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In a helicopter missile attack, Israel killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, as he was being brought home in his wheelchair from a mosque in Gaza City early in the morning. Huge crowds of Palestinians protested angrily at the assassination; seven other people were killed in the attack. Mr Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, called the assassination an ‘unlawful killing, which we condemn’. ‘It is unacceptable,’ he added, ‘unjust and very unlikely to achieve its objectives.’ In London, the Financial Times-Stock Exchange index of shares fell by 1.9 per cent in a day after the assassination; on Wall Street the Dow Jones index fell by 1.2 per cent. President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan was re-elected with a 30,000 majority out of 13 million votes. A day earlier he had been slightly wounded after being shot in the stomach in an assassination attempt; the vice-president was shot in the knee. Thousands of Pakistani soldiers went into action against positions in south Waziristan suspected of sheltering followers of al-Qa’eda. The Afghan aviation minister, Mr Mirwais Sadiq, was killed by soldiers loyal to a local commander, setting off fighting which left 100 dead. Twenty-eight people died and 3,600 Serbs were made homeless during clashes between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo after the drowning of two Albanian boys in a river. Spanish police arrested more suspects in connection with the bombing of trains in Madrid, which killed 202, bringing the number held to 14. Mr Leszek Miller, the Prime Minister of Poland, which, together with Spain, blocked agreement last December on a constitution for the European Union, appeared to have come to an arrangement with Mr Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor of Germany, to let plans be activated again while Ireland retains the presidency of the EU, which it relinquishes at the end of June. The European Commission fined Microsoft 497 million euros because of the way it was using its Windows monopoly. Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, who was Queen from 1948 to 1980, when she abdicated, died, aged 94. The roving machine on Mars, Opportunity, found sediment with ripple patterns that indicated it had been formed in salt water.
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