"Terrorism
can never be
justified as an act of faith. It is an act of evil in all
circumstances."
Prime Minister
Gordon Brown, 1 July 2007. To read Tony Blair's "dossiers"
terror, click here. How about piracy on the high seas? Most recent
vessel under USA flag.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
- AFGHANISTAN eight years on...
- SUBURBAN TRAIN SERVICE
ATTACKS:
Spain, UK and now India (2006) (Bombay
"Mumbai" blast)...and, targerting police, in Casablanca.
- Kashmir crisis on-going,
illustrated in BBC map above. Click for U.N. report on PEACEKEEPING.
For more general information and nifty maps, check out United
Nations WEBsite ;
- BBCi graphic of subjects
caught in terror web; American Taliban Lindh. Highjacker #20
(who never got into the U.S.A.), captured on the one-year
anniversary of September 11 (in Pakistan).
- Moscow terror
location. Proud originator
of terror plot in Moscow. Link to another, old but
interesting story...
- Threats upcoming - UK
and USA?
- Culture war?
- Old
terror plotter getting out of jail news.
France declares war against al-Qaida
YAHOO
By ELAINE GANLEY, Associated Press Writer
27 July 2010
PARIS – France has declared war on al-Qaida, and matched its fighting
words with a first attack on a base camp of the terror network's North
African branch, after the terror network killed a French aid worker it
took hostage in April.
The declaration and attack marked a shift in strategy for France,
usually discrete about its behind-the-scenes battle against terrorism.
"We are at war with al-Qaida," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said
Tuesday, a day after President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the death of
78-year-old hostage Michel Germaneau.
The humanitarian worker had been abducted April 20 or 22 in Niger by
al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, and was later taken to Mali, officials
said.
The killers will "not go unpunished," Sarkozy said in unusually strong
language, given France's habit of employing quiet cooperation with its
regional allies — Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Algeria — in which the
al-Qaida franchise was spawned amid an Islamist insurgency.
The Salafist Group for Call and Combat formally merged with al-Qaida in
2006 and spread through the Sahel region — parts of Mauritania, Mali
and Niger.
Officials suggest France will activate accords with these countries to
stop the terrorists in their tracks.
"It's a universal threat that concerns the entire world ... not just
France or the West," Defense Minister Herve Morin said Tuesday on
France-2 television. "We will support local authorities so these
assassins and (their) commanders are tracked, judged and taken before
justice and punished. And, yes, we will help them."
Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger in April opened a joint military
headquarters deep in the desert to respond to threats from traffickers
and the al-Qaida offshoot. U.S. Special Forces have helped the four
nations train troops in recent years.
The United States said it would help the French "in any way that we
can" to bring those who killed Germaneau to justice, according to U.S.
State Dept. spokesman P.J. Crowley.
"There is no religion that sanctions what can only be described as
cold-blooded murder," Crowley said Tuesday.
Fillon refused to say how France would act. "But we will," he said in
an interview with Europe 1 radio.
And perhaps it already has. On Thursday, the French backed Mauritanian
forces in attacking an al-Qaida camp on the border with Mali, killing
at least six suspected terrorists. It is the first time France is known
to have attacked an al-Qaida base.
France said it was a last-ditch effort to save its citizen, while
Mauritania said it was trying to stop an imminent attack by fighters
gathering at the base.
For the French, the move may have backfired. The al-Qaida group said in
an audio message broadcast Sunday that it had killed Germaneau in
retaliation for the raid. However, French officials suggested, however,
that the hostage, who had a heart problem, may already have been dead.
Even now, "We have no proof of life or death," Morin said.
"We can expect an increase in the French riposte," said Antoine Sfeir,
an expert on Islamist terrorists who has traveled in the region.
An estimated 400-500 such fighters are thought to roam the Sahel
region, a desert expanse as large as the European Union.
Despite meager numbers, the region's al-Qaida fighters pose a clear
threat. Among the more recent victims, a British captive was beheaded
last year and two Spanish aid workers were taken hostage in Mauritania
in November. Spain is working to free them. Mauritanian soldiers also
have fallen in numerous attacks.
The head of the French Institute of Strategic Analysis suggested the
French government's rhetoric was normal.
"It's important to make that kind of announcement," Francois Gere said.
"I think it's made of the same stuff" as former U.S. President George
W. Bush's tough line on al-Qaida.
But "a government has to make clear it must respond strongly" while
maintaining the discretion needed to ensure cooperation, Gere said. In
the past France has been cautious because those governments don't want
the appearance of interference from the West, he said.
Spain has maintained a low profile as videos by the al-Qaida franchise
regularly call for the conquest of "al-Andalus" — a reference to the
period of Muslim rule of much of Spain in medieval times.
Suicide Attacks Strike at Police in
Southern Russia
NYTIMES
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
March 31, 2010
MOSCOW — Two explosions killed at least 12 people in the volatile North
Caucasus region on Wednesday in what appeared to be attacks aimed at
the police, investigators from the Russian prosecutor’s office said.
One of the explosions was caused by a suicide bomber wearing a police
uniform, officials said. The bombings, which also injured at
least two dozen people, occurred in Dagestan, a region of southern
Russia that borders Chechnya where attacks against the police occur
almost daily.
The attacks came two days after two suicide bombers set off explosions in the Moscow
subway during the morning rush hour, killing 39 people,
underscoring the difficulties facing the Russian authorities in
preventing such attacks.
Law enforcement agencies throughout the country have been on alert
since the Moscow bombings, and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has
ordered the security forces to drag those responsible “out of the
bottom of the sewer and into the light of God.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Putin said the attacks in Dagestan and Moscow could
have been organized by “the same bandits,” the Interfax news agency
reported.
Though no one has yet claimed responsibility for any of the attacks,
the North Caucasus region has been marked for particular scrutiny.
Russian officials have said the two women bombers on Monday were from
Chechnya or a neighboring region in the North Caucasus. For years
Russia has been trying to stamp out a lingering Muslim insurgency in
the region, which includes Chechnya, where federal forces fought two
bloody wars against Muslim separatists.
The first of the bombs on Wednesday exploded in a parked car, killing
two police officers who had pulled up beside it in their vehicle,
according to a statement on the Web site of the prosecutor’s
investigative wing.
As rescue workers and police officials gathered at the scene, a man in
a police uniform walked up and set off his explosives, killing several
more people, including the police chief of Kizlyar, the town where the
attacks occurred. Such attacks, which are not uncommon in the
region, typically target police and government officials. There has
been speculation that the bombings were revenge attacks for the recent
killings of separatist leaders in the North Caucasus by police
officials.
In the Moscow attacks, however, civilians appeared to be the prime
targets: The bombers set off their explosives at two subway stations
during the Monday morning rush hour, the first such attacks in the
capital in years. Rashid G. Nurgaliyev, Russia’s interior
minister, ordered the police on Wednesday to increase security in
public places like theaters, schools and universities.
“These attacks show,” he said, “that terrorists can target anywhere.”
Success
of lone gunmen may shift al-Qaida strategy
YAHOO
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
March 11, 2010
WASHINGTON – On Christmas Day, a
passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit tried to
blow up the plane with plastic explosives in his underwear. He failed,
yet the very attempt shook the U.S. government, set federal agencies
against each other and triggered months of political second-guessing.
In fact, short of mass casualties,
the attack allegedly attempted by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
had exactly the kind of reaction that al-Qaida is after. And, it
appears, that lesson is resonating with the terror network's leadership.
For the first time, the group that
carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its
ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably
more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be:
Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as
good.
U.S. officials and counterterrorism
experts say the airline attack and last November's shooting at Fort
Hood, Texas, prove that simple, well-played smaller attacks against the
United States also can be harmful to the American psyche, although not
as devastating as a 9/11-style attack.
In a recent Internet posting,
U.S.-born al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn made a public pitch for such
smaller, single acts of jihad.
"Even apparently unsuccessful
attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities
to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into
bankruptcy," Gadahn said in a video released and translated by
U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamic militant
message traffic.
It's a message that officials
believe has been evolving for the last year and has turned upside down
the prevailing wisdom that the next al-Qaida attack against the U.S.
must be bigger and bolder than the one on Sept. 11, 2001.
"It's pretty clear that while
al-Qaida would still love to have home runs, they will take singles and
doubles if they can get them," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution Saban Center and a former CIA officer. "And
that makes the job of counterterrorism much, much harder."
Counterterror officials note that
al-Qaida leaders monitor the U.S. closely and watched the
reverberations of the Abdulmutallab attack. They saw the scramble to
boost security, the members of Congress blasting federal agencies for
intelligence and screening failures, the political drumbeat against the
Obama administration's national security efforts and the agency leaders
who rushed to blame each other.
The shift is ideological as well as
tactical. Before Gadahn's latest video missive, al-Qaida central —
Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri — had not seemed to embrace the call
for smaller, more singular insurgent operations.
"Big al-Qaida still has too much of
an ego; they still want big, synchronized, high-visibility attacks,"
said Jarret Brachman, an expert on jihadist groups. "They haven't yet
said, 'Let a thousand flowers bloom.'"
Core al-Qaida senior leaders have
worried that unleashing scattered and untrained insurgents who could
make mistakes could do more harm than good to the greater jihadi
message.
Brachman pointed to the November
2005 hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, when one of the bombers set off
his suicide belt in a wedding reception at the Radisson SAS rather than
the lobby — killing the groom's father and 16 other family members and
in-laws.
Killing vast numbers of innocent
civilians — including fellow Muslims — was one of the factors leading
to the erosion of al-Qaida in Iraq, a mistake the terror group doesn't
want to make again.
In larger, more elaborate plots
there are often multiple people involved, and the chances are greater
that one will make a mistake or that law enforcement authorities will
get a tip or notice something is going on. In smaller operations,
involving just one person or two, the chances are slimmer.
Take, for example, Najibullah Zazi.
His plot to bomb the New York City subway system late last year
unraveled after investigators got a tip and were able to gather
information from a Queens imam who was communicating with the
24-year-old Afghan immigrant, as well as others at the same mosque.
Zazi, who has said he was recruited
by al-Qaida and received training in a camp in Pakistan on how to build
a bomb, was arrested in Denver, before he was able to make his planned
drive back to New York to set the plot in motion.
In contrast, officials allege that
Maj. Nidal Hasan acted alone after exchanging e-mails with radical
Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The shooting spree he is accused of
undertaking at Fort Hood killed 13 people and wounded more than two
dozen others.
Officials have raised concerns that
while U.S. authorities were aware that Hasan was communicating with
al-Awlaki, that information wasn't passed along to the military. But,
since his assault did not include other people, and simply involved him
walking into a building on base where he was allowed to be, it still
would have been difficult to predict or prevent.
The call for more individual jihad
is not a new idea to al-Qaida followers on Internet forums. They have
been touting the strategy for a year or two, and the foiled Northwest
Airlines attack only re-energized the debate.
One writer on a jihadi Internet
forum scolded those who condemned Abdulmutallab, the alleged
perpetrator, as a failure.
"From my prospective living in the
United States brother Abdulmutallab succeeded. Maybe he didn't achieve
his full objective but you do not necessarily need to achieve a grade
of 100 percent to pass the class," the writer said in an early January
posting on the Ansar al-Mujahideen discussion forum, which is
pro-al-Qaida and is now closed to new members.
"What Abdulmutallab did was instill
a fear in Americans. This is a very significant accomplishment. An
increased fear of flying, for example, can cripple the airlines and
cause economic problems."
Another poster answered: "What did
he accomplish? How many billions do you think they will spend to boost
security that won't work anyway? He humiliated the Americans, afterward
Newark Airport was on lock down for 6 hours because someone walked the
wrong way. Success comes in many ways."
Gadahn, in his video, took a broader
view, telling followers: "Jihad is neither the personal property nor
the exclusive responsibility of any single group, organization or
individual. ... Instead it is the personal duty of every able-bodied
Muslim on the face of this earth."
Dutch to use full body scanners for US
flights
YAHOO
By MIKE CORDER and ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press
Dec. 30, 2009
THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The Netherlands announced Wednesday it will
immediately begin using full body scanners for flights heading to the
United States, issuing a report that called the failed Christmas Day
airline bombing a "professional" al-Qaida terror attack.
A top Dutch official said a scanner of that type may have stopped Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to
Detroit from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Friday carrying undetected
explosives. Law enforcement officials say the 23-year-old Nigerian
tried but failed to detonate the explosives on a plane carrying over
300 people.
"It is not exaggerating to say the world has escaped a disaster,"
Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst told a news conference, referring to
it as "another al-Qaida attack."
The Dutch minister said U.S. had not wanted these scanners to be used
previously because of privacy concerns but said there was now agreement
with Washington authorities that "all possible measures will be used on
flights to the U.S."
A key European legislator urged the European Union to begin rapidly
installing the new equipment across the 27-nation bloc, but no other
European nations immediately followed the Dutch move.
Body scanners that peer underneath clothing have been available for
years, but privacy advocates say they are a "virtual strip search"
because they display an image of the body onto a computer screen.
Ian Dowty, a lawyer with Action on Rights of the Child, said allowing
minors to pass through the scanners violates child pornography laws.
"It shows genitalia," he told The Associated Press. "As far as English
law is concerned ... it's unlawful if it's indecent."
For that reason, British authorities have exempted under-18s from body
scan trials at places including Paddington Station in London as well as
Heathrow and Manchester airports.
New software, however, eliminates that problem by projecting a stylized
image rather than an actual picture onto a computer screen,
highlighting the area of the body where objects are concealed in
pockets or under the clothing.
Ter Horst, the Dutch minister, the scanners likely would have alerted
security guards to the materials concealed in Abdulmutallab's underwear
and prevented him from boarding the Northwest flight.
"Our view now is that the use of millimeter wave scanners would
certainly have helped detect that he had something on his body, but you
can never give 100 percent guarantees," Ter Horst said.
In its preliminary report, the Dutch government called the plan to blow
up the Detroit-bound aircraft "professional" but said its execution was
"amateurish."
Ter Horst said Abdulmutallab apparently assembled the explosive device,
including 80 grams of Pentrite, or PETN, in the aircraft toilet, then
planned to detonate it with a syringe of chemicals. She said the
explosives appeared to have been professionally prepared and had been
given to Abdulmutallab, but did not elaborate.
"The approach in this case shows — despite the failure of the attack —
a fairly professional approach," the investigation summary stated.
"Pentrite is a very powerful conventional explosive, which is not easy
to produce yourself."
"If you want to detonate it, you have to do that another way than he
did. That is why we talk about amateurism," Ter Horst said.
Abdulmutallab arrived in Amsterdam on Friday from Lagos, Nigeria on a
KLM flight. After a layover of less than three hours in the
international departure hall, he passed through a security check at the
gate in Amsterdam, including a hand baggage scan and a metal detector,
and headed to the Northwest flight. He did not pass through a full-body
scanner.
Abdulmutallab was carrying a valid Nigerian passport and had a valid
U.S. visa, the Dutch said. His name also did not appear on any Dutch
list of terror suspects.
"No suspicious matters which would give reason to classify the person
involved as a high-risk passenger were identified during the security
check," Ter Horst said.
Erik Ackerboom, head of the Dutch counterterrorism bureau, dismissed
suggestions that Abdulmutallab should have aroused suspicion when he
paid for a round-trip ticket from Lagos to Detroit in cash and had no
check-in luggage.
Paying cash in Africa is not unusual, he said, and the lack of
suitcases "wasn't a reason for alarm."
Abdulmutallab, charged with trying to destroy an aircraft, is being
held at the federal prison in Milan, Michigan.
Amsterdam's Schiphol has 15 body scanners, each costing more than
$200,000. But until now neither the European Union nor the U.S. have
approved the routine use of the scanners at European airports.
At least two scanners in Amsterdam have been experimentally using the
less-invasive software since late November and the Dutch said those
will be put into use immediately. All other scanners will be upgraded
within three weeks.
In the U.S., 40 of the machines are being operated in at least 19 U.S.
airports.
Six machines are being used for primary screenings at six U.S.
airports: Albuquerque, N.M.; Las Vegas; Miami; San Francisco; Salt Lake
City; and Tulsa, Okla. Passengers go through the scans instead of a
metal detector, although they can elect to receive a pat-down search
from a security officer instead.
The remainder of the machines are being used at 13 U.S. airports for
secondary screening of passengers who set off a metal detector. But
those travelers can also opt for a pat-down instead.
Last year the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted against using
the scanners and called for further study, allowing Schiphol to conduct
a pilot test of the scanners on European flights.
But opposition faded Wednesday when a key assembly member said the
newest types "pose no privacy risk." Peter van Dalen, vice-chairman of
the assembly's transport committee said, a recent demonstration at
Schiphol lifted any doubts that the equipment violates the privacy of
air passengers.
A Dutch digital rights group, Bits of Freedom, said the decision to
introduce the scanners on short notice was a fear-driven overreaction.
"The chance of someone being a victim of a terrorist attack in the air
is a lot smaller than the chance of being struck by lightning," the
group wrote in an open letter to the Dutch Justice Ministry.
Meanwhile, officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday that a man
tried to board a commercial airliner in the Somali capital of Mogadishu
last month carrying powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe in a case
bearing chilling similarities to the Detroit airliner plot.
The Somali man — whose name has not yet been released — was arrested by
African Union peacekeeping troops before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines
flight took off. It had been scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the
northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai. A Somali
police spokesman, Abdulahi Hassan Barise, said the suspect is in Somali
custody.
"We don't know whether he's linked with al-Qaida or other foreign
organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught
him red-handed," said Barise.
President Barack Obama has demanded a preliminary report by Thursday
from U.S. security authorities on what went wrong in the Detroit
airliner case. Obama said the intelligence community should have been
able to piece together information that would have raised "red flags"
and possibly prevented Abdulmutallab from boarding the airliner.
"There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to
this potential catastrophic breach of security," Obama told reporters
in Hawaii, calling the intelligence shortcomings "totally unacceptable."
Abdulmutallab had been placed in one expansive database, but he never
made it onto more restrictive lists that would have caught the
attention of U.S. counterterrorist screeners, despite his father's
warnings to U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria last month. Those
warnings also did not result in Abdulmutallab's U.S. visa being revoked.
U.S. investigators said Abdulmutallab told them he received training
and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen — which lies across
the Gulf of Aden from Somalia.
Somali arrested
at airport with chemicals, syringe
YAHOO
By MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN, KATHARINE HOURELD and JASON STRAZIUSO,
Associated Press Writers
December 30, 2009
MOGADISHU, Somalia – A man tried to board a commercial airliner in
Mogadishu last month carrying powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe
that could have caused an explosion in a case bearing chilling
similarities to the terrorist plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner,
officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The Somali man — whose name has not yet been released — was arrested by
African Union peacekeeping troops before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines
flight took off. It had been scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the
northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai. A Somali
police spokesman, Abdulahi Hassan Barise, said the suspect is in Somali
custody.
"We don't know whether he's linked with al-Qaida or other foreign
organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught
him red-handed," said Barise.
A Nairobi-based diplomat said the incident in Somalia is similar to the
attempted attack on the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in that
the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid —
tools similar to those used in the Detroit attack. The diplomat spoke
on condition he not be identified because he isn't authorized to
release the information.
Barigye Bahoku, the spokesman for the African Union military force in
Mogadishu, said the chemicals from the Somali suspect could have caused
an explosion that would have caused air decompression inside the plane.
However, Bahoku said he doesn't believe an explosion would have brought
the plane down.
A second international official familiar with the incident, also
speaking on condition of anonymity because he isn't authorized to
discuss the case, confirmed that the substances carried by the Somali
passenger could have been used as an explosive device.
In the Detroit case, alleged attacker Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab hid
explosive PETN in a condom or condom-like bag just below his torso when
he traveled from Amsterdam to Detroit. Like the captured Somali,
Abdulmutallab also had a syringe filled with liquid. The substances
seized from the Somali passenger are being tested.
The November incident garnered little attention before the Dec. 25
attack aboard a flight on final approach to Detroit. U.S. officials
have now learned of the Somali case and are hastening to investigate
any possible links between it and the Detroit attack, though no
officials would speak on the record about the probe.
U.S. investigators said Abdulmutallab told them he received training
and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen — which lies across
the Gulf of Aden from Somalia. Similarly, large swaths of Somalia are
controlled by an insurgent group, al-Shabab, which has ties to al-Qaida.
Western officials say many of the hundreds of foreign jihadi fighters
in Somalia come in small boats across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. The
officials also say that examination of equipment used in some Somali
suicide attacks leads them to believe it was originally assembled in
Yemen.
Law enforcement officials believe the suspect in the Detroit incident
tried to ignite a two-part concoction of the high explosive PETN and
possibly a glycol-based liquid explosive, setting off popping, smoke
and some fire but no deadly detonation. Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian
national, is charged with trying to destroy an aircraft.
A Somali security official involved in the capture of the suspect in
Mogadishu said he had a 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) package of chemical
powder and a container of liquid chemicals. The security official said
the suspect was the last passenger to try to board.
Once security officials detected the powder chemicals and syringe, the
suspect tried to bribe the security team that detained him, the Somali
security official said. The security official said the suspect had a
white shampoo bottle with a black acid-like substance in it. He also
had a clear plastic bag with a light green chalky substance and a
syringe containing a green liquid. The security official spoke on
condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the
information.
The powdered material had the strong scent of ammonia, Bahoku said, and
samples have been sent to London for testing.
The Somali security officials said the Daallo Airlines flight was
scheduled to go from Mogadishu to Hargeisa, to Djibouti and then to
Dubai.
A spokeswoman for Daallo Airlines said that company officials weren't
aware of the incident and would have to seek more information before
commenting. Daallo Airlines is based in Dubai and has offices in
Djibouti and France.
Missile test in Iran weekend before Yom Kippur
'Have you no shame?'
NYPOST
By BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
Last Updated: 8:41 AM, September 25, 2009
Posted: 11:22 PM, September 24, 2009
Excerpts from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's
address yester day to the United Nations General Assembly:
NEARLY 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the
Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years old, to a state of their own in
their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the prime minister of
Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country
and my people.
The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and
the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the
recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that
central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.
Yesterday, the president of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his
latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed
that the Holocaust is a lie.
LAST month, I went to a villa in a sub urb of Berlin called Wannsee.
There, on Jan. 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met
and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes
of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.
Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise
instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this
a lie?
A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original
construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those
plans are signed by Hitler's deputy, Heinrich Himmler, himself. Here is
a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were
murdered. Is this too a lie?
This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie?
And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed
numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?
One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every
Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents,
her father's two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles
and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?
YESTERDAY, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this po
dium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room
in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity, and you
brought honor to your countries.
But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf
of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you
no shame? Have you no decency?
A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man
who denies that the murder of 6 million Jews took place and pledges to
wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the
charter of the United Nations!
Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten
only the Jews. You're wrong. History has shown us time and again that
what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many
others.
THIS Iranian regime is fueled by an ex treme fundamentalism that burst
onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for
centuries. In the past 30 years, this fanaticism has swept the globe
with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice
of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews
and Hindus and many others.
Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this
unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever
they can, they impose a backward, regimented society where women,
minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally
subjugated.
The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith
nor civilization against civilization. It pits civilization against
barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify
life against those who glorify death.
The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the
progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of
technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day.
Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future
offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope.
BUT if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly
weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And, like
the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom
will prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and fortune has been
exacted from mankind.
That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage
between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.
The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of
Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the
United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community
confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely
stand up for freedom?
Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in
broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the
streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community
thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of
terrorism?
Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime
of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace
of the entire world?
The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People
of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who
have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand
by their side?
Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations.
WE want peace. I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we
roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy
peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question
facing the international community is whether it is prepared to
confront those forces or accommodate them.
Over 70 years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the
"confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of
civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them. He
bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to
act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear
thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until
self-preservation strikes its jarring gong."
I speak here today in the hope that Churchill's assessment of the
"unteachability of mankind" is for once proven wrong. I speak here
today in the hope that we can learn from history -- that we can prevent
danger in time.
In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years
ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril,
secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for
generations to come.
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of Use
U.S. commander: more troops or
Afghan war lost
YAHOO
By Peter Graff and Golnar Motevalli Peter Graff And Golnar Motevalli
KABUL (Reuters) – The Afghan war will be lost unless more troops are
sent to pursue a radically revised strategy, the top U.S. and NATO
commander said in a confidential assessment that lays out stark choices
for President Barack Obama.
In the assessment, sent to Washington last month and leaked on Monday,
Army General Stanley McChrystal said failure to reverse "insurgent
momentum" in the near term risked an outcome where "defeating the
insurgency is no longer possible".
A copy of the 66-page document was obtained by the Washington Post and
published on its website with some parts removed at the request of the
government for security reasons.
"Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it,"
McChrystal wrote.
"Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict,
greater casualties, higher overall costs and ultimately, a critical
loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to
result in mission failure."
McChrystal, who commands more than 100,000 Western troops, two thirds
of them American, has drafted a separate request spelling out how many
more he needs but has not sent it to the Pentagon, which says it is
considering how he should submit it. Opinion polls show Americans
and
their European NATO allies turning against the nearly eight-year-old
war.
A request for more troops faces resistance from within Obama's
Democratic Party, which controls Congress, but refusing to give
McChrystal what he wants would open Obama to criticism from Republicans
who say he should act quickly. In a series of interviews on
Sunday
Obama said he would not rush to a decision and wanted to first review
his strategy for the region before considering whether to send more
troops.
"I just want to make sure that everybody understands that you don't
make decisions about resources before you have the strategy ready," he
told ABC.
McChrystal's spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Tadd Sholtis, said that
while McChrystal does not believe he can defeat Afghanistan's
insurgency without more troops, he could carry out a mission with
different goals if Obama ordered it.
"The assessment is based on his understand of the mission as it was
presented to him. If there's a change in strategy, then the resources
piece changes," he said. He said McChrystal had no intention of
resigning if Obama denies his request.
GRIM PICTURE
In his assessment, McChrystal painted a grim picture of the war so far,
saying "the overall situation is deteriorating".
He called for a "revolutionary" shift putting more emphasis on
protecting Afghans than on killing insurgents.
"Our objective must be the population," he wrote. "The objective is the
will of the people, our conventional warfare culture is part of the
problem, the Afghans must ultimately defeat the insurgency."
In a methodical critique of the war's conduct over the past eight
years, he said NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
troops often lacked basic understanding of Afghan society. He also
strongly criticized the Afghan government as having lost the faith of
the country's people.
"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers,
widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and
ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their
government," McChrystal said.
Among the failures: Afghan prisons had been allowed to become
sanctuaries where al Qaeda and Taliban fighters recruit more followers
and plan attacks. Even the West's multi-billion dollar
development aid
programs came in for blunt criticism: "Too often these projects enrich
power brokers, corrupt officials or international contractors and serve
only limited segments of the population."
In the weeks since the assessment was written, Afghanistan has held a
disputed election, which makes it more difficult to persuade Western
countries to send additional troops. European allies, whose
governments support the war often over public opposition at home, have
begun openly wavering. Britain has suffered its worst combat
casualties in a generation, German troops called in an air strike that
killed scores of people, and last week six Italian soldiers were killed
by a bomb, all events that sapped European support for the war.
Thousands of Italians packed the streets of Rome on Monday for a state
funeral for the soldiers, amid mounting calls for Italy to pull its
troops out. Tim Ripley, a British analyst for Jane's Defense
Weekly,
told Reuters fixing the war effort would be a problem far more
complicated than even that faced by U.S. commanders in Iraq.
"Think of all the parts. You've got America, the president, Congress,
the Pentagon. You've got the Afghan government and security forces.
NATO: all the different countries. Pakistan. And that's just the people
who are supposed to be on our side."
"It's one thing coming up with a smart plan. It's another thing having
the ability to put it into practice. Is it beyond the reach of one
individual to pull it all together?"
I-BBC
Page last updated at 14:47 GMT,
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 15:47 UK
An international investigation is under way over what
happened to the ship. "About Town" notes: See below to chart the
happenings...
|
'Ransom threat
hit hijack ship'
A group that hijacked the
Arctic Sea
threatened to blow up the cargo ship if its demand for a ransom was not
met, Russian defence ministry officials say.
The vessel's
eight alleged hijackers and its 15-man crew were questioned aboard a
Russian naval ship off the coast of West Africa. The Arctic Sea was
said to have gone missing on 30 July as it rounded the north-western
corner of France. But Maltese maritime authorities have said it "never
disappeared".
Speculation
about what happened to the ship has included suggestions of piracy, a
mafia dispute, a commercial row, smuggling or trafficking.
Correspondents say that despite the details given by Russian officials,
the case is still laden with mysteries.
Carrying
timber reportedly worth $1.8m (£1.1m), the 4,000-tonne Arctic Sea
sailed from Finland and had been scheduled to dock in the Algerian port
of Bejaia on 4 August.
'Continuously tracked'
Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov says the
hijackers attacked on 24 July. Once
on board, they threatened the crew with guns and forced them to turn
off navigational and tracking equipment and sail south, the defence
minister said.
