 13 children, according to the Afghan human rights commission.

The civilian toll has raised fears that NATO may lose the support of the population even as it drives out the Taliban. The deaths come even though NATO has said its priority is protecting the civilian population and has adopted strict rules to prevent casualties.

A spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry said both the Afghan government and NATO troops realized they had to be realistic and accept that there would be civilian deaths.

“Preventing civilian casualties is our biggest challenge,” Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters in Kabul. “You should not expect zero casualties, either from our side or from the international forces. That will only happen when the fighting is over. And we are all trying to make that happen.”

NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, speaking alongside Azimi, urged Afghans to recognize that international troops are putting themselves in greater danger in order to try to protect civilians.

“We are going beyond the laws of armed conflict by increasing our risk,” Tremblay said. Hard money training.

Emergency crews used bulldozers and other heavy equipment Monday to search for at least four people still missing in Madeira after flash floods and rockslides killed 42 people on the Portuguese vacation island.

Rescue teams in more than 400 vehicles worked all through the night to clear tons of caked mud, boulders and snapped trees that had piled up in the capital of Funchal and other coastal communities, authorities said.

After a month’s worth of rain fell in about eight hours, a raging torrent of water and mud swept away people, houses and vehicles Saturday on the steep-sloped Atlantic Ocean island. Locals said the storm was the worst in living memory.

Only four people were officially unaccounted for on Monday, but officials said there could be further victims because blocked roads and downed phone lines made it difficult to get a complete picture of the damage.

Parts of downtown Funchal were cordoned off as crews pumped rainwater and sludge out of a shopping mall’s underground parking lot where officials fear more bodies may be found. The parking lot’s two levels were completely submerged.

“The recovery is going to be a hard work,” resident Miguel Eduardo told Associated Press Television News. “It will take us a few months to recover.”

More than 120 people were injured, and almost 120 others forced to leave their homes by the flooding were staying at a military barracks, according to the regional government.

Several main roads remained blocked by debris, but officials hoped to reopen all the island’s roads by the end of the week.

The victims, in white body bags, were taken to Funchal’s international airport where a makeshift morgue was set up. Among the dead was a local firefighter who was swept away in a muddy torrent as he tried to save a woman, his colleagues said.

The British Foreign office said one British national was killed and a few others had been hospitalized on Madeira. The island is popular with British tourists because of its mild climate.

Madeira is the main island of a Portuguese archipelago of the same name in the Atlantic Ocean just over 300 miles (480 kilometers) off the west coast of Africa. It has a population of around 250,000 people.

The head of the regional government, Alberto Joao Jardim, told people to stay at home if they could Monday and schools canceled classes for some 30,000 students.

The flash floods were so powerful they carved paths down mountains and ripped through the city, churning under some bridges and tearing others down.

“A woman came running and said the water is coming and then she started to run, and then we ran with her,” Danish tourist Luna Graigsson told APTN. “It was astonishing that the water came so fast.”

The Portuguese government was holding a special Cabinet meeting Monday and was expected to announce three days of national mourning for the victims. It may also grant financial aid to rebuild Madeira’s many destroyed roads and bridges.

The regional government says it has no estimate yet of its financial needs.

Portugal Telecom said 85 percent of the island’s cellular and fixed-line capacity was restored by late Sunday.

Environmental groups alleged that building on natural water runoffs and the island’s poor infrastructure management contributed to the disaster, but officials insisted it was impossible to prepare for such a freak deluge.

A Portuguese Navy frigate bringing troops to help with the cleanup was to dock in Funchal later Monday. A medical team with divers and rescue experts arrived Sunday aboard a military transport plane.

Light showers were forecast for the Atlantic Ocean island Monday and Tuesday. Hard money training.

The Sunni wing of Iraq’s leading nonsectarian political coalition said Saturday it will drop out of next month’s election as a result of alleged Iranian influence on a Shiite-led vetting panel that blacklisted hundreds of candidates.

The announcement raises the likelihood that the legitimacy of the March 7 parliamentary vote will be called into question. U.S. and United Nations diplomats have expressed fears that a disputed result could also open the door to a new round of violence and delay plans for American troops to leave Iraq.

Further raising the stakes, the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue called on other parties to join it in withdrawing from the vote. It stopped short, however, of advocating a boycott by Sunni voters — a strategy blamed for depriving Sunnis of a political voice in the past.

In a statement explaining the step, spokesman Haidar al-Mullah said the party decided to pull out of the vote after U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American military commander in Iraq, each described the Shiite leaders of a candidate-vetting panel as having ties to Iran.

He described the panel’s work as an Iranian-influenced process and said, “The Iraqi Front for National Dialogue cannot continue in a political process run by a foreign agenda.”

