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NEW DELHI: Intense rains have lashed parts of Pakistan and India and triggered flash floods in Indian-controlled Kashmir’s Jammu region, leaving at least 32 people dead and many missing following a landslide on a Hindu pilgrimage route, news agency Press Trust of India reported Wednesday.
The time frame of the flooding deaths was not immediately clear.
Authorities in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province on Wednesday called for army assistance in rescue and relief efforts after torrential rains caused major rivers to swell, inundating villages and displacing more than 150,000 people, officials said.
Rescuers evacuated more than 20,000 people overnight from the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, which also faced the risk of flood. Those evacuated from areas near Lahore were living along the bed of the Ravi river, said Irfan Ali Kathia, director-general of the Punjab Disaster Management Authority.
Mass evacuations began earlier this week in six districts of Punjab after heavier-than-normal monsoon rains and the release of water from overflowing dams in neighboring India trigged flash floods in low-lying border regions, Kathia said.
Forecasters predicted rain will continue across the region this week. Heavy downpours and flash floods in the Himalayan region have killed nearly 100 people in August.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday praised authorities for the timely evacuations to avoid losses and said relief supplies and tents are being provided to flood-effected people, according to a government statement.
Kathia warned floodwaters in the Ravi, Chenab and Sutlej rivers were rising dangerously and many villages were inundated in Kasur, Okara, Bahawalnagar, Bahawalpur, Vehari and Sialkot districts.
Rescuers have used boats to evacuate people to safer places this week, Kathia said. India alerted Pakistan about possible cross-border flooding through diplomatic channels rather than the Indus Waters Commission, which is the permanent mechanism under the 1960 World Bank brokered Indus Waters Treaty.
New Delhi suspended the commission’s work after the April killing of 26 tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir, though Islamabad insists India cannot unilaterally scrap the treaty.
The latest flood warning comes as rescuers with sniffer dogs search for more than 150 people who have been reported missing this month after cloudburst flooding killed over 300 residents in three villages in northwestern Buner district.
Floods have killed more than 800 people in Pakistan since late June.
Scientists say climate change is fueling heavier monsoon rains in South Asia, raising fears of a repeat of a 2022 weather disaster that struck a third of Pakistan and killed 1,739 people.

BOGOTA: The father of Miguel Uribe, the Colombian presidential candidate fatally shot at a political rally earlier this year, launched a presidential campaign Tuesday in what he called an effort keep his son’s legacy alive and build a safer and more prosperous Colombia.
Miguel Uribe Londoño, 72, announced his candidacy with a speech outside the congressional building in the capital where his son became a well-known senator, and spoke behind a podium fitted with the campaign logo used by his deceased son.
“Together we can build a secure Colombia where people will not fear going out into the streets, and where business owners will not have to make extortion payments” to gangs, Uribe Londoño said in Bogota. “A democratic Colombia, where the government does not foment divisions between the rich and the poor, whites or Blacks, or those who are on the left or on the right.”
Uribe Londoño was a member of Bogota’s city council in the late 80s and a senator for Colombia’s Conservative Party in the early 90s. But he had no plans to run for the presidency before his son’s death, and was not widely known by the public.
He gained new prominence during his son’s nationally televised funeral, when he delivered a speech decrying what he called the country’s descent into “madness” under the administration of left-wing President Gustavo Petro and urging Colombians to vote in next year’s elections.
Uribe Londoño is one of five candidates that are running for the Democratic Center, the conservative party that Miguel Uribe belonged to. The party has said that later this year, it will use opinion polls to decide on its final candidate.
Sergio Guzman, a political analyst in Bogota, said that Uribe Londoño’s decision to enter the presidential race “reinvigorates” the Democratic Center, which has struggled to find a popular candidate while its leader, former President Alvaro Uribe, fights corruption allegations in Colombian courts. The former president is no relation to Uribe Londoño
Guzman said that Uribe Londoño, whose wife was murdered in the 1990s, “symbolizes the pain of many victims, especially those who are conservatives.”
Uribe Londoño’s entry into the presidential race comes as Colombia faces a new wave of violence, caused largely by rebel groups and drug gangs that are trying to take over territory abandoned by the FARC, the guerrilla army that made peace with the government in 2016.
Last week, seven people were killed as a FARC hold-out group set off a car bomb outside a military base in Colombia’s third largest city. While in the province of Antioquia, rebels took down a helicopter that was conducting anti-narcotics operations, killing 13 police officers.
Petro has attempted to broker peace deals with the nation’s remaining rebel groups, and granted many of them ceasefires in an effort to boost negotiations. But these peace talks have yielded few results, and critics of the president say they have helped the rebel groups to become stronger.
“I am not the only father who has lost that which he loved the most” Uribe Londoño said on Tuesday. “But I would like to be voice of the latest father, who has had to accept the cruel destiny that they want to impose on us with violence and terror.”