"Crewmembers confirm that the hijackers demanded a
ransom and
threatened to blow the ship up if their orders were not obeyed," an
unnamed Russian defence ministry official was quoted as saying by
Interfax news agency. Earlier reports said assailants had left the ship
after 12 hours.
Four of the suspects are Estonian, two are Latvians and
two Russians.
Moscow deployed vessels from its Atlantic fleet to find
the Arctic Sea last week. Russia said it reached the Maltese-flagged
ship on Monday, 300 miles (480 km) off Cape Verde in the Atlantic
Ocean. The hijackers were armed but abandoned their weapons when
stopped, Russian officials say.
But
the Malta Maritime Authority said the Arctic Sea had been "continuously
tracked" from the moment it was reported to have been hijacked until
the Russian navy said it had taken the ship on Monday.
Maritime
officials in Malta, Finland and Sweden had not wanted "to jeopardise
the life and safety of the persons on board and the integrity of the
ship", it said.
Last weekend, a multinational investigation was
launched after police in Finland said a ransom demand had been made,
while emphasising that they could not confirm its authenticity.
|
S
O M A L I P I R A
T E S - O T H E R
P A R T S O F T H
E W O R L D
President Obama says he
wants to make
it very clear that we will work
to "halt the rise of privacy." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7996659.stm
New deployment
techniques for pirate speed boats aiming bigger?
Top above, poster for movie "Black Hawk Down" under Clinton
Administration; "Wind and the Lion"
(co-starring,
perhaps, the earlier version of the
U.S.S. Bainbridge) tests President Teddy Roosevelt...and cruise ships
have been terror targets in the past in real life.
Trial of alleged Somali pirates opens in
Netherlands
Page last updated at 15:26 GMT,
Tuesday, 25 May 2010 16:26 UK
The five men are accused of seeking to hijack a cargo
ship in the Gulf of Aden
The first European trial of alleged
Somali pirates has opened in the Netherlands.
Five men have denied seeking to hijack a cargo ship
registered in the Netherlands Antilles, saying they were on a simple
fishing trip.
They were arrested in the Gulf of Aden last year when their
high-speed boat was intercepted by a Danish frigate. They face up to 12
years in jail.
Pirates attempted more than 200 attacks off the Somali coast
in 2009.
Worldwide, there were an estimated 400 pirate attacks.
'Just
fishing'
The five men are being tried in Rotterdam district court.
They were arrested in January last year after allegedly preparing to
board the cargo ship Samanyolu, which was registered in the Caribbean.
One of the suspects, Farah Ahmed Yusuf, 25, told the court:
"The intention was to fish."
During the trip their engine broke down and they tried to get
the attention of a passing ship, he said.
"As we came closer, we put our hands in the air. While we had
our hands in the air, they shot at us. They attacked us," he said,
denying that he or his friends had fired any shots.
The Turkish crew on board the ship testified that the men
sped towards the ship, firing with rifles, and that they also fired a
rocket at the ship's bridge, but it missed.
The crew say they fired flares at the small boat to keep it
at bay until a Danish patrol vessel arrived.
One suspect, Sayid Ali Garaar, 39, pleaded with the court: "I
am the victim here. They destroyed my boat and put my life in danger."
Speaking about life in lawless Somalia, he added: "You sleep
in your house while I have no country, no family. I have nothing."
The men's lawyers say they will challenge the jurisdiction of
Dutch courts to try the case because the cargo vessel was under the
flag of the Netherlands Antilles, which has its own justice system.
This trial is expected to last five days, and the judgement
is expected to be handed down in the middle of next month.
Death
sentence
The trial is being watched closely in other countries seeking
a judicial solution to the growing problem of piracy.
Many of the suspects arrested in military operations in the
Gulf of Aden in recent years have had to be set free for lack of
evidence, while nearby African countries have been reluctant to take on
the burden of trials.
Last Tuesday, a Yemeni court sentenced six Somali pirates to
death and jailed six others for 10 years each for hijacking a Yemeni
oil tanker and killing two cabin crew in April last year.
Also last Tuesday, another Somali, Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse,
pleaded guilty in a New York court to seizing a US ship and kidnapping
its captain last year. He faces a minimum of 27 years in prison, and is
expected to be sentenced in October.
Muse is the only surviving attacker of the Maersk Alabama
merchant ship off Somalia's coast in April 2009.
DIE HARD SERIES IS INSTRUCTIONAL...BUT TO WHOM?
How is this form of "terror" (large merchant vessels) related to any of
the others?
DIE HARD 3, the movie, come to life? Where is Bruce Willis when
you need
him? Ahah! Die
Hard 4 is now showing - embellished take-over
of computer systems motif started in Die Hard 2 and REALLY expands it,
21st century style!
LITERACY QUESTION
If the Somali pirates had a better education in foreign languages,
would they have taken a second shot at this ship?
Crew packing heat when pirates attack
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Last Updated: 9:08 AM, November 18, 2009
Posted: 6:59 AM, November 18, 2009
NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama for the
second time in seven months this morning, but guards on board the
U.S.-flagged cargo ship repelled the takeover attempt, the EU's naval
force said.
Pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama last April and took ship captain
Richard Phillips hostage, holding him at gunpoint in a lifeboat for
five days. Navy SEAL sharpshooters freed Phillips while killing three
pirates in a daring nighttime attack.
Somali pirates attacked the ship with automatic weapons early Wednesday
about 350 nautical miles east of the Somali coast, but guards on board
the craft fired back and thwarted the attempted hijacking.
Cmdr. John Harbour, a spokesman for the EU Naval Force, called it "pure
chance" that the Maersk Alabama had been targeted a second time.
"It's not the first vessel to have been attacked twice, and it's a
chance that every single ship takes as it passes through the area,"
Harbour said. "At least this time they had a vessel protection
detachment on board who were able to repel the attack."
An EU patrol aircraft from the Horn of Africa nation Djibouti was
called in to investigate, and the closest EU Naval Force vessel was
tasked with searching for the pirate attack group, the EU Naval Force
said in a statement.
Phillips' ordeal last spring galvanized the attention of the U.S.
public to the dangers of operating merchant ships in the Horn of
Africa, one of the busiest and most precarious sea lanes in the world.
Pirates have greatly increased their attacks in recent weeks after
seasonal rains subsided. On Monday, a self-proclaimed pirate said that
Somali hijackers had been paid $3.3 million for the release of 36 crew
members from a Spanish vessel held for more than six weeks — a clear
demonstration of how lucrative the trade can be for impoverished
Somalis.
Phillips told The Associated Press last month from his farmhouse in
Vermont that he was contemplating retiring from sea life after his
ordeal. He's been given a book deal and a movie could be in the works.
Phillips was hailed as a hero for helping his crew thwart April's
hijacking before he was taken hostage, but he says he never
volunteered, as crew members and his family reported at the time.
JONAH AND THE WHALE
MEETS HEIMLICH MANEUVER? U.S. NAVY ENDS STANDOFF; A.C.L.U. TO THE...RESCUE?
A true gift for Easter! No "Black Hawk Down" tragedy
here!!! Quick sharpshooter action and just the right timing wins
the day! TR would have liked this! Now our American justice
system will show the world why "The Mouse That Roared" (1959), the
movie, was such a sharp comment on the American sense of justice, fair
play and global responsibility.
Ship captain: Just arming crews won't
stop piracy
DAY
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer
Posted on Apr 30, 2:25 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Commercial ships working pirate-infested waters
should be protected by an armed corps of senior officers backed by the
government, Maersk Alabama Capt. Richard Phillips told Congress
Thursday, emphasizing all must operate under a clear chain of command.
"I am not comfortable giving up command authority to others, including
the commander of a protection force," Phillips said in remarks prepared
for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and obtained by The
Associated Press. "In the heat of an attack, there can be only one
final decision-maker."
Phillips, who was held by pirates for five days this month and rescued
by Navy SEALs, was the star witness during a series of hearings as
Congress considers ways to combat a spike in piracy against ships
carrying billions of dollars in cargo and humanitarian aid.
Modern-day piracy, the experts were to testify, is the product of
lawlessness in places like Somalia and is motivated by money more than
ideology. It's a dangerous business nonetheless, with pirates carrying
small arms and rocket launchers.
The International Maritime Bureau recorded 111 attacks in the waters
off the Horn of Africa in 2008, almost double the number of the year
before. The bureau has recorded at least 84 attacks in the first
quarter of 2009.
About 300 non-U.S. crew members remain in Somali captivity aboard 18
hijacked vessels, according to the Senate panel.
The problem requires a complex regional response between the United
States and other powers such as China, India and Russia, Ambassador
Stephen Mull told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He said U.S.
officials are working with other countries to deny pirates whatever
they might gain from taking ships and crews.
"We will continue to press the importance of a 'no concessions' policy
when dealing with pirates," Mull said.
Phillips' firsthand experience aside, there's little consensus among
policymakers and maritime experts on the wisdom of arming merchant
seamen.
The chairman of Phillips' own company told the Senate panel that doing
so could make the seas even more dangerous.
"Arming merchant sailors may result in the acquisition of ever more
lethal weapons and tactics by the pirates, a race that merchant sailors
cannot win," Maersk Inc. Chairman John P. Clancey said in his prepared
remarks.
Witnesses said the solution will require a combination of diplomacy and
cooperation between governments, shippers and seamen's unions.
Government protection for ships in vast international waters was
already in progress.
Belgium said Thursday that its military will provide onboard protection
to commercial ships off the Horn of Africa, beginning this weekend.
Teams of eight soldiers will be available to Belgian ships upon request
if an EU anti-piracy flotilla in the region can't guarantee protection.
The costs will be assumed by ship owners.
Phillips, 53, was taken hostage April 8 after four Somali pirates
assaulted his ship, the Maersk Alabama. He was rescued April 12. He has
described the siege in interviews, but told the Senate panel he would
not talk about the details because of an ongoing investigation and
legal proceedings against one of the pirates who held him hostage.
Israeli security fights off pirates
attacking ship
New Haven Register
Monday, April 27, 2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The small white skiff approached the Italian
cruise ship Melody after dinnertime as it sailed north of the
Seychelles, the pirates firing wildly toward the 1,500 passengers and
crew on board.
What the pirates didn’t expect was that, in the darkness, the crew
would fire back. Private Israeli security forces aboard the liner
fired on the pirates Saturday with pistols and water hoses, preventing
them from getting aboard. Passengers were ordered to return to
their cabins and the lights on deck were switched off. The massive
vessel then sailed on in darkness, eventually escorted by a Spanish
warship to make sure it made it to its next port.
“It felt like we were in war,” the ship’s Italian Commander, Ciro
Pinto, told Italian state radio.
None of the roughly 1,000 passengers were hurt and by Sunday afternoon
they were back out on deck sunning themselves, Pellegrino said.
But analysts say the unprecedented use of weapons by the ship’s
security force could make things worse in the pirate-infested waters
off the Horn of Africa, where over 100 ships were attacked last year by
Somalia-based pirates. In nearly all the hijackings, the crews were
unharmed and were let go after a ransom was paid.
“There is a consensus in the shipping industry that, in the vast
majority of cases, having an armed guard is not a good idea. The No. 1
reason is that it could cause an escalation of violence and pirates
that have so far been trying to scare ships could now start to kill
people,” said Roger Middleton, an expert on Somali piracy at
London-based think tank Chatham House.
Other experts disagree, saying piracy off the coast of modern-day
Somalia is unique in that the pirates are most interested in human
cargo.
“Their business model, if you will, has been to not cross a line which
would bring the whole weight of the world upon them. They want to seize
hostages and ransom those hostages. So the likelihood that they would
escalate violence is unlikely,” said Africa expert Peter Pham, director
of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James
Madison University.
He argued that arming ships is not a sustainable solution, given that
an estimated 20,000 ships pass through the Gulf of Aden each year.
“For the Melody, you’re talking about 1,000 passengers and 500 crew
members, so maybe for 1,500 people paying to have security on board
makes both economical and tactical sense — but when you’re dealing with
ordinary cargo ships it’s very different,” he said.
Pellegrino said MSC Cruises had Israeli private security forces on all
their ships because they were the best. He said the pistols on board
were at the discretion of the commander and the security forces.
The attack occurred near the Seychelles and about 500 miles (800
kilometers) east of Somalia, according to the anti-piracy flotilla
headquarters of the Maritime Security Center Horn of Africa. The Melody
was traveling up Africa’s east coast, from Durban, South Africa to
Genoa, Italy.
Pinto said the pirates fired “like crazy” with automatic weapons,
slightly damaging the liner, when they approached in a small, white
Zodiac-like boat.
“After about four or five minutes, they tried to put a ladder up,”
Pinto told Sky TG24. “They were starting to climb up but we reacted, we
started to fire ourselves. When they saw our fire, and also the water
from the water hoses that we started to spray toward the Zodiac, they
left and went away ... They followed us for a bit, about 20 minutes,”
he said.
Somali Pirate Suspect Arrives in U.S.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:46 a.m. ET
April 21, 2009
NEW YORK (AP) -- A Somali teenager arrived to face what are believed to
be the first piracy charges in the United States in more than a
century, smiling but saying nothing as he was led into a federal
building under heavy guard.
Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, the sole surviving Somali pirate from the
hostage-taking of an American ship captain, was to appear in a
courtroom Tuesday on what were expected to be piracy and hostage-taking
charges.
Handcuffed with a chain wrapped around his waist and about a dozen
federal agents surrounding him, the slight teen seemed poised as he
passed through the glare of dozens of news cameras in a drenching
rainstorm. His left hand was heavily bandaged from the wound he
suffered during the skirmish on the cargo ship, the Maersk
Alabama. A law enforcement official familiar with the case said
Muse (moo-SAY') was being charged under two obscure federal laws that
deal with piracy and hostage-taking. The official spoke on condition of
anonymity because the charges had not been announced.
The teenager was flown from Africa to a New York airport on the same
day that his mother appealed to President Barack Obama for his release.
She said her son was coaxed into piracy by ''gangsters with money.''
''I appeal to President Obama to pardon my teenager; I request him to
release my son or at least allow me to see him and be with him during
the trial,'' Adar Abdirahman Hassan said in a telephone interview with
The Associated Press from her home in Galkayo town in Somalia.
The boy's father, Abdiqadir Muse, said the pirates lied to his son,
telling him they were going to get money. The family is penniless, he
said.
''He just went with them without knowing what he was getting into,''
Muse said in a separate telephone interview with the AP through an
interpreter.
He also said it was his son's first outing with the pirates after
having been taken from his home about a week and a half before he
surrendered at sea to U.S. officials. The young pirate's age and
real name remained unclear. His parents said he is only 16; law
enforcement said he is at least 18, meaning prosecutors will not have
to take extra legal steps to try him in a U.S. court. His worried
family asked the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center to
help get him a lawyer, said the organization's executive director, Omar
Jamal.
''What we have is a confused teenager, overnight thrown into the
highest level of the criminal justice system in the United States out
of a country where there's no law at all,'' Jamal said. Muse speaks no
English, he said.
The suspect was taken aboard a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Bainbridge,
shortly before Navy SEAL snipers killed three of his colleagues who had
held Maersk Alabama Capt. Richard Phillips hostage. The U.S.
officials said the teenager was brought to New York to face trial in
part because the FBI office here has a history of handling cases in
Africa involving major crimes against Americans, such as the al-Qaida
bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998.
Court documents list the suspect's name as Abduhl Wali-i-Musi, which
the boy's parents have said is incorrect. Ron Kuby, a New
York-based civil rights lawyer, said he has been in discussions about
forming a legal team to represent the Somali suspect.
''I think in this particular case, there's a grave question as to
whether America was in violation of principles of truce in warfare on
the high seas,'' said Kuby. ''This man seemed to come onto the
Bainbridge under a flag of truce to negotiate. He was then captured.
There is a question whether he is lawfully in American custody and
serious questions as to whether he can be prosecuted because of his
age.''
17 April 2009
The suspected pirate was arrested
by US sailors while rescuing a US hostage
|
Somali 'pirate'
to be tried in US
A Somali teenager captured by the US navy during a
confrontation with pirates is to be taken to the US to face trail, US
officials have said.
The man, named as Abdul Wali Muse, was allegedly
involved in the attempt to seize the Maersk Alabama merchant ship off
Somalia last week.
His three companions were killed by US navy snipers in
the operation to rescue the Alabama's kidnapped US captain.
Capt Richard Phillips is now returning to the US from
Kenya after his ordeal.
US officials say Mr Muse will be tried in a federal
court in New York, American media have reported.
There is some confusion about his age, however, and
whether he can be tried as an adult in the US.
No charges have been filed, but acts of piracy can
carry a sentence of life in prison, says the BBC's Jonathan Beale in
Washington.
Hero's welcome
It is not clear when Mr Muse will be taken to the US.
US officials had considered handing him over to
authorities in Kenya, which has prosecuted pirates in the past under an
international agreement.
On Thursday, French officials said they would send 11
suspected pirates to Kenya for trial.
There has been pressure to prosecute him in an American
court as the Maersk Alabama is a US-flagged ship and Capt Phillips is
an American citizen, says our correspondent.
Capt Phillips was freed in a
dramatic high seas rescue
|
He was held hostage for five days after the Alabama was
attacked on 8 April.
The crew disabled the ship's power and hid from the
pirates while Capt Phillips offered himself as a hostage, the ship's
crew said.
The crew sailed the ship to Kenya after the pirates
left on a lifeboat with the captain.
The other 19 members of the crew returned to the US on
Thursday to be greeted by cheers and hugs from family and friends.
After his rescue, Capt Phillips was taken on board the
destroyer USS Bainbridge, which has been in the waters off Somalia
conducting anti-piracy patrols.
He was taken to the Kenyan port of Mombasa on Thursday
and is now on his way back to the US where he is expected to receive a
hero's welcome.
Anti-piracy measures
Pirates operating off the coast of Somalia have
intensified attacks on shipping in recent weeks in one of the world's
busiest sea lanes, despite patrols by the US and other navies.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled a plan
on Wednesday to tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean
off Somalia.
She said an expanded international effort was needed,
as well as freezing pirates' assets, and plugging gaps in the shipping
industry's own defences.
Improving the situation in Somalia itself was also key,
she said.
|
Captain of Ship Seized by Pirates
Reaches Dry Land
NYTIMES
By MARK McDONALD AND MATTHEW SALTMARSH
April 17, 2009
Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama who was
freed by U.S. Navy commandos in a dramatic operation at sea, arrived
Thursday in Mombasa, Kenya, on board the U.S.S. Bainbridge.
Captain Phillips was expected to leave Mombasa to return to the United
States later Thursday. The U.S. destroyer that rescued him docked
to the strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd hours after
his crew reunited with their families back home, The Associated Press
reported from Mombasa. A charter plane was on standby to whisk
Phillips home, the report added, citing an unnamed security official at
Mombasa airport. The arrival of the Bainbridge at port in Kenya
had been delayed after it responded to a distress call on Tuesday from
another American merchant ship, the Liberty Sun.
The crew of the Maersk Alabama, an American cargo ship which was
briefly seized last week by Somali pirates, arrived back in the United
States early Thursday morning.
The 19-man crew from the Alabama arrived at 1 a.m. on a chartered
flight at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Family members and
representatives from the shipping company Maersk greeted the plane,
standing on the tarmac, cheering and waving American flags.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday
announced new diplomatic efforts to deal with the increasing piracy in
the Gulf of Aden and off the East African coast. She endorsed freezing
pirates’ assets and perhaps moving against pirate sanctuaries on land.
The United States successfully pressed for the passage of a U.N.
Security Council resolution last December that authorized such “hot
pursuits” by international navies.
Also Wednesday, French naval forces detained 11 people suspected of
being pirates during an assault on what they described as a pirate
“mother ship” in the Indian Ocean off Somalia. The Liberty Sun was
attacked in the same area, but the ship’s evasive maneuvers foiled the
hijack attempt. The Liberty Sun, with its cargo of humanitarian food
aid, arrived in Mombasa on Wednesday evening. French forces had
freed a yacht, the Tanit, in an operation last week in which two
pirates and a hostage were killed; three pirates taken prisoner in that
episode have been sent to France.
The French tactics — and the earlier rescue operation by the
Bainbridge, which included U.S. Navy snipers killing three pirates
using night-vision scopes — indicated a more muscular approach by
governments in battling piracy. It was a change of course broadly
outlined in Mrs. Clinton’s remarks.
“The modus operandi,” she said, “for a lot of countries and shipping
companies up until now has been, “OK, they hijacked the ship. They get
it into port. Nobody’s harmed. We pay a ransom. We’ve done a business
calculation, so that’s the way it is.’ “
But then she added: “The United States does not make concessions or
ransom payments to pirates.”
The 11 suspects detained Wednesday by the French were being held on
board a French frigate, the Nivôse, part of a European Union
antipiracy task force patrolling the area, the French Defense Ministry
said in a statement.
15 April 2009,
I-BBC
The French navy captured 11 pirates
after intercepting a "mother ship"
|
US unveils plan
to tackle piracy
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has unveiled a
four-point plan to tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
She said an expanded international effort was needed,
as well as freezing pirates' assets, and plugging gaps in the shipping
industry's own defences.
Improving the situation in Somalia itself was also key,
she said.
Pirate attacks have increased in the past few days,
including on US vessels, despite anti-piracy patrols by the US and
other navies.
Mrs Clinton said: "We may be dealing with a
17th-Century crime, but we need to bring 21st-Century assets to bear."
The US Navy shot dead three pirates a few days ago in
the rescue of a US cargo ship captain who had been taken hostage from
his own ship.
 |
 It is time to eliminate the
financial payoff of piracy 
Hillary Clinton
US Secretary of State
|
The captain was unhurt and a fourth pirate was
captured.
His crew had managed to fight off the armed pirates
from the Maersk Alabama, but the captain was taken away in a lifeboat.
Among recent developments:
- Another US ship, the Liberty Sun, was attacked by
armed pirates, but escaped them with slight damage to the vessel.
- The crew of the Maersk Alabama flew home to the US
from the Kenyan city of Mombasa, but their captain's own return was
delayed as he was still on the USS Bainbridge, the warship which had
diverted to assist Liberty Sun.
- One pirate said the attack on the Liberty Sun was
revenge for the recent deaths of pirates.
- The French navy captured 11 pirates after
intercepting a command vessel about 550 miles (900km) off the coast of
Kenya.
- The Greek maritime ministry announced that a Greek
cargo ship and its 24 crew, held by pirates since mid-March, had been
released.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on
plans to tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden
The US four-point plan includes sending an envoy to the
Somali donors' conference in Brussels on 23 April to work on plans to
improve the situation in Somalia.
Mrs Clinton said the US would work with the Contact
Group on Piracy Off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) to expand the
multinational response to piracy.
She called for states to take responsibility for
prosecuting and imprisoning captured pirates.
"These pirates are criminals, they are armed gangs on
the sea, and those plotting attacks must be stopped."
Mrs Clinton called for continued work on releasing
captured vessels, as several ships and their crews remain in the hands
of pirates.
She also said the international group had to consider
ways to track and freeze pirate assets.
"It is time to eliminate the financial payoff of
piracy," she told reporters.
"We will also reiterate to all concerned the US policy
of making no concessions or ransom payments to hostage takers."
The state department will set up meetings with members
of the Somali Transitional Federal Government and regional leaders.
"We must press authorities within Somalia to take
action against pirates operating from bases within their territory,"
Mrs Clinton said.
Making clear the threat was not just an issue for
governments to resolve, she said the shipping industry had a joint
responsibility.
"I have directed the [State] Department to work with
shippers and the insurance industry to address gaps in their
self-defence measures."
|
Somali pirates hijack 4 ships
DAY
Published on 4/15/2009
Mombasa, Kenya - Somali pirates were back to business as usual Tuesday,
defiantly seizing four more ships with 60 hostages after U.S.
sharpshooters rescued an American freighter captain. “No one can deter
us,” one bandit boasted.
The freed skipper, Richard Phillips, will return home to the United
States today after reuniting with his 19-man crew in the Kenyan port of
Mombasa, according to the shipping company Maersk Line Ltd.
The brigands grabbed more ships and hostages to show they would not be
intimidated by President Barack Obama's pledge to confront the
high-seas bandits, according to a pirate based in the Somali coastal
town of Harardhere.
”Our latest hijackings are meant to show that no one can deter us from
protecting our waters from the enemy because we believe in dying for
our land,” Omar Dahir Idle told The Associated Press by telephone. “Our
guns do not fire water. I am sure we will avenge.”
On Monday, Obama vowed to “halt the rise of piracy” without saying
exactly how the U.S. and allies would do it.
The pirates have vowed vengeance for five colleagues slain by U.S. and
French forces in two hostage rescues since Friday.
”The recent American operation, French navy attack on our colleagues or
any other operation mean nothing to us,” said Idle, 26, whose gang
holds a German freighter with 24 hostages.
The pirates say they are fighting illegal fishing and dumping of toxic
waste in Somali waters but have come to operate hundreds of miles from
there in a sprawling 1.1 million square-mile danger zone.
15 April 2009, I-BBC
The French warship is part of the
EU's operation in the Gulf of Aden
|
French warship
captures pirates
A French warship has captured 11 pirates off the coast
of Kenya, amid calls for the international community to deal with the
problem of piracy.
The pirates were captured by a warship from an EU
piracy patrol, hours after a failed attack on a US ship.
News of the incidents came as the UN special envoy for
Somalia said the attacks threatened international peace.
He urged financial backers of the "bandits", as he
called them, to be identified and held accountable.
The latest attack involved pirates firing
rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at a US-flagged cargo
ship, the Liberty Sun, which was carrying food aid for Africa.
'Mother ship'
The French Defence Ministry said the warship Nivose
captured the pirates about 550 miles (900km) east of the Kenyan port of
Mombasa.
It had detected a "mother ship", or command vessel, on
Tuesday, and observed it overnight before launching an assault early on
Wednesday, the ministry said.
An attack on a Liberian-registered vessel was also
thwarted, the ministry added.
The Nivose is part of the European Union's operation to
protect shipping in the Gulf of Aden.
Despite several anti-piracy patrols, there has been an
increase in attacks in the past few days, with four ships seized and
others attacked.
The United Nations special envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou
Ould-Abdallah, said the attacks were threatening international peace.
In a BBC interview, he also called for help for poor
Somalis themselves, many of whom were being exploited by the pirates.
|
Crew
Honors Captain After Rescue
NYTIMES
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and SCOTT SHANE
April
14, 2009
Jubilation
from his crew, relief from his family and vows of bitter revenge from
Somali pirates have followed the rescue of an American cargo-ship
captain by Navy sharpshooters.
The five-day standoff in the Indian Ocean ended at dusk on Sunday when
Navy Seal snipers on the fantail of the destroyer U.S.S. Bainbridge
killed three of the pirates holding Capt. Richard Phillips in an orange
covered lifeboat in the Indian Ocean while the fourth pirate was in
American hands. The pirates had first tried to seize an American-crewed
container vessel, the Maersk Alabama, last Wednesday, and then
retreated to the lifeboat with the captain as a hostage when the
American crew retook control of the ship a few hours later. The
Bainbridge, on patrol in the region, arrived to deal with the pirates
while the container ship went on to port in Mombasa, Kenya.
Saying they felt lucky to be alive, the crew paid tribute on Monday to
the courage of their captain, thanked the Navy for helping them and
called on President Obama to do more to stamp out piracy near the Horn
of Africa, where a dozen other ships with more than 200 crew members
are being held for ransom now, according to the Malaysia-based
International Maritime Bureau.
“We would like to implore President Obama to use all of his resources
and increase the commitment to ending this Somali pirate scourge,” said
Capt. Shane Murphy, the second-in-command of the Maersk Alabama, at a
news conference in Mombasa. “It’s time for us to step in and put an end
to this crisis.”
While the outcome of the standoff over Captain Phillips on the lifeboat
was a triumph for America, officials in many countries plagued by
pirates said that it was not likely to discourage them. In Somalia
itself, other pirates reacted angrily to news of the rescue, and some
said they would avenge the deaths of their colleagues by killing
Americans in sea hijackings to come.
“Every country will be treated the way it treats us,” Abdullahi Lami,
one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the pirate den of
Gaan, a central Somali town, was quoted by The Associated Press as
saying in a telephone interview. “In the future, America will be the
one mourning and crying.”
Pirates have also vowed violent revenge against French ships and
sailors after French commandos stormed a private yacht seized by
pirates in the Gulf of Aden on Friday, an action inn which two pirates
and one hostage died while four hostages were freed and three pirates
captured. "The French and the Americans will regret starting this
killing,” a pirate identified only as Hussein told Reuters by satellite
telephone on Monday. “We do not kill, but take only ransom. We shall do
something to anyone we see as French or American from now."
...Aboard the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton cargo ship, Captain
Phillips’s crew erupted in cheers, waved American flags and fired off
flares when they got word of the rescue. When four pirates attacked the
ship on Wednesday, the crew escaped harm after the captain offered
himself as a hostage. He told his crewmen to lock themselves in cabins,
and then allowed himself to be taken at gunpoint into the lifeboat in
which the pirates fled.
Over the ensuing days, according to official accounts of the episode,
the pirates demanded $2 million in ransom for the captain’s life and
made repeated threats to kill him as their motorized lifeboat moved
about 30 miles off the Somali coast. It was closely watched by United
States warships and helicopters in an increasingly tense standoff.
