Fighters killed in Philippines raid

Troops in the Philippines have killed at least seven al-Qaeda- linked fighters in an assault on an Abu Sayyaf base in the southern coastal town of Sulu, according to officials.

Government forces raided the Abu Sayyaf hideout on Sunday, but failed in their mission to capture a Malaysian man wanted as a "terror suspect" by the US.

Zulkifli bin Hir, a Malaysian fighter also known as Marwan, and Abu Benhur, an Abu Sayyaf commander, are believed to have escaped with other fleeing fighters.

"They may have escaped but we are pursuing them. This campaign will be relentless," Brigadier-General Rustico Guerrero, a regional military commander, said.

He also said that one marine had been wounded in the attack and noted that 15 assault weapons abandoned by the fighters had been seized.

Philippine forces have staged a number of assaults in recent weeks, acting on intelligence from captured fighters and US military surveillance.

Deadly bombings

The US has offered a $5m reward for the capture of Marwan, a US-trained Malaysian engineer Washigton says has links to several Southeast Asian armed groups with ties to al-Qaeda.

He has been accused by Philippine authorities of involvement in a number of deadly bombings in the country.

The US says he the leader of the Kumpulun Mujahidin Malaysia (KMM) and a member of the central command of Jemaah Islamiyah, which is blamed for numerous attacks, including the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings in Indonesia.

The group has been fighting for years to create an independent Islamic province in the Philippines.

Last month, Philippine forces killed Albader Parad, a young Abu Sayyaf commander, who has been accused of beheadings and high-profile kidnappings.

He was allegedly involved in the kidnapping of three Red Cross workers who were freed last year, reportedly after payment of a large ransom.

Chile mourns earthquake victims

Chile has begun three days of national mourning after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake killed hundreds of people and damaged infrastructure.

Flags will be lowered across the country on Sunday as officials struggle to establish the exact number of the dead.

The official toll was initially put at 802 people, but that was subsequently revised down to 452 confirmed deaths after it emerged that in some areas people who were simply missing had been listed as dead.

Emergency workers, meanwhile, are still struggling to cope with problems caused by a series of strong after-shocks as well as dealing with the devastation triggered by the original quake.

Around 500, 000 homes were destroyed by the earthquake and sanitary conditions for many still living on the streets have become a growing concern.

"We have cases of gastroenteritis, respiratory problems, and we've had heart problems due to fears caused by recent aftershocks," Carlos Barra, a doctor working in a health centre near Concepcion, the quake's epicentre, told the AFP news agency.

Returning to normal

Despite the devastation, life was slowly beginning to return to normal, news agencies reported.

Vaccinations against hepatitis and tetanus had started in the town of Constitucion, Patricio Rosende, the deputy interior minister, said.

The UN renewed a pledge to provide international aid to Chile, with Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general, touring Concepcion on Saturday.

"The Chilean government is asking for international aid and we will give it," Ban said.

"Your people were generous enough to rush to Haiti when it was hit, now it is the moment for the international community to stand with the Chilean people.

"I can feel all this, for your loss, for your struggle."

Ban spoke as the first shipment of food from the UN's World Food Programme arrived in Chile in response to the government's request for help.

"This is the first shipment of 70 tonnes (of food)," the Reuters news agency quoted Francisco Espejo, a WFP representative, as saying.

"The total is to help 35,000 children over the next five days, giving them portions that total 480 calories.

"We are channelling the aid jointly with national organisations that will ensure an adequate distribution throughout the most affected zones."

Greek PM in France for debt talks

The Greek prime minister has travelled to Paris seeking firmer international support for harsh austerity measures that have sparked violent protests at home.

George Papandreou arrived in the French capital on Sunday, the third stop of a four-city tour.

The Greek leader is adamant that his government in Athens has done all it can to reduce its massive 12.7 per cent budget deficit.

Greece is now seeking concrete action from its European partners to calm markets and bring down the country's high borrowing costs, which are about twice that of Germany's.

Papandreou, who visited Luxembourg and Berlin on Friday, is likely to find a sympathetic ear in his meeting on Sunday evening with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

Potential support

Sarkozy has said Greece's euro-zone partners should not abandon it because doing so would defeat the very purpose of the 16-nation common currency project.

"If we created the euro, we cannot abandon a euro-zone country - otherwise it wasn't worth it to create the euro," Sarkozy said at a Paris agricultural fair on Saturday.

"That's why I'm supporting Greece."

Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister, is expected to attend the Papandreou-Sarkozy meeting along with George Papaconstantinou, her Greek counterpart.

She said the talks would focus on how Greece's new austerity plan will be enacted and that Sarkozy would back Greece if its debt woes got it into real trouble, but she gave no details of potential emergency support.

Following his meetings in Paris, Papandreou will fly to Washington for talks with Barack Obama, the US president, on Tuesday.

Budget nightmare

Papandreou's Socialist party came to power in October and shocked Europe by quickly revising the government's budget deficit to 12.7 per cent of gross domestic product for 2009, from below 4 per cent earlier that year.

