World

LAGOS — Nigeria's government on Thursday said it was studying a "proof of life" video showing 15 of the more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram, as parents and their supporters marked the second anniversary of the kidnapping. 

The footage, shown on CNN, is the first time any of the missing girls have been seen since a previous Boko Haram video in May 2014, when about 100 were seen in Islamic dress reciting the Koran.

A total of 276 girls were abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, on April 14, 2014. Fifty-seven escaped in the immediate aftermath. 

Three mothers and a classmate of the 219 schoolgirls still missing confirmed the identities of the girls in the images broadcast on Wednesday night. 

A senior government source told AFP it had received the video, which shows the girls in black hijabs, stating their names, that they were abducted from Chibok and saying they were "all well".

The video was said to have been shot on December 25 last year.

But the source said they were keen to avoid the problems encountered by the previous administration, which prematurely announced talks with Boko Haram elements and even a ceasefire. 

"Our intelligence and security authorities... received a similar video in July last year and when they followed the lead it led to a cul-de sac," he revealed.

Contact could not be made and it was impossible to determine the identities of the purported Boko Haram members who sent it or if the move had the blessing of the group's leadership, he added.

Factionalised 

Boko Haram has long been known to be factionalised, comprising groups of ideologically sympathetic fighters who do not always act under the direct orders of senior commanders.

In an indication the latest video and the previous unpublicised message may have come from one of these factions, the source also said the government had received a ransom demand last July.

The group asked for 1 million euros ($1.1 million) for 10 of the girls, the source disclosed. 

That lends weight to theories the Chibok girls were split up following the abduction and were being held separately in different locations, complicating any possible talks or rescue bid.

AFP has also seen photographs of five girls that were sent to the government in mid-January this year as part of the same bid for negotiations.

Boko Haram's leader Abubakar Shekau has previously said the girls would be released in exchange for militants held in Nigerian custody.

Prayers, vigils 

Thursday's two-year anniversary was marked across Nigeria with vigils and protest marches, including at the site of the abduction involving many of the missing girls' parents, wearing black.

In the commercial hub, Lagos, and in the capital, Abuja, hundreds of protesters from the #BringBackOurGirls movement gathered to renewed calls for the release of the girls and other victims.

Boko Haram has used kidnapping as a weapon, seizing thousands of women and young girls, and forcibly conscripting men and boys, in a conflict that has killed an estimated 20,000 since 2009.

The men and boys have been forced to fight in Boko Haram's ranks, while the girls and women have been turned into sex slaves and even suicide bombers.

Amnesty International's Nigeria director M.K. Ibrahim called for the release of all captives and said the Chibok girls symbolised "all the civilians whose lives have been devastated by Boko Haram".

"[President] Muhammadu Buhari's government should do all it lawfully can to bring an end to the agony of the parents of the Chibok girls and all those abducted," he added.

Buhari was on a visit to China on the anniversary but has said the return of the girls is central to the government's success against Boko Haram.

The International Crisis Group said the anniversary was an opportunity to address the conflict's effect on children as the military frees more areas from Boko Haram's control.

Human Rights Watch said this week some 952,000 of the 2.6 million people displaced by the violence were children, who had been "robbed" of their right to education by attacks on schools.

UNICEF said separately there had been a sharp rise in the use of abducted children as human bombs. Three-quarters of the child bombers in attacks from January 2014 to February 2016 were girls.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's grip on power was slipping Wednesday after more allies abandoned her in the fight against an impeachment drive which she has branded a coup.

The 68-year-old leader moved closer to being driven from office in a political and economic crisis rocking Latin America's biggest country less than four months before it hosts the Olympic Games.

With pressure rising after two blocs in Rousseff's ruling coalition announced they would vote to impeach her, she canceled her appearance at a ceremony to light the Olympic flame on Wednesday.

Tuesday's defections swelled the number of lawmakers likely to back a motion against her when the lower house of congress votes Sunday on whether an impeachment trial should be launched.

Polls published in the Brazilian media indicate opposition parties are closing in on securing the 342 votes needed to approve the impeachment motion and send it to the senate for a further vote.

Leading newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo on Wednesday calculated on Wednesday that the number of lawmakers who have now decided to support impeachment has risen to 302 — but dozens have yet to state a position.

