BEIRUT: : Israeli warplanes killed three people in a raid on Syria’s Aleppo airport Tuesday, a war monitor said after the strike which, according to a Syrian official, halted earthquake aid flights.
The airport has been a major conduit for relief flights since a February 6 earthquake devastated swathes of southeastern Turkiye and neighboring Syria.
A transport ministry official in Syria said the aid flights were among those brought to a stop from Aleppo, Syria’s second city.

LONDON: Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces foiled an attempt to smuggle narcotic pills into a prison in the north of the country by hiding them inside sunflower seeds.

A 25-year-old Lebanese man who tried to deliver three bags of the seeds to an inmate at Batroun Prison, south of Tripoli, has been arrested, officials said on Tuesday. The sunflower seeds had been removed from their husks and replaced with captagon and Artane (benzhexol) pills that were split in half. The security forces shared on Twitter a short video showing the seized drugs.

CAIRO: A passenger train derailed Tuesday north of Cairo, killing at least two people and injuring 16 others, Egyptian authorities said. It was the latest in a series of rail accidents in the country in recent years.
The derailing happened as the train was traveling through a station in the city of Qalyub on its way to the city of Menouf in the Nile Delta, state prosecutors said in a statement. They said they had opened an investigation into the cause of the crash.

ANKARA: Turkiye’s six-party opposition bloc on Monday announced the joint presidential candidature of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkiye’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), who is set to face off against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May elections.

“We will govern Turkiye with consultations and compromise,” Kilicdaroglu said during the launch ceremony of his candidature in Ankara. “Our table is the table of peace. Our only goal is to take the country to days of prosperity, peace and joy.”

VIENNA: Iran’s concessions to UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi during his visit to Tehran over the weekend depend to a large extent on future negotiations, Grossi conceded on Monday, walking back some comments he made upon his return.
Two days before a quarterly meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors, the IAEA and Iran said they had agreed to make progress on various issues, including a long-stalled IAEA inquiry into uranium particles found at three undeclared sites in Iran.