The vetting panel is led by Shiite politicians Ali al-Lami and Ahmed Chalabi. It banned more than 440 candidates whom it described as loyalists to Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath party.

Most of the blacklisted candidates are Sunni, although some are Shiite. Among those barred from running is Sunni lawmaker Saleh al-Mutlaq, the head of the National Dialogue party. Al-Mutlaq has said he quit the Baath party in the 1970s.

In a speech last week to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, Odierno said the U.S. has direct intelligence that al-Lami and Chalabi “are clearly influenced by Iran.” Odierno also accused al-Lami of having been “involved in various nefarious activities in Iraq for some time.”

A day later, Hill told reporters in Washington that “absolutely, these gentlemen are certainly under the influence of Iran.”

Hill added: “We remain concerned about Iran’s behavior toward its neighbors. Iran should have a good relationship with its neighbor, but it needs to do a much better job of respecting its neighbor’s sovereignty.”

A perception among Sunnis that they are being shut out of the election could set back progress the U.S. military made in 2006 and 2007 in reversing the insurgency, which threatened Iraq with civil war. A breakdown in security could also hamper U.S. plans to withdraw all combat troops by the end of August, a step that is critical to President Barack Obama’s new focus on Afghanistan.

The National Dialogue currently has 11 members in parliament, including al-Mutlaq. It is the main Sunni wing of the Iraqi National Movement, the nation’s top nonsectarian coalition. The Shiite wing of the National Movement is headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Shortly after al-Mullah issued his statement Saturday morning, another party, the National Council for Tribes of Iraq, said it also would drop out. The party includes both Sunnis and Shiites. Hard money training.

Hamas claimed Friday that two ex-officers from the rival Fatah organization were involved in the assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai, and Fatah shot back by insinuating Hamas members were the ones who collaborated with the killers.

The slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a luxury Dubai hotel room last month has widely been blamed on Israel’s Mossad spy agency but it also has sparked bitter recriminations among the rival Palestinian factions, which have long competed for influence in the Palestinian territories.

Dubai police unveiled 11 suspects — 10 men and one woman — who apparently traveled to Dubai on European passports with real names and authentic data, but possibly altered photos.

Dubai also said police had two Palestinians in custody for alleged involvement in the murder of al-Mabhouh, whose body was found on Jan. 20. The two were arrested in Jordan shortly after the killing, then sent back to Dubai.

A Hamas Web site, the Palestine Information Center, said those two men were former Fatah security officers and current employees of a senior Fatah official, who was not identified. Dubai authorities have not identified the two Palestinians and would not comment Friday.

Hamas stopped short of accusing Fatah of collaborating with the Mossad, however. Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’ leadership in Damascus, told The Associated Press on Friday that Hamas is “not accusing any party” other than Israel, though he said the agents might have used “small collaborators for logistic issues.”

The Hamas Web site identifies the two men as Anwar Shheibar and Ahmad Hassanain. It says they served in Fatah’s security services in Gaza, fled the territory in 2006, and currently work for a construction company owned by a high-ranking Fatah official, Mohammed Dahlan.

Fatah denies connection
Dahlan denied any connection to the men or to the killing.

“I don’t have any companies in Dubai and I don’t know these people,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

“Only Hamas knew he (al-Mabhouh) was in Dubai, so it’s their fault, not the Palestinian Authority’s,” he said. “For political reasons Hamas is blaming us for its own internal problems.”

A Fatah spokesman also denied the charge. “Hamas is trying by these accusations to cover up the security flaws in the first lines of its leadership,” said Adnan Damiri, a spokesman for Palestinian security forces in the Fatah-ruled West Bank. “Hamas is the only one to know the movement of Al-Mabhouh, and from there the information went to the Israelis.”

Officials of the Fatah-affiliated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank city of Ramallah said the two men are former members of Fatah who later joined Hamas security forces in Gaza. They said the men were sent to Dubai on Hamas business last month but had no further details. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been given permission to comment publicly.

Israel mum
Israel has refused to comment on accusations it was behind the killing, with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman saying Wednesday that “Israel never responds, never confirms and never denies.”

Hamas and Fatah have been trading accusations over the affair for days, but Friday’s allegations were the first time names were used. Each side has made attempts to tone down the rhetoric — perhaps to avoid destroying prospects for reconciliation between the rivals who control separate territories on opposite sides of Israel.

The Western-backed Fatah and the Islamic militant Hamas fought a bloody civil war in 2007 that left Hamas in charge of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank. Palestinians hope to establish a state in both areas. Hard money training.

Taliban insurgents are increasingly using civilians as human shields as they fight allied troops trying to take the militants’ southern stronghold of Marjah, an Afghan official said Wednesday as military squads resumed painstaking house-to-house searches.

