Sri Lanka’s government on Friday released nearly 1,800 former Tamil Tiger rebels who had been held since the island nation’s civil war ended more than two years ago.

The former combatants — among about 11,000 Tamil Tigers who surrendered at the end of the war in May 2009 — were held in military-run rehabilitation centers, where they underwent vocational training. The military says about 1,000 remain in centers.

Sri Lanka has come under pressure from rights groups and other countries to either charge the detainees or release them.

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About 40 Burma Army soldiers were killed in one day, Tuesday, by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) as the momentum increases in the civil war in Burma’s northern Kachin State, people in the war zone said.

People in the battle field said government soldiers died during fighting against the People’s Army under the KIA around Ja Ing Yang Village, near Sinbo, in central Kachin State.

There were no KIA casualties, a KIA officer in the frontline said.

Fighting is happening daily between the two sides in different areas in the Shadan Pa Valley, close to Ja Ing Yang, according to local people.

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A Taliban attack in southern Afghanistan killed eight officers and completely destroyed a police post, a provincial spokesman said Wednesday.

At least three more officers were injured in the Tuesday night attack near Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, according to Daud Ahmadi, the spokesman.

An investigation revealed it was an inside job, he said.

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One police officer has been killed and some 60 people injured as a result of a double terror attack in the capital of the Russian republic of Dagestan, Makhachkala. Militants wanted over the blast are being besieged by federal troops.

Several militants are blocked in a village house in the north of Dagestan region, counter terror officials reported. Negotiations with the alleged organizers of the overnight blasts in the capital are being held at the moment.

One of the bandits has been killed in the shoot-out, reports Interfax news agency citing the National Counter-Terrorism Committee.

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Al-Qaeda’s chief of operations in Pakistan Abu Hafs al-Shahri has been killed, a senior US official said on Thursday.

The death of Abu Hafs in Waziristan follows the killing of al Qaeda’s number two Atiyah abd al-Rahman last month, and comes amid stepped up US drone strikes following the killing of Osama bin Laden in May.

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