Talks to free the captain began Thursday, with the commander of the
Bainbridge communicating with the pirates under instructions from
F.B.I. hostage negotiators flown to the scene. The pirates threatened
to kill Captain Phillips if attacked, and the result was tragicomic:
the world’s most powerful navy vs. a lifeboat.
Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of the United States naval
forces in the region, said in a briefing in Bahrain that despite ransom
demands from the pirates, the United States had not discussed any
ransom and had talked to the pirates only about the release of Captain
Phillips and the pirates’ surrender.
The Defense Department twice sought Mr. Obama’s permission to use force
to rescue Captain Phillips, most recently on Friday night, senior
defense officials said. On Saturday morning, the president agreed, they
said, if it appeared that the captain’s life was in imminent danger...
Piracy was one of the issues that Rep. Donald Payne, Democrat of New
Jersey, discussed with Somali officials on Monday during a rare visit
by an American official to Mogadishu, the chaotic Somali capital. Mr.
Payne remained in the city only a few hours, meeting with Somalia’s
interim president and prime minister and holding a news conference.
Insurgents fired a mortar shell at Mr. Payne’s plane before it
departed, news reports said — not an uncommon occurrence at one of the
world’s most dangerous airports.
At the press conference in Mogadishu, Mr. Payne, the chairman of the
House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, called
for broader efforts against piracy along Somalia’s lawless coast, and
he defended the Navy action on Sunday that ended the five-day hostage
standoff. "Illegal activities must be dealt with,” he said, according
to Agence France-Presse. “If you don’t deal with criminal behavior,
then they will continue."
Some new news
here...
In Rescue of Captain, Navy Kills 3
Pirates
NYTIMES
By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN and SCOTT SHANE
April 13, 2009
Navy Seals rescued an American
ship captain unharmed and killed three Somali pirates in a daring
operation in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, ending a five-day hostage
standoff between United States naval forces and a small band of
brigands in a covered orange lifeboat off the Horn of Africa.
Acting with President Obama’s authorization and in the belief that the
hostage, Capt. Richard Phillips, was in imminent danger of being killed
by captors armed with pistols and AK-47s, snipers on the fantail of the
destroyer Bainbridge, which was towing the lifeboat on a 100-foot line,
opened fire and picked off the three captors.
Two of the captors had poked their heads out of a rear hatch of the
lifeboat, exposing themselves to clear shots, and the third could be
seen through a window in the bow, pointing an automatic rifle at the
captain, who was tied up inside the 18-foot lifeboat, senior Navy
officials said.
It took only three remarkable shots — one each by snipers firing from a
distance at dusk, using night-vision scopes, the officials said. Within
minutes, Seals in a small craft rowed up to the lifeboat, climbed
aboard, found the three pirates dead and untied Captain Phillips,
ending the contretemps at sea that had riveted much of the world’s
attention. A fourth pirate had surrendered earlier...
“I share the country’s admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips
and his selfless concern for his crew,” Mr. Obama said in a White House
statement. “His courage is a model for all Americans.”
The Defense Department twice asked Mr. Obama for permission to use
military force to rescue Captain Phillips, most recently late on Friday
night, senior defense officials said. On Saturday morning, the
president agreed to permit action, they said, but only if it appeared
that the captain’s life was in imminent danger.
By Friday, with several warships within easy reach of the lifeboat, the
negotiations had gone nowhere. Captain Phillips jumped into the sea,
but was quickly recaptured. On Saturday, the pirates fired several
shots at a small boat that had approached from the Bainbridge.
By the weekend, however, the pirates had begun to run out of food,
water and fuel. That apparently provided the opening officials were
hoping for. In briefings, senior officers who spoke anonymously because
they had not been authorized to disclose information said that the
pirates agreed Sunday to accept supplies of food and water. A small
craft was used to deliver them and it apparently made several trips
between the Bainbridge and the lifeboat.
On one trip, one of the four pirates — a man whose hand had been gashed
during the capture of Captain Phillips — asked for medical treatment
and, in effect surrendering, was taken in the small boat to the
Bainbridge. Justice Department officials were studying options for his
case, including criminal charges in the United States or turning him
over to Kenya, where dozens of pirates have faced prosecution. Three
pirates were left on board with Captain Phillips.
Meanwhile, Navy Seals were flown in by fixed-wing aircraft. They
parachuted into the sea with inflatable boats and were picked up by the
Bainbridge. On Sunday, the pirates, their fuel exhausted, were drifting
toward the Somali coast. They agreed to accept a tow from the
Bainbridge, the senior officials said. At first, the towline was 200
feet long, but as darkness gathered late on Sunday and seas became
rough, the tow line was shortened to 100 feet, the officials said. It
was unclear if this was done with the pirates’ knowledge.
At dusk, a single tracer bullet was seen fired from the lifeboat. The
intent was unclear, but it ratcheted up the tension and Seal snipers at
the stern rail of the Bainbridge fixed night-vision scopes to their
high-powered rifles, getting ready for action.
What they saw was the head and shoulders of two of the pirates emerging
from the rear hatch of the lifeboat. In addition, through the window of
the front hatch, they saw the third pirate, pointing his AK-47 at the
back of Captain Phillips, who was seen to be tied up.
That was it: the provocation that fulfilled the president’s order to
act only if the captain’s life was in imminent danger, and the
opportunity of having clear shots at each of the captors. The order was
given. Senior defense officials, themselves marveling at the skill of
the snipers, said each took a target and fired one shot.
Even as the gunfire cracked across the water, Special Forces personnel
were sliding down ropes from the Bainbridge. Within minutes, they were
boarding the lifeboat to confirm the kills and free the captain from
his bonds.
“This was an incredible team effort,” Admiral Gortney said when it was
over. “And I am extremely proud of the tireless efforts of all the men
and women who made this rescue possible.”
US sea captain held hostage by
Somali pirates freed safely in swift firefight; 3 pirates slain
Hartford Courant
ELIZABETH A. KENNEDYLARA JAKES, Associated Press Writers Associated
Press Writers
1:57 PM EDT, April 12, 2009
MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) — An American ship captain was freed unharmed
Sunday in a swift firefight that killed three of the four Somali
pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast
of Africa, the ship's owner said.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said a pirate who had been involved
in negotiations to free Capt. Richard Phillips but who was not on the
lifeboat was in custody. The Justice Department said it was reviewing
evidence and considering criminal charges against the captured pirate.
Phillips, 53, of Underhill, Vermont, was safely transported to a Navy
warship nearby.
Maersk Line Limited President and CEO John Reinhart said in a news
release that the U.S. government informed the company around 1:30 p.m.
EDT Sunday that Phillips had been rescued. Reinhart said the company
called Phillips' wife, Andrea, to tell her the news.
The U.S. official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and
spoke on condition of anonymity. A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate
comment.
When Phillips' crew heard the news aboard their ship in the port of
Mombasa, they placed an American flag over the rail of the top of the
Maersk Alabama and whistled and pumped their fists in the air. Crew
fired a bright red flare into the sky from the ship.
"We made it!" said crewman ATM Reza, pumping his fist in the air.
"He managed to be in a 120-degree oven for days, it's amazing," said
another of about a dozen crew members who came out to talk to
reporters. He said the crew found out the captain was released because
one of the sailors had been talking to his wife on the phone.
Capt. Joseph Murphy, the father of second-in-command Shane Murphy,
thanked Phillips for his bravery.
"Our prayers have been answered on this Easter Sunday. I have made it
clear throughout this terrible ordeal that my son and our family will
forever be indebted to Capt. Phillips for his bravery," Murphy said.
"If not for his incredible personal sacrifice, this kidnapping and act
of terror could have turned out much worse."
In the written statement, Murphy said both his family and Phillips'
"can now celebrate a joyous Easter together."
Terry Aiken, 66, who lives across the street from the Phillips house,
fought back tears as he reacted to the news.
"I'm very, very happy," Aiken said. "I can't be happier for him and his
family."
A government official and others in Somalia with knowledge of the
situation had reported hours earlier that negotiations for Phillips'
release had broken down.
Talks to free him began Thursday with the captain of the USS Bainbridge
talking to the pirates under instruction from FBI hostage negotiators
on board the U.S. destroyer. The pirates had threatened to kill
Phillips if attacked.
Three U.S. warships were within easy reach of the lifeboat on Saturday.
The U.S. Navy had assumed the pirates would try to get their hostage to
shore, where they can hide him on Somalia's lawless soil and be in a
stronger position to negotiate a ransom.
Maersk Line said before news of the rescue broke that "the U.S. Navy
had sight contact" of Phillips — apparently when the pirates opened the
hatches.
Before Phillips was freed, a pirate who said he was associated with the
gang that held Phillips, Ahmed Mohamed Nur, told The Associated Press
that the pirates had reported that "helicopters continue to fly over
their heads in the daylight and in the night they are under the focus
of a spotlight from a warship."
He spoke by satellite phone from Harardhere, a port and pirate
stronghold where a fisherman said helicopters flew over the town Sunday
morning and a warship was looming on the horizon. The fisherman, Abdi
Sheikh Muse, said that could be an indication the lifeboat may be near
to shore.
The district commissioner of the central Mudug region said talks went
on all day Saturday, with clan elders from his area talking by
satellite telephone and through a translator with Americans, but
collapsed late Saturday night.
"The negotiations between the elders and American officials have broken
down. The reason is American officials wanted to arrest the pirates in
Puntland and elders refused the arrest of the pirates," said the
commissioner, Abdi Aziz Aw Yusuf. He said he organized initial contacts
between the elders and the Americans.
Two other Somalis, one involved in the negotiations and another in
contact with the pirates, also said the talks collapsed because of the
U.S. insistence that the pirates be arrested and brought to justice.
Phillips' crew of 19 American sailors reached safe harbor in Kenya's
northeast port of Mombasa on Saturday night under guard of U.S. Navy
Seals, exhilarated by their freedom but mourning the absence of
Phillips.
Crew members said their ordeal had begun with the Somali pirates
hauling themselves up from a small boat bobbing on the surface of the
Indian Ocean far below.
As the pirates shot in the air, Phillips told his crew to lock
themselves in a cabin and surrendered himself to safeguard his men,
crew members said.
Phillips was then held hostage in an enclosed lifeboat that was closely
watched by U.S. warships and a helicopter in an increasingly tense
standoff. On Friday, the French navy freed a sailboat seized off
Somalia last week by other pirates, but one of the five hostages was
killed.
Phillips jumped out of the lifeboat Friday and tried to swim for his
freedom but was recaptured when a pirate fired an automatic weapon at
or near him, according to U.S. Defense Department officials speaking on
condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about
the unfolding operations.
Early Saturday, the pirates holding Phillips in the lifeboat fired a
few shots at a small U.S. Navy vessel that had approached, a U.S.
military official said on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The official said the U.S. sailors did not return fire, the Navy vessel
turned away and no one was hurt. He said the vessel had not been
attempting a rescue. The pirates are believed armed with pistols and
AK-47 assault rifles.
"When I spoke to the crew, they won't consider it done when they board
a plane and come home," Maersk President John Reinhart said from
Norfolk, Virginia before news of Phillips' rescue. "They won't consider
it done until the captain is back, nor will we."
In Phillips' hometown, the Rev. Charles Danielson of the St. Thomas
Church said before the news broke that the congregation would continue
to pray for Phillips and his family, who are members, and he would
encourage "people to find hope in the triumph of good over evil."
Reinhart said he spoke with Phillips' wife, who is surrounded by family
and two company employees who were sent to support her.
"She's a brave woman," Reinhart said. "And she has one favor to ask:
'Do what you have to do to bring Richard home safely.' That means don't
make a mistake, folks. We have to be perfect in our execution."
US ship, choppers,
shadow hostage captain, pirates
DAY
By Associated Press Writers
Posted on Apr 12, 10:25 AM EDT
MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) -- U.S. warships and helicopters stalked a
lifeboat holding an American sea captain and his four Somali captors
Sunday as Somalis reported negotiations for his release have collapsed
and his crew briefed FBI agents about how they fought off the pirates
who boarded their ship.
A Somali man involved in the negotiations and another in telephone
contact with the pirates said clan elders have been trying to negotiate
a free passage for the pirates in exchange for the release of Capt.
Richard Phillips, but the talks broke down Saturday night over the U.S.
insistence that the pirates must be arrested and brought to
justice.
Nineteen American sailors guarded by U.S. Navy Seals reached safe
harbor in Kenya's northeast port of Mombasa on Saturday night,
exhilarated by freedom but mourning the absence of Capt. Richard
Phillips, who sacrificed himself as a hostage to save them.
"He saved our lives!" second mate Ken Quinn, of Bradenton, Florida,
declared from the ship deck. "He's a hero."
ATM Reza, a crew member from Hartford, Conn., who said he was first to
see the pirates board the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama on Wednesday,
described how the bandits "came on with hooks and ropes and were firing
in the air."
He was responding to a throng of reporters shouting questions from
shore about the ordeal that began with Somali pirates hauling
themselves up from a small boat bobbing on the surface of the Indian
Ocean far below. As the pirates shot in the air, Phillips, 53, of
Underhill, Vermont, told his crew to lock themselves in a cabin and
surrendered himself to safeguard his men, crew members said...full
story here.
Phillips, a Winchester, Mass., native, was still held hostage in an
enclosed lifeboat Sunday by four pirates being closely watched by U.S.
warships and a helicopter in an increasingly tense standoff. The
lifeboat is out of fuel and drifting.
The Alabama's second-in-command, Capt. Shane Murphy of Seekonk, Mass.,
was among the sailors to reach safety. His father, Capt. Joseph Murphy,
is an instructor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy on Cape
Cod. A
Pentagon spokesman said Saturday night that negotiations to free
Phillips were continuing.
But Abdiwali Ali Tar said they were deadlocked. "Some local elders as
well as our company have been involved in the negotiations but things
seem to be deadlocked because the pirates want to make sure to be in a
safe location first with the captain - either on one of the ships their
colleagues hold or Somali coastal villages - but the Americans will not
allow that," said Tar, the head of a private security firm acting as
the coast guard in northeast Puntland region, a haven for pirates.
A second man who closely monitors piracy said his pirate sources
reported the negotiations collapsed because clan elders want the
pirates to go free if they release Phillips but the U.S. Navy is
demanding the elders surrender them to Puntland authorities. The man
spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Talks had
begun
Thursday with the captain of the USS Bainbridge talking to the pirates
under instruction from FBI hostage negotiators on board the U.S.
destroyer.
It was not clear where the lifeboat was on Sunday. A pirate who says he
is associated with the gang holding Phillips, Ahmed Mohamed Nur, told
The Associated Press that the pirates say "helicopters continue to fly
over their heads in the daylight and in the night they are under the
focus of a spotlight from a warship."
But Nur said satellite phone calls with the pirates had not established
the position of the boat: "We do not know where exactly the boat is."
He spoke by satellite phone from Harardhere, a port and pirate
stronghold where a fisherman said helicopters flew over the town Sunday
morning and a warship was looming on the horizon. The fisherman, Abdi
Sheikh Muse, said that could be an indication the lifeboat may be near
to shore. The U.S. Navy has assumed the pirates would try to get
their
hostage to shore, where they can hide him on Somalia's lawless soil and
be in a stronger position to negotiate a ransom.
Three U.S. warships were within easy reach of the lifeboat on Saturday,
but fears of endangering Phillips' life limit their ability to use
their overwhelming firepower.
On Friday, the French navy freed a sailboat seized off Somalia last
week by other pirates, but one of the five hostages was killed.
Early Saturday, the pirates holding Phillips in the lifeboat fired a
few shots at a small U.S. Navy vessel that had approached, a U.S.
military official said on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The official said the
U.S.
sailors did not return fire, the Navy vessel turned away and no one was
hurt. He said the vessel had not been attempting a rescue. The pirates
are believed armed with pistols and AK-47 assault rifles.
Phillips jumped out of the lifeboat Friday and tried to swim for his
freedom but was recaptured when a pirate fired an automatic weapon at
or near him, according to U.S. Defense Department officials speaking on
condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about
the unfolding operations.
In Mombasa, the Alabama crew described how they overpowered the pirates.
Reza, a father of one, said that after the pirates boarded, he had led
one to the engine room where he stabbed him in the hand with an ice
pick and tied him up. Other sailors corroborated that story. The
crew
have told family members by phone that they took one pirate hostage
before giving him up in the hope their captain would be released.
Instead, the Somalis fled with Phillips to the lifeboat.
Some of the Alabama's crew cheered and cracked jokes as they arrived in
Mombasa, others peered warily over the edge of their 17,000-ton cargo
ship that had been transporting food aid. With Navy SEALs
standing
guard, one sailor told off the mass of journalists, saying: "Don't
disrespect these men like that. They've got a man out on a lifeboat
dying so we can live."
Crewman William Rios, 41, of New York City, described the whole
experience as a "nightmare" and said the first thing he will do back
home is go to church. Maersk President John Reinhart said from
Norfolk, Virginia, that the ship was still a crime scene and the
crewmen could not leave until the FBI investigates the attack. He said
crew members have been provided phones so they can stay in touch with
family members.
"When I spoke to the crew, they won't consider it done when they board
a plane and come home," Reinhart said. "They won't consider it done
until the captain is back, nor will we."
Other bandits, among hundreds who have made the Gulf of Aden the
world's most dangerous waterway, seized an Italian tugboat off
Somalia's north coast Saturday as it was pulling barges, said Shona
Lowe, a spokeswoman at NATO's Northwood maritime command center outside
London. The Foreign Ministry in Rome confirmed 10 of the 16 crew
members are Italian. The others are five Romanians and a Croatian,
according to Micoperi, the Italian company that owns the ship.
A piracy expert said the two hijackings did not appear related.
"This is just the Somali pirate machine in full flow," said Graeme
Gibbon-Brooks, founder of Dryad Maritime Intelligence Ltd.
In Phillips' hometown, the Rev. Charles Danielson of the St. Thomas
Church said the congregation would continue to pray for Phillips and
his family, who are members, and he would encourage "people to find
hope in the triumph of good over evil."
Reinhart said he spoke with Phillips' wife, Andrea, who is surrounded
by family and two company employees who were sent to support her.
"She's a brave woman," Reinhart said. "And she has one favor to ask:
'Do what you have to do to bring Richard home safely.' That means don't
make a mistake, folks. We have to be perfect in our execution."
Pirates Seize U.S. - Owned, Italy - Flagged
Tugboat
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
Filed at 10:42 a.m. ET
April 11, 2009
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Pirates seized a U.S.-owned and Italian-flagged
tugboat with 16 crew on Saturday in the latest hijacking in the busy
Gulf of Aden waterway, a regional maritime group said. Andrew
Mwangura, of the Mombasa-based East African Seafarers' Assistance
Programme, said the crew were believed to be unharmed on the tugboat,
which he added was operated from the United Arab Emirates. He
said the tugboat was towing two barges at the time of capture but there
were no details on their cargo.
"This incident shows the pirates are becoming more daring and violent,"
Mwangura told Reuters by phone.
NATO alliance officials on board the Portuguese warship NRB Corte-Real,
which is patrolling the Gulf of Aden, said a distress call came from
the MV Buccaneer tugboat but communications were lost six minutes
later. They said 10 of the tugboat's crew were Italian
citizens. Somali pirates have stepped up attacks in March after a
lull at the start of 2009.
International interest has focused this week on the plight of an
American hostage, Richard Phillips, held by four pirates on a lifeboat
flanked by U.S. naval warships in a high seas standoff since Wednesday.
Secretary
of State Clinton must remember this...
Somali Pirates In German Ship Fail to Find Comrades
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:35 a.m. ET
April 11, 2009
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Pirates on a German ship with 24 foreign hostages
said on Saturday they had returned to the Somali coast after failing to
locate the scene of a standoff involving an American captive on a
drifting lifeboat. The pirates had hoped to use the hijacked
20,000-tonne container vessel, Hansa Stavanger, as a "shield" to reach
fellow pirates holding American ship captain Richard Phillips far out
in the Indian Ocean. U.S. naval ships are close to the lifeboat.
"We have come back to Haradheere coast. We could not locate the
lifeboat," one pirate on the German ship, who identified himself as
Suleiman, told Reuters.
The German ship was seized off south Somalia between Kenya and the
Seychelles and has a crew of 24. Somali elders and relatives of
pirates holding Phillips are planning a mediation mission, a regional
maritime group said.
"They are just looking to arrange safe passage for the pirates, no
ransom," the group's coordinator Andrew Mwangura told Reuters.
Separately, French special forces stormed a yacht held by pirates
elsewhere in the lawless stretch of the Indian Ocean in an assault that
killed one hostage, but freed four. Two pirates were killed and
three
captured.
On Saturday, NATO staff said pirates had attacked a Panama-flagged bulk
carrier in the Gulf of Aden between Somalia and Yemen. An
unexploded
rocket-propelled grenade had landed in the commanding officer's cabin
and bullets were fired at the ship before it repelled the attack with
water-hoses, said the officials, aboard a Portuguese warship in the
area. More U.S. warships have been sent toward the lifeboat
drifting
in international waters off Somalia, where pirates have been holding
Phillips since trying to hijack his ship, the 17,000-tonne,
Danish-owned Maersk Alabama, on Wednesday.
The American captain's relatives have said he volunteered to get in the
lifeboat with the pirates in exchange for the safety of his crew, who
regained control of the Maersk Alabama. The ship, carrying food relief
to Kenya, was due into Kenya's Mombasa port at around 5 p.m. (10:00
a.m. EDT) on Saturday. U.S. officials said there was unlikely to be
access to the crew.
At one point, Phillips tried to escape the lifeboat by jumping
overboard, but was quickly recaptured. Close by, the destroyer
USS
Bainbridge launched monitoring drones and kept radio contact with the
pirates. A U.S. official said it was seeking a peaceful outcome and FBI
experts were helping.
OTHER HOSTAGES
Phillips is one of about 250 hostages being held by Somali pirates
preying on the busy sea lanes of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian
Ocean. There are more Filipinos than any other nationality and
the
pirates are keeping about 16 captured vessels at or near lairs like
Eyl, Hobyo and Haradheere on Somalia's eastern coast -- five of them
taken in the last week alone. The fact Phillips is the first U.S.
citizen seized has galvanized intense world attention.
"Once again, it has taken American involvement to get world powers
really interested," said a diplomat who tracks Somalia from Nairobi. "I
hope they don't forget the Filipinos and all the others, once this guy
is released."
The standoff has also forced U.S. President Barack Obama to focus on a
place most Americans would rather forget. Perched on the Horn of
Africa, Somalia has suffered 18 years of conflict since warlords
toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
Americans remember with a shudder the disastrous U.S.-U.N. intervention
there soon after, including the infamous "Black Hawk Down" battle in
1993 when 18 U.S. troops were killed in a 17-hour firefight that was
later made into a hit movie.
DEFIANT
The pirate gang holding Phillips remained defiant despite the arrival
of U.S. and other naval ships in the area.
"We will defend ourselves if attacked," one told Reuters by satellite
phone.
The pirates are demanding $2 million for his release and a guarantee of
their own safety, a pirate source said. Somalia's Islamist
insurgent
movement al Shabaab, which is on Washington's list of terrorist
organizations, lambasted the international naval patrols and said no
money should be paid.
"You are the ones who are the pirates. Leave our waters. You will be
defeated, whatever you can do. And you will regret anything you pay as
a ransom," al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Muktar Robow Mansoor told
reporters. Al Shabaab has denied any links with the pirates.
Officials in Washington confirmed reinforcements were nearby, listing
the frigate USS Halyburton, equipped with guided missiles and
helicopters, and a German frigate. The USS Boxer, an amphibious
assault ship, was also on its way, mainly in case its medical
facilities were required. In France, the government stood by its
raid
to free the yacht, which was hijacked en route to Zanzibar last weekend
with two couples and a 3-year-old child aboard.
"During the operation, a hostage sadly died," said French President
Nicolas Sarkozy's office. But it said the president "confirms France's
determination not to give in to blackmail and to defeat the pirates.
Last year there were 42 ship hijackings off Somalia, which disrupted
shipping, delayed food aid to East Africa and raised insurance costs.
Some cargo ships have been diverted to travel around South Africa
instead of through the Suez Canal.
(Additional reporting by Abdi Sheikh and Mohamed Ahmed in Mogadishu,
Abdiqani Hassan in Bosasso, Daniel Wallis in Mombasa, Alison Bevege on
board the NRB Corte-Real, Andrew Gray and Anthony Boadle in Washington,
William Maclean in London and Andrew Cawthorne in Nairobi; writing by
Andrew Cawthorne; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
US ships block help for pirates holding US
captain
DAY
By MICHELLE FAUL and TOM MALITI, Associated Press Writers
Posted on Apr 11, 7:01 AM EDT
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- U.S. warships are trying to stop Somali pirates
from sending reinforcements to a lifeboat where an American captain is
being held hostage as the high-seas standoff off Africa's eastern coast
entered a fourth day Saturday. Underscoring the high stakes
involved,
France's navy on Friday freed a sailboat seized off Somalia last week
by other pirates, but one of the hostages was killed.
A Nairobi-based diplomat, who spoke on condition on anonymity because
he is not authorized to talk to reporters, said the pirates have
summoned assistance but at least two American ships and U.S. Navy
surveillance aircraft are deterring pirate ships and skiffs from
contact with the lifeboat.
The pirates have threatened to kill their American hostage, Capt.
Richard Phillips, if the U.S. attacks them, according to a Somali who
has been in contact with the pirates.
The Somali said the pirates had called in four commandeered ships with
hostages from a variety of nations including the Philippines, Russia
and Germany.
The vice president of the Philippines, the nation with the largest
number of sailors held captive by Somali pirates, appealed Saturday for
the safety of hostages to be ensured in the standoff.
"We hope that before launching any tactical action against the pirates,
the welfare of every hostage is guaranteed and ensured," said Vice
President Noli de Castro. "Moreover, any military action is best done
in consultation with the United Nations to gain the support and
cooperation of other countries."
U.S. rules of engagement prevent the Americans using their vastly
superior fighting power to engage the pirates if there is any danger to
civilians.
The situation is new for the pirates. Normally, they seize a ship with
many hostages and get it anchored near shore, where they can quickly
escape to land, and then begin negotiations for multimillion-dollar
ransoms. Left with only Phillips and a lifeboat that is out of fuel,
they are in a vulnerable position. On Friday, Phillips jumped out
of
the lifeboat and tried to swim for his freedom but was recaptured when
a pirate fired an automatic weapon at or near him, according to U.S.
Defense Department officials speaking on condition of anonymity because
they are not authorized to talk about the sensitive, unfolding
operations.
Phillips, of Underhill, Vermont, was seized Wednesday after he thwarted
the pirates' bid to hijack the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama freighter,
which was carrying food aid for hungry people in Somalia, Rwanda and
Uganda.
The Alabama headed toward the Kenyan port of Mombasa - its original
destination - with 20 American crew members aboard. It was expected to
arrive Saturday night, said Joseph Murphy, whose son is
second-in-command of the vessel.
Piracy along the anarchic and impoverished Somali coast, the longest in
Africa, has risen in recent years. Somali pirates hold about a dozen
ships with more than 200 crew members, according to the International
Maritime Bureau, a piracy watchdog group based in Malaysia. The bureau
lists 66 attacks since January, not including the Alabama.
The pirates' strategy is to link up with colleagues on other seized
ships, who are holding Russian, German, Filipino and other hostages,
and get Phillips to lawless Somalia, where they could hide the hostage
and make it difficult to stage a rescue, the Somali speaking to the
pirates said. That would give the pirates more leverage and a stronger
negotiating position to discuss a ransom. Anchoring near shore also
means they could get to land quickly if attacked.
The Somali, who helped negotiate a ransom last year to pirates who
seized a Ukrainian ship carrying tanks, spoke on condition of anonymity
for fear of reprisals. He said he has talked with a pirate leader in
Somalia who helped coordinate the failed effort to seize the
Alabama.
Sailors on the USS Bainbridge, which has rescue helicopters and
lifeboats, were able to see Phillips but at several hundred yards away
were too far to help him. The U.S. destroyer is keeping its distance,
in part to stay out of the pirates' range of fire.
Its sailors saw Phillips moving around and talking after his return to
the lifeboat, and the Defense Department officials think he is unharmed.
The Bainbridge was joined Friday by the USS Hallyburton, which has
helicopters, and the huge, amphibious USS Boxer is expected on the
scene soon, the defense officials said. The Boxer is the flag ship of a
multination anti-piracy task force that resembles a small aircraft
carrier. It has a crew of more than 1,000, a mobile hospital, missile
launchers and about two dozen helicopters and attack planes.
Negotiations had been taking place between the pirates and the captain
of the Bainbridge, who was getting direction from FBI hostage
negotiators, the officials said.
Phillips, 53, thwarted the takeover of the 17,000-ton Alabama by
telling his crew of about 20 to lock themselves in a cabin, the crew
told stateside relatives. The crew later overpowered some of the
pirates but Phillips surrendered himself to safeguard his men, and the
Somalis fled with him to an enclosed lifeboat, the relatives said.
