M r Ben Bradshaw, a Foreign Office minister, said that officials
had visited three British citizens imprisoned, after their capture in Afghanistan, at Camp XRay, a compound at the United States base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. None of the British prisoners had complained and their physical health was good, Mr Bradshaw said. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, flew off to Africa to prepare the way for Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, who is to tour that continent next month. Mr Straw's first stop was the Democratic Republic of Congo, ravaged by a war between six countries in which two million have died. Four Sinn Fein MPs, Mr Gerry Adams, Mr Martin McGuinness, Miss Michelle Gildernew and Mr Pat Doherty, moved into offices in the Palace of Westminster and began to draw expenses, although they would not take the oath of loyalty to the Queen or their seats in Parliament. A special criminal court in the Republic of Ireland convicted Cohn Murphy of conspiring to cause an explosion around 15 August 1998, the date of the bombing of Omagh, in which 29 were killed. Reports by the National Farmers' Union and by Devon County Council listed the blunders made by the government in combating the foot-and-mouth epidemic last year; delay in using the army was criti
cised by the NFU. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, visited President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority, who has since December been confined to his compound in RamaIlah. The highly infectious winter vomiting virus, a small round-structured virus, swept the land. Eight children were found to have drowned in garden ponds compared with ten the year before, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
THE 11,381 ft volcano Nyiragongo destroyed much of the town of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the border with Rwanda; lavaflows up to a mile wide destroyed buildings and drove half a million to flee the area, but after a few days most returned, preferring the danger to disease and threat of attacks in the forest. Dozens were killed when the petrol station from which they were taking fuel to sell blew up. Israeli troops occupied Tulkarm, a town of 50,000 in the West Bank, and arrested men in house-to-house searches before withdrawing their tanks; earlier, Israeli forces detonated explosives to destroy the headquarters of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation in Ramallah. This followed a gun attack by Palestinians of the so-called Al Aqsa Brigades which killed six and wounded many more at a batmitzvah party. Gunmen on
motorbikes shot dead four Indian policemen in an attack on a United States government cultural centre in Calcutta; Indian officials said a Pakistan-based Islamic militant group claimed responsibility. Mr Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, visited Saudi Arabia and then flew to Japan where 60 donor nations were meeting to see what they could do to help reconstruct the war-torn country. The government of Colombia gave yet another ultimatum to Fare (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas to reach a peace settlement in the 38-year civil war in which 40,000 have died, or face an offensive against their enclave, which is the size of Switzerland. In Switzerland, the Sudanese government and southern rebels signed a six-month ceasefire covering the 31,000 square mile Nuba mountain region to allow aid to reach people there. The Pope took a train from the Vatican to Assisi where he had invited leaders from several religions — including Hindus and African animists — to pray for world peace. Peggy Lee, the singer, died, aged 81, It emerged that 20 bugging devices had been found last October on the aeroplane used by President Jiang Zemin of China, and the United States was blamed; after delivery, the Boeing aircraft had been fitted out in San Antonio, Texas.
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