PAKISTAN: An officer who was critically wounded in a roadside bombing that targeted police assigned to protect polio vaccination workers in north-west Pakistan died in a hospital today, raising the death toll from the attack, claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, to seven.

Police said at least three officers remained in critical condition after Monday’s bombing in the district of Mamund, a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan.

IRAN: A Danish appeals court today upheld guilty verdicts for three members of an Iranian separatist group convicted of promoting terror in Iran and gathering information for an unnamed Saudi intelligence service.

The three were convicted of a deadly attack on a military parade in the south-west Iranian city of Ahwaz in September 2018. 

BHUTAN: The People’s Democratic Party won the most seats in Bhutan’s parliamentary elections today and will form the new government as residents hope politicians make good on promises to fix the economic crisis in the Himalayan nation.

Latest figures from the Bhutan Broadcasting Service showed the PDP had won 30 of the 47 National Assembly seats to return to power, and the Bhutan Tendrel Party had secured 17.

SPAIN: More than 6,600 migrants died while trying to reach Spain by boat last year, Walking Borders, a Spanish non-profit organisation, said today.

The figure is more than double the number in the previous year, when the organisation said 2,390 died.

Walking Borders said 2023 was the deadliest year since it began keeping records in 2007. Most of the 6,618 deaths occurred on the route from west Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands.