World Scene

YEMEN

Bomb kills 18 outside mosque

SAN’A — A bomb rigged to a motorcycle blew up amid a crowd of worshippers leaving Friday prayers at a mosque in a rebel stronghold of northern Yemen, killing at least 18 people and wounding about four dozen, officials said.

The attack occurred in Saada, a city in a mountainous Shi’ite Muslim area on the border with Saudi Arabia where a rebellion by members of the al-Zaydi sect erupted in 2004. Thousands have died in violence between the rebels and the government of this predominantly Sunni country.

Government officials blamed the bombing on rebel leader Abdel-Malek al-Hawthi and said six people had been arrested in Saada. Al-Hawthi denied involvement and charged that senior army officers staged the attack to stoke tensions.

SUDAN

Officials among 21 killed in plane crash

KHARTOUM — A plane carrying southern Sudan’s defense minister and a presidential adviser crashed yesterday, killing all 21 people on board, state media reported.

Nineteen passengers and two crew members were killed when the plane went down in a remote Bahr Gazal region of southern Sudan, state-run Sudan News Agency reported. Minister of Defense Dominic Dim Deng and Justin Yak, an adviser to the Southern Sudan president, were among the dead.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

Southern Sudan has its own semiautonomous government after a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war between the ethnic African south and Sudan’s Arab-dominated government in the capital Khartoum.

CHINA

Virus outbreak claims 21 children

BEIJING — An outbreak of intestinal virus in eastern China has claimed the lives of at least 21 children and the number of reported cases has risen to nearly 2,500, the official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday.

Xinhua said all those suffering from Enterovirus 71 were under age 6 and most were under age 2. The outbreak was first reported in March in Fuyang, a city in the eastern province of Anhui.

The virus causes fever, mouth sores and a rash with blisters.

GERMANY

Member of plot to kill Hitler dies

BERLIN — Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died. He was 90.

The German military said yesterday that the former army major died Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death.

Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. The plot is the basis for the upcoming Tom Cruise film “Valkyrie” in which the American actor plays the aristocratic colonel.

SOMALIA

Islamist insurgents threaten revenge

MOGADISHU — A U.S. air strike that killed the suspected al Qaeda leader in Somalia brought warnings of vengeance from Islamic insurgents yesterday and the threat of a boycott that could jeopardize peace talks with the U.N.-supported government.

The biggest alliance supporting Somalia’s Islamic insurgency said it might pull out of planned May 10 talks on escalating fighting and a humanitarian crisis that has caused thousands of civilian deaths over the past year.

In a pre-dawn attack Thursday, U.S. missiles destroyed the house of reputed al Qaeda leader Aden Hashi Ayro in the central town of Dusamareeb. The attack killed 24 others, a town elder said.

BRITAIN

2 men convicted of blackmailing royal

LONDON — Two men were convicted yesterday and sentenced to five years in prison in the first plot to blackmail a member of Britain’s royal family in more than a century.

Ian Strachan, 31, and Sean McGuigan, 41, were found guilty in a complicated blackmail scheme against the royal that featured allegations involving sex and drugs. The judge ordered that the royal’s name be kept secret.

From wire dispatches and staff reports