Meanwhile, France's defense minister promised an autopsy and
investigation into the death of a hostage killed Friday during a French
navy commando operation that freed four other captives held by Somali
pirates.
Pirates had seized a sailboat carrying Florent Lemacon, his wife,
3-year-old son and two friends off the Somali coast a week ago. On
Friday, French navy commandos stormed the boat in an assault triggered
by threats the passengers would be executed. Two pirates were
killed,
and Lemacon died in an exchange of fire as he tried to duck down the
hatch. Three pirates were taken prisoner in the operation, and are to
be brought to France for criminal proceedings.
Both U.S. and
Pirates Sending More Ships to Standoff
NYTIMES
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM and SHARON OTTERMAN
April 11, 2009
MOGADISHU, Somalia — American Naval reinforcements moved towards the
scene of a pirate hostage standoff in the Indian Ocean on Friday amid
reports that the Somali pirates, desperate to get back to shore with
their American captive, had themselves called in additional ships and
men.
Residents reached by telephone in the town of Xarardheere, a pirate
haven in central Somalia, said that the pirates were sending small
boats with additional supplies, pirates, and weapons to the hostage
scene. The Associated Press reported that the pirates were sending
larger ships—including previously hijacked ships with hostages still
aboard—to serve as shields for the small, enclosed lifeboat that now
holds four Somali pirates and their American captive, Capt. Richard
Phillips.
Captain Phillips was taken Wednesday after an hours-long battle that
began when the Somali pirates attempted to commandeer the U.S.-flagged
Maersk Alabama, a 17,000 ton container ship that was carrying food and
relief aid to Mombasa, Kenya. The pirates gained control of the ship
for a number of hours, but the unarmed American crew of 20 then managed
to overpower the pirates and retake command.
The pirates retreated into a large enclosed lifeboat, taking the ship’s
captain as a hostage, apparently seeking a cash ransom. Alerted by a
distress call, the U.S.S. Bainbridge, an $800 million American Navy
destroyer, arrived Thursday to take the lead in negotiating for the
release of Captain Phillips.
Hostage negotiators with The Federal Bureau of Investigation have also
been asked for their assistance, and General David H. Petraeus, the
head of U.S. Central Command, said Thursday that other warships were
headed to the scene.
An unnamed Pentagon official was quoted by CNN on Friday as saying that
Capt. Phillips had attempted to escape from the lifeboat at about
midnight local time and swim to the nearby U.S.S. Bainbridge by jumping
overboard, but that the pirates had jumped into the sea after him and
recaptured him. It was not immediately possible to confirm this report.
The Norfolk, Va. based company to which the ship is registered, Maersk
Line, Ltd, a subsidiary of A.P. Moller - Maersk, the Danish shipping
giant, said Thursday that the Maersk Alabama had left the hostage scene
at the Navy’s request to return to shore. The father of the ship’s
second in command, Capt. Shane Murphy, told news organizations that the
ship was headed to its original destination, Mombasa, with an armed
guard of 18 men, and that it was due to arrive Saturday.
It was not immediately possible to confirm Associated Press reports
that additional large ships, including a German cargo ship seized by
pirates earlier this month, were headed to the hostage scene to serve
as reinforcements for the beleaguered pirates.
A Somali resident of the pirate stronghold Eyl in Somalia’s Northern
Puntland region was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that two
pirate ships had left Eyl on Wednesday afternoon. He said a third — the
German cargo ship Hansa Stavanger — had sailed from Xarardheere, some
230 miles south along the Somali coastline, and a fourth — a Taiwanese
fishing vessel seized Monday that was only 30 miles from the lifeboat —
was also on its way. The man said there were a total of 52 hostages
aboard the ships floating toward the scene.
Residents of Xarardheere reached by The Times, however, said the
pirates had only sent small speedboats with pirates aboard as
reinforcements.
The Associated Press also quoted another pirate in Xarardheere as
saying that the pirates holding Captain Phillips were very worried
about getting killed in their standoff with the American warship, and
that they had decided to defer talks about a ransom for Captain
Phillips until they made it back to shore.
“They had asked us for reinforcement and we have already sent a good
number of well-equipped colleagues, who were holding a German cargo
ship,” the pirate, identified only by his first name, Badow, was quoted
by The A.P. as saying.
“We are not intending to harm the captain, so that we hope our
colleagues would not be harmed as long as they hold him,” Badow told
them. “All we need, first, is a safe route to escape with the captain,
and then (negotiate) ransom later,” he added.
FBI joins effort
in hostage standoff with pirates
DAY
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press Writer
Posted on Apr 9, 11:11 AM EDT
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- FBI hostage negotiators joined U.S. Navy efforts
Thursday to free an American cargo ship captain held captive on a
lifeboat by Somali pirates. A U.S. destroyer and a spy plane kept close
watch in the high-seas standoff near the Horn of Africa.
The pirates took Capt. Richard Phillips hostage Wednesday after they
hijacked the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama, but the cargo ship's crew
overpowered them and at least four then fled to a covered lifeboat. It
was the first such attack on American sailors in about 200 years.
Kevin Speers, a spokesman for the Maersk shipping company, said the
pirates have made no demands yet to the company. He said the safe
return of the captain is now its top priority.
The Maersk Alabama is again under way to the Kenyan port of Mombasa -
its original destination - with 18 armed guards, according to Joseph
Murphy, whose son, Shane Murphy, is second in command. A person reached
by The Associated Press by phone on the bridge of the vessel confirmed
that "We're moving."
Murphy said he was told about the development by company officials who
are briefing families and estimates it will arrive in Kenya in about
two days. The Maersk Alabama, loaded with relief aid, had been en route
to the Kenyan port of Mobassa when it was attacked about 380 miles east
of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Earlier Thursday, the USS
Bainbridge had arrived near the Maersk Alabama and the lifeboat with
the pirates, Speers said, adding that the lifeboat holding the pirates
and the captain was out of fuel.
"The boat is dead in the water," he told AP Radio. "It's floating near
the Alabama. It's my understanding that it's floating freely."
The U.S. Navy has sent up P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft and has video
of the scene. FBI spokesman Richard Kolko described the bureau's
hostage negotiating team as "fully engaged" with the military in
strategizing ways to retrieve the ship's captain and secure the Maersk
Alabama and its roughly 20-member U.S. crew.
One senior Pentagon official, speaking on grounds of anonymity because
of the sensitivity of the situation, described the incident now as a
"somewhat of a standoff."
Though officials declined to say how close the Bainbridge is to the
site, one official said of the pirates: "They can see it with their
eyes." He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of
talking about a military operation in progress. The Bainbridge
was
among several U.S. ships that had been patrolling in the region when
the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama was captured by the pirates about 380
miles east of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. It was the sixth vessel
seized in a week.
Somali Foreign Minister Mohamed Omaar said the pirates "cannot win"
against American forces.
"The pirates are playing with fire and have got themselves into a
situation where they have to extricate themselves because there is no
way they can win," he told The Associated Press.
Phillips' family was at his Vermont farmhouse, anxiously watching news
reports and taking telephone calls from the State Department.
"We are on pins and needles," said Gina Coggio, 29, half sister of
Phillips' wife, Andrea, as she stood on the porch of his one-story
house Wednesday in a light snow. "I know the crew has been in touch
with their own family members, and we're hoping we'll hear from Richard
soon."
Phillips surrendered himself to the pirates to secure the safety of the
crew, Coggio said.
"What I understand is that he offered himself as the hostage," she
said. "That is what he would do. It's just who he is and his response
as a captain."
Coggio said she believed there were negotiations under way, although
she didn't specify between whom. With one warship nearby and more
on
the way, piracy expert Roger Middleton from London-based think tank
Chatham House said the pirates were facing difficult choices.
"The pirates are in a very, very tight corner," Middleton said.
"They've got only one guy, they've got nowhere to hide him, they've got
no way to defend themselves effectively against the military who are on
the way and they are hundreds of miles from Somalia."
The pirates would probably try to get to a mothership, he said, one of
the larger vessels that tow the pirates' speedboats out to sea and
resupply them as they lie in wait for prey. But they also would be
aware that if they try to take Phillips to Somalia, they might be
intercepted. And if they hand him over, they would almost certainly be
arrested. Other analysts say the U.S. will be reluctant to use
force
as long as one of its citizens remains hostage. French commandos, for
example, have mounted two military operations against pirates once the
ransom had been paid and its citizens were safe.
Many of the pirates have shifted their operations down the Somali
coastline from the Gulf of Aden to escape naval warship patrols, which
had some success in preventing attacks last year. International
attention focused on Somali pirates last year after the audacious
hijackings of an arms shipment and a Saudi oil supertanker. Warships
from more than a dozen nations are patrolling off the Somali coast but
analysts say the multimillion-dollar ransoms paid out by companies
ensure piracy in war-ravaged, impoverished Somalia will not disappear.
The attacks often beg the question of why ship owners do not arm their
crew to fend off attacks. Much of the problem lies with the cargo. The
Saudi supertanker, for example, was loaded with 2 million barrels of
oil. The vapor from that cargo was highly flammable; a spark from the
firing of a gun could cause an explosion.
There is also the problem of keeping the pirates off the ships - once
they're on board, they will very likely fight back and people will
die. Pirates travel in open skiffs with outboard engines, working
with
larger ships that tow them far out to sea. They use satellite
navigational and communications equipment, and have an intimate
knowledge of local waters, clambering aboard commercial vessels with
ladders and grappling hooks.
Any blip on an unwary ship's radar screens, alerting the crew to nearby
vessels, is likely to be mistaken for fishing trawlers or any number of
smaller, non-threatening ships that take to the seas every day.
It
helps that the pirates' prey are usually massive, slow-moving ships. By
the time anyone notices, pirates will have grappled their way onto the
ship, brandishing AK-47s.
U.S. Crew in Standoff With
Pirates Off Somalia Coast
NYTIMES
By SHARON OTTERMAN and MARK MAZZETTI
April 9, 2009
Hours after pirates commandeered a United States-flagged
container ship with 20 American crew members off the coast of Somalia
on Wednesday, the pirates and crew appeared to be in a standoff, with
the ship under control of its crew once again but the skipper a captive
of the pirates.
There were conflicting reports about the drama unfolding on the
container ship, the Maersk Alabama — the first ship with an American
crew to be seized by pirates in the Horn of Africa, one of the most
notoriously lawless zones on the high seas. By late afternoon
Washington time, when it was night off Somalia, the situation was
unresolved, although there had apparently been no bloodshed.
Several American warships were headed for the area. The vessels
reportedly included a destroyer, the U.S.S. Bainbridge, which can steam
at more than 30 knots and can launch helicopters. Based on early
reports that the closest ships were some 345 miles from the scene at
the time of the hijacking, they could be expected to arrive in the area
by late Wednesday night, Eastern time, or daylight Thursday off Somali.
At about noon Eastern time, some 12 hours after the hijacking, a
Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity said that “it is
our understanding that the crew has taken back control of the vessel.”
But as the hours went by, it became clear that the situation was far
from resolved, as a senior American military official said the skipper
had been taken off his ship while the captors tried to negotiate a
ransom. There were reports that the crew had been able to disable
the ship around the time that the pirates came aboard, preventing them
from going anywhere with their prize. Later, there were reports that
while the crew had been able to capture one pirate and regain control
of the ship, at least three pirates were holding the captain hostage in
a small boat near the vessel.
Complicating the situation was that the pirates apparently broke their
word, refusing to release the captain after the ship’s crew had
released the captive pirate in what was supposed to be a trade.
“We had a pirate, we took him for 12 hours,” Second Mate Ken Quinn told
C.N.N. in a live interview Wednesday. “We returned him, but they didn’t
return the captain.”
C.N.N. reported that the captain had been in touch with his crew by
radio and had said he was not hurt. The Maersk Alabama was taken
by pirates at about 7:30 a.m. local time, roughly 280 miles southeast
of the Somali city of Eyl, a known haven for pirates, a spokesman for
the United States Navy said. The ship is owned and operated by Maersk
Line Limited, a United States subsidiary of A.P. Moller-Maersk Group,
the Danish shipping giant.
John F. Reinhart, the president and chief executive officer of Maersk
Line Limited, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the company
had received a call that morning from the crew saying that they were
unharmed. Later, the company issued a statement saying that the crew
was in control.
President Obama, who returned to Washington early Wednesday from an
overseas trip, was briefed on the situation. The White House press
secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the administration was “assessing a
course of action to resolve this situation.”
The Maersk Alabama was at least the sixth ship commandeered by pirates
in the last week off the Horn. Pirates have been operating in the
region with near impunity despite efforts by many nations, including
the United States, to intimidate them with naval warship patrols.
The Cape Cod Times reported on its Web site Wednesday that both the
chief officer — Capt. Shane Murphy, 34 — and the captain of the vessel
— Capt. Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vermont — were graduates of the
Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Mr. Murphy’s father said the Department
of Defense had told him that the crew had regained control of the
vessel, The A.P. reported.
While Maersk Line Limited, based in Norfolk, Virginia, is one of the
Department of Defense’s primary shipping contractors, it was not under
contract with the Defense Department at the time of its hijacking, said
Lt. Stephanie Murdock, a spokeswoman with the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based
in Bahrain. The 508-foot long ship was en route to the Kenyan
port of Mombasa and was carrying food and other agricultural materials
for the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, among other
clients, including the United States Agency for International
Development.
It was on a regular rotation through the Indian Ocean from Salalah, a
city in southwestern Oman, to Djibouti, and then on to Mombasa,
according to the company’s headquarters in Denmark.
The ship, built in Taiwan in 1998, was less than half full, carrying
some 400 20-foot containers of cargo such as vegetable oil and bulgur
wheat. It can carry over 1,000 such containers, and was deployed in
Maersk Line’s East Africa service network, the company said.
There have been more than 60 pirate attacks this year off of the Somali
coast, with the bulk of the attacks occurring in the Gulf of Aden,
which separates the Arabian peninsula from the Horn of Africa. Sixteen
ships with more than 200 crew remain in pirate custody, most of them
docked a few miles off the Somali coast while ransom negotiations with
the ship owners take place, said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman
with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Most of the pirate attacks have ended peacefully, with the payment of
ransom. But there have been exceptions. A year ago, for instance,
French commandos seized six pirates during a helicopter raid after the
attackers had freed the 30-member crew of a hijacked luxury yacht.
About 15 international naval vessels, including three American Navy
ships, now patrol the waters, many under an American-led task force
created to combat piracy.
At the time of the attack on the Maersk Alabama, the closest patrol
vessel was some 300 nautical miles away, the Navy said. Most of the
patrol vessels are concentrated in the Gulf of Aden, and as a result,
the pirates have expanded their reach into the open seas. The Navy
would not comment on whether its patrol boats were now following the
hijacked vessel.
“It’s that old saying: Where the cops aren’t, the criminals are going
to go,” Lieutenant Christensen said. “We patrol an area of more than
one million square miles. The simple fact of the matter is that we
can’t be everywhere at one time.”
Piracy has become a multi-million dollar business in Somalia, a nation
that has limped along since 1991 without a functioning central
government. A captured Ukrainian arms freighter hijacked off Somalia’s
coast in 2008, for example, was released in February when its owners
paid $3.2 million in cash, dropped by parachute.
Armed with automatic weapons, the pirates often attack the large
merchant ships from small speed boats, then scale the towering ship
hulls with hooks and ropes and overtake the merchant crews, which are
generally unarmed.
To extend their reach from shore, the pirates have begun operating from
floating outposts known as “mother ships” — often captured fishing
trawlers that can serve as bases for the smaller speedboats as they lie
in wait. The crews are generally not harmed by the pirates.
Lieutenant Christensen said he “could not recall” another episode
involving the capture of an American ship by Somali pirates. Noel
Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center at the International
Maritime Bureau, in Kuala Lumpur, said that no such occurrences had
been reported “for the past three or four years — at least.”
“There are no reports that any of the crew is injured,” Mr. Choong
said. “Normally, the pirates would treat the crew well.”
“The Somali pirates are now actually venturing very far out from the
coast,” Mr. Choong said, “up to 500 nautical miles.”
The ship has carried a United States flag — meaning it is registered in
the United States — since 2004, when it came under contract with the
United States Maritime Security Program, which is run by the Maritime
Administration, an agency within the United States Department of
Transportation, according to a press release issued by Maersk Line
Limited. The designation allows the ship to contract with American
government agencies and carry sensitive American cargo.
The 17,000-ton ship has sailed out of Dubai since November 2004, the
press release said.
Note: "mother
ship" arrangement reminds me of "Waterworld"
U.S. Crew Said to Retake Ship
From Pirates Off Somalia
NYTIMES
By SHARON OTTERMAN
April 9, 2009
Pirates commandeered a United States-flagged container
ship with 20 American crew members off the coast of Somalia on
Wednesday, in what appeared to be the first time a ship with an
American crew had been seized by pirates in the area. There were
conflicting reports about who was in control of the ship hours after it
was seized.
At about noon Eastern time, some twelve hours after the hijacking, a
Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity said that “it is
our understanding that the crew has taken back control of the vessel.”
A second military official, also speaking anonymously because of the
delicacy of the situation, said that initial reports remained murky.
The official said that crew members may be holding one of the pirates,
but that several of the pirates may be holding the ship’s captain.
A crew member told the Associated Press that the pirates were holding
the ship’s captain’s hostage and that negotiations were under way.
The container ship, the Maersk Alabama, was taken by pirates at about
7:30 a.m. local time, 280 miles southeast of the Somali city of Eyl, a
known haven for pirates, a spokesman for the United States Navy said.
The ship is owned and operated by Maersk Line Limited, a United States
subsidiary of A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, the Danish shipping giant.
John F. Reinhart, the president and chief executive officer of Maersk
Line Limited, said at a news conference at noon EDT that the company
had received a call Wednesday morning from the crew confirming that
they were unharmed. He could not, however, confirm reports that the
ship had been retaken by its crew.
President Obama, who returned to Washington at 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday
after his overseas trip, was briefed on the situation. The White House
press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the administration was “assessing a
course of action to resolve this situation.”
The Maersk Alabama was at least the sixth ship commandeered by pirates
in the last week off the Horn of Africa, one of the most notoriously
lawless zones on the high seas. Pirates have been operating in the
region with near impunity despite efforts by many nations, including
the United States, to intimidate them with naval warship patrols.
The Cape Cod Times reported on its Web site Wednesday that both the
chief officer — Capt. Shane Murphy, 34 — and the captain of the vessel
— Capt. Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vermont — were graduates of the
Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Later, Mr. Murphy’s father said the
Department of Defense had told him that the crew had regained control
of the vessel, The A.P. reported.
While Maersk Line Limited, based in Norfolk, Virginia, is one of the
Department of Defense’s primary shipping contractors, it was not under
contract with the Defense Department at the time of its hijacking, said
Lt. Stephanie Murdock, a spokeswoman with the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based
in Bahrain.
The 508-foot long ship was en route to the Kenyan port of Mombasa and
was carrying food and other agricultural materials for the World Food
Program, a United Nations agency, among other clients, including the
United States Agency for International Development.
It was on a regular rotation through the Indian Ocean from Salalah, a
city in southwestern Oman, to Djibouti, and then on to Mombasa,
according to the company’s headquarters in Denmark.
The ship, built in Taiwan in 1998, was less than half full, carrying
some 400 20-foot containers of cargo such as vegetable oil and bulgur
wheat. It can carry over 1,000 such containers, and was deployed in
Maersk Line’s East Africa service network, the company said.
There have been more than 50 pirate attacks this year off of the Somali
coast, with the bulk of the attacks occurring in the Gulf of Aden,
which separates the Arabian peninsula from the Horn of Africa. Sixteen
ships with more than 200 crew remain in pirate custody, most of them
docked a few miles off the Somali coast while ransom negotiations with
the ship owners take place, said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman
with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
About 15 international naval vessels, including three American Navy
ships, now patrol the pirate-infested waters, many under an
American-led task force created to combat piracy.
At the time of the attack on the Maersk Alabama, the closest patrol
vessel was some 300 nautical miles away, the Navy said. Most of the
patrol vessels are concentrated in the Gulf of Aden, and as a result,
the pirates have expanded their reach into the open seas. The Navy
would not comment on whether its patrol boats were now following the
hijacked vessel.
“It’s that old saying: Where the cops aren’t, the criminals are going
to go,” Lieutenant Christensen said. “We patrol an area of more than
one million square miles. The simple fact of the matter is that we
can’t be everywhere at one time.”
Piracy has become a multi-million dollar business in Somalia, a nation
that has limped along since 1991 without a functioning central
government. A captured Ukrainian arms freighter hijacked off Somalia’s
coast in 2008, for example, was released in February when its owners
paid $3.2 million in cash, dropped by parachute.
Armed with automatic weapons, the pirates often attack the large
merchant ships from small speed boats, then scale the towering ship
hulls with hooks and ropes and overtake the merchant crews, which are
generally unarmed.
To extend their reach from shore, the pirates have begun operating from
floating outposts known as “mother ships” — often captured fishing
trawlers that can serve as bases for the smaller speedboats as they lie
in wait. The crews are generally not harmed by the pirates.
Lieutenant Christensen said he “could not recall” another episode
involving the capture of an American ship by Somali pirates. Noel
Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center at the International
Maritime Bureau, in Kuala Lumpur, said that no such occurrences had
been reported “for the past three or four years — at least.”
“There are no reports that any of the crew is injured,” Mr. Choong
said. “Normally, the pirates would treat the crew well.”
“The Somali pirates are now actually venturing very far out from the
coast,” Mr. Choong said, “up to 500 nautical miles.”
The ship has carried a United States flag — meaning it is registered in
the United States — since 2004, when it came under contract with the
United States Maritime Security Program, which is run by the Maritime
Administration, an agency within the United States Department of
Transportation, according to a press release issued by Maersk Line
Limited. The designation allows the ship to contract with American
government agencies and carry sensitive American cargo.
The 17,000-ton ship has sailed out of Dubai since November 2004, the
press release said.
Somali Pirates Seize Ship; 21 Americans
Aboard
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:45 a.m. ET
April 8, 2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a
U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 21 crew members aboard, a diplomat and a
U.S. Navy spokesman said.
The Kenya-based diplomat identified the vessel as the 17,000-ton Maersk
Alabama and said all the crew members are American. The diplomat spoke
on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the
media. The U.S. Navy confirmed that a U.S. flagged ship with 21
members of crew was hijacked early Wednesday off the eastern coast of
Somalia.
Spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said the attacked happened in the
early hours of the morning hours, about 280 miles (450 kilometers)
northeast of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia.
Christensen said there were U.S. citizens aboard the ship, but he did
not say how many. He declined to release the name of the ship until the
family members of the crew are notified. He said the ship was
operated by the Danish company Maersk, which deals with the U.S.
Department of Defense. Christensen said the vessel was not working
under a Pentagon contract when hijacked.
Maersk Kenya Managing Director Rolf Nielsen said the company was still
verifying reports of the hijacking. An U.S. embassy spokeswoman was not
immediately able to confirm the incident. Andrew Mwangura of the
East African Seafarers' Assistance Program said the ship was taken
about 400 miles (640 kilometers) from the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
The vessel is the sixth to be seized within a week and the first with
an all-American crew.
Somali Pirates Seize German Ship
By REUTERS
Filed at 10:11 a.m. ET
April 5, 2009
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Somali pirates have seized a 20,000-ton German
container vessel in their latest attack on the Indian Ocean's busy
commercial shipping lanes, a regional maritime group said Sunday.
Heavily armed gangs from the lawless Horn of Africa nation hijacked
dozens of vessels there and in the strategic Gulf of Aden last year,
taking hundreds of sailors hostage and making off with millions of
dollars in ransoms. Foreign navies rushed warships to the area in
response, reducing the number of successful attacks in recent months.
But there are still near-daily attempts.
Andrew Mwangura of the Mombasa-based East African Seafarers' Assistance
Program said the latest hijacking happened on Saturday 400 nautical
miles off the southern Somali port of Kismayu, between the Seychelles
and Kenya.
"We believe the German ship has 24 crew on board. We're trying to
establish their identities and the name of the vessel," Mwangura told
Reuters.
The German Foreign Ministry said it was seeking "concrete evidence"
that a German-flagged vessel had been captured.
"The Federal Government is dealing with the case, and all the
appropriate public authorities are participating intensively," a
spokeswoman said.
SPEED BOATS
Somali pirates seized two European-owned tankers late last month. Last
week, the Seychelles military deployed security forces on its outer
islands after the pirates hijacked a second vessel flying the Indian
Ocean nation's flag. The pirates typically use speed boats
launched from "mother ships." They then take captured vessels to remote
coastal village bases in Somalia, where they have usually treat their
hostages well in anticipation of a sizeable ransom payment.
In January, Somali gunmen freed the Sirius Star -- a Saudi supertanker
loaded with $100 million worth of crude oil -- and its 25 crew after $3
million was parachuted onto its deck. Last September, they also
grabbed world headlines by seizing a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying 33
Soviet-era T-72 tanks. It was released in February, reportedly for a
$3.2 million ransom.
The pirates say the arrival of high-tech foreign warships in the waters
off their country has made their work more dangerous. One gang
member, who asked not to be named, told Reuters in the northern port of
Bosasso that he had been part of an aborted attack on another large
commercial vessel late Saturday.
"We opened fire on a ship near the Gulf of Aden, but our ladder was too
short to climb up," he said. "It escaped at high speed. We were nine
pirates in two speed boats and immediately we came back. We feared
attacks by the warships."
Somali Pirates Hijack German Gas Tanker, 13
Crew
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:19 p.m. ET
January 29, 2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Somali pirates hijacked a German tanker loaded
with liquefied petroleum gas Thursday off the Horn of Africa. The
ship's 13-man crew was reported safe, even though gunshots were heard
over the ship's radio. The MV Longchamp is the third ship
captured by pirates this month in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's
busiest shipping lanes.
Piracy has taken an increasing toll on international shipping in the
key water link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Pirates made an estimated $30 million hijacking ships for ransom last
year, seizing more than 40 vessels off Somalia's coastline.
More than a dozen warships from countries including Britain, France,
Germany, Iran, China and the United States now patrol Somali waters to
protect vessels. But the warships were not near the Longchamp when it
was taken, said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Bahrain-based spokesman for
the U.S. 5th Fleet. Seven pirates boarded the Bahamas-registered
Longchamp early Thursday, the tanker's manager, Bernhard Schulte
Shipmanagement, said in a statement.
Spokesman Andre Delau said the ship's master had been briefly allowed
to communicate with the firm and had said the crew of 12 Filipinos and
one Indonesian were safe.
''We think that everything is in order, nobody is injured,'' he told
The Associated Press.
No ransom demands have been made yet, the company said. Robin
Phillips, deputy director of the Bahamas maritime authority in London,
said the Longchamp had been traveling in a corridor secured by EU
military forces when it sent a distress signal before dawn.
''Ships and helicopters were dispatched, but they arrived too late,''
said Phillips, adding that gunshots could be heard over the radio.
He said the ship later set a course for Somalia, to the south.
Christensen said the ship was seized off the southern coast of Yemen,
about 60 miles (95 kilometers) from the town of al-Mukalla, the capital
of the Hadramaut region. He also said 21 ships since Dec. 1 have
taken ''aggressive, evasive maneuvers'' and successfully evaded pirate
attacks.
Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy
reporting center, said Thursday's hijacking was the first attack since
Jan. 14. For the past two weeks, strong winds have made it difficult
for pirates to launch their small boats, but the weather has now
improved, Choong said. There have been 15 attacks so far this
year, and three ships seized, he said.
Cyrus Mody of the International Maritime Bureau said 166 crew on nine
ships were still being held off the coast of Somalia, not including the
Longchamp. Six other hijacked ships have been released this month,
including an oil tanker freed for a reported $3 million ransom.
Somalia, a nation of about 8 million people, has not had a functioning
government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and then turned
on each other. Pirates see its lawless coastline as a haven.
Also Thursday, an official said the breakaway Somali region of Puntland
had agreed to a French request that it take custody of nine suspected
pirates arrested Tuesday by France.
''We consider them to be a real threat for the regional security and
the world, as well,'' said Abdullahi Said Samatar, the Puntland
security minister.
The German military reported two more suspected attempts by pirates to
attack ships in the Gulf of Aden early Thursday. A German navy
frigate received an emergency call from a cargo ship, the European
Champion, which reported that it was being followed by a skiff. A
military statement said the skiff backed off after the German ship sent
its on-board helicopter to the scene. A second cargo ship, the
Eleni G., radioed that it was being pestered by several skiffs. A
German frigate sailed toward the ship, which shook off the suspected
pirates.
Germans
Save Egyptian Ship From Somali Pirates
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:20 a.m. ET
December 25, 2008
KUALA
LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- A German military helicopter chased away
pirates on Thursday who were trying to board an Egyptian ship off the
coast of Somalia. One of the ship's crew was shot in the attack.
The bulk carrier with 31 crew was passing through the Gulf of Aden on
its way to Asia when gun-toting pirates in a speedboat began pursuing
it, said Noel Choong of the International Maritime Bureau's piracy
reporting center. A passing ship alerted the Kuala Lumpur-based
bureau, which asked a multinational naval coalition force in the area
to help, said Choong.