Analysts say the desertion on Tuesday of two of Rousseff's key allies, the PP and PRB parties which have 69 lawmakers between them, could prompt a stampede.

"If all the medium-sized parties abandon her, Rousseff will have no way to survive impeachment," said political scientist David Fleischer of Brasilia University.

One of Rousseff's last remaining coalition allies, the PSD party with 36 votes, called a meeting in Brasilia on Wednesday to decide on its position.

Another party, the PR, was scheduled to meet on Thursday. It has 40 seats. Between them, the two parties could swing the vote against Rousseff in the 513-seat congress.

‘Traitor' in 'coup' 

Rousseff is in the final stretch of a bruising attempt to save her presidency over charges that she illegally manipulated government accounts to mask the effects of recession during her 2014 re-election.

On Tuesday she branded her vice-president Michel Temer a traitor and coup-plotter after an audio recording was leaked in which he was heard practicing the speech he would make if Rousseff is impeached.

"The conspirators' mask has slipped," she said.

"We are living in strange and worrying times — times of a coup, and of pretending, and betrayal of trust."

Protesters both for and against Rousseff have called for demonstrations this weekend in Brasilia. Security forces have put up fences to protect government buildings from possible disturbances.

Lawmakers who have yet to declare their position were facing fierce lobbying, including from Rousseff's top ally and predecessor as president, Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva.

But he too faces pressure: the courts have suspended his appointment as Rousseff's chief of staff over a corruption case against him.

Rousseff a risky bet 

Brazil's political system has been paralysed by a huge corruption scandal at state oil company Petrobras. The charges against Lula are linked to that case.

The country has sunk meanwhile into its worst recession in decades.

"Deputies are thinking about their chances of being re-elected" in the next elections, scheduled for 2018, said Fleischer.

Backing Rousseff is highly politically risky since her popularity has plunged so much, he added.

If the lower house votes by two thirds to move forward with the motion, the senate must then hold a vote on whether to hold an impeachment trial.

"In the senate it will be even harder to stop impeachment, because the PMDB (Temer's party) is the strongest there," said Michael Freitas Mohallem, a political analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.

Financial markets have been betting against Rousseff, with stock prices in Brazil rallying as her chances of being impeached have risen.

MADRID — Spanish police said Wednesday they had detained a Frenchman suspected of heading a weapons trafficking ring that supplied arms to one of the militants that killed 17 people in Paris in January 2015.

In a statement, police said Antoine Denevi, a 27-year-old from a small town in northern France, was detained on Tuesday in the southern Malaga area after Paris issued a Europe-wide arrest warrant.

He "left the neighbouring country [France] weeks after the Paris attacks to escape police action, and settled in the province of Malaga from where he continued his illegal activities using fake papers," the police said.

"It's also been determined that his activities were linked with people of Serbian origin, who may have facilitated his access to arms and munitions."

Police suspect that Denevi's alleged trafficking ring armed Amedy Coulibaly, who shot dead a policewoman and took hostages in a Jewish supermarket, where he killed four people.

An expert in arms trafficking in France told AFP that the weapons used by Coulibaly — a Czech-made Scorpion submachinegun and a Kalashnikov rifle — were "very easily" available.

Coulibaly was an accomplice of the Kouachi brothers, who killed 12 people in an attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo two days before Coulibaly held up the supermarket. All three were shot dead by police.

Both Spanish and French police participated in Tuesday's operation in the seaside resort of Rincon de la Victoria, during which two other people were detained — one from Serbia and another from Montenegro.

Denies selling arms to militant 

Denevi, who hails from the small town of Sainte-Catherine, was immediately taken to Madrid, where he was brought before a judge in the National Court.

The National Court, which hears cases related to extremism, has charged Denevi with arms trafficking. 

So far no terrorism charges have been brought against him, which could indicate he was unaware of the use for which the weapons were intended.

A judicial source, who wished to remain anonymous, said the suspect had denied selling weapons to militants and accepted to be extradited to France. 

The three-day attacks in January 2015 shook France, prompting much soul-searching as to how three French youths could gun down 17 fellow citizens in cold blood.

The trio had very specific targets — the cartoonists who had mocked the Prophet Mohammed in Charlie Hebdo's pages, the police and Jews.

