THURS Page: d16

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MECCA, Saudi Arabia — Muslim pilgrims stampeded on the last day of a symbolic stoning ritual at the hajj today, and the Interior Ministry said an unknown number of people were killed. The Al-Arabiya network reported that dozens of pilgrims died.The stampede occurred as tens of thousands of pilgrims filed past al-Jamarat, a series of three pillars representing the devil that the faithful pelt with stones to purge themselves of sin.The ritual has seen deadly stampedes in the past, including one in 1990 that killed 1,426 people and another in February 2004 that killed 244.A ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, said the stampede happened after some pieces of luggage dropped from moving buses. The pilgrims apparently tripped over them as they were rushing to the pillars, he said.Al-Turki said there were deaths, but he could not give an exact number.

LAGOS, Nigeria — Gunmen stormed an offshore oil platform run Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria and kidnapped four foreign oil workers, a company official said today.Assailants in three boats seized the four oil workers from a support vessel attached to Shell's EA oil platform off the southern oil-rich Niger Delta on Wednesday afternoon, Shell spokesman Andy Corrigan said by telephone from London.Corrigan said it was unclear if the hostages were working for Shell or one of its contractors. He declined to give further details, including the nationalities of those abducted, "for safety and security reasons."Graeme Bannatyne, spokesman for the British Embassy in Nigeria, said it believed one of its nationals was among the hostages.Local communities in Nigeria have been demanding a greater share of revenues from the oil flowing from their land for years. Hostage-taking is common, and kidnapped workers are usually released unharmed.

SEOUL, South Korea — Disgraced researcher Hwang Woo-suk asked forgiveness today from fellow South Koreans for his fraudulent claims of human stem cell breakthroughs, but blamed the scandal on junior researchers who he said deceived him.Hwang, in his first public appearance in nearly three weeks, continued to insist he has the technology to use cloning to create human embryonic stem cells genetically matched to patients — saying he could do so in six months if he had access to enough human eggs.Seoul National University, where Hwang is a professor, issued investigation results Tuesday saying he fabricated landmark claims in 2004 to have created the world's first stem cells from a cloned human embryo. The university previously ruled that another Hwang article last year on patient-specific stem cells also was fake."The use of fake data ... is what I have to take full responsibility for as first author," Hwang told a nationally televised news conference. "I acknowledge all of that and apologize once again."Hwang repeated his earlier claims that he was deceived about the data by two junior scientists at a partner research hospital, and said that he believed that his papers were legitimate when they were published.By The Associated Press