Papandreou has called the situation "worse than our worst nightmare".

Analysts consider France as more sympathetic to Greece's problems than Germany, where Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, met Papandreou on Friday.

Merkel pledged political support for Greece, but without any concrete details.

She also praised the latest Greek austerity measures, which cut civil servants' pay, froze pensions and hiked a range of taxes - including those on sales, fuel, cigarettes and alcohol.

But Greece's new austerity plan has sparked strikes and violent demonstrations at home, with protesters clashing with riot police in central Athens, while a general strike has been called for Thursday, on top of another planned for March 16.

European partners

Both Merkel and Papandreou stressed that Greece is not looking for financial aid from its European partners.

Athens has not asked, Merkel said, and none was being offered.

But what Greece does want is some form of support that would reduce its sky-high borrowing costs on the international market.

It insists it is the victim of speculators who are pushing up the price at which it can borrow.

Papandreou has one big card to play, saying unless his new austerity plan receives the full backing of markets and its European partners, he could be forced to seek help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

That is something Sarkozy is thought to be against because the IMF is run by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, his political rival.

Polls close in Iraq election

Polling stations have closed in Iraq's parliamentary election, in a vote marred by violence as a series of explosions left at least 38 people dead and 89 others wounded in the capital, Baghdad.

Millions of people turned out to cast their ballots across the country on Sunday, for the second full parliamentary election since the 2003 US-led invasion.

About 19 million voters were eligible to choose from more than 6,000 candidates from 86 political groups looking to gain seats in the 325-member assembly.

But the vote came against a backdrop of deadly attacks.

The bloodiest toll was from an explosion that destroyed a residential building in the Shaab district of northern Baghdad, killing 25 people and wounding at least eight more.

Initial reports indicated that dynamite was used to blow up the building, the interior ministry official said.

Polling stations targeted

Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from Baghdad, said the series of mortar attacks and blasts from improvised explosive devices overshadowed the start of voting.

"The apparent target were polling stations though none was directly damaged in any of the attacks. After that very dangerous start, voting proceeded fairly smoothly," he said.

"At this point it's still unclear exactly how large the turnout was, but reports from most areas indicate that the turnout was very satisfactory as far as those who want to see a successful poll process go are concerned."

Nouri al-Maliki, the incumbent Iraqi prime minister, whose State of Law coalition is claiming credit for improved security since the peak of sectarian warfare in 2006-07, dismissed Sunday's attacks as "just noises to scare the Iraqi people from voting".

"But I know the Iraqi people. They have conviction. When there is a challenge, they persevere, and you will see for yourselves the large number of people that come out to vote."

Voting scenes

Elsewhere, Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from Sulaymaniyah, in Kurdistan region, said a member of the provincial council of Mosul, Qusay Abbas, was shot dead in the disputed area of Shabak.

"Mosul is a tense city and there is still no real political reconciliation between Arabs and Kurds," she said.

"Today we are seeing a lot of Arabs turning up at the polling stations who want to be part of the political process, from which they have been away for many years, which has weakened them and given Kurds more clout in the Iraqi parliament."

The election was supervised by as many as 120 international monitors, with a number of foreign embassies providing staff to act as observers.

Al Jazeera's Omar Chatriwala, who accompanied a team of UN monitors on a tour of several cities, saw about 200 people in a polling station on the outskirts of Ramadi at around 9:30am.

"The voting co-ordinator said there had been no problems," he said. "Another co-ordinator, who was in charge of six polling stations, said 3,000 people had turned out to vote in the first couple of hours."

Secular agendas

Voters were choosing between a broad range of parties and coalitions and no bloc is expected to win a majority.

After the last national election in 2005, it took the various political parties about five months to agree on a prime minister and for a cabinet to be approved.

Our correspondent, Mike Hanna, said: "In the past, people have tended to vote along sectarian lines. But now, no governing coalition can come to power unless it has the widest possible breadth of support.

"So political parties and coalitions have been fighting a campaign not on sectarian issues, but on the wider issues of Iraqi nationalism."

Al-Maliki is taking on political opponents tapping into exasperation with years of conflict, poor public services and corruption, and hoping to gain support from a once-dominant Sunni minority.

Iyad Allawi, a former prime minister who heads the cross-sectarian, secularist Iraqiya list, is already complaining about irregularities in early voting, setting the scene for possible challenges to the election's integrity.

Hasan Salman, a representative of the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) - the successor of the United Iraqi Alliance, which has dominated the government since the December 2005 elections - also claimed voting irregularities.

"The government is using its power to steer things to its interest," he told Al Jazeera.

"We are scared the result will be fraudulent. There are 19 million Iraqis qualified to vote, but there are 25 million voting slips, and we still have not received an answer why extra 6 million slips were printed."

The Iraqi electoral commission is to announce preliminary results on March 10-11, based on votes from about 30 per cent of the polling stations.

The supreme court would then certify the poll results, after hearing appeals, within about a month of the election.