Coulibaly was shot dead in the Jewish supermarket on January 9 in a dramatic raid by French special forces.

The Kouachi brothers were also killed by special forces in a near simultaneous assault on a printing factory just outside Paris where they had holed up.

The three-day killing spree was, at the time, the worst extremist attack on European soil in nearly a decade, but militants hit Paris again in November, killing 130 people.

THE HAGUE — A homeless Pole triggered a major security scare and partial evacuation of Amsterdam airport after claiming to be a terrorist, Dutch military police said on Wednesday.

Dozens of heavily armed military police had swooped on Schiphol Airport late Tuesday, when the alarm was raised three weeks to the day after the deadly suicide bombings in Brussels.

One man who was arrested was "a 25-year-old Polish man without fixed address... who told officers he was a terrorist," police said in a statement on their official Facebook page.

"He had two bags with him which were checked by the bomb squad but no explosives were found," the statement added.

The man, whose name was not given, appeared before a judge on Wednesday where he "confessed to have been under the influence of alcohol". 

Military police were investigating the wide-scale security alert triggered after a bystander phoned police about a "suspicious situation", a military police spokesman had said.

The scare at one of Europe's busiest travel hubs, with flight links to 319 destinations around the world, came exactly three weeks after the March 22 attacks on the Brussels airport and metro that left 32 people dead and hundreds wounded.

The Netherlands tightened security and stepped up border controls in the wake of the suicide bombings in its southern neighbour, which also followed the coordinated attacks in Paris in November.

Tensions have been high since last month's bombings in Belgium, which like the Paris attacks in which 130 people died, were claimed by the Daesh terror group.

There have been concerns that the Netherlands could be targeted in a terror attack, due to its proximity to both Belgium and France, and its role in the US-led bombing campaign against Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

Schiphol is Europe's fourth-largest airport, and welcomes some 55 million passengers through its gates every year.

No flights or train traffic were disrupted during Tuesday's operation, which saw balaclava-clad and sub-machine gun-toting officers cordoning off a square at the entrance to the airport's shopping plaza, which leads to the arrivals and departures halls.

Hundreds of passengers, many of them on long-haul flights, waited for hours until the all-clear was given at around 1:30 am on Wednesday (2330 GMT).

Last month, at the request of French authorities, Dutch police carried out raids on an apartment in Rotterdam, uncovering about 45kg of ammunition.

French suspect Anis Bahri was arrested at the flat suspected of trying to take part in a foiled plot in France. He is now fighting his extradition to Paris.

Investigators have uncovered extensive links between the Paris and Brussels attacks, with many of the same people involved.

Adding to the jitters in The Netherlands, one of the suicide bombers in Brussels, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, was found to have been expelled from Turkey to the Netherlands last year, before he slipped back across the border to Belgium.

KABUL — The Taliban announced the start of their spring offensive on Tuesday, pledging to launch large-scale offensives against government strongholds backed by suicide and guerrilla attacks to drive Afghanistan's Western-backed government from power.

The announcement of the start of "Operation Omari", named after the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, came just days after Secretary of State John Kerry visited Kabul and reaffirmed US support for a national unity government led by President Ashraf Ghani.

"Jihad against the aggressive and usurping infidel army is a holy obligation upon our necks, and our only recourse for re-establishing an Islamic system and regaining our independence," the Taliban said in a statement.

The insurgency has gained strength since the withdrawal of international troops from combat at the end of 2014 and the Taliban are stronger than at any point since they were driven from power by US-backed forces in 2001.

As well as suicide and tactical attacks, the offensive would include assassinations of "enemy" commanders in urban centres, the Taliban said.

"The present operation will also employ all means at our disposal to bog the enemy down in a war of attrition that lowers the morale of the foreign invaders and their internal armed militias," they said.

In line with recent statements, the militants also said they would establish good governance in areas they controlled, and avoid civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure.

The seasons have long shaped violence in Afghanistan with fighting easing off in the winter, when mountain passes get snowed in, and picking up again in the spring and summer.

How far the announcement will lead to an immediate escalation in fighting, which caused 11,000 civilian casualties last year, remains unclear. However, NATO and Afghan officials have said they expect very tough combat in 2016.