In response, the German navy frigate Karlsruhe dispatched a helicopter,
a military spokesman said on condition of anonymity, citing
policy.
The pirates fled as the chopper reached the vessel, according to a
statement from the German military, but not before shooting and
injuring one the ship's crew. A second helicopter, carrying a
medical
team, retrieved the injured crew, who is now receiving treatment on the
Karlsruhe, the statement said.
Piracy has taken an increasing toll on international shipping this
year, especially in the Gulf of Aden -- one of the world's busiest sea
lanes. Spurred by widespread poverty in their homeland, Somali pirates
have made an estimated $30 million hijacking ships for ransom this
year. More than a dozen warships are now patrolling the vast
gulf.
Countries as diverse as Britain, India, Iran, America, France and
Germany have naval forces in the waters or on their way there.
''Despite increased naval patrols, pirates are continuing to attack
ships because the warships cannot be everywhere at the same time. But
we are pleased with the quick assistance by the coalition force,''
Choong said.
Choong said there have been 110 pirate attacks this year in the Gulf of
Aden, including 42 hijackings. Most were released after a ransom was
paid, though 14 -- with more than 240 crew -- are still being
held. A
second German frigate responded to another emergency call Thursday from
a different ship in the gulf, the military said. The statement gave no
other details on that incident.
Japan said Wednesday it is considering sending military ships to join
the coalition. China is scheduled to send warships on Friday.
Somalia,
a nation of about 8 million people, has not had a functioning
government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and then turned
on each other.
3 Chinese Ships to Leave
Friday for Somalia
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:40 a.m. ET
December 23, 2008
BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese warships on a mission to protect their
country's vessels and crews from pirate attacks off Somalia will depart
Friday, armed with special forces, helicopters and plans to share
information with other countries working in the area.
The operation, China's first major naval mission abroad, will include
destroyers Haikou and Wuhan as well as a large supply ship, said Rear
Adm. Xiao Xinnian, Deputy Chief of Staff of the People's Liberation
Army Navy. On board will be two helicopters and traditional weapons
such as missiles and cannons...
Though the purpose of the mission was to protect Chinese ships and
crews, Beijing has called for stepped up cooperation in anti-piracy
efforts. China announced it was sending warships to the area after the
U.N. Security Council authorized nations to conduct land and air
attacks on pirate bases...
A Communist Party newspaper has said the mission would initially last
three months, but Huang did not give an exact length, saying the
duration would depend on the U.N. mandate and conditions in the area.
The ships will depart Friday from the island province of Hainan in
southern China.
A German Navy frigate, meanwhile, sailed out of Djibouti's harbor
Tuesday to protect civilian ships in the region from Somali-based
pirates. The Karlsruhe, with some 240 sailors on board as well as
speedboats and
a helicopter, set off after lawmakers in Berlin last week approved
Germany's participation in a one-year, European Union-led anti-piracy
mission...full story here.
Indian Navy Captures 23 Pirates in Gulf of Aden
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:49 p.m. ET
December 13, 2008
NEW DELHI (AP) -- The Indian navy captured 23 pirates who
threatened a merchant vessel Saturday in the lawless waters of the Gulf
of Aden, where dozens of ships have come under attack by gunmen in
recent months.
An Indian navy ship, the INS Mysore, was escorting merchant ships in
gulf off Somalia when it received a distress call from seamen on board
the MV Gibe, who said they were being attacked by two boats. The
message said the pirates were firing as their boats closed in on the
Gibe, according to a statement from the Indian government. The pirate
boats attempted to escape when they saw the Mysore and its helicopter,
but were boarded by Indian marine commandoes, the statement said.
The pirates had ''a substantial cache of arms and equipment,''
including seven AK-47 assault rifles, three machine guns, a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher and other weapons, the statement
said. They also found a GPS receiver and other equipment. The
pirates were from Somalia and Yemen, two countries on the coast of the
Gulf of Aden.
The Gibe was flying an Ethiopian flag, the statement said, but there
was no further information about the ship.
Last month, India's navy drew criticism after sinking a Thai fishing
trawler that had been commandeered hours earlier by pirates. At least
one Thai crew member was killed in the attack, which the Indian navy
had originally announced by saying it had sunk a pirate ''mother
ship.'' The Indian navy defended its actions, saying it had fired in
self-defense.
Somali pirates have become increasingly brazen, and recently seized a
Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million of crude oil. Many of the
vessels are taken to pirate-controlled regions in Somalia, where they
are held for ransom. It was not immediately clear what would
happen to the pirates captured by the Indians, or where they would be
taken. The statement said only that the prisoners and their weapons
would be ''handed over to appropriate authorities ashore.''
Most foreign navies patrolling the Somali coast have been reluctant to
detain suspects because of uncertainties over where they would face
trial, since Somalia has no effective central government or legal
system.
An estimated 1,500 pirates are based in Somalia's semiautonomous
Puntland region, raking in millions of dollars.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will present a draft Security
Council resolution next week asking the United Nations to authorize
''all necessary measures'' against piracy from Somalia. But on
Friday, the commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet expressed doubt
about the wisdom of launching attacks against Somali pirates on land,
as the draft proposes.
U.S. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney told reporters that it is difficult to
identify pirates, and the potential for killing innocent civilians
''cannot be overestimated.''
Somali Pirates Threat Force Cruise Ship
Evacuation
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:18 a.m. ET
December
9, 2008
BERLIN (AP) -- A cruise ship will
evacuate passengers before sailing through waters off the Somali coast
and fly them to the next port of call to protect them from possible
pirate attacks, German cruise operator Hapag-Lloyd said Tuesday.
An official with the European Union's anti-piracy mission said
separately that the force would station armed guards on vulnerable
cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden.
The MS Columbus cruise ship will drop off its 246 passengers before the
ship and some of its crew sail through the Gulf on Wednesday, the
Hamburg-based company said in a statement, without saying exactly where
they would disembark. It said the passengers would take a charter
flight Wednesday to Dubai and spend three days at a five-star hotel
waiting to rejoin the 150-meter (490-foot) vessel in the southern Oman
port of Salalah for the remainder of a round-the-world tour that began
in Italy.
The company said it was sending its passengers on the detour as a
''precautionary measure,'' given rampant piracy off the coast of
lawless Somalia that recently has targeted cruise ships as well as
commercial vessels, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Ukrainian ship
carrying tanks and other weapons.
Last week, pirates fired upon the M/S Nautica, a cruise liner carrying
650 passengers and 400 crew members, but the massive ship quickly
outran its assailants. Other ships have not been so lucky. Pirates have
attacked 32 vessels and hijacked 12 of them since NATO deployed a
four-vessel flotilla on Oct. 24 to escort cargo ships and conduct
anti-piracy patrols. An EU anti-piracy mission -- which takes
over for the NATO ships on Monday -- may also involve stationing armed
guards on the most vulnerable cargo ships in high-risk areas, the
British naval commander in charge of the EU mission said Tuesday.
British Vice-Admiral Philip Jones said the guards could be placed on
some ships transporting food aid to Somalia. The EU mission will also
includes four ships and two maritime reconnaissance aircraft. In
addition to the EU vessels, about a dozen other warships from the U.S.
5th Fleet based in Bahrain, as well as from India, Russia and Malaysia
and other nations are patrolling in the area.
The Russian navy will soon replace its warship in the region with
another from a different fleet, navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo said
Tuesday in Moscow. The missile frigate Neustrashimy, or Intrepid
-- deployed from Russia's Northern Fleet after pirates seized the
Ukrainian ship carrying tanks in September -- has escorted freighters
through the Gulf and helped thwart at least two pirate attacks, the
navy said.
The Intrepid will remain in the region through December and be replaced
by a ship from Russia's Pacific Fleet.
Piracy Is Terrorism
NYTIMES
By DOUGLAS R. BURGESS Jr.
December
5, 2008
THE golden age of piracy has returned. Just as Henry Every and William
Kidd once made their fortunes in the Red Sea, a new generation has
emerged, armed with grenade launchers and assault rifles, to threaten
trade and distract the world’s navies. With the recent capture of the
Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, a crime that once seemed remote and
archaic has again claimed center stage.
And yet the world’s legal apparatus is woefully confused as to how to
respond to piracy. Are the Somali pirates ordinary criminals, or a
quasi-military force?
The question is not insignificant. It has virtually paralyzed the
navies called to police the Gulf of Aden. The German Navy frigate
Emden, on patrol this spring to intercept Qaeda vessels off the Somali
coast, encountered pirate vessels attacking a Japanese tanker. But
since it was allowed to intervene only if the pirates were defined as
“terrorists,” the Emden had no choice but to let the pirates go.
Currently, 13 vessels are held by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, while
the navies of a dozen nations circle almost helplessly.
The legal confusion extends to what happens once pirates have been
caught. In theory, any nation can shoulder the burden of prosecution.
In fact, few are eager to do so.
Prosecuting pirates puts enormous strain on a country’s legal system. A
state whose ship was not attacked, and whose only involvement with the
incident was as rescuer, might balk at being asked to foot the bill for
lengthy and costly proceedings. Yet it might find itself forced to do
so, if neither the victim’s nor the pirates’ state is willing. As
Somalia has not had a recognized government since the early 1990s, the
situation is all the more precarious for would-be capturers. The result
is that ship owners, knowing that no rescue is imminent, pay the
ransom. This emboldens the pirates further, and the problem worsens.
Fortunately, there is a way out of this legal morass. Indeed, the law
is very clear — we just seem to have forgotten about it.
The solution to piracy lies in the very nature of piracy itself. The
Roman lawmaker Cicero defined piracy as a crime against civilization
itself, which English jurist Edward Coke famously rephrased as “hostis
humani generis” — enemies of the human race. As such, they were enemies
not of one state but of all states, and correspondingly all states
shared in the burden of capturing them.
From this precept came the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, meaning
that pirates — unlike any other criminals — could be captured wherever
they were found, by anyone who found them. This recognition of piracy’s
unique threat was the cornerstone of international law for more than
2,000 years.
Though you wouldn’t guess it from the current situation, the law is
surprisingly clear. The definition of pirates as enemies of the human
race is reaffirmed in British and American trial law and in numerous
treaties.
As a customary international law (albeit one that has fallen out of use
since the decline of traditional piracy) it cuts through the Gordian
knot of individual states’ engagement rules. Pirates are not ordinary
criminals. They are not enemy combatants. They are a hybrid, recognized
as such for thousands of years, and can be seized at will by anyone, at
any time, anywhere they are found.
And what of the Emden’s problem? Are pirates a species of terrorist? In
short, yes. The same definition of pirates as hostis humani generis
could also be applied to international organized terrorism. Both crimes
involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their
nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at
civilians; both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United
Nations Convention on the High Seas stipulates, “for private ends.”
For this reason, it seems sensible that the United States and the
international community adopt a new, shared legal definition that would
recognize the link between piracy and terrorism. This could take the
form of an act of Congress or, more broadly, a new jurisdiction for
piracy and terrorism cases at the International Criminal Court.
There is ample precedent. In the 1970s, the hijacking of airliners was
defined by the United Nations as “aerial piracy.” In 1985, when
Palestinian terrorists seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro and held
its passengers hostage, President Ronald Reagan called the hijackers
“pirates.” Recent evidence also indicates that the Somali pirates hand
over a part of their millions in ransom money to Al Shabaab, the Somali
rebel group that has been linked to Al Qaeda.
The similarities and overlaps between the two crimes have prompted some
jurists to advocate abandoning the term piracy altogether in favor of
“maritime terrorism.” By reasserting the traditional definition of
pirates as hostis humani generis, and linking it to terrorism, the
United States and other nations will not only gain a powerful tool in
fighting the Somali pirates, but other incidents of terrorism around
the world as well.
Recognizing piracy as an international crime will do something else: It
will give individual states that don’t want to prosecute pirates an
alternative — the international court. If pirates are recognized under
their traditional international legal status — as neither ordinary
criminals nor combatants, but enemies of the human race — states will
have a much freer hand in capturing them. If piracy falls within the
jurisdiction of the international court, states will not need to
shoulder the burden of prosecution alone.
Today the world’s navies are hamstrung by conflicting laws and the
absence of an international code. A comprehensive legal framework is
the only way to break the stalemate off Somalia. In a trial before the
Old Bailey in 1696, Dr. Henry Newton, the Admiralty advocate, declared,
“Suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease.”
More than 300 years later, the world is suffering again. Fortunately,
this time we have the answer.
Douglas R. Burgess Jr. is the author
of “The Pirates’ Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History’s Most
Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America.”
So, this is the
country that got the Muslim world angry about the cartoons?
Danish Navy Rescues Suspected Pirates
NYTIMES
By ALAN COWELL
December
6, 2008
LONDON -- A Danish warship on patrol to thwart piracy in the Gulf of
Aden ended up rescuing seven of its presumed prey when its crew found
suspected Somali pirates adrift this week with a broken motor on their
speedboat, the Danish Navy said on Friday.
Danish sailors brought the hungry, thirsty Somalis on board their own
ship, a naval official said. Then they sank the speedboat.
The incident highlighted the challenges facing a small international
flotilla patrolling vast expanses of ocean where pirates have struck
with increasing audacity, hijacking vessels including a Ukrainian
freighter laden with armaments and a supertanker carrying an estimated
$100 million of crude oil.
Earlier this week, pirates chased and shot at an American cruise ship
with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as
it sailed along a corridor patrolled by the international warships,
officials told The Associated Press.
The Danish warship, a combat support vessel called the HDMS Absalon,
picked up the seven men about 90 miles off the coast of Yemen on
Wednesday after a maritime patrol aircraft spotted them signaling in
distress, said Lt. Cmdr. Jesper Lynge, a Danish Navy spokesman, in a
telephone interview from Copenhagen.
But when Danish special forces from the Absalon went alongside the
stricken speed-boat, they found rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47
assault rifles -- familiar pirate weapons -- which they confiscated.
“Their ship had been without propulsion for several days,” he said.
“They were hungry and thirsty. We had them checked out by our doctor.
We gave them blankets, food and water.”
But they did not arrest them.
“We had a situation where these guys were shipwrecked persons,”
Lieutenant Commander Lynge said. “But we haven’t caught them in an act
of piracy, and what their main purpose was -- your guess is as good as
mine.”
The Danish crew handed them over early Friday to the Yemen coast guard,
he said.
The Absalon, with a crew of 100, was deployed in the Gulf of Aden last
September as part of an international effort to curb piracy.
The Danish actions followed another incident last month in which an
Indian Navy warship sank what officials called a pirate “mother ship,”
but later described by its owner as a hijacked Thai fishing trawler.
Negotiations are under way to free the Ukrainian freighter, the Faina,
captured more than two months ago.
Last Sunday, Andrew Mwangura, who as head of a Kenyan maritime
association has helped mediate the situation, said the Somali pirates
who seized the Ukrainian vessel had agreed on a ransom with the ship’s
owners. He would not reveal the figure, but he said that the only thing
left was to figure out how to get the money to the pirates and hand
over the ship.
The hijacked supertanker, the Sirius Star, is anchored a few miles off
the coast of Somalia, near the town of Xarardheere. Its cargo of 2
million barrels of Saudi crude is worth about $100 million; the ship
itself is worth more than $100 million. There are 25 crew members
aboard. The pirates who seized it have been reported by news agencies
to have demanded between $15 million and $25 million for its release.
Somali
Pirates Fail to Hijack U.S. Cruise Liner
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:02 p.m. ET
December
2, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- The luxury American cruise ship steaming across
the Gulf of Aden with hundreds of well-heeled tourists just might have
been too much for Somali pirates to resist.
But the bandits, riding in two skiffs and firing rifle shots at the
gleaming ship, were outrun in minutes when the captain of M/S Nautica
gunned the engine and sped away, a spokesman for the company said
Tuesday.
Still, the implications had the pirates hijacked the ship added a new
dimension to the piracy scourge, as NATO foreign ministers groped for
solutions at a meeting in Brussels and the United Nations extended an
international piracy-fighting mandate for another year.
The potential for massive ransom payments from the families of hundreds
of rich tourists may encourage similar attempts, especially following
the successful capture of a Ukrainian cargo ship laden with tanks and a
Saudi oil tanker carrying $100 million in crude.
And the brazen attack also raises questions: What was a cruise ship
doing in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden? How many such
targets are sailing these seas, and how can they be protected?
Even the pirates' motives were in question: they could simply have been
testing the defenses of the massive ship, rather than making a real
effort to hijack it.
Sunday's attack on the M/S Nautica, which was reported Tuesday, comes
several weeks after a NATO mission served mainly to underscore the
impotence of the world community. A handful of Western ships can do
little to prevent attacks in a vast sea, and without the right to board
hijacked vessels, they can only watch as the booty is towed to port.
''It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape,'' said Noel
Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting
center in Malaysia, urging all ships to remain vigilant.
Some of the world's leading cruise companies said Tuesday they are
considering changing their itineraries to avoid going near the coast of
Somalia following news of the weekend attack.
Cunard's public relations manager Eric Flounders said the company has
two liners, the Queen Mary 2 and Queen Victoria, scheduled to go
through the Gulf of Aden in March but added the company ''will
obviously consider changing the itinerary'' should the situation not
improve.
Spokeswoman Michele Andjel said P&O Cruises is considering whether
to reroute the Arcadia, which is due around the Gulf of Aden in January.
Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Bahrain-based spokesman for the U.S. Navy's
5th Fleet, said 21,000 ships cross the Gulf of Aden every year, but he
did not know how many cruise liners are included in that figure. The
gulf links the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the
Indian Ocean.
''We are not advising ships to go a different way, but we do advise to
go through the international corridor within the Gulf of Aden,''
Christensen said, referring to a security corridor patrolled by the
international coalition.
Pirates have attacked about 100 ships off the Somali coast this year
and hijacked 40 vessels. They still hold 14 ships along with more than
250 crew members, according to maritime officials.
NATO said an Italian destroyer prevented five cargo ships from being
hijacked Tuesday in the Gulf of Aden by blocking the small pirate boats
from the ships and using a helicopter to disperse them.
The Nautica is not the first pleasure boat to be attacked.
The luxury yacht Le Ponant was attacked earlier this year, and pirates
opened fire in 2005 on the Seabourn Spirit off the Somali coast. The
cruise ship evaded capture by using its speed and a long-range acoustic
device that blasted a painful wave of sound at the pirates.
The Nautica also escaped by speeding up as two small pirate skiffs
tried to close in, said Tim Rubacky, a spokesman for Oceania Cruises,
Inc., which owns the Nautica. He said one skiff made it within 300
yards (275 meters) of the cruise ship and fired eight rifle shots at
the vessel before trailing off.
''When the pirates were sighted, the captain went on the public address
system and asked passengers to remain in the interior spaces of the
ship and wait until he gave further instructions,'' Rubacky said.
''Within five minutes, it was over.''
He said the ship still plans to return through the Gulf of Aden.
''We believe this was an isolated incident,'' he said. ''M/S Nautica is
well-equipped to deal with these situations and the crew is
well-trained.''
However, Rubacky would not comment on the crew's training or whether
the ship had weapons or other devices to help fight off a hijacking.
The Nautica was on a 32-day cruise from Rome to Singapore, with stops
at ports in Italy, Egypt, Oman, Dubai, India, Malaysia and Thailand,
according to Oceania's Web site. Choong said the ship was carrying 656
passengers and 399 crew members.
The liner arrived in the southern Oman port of Salalah on Monday
morning, and passengers toured the city before leaving for the capital,
Muscat, that evening, an Oman tourism official said.
In New York on Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council extended for another
year its authorization for countries to enter Somalia's territorial
waters, with advance notice, and use ''all necessary means'' to stop
piracy and armed robbery at sea.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to address the
Security Council on the subject of piracy at a followup session Dec. 16.
Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, and pirates
have taken advantage of the country's lawlessness to launch attacks on
foreign shipping from the Somali coast.
In two of the most daring attacks, pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter
loaded with 33 battle tanks and other heavy weapons in September and
captured the Saudi oil tanker on Nov. 15.
On Tuesday, a Somali pirate spokesman said his group will release the
Ukrainian ship and crew within the next two days after a ransom is paid.
Sugule Ali told The Associated Press by satellite phone on Tuesday that
a ransom agreement had been reached, but would not say how much. The
pirates had originally asked for $20 million when they hijacked the MV
Faina.
''Once we receive this payment, we will also make sure that all our
colleagues on ship reach land safely, then the release will take
place,'' Ali said.
------
Associated Press writers Katharine
Houreld in Nairobi, Kenya, Pan Pylas in London, Carley Petesch in New
York, John Heilprin at the United Nations, Barbara Surk in Dubai,
United Arab Emirates, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Saeed
al-Nahdy in Muscat, Oman, contributed to this report.
Legal
Hurdles in West Slow Pursuit
of Pirates
NYTIMES
By NICHOLAS KULISH
November 29, 2008
BERLIN — Somali pirates firing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled
grenades hijacked yet another ship in the Gulf of Aden on Friday, this
time seizing a chemical tanker. A German military helicopter from a
nearby warship arrived in time to pull three security guards out of the
water, but not soon enough to prevent the hijacking of the ship and the
rest of the crew.
The latest attack, in which even trained security personnel aboard
could not deter the pirates, demonstrated the urgent need for
coordinated action by governments from Cairo to Berlin. But the
bureaucratic and legal hurdles facing international institutions and
national governments have so far defeated most efforts to deal with the
nimble crews of pirates in speedboats, whose tactics have grown bolder
as their profits have paid for better weapons and equipment.
While the pirates have been buying GPS devices, satellite phones and
more-powerful outboard motors, officials in Europe have been discussing
jurisdictional issues surrounding the arrest of pirates on the high
seas and even the possibility that the pirates might demand asylum if
brought onto European Union shores.
Germany, perhaps more than any other country, epitomizes both the
importance of safe passage for ships and the difficulty of reacting
swiftly. It is the world’s leading exporter of goods, and according to
the German Shipowners’ Association it has the world’s largest
container-ship fleet, with some 36 percent of total container capacity.
That would seem to argue for swift action to stop the pirates, and
Germany did indeed draw international attention earlier this week when
it announced that up to 1,400 military personnel members might take
part in the mission to combat piracy. But the figure significantly
overstated the likely deployment as part of a European Union mission in
the region, and Parliament has yet to approve it. It also remains to be
seen whether the rules of engagement give German sailors a free enough
hand to fight the pirates.
German law requires parliamentary approval for all troop deployments,
an outgrowth of the country’s uneasiness with the use of military force
after the aggression and crimes of the Nazi regime.
On Wednesday, government ministry officials, members of Parliament and
representatives of the shipping industry and the workers’ unions
gathered on a dark, rainy night in the imposing stone Reichstag
building to debate the problem and the best course of action. In
addition to the question of asylum, questions of extradition to other
countries and how to proceed with potential prosecutions were high on
the agenda.
“It is not only the case for Germany that these legal questions have to
be clarified, but that also goes for the other countries,” said Vice
Adm. Hans-Joachim Stricker, commander of the German fleet, in an
interview shortly before the proceedings began. “That is being worked
on under high pressure, and once these legal questions are clarified,
then the operations can be ordered.”
But some legal experts in Germany said that the United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea and an existing United Nations mandate
to combat Somali piracy already provided all the legal cover necessary
for muscular action against the pirates.
“The legal regime is in existence, sustainable, and there’s no problem
with that,” said Rüdiger Wolfrum, professor and director at the
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law
and a leading jurist here. “There is a certain political hesitation to
forcefully engage in anti-pirate acts.”
If it gets approval, the German military is planning to send a frigate,
the Karlsruhe, with some 220 seamen on board, to join in the European
Union’s first naval mission, Operation Atalanta, named after the swift
huntress of Greek legend. “At this point we are finalizing the
operational plan,” said Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for Javier
Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.
Ms. Gallach said that half a dozen nations or more were expected to
contribute to the mission and that its first tasks would probably begin
Dec. 9, after the expected approval by the countries’ foreign ministers
the day before. The presence is expected to include up to six frigates,
three to five airplanes for maritime patrols and some 1,200 people in
all, and the European Union hopes to coordinate actions with other
navies operating in the region, including those from India, Russia and
the United States.
But the Germans may not obtain the necessary approvals for their part
of the plan in time to join the mission right away. Though the plan is
expected to be approved before Christmas, the slowness of the process
has frustrated some members of Parliament.
“I cannot believe that we could have this kind of problem, where
pirates fool around with the international community,” said Bernd
Siebert, a member of Parliament and a defense expert with Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “The bureaucratic obstacles and
legal problems must be overcome. We have discussed this for too long.”
The capture of yet another ship on Friday, the chemical tanker
Biscaglia, flying under the Liberian flag, underscored the point. The
company that provided the security personnel for the ship, Anti Piracy
Maritime Security Solutions, based in Poole, England, said in a
statement after communicating with its team leader that “the ship came
under sustained and heavy attack from automatic weapons and
rocket-propelled grenades.”
The security team had been using nonlethal means, including water
cannons, to defend the ship. After getting the crew to a safe place,
the men were unable to prevent the pirates from boarding and jumped
overboard under fire, the statement said. The three men, two Britons
and one Irishman, were rescued unharmed by a German military
helicopter. Roughly 30 crew members were still on board the ship at the
time of the hijacking, according to the International Maritime Bureau,
which runs the Piracy Reporting Center.
A spokesman for the operations command of the Bundeswehr, the German
armed forces, confirmed that the Mecklenburg Vorpommern, a frigate
operating in the region as part of the American-led antiterrorism
mission, sent its helicopter to investigate after receiving an
emergency call from the tanker. By the time the helicopter, a Sea Lynx
Mk 88, arrived, the pirates had already boarded the tanker, the
spokesman said, thereby precluding aggressive countermeasures for fear
of the crew’s safety.
“From the time a crew on board spots the pirates to the time they
actually board is usually only 15 minutes,” said Peter Lehr, an expert
on piracy and maritime terrorism at the University of St. Andrews in
Scotland. Mr. Lehr said that even the addition of the European Union
naval mission would not be enough to secure the vast area. “A naval
escort has to be nearby. As soon as they’re on board it’s too late to
do anything.”
Forty ships have been confirmed as hijacked this year out of a total of
close to 100 that have been attacked, according to the International
Maritime Bureau. The most spectacular hijacking occurred two weeks ago,
when pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker, the Sirius Star, worth
$100 million and loaded with two million barrels of oil, worth another
$100 million.
Pirates have already collected at least $25 million in ransom this
year, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said last
week. The Associated Press reported Friday that a Greek-owned cargo
ship taken more than two months ago was released Thursday.
Oops! Not a pirate ship after
all? Any connection to latest
terror event in Mumbai?
Indian Navy Sinks Pirate Ship
NYTIMES
By HARI KUMAR and ALAN COWELL
November 20, 2008
NEW DELHI — As negotiations started for the release of a Saudi-owned
supertanker seized by pirates off Somalia, the Indian Navy said on
Wednesday that one of its warships fought a battle at sea with would-be
hijackers in the Gulf of Aden, sinking one suspect vessel and forcing
the pirates to abandon a second as they fled..
The drama on the night-time waters of the Indian Ocean late Tuesday
underscored the growing international concern at the audacity with
which armed pirates, mostly based in Somalia, range across vast areas
of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, attacking at will.
The enormous Saudi-owned supertanker, Sirius Star, remained at anchor
off the coast of Somalia on Wednesday, but there was no immediate word
on the status of negotiations for its release.
In Rome, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, confirmed
that the owners of the Star “are negotiating on the issue” and were
“the final arbiter of the issue”, despite the Saudi government’s
official opposition to such discussions with “pirates, terrorists or
hijackers,” according to news reports. But he did not elaborate.
The ship is owned by Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi
Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco. At 1,080 feet, it is the largest
ship known to have been seized by pirates. Its 25-member crew is made
up of personnel from Britain, Poland, Croatia, the Philippines and
Saudi Arabia. The supertanker, about the same length as an American
Nimitz class aircraft carrier, is fully loaded with two million barrels
of oil valued at around $100 million. In a statement on Wednesday,
Cmdr. Nirad Kumar Sinha, a spokesman for the Indian Navy, said an
Indian warship, the INS Tabar, encountered a flotilla of three pirate
vessels some 320 miles south west of the Omani coast in the Gulf of
Aden in a separate incident on Tuesday evening. One ship was apparently
a “mother ship” used by pirates to extend their range, with two
speedboats in tow. The suspect vessel matched the description of a
pirate vessel issued by international anti-piracy authorities,
Commander Sinha said.
He said the ‘“whole operation lasted four to five hours” and was “the
first such incident in which the Indian Navy sank the pirates’ mother
ship.”
When the Indian vessel tried to halt the ship, he said, “the vessel’s
threatening response was that she would blow up the naval warship” if
it came closer.
“Pirates were seen roaming on the upper deck of this vessel with guns
and rocket propelled grenade launchers,” Commander Sinha said. “The
vessel continued its threatening calls and subsequently fired upon INS
Tabar. On being fired upon, INS Tabar retaliated in self-defense and
opened fire on the mother vessel.”
