LAHORE: Pakistani officials said Sunday that four extremists allegedly involved in a 2009 attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team were killed in a shootout with police.
The attack on the cricket team killed six police and two bystanders, and wounded six cricket players. The Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an affiliated extremist group, claimed the attack, which was carried out by 10 gunmen.
The shootout erupted late Saturday on the edge of Lahore when other gunmen tried to break the militants out of police custody, a counterterrorism official said. Another senior official confirmed the account. Both spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.
Pakistan has stepped up its fight against extremist groups over the past two years, including with a military offensive in North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border and longtime stronghold of Al-Qaeda and other militants.
On Sunday, security forces raided a religious seminary on the outskirts of the southwestern city of Quetta, where a suicide bomber killed more than 70 people earlier this month, and sealed it when they found nearly 100 illegal Afghan immigrants residing there, provincial government spokesman Anwarul Haq said.
Other such raids netted another 228 Afghans, said paramilitary spokesman Khan Wasey. It was unclear if the raids were linked to terrorism suspicions.
Quetta is the capital of the southwestern Baluchistan province, which has long been the scene of a low-level insurgency by separatists groups. Extremist groups also operate in the region. Six alleged recruiters for Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group have been arrested in the province in recent days, according to provincial home minister Sarfaz Bugti.
Four extremists behind 2009 cricket attack killed: Pakistan
Four extremists behind 2009 cricket attack killed: Pakistan
India plans AI ‘data city’ on staggering scale
- ‘The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius’
NEW DELHI: As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new “data city” to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says.
“The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it,” said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India’s AI push.
“And as a nation ... we have taken a stand that we’ve got to embrace it,” he said ahead of an international AI summit next week in New Delhi.
Lokesh boasts the state has secured investment agreements of $175 billion involving 760 projects, including a $15 billion investment by Google for its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the United States.
And a joint venture between India’s Reliance Industries, Canada’s Brookfield and US firm Digital Realty is investing $11 billion to develop an AI data center in the same city.
Visakhapatnam — home to around two million people and popularly known as “Vizag” — is better known for its cricket ground that hosts international matches than cutting-edge technology.
But the southeastern port city is now being pitched as a landing point for submarine internet cables linking India to Singapore.
“The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius,” Lokesh said. For comparison, Taiwan is roughly 100 kilometers wide.
Lokesh said the plan goes far beyond data connectivity, adding that his state had “received close to 25 percent of all foreign direct investments” to India in 2025.
“It’s not just about the data centers,” he explained while outlining a sweeping vision of change, with Andhra Pradesh offering land at one US cent per acre for major investors.