About 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops are taking part in the offensive around Marjah, which has an estimated 80,000 inhabitants and was the largest town in southern Helmand province under Taliban control. NATO hopes to rush in aid and public services as soon as the town is secured to try to win the loyalty of the population.

With the assault in its fifth day, insurgents are firing at Afghan troops from inside or next to compounds where women and children appear to have been ordered to stand on a roof or in a window, said Gen. Mohiudin Ghori, the brigade commander for Afghan troops in Marjah.

“Especially in the south of Marjah, the enemy is fighting from compounds where soldiers can very clearly see women or children on the roof or in a second-floor or third-floor window,” Ghori said. “They are trying to get us to fire on them and kill the civilians.”

The Marjah offensive is the biggest joint operation since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and is a major test of a retooled NATO strategy to focus on protecting civilians, rather than killing insurgents.

Ghori said troops have made choices either not to fire at the insurgents with civilians nearby or they have had to target and advance much more slowly in order to distinguish between militants and civilians as they go.

Even with such caution on both the NATO and Afghan side, civilians have been killed. NATO has confirmed 15 civilian deaths in the operation. Afghan rights groups say at least 19 have been killed.

In northern Marjah on Wednesday, U.S. Marines fanned out through poppy fields, dirt roads and side alleys to take control of a broader stretch of area from insurgents as machine gun fire rattled in the distance.

The Marines found several compounds that had primitive drawings on their walls depicting insurgents blowing up tanks or helicopters, a sign that Afghan troops say revealed strong Taliban support in the neighborhood.

Lt. Col. Brian Christmas, commander of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, said security has improved enough in northern Marjah for Afghan police to step in. Other Marine units have taken control over main locations in the center of town.

“Bringing in the Afghan police frees up my forces to clear more insurgent zones,” Christmas said.

Combat engineers were building a fortified base at the entrance of town for the police, who are expected to arrive Thursday.

Afghan police chosen for the task in Marjah were selected from other regions of the country instead of Helmand province, Marine officials said, in order to avoid handing over day-to-day security to officers who may have tribal or friendship ties to the Taliban.

A day earlier, Marines and Afghan forces moving by land from the north had succeeded in linking up with U.S. units that have faced nearly constant Taliban attack in the four days since they were dropped by helicopter into this insurgent stronghold.

The linkup between the two Marine rifle companies and their Afghan army partners will enable the U.S. to expand its control in Marjah, about 380 miles (610 kilometers) southwest of Kabul.

A top Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Razaq Akhund, dismissed the offensive as NATO propaganda and said on the group’s Web site that Marjah was militarily insignificant.

Four NATO service members have been killed in the Marjah operation. An American and a Briton were killed on Saturday, while two others whose nationalities were not identified were killed Tuesday. One Afghan soldier also died Tuesday, Afghan officials said.

The Marines and Afghan troops “saw sustained but less frequent insurgent activity” in Marjah on Wednesday, limited mostly to small-scale attacks, NATO said in a statement.

Marine officials have said that Taliban resistance has started to seem more disorganized than in the first few days of the assault, when small teams of insurgents swarmed around Marine and Afghan army positions firing rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Troops are encountering less fire from mortars and RPGs than at the start of the assault, suggesting that the insurgents may have depleted some of their reserves or that the heavier weapons have been hit, Ghori said.

Nevertheless, Taliban have not given up. Insurgent snipers hiding in haystacks in poppy fields have exchanged fire with Marines and Afghan troops in recent days as they swept south.

Insurgents tried but failed to shoot down an Osprey aircraft with rocket-propelled grenades as Cobra attack helicopters fired missiles at Taliban positions, including a machine gun bunker.

NATO said it has reinstated use of a high-tech rocket system that it suspended after two rockets hit a house on the outskirts of Marjah on Sunday, killing 12 people, including at least five children.

The military coalition originally said the missiles went hundreds of yards (meters) off target but said Tuesday that it determined that the rockets hit the intended target.

Afghan officials said three Taliban fighters were in the house at the time.

Violence and NATO strikes have continued elsewhere in the country.

In neighboring Kandahar province, four Afghan policemen were killed and four others were wounded when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb on Tuesday, the Afghan Interior Ministry said.

And in the east, NATO said it killed more than a dozen insurgents in an airstrike near the Pakistani border. Hard money training.

Three more Afghan civilians were killed in the assault on a southern Taliban stronghold, NATO forces said Tuesday, highlighting the toll on the population from an offensive aimed at making them safer.

The deaths — in three separate incidents — come after two errant U.S. missiles struck a house on the outskirts of the town of Marjah on Sunday, killing 12 people, half of them children. Afghan officials said Monday three Taliban fighters were in the house at the time of the attack.