“As a result of the firing by INS Tabar, fire broke out on the vessel
and explosions were heard, possibly due to exploding ammunition that
was stored on the vessel. Almost simultaneously, two speedboats were
observed breaking off to escape. The ship chased the first boat which
was later found abandoned. The other boat made good its escape into
darkness,” he said. There was no immediate word on casualties among the
pirates.
The Indian account suggested that pirates had attacked the Tabar,
deployed to repulse pirates — equaling the brazenness of the hijacking
on Sunday of the Sirius Star.
At least eight ships have been hijacked in a vast expanse of ocean off
the east African coastline in the past two weeks.
On the same day the Indian Navy engaged the pirates, a cargo ship
registered in Hong Kong and loaded with 36,000 tons of wheat was seized
in the Gulf of Aden, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.
The vessel, with 25 crew aboard, was headed for the Iranian port of
Bandar Abbas.
That hijacking was followed by a report Wednesday, still to be
confirmed by Greek authorities, that a Greek bulk carrier had also been
seized in the Gulf of Aden. A regional maritime group based in Mombasa,
Kenya, told Reuters 23 to 25 crew were aboard that ship. The Associated
Press also reported that a Thai fishing boat with 16 crew members had
been seized off the coast of Somalia on Tuesday.
International anti-piracy patrols, deployed since August, have had
occasional success.
Last week, a British frigate, the Cumberland, launched speedboats to
intercept a hijacked dhow, exchanging fire with pirates before British
naval personnel boarded it, the British Ministry of Defense said
Tuesday. Eight alleged hijackers were captured and handed over to
Kenyan authorities on Tuesday. Two people believed to be Somali
nationals were killed in the operation, the ministry said.
The more aggressive actions by naval patrols were welcomed by
international shipping organizations on Wednesday.
Cyrus Mody, of the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors global
piracy, said in a telephone interview from London that the shipping
industry had been urging stronger naval measures against the pirates’
“mother ships” for some time and would approve of the Indian Navy’s
action. “This is the sort of action which should be taken to try to
deal with the situation,” he said.
Peter Hinchliffe, the marine director of the International Chamber of
Shipping in London, said in a separate telephone interview that the
Indian Navy’s action “is going to start to bring the message home” to
pirates “that the international community really is ranged against
them.” However, he said, “we would prefer that the pirates are arrested
and put through legal channels.”
This year, at least 92 ships have been attacked in and around the Gulf
of Aden, more than triple the number in 2007, according to the
International Maritime Bureau At least 14 of those ships, carrying more
than 250 crew members, are still in the control of hijackers. They
include a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade
launchers and ammunition, which has been held hostage since late
September.
An estimated $25 million to $30 million has been paid in ransom to
Somali pirates this year, according to a report released Tuesday by Ban
Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. But the cost is likely
to spread to consumers as shipping companies face higher insurance
bills inspired by the wave of piracy.
Brendan Flood, a marine underwriter for a specialist insurer Hiscox in
London, said in a posting on the Lloyds’ insurance website: “With the
general situation having deteriorated so quickly, insurance premiums
for the hull, cargo and crew for vessels taking this increasingly
dangerous route will be under pressure and will need to be reassessed.”
Maritime
Hijackings Decrease in Asia
NYTIMES
By MARK McDONALD
November 19, 2008
HONG KONG — The hijacking of a Saudi supertanker has not
led to alerts and alarms in Asia, which has weathered its own previous
storms of piracy.
“It will be very difficult to copycat the Somalia situation in Asia,”
said Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center at the
International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “The
governments here are more committed and have more resources. In fact,
the attacks here are coming down.”
A regional piracy-monitoring agency in Singapore said maritime attacks
in Asia in the first nine months of the year dropped 11 percent
compared to 2007 and 32 percent from 2006.
Meanwhile, the hijacking of the Saudi tanker is just another red
push-pin on the 2008 master piracy map maintained by the maritime
bureau, a private group in the Malaysian capital.
The hundreds of pins denoting attacks and hijackings are heavily
clustered in three regions — the Gulf of Aden and the eastern coast of
Somalia; the coast of West Africa, particularly off Nigeria; and the
Indonesian archipelago. But the vast majority of the incidents off
Indonesia, and throughout Southeast Asia, are low-level attacks against
small vessels, the petty theft of cargo or the robbery of crew members.
Maritime experts in Southeast Asia cite naval patrols by Indonesia,
Malaysia and Singapore — known in the anti-piracy business as “the
littoral states” — for the significant reduction in attacks, and
particularly a decrease in hijackings. Satellite monitoring also is
used.
Stepped-up sea patrols began three years ago when pirates began to
increase their attacks in the Strait of Malacca — the long, narrow
funnel between peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of
Sumatra. Even large cargo vessels and tankers became vulnerable as
pirates began to arm themselves with automatic weapons and
rocket-propelled grenades.
In 2005, the insurer Lloyds of London listed the strait as the world’s
No. 1 hot spot for seagoing piracy — in effect declaring it a war zone
— and placed an insurance premium on any ships using the passageway.
The losses from the attacks, the new vulnerability of tankers and the
extra costs for insurance led to tremendous anxiety among ship
captains, owners, insurers and governments. An estimated 40 percent of
the world’s seaborne commerce moves through the strait, including
shipments of oil from the Middle East to East Asia.
“If oil would get disrupted in the Malacca Straits, Japan would get
very concerned because that’s their oil lifeline,” said Mr. Choong. The
last major act of piracy in the Asia-Pacific region was in December
2005, Mr. Choong said, when a large chemical tanker was hijacked en
route from Indonesia to Singapore. The ship had a “tracker” on board,
the equivalent of an airplane transponder, and was quickly found in the
South China Sea.
“With the tracker, she had nowhere to run,” Mr. Choong said. “The
recovery of ships is very high in Asia.”
Piracy in the region still happens, of course. The more serious
incidents involve the seagoing theft of oil or gas from small tankers.
Typically, the ship is seized at night by lightly armed pirates in
speedboats. The crew is then set adrift in lifeboats and the cargo is
pumped into an accompanying pirate tanker. The stolen oil and gas is
then sold in small amounts in regional villages and ports.
In a transcript from the maritime bureau, this minor incident in
Kalimantan, Indonesia, was the only one reported from Asia in the last
week: “Four robbers armed with catapults, knives and hacksaws boarded a
bulk carrier at anchor. They threatened the duty crew with catapults
and stole ship’s stores from forward locker. Alarm raised and ship’s
whistle sounded. Robbers jumped overboard and escaped in a wooden fast
boat. Incident reported to coastal authorities.”
“The severity is much greater in Somalia, where the pirates are very
heavily armed, as compared to Southeast Asia, where the robbers usually
just have knives,” said Lee Yin Mui, assistant director of research at
the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed
Robbery Against Ships at Sea. The 16-nation network, known as ReCAAP,
is based in Singapore.
In the first quarter of this year, the maritime bureau recorded 83
ships being hijacked or fired upon worldwide. The Gulf of Aden had more
than half those attacks, 47 in all, while only two incidents occurred
in the Straits of Malacca.
“Hijacking incidents here involve much smaller ships, usually tugboats
which are slow-moving and easy to board,” Miss Lee said. “The pirates
escape in their own boats. The crews are often abandoned on a remote
beach. We see this as quite compassionate.”
In the most recent hijacking, Miss Lee said 15 pirates seized a
Singaporean tugboat, the Whale 7, as it was towing a barge to Thailand.
ReCAAP and the maritime bureau in Malaysia issued alerts to ship
captains and harbor masters in the region, and the boat was found three
weeks later in Thailand. The tug had been renamed the Saga 01 and
repainted — from a deep-water blue to traffic-cone orange. The Thai
police arrested the pirates, who said they had been paid $35,000 to
seize the tug.
5 Somali Pirates Drown With
Ransom
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:49 p.m. ET
January 10, 2009
MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) -- Five of the pirates who hijacked a Saudi
supertanker drowned with their share of a $3 million ransom, a relative
said Saturday, the day after the bundle of cash was apparently dropped
by parachute onto the deck of the ship.
The Sirius Star and its 25 crew sailed safely away Friday at the end of
a two-month standoff in the Gulf of Aden, where pirates attacked over
100 ships last year. Hundreds more kidnapped sailors remain in the
hands of pirates.
The drowned pirates' boat overturned in rough seas, and family members
were still looking for four missing bodies, said Daud Nure, another
pirate who knew the men involved.
Piracy is one of the few ways to make money in Somalia. Half the
population is dependent on aid and a whole generation has grown up
knowing nothing but war. A recent report by London's Chatham House
think-tank said pirates raked in more than $30 million in ransoms last
year.
Somalia's lawless coastline borders one of the world's busiest shipping
lanes, which links the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea to the Indian
Ocean. Attacks have continued despite the patrols by warships from
France, Germany, Britain, America, India and China.
The naval coalition has been closely monitoring both the Sirius Star
and the Faina, a Ukrainian ship loaded with military tanks that has
been held since September. The seizure of the Sirius Star on Nov. 15
prompted fears that the pirates might release some of the cargo of
crude oil into the ocean, causing an environmental disaster as a way of
pressuring negotiators. At the time, the oil was valued at $100 million.
Abukar Haji, uncle of one of the dead pirates, blamed the naval
surveillance for the accident that killed his pirate nephew Saturday.
''The boat the pirates were traveling in capsized because it was
running at high speed because the pirates were afraid of an attack from
the warships patrolling around,'' he said.
''There has been human and monetary loss but what makes us feel sad is
that we don't still have the dead bodies of our relatives. Four are
still missing and one washed up on the shore.''
Pirate Daud Nure said three of the eight passengers had managed to swim
to shore after the boat overturned in rough seas. He was not part of
the pirate operation but knew those involved.
''Here in Haradhere the news is grim, relatives are looking for their
dead,'' he said.
The tanker had left Somali territorial waters and was on its way home
Saturday, said Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali Naimi. A Saudi Oil
Ministry official said the ship was headed for Dammam, on the country's
Gulf coast, but gave no estimated time of arrival. The official spoke
on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the
press.
The U.S. Navy, which announced this week it will head a new anti-piracy
task force, released photos Friday showing a parachute, carrying what
was described as ''an apparent payment,'' floating down toward the
tanker.
The Liberian-flagged ship is owned by Vela International Marine Ltd., a
subsidiary of Saudi oil company Aramco. Neither commented on the
reported ransom drop.
''All the crew members are safe and I am glad to say that they are all
in good health and high spirits,'' said a statement by Saleh K'aki,
president and CEO of Vela. ''Throughout this ordeal, our sole objective
was the safe and timely release of the crew. That has been achieved
today.''
But over a dozen ships and around 300 crew members are still being
held. The capture of the Sirius Star has already demonstrated the
pirates' ability to strike high value targets hundreds of miles
offshore.
On the same day the Saudi ship was freed, pirates released a captured
Iranian-chartered cargo ship, Iran's state television reported
Saturday. The ship Delight was carrying 36 tons of wheat when it was
attacked in the Gulf of Aden Nov. 18 and seized by pirates. All 25 crew
are in good health and the vessel is sailing toward Iran, the TV report
said. It did not say if a ransom was paid.
Pirates
Release Hijacked Tanker Article
Wall Street Journal
By CHIP CUMMINS
JANUARY 10, 2009, 6:44 A.M. ET
DUBAI -- The operator of a Saudi Arabian oil tanker, hijacked by
pirates in November, said the ship had been released, a day after the
U.S. Navy reported that a package, believed to be a ransom, was
parachuted from a plane onto the deck of the vessel.
The release ends one of the most dramatic of several recent pirate
attacks in the waters off East Africa.
The Navy said Somali pirates aboard the vessel appeared to have
received a ransom, and released photos Friday showing a package
attached to a parachute being dropped to the Sirius Star. The
supertanker, which has a crew of 25, was fully laden with a cargo of
crude oil -- valued at more than $100 million -- when pirates seized
the vessel in mid-November.
The Sirius Star is operated by Vela International, an affiliate of
Saudi Arabia's state oil company, Aramco. Dubai-based Vela confirmed
Saturday in a statement on its website that the vessel had been
released, and that the ship's crew was healthy and "in high spirits."
Representatives of Vela, Aramco and the Saudi government weren't
immediately available to comment further on the U.S. Navy report of the
suspected ransom delivery.
The Sirius Star was seized more than 450 miles off Africa's east coast,
further south than most recent pirate attacks in and around the Gulf of
Aden, a busy thoroughfare for oil tankers and other vessels.
Hijacked
Supertanker Drops Anchor
NYTIMES
By ROBERT F. WORTH and MARK McDONALD
November 19, 2008
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — A hijacked Saudi-owned supertanker carrying more
than $100 million worth of crude oil is believed to have anchored off
Somalia and its owners are working toward “the safe and speedy return”
of the 25 crew, the owners said Tuesday.
A statement from Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi
Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco, said the company was “awaiting
further contact from the pirates in control of the vessel” who seized
it some 480 miles off the coast of Somalia. Earlier reports said the
1,080-foot Sirius Star had been hijacked off the Kenyan coast.
The statement did not say specifically that negotiations with the
hijackers had started. The supertanker, about the same length as an
American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, is the largest ship known to
have been seized by pirates.
The statement from Vela International, issued in Dubai, quoted the
company’s president and chief executive, Salah B. Ka’aki, as saying the
company’s “first and foremost priority is ensuring the safety of the
crew. We are in communication with their families and are working
toward their safe and speedy return." The crew is composed of 2
British, 2 Polish, 1 Croatian, 1 Saudi and 19 Philippines nationals.
“Vela continues to monitor the situation and coordinate with the
relevant embassies. At this time, Vela is awaiting further contact from
the pirates in control of the vessel,” the statement said.
Earlier, Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth
Fleet, stationed in Bahrain said that if the hijacking follows the
pattern of previous attacks, the ship would anchor and “negotiations
will begin between the pirates and the owners of ship.”
Although the supertanker’s exact location near the Somali coast was not
clear, in the past most pirates have brought hijacked vessels to a
stretch of coastline between Eyl in the north to the Harradera region
to the south, Commander Campbell said in a telephone interview.
The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali
pirates in recent months, but this appeared to be the first time that
pirates have seized a loaded oil tanker.
Asked about a possible naval intervention, Commander Campbell said:
“Once the attack takes place, this is a hostage situation, and there
are 25 crew members on board that ship. As with any hostage situation,
there has to be concern for those individuals.”
Negotiations with pirates have often taken weeks or even months. A
Ukrainian vessel hijacked in September, loaded with tanks and other
heavy weapons, is still being held at Hobyo on the Somali coast, where
the ship’s crew remain captives, Commander Campbell said.
According to the International Maritime Bureau, a global clearinghouse
for piracy reporting based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, , 88 ships have
been attacked in the Gulf of Aden alone this year. And 14 hijacked
ships remain in the gulf — the heavily armed hijackers still on board,
with the crews, cargo and the vessels themselves being held for ransom.
“They’re still at sea and still negotiating,” said Noel Choong, the
head of the bureau’s piracy reporting center. As ransom payoffs have
risen, he said, pirates have increased their demands. “They know the
going rate.”
Only a few years ago, the average ransom was in the tens of thousands
to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now payments can range from
$500,000 to $2 million.
The pirates’ profits are set to reach a record $50 million in 2008,
Somali officials say. Shipping firms are usually prepared to pay,
because the sums are low compared with the value of the ships.
The attack on the Sirius Star took place despite an increased
multinational naval presence off the Somali coast, where most of the
recent hijackings have taken place. The pirates, often armed with
automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, travel in speedboats
equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment.
The location of the latest attack, far out to sea, suggested that the
pirates may be expanding their range in an effort to avoid the
multinational naval patrols now plying the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian
Sea.
“I’m stunned by the range of it,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference in Washington. The
ship’s distance from the coast was “the longest distance I’ve seen for
any of these incidents,” he said.
The vessel was headed for the United States when it was seized, Reuters
reported.
Maritime experts recently have noticed a new development in the gulf —
the pirates’ use of “mother ships,” large oceangoing trawlers carrying
fleets of speedboats which are then deployed when a new prize is
encountered.
“They launch these boats and they’re like wild dogs,” said Mr. Choong
in Kuala Lumpur. “They attack the ship from the port, from starboard,
from all points, shooting, scaring the captain, firing RPGs and forcing
the ship to stop.”
There are some countermeasures the merchant ships can use when
approaching pirates are spotted. Fire-retardant foam or huge blasts of
water can be sprayed from the ship to douse the would-be hijackers.
Once pirates get aboard, however, the ship is theirs, because crews on
commercial vessels are rarely armed, according to Mr. Choong and other
maritime experts. “They are not mentally or physically fit enough to
handle weapons,” he said.
Nor do many ship owners use armed contractors — seagoing mercenaries —
to fight or ward off approaching pirates. Experts said crew safety and
insurance liability were overriding concerns of captains and owners.
“We do not advocate this, having armed escorts on board,” said Lee Yin
Mui, assistant director of research at the Regional Cooperation
Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships at Sea.
Known as ReCAAP, the 16-nation network is based in Singapore.
“Armed escorts could only escalate the situation,” she said, “and
perhaps trigger off heavy crossfire.”
OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD
Page
last updated at 15:37 GMT, Thursday, 1 April 2010 16:37 UK
The suspects are now on board the USS Nicholas
US Navy captures suspected
pirates after gunbattle
A US warship has seized five suspected
pirates after an exchange of fire in the Indian Ocean west of the
Seychelles, the US Navy says.
Its statement says the USS Nicholas sank a skiff and captured
a suspected mother ship in international waters.
The incident happened at 1227 local time when suspected
pirates opened fire on the warship.
The warship returned fire before commencing pursuit to
disable the skiff, the statement said.
Three suspected pirates were captured after personnel from
the USS Nicholas boarded the skiff. Ammunition and cans of fuel were
also found on the vessel, which was later sunk.
Two more suspected pirates were also seized on the suspected
mother ship.
"The suspected pirates will remain in US custody on board
Nicholas until a determination is made regarding their disposition,"
the statement said.
Page last updated at 15:44 GMT, Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Pirates kill sailor in
attack on oil tanker off Benin
Pirates have attacked an oil tanker
off the coast of west Africa, killing a Ukrainian seaman, the commander
of Benin's naval forces says.
Cdr Fernand Maxime Ahoyo says the Cancale Star's chief
engineer was killed and one other crewman wounded.
The
pirates attacked the vessel some 18 nautical miles (33km) off the coast
of Benin, in what correspondents say is the country's first such
attack.
One pirate was overpowered by the crew, but the others
managed to escape.
Benin-based journalist Esther Tola told the BBC that the
pirates were thought to be from Nigeria.
The commander said naval forces had rescued the crew from the
tanker and brought them into port.
There
were 24 seamen of different nationalities on board the Monrovia-flagged
vessel, including Filipinos, Lithuanians and Ukranians, Cdr Ahoyo told
AFP news agency.
Western front
The International
Maritime Bureau (IMB) says piracy in the waters of west Africa is on
the rise, with 100 such incidents recorded last year.
The IMB
has previously warned of heightened piracy risks along shipping routes
in Nigeria and Ghana, to the east and west of Benin.
It said
attacks usually took place while ships were at anchor or close to
coastal areas, unlike in eastern Africa, where Somali pirates strike
ships hundreds of miles out to sea.
More than 10 ships and 200 hostages are currently being held
by pirates operating in waters off Somalia.
An
international force of about 40 warships has been stationed around the
Gulf of Aden, in an effort to clamp down on piracy in some the world's
busiest shipping lanes.
INDIA
View of the pool at the Taj
Mahal Hotel. Photo from several years ago, prior to terror
assault, by WestportNow photographer.
Mumbai attack
gunman Qasab sentenced to death
Page last updated at 10:54 GMT,
Thursday, 6 May 2010 11:54 UK
Crowds across Mumbai were jubilant on
hearing of the sentence
|
The only gunman captured alive after the 2008
Mumbai attacks has been sentenced to death by an Indian court.
Mohammed
Ajmal Amir Qasab, a Pakistani citizen aged 22, was found guilty on
Monday of many charges, including murder and waging war on India.
When sentencing, the judge said there was no chance of his
rehabilitation. Qasab has the right to appeal.
The attacks left 174 people dead, nine of them gunmen.
Relations between India and Pakistan have still to recover.
India blamed Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba
for the attack.
After
initial denials, Pakistan acknowledged the attacks had been partially
planned on its territory and that Qasab was one of its citizens.
'Cruelty incarnate'
Judge
ML Tahaliyani said "he should be hanged by the neck until he is dead",
adding he had lost his right to "humanitarian treatment".
|
AT THE SCENE
Prachi Pinglay
BBC News, Mumbai
The
death sentence was a foregone conclusion. The judge said that "leniency
cannot be shown" because "he was more than keen to attack India".
He was studiously deadpan when the verdict was handed
down on Monday.
But today Qasab was emotional. A police constable later said: "He asked
for water. He was upset and crying."
Security to get into the
court was extremely tight. Afterwards, lawyers and policemen expressed
relief that they would no longer have to attend this specially-built
courtroom in a jail.
Outside the court, there were crowds of
people celebrating the sentence. Demonstrators held up placards saying,
"hang him", and people set off firecrackers in jubilation.
|
The BBC's Prachi Pinglay, in the courtroom in Mumbai
(Bombay), said
Qasab shook his head when asked if he wanted to make a statement. He
was later seen wiping his face and talking to a policeman.
Prosecuter Ujjwal Nikam appeared in front of the court
smiling and giving the victory sign.
"I'm very happy with the judgement. I have been successful in
my attempt to put a balm on the wounds of the victims," he said.
During the trial Qasab had been branded a "killing machine"
and "cruelty incarnate" by the prosecution.
"Today's
sentencing sends the message that keeping Qasab alive would be a crime
in itself," Mr Nikam added as crowds outside the court chanted "victory
to Hindustan".
Qasab's lawyer had called for leniency, saying
his client had been brainwashed by a terrorist organisation and could
be rehabilitated.
He said no decision had been made yet on whether to appeal
against the sentence, the Associated Press news agency reported.
In
India the death penalty is carried out by hanging, but it is rarely
used and most death sentences are commuted to life imprisonment.
Only one person has been executed since 1995. A security
guard was hanged in 2004 for the rape and murder of a schoolgirl.
The BBC's Soutik Biswas in Delhi said if Qasab decided to
appeal, the legal process could take years.
Our correspondent said Qasab could, as a last resort, appeal
to the president for clemency, which would take even more time.
'Mastermind' in custody
|
MOHAMMED AJMAL AMIR QASAB
Pakistani citizen from Punjab province
Reports say he received little
education, and spent his youth alternating between labouring and petty
crime
India says he was trained for Mumbai
operation by Lashkar-e-Taiba group in a remote camp
Captured on camera at the Chhatrapati
Shivaji
Terminus, a slight figure in combat trousers and a sweatshirt,
clutching an assault rifle
Prosecutors said he had confessed but
his lawyers then said his statement had been coerced, and it was
retracted
|
Qasab was the only attacker caught alive in the three-day
assault by
10 gunmen on hotels, a railway station, a restaurant and a Jewish
centre in Mumbai.
Late last year, Pakistan charged seven people
in connection with the attacks, including the suspected mastermind
Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who is alleged to head the Pakistan-based
militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
But progress with those charges has been slow partly because
of legal technicalities in Pakistan, correspondents say.
In the US, an American man of Pakistani origin has pleaded
guilty to scouting targets in Mumbai for the attacks.
David
Coleman Headley is alleged to have made five extended trips to Mumbai
between 2006 and 2008. India has said it will ask for access to Mr
Headley in connection with the attacks.
Indian Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam arriving at court Monday
in Mumbai
Pakistani
Man Convicted in 2008 Mumbai Attacks
NYTIMES
By VIKAS BAJAJ
May
3, 2010
MUMBAI, India — The only surviving gunman of the 2008 terrorist attack
against this city was convicted Monday of waging war against India,
murder, conspiracy and other crimes during a the three-day assault that
killed more than 160 people. The defendant, Ajmal Kasab, a Pakistani,
hung his head as a judge read a summary of the judgment to him in Hindi
at a special jail courtroom here. Mr. Kasab, who had spent most of the
hearing bent over, held a grave expression but did not say anything.
“The offenses committed by them was a brazen act of war against India,”
the judge, M. L. Tahaliyani, said, referring to Mr. Kasab and nine
other gunmen who attacked five-star hotels, a busy commuter train
station, a popular bar and a Jewish center. He added, “It was not a
simple crime of murder or intent to murder.”
Mr. Kasab faces the death penalty or life in prison; the court will
meet on Tuesday to consider his sentence.
The verdict comes just days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of
India discussed terrorism with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of
Pakistan on the sidelines of a regional submit in Bhutan. The Mumbai
attacks severely strained already-tense relations between the
countries, who have fought several wars since they were divided after
the end of British rule here in 1947.
India has accused elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence
services of aiding terror groups against India. Pakistani officials
have denied providing state support to such groups.
On Monday, the court also acquitted two Indians whom the police had
accused of aiding the terrorists by supplying them with a map of
Mumbai. After sharply criticizing the prosecution, the judge presiding
over the case, M. L. Tahaliyani, said the evidence against those two
men “falls very short.”
The government had accused those men, Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed,
of drawing and supplying a map recovered from the pocket of one of the
dead gunmen. Mr. Tahaliyani said that the links tying the two men, the
map and the terrorists were tenuous. The recovered map, for instance,
was clean while the pants and pockets of the dead gunman from whom it
was said to have been recovered were soiled with sweat and blood, the
judge said.
The prosecutor leading the government’s case, Ujjwal Nikam, said he
would appeal the acquittal.
In the case against Mr. Kasab, the judge said a retracted confession by
him and convincing corroborative evidence showed he and the other
gunmen had been trained and sent by a Pakistani terrorist group,
Lashkar-e-Taiba. He said 35 men, including Hafez Saeed, the founder of
that group whom India has accused of orchestrating the attack, appear
to be involved in planning the attacks. But the judge added that their
guilt could not be proven in his court.
India has sought the extradition of Mr. Saeed and other Pakistanis
without success. Officials in Pakistan have said that India needs to
provide more evidence.
After the attacks, India broke off a formal “composite dialogue” with
Pakistan. For months, India refused to resume dialogue but that changed
earlier this year with a meeting between senior bureaucrats. Both sides
described last week’s meeting between the prime ministers as productive
and said the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers would meet soon.
The trial of Mr. Kasab, 22, and the two other men took about year to
conclude — a very fast resolution for the Indian judicial system, where
cases often drag on for years and even decades. The court received
testimony from more than 600 witnesses, thousands of pages of evidence
and video and audio surveillance of the attack. Judge Tahaliyani’s
decision totaled more than 1,500 pages.
In spite of the fast pace, the trial suffered a number of setbacks. Mr.
Kasab’s original court-appointed lawyer was dismissed on the first day
of hearings after it was revealed that she was representing a witness
to the attacks in a separate civil case. The court dismissed Mr.
Kasab’s second lawyer late last year after he and Judge Tahaliyani
disagreed about a procedural matter.
Mr. Kasab has also changed his version of the events several times.
After his arrest, he provided a rich narrative about how he became a
terrorist to the police and a magistrate. But he recanted his earlier
statement at the start of the trial. Then, last July, he said in court
that he was guilty and wanted to be hanged. However, he changed his
mind again in December and told the court he was a tourist who arrived
in Mumbai before the attacks and had been framed by the police.
The attacks started on Nov. 26, 2008. Mr. Kasab and a partner, Abu
Ismail, shot and killed commuters at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus,
a busy train station, where the Indian authorities said 58 people died.
After a confrontation later that evening, police officers killed Mr.
Ismail and arrested Mr. Kasab.
It took commandos nearly three days to kill the other eight attackers
who had taken over two of Mumbai’s finest hotels, the Oberoi and the
Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, and a Chabad-Lubavitch center then known as
Nariman House.
The Mumbai attacks also spread wider international tentacles.
Last December, an American at the center of an international terrorism
investigation was charged with helping plot the Mumbai attacks by
identifying targets for Lashkar-e-Taiba. The suspect, David C. Headley
of Chicago, pleaded guilty in March.
Mr. Headley was first arrested in October, 2009, along with another
Chicago resident, Tahawwur Rana, and charged with plotting to attack a
Danish newspaper that in 2005 published cartoons depicting the Prophet
Muhammad, outraging much of the Muslim world.
Alan Cowell contributed reporting
from Paris.
Page last
updated at 17:23
GMT, Monday, 7 December 2009
Chicago man accused of
involvement in Mumbai attacks
The attacks in Mumbai were the result of
extensive planning
|
US prosecutors have charged a Chicago man
with involvement in the deadly Mumbai (Bombay) attacks of a year ago.
David Headley is said to have helped identify targets for the
assaults which left 174 people dead, including nine gunmen.
He
had already been accused with another man of plotting to attack a
Danish newspaper over cartoons that caused outrage in the Muslim world.
Federal prosecutors said Mr Headley was co-operating with
both investigations.
Mr
Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006, and Tahawwur
Hussain Rana are charged with planning attacks on the Danish offices of
the Jyllands-Posten, which in 2005 printed controversial cartoons
depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
US prosecutors said they had
also unsealed charges against a retired Pakistani military major, Abdur
Rehman Hashim Syed, for participating in the conspiracy to attack the
Danish newspaper and its employees.
