Africa

A Syrian-born Islamist cleric who taught one of the men accused of hacking to death an off-duty British soldier on a London street praised the attack for its “courage” and said Muslims would see it as a strike on a military target.

Two suicide bombers struck on Thursday at a military barracks and a plant run by French nuclear group Areva in northern Niger, military and company sources said.

Revered Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, author of the widely praised novel "Things Fall Apart," will be buried in his small hometown on Thursday in a ceremony expected to draw crowds of mourners.

South African officials used President Jacob Zuma's name to secure landing rights at a military air base to fly in guests for a lavish wedding hosted by a well-connected Indian family, a probe showed today.

Twenty-three youths have died in the past nine days at initiation ceremonies that include circumcisions and survival tests, South African police said today.

Dismissing the perception of Mauritius being a route for round-tripping and laundering of black money to and from India, the country's banking industry body says that the laws governing its banks are too stringent to be abused for illicit activities.

A former presidential candidate and popular talk show host in Guyana will stand trial on charges of raping a 7-year-old girl.

Six people died and more than 30 others were injured after a building collapsed in northeastern Rwanda, police said today as they called off rescue efforts a day after the accident.

Police in Rwanda said three people were killed and an unknown number were feared trapped after a four-storey building under construction collapsed on Tuesday in a town in the northeast of the central African country.

A powerful car bomb exploded today near a hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi, killing and wounding dozens in what officials said was the first such attack on civilians since Moamer Kadhafi's ouster.

Ten of 40 mentally ill patients who escaped from a psychiatric hospital in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, have been returned to the facility, officials said today.

Egypt's interior minister said on Saturday police arrested three members of an al Qaeda-linked cell in an alleged transnational plot to bomb a Western embassy and other targets in the country.

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak appeared in court on Saturday to face a new trial for complicity in the murder of hundreds protesters during the 2011 uprising, as well as for corruption.

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was back in court on Saturday to face a retrial on charges of complicity in the murder of protesters, reopening a case that has shown the difficulty of transitional justice in post-revolutionary Egypt.