US embassy warning

While there was no sudden surge in violence, officials said at least five members of Afghanistan's border police had been killed overnight when one police officer turned his weapon on his colleagues.

The "insider attack" happened at a frontier post in southern Kandahar province and the attacker fled into Pakistan. The Taliban claimed seven police had been killed and that the attacker had gone over to join the militant group.

Hours before the Taliban announced their offensive, the US embassy in Kabul issued an emergency warning to US citizens, saying it had received reports that insurgents were planning attacks on a major hotel in Kabul.

Heavy fighting has continued for months across Afghanistan, from Kunduz, the northern city that fell briefly to the insurgents last year, to Helmand province bordering Pakistan in the south.

In Helmand, where thousands of British and American troops were killed or wounded fighting the Taliban, government forces have pulled back from many areas and are struggling to hold centres close to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Understrength Afghan security forces, struggling with heavy casualties and high desertion rates and short of air power, transport and logistical support, have struggled in their first year fighting largely alone.

According to NATO commanders, the Taliban exert control over only 6 per cent of Afghanistan but up to a third of the country is at risk from the insurgents and government forces control no more than 70 per cent of territory.

US General John Nicholson, who took over as commander of international troops in Afghanistan last month, is conducting a strategic review, including plans to cut US troops in Afghanistan from 9,800 to 5,500 by the end of the year.

Unless the plan is changed, the reduction would mean the end of most of NATO's training and assistance operation, leaving the remaining US troops focusing on counter-terrorism operations against radical groups such as the Daesh terror group.

SEOUL — North Korea accused South Korea Tuesday of kidnapping its citizens after Seoul said 13 of them had defected to the South from China, where they worked in a Pyongyang-operated restaurant.

In its first reaction since Seoul announced the defections, the North's Red Cross spokesman accused the South of committing a crime on an "unparalelled" scale by "kidnapping" them.

The spokesman called for the South to apologise and return them immediately or face "unimaginable consequences and strong countermeasures".

"We know in detail how they were abducted to the South under connivance from the country concerned and how they passed through a certain country in Southeastern Asia," the spokesman was quoted as saying on the North's propaganda website Uriminzokkiri.

China said Monday that the 13 people — a male manager and 12 young female employees — had legitimate passports and had freely exited China.

The defectors arrived in the South last Thursday, the unification ministry said.

The North operates such restaurants overseas to earn much-needed hard currency.

There have been defections by individual restaurant workers in the past, but this is the first time so many staff from one establishment have defected en masse.

Seoul Monday also announced that a North Korean colonel involved in espionage operations and a diplomat in Africa had fled to the South last year.

LIBREVILLE — The number of children used by Nigeria's Boko Haram to stage suicide bombings has risen more than 10-fold in one of the most "horrific" aspects of the insurgency, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Experts said the group, which has been weakened by a multinational military offensive, is now trying to spread terror by using children for attacks in crowded markets, mosques and even camps for people fleeing Boko Haram violence.

This has had disastrous consequences for children, especially girls, who had survived captivity and sexual violence by Boko Haram, said a report by UN children's agency UNICEF.

"The number of children involved in 'suicide' attacks in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger has risen sharply over the past year, from four in 2014 to 44 in 2015," UNICEF said.

More than 75 per cent of the children involved in such attacks are girls, it added.

"Let us be clear: these children are victims, not perpetrators," said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF regional director for west and central Africa.

"Deceiving children and forcing them to carry out deadly acts has been one of the most horrific aspects of the violence in Nigeria and in neighbouring countries," he said.

The report was released two years after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 teenagers in the dead of night from the small town of Chibok in northern Nigeria. A total of 219 students are still missing.

Disturbing trends 

The report, titled "Beyond Chibok", said alarming trends have surfaced after Boko Haram started attacking countries neighbouring Nigeria.

"Between January 2014 and February 2016, Cameroon recorded the highest number of suicide attacks involving children [21], followed by Nigeria [17] and Chad [two]," it said.

During the same period, nearly one in five suicide bombers was a child and three quarters of them were girls.

Last year, children were used in one out of every two attacks in Cameroon, one out of eight in Chad, and one out of seven in Nigeria.

