Pakistani officials say gunmen disguised in military uniforms stopped a passenger bus in the northern part of the country and shot dead 18 Shi'ite passengers.

Police said the gunmen ambushed the bus en route to the northern town of Gilgit early Tuesday as it traveled through the mountainous district of Kohistan. The attackers boarded the bus, checked the identity of the passengers and opened fire on the Shi'ite passengers.

The Danish Navy says it has freed 16 hostages held by Somali pirates, but two other hostages were apparently killed during the rescue operation.

The warship Absalon fired on and intercepted a pirate mother ship as it tried to sneak away from the Somali coast Monday, according to a Danish Navy statement.

It says Absalon crew members boarded the ship and found 17 suspected pirates along with 18 hostages from the ship's original crew. It says two of the hostages were found badly injured and died, despite medical attention.

A bomb has exploded outside the offices of Nepal's state-run oil company, killing three people.

Monday's attack was the first blast in the capital, Kathmandu, since 2009.

Police say a remote-control bomb was detonated in front of the Nepal Oil Corporation during lunchtime.

Nepal's Home Minister Bijaya Gachchedar said a little-known group calling itself United Ethnic Liberation Front took responsibility for the bombing.

The minister ordered that security be tightened in Kathmandu following the blast.

The radical Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram says it bombed a Christian church Sunday in Jos, killing three people and wounding dozens more.

The suicide bombing was one in a series of recent attacks by the group on Christian targets in northern Nigeria, including a Christmas day bombing of a Catholic church near Abuja that killed at least 37 people.

Following Sunday's attack, Christian youths seeking revenge beat to death two Muslim men in Jos.

Russia's state television says Russian and Ukrainian authorities have arrested a group of suspects accused of attempting to assassinate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The Channel One station said Monday the suspects were plotting to kill Mr. Putin in Moscow immediately after Russia's March 4 presidential election. The report said the suspects were arrested in Ukraine's Black Sea port city of Odessa.

Al-Qaida is claiming responsibility for a suicide-bombing Saturday in the southern Yemeni port city of Mukalla, which left at least 26 people dead and at least 20 others wounded. The bombing came just hours after a speech by Yemen's new President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is originally from the south of the country.

Witnesses say the suicide car-bomber broke through an outer barrier at a presidential compound in Mukalla blowing up himself and his vehicle, near a group of soldiers who were eating, causing dozens of casualties.

Witnesses say an airstrike has killed seven members of the al-Qaida-linked rebel group al-Shabab in southern Somalia.

The air attack occurred early Friday in a rebel-controlled area known as Kilometer 60, south of the capital, Mogadishu.

Somali officials say an al-Shabab commander was among those killed when a missile from an unidentified plane struck a vehicle. A reporter for VOA's Somali Service says the dead include four foreigners and three Somalis.

Officials in northwest Pakistan say suicide bombers have attacked a police station, killing at least four police officers.

Authorities say three attackers, armed with guns and hand grenades, stormed the station early Friday in the city of Peshawar.

The bombers opened fire while entering the compound and then detonated their explosives. Six police officers were wounded in the assault.

Officials say the station was targeted because it is one of the largest in Peshawar and houses hundreds of new police recruits.

Ethiopian and Somali soldiers seized control of the town of Baidoa in central Somalia this week, driving al-Shabab militants from one of their major strongholds. But analysts say the strategic victory carries significant risks.

Ethiopian forces working alongside troops from Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, TFG, met very little resistance on the road to Baidoa.

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