Mumbai Defendant Says He Would Accept Hanging
NYTIMES
By VIKAS BAJAJ
July 23, 2009
MUMBAI, India — The legal maneuvering over the confession of the sole
surviving gunman in the Mumbai attacks last November continued
Wednesday, with the defendant, Ajmal Kasab, denying that he admitted
his guilt in a bid to win leniency and avoid the death penalty.
“If anybody is worried that I am trying to escape death by hanging, I’m
not,” he declared in court. “If that’s the punishment I am given, so be
it.”
It was the third straight day of dramatic testimony in the Mumbai
courtroom, where Mr. Kasab stunned Indians on Monday by delivering a
lengthy admission of his role in the assault on hotels and other public
sites in a brazen attack by militants based in Pakistan that killed
more than 160 people.
The court is grappling over whether to accept Mr. Kasab’s confession.
The judge overseeing the case, M. L. Tahilyani, said he would rule
tomorrow. His decision could impact other cases pending in India and
Pakistan.
Lawyers are also arguing about the way in which Mr. Kasab, who is
supposed to have no access to newspapers or television, heard about the
Pakistani government’s admission that Pakistani citizens were involved
in the attack. Mr. Kasab said on Tuesday that guards outside his cell
told him about the development, which prompted him to confess.
The prosecution asked the court to accept into the record a portion of
Mr. Kasab’s admission of guilt on Monday related to the killings at a
busy Mumbai train station, where Mr. Kasab and an accomplice mowed down
dozens of people, but requested that it not admit other aspects of the
confession that, it asserts, were filled with “lies and contradiction.”
The prosecutor, Ujjwal Nikam, alleged that Mr. Kasab had deliberately
played down his role in the attacks to avoid the death penalty and help
his Pakistani counterparts who will be tried across the border. He said
any evidence presented in court here could make its way to court there,
an argument that Judge Tahilyani discounted.
But Mr. Kasab’s lawyer, S. G. Abbas Kazmi, said that his client had
been “mentally tortured” by his guards, who told him that the case was
now a lost cause for him since Pakistan had given him up and since the
police, court and even defense lawyers were Indian. When the judge
asked Mr. Kasab if this was true, he said that this happened some time
ago when he was in police custody, not recently.
Mr. Kazmi said the court should pursue one of two options: The judge
can accept Mr. Kasab’s plea and issue a judgment and sentence, or he
can reject the admission of guilt and prohibit the incriminating
statement Mr. Kasab made on Monday from being used during the rest of
the trial.
Mr. Nikam complained that the defense lawyer was trying to mislead the
court. Mr. Kasab’s admission has been the latest in a series of
surprising incidents in the trial that have included the dismissal of a
defense lawyer who had improper contact with a witness.
The Indian press has extensively covered the trial’s every turn. Mr.
Nikam and Mr. Kazmi have become familiar faces on television. They are
mobbed by reporters every time they step out of the courtroom.
The judge declared part of Mr. Kasab’s testimony on Tuesday, about his
indoctrination as a militant, so explosive that he put it under seal.
Mr. Kasab seemed to almost invite a death sentence on Wednesday.
“Whatever I have done, I have done in this world,” he said. “It would
be better if I am punished in this world. It would be better than God’s
punishment.”
Page last updated at 12:13 GMT, Monday, 20 July 2009
13:13 UK
Main Mumbai suspect
pleads guilty
The leading suspect in last November's
deadly attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) pleaded guilty.
Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab stood up before the court to say he
admitted his role in the killings. Mr Qasab, who is a Pakistani, faces
86 charges, including waging war on India, murder and possessing
explosives.
It
is not clear why he has changed his plea. In May, he pleaded not guilty
to all charges. More than 170 people died in the attacks, nine of them
gunmen. Prosecutors say Mr Qasab is the sole surviving attacker.
'Shocked'
The BBC's Prachi Pinglay, who was in the courtroom in Mumbai, said
Mr Qasab appeared calm. He said there had been no pressure on him to
confess and it had been his decision to do so.
"I request the court to accept my plea and pronounce the
sentence," he told the judge, smiling.
Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam said: "We were not expecting this. We
were all shocked when he made a plea of guilt.
"It is for the court to decide whether to accept his plea or
not. It was all of a sudden. The court is now recording his plea."
Shortly afterwards Mr Nikam told the BBC the confession was
"a victory for the prosecution".
During
his testimony, the suspect gave details of his journey from Pakistan,
the attacks at a historic railway station in Mumbai and the city's Cama
hospital. Mr Qasab's lawyer said he had nothing to do with the
confession. It is not fully clear what prompted Mr Qasab to change his
plea. He said he had done so because Pakistan had finally admitted he
was a Pakistani citizen, but that was some time ago.
Police
say Mr Qasab confessed before a magistrate to the attacks after his
arrest, but he retracted that confession at an early hearing. His
lawyers said then that it had been coerced.
Wept in court
Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, 21, was arrested on the first day
of the attacks and has been in Indian custody ever since. In his
initial appearances before the court, Mr Qasab appeared relaxed and
smiled and grinned. But
more recently, he broke down and wept in court as a witness recounted
the violent events which took place over three days in late November.
The attacks led to a worsening of relationship between India
and Pakistan.
India accused Pakistan-based fighters from the banned
militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of carrying out the attacks. In
the immediate aftermath of the killings, Pakistan denied any
responsibility, but later admitted the attacks had been partly planned
on its soil.
Islamabad also eventually admitted that Mr Qasab was a
Pakistani citizen.
Pakistan
Says Mumbai Attack Partly Planned on Its Soil
NYTIMES
By SALMAN MASOOD
February 13, 2009
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan acknowledged for the first time in
public on Thursday that parts of the murderous Mumbai terror attacks
were planned on its soil and said six new suspects were being held,
including “the main operator.”
Rehman Malik, the senior security official in the Interior Ministry,
said the attackers had set sail from southern Pakistan to Mumbai, where
they used inflatable boats whose engines had been purchased in the
southern Pakistani port of Karachi.
“Part of the conspiracy was done in Pakistan,” Mr. Malik said in a
televised news briefing Thursday. He said a formal police inquiry had
been launched “and I want to assure our nation, I want to assure the
international community, that we mean business.”
His remarks offered the fullest public accounting so far of Pakistan’s
investigation into the Mumbai attacks last November, when 10 attackers
went on a murderous spree through luxury hotels, a Jewish center and
other targets, leaving 163 people dead.
Only one of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, survived and Islamabad has
already acknowledged he was of Pakistani origin. But the disclosures on
Thursday seemed, initially at least, to vindicate some of India’s
earlier claims of greater Pakistani involvement, although they were not
confirmation of India’s claims that elements of the Pakistani security
apparatus may have been involved.
Mr. Malik went much further on Thursday in acknowledging the extent to
which Pakistan had been the rear-base for the onslaught, seeking to
assure India that Pakistan was investigating the killings vigorously.
India has previously accused Pakistan of procrastinating in the
inquiry, and has accused Pakistani “official agencies” of involvement,
sharpening tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors who have
gone to war in the past.
It was not immediately clear why Pakistan had chosen this moment to
publicize its findings. Mr. Malik’s disclosures came on the final day
of a visit to Pakistan by Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s
special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, who was scheduled to fly
later to Kabul, the Afghan capital. The timing may, thus, have been
intended to display Pakistani goodwill.
Mr. Malik said investigators had identified three boats used in the
attack. “The boats that were used by the terrorists to reach Mumbai are
under our possession,” he said. “We have also identified the crew,” he
said. “We have located the hide-outs.”
He identified by name some of those arrested as a result of the inquiry
and said one of them had been lured back to Pakistan from Spain.
“Muhammad Ishfaq is under our custody,” Mr. Malik said, referring to
one of the detained suspects. “Javed Iqbal, located in Spain — he is
under our custody,” he said, without elaborating on their roles.
Sketching the international profile of the attackers’ communications,
he said cellphone SIM cards were bought in Austria while calls over the
Internet, using a server in Texas, were paid for in Barcelona, Spain.
“One person named Javed Iqbal was living in Barcelona,” he said. “Don’t
ask how I brought him to Pakistan. He was lured to come here.”
Mr. Malik identified another of the conspirators held in Pakistan as
Hamman Amin Sadiq, who, he said, had been traced through telephone
records and bank transfers.
“He was basically the main operator,” Mr. Malik said.
India, along with many western intelligence agencies, has accused the
militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of responsibility for the attacks. Mr.
Malik said that Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the operational commander of
Lashkar-e-Taiba and the alleged overall mastermind of the attacks, was
“under investigation.”
Lashkar-e-Taiba is an outlawed militant group that wants to expel India
from Kashmir.
Mr. Malik said e-mails that claimed the responsibility for the attacks
were allegedly created by Zarar Shah, the communications coordinator of
Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Mr. Malik said on Thursday that Pakistani authorities have not yet
ascertained the identities of the other nine attackers because
information provided by India was vague. “We have requested more
information from India,” he said.
He said was pressing India to provide DNA profiles of all 10 attackers.
Pakistan had given Indian officials a list of 30 questions to which
investigators were seeking answers, including some relating to the
records of conversations between the attackers and their handlers.
Vishnu Prakash, the spokesman for the Indian Foreign Ministry, said
that India would respond officially to Mr. Malik’s disclosures after
the Indian ambassador in Islamabad received official word about them
from the Pakistani government later in the day.
Mr. Malik said that Pakistan had “gone the extra mile” to satisfy
Indian concerns. Pakistan’s message to India was: “We are with you and
we have proved we are with you,” he said.
Speaking before the Pakistani announcements on Thursday, India’s junior
foreign minister, Anand Sharma, said, “What is required of Pakistan is
that it should not delay, deflect or confuse, but act.”
Also speaking hours before the Pakistani news briefing on Thursday,
Indian President Pratibha Patil called for “decisive and credible
action” by Pakistan against terrorist groups.
“Despite solemn commitments given by Pakistan at the highest level that
it would not allow territory under its control to be used for terrorism
in any manner against India, terrorists from Pakistan have continued to
attack India,” she said in a speech in Parliament.
“We expect Pakistan to honor the commitments made to us, and to take
decisive and credible action against all terrorist groups that are
based in and operate from its territory.”
Somini Sengupta contributed reporting
from New Delhi and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Pakistan Says Surviving
Mumbai Gunman Is Pakistani
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:23 a.m. ET
January 7, 2009
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan's information minister says an
investigation has revealed that the lone surviving Mumbai gunman is a
Pakistani citizen, as India has alleged.
Up until now Pakistan had refused to confirm Ajmal Kasab's nationality,
saying he was not registered in the country's identification
databases. Information Minister Sherry Rehman confirmed Kasab was
a
Pakistani in a text message but gave no other details. The
confirmation Wednesday comes a day after New Delhi handed over a
dossier of what it said was evidence linking the Mumbai attackers to
Pakistan.
The attacks in November killed 164 people and left nine of 10 gunmen
dead. Pakistan has made some moves against groups alleged linked to the
attacks.
Indian
Police Disclose More Suicide Attackers
NYTIMES
By JEREMY KAHN and ROBERT F. WORTH
December 10, 2008
MUMBAI, India — The Mumbai police said Tuesday that the
10 men who carried out the terrorist attacks here belonged to a group
of 30 recruits of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Pakistani militant organization
who had been selected for suicide missions, and that the whereabouts of
the other 20 were unknown.
It was the first time that the Indian police had disclosed the larger
number of suicide recruits, and while they said there was no reason to
believe that the other 20 were in India, they expressed concern about
such a possibility.
"Another 20 were ready to die," said Deven Bharti, a Mumbai Police
deputy commissioner, in an interview. “This is the very disturbing part
of it.”
The Indian police have consistently maintained that only 10 gunmen
participated in the Nov. 26-29 attacks in Mumbai that left 171 people
dead and raised tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors India and
Pakistan to the the highest in years.
Mr. Bharti said the information about the other recruits came from the
sole surviving attacker, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, who was arrested during
the attacks and has been in police custody ever since.
The deputy commissioner also said that based on the questioning of Mr.
Kasab, the 30 recruits were provided with highly specialized training,
including learning marine combat skills.
Once Mr. Kasab and his nine fellow attackers were selected by Lashkar
leaders, they were kept sequestered in a house for three months, the
deputy commissioner said. Here they were further divided into two-man
teams, each team assigned a different target within Mumbai to attack,
information that they were forbidden from sharing with one another.
They never saw the other 20 trainees again, the deputy commissioner
said, according to the information provided by Mr. Kasab.
The Indian police also on Tuesday provided further names and
photographs of the Mumbai attackers, and supplied new details of the
weaponry and communications and navigation equipment that they used
during their assault.
The authorities had already identified two of the Mumbai gunmen,
including Mr. Kasab, the lone survivor from the attacks, from the
village of Faridkot, and Ismail Khan, from Deira Ismail Khan.
Each of the men had aliases, and they knew each other only by those
aliases during their training, the police said. Only in the final few
days before the attack, while they traveled by boat from the port of
Karachi in Pakistan across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai, did they learn
each others’ true names, said Rakesh Maria, Mumbai’s joint police
commissioner.
At a news conference in Mumbai, Mr. Maria said the attackers carried a
dozen grenades, a 9 mm handgun with two 18 round clips and an AK-47,
along with seven to nine 30 round magazines, in addition to more than
100 rounds of loose ammunition. Mr. Maria had said previously that each
terrorist also carried an 8 kilogram bomb. Three of these bombs were
recovered and diffused, while the others exploded at various locations
around the city, according to the police.
As the Indian police gave more information about the attackers, the
Pakistani government publicly confirmed for the first time on Tuesday
that its forces had seized two militant leaders, including the
operational commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The confirmation of the arrest of the Lashkar leader, Zaki ur-Rehman
Lakhvi, was made by Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar in an
interview on Indian television. It was the furthest the authorities in
Pakistan have yet gone in publicly acknowledging the possible
complicity of Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Mumbai attacks.
Mr. Mukhtar identified the second militant leader arrested as Masood
Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Muhammad, another banned militant group based in
Pakistan.
Mr. Azhar, who was freed in 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked
Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was on a list presented
to Pakistan by the Indian government days after the attacks in Mumbai.
The list contained the names of 20 suspects wanted in connection with
other terrorist attacks and pending criminal cases.
Mr. Lakhvi “has been picked up,” Mr. Mukhtar said, according to the
television channel, CNN-IBN. “About Masood Azhar, I don’t think we had
decided yesterday to pick him up but our president is determined that
we remove all irritants and as a small irritant he has been picked up.”
He said that President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan was “determined
that we must cooperate with India.”
Mr. Zardari himself, in an op-ed article published in the Tuesday
edition of The New York Times, said Pakistan feels India’s pain and
that Pakistan “is committed to the pursuit, arrest, trial and
punishment of anyone involved in these heinous attacks.” But Mr.
Zardari also cautioned India against what he called “hasty judgments
and inflammatory statements.”
After mounting pressure from the United States and India, Pakistani
authorities on Sunday raided a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the
militant group, in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered
Kashmir, Pakistani and American officials said.
That operation appeared to be Pakistan’s first concrete response to the
demands from India and the United States to take action against the
militants suspected in the attacks.
Since then, the authorities have carried out raids on at least five
more offices of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Associated Press reported Tuesday,
citing an unidentified senior Pakistani security official. The official
said that 20 more people had been arrested.
It was unclear from the defense minister’s remarks whether Mr. Lakhvi
was detained in the first raid on Sunday. Lashkar-e-Taiba was founded
20 years ago with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies as a
proxy force to challenge Indian control of part of Muslim-dominated
Kashmir.
American intelligence and counterterrorism officials told The New York
Times that Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence,
continued nurturing the group, even after 9/11, when the Pakistani
government pledged to sever its ties with militant groups.
While investigators and intelligence officials say there is no hard
evidence linking Pakistan’s spy agency to the Mumbai attacks, they have
pointed to Lashkar as the likely culprit.
Jeremy Kahn and Robert F. Worth reported from Mumbai, India. Reporting
was contributed by Jane Perlez in Islamabad, Pakistan; Graham Bowley in
New York; Eric Schmitt in Washington; Yusuf Jameel in Srinagar,
Kashmir; and Salman Masood in Islamabad, Pakistan.
India
Acknowledges Errors in Security Response to Attacks
NYTIMES
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and JANE PERLEZ
December 6, 2008
MUMBAI, India — India conceded Friday that the devastating terrorist
attacks on Mumbai last week revealed “lapses” in its security
arrangements, while the country’s prime minister articulated the scale
of anger and grievance stirred by the attacks in the Indian public.
“The people of India feel a sense of hurt and anger as never before,”
said the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, at a news conference in New
Delhi.
That anger has been directed in part at India’s neighbor, Pakistan,
where Indian and American officials believe the attackers received
training, and Mr. Manmohan said on Friday that other countries around
the world should now confront Pakistan over the alleged presence of
terrorists on its soil.
“We expect the world community to come to the same conclusion, that the
territory of a neighboring country has been used for this crime,” he
said, referring to Pakistan.
But the anger is also focused domestically too, as Indians rage at
their government for not having done more to protect them. In the
most public outrage so far, tens of thousands in Mumbai marched near
the attacked sites on Wednesday, while similar rallies were held in New
Delhi and in the southern technology hubs of Bangalore and
Hyderabad. Speaking in Mumbai on Friday, India’s new home
minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, admitted that there had been
“lapses” in the way India handled the crisis and said his government
was trying to “improve the effectiveness of the security systems.”
“There have been lapses,” he told reporters. “I would be less than
truthful if I said there had been no lapses.”
Questions raised include why Indian intelligence had no forewarning of
the plot, why security was so loose at the sites attacked in Mumbai,
and why Indian security forces were so poorly armed — and in some cases
so slow to respond. Meanwhile, evidence linking the attackers to
Pakistan builds. Fresh evidence unearthed by investigators in India has
indicated that the Mumbai attacks were stage-managed from at least two
Pakistani cities by top leaders of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified a
Lashkar operative, who goes by the name Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind
of the attacks. On Thursday, Indian investigators named one of the most
well-known senior figures in Lashkar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. The
names of both men came from the interrogations of the one surviving
attacker, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, according to police officials in
Mumbai.
While Mr. Muzammil appears to have served as a control officer in
Lahore, Pakistan, Mr. Lakhvi, his boss and the operational commander of
Lashkar, worked from Karachi, a southern Pakistani port city, said
investigators in Mumbai. It now appears that both men were in
contact with their charges as they sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, and
then continued guiding the attacks even as they unfolded, directing the
assaults and possibly providing information about the police and
military response in India.
Some of the calls appeared to be conversations about who would live and
who would die among the gunmen’s hostages, according to an official who
interviewed survivors and a report by security consultants with
contacts among the investigators. While Indian officials have
pointed a finger directly at Pakistani elements, terrorism experts and
some Western officials warned that the emerging sketch of the plotters
was still preliminary and could broaden even to include militants
within India. India, too, has a long history of antagonism with
Pakistan.
In Mumbai, meanwhile, Mr. Chidambaram issued a lower tally on Friday
for casualties in the attacks, saying 163 people — including 18 members
of the security forces — died along with nine suspected terrorists. The
number of injured was 293, he said. Previous accounts put the death
count among the attackers’ victims at more than 170. On Thursday,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Islamabad with Pakistani
leaders, a day after meeting with Indian leaders, to urge that the two
countries work together to find the attackers’ commanders and bring
them to justice.
“What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be
taken,” Ms. Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base in Pakistan after
meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza
Gilani.
But while Pakistan’s leaders offered polite assurances, they made no
public announcement of concrete measures to be taken against Lashkar.
They have also continued to express skepticism of Pakistani involvement
and have resisted handing over 20 suspects demanded by India.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose name means “army of the pure,” was founded with
the help of Pakistani intelligence officers more than 20 years ago as a
proxy force to challenge Indian control of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.
Since then, the group has broadened its ambitions, its reach and its
contacts with an international network of jihadi groups. Its fighters
have turned up in Afghanistan and Iraq and have been blamed for several
other high-profile attacks in India before.
Today it is technically banned in Pakistan but operates openly through
affiliates. Its links to Al Qaeda remain murky, as does the extent of
its current ties to Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services
Intelligence, or ISI.
In an interview this week, Muhammad Yahya Mujahid, a spokesman for
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a parent organization of Lashkar, denied that Lashkar
or its leader, Haffiz Muhammad Saeed, had any connection to the attack.
The surviving gunman in Mumbai claimed to have met Mr. Saeed at a
training camp in Pakistan. American counterterrorism officials
said there was no clear evidence that the Pakistani intelligence
service played a role in the Mumbai attacks, or that Pakistani
operatives were linked to the attackers.
Deven Bharti, a deputy commissioner on the Mumbai police force, would
not comment on Indian media reports claiming direct links between the
ISI and the Mumbai attacks.
But, he said, “we have certain evidence of government complicity that
we are trying to verify.”
The weapons used in the attacks, he said, came from a factory based in
Punjab Province in Pakistan that is under contract to the Pakistani
military, he said. The factory was also the source of grenades
and explosives used in several earlier terrorist attacks in India, Mr.
Bharti said. Those included bombings in Mumbai in 1993; a suicide
attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the bombing of the Indian
Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in July, he said. Investigators
discovered the link to the Pakistan factory, Mr. Bharti said, after
recovering a grenade left by the attackers that had EN ARGES printed on
it.
That corresponds to a brand name belonging to a German company that
granted a license to the factory to make weapons for the Pakistani
military.
One possible collaborator in the plot, the authorities say, was an
Indian named Faheem Ahmed Ansari, who was arrested in February in a
northern Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, along with two other suspected
Lashkar members. Mr. Ansari told the police interrogators that
from fall 2007 to February 2008 he surveyed possible targets for
Lashkar in Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and
the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail station.
The Uttar Pradesh police said he was arrested in connection with a gun
and grenade attack on New Year’s Eve on a police camp in Rampur when he
returned to pick up weapons left behind. His intention was to take the
weapons to Mumbai for use in a later operation, they said. Other
evidence emerged Thursday highlighting the sophistication and cruelty
of the attacks.
Some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in the city had been
treated particularly savagely, the police said, with bodies bearing
what appeared to be strangulation marks and other wounds that did not
come from gunshots or grenades.
Even before the attackers landed on Mumbai’s shores, Mr. Lakhvi, the
Lashkar commander, who is normally based in Kashmir, helped organize
the plot from Karachi for the last three months, said a Pakistani
official in contact with Lashkar. The gunmen also kept in
contact with their handlers in Pakistan with cellphones as they rounded
up guests at the two hotels, officials say. The attackers left a
trail of evidence in a satellite phone they left behind on the fishing
trawler they hijacked near Karachi at the start of their 500-mile
journey to Mumbai.
The phone contained the telephone numbers of Mr. Muzammil, Mr. Lakhvi
and a number of other Lashkar operatives, according to a report on the
Mumbai siege released Thursday by M. J. Gohel and Sajjan M. Gohel, two
security analysts who direct the Asia-Pacific Foundation in
London. The numbers dialed on the phone found on the trawler used
to call Mr. Muzammil matched the numbers on the cellphones recovered
from the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the report said.
Based on evidence found on the trawler, it was possible that five other
men were involved in the plot and were still at large, the report
said. In one of the hotels, a gunman asked several Indian guests
what caste they belonged to and what state they came from, said an
official who interviewed the guests.
Once the attacker found out these details, he then called someone
believed to be Mr. Muzammil, who was also identified by the surviving
gunman and who was in Lahore, according to phone records recovered by
investigators. The surviving guests said the attacker told the
person on the other end of the phone the guests’ details and asked
whether they should be killed or not.
At one point, a guest said one of the calls seemed to be a conference
call with two people on the other end.
Once the calls were finished, the attacker moved the small group of
guests, who did not know what their fate would be, into a room. When
the attackers became distracted by tear gas fired by the police, the
hostages managed to escape. In another instance, the gunmen
forced a Singaporean hostage at the Oberoi hotel, Lo Hwei Yen, to call
her husband in Singapore. She told him that the hostages were demanding
that Singaporean officials tell India not to try a rescue operation.
The next day, Ms. Lo was killed, the foundation’s report said.
Investigators found that after the gunmen killed her, they used the
phone she had called her husband with, the report said.
“The worrying scenario is that Muzammil may have ordered her execution
along with two other hostages that were found murdered in the same
room,” the report said.
Somini Sengupta reported from Mumbai,
India, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad. Reporting was contributed by
Robert F. Worth and Jeremy Kahn from Mumbai; Hari Kumar from New Delhi;
Salman Masood from Islamabad; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Graham
Bowley from New York.
More
Mumbai Links to Pakistan and Signs of Hostage Abuse
NYTIMES
By JEREMY KAHN and SALMAN MASOOD
December 5, 2008
MUMBAI, India — The Mumbai police on Thursday identified a second
Pakistani terrorist as an engineer of the bloody assaults on the city
last week and confirmed that they were investigating whether a Mumbai
man arrested on terrorism charges had scoped out some of the
high-profile targets the attackers struck, leaving more than 170 dead.
Gruesome new evidence also emerged Thursday suggesting that some of the
six people killed at the Jewish center in Mumbai had been treated
savagely. Some of the bodies appeared to have strangulation marks and
wounds on their bodies did not come from gunshots or grenades, the
police said.
The new links to Pakistan added fresh complications to American
diplomatic efforts to secure cooperation between India and Pakistan,
which has questioned some of the evidence that Pakistanis were
involved. On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in
Islamabad with Pakistani leaders, a day after meeting with Indian
leaders, to urge that the two countries work together to find the
attackers and bring them to justice.
“What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be
taken,” Ms. Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base after meeting with
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.
Ms. Rice’s brief visit to Pakistan completed a delicate diplomatic
minuet with visits to the region by the secretary of state and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who was in
Pakistan on Wednesday and flew to India on Thursday for meetings.
In Mumbai, Rakesh Maria, India’s joint commissioner of police, said
that the second Lashkar-e-Taiba military commander who helped engineer
the attacks was Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. Mr. Maria said that the
surviving attacker, 21-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, identified Mr.
Lakhvi and said he helped indoctrinate all the attackers.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group that long focused on the
disputed territory of Kashmir, is officially banned in Pakistan but,
with a history of links to Pakistan’s intelligence, has been hiding in
plain sight for years. On Thursday, a spokesman for the group’s leader,
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, denied involvement in the Mumbai attacks,
Pakistani news media reported.
Mr. Maria also said that it was believed that the attackers were in
contact with Mr. Lakhvi on their journey from Karachi to Mumbai by sea
and may have been during the attacks as well. Indian and American
intelligence officials have already identified another Lashkar-e-Taiba
operative, Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks, and said he
was in contact by satellite phone with the attackers during their
journey.
Another police official, Deven Bharti, said the interrogation of Mr.
Kasab, the captured gunman, was focusing on three lines of inquiry: the
identities of the other nine; their training and planning; and whether
they had local accomplices. The suspected collaborator, Faheem
Ahmed Ansari, was arrested on Feb. 10 in Rampur in the northern Indian
state of Uttar Pradesh a in connection with gun and grenade attack on
New Year’s Eve on a police camp. He was arrested with two others; all
three are suspected members of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Mr. Ansari told police interrogators in Uttar Pradesh that from fall
2007 to February 2008, he had been in Mumbai scoping out possible
targets for the guerrilla group, including the Taj Mahal Palace and
Tower Hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail
station.
The Uttar Pradesh police said that Mr. Ansari was arrested after he
returned to Rampur to pick up weapons left behind from the New Year’s
Eve attack and take them to Mumbai for use in a later operation.
Ms Rice, during talks with Pakistani leaders, stressed that Pakistan
should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.
“Pakistan should also take the necessary steps to prevent any non-state
actors from indulging in such activities against any country from its
soil,” Ms. Rice said, according to a statement from the Pakistani prime
minister’s office.
At the news conference in Chaklala, Ms. Rice said that the Indian
government is concerned and determined “to find the perpetrators, bring
them to justice, determined to prevent the next attack.”
“I found the Pakistani leadership understanding the importance of doing
so. Particularly in rooting out terrorists and rounding up whoever
perpetrated this attack, from wherever it was perpetrated, whatever its
sources, whatever the leads, because everybody wants to prevent further
attacks,” she said.
For his part, Mr. Zardari told Ms. Rice that he will take “strong
action against any Pakistani elements found involved in the Mumbai
attacks,” according to a spokesperson for the Pakistani president.
Ms. Rice said Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.
Within India, sharp questions have been raised about the stunning
inadequacy of Indian security forces and intelligence services. On
Thursday, the Indian Air Force chief, Fali Homar Major told reporters
that new intelligence reports had persuaded the authorities to declare
an alert at airports. “This is based on a little warning that has been
received,” he said. “We are prepared as usual.”
He offered no further details, but an Indian television network, NDTV,
said the warning related to what it called a “9/11” plot timed to
coincide with the anniversary on Dec. 6 of the destruction by Hindu
militants of the Babri mosque in northern India in 1992.
News reports on Thursday said six airports, including those at New
Delhi and Mumbai, were on alert, with heightened security searches for
passengers and warplanes ready to take to the skies.
Jeremy Kahn reported from Mumbai, India, and Salman Masood from
Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta and
Robert F. Worth from Mumbai, India; Jane Perlez from Lahore, Pakistan;
Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Eric Schmitt from Washington and Alan Cowell
from London.