UNICEF said the number of Boko Haram suicide bombings had increased from 32 in 2014 to 151 last year.

"The calculated use of children who may have been coerced into carrying bombs, has created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion that has devastating consequences" for them, it said.

"As 'suicide' attacks involving children become commonplace, some communities are starting to see children as threats to their safety," said Fontaine. 

"This suspicion towards children can have destructive consequences; how can a community rebuild itself when it is casting out its own sisters, daughters and mothers?" he said.

An estimated 20,000 people have been killed since Boko Haram launched its campaign of violence in 2009 to carve out a hardline  state in northeast Nigeria. 

More than 2.6 million people have fled their homes since, but some of the internally displaced have recently begun returning after the Nigerian military captured swathes of territory back from the insurgents.

But UNICEF underscored that the repercussions were devastating for children caught up in the conflict.

It said nearly 1.3 million children have been displaced, about 1,800 schools are closed — either damaged, looted, burned down or used as shelter by displaced people and more than 5,000 children reported either as unaccompanied or separated from their parents.

BRASILIA — A committee of Brazil's lower house of Congress voted 38-27 on Monday to recommend the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, who faces charges of breaking budget laws to support her re-election in 2014.

A vote in the full lower house is expected to take place on Sunday. If two-thirds vote in favor, the impeachment will be sent to the senate.

If the upper house decides by a simple majority to put Rousseff on trial, she will immediately be suspended for up to six months while the senate decides her fate, and Vice President Michel Temer will take office as acting president.

It would be the first impeachment of a Brazilian president since 1992 when Fernando Collor de Mello faced massive protests for his ouster on corruption charges and resigned moments before his conviction by the senate.

A former leftist guerrilla, Rousseff has denied any wrongdoing, and rallied the rank and file of her Workers' Party to oppose what she has called a coup against a democratically elected president.

Speaking to thousands of supporters in Rio de Janeiro, Rousseff's predecessor and Workers' Party founder Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Brazilian business elites were pressuring lawmakers to remove the president. Lula, who is under investigation in a graft probe, said he had convinced Rousseff to return to policies that favoured Brazil's poor.

Caught in a political storm fueled by Brazil's worst recession in decades and the country's biggest corruption scandal, Rousseff has lost key coalition allies in Congress, including her main partner, Vice President Temer's PMDB Party.

The rift between Rousseff and her vice president reached breaking point on Monday after an audio message of Temer calling for a government of national unity was released apparently by mistake, further muddying Brazil's political water.

Temer's 14-minute audio message sent to members of his own PMDB Party via the WhatsApp messaging app showed he was preparing to take over if Rousseff is forced from office.

The audio was posted on the website of the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper and confirmed to Reuters by Temer's aides as authentic. Aides said it was accidentally released and they quickly sent another message asking legislators to disregard it.

In his message, Temer said he did not want to get ahead of events, but he had to show the country he was ready to lead it if needed.

"We need a government of national salvation and national unity," Temer said in the audio. "We need to unite all the political parties, and all the parties should be ready to collaborate to drag Brazil out of this crisis."

Rousseff's chief of staff Jaques Wagner called the vice president a "conspirator" and said he should resign if Rousseff survives impeachment.

"Having joined the conspiracy, he should resign when it is defeated, because the climate will become unbearable," Wagner told reporters.

Wagner said the government will continue working to muster enough votes to block impeachment in the lower house, encouraged by the fact that in committee the opposition had not won the two thirds it will need in the plenary.

The committee vote, however, is expected to sway undecided lawmakers to vote for Rousseff's removal, said Claudio Couto, a politics professor at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas think tank.

"It has a snowball effect. With each approval, the chances of impeachment clearing the next chamber increases," Couto said. "The wider the margin, the more momentum impeachment will gather."

The Brasilia-based consultancy Arko Advice said committee votes for impeachment were higher than expected and it raised to 65 per cent the odds of Rousseff being unseated by Congress.

Polarised country

The latest moves in Brazil's political crisis have the country on edge as it faces not only a government meltdown but its worst recession in decades. The political chaos in the capital, Brasilia, is playing out less than 100 days before the nation plays host to the first Olympic Games to be held in South America — an event that will cast the world's eyes on Brazil.

