AT least 30 villagers searching for gold in a riverbed died in a flash flood in north-eastern Badakhshan province, an official in Afghanistan has said.
Nek Mohammad Nazari, spokesman for the provincial governor, said dozens were injured as a landslide and flash flood engulfed the river this morning in Kohistan district. The area is about 68 miles from Fayzabad, the capital of Badakhshan.
Nazari said the villagers had dug deep in the river, which had in the past been mined for gold, when they were caught in the flash flood.
He added that the casualty numbers could rise. Another official, Fawzia Kofi, a politician from Badakhshan, gave a higher death toll, saying 40 were killed.
OFFICIALS have shut down 13 escape room sites over safety issues after five teenage girls were killed in a fire in Poland.
Firefighter chief Leszek Suski said the escape room at a private house in the city of Koszalin, where the girls died on Friday locked inside a room celebrating a birthday, had no emergency evacuation route.
Firefighters found the bodies of the 15-year-old victims after they extinguished a fire next to the locked room. Post-mortem examinations showed they died of carbon monoxide inhalation.
Police chief Jaroslaw Szymczyk said other people had previously posted critical remarks online about the safety of that escape room site, but local officials were not notified. The 28-year-old who runs the site has been detained and will be questioned, Szymczyk said. His employee, who suffered burns in the fire, is also going to be questioned.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki spoke after holding a meeting in which officials discussed ways of improving safety at entertainment venues.
He called the deaths of the 15-year-olds an “immense tragedy”.
MALAYSIAN King Sultan Muhammad V has abdicated after just two years on the throne.
The palace said in a statement that the 49-year-old Sultan Muhammad V had resigned with immediate effect, cutting short his five-year term. No reason was given in the statement.
It is the first abdication in Malaysia’s history.
Sultan Muhammad V, ruler of north-east Kelantan state, was installed in December 2016 as one of Malaysia’s youngest constitutional monarchs.
He is said to have married a 25-year-old former Russian beauty queen in November. The reports in Russian and British media and on social media featured pictures of the wedding, which reportedly took place in Moscow. Under a unique system maintained since Malaysia’s independence from Britain in 1957, nine hereditary state rulers take turns as king for five-year terms.
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