About 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops are taking part in the massive offensive around Marjah — the linchpin of the Taliban logistical and opium poppy smuggling network in the militant-influenced south. U.S. Marines are spearheading the assault.

As the assault aimed at breaking the Taliban stranglehold over southern Afghanistan continued, the extremist group received a blow with the news that the Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in Pakistan.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the No. 2 behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the port city of Karachi, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the information. The arrest appeared to have occurred as many as 10 days ago, and it was unclear if it had had any effect on the Marjah battle.

The offensive is the biggest joint operation since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, and a major test of a retooled NATO strategy to focus on protecting civilians, rather than killing insurgents.

But in the fourth day of an assault that could take weeks, the drumbeat of gunfire and controlled detonations of planted bombs sparked fears that civilians will bear the burden of the fight.

In two of the incidents NATO confirmed Tuesday, Afghan men came toward NATO forces and ignored shouts and hand signals to stop, NATO said. Troops opened fire and killed them.

In the third incident, two Afghan men were caught in the crossfire between insurgents and NATO forces. Both were wounded and one died of his injuries despite being given medical care, NATO said.

Taliban fighters have stepped up counterattacks against Marines and Afghan soldiers in Marjah, slowing the allied advance to a crawl despite Afghan government claims the insurgents were broken and on the run.

Though NATO has only confirmed 15 civilian deaths, an Afghan human rights group said Tuesday that they have counted 19 civilians killed since the beginning of the operation. Four of those were people who were caught in the crossfire when they had to leave their homes for various reasons.

“Their neighbors tell us that the bodies are outside and they want someone to pick them up. They say they’re scared if they go outside they will also be shot dead,” said Ajmal Samadi, the director of Afghanistan Rights Monitor. It was unclear whether NATO or insurgent forces were to blame for the deaths, he said.

In the streets, Taliban fighters appeared to be slipping under the cover of darkness into compounds already deemed free of weapons and explosives, then opening fire on the Marines from behind U.S. lines.

Explosions could be heard around town Tuesday as Marines endeavored to push further through streets littered with bombs and booby traps.

Squads with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines fanned out into compounds to search for explosive devices and insurgents, as an armored-vehicle convoy moved forward. A mine-roller leading the way continuously detonated planted bombs as it advanced.

Residents said they were scared to be seen with NATO forces.

“Don’t take pictures or the Taliban will come back to kill me,” Wali Mohammad told an AP reporter as Marines searched his compound.

He said he strongly suspected insurgents would return to the area as soon as the Marines moved on.

He denied that the Taliban had holed up in his house during Monday’s fighting, but said they often shot at U.S. and Afghan troops from his neighbors’ house.

“When they come, we try to tell them not to use our house, but they have guns so they do what they want,” the poppy farmer said.

The Marines’ goal for many days has been to link up with other companies that airdropped into the city Saturday, but progress has been slow.

“It’s really crucial that we get through today,” said Lima Company Capt. Joshua Winfrey.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai approved the assault on Marjah only after instructing NATO and Afghan commanders to be careful about harming civilians. “This operation has been done with that in mind,” the top NATO commander, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said Monday.

Despite those instructions, NATO reported its first civilian deaths Sunday, saying two U.S. rockets veered off target by up to 600 yards (meters) and slammed into a home — killing six children and six adults.

In London, Britain’s top military officer, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, called the missile strike a “very serious setback” to efforts to win the support of locals, who are from the same Pashtun ethnic group as the Taliban.

NATO suspended the use of the rocket system that killed the civilians following the 12 deaths, pending an investigation.

In a separate incident unrelated to the Marjah offensive, a NATO airstrike in neighboring Kandahar province killed five civilians and wounded two. NATO said in a statement they were mistakenly believed to have been planting roadside bombs.

Afghan commanders spoke optimistically about progress in Marjah, a town of about 80,000 people seen as key to securing the restive south.

“It is very weak resistance, sporadic resistance by the enemy in some villages in Marjah area,” Chief of Army Staff Bismullah Mohammadi said. Other officials have said Taliban fighters were fleeing across the border and the town should soon be cleared of insurgents.

In Marjah, however, there has been little sign the Taliban are broken. Instead, small, mobile teams of insurgents have repeatedly attacked U.S. and Afghan troops with rocket, rifle and rocket-propelled grenade fire in recent days.

Taliban fighters moved close enough to the main road to fire repeatedly on columns of mine-clearing vehicles.

Allied officials have reported only two coalition deaths so far — one American and one Briton killed Saturday. There have been no reports of wounded. Afghan officials said at least 27 insurgents were killed so far in the offensive.

As long as the town remains unstable, NATO officials cannot move to the second phase — restoring Afghan government control and rushing in aid and public services to win over inhabitants who have been living under Taliban rule for years. Hard money training.