The battle over Rousseff's impeachment has polarised the nation of 200 million people and brought the government of Latin America's largest economy to a virtual standstill.

The proposed impeachment is also taking place as Brazil faces its largest corruption investigation, targeting a sprawling kickback scheme at state-run oil company Petrobras.

Prosecutors say billions in bribes were paid over several years and have implicated not only members of Rousseff's Workers' Party but members of the opposition leading the charge to impeach her.

Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil's lower house, a Rousseff enemy who is guiding the impeachment proceedings, faces charges of accepting millions in bribes in connection to the Petrobras case, while the head of Brazil's senate is also caught up in the investigation.

To battle to prevent impeachment approval in the full lower house vote, Rousseff's government is trying to win over lawmakers by offering government jobs that became vacant when the PMDB quit her governing coalition two weeks ago.

The Brazilian real strengthened nearly 3 per cent before Monday's vote to an eight-month peak on expectations that the committee would decide to impeach Rousseff. Investors are betting that her removal will issue in more business-friendly policies to pull Brazil's economy out of a tailspin.

PARAVOOR, India — Medical teams on Monday tended to hundreds of people injured in a massive fire that killed at least 110 people, while authorities searched for those responsible for illegally putting on the fireworks display that caused the weekend blaze at a Hindu temple in southern India.

Amid the burned wreckage of the Puttingal Devi temple complex in the village of Paravoor, rescue officials sifted through huge piles of dust, wood and concrete for clues about how an unauthorised pyrotechnic display staged before dawn Sunday sparked a fire that swept through the temple as it was packed with thousands for a religious festival.

Police detained five workers for questioning about fireworks stored at the site, hoping to learn more about who owned the fireworks and who had contracted the pyrotechnical display, police constable R. Unnikrishnan Nair said. The five were later released, but Nair did not say whether they were able to help authorities track down any of the 15 temple board members who fled after the accident.

The Press Trust of India news agency reported that police were investigating six people — missing temple board members and associates of firework contractors — for possible charges of attempted murder and culpable homicide, both punishable by life imprisonment, and illegally storing a cache of explosives.

The death toll from the disaster stood at 110, with more than 380 injured, including many with burn injuries and others hurt when an adjacent building storing fireworks collapsed, police said.

Following the fire, which broke out around 3am on Sunday, villagers and police pulled many of the injured out from under slabs of concrete and twisted steel girders. They were taken to hospitals in the Kerala state capital of Thiruvananthapuram, about 60 kilometres south of Paravoor, as well as the nearby city of Kollam.

Scores of worried relatives crowded the Kollam District Hospital on Monday, searching for loved ones still missing.

"We are just trying to calm them down so that they can give us the information, with which we can help them find their missing relatives," said K. Shijil, a help-desk worker at the hospital who was giving out emergency kits that included a towel, clothes, drinking water and cookies.

Among a throng of people crowding the help desk was Somraj, a gray-haired man in his 50s. He was looking for his son-in-law, Anu Lal, who had been watching the fireworks show with him when the disaster occurred.

"We were about to return home, when Anu said, 'Let's watch for a few more minutes'," recalled Somraj, who like many in southern India goes by one name. "Then came this loud explosion, and everything went dark. I've been searching for him everywhere."

The fire started when a spark from the fireworks display ignited a stash of fireworks that had been stored at the temple complex.

Scores of devotees ran in panic as the massive initial blast cut off power in the complex. Flames trapped many devotees inside the compound. More explosions sent flames and debris raining down, with some chunks of concrete falling as far as 1 kilometre away, a witness said.

"It was complete chaos," villager Krishna Das said. "People were screaming in the dark. Ambulance sirens went off, and in the darkness no one knew how to find their way out of the complex."

TV channels showed video of huge clouds of white smoke billowing from the temple, as fireworks were still going off in the sky.

Most of the 110 deaths occurred when the building where the fireworks were stored collapsed, according to Kerala state's Chief Minister Oommen Chandy.

Most of the bodies have been identified, officials said, though there were still at least 11 unknown victims charred beyond recognition.

District authorities worried about safety had denied permission to the temple this year for its annual competitive fireworks show, during which different groups put on displays at the end of a seven-day festival honouring the goddess Bhadrakali, a southern Indian incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.

"They were clearly told that no permission would be given for any kind of fireworks," said A. Shainamol, the district's top official. She said officials had worried that the competing sides would try to outdo each other with more and more fireworks, and nearby residents had complained that the shows were a nuisance and a fire hazard.

Meanwhile, a judge filed a petition in the Kerala state’s high court on Monday calling for an immediate ban on the use of high-decibel explosive fireworks in the state. The court will take up the petition on Tuesday.

The Travancore Devaswom Board, which runs more than 1,200 temples in the state, said it was opposed to a complete ban. Prayar Gopalakrishnan, the board's president, said the displays were part of temple festival rituals, but added that they should be done with sufficient safety precautions.

HIROSHIMA, Japan — John Kerry said Monday he was "deeply moved" by his unprecedented visit to the Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial — and urged President Barack Obama also to make the trip.

The US secretary of state, who was joined by other G-7 foreign ministers, is the highest-ranking administration official to pay respects at the spot where American planes launched the first-ever nuclear attack more than seven decades ago.

Washington officials say Obama is considering a trip to Hiroshima late next month around the time of a Group of Seven summit, which is being held in another part of Japan.

An Obama visit would have huge symbolic importance as the first to Hiroshima by a sitting US president.

"I want to express on a personal level how deeply moved I am" to be the first US secretary of state to visit Hiroshima, Kerry told reporters Monday as he and his G-7 counterparts wrapped up two days of talks.

A museum at the memorial site is a "gut-wrenching display that tugs at all your sensibilities as a human being", Kerry said.

About 140,000 people died from the Hiroshima blast on August 6, 1945, or later from severe radiation exposure. The city, a key military installation during the war, was flattened by the massive detonation.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki followed three days later, killing some 74,000 people. Japan surrendered within a week to end World War II.

"Everyone should visit Hiroshima, and everyone means everyone," Kerry said.

"I hope one day the president of the United States will be among the everyone who is able to come here."

But Kerry declined to comment on the likelihood of an Obama visit.

"Whether or not he can come as president, I don't know," he said.

"That is subject to a very full and complicated schedule that the president has to plan out way ahead of time."

'World without nuclear weapons' 

On Monday morning, the G-7 ministers and the foreign policy chief of the European Union visited the memorial museum, which shows the devastating impact of the bombing — such as survivors' burned clothing and other personal effects.

"It is a stark, harsh, compelling reminder not only of our obligation to end the threat of nuclear weapons, but to rededicate all our effort to avoid war itself," Kerry wrote in the museum's guest book.

The G-7 later issued its Hiroshima Declaration that called for a "world without nuclear weapons".

The foreign ministers discussed a range of other issues, from the refugee crisis and war in Syria to North Korea's latest military provocations and conflict-wracked Ukraine.

They pledged to step up the fight against the Daesh group, while expressing concern about maritime disputes in Asia — an oblique criticism of China's territorial ambitions.

Earlier Monday, hundreds of schoolchildren waved flags of G-7 nations and the EU as the group walked to a cenotaph in the leafy park next to the museum. 

Later children presented them with necklaces made of paper cranes — a symbol of peace — woven in the bright colours of their national flags.

The ministers laid wreaths at the site, with the ruins of a domed building gutted by the blast in the background.

"There are no bad feelings and we're not angry," 43-year-old Hiroshima businessman Jun Miura told AFP, adding that he hoped Obama would visit the city.

"I want the president to see for himself exactly what happened. I am sure he has seen video of it, and read about it. But you have to come here to see it and contemplate."

For US tourist Jeremy Griffiths, visiting the memorial is a stark reminder of the scale of the damage.

"You can read all you want, but until you are actually at the place [where the bombing] occurred — it just changes how you look at it," said the 29-year-old IT programmer from Florida.

The bombings are a highly emotive subject in both Japan and the United States.

Japan, as the only nation to have experienced a nuclear attack, emphasises the suffering its people endured. But while publicly calling for the eradication of nuclear weapons, it has for decades been a close security ally of Washington under the protection of the US nuclear umbrella.

Many in the US, meanwhile, chafe at any suggestion of an apology, saying Japan started the war with its attack on Pearl Harbor and that the bombings hastened the war's end — preventing more deaths.