VIDEO
REPORT FROM SKY NEWS HERE
More on the Captured Gunman
NYTIMES
By Sharon Otterman
December 2, 2008, 10:57 am
Indian police and government officials are beginning to speak on the
record about the information they have gleaned from Ajmal Amir Qasab,
the only gunman to be captured in the Mumbai terrorist attacks last
week, as well as other aspects of the ongoing investigation.
Hassan Gafoor, the Mumbai police commissioner, told a news conference
on Tuesday: “There were 10 terrorists in five groups of two members
each, who had come from Karachi in boats. They later hired five taxis
to get to their destination.”
He said the terrorists came from Pakistan and that they were trained
for over a year by ex-Army personnel, according to a Sky News account
of the press conference. The information tracks closely with what
unnamed officials have been telling reporters about Mr. Qasab’s
interrogation.
“They were carrying five time bombs,” Mr. Gafoor said. “Two exploded in
taxis in Vile Parle and Dockyard Road. One bomb was placed inside
Oberoi hotel, one near Taj hotel.”
Rakesh Maria, joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, held a news
conference on Monday, confirming that Mr. Qasab said he was a member of
Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group, and that
he believed all of the attackers were from Pakistan.
More images of the gunman and his capture have also emerged.
Grainy closed circuit television footage released Tuesday shows Mr.
Qasab and an accomplice — named by reports in the Indian media as Abu
Ismail Dera Ismail Khan, 25 — opening fire at Mumbai’s main train
station, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Another segment shows the gunmen
firing at Indian police.
Sky News also has video images released Monday of the capture of Mr.
Qasab by police, shot on a mobile-phone camera.
And Gulf News has an interview with Sebastian D’Souza, the Mumbai
Mirror photographer who took the chilling photographs of Mr. Qasab in
the train station. Mr. D’Souza jumped from train to train on the
platform, evading gunfire, in order to get the photographs, which show
Mr. Qasab advancing, wearing cargo pants, a Versace T-shirt and black
sneakers, with an assault rifle in hand.
US
Official: India Knew of Plot on Mumbai's Coast
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:19 p.m. ET
December 2, 2008
MUMBAI, India (AP) -- India received a warning from the United States
before last week's attacks in Mumbai that militants were plotting a
waterborne assault on the city, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday as
domestic intelligence officials said they were aware of a
Pakistan-based plot.
Another U.S. official added that there is reason to suspect the
assailants were part of a group at least partly based across the border
in Pakistan.
As the evidence of the militants' links to Pakistan mounts, a list of
about 20 people -- including India's most-wanted man -- was submitted
to Pakistan's high commissioner to New Delhi on Monday night, said
India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee.
The revelations come as the Indian government faces widespread
accusations of security and intelligence failures after suspected
Muslim militants carried out a three-day attack across India's
financial capital, killing at least 172 people -- including six
Americans -- and wounding 239.
India has already demanded Pakistan take ''strong action'' against
those responsible for the attacks, and the U.S. has pressured Islamabad
to cooperate in the investigation. America's chief diplomat, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, will visit India on Wednesday. A Bush
administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of
the sensitive nature of intelligence information, said Tuesday that the
U.S. passed on information to India about a potential attack on Mumbai
from its long waterfront. But the official would not elaborate on the
timing or details of the U.S. warning to Indian counterparts.
Another American official said the assailants could have been at least
partly based in Pakistan -- the closest the U.S. has come to laying
blame for the attacks. The State Department official, who requested
anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, was careful to say not
all the evidence is in.
Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Israelis began burying the six Jews killed in
one of those attacks, the assault on a Jewish center run by the
ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement.
Several thousand ultra-Orthodox mourners gathered for the first
funeral, that of Leibish Teitelbaum, an American who lived in
Jerusalem. Four Israelis and a Mexican Jewish woman were also
killed. A memorial ceremony was scheduled for later Wednesday for the
29-year-old rabbi who ran the Jewish center, Gavriel Holtzberg, and his
28-year-old wife, Rivkah.
Indian officials continued to interrogate the only surviving attacker,
who reportedly told police that he and the other nine gunmen had
trained for months in camps in Pakistan operated by the banned
Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
India's foreign intelligence agency received information as recently as
September that Pakistan-based terrorists were plotting attacks against
Mumbai targets, according to a government intelligence official
familiar with the matter. He said the information, which he attributed
to Indian sources and not the Americans, included indications that
hotels would be targeted but did not specify which ones. The
information was then relayed to domestic security authorities, said the
official, who was not authorized to talk publicly about the details and
spoke on condition of anonymity. But it's unclear whether the
government acted on the intelligence.
The famous Taj Mahal hotel, scene of much of the bloodshed, had
tightened security with metal detectors and other measures in the weeks
before the attacks, after being warned of a possible threat.
But the precautions ''could not have stopped what took place,'' Ratan
Tata, chairman of the company that owns the hotel, told CNN. ''They
(the gunmen) didn't come through that entrance. They came from
somewhere in the back.''
A day after soldiers finishing removed the last bodies from the hotel,
where the standoff finally ended Saturday morning, wood boards covered
its marble latticework and seafront entrance as plainclothes police
searched for evidence. The building was the last to be cleared,
following the five-star Oberoi hotel, the Jewish center, and other
sites struck in this city of 18 million.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has promised to strengthen maritime
and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative
agency, met Tuesday with top security aides to review any government
lapses. Among those sought by India is fugitive Dawood Ibrahim --
a powerful gangster, the alleged mastermind of 1993 Mumbai bombings,
and India's most-wanted man. Also included is Masood Azhar, a
terror suspect freed from an Indian prison in exchange for the release
of hostages aboard an Indian Airlines aircraft hijacked on Christmas
Day 1999.
In the past, Pakistan has denied harboring the men. However, Pakistan
said it would consider India's request and respond after receiving the
list.
''We must try to dampen down the discourse of conflict and work toward
regional peace,'' said Pakistani Information Minister Sherry Rehman.
While the cross-border rhetoric between Pakistan and India has
increased since the attacks, both countries -- by their often-bellicose
standards -- carefully refrained from making statements that could
quickly lead to a buildup of troops along their already militarized
frontier. Mukherjee appeared to tone things down further Tuesday,
telling reporters that ''nobody is talking about military action,''
according to the Press Trust of India news agency. Mukherjee,
responding to questions on what actions India would take, said only
''time will show.''
In Pakistan, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi pledged full
cooperation.
Qureshi said Pakistan has offered a ''joint investigative mechanism and
joint commission.'' He didn't say when the offer was made or if India
had responded. With the investigation still under way, and FBI
and Scotland Yard teams assisting, more details emerged about the
suspects and the attacks.
The sole surviving attacker, Ajmal Qasab, told police his group trained
over about six months in camps operated by Lashkar in Pakistan,
learning close-combat techniques, hostage-taking, handling of
explosives, satellite navigation, and high-seas survival skills,
according to two Indian security officials familiar with the
investigation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were
not authorized to speak publicly about the details.
Lashkar was outlawed in Pakistan under pressure from the U.S. in 2002,
a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group.
Qasab told investigators the militants hijacked an Indian vessel and
killed three crew members, keeping the captain alive long enough to
guide them into Mumbai, the two security officials said. The men,
ages 18-28, then came ashore in a dinghy at two different Mumbai areas
before slipping into the city in two teams, officials said.
The gunmen hired two separate taxis after reaching Mumbai, planting
bombs that later exploded in each vehicle, officials said. Two more
unexploded bombs were found outside the Taj Mahal hotel. The
gunmen struck at several sites, including a train station, where they
mowed down police and passers-by; the Jewish center; and the two luxury
hotels, representing the city's wealth and tourism, reportedly seeking
out Westerners.
The 19 foreigners killed were Americans, Germans, Canadians, Israelis
and nationals from Britain, Italy, Mexico, Japan, China, Thailand,
Australia, Singapore and Mexico.
------
Associated Press writers Ravi Nessman
in Mumbai, Ashok Sharma in New Delhi, Asif Shahzad in Islamabad,
Pakistan, Anne Gearan in Brussels, Belgium, and Jennifer Loven in
Washington contributed to this report.
Obama
Says S.Asia Is Chief Threat to U.S.
By REUTERS
Filed at 12:40 p.m. ET
December 1, 2008
CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect
Barack Obama said on Monday militants based in South Asia represented
the biggest threat to the United States and he was "absolutely
committed" to eliminating the threat of terrorism.
"We cannot tolerate a world where
innocents are killed by extremists based on twisted ideologies," Obama,
who takes office on January 20, told reporters after naming his
national security team.
"We're going to have to bring the full force of our power -- not only
military but also diplomatic, economic and political -- to deal with
those threats. Not only to keep America safe but also to ensure that
peace and prosperity continue around the world."
With the world shocked by the deadly Islamic militant attack on India's
financial center of Mumbai that killed 183 people, Obama pointed to
South Asia as the area of greatest concern.
"The situation in Afghanistan has been worsening. The situation in
South Asia as a whole and the safe havens for terrorists that have been
established there, represent the single most important threat against
the American people," he said.
"We're going to have to mobilize our resources and focus our attention
on defeating al Qaeda, (Osama) bin Laden, and any other extremists
groups that intend to target American citizens."
Obama offered American support when he spoke to Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh after the Mumbai attacks. India has blamed the
attacks on militants from Pakistan. Obama said that while sovereign
nations "obviously have the right to defend themselves", he did not
want to comment on the specifics surrounding the Mumbai attack.
"I am confident that India's great democracy is more resilient than
killers who would tear it down," Obama said.
"I can tell you that my administration will remain steadfast in support
of India's efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and
bring them to justice. And I expect that the world community will feel
the same way."
Analysts
Say It
Will Be Difficult to Shield Luxury Hotels From Terrorist Attacks
NYTIMES
By KEITH BRADSHER
December 1, 2008
MUMBAI, India — For decades, luxury hotels have been oases for
travelers in developing countries, places to mingle with the local
elite, enjoy a lavish meal or a dip in the pool and sleep in a clean,
safe room.
But last week’s lethal attacks on two of India’s most famous hotels —
coming just two months after a huge truck bomb devastated the Marriott
in Islamabad, Pakistan — have underlined the extent to which these
hotels are becoming magnets for terrorists. Worse, hotel executives and
security experts say that little can be done to stop extensively
trained gunmen with military assault rifles and grenades who launch
attacks like the ones that left this city’s Oberoi and Taj Mahal Palace
& Tower strewn with bodies.
P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said at a news
conference over the weekend that he had directed his company’s hotels
to step up security after the Islamabad bombing. The Oberoi banned
anyone from parking in front of its hotel here for fear that a car bomb
could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby, a risk at many
hotels.
But those protections did not deter the attackers, who entered the
Oberoi on foot.
Mr. Oberoi questioned whether any hotel could defend against such an
assault.
“The authorities have to help us,” he said, by preventing attacks from
occurring at all.
The Taj, it turns out, had warning, according to both an Indian
government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Ratan
Tata, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel. In an interview
on CNN, Mr. Tata said the hotel had temporarily increased security
after being warned of a possible terrorist attack. But he said those
measures were eased shortly before last week’s attacks and could not
have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel.
American hotel chains have policies against discussing security
precautions, but watched the Mumbai hotel sieges closely.
“We never talk about security measures in our hotels because to talk
about what we do would compromise them, but I think it’s fair to say
what happened in Mumbai is going to re-energize them,” said Vivian
Deuschl, the spokeswoman for the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, a Marriott
subsidiary.
Some hotels in Asia already take elaborate precautions, particularly in
countries with histories of attacks on Western luxury hotels.
At the Grand Hyatt in Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, guards check the
trunks of all vehicles and even use mirrors to check cars’ underbodies
for explosives before letting them drive to the entrance. Guests’
baggage is opened and checked by hand for suspicious objects, and
everyone must go through a metal detector before entering the building.
In Pakistan’s major cities, where hotels have been targets before,
already-tight security at some hotels has become even more intrusive
since the Marriott bombing. Guests have to pass through at least one,
and often, several security checkpoints on their way into the hotels;
some are staffed by paramilitaries. At the luxury Serena Hotel in
Islamabad, those who wish to enter are grilled about where they are
going and whom they are meeting.
But security experts say such measures — and even some lesser ones —
will be difficult to implement outside of war zones or countries where
hotels have already been made targets, even after the attacks in
Mumbai.
“It is incredibly difficult to have a quick-fix solution to what we
saw,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert with the Swedish
National Defense College. “You are stuck with the dilemma of having a
complete lockdown. Tourists don’t want that. They want to participate
in the culture, they want to experience it.”
Hotels have some built-in design problems for those seeking to protect
them from terrorists. Long hallways can turn into dangerous mazes
during the type of attacks that occurred in Mumbai. And the Oberoi and
the old wing of the Taj hotel, where most of the fighting took place,
both have high, central atriums, as many hotels do. This proved to be a
vulnerability.
After throwing grenades and directing automatic weapons fire at staff
and diners in ground-floor lobbies and restaurants, the attackers at
each hotel ascended the atriums. This allowed them to hunt down guests
while dropping grenades and shooting at commandos below.
The Oberoi Group employs many plainclothes security officers in its
hotels, but they are unarmed, Mr. Oberoi said.
J. K. Dutt, the director general of India’s National Security Guards,
the commando force that took the lead in the fighting, said Sunday in a
televised news conference that the most difficult gunman to attack in
the Taj hotel was one who ascended a spiral staircase and took up a
position behind an extremely thick pillar that was part of the
105-year-old building’s original structure.
Particularly at the Taj, the attackers seemed to have detailed
knowledge of the building’s layout, Mr. Dutt said. They kept moving
among large halls with multiple entrances, not allowing themselves to
be cornered in small rooms without other exits. By contrast, the
commandos and the police had old blueprints of the massive,
labyrinthine hotel that did not clearly show which passageways were
connected and which were blocked by walls, and did not show recent
construction, Mr. Dutt said.
The police and first-response agencies should be working with the hotel
industry to devise crisis action plans that would include computer
programs detailing all internal and external aspects of hotel building
structure, said Michael Coldrick, a London-based security professional
and a former explosives specialist with Scotland Yard. For example, a
prerecorded DVD walk-through of a hotel could be used to brief special
forces assault teams to make sure that they know what to expect.
Hotels may also ask staff to keep a closer eye on customers. At some
point, Mr. Coldrick said, “We might see cleaning ladies with explosives
detectors.”
In the end, several security experts say, no system is foolproof.
The Marriott in Islamabad, which had been struck in the past, had
layers of security in place on the night the truck bomber approached.
The truck was stopped by security guards who check vehicles before
allowing them through a hydraulic barrier.
Those precautions are credited with saving lives; the truck never made
it past the barrier and closer to the hotel, where the blast would have
been more devastating. Still, more than 50 people died and more than
250 were wounded.
FROM I-BBC:
Video report:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7752824.stm
Pictures: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7751360.stm
Timeline Emerges Amid
Security Changes in India
NYTIMES
By Sharon Otterman
November 30, 2008, 12:20 pm
Facing criticism over the government’s handling of the Mumbai attacks,
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Sunday that the country
would strengthen and streamline its anti-terrorist forces.
One key change will be to double the size of the 7,400-member National
Security Guard — the elite, black-suited army commandos who launched
themselves from helicopters onto rooftops during the attacks and went
floor by floor in the Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels to flush out
the terrorists. The new commandos will be based in four cities around
the country, not just in Delhi, which is now their sole base.
The Times’s Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar have reported on Sunday that
it took the commandos about 10 hours to begin their Mumbai operation.
If the response had been quicker, said J. N. Rai, former intelligence
officer and adviser to the home ministry, they could have “saved many
more lives.”
Why did it take so long? A slow plane, sleeping commandos and lags in
communication between top ministers, the Times of India reports.
According to the newspaper’s account, this is how the response played
out in real time:
9:30 p.m. Wednesday: The terrorists strike Mumbai. Chief Minister
Vilasrao Deshmukh is in Kerala. He is briefed about the attack. By the
time he grasps the enormity of the situation, 90 minutes have gone by.
11 p.m.: Mr. Deshmukh calls Home Minister Shivraj Patil - who has now
resigned from his post - and asks for NSG commandos. “How many men?”
Patil asks. “200,” Mr. Deshmukh says. Mr. Patil calls NSG chief J.K.
Dutt and tells him to send 200 battle-ready commandos to Mumbai.
11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thursday: Most of the NSG men have to be roused from
sleep. They don their uniforms, strap on safety gear and collect ammo
and firearms. It is discovered that the plane that can take 200 men,
the IL 76, is not in Delhi but Chandigarh. Someone wakes up the IL 76
pilot, the plane refueled. It finally arrives in Delhi.
5 a.m. The commandos land at Mumbai airport. By the time they board the
waiting buses, it is 5:25 a.m.
6 a.m. The buses reach the designated place in south Mumbai where the
commandos are briefed, divided into different groups and sent out on
their mission.
7 a.m. They start their operation about nine-and-a-half hours after the
terror strike.
“When Indian cities are vulnerable to terror attacks,” the article
concluded by asking, “why is there no commando force like the NSG, or
its units, in every city?”
Bush
Sends Rice to India in Aftermath of Attacks
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:23 p.m. ET
November 30, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President George W. Bush on Sunday dispatched
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi in support of India
following the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 200 people,
including six Americans.
Rice and Bush wanted an opportunity ''to express the condolences of the
American government directly to the Indian government and the Indian
people,'' Rice spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Rice was scheduled to leave Sunday night for a meeting in London and
then travel to Brussels for a NATO gathering. On Wednesday, following
the NATO meeting, she will travel to New Delhi, according to her new
itinerary.
''Secretary Rice's visit to India is a further demonstration of the
United States' commitment to stand in solidarity with the people of
India as we all work together to hold these extremists accountable,''
White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.
Rice had planned to attend the meeting of NATO foreign ministers
Tuesday and Wednesday, with talks focusing on a broad international
agenda, including Afghanistan, Georgia and the Ukraine. From there she
was to visit Rome, Helsinki and Copenhagen, but it was unclear whether
the trip to India would cancel or only postpone those visits.
Rice spoke with President-elect Barack Obama about India earlier on
Sunday, McCormack said. It was the third phone conversation between the
two since the attacks. Rice has also been in daily phone contact with
Indian and Pakistani officials.
The announcement of Rice's trip came hours after Bush assured India's
leader that the U.S. government will put its full weight behind the
investigation into the attacks in Mumbai.
Earlier Sunday, a Republican senator endorsed a campaign suggestion
from President-elect Barack Obama -- appointment of a special envoy,
perhaps former President Bill Clinton, to the disputed region of
Kashmir -- as the U.S. seeks to ease tensions between India and its
nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan.
The lone gunman captured by police after the attacks told authorities
he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to Kashmir, a
senior Indian police officer said. India has blamed ''elements'' from
Pakistan for the 60-hour siege during which suspected Muslim militants
hit 10 sites across India's financial capital, leaving at least 174
dead.
Bush told India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in a telephone call
that ''out of this tragedy can come an opportunity to hold these
extremists accountable and demonstrate the world's shared commitment to
combat terrorism,'' White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a
statement.
In addition to the Americans killed in the coordinated shooting rampage
in India's financial capital, the foreigners among the dead included
Germans, Canadians, Israelis and nationals from Britain, Italy, Japan,
China, Thailand, Australia and Singapore.
Bush told the prime minister that ''he has directed the state and
defense departments along with other federal agencies to devote the
necessary resources and personnel to this situation,'' Johndroe said.
Despite India's claim, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States,
Husain Haqqani, said: ''I don't think that this is the time for India
or anybody in India to accuse Pakistan. It's time to work with
Pakistan. Pakistan is now a democracy. India is a democracy. And as two
democracies, we need to strengthen each other, rather than fall into
the trap of the terrorists, who want us to fight with each other so
that they can get greater strength.''
India repeatedly has accused Pakistan of complicity in terrorist
attacks on its soil, many of which it traces to militant groups
fighting Indian rule in the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir. The
U.S. has tried to persuade Pakistan to shift its security focus from
India, with which it has fought three wars, to Islamic militants along
the Afghan border.
Obama told Time magazine in an interview in October that ''Kashmir in
particular is an interesting situation ... that is obviously a
potential tar pit diplomatically.'' He spoke of devoting ''serious
diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there to figure out a
plausible approach.'' When asked if that sounded like a job for
Clinton, Obama replied, ''Might not be bad'' and that they had spoken
about the issue when they had lunch in September in Clinton's New York
office.
The suggestion of sending an envoy won support from a leading
Republican senator.
''I would think that might be a good idea because, it appears to me,
that we have an interlocking situation of Afghanistan, Pakistan and
India,'' said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, top Republican on the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Asked specifically about Clinton as a possible mediator, Lugar said:
''I think he could do a great job there.''
Lugar and Haqqani appeared on ABC's ''This Week.''
|
Investigators are piecing together
how the attacks unfolded
|
i-BBC 30 November 2008
How Mumbai attacks unfolded
New details have been
slowly emerging about the early stages of the Mumbai terror attacks.
Much of the information has been gleaned after the capture of one of
the militants involved, as the BBC's Prachi Pinglay reports from Mumbai.
The story of the Mumbai terror attacks likely began
when a private fishing trawler with five crew members set sail from the
Arabian sea off the coast of Porbandar in India's western Gujarat state
on 13 November.
Sometime during the next 12 days, the trawler was taken
over at sea by at least 10 young men, aged between 20 and 23 years,
carrying backpacks and bags, according to sources in the Mumbai police,
coastguard, and commandos.
Investigators still do not know what the men were
sailing on and where they were coming from when they took over the
trawler - though suspicion has fallen on the Pakistani port city of
Karachi.
What they do know is that the men tied up one of the
crew in the trawler's engine room, and slit his throat. The abandoned
trawler was found by Indian coastguard ships more than three nautical
miles off Mumbai.
GPS co-ordinates
When coastguards boarded the vessel, they found the
dead crew member, plus a satellite phone and GPS tracker that possibly
belonged to the trawler's crew.
|
Investigators say that Kasar
has told them that their work was to 'take hostages for safe passage'
|
Investigators told the BBC that the tracker showed "a
return mapping for Karachi", leading to speculation that the men who
attacked Mumbai had planned to return in the same trawler.
A ferry doing about 20 knots can cover the 506-nautical
mile distance between Karachi and Mumbai in a little over 24 hours.
After abandoning the trawler, the men opened the
inflatable dinghies they were carrying and sailed into Mumbai waters
early on 26 November, a little more than 10 hours before the attack,
investigators say.
An abandoned dinghy has been recovered in the sea off
one of the many fishing colonies which dot the city's coast.
One of the top investigating officers told the BBC that
the gunmen - nine were eventually killed and one arrested - split up
into four groups and took the city's rickety black-and-yellow Fiat
taxis from the fishing colony at Cuffe Parade to some of the locations
they planned to attack.
They say the men left grenades or bombs inside the
taxis before they got out. The taxis exploded soon after, killing two
drivers and one bystander.
Militants split into groups,
attacking a number of locations
|
The first round of attacks took place around the
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or the Victoria Terminus railway station,
when gunmen entered the platforms and fired on people indiscriminately.
They walked out of the station after the carnage, and
shot three policemen and fired at journalists gathered near a cinema to
record the event. Then they took a police van and drove off.
A flat tyre forced the gunmen to abandon the police
van. The men then stole a Skoda car and drove towards the seafront
Marine Drive, just as the other groups of gunmen were attacking a cafe,
two luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural centre.
As the Skoda took a zig-zag route through the streets
of Mumbai, the men inside opened fire in several locations - including
at the Cama and Albless hospital for women and children.
Police say they intercepted the Skoda on the seafront
and shot at it, killing one of the gunmen and arresting the other.
Twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasar,
who police says hails from Pakistan's Punjab province, is now the
investigators' key to unravelling the planning that went into the
attacks.
'Senseless violence'
Commandos who fought early pitched battles with the
gunmen in the two luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident, say
that the lithe attackers moved quickly from room to room and climbed up
and down floors to throw them off tracks.
The gunmen set fire to curtains and threw grenades to
distract the commandos, according to federal commando chief JK Dutt.
"We found a lot of unexploded grenades inside the
hotel. They damaged a lot of property. It was senseless violence," he
said.
They also found lots of dry fruits, Indian and American
currency, ammunition and fake Mumbai college student identity cards in
the bags the gunmen had left behind during the attacks.
"We are checking whether the gunmen had any local
support. But what we are sure is that they were not from India, and had
trained in and were carrying stuff - AK-56, AK-47 and 9mm revolvers and
hand grenades possibly of Chinese make," said an investigator.
The investigators say that Kasar has told them that
their work was to "take hostages for safe passage". He also told them
their aim was to "create an international incident, and anything big in
Mumbai would be noticed all over the world".
|
Bush Discusses India With Diplomats, Security Team
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:15 p.m. ET
November 29, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President George W. Bush held an hourlong
video-teleconference Saturday with U.S. diplomats in India following
the terror rampage left six Americans dead and raised tensions with
neighboring Pakistan.
Bush held the secured video meeting from the Camp David presidential
retreat where he spent Thanksgiving. He planned a brief statement about
the attacks upon his return to the White House later Saturday.
Those participating in the session included Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice; David Mulford, the U.S. ambassador to India; Paul
Folmsbee, consul general at the U.S. consulate in Mumbai; and members
of Bush's national security team.
''President Bush thanked our ambassador and our consul general for all
the work they've done to help Americans affected by the terrorists,''
White House press secretary Dana Perino said.
President-elect Barack Obama called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh on Friday night to offer condolences and was monitoring the
situation. The siege, which killed at least 195 people, including 18
foreigners, in India's financial capital, ended Saturday when commandos
killed the last three gunmen inside a luxury hotel.
A previously unknown Muslim group with a name suggesting origins inside
India claimed responsibility, but Indian officials said the sole
surviving gunman was from Pakistan and they pointed a finger of blame
at their neighbor and rival.
The U.S. is concerned about a potential flare-up between India and
Pakistan, both nuclear-armed countries. To ease tensions, intelligence
officials are searching for clues that might identify the attackers
even as Indian officials claim ''elements in Pakistan'' were involved.
FBI agents were en route to India on Saturday. A second group of
investigators was on alert to join the first team if necessary. The
State Department warned U.S. citizens still in the city that their
lives remain at risk.
A U.S. counterterrorism official said some ''signatures of the attack''
were consistent with the work of Pakistani militant groups known as
Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed that have fought Indian troops in
the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir and are reported to be linked
to al-Qaida. But the official emphasized it was premature to pinpoint
who was responsible for the attacks. A second official, specializing in
counterintelligence, also cautioned against rushing to judgment on the
origins of the gunmen. The U.S. officials spoke on condition of
anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation.
''There were very worrying tensions in the region,'' said Gordon
Duguid, a State Department spokesman.
As U.S. officials worked to ease hard feelings between India and
Pakistan, a tentative rapprochement between the two nuclear-armed
rivals could hang in the balance.
Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, said in a statement
that his country is ''confronting the menace of terrorism with great
vigor.'' Haqqani insisted ''it is unfair to blame Pakistan or
Pakistanis for these acts of terrorism even before an investigation is
undertaken.''
The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, said six Americans were killed.
Among them were:
--Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivkah, 28. They
were killed in an attack on the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch
movement's center in Mumbai, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin said in New York.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Rivkah Holtzberg only had Israeli
citizenship.
--Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli with dual U.S. citizenship who was
visiting the center.
--Rabbi Leibish Teitlebaum of Brooklyn, N.Y., who was visiting the
center.
--Alan Scherr, 58, and daughter Naomi, 13, of Virginia, who died in a
cafe Wednesday night. They lived at the Synchronicity Foundation
sanctuary about 15 miles southwest of Charlottesville, Va., and were
among 25 foundation participants in a spiritual program in Mumbai,
according to a spokeswoman for the foundation.
A
Day of Reckoning as India Toll Tops 170
NYTIMES
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and KEITH BRADSHER
November 30, 2008
MUMBAI, India — Death hung over Mumbai on Saturday.
Bodies were extracted from the ruins of the Taj Mahal Palace &
Tower hotel in the hours after the standoff with militants there ended
on Saturday in a gunfight and fire. At the main city hospital morgue,
relatives came, clutching one another in grief, to identify their dead.
By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by
evening the death toll had risen to at least 172. Funerals, among them
ceremonies for two policemen and a lawyer, went on throughout the day.
As the reckoning began after the three-day siege here, troubling
questions arose about the apparent failure of the Indian authorities to
anticipate the attack or respond to it more swiftly.
And tensions were high, as well, between India and Pakistan, where
officials insisted that their government had nothing to do with
assisting the attackers and promised that they would act swiftly if any
connection was found within their country.
Perhaps the most troubling question to emerge Saturday for the Indian
authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen
could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian police officers,
paramilitary forces and soldiers for more than three days in three
different buildings.
As the investigation continued, it was unclear whether the attackers
had collaborators already in the city, or whether others in their group
had escaped. All told, the gunmen struck 10 sites in bustling south
Mumbai.
Amid the cleanup effort in this stricken city, the brutality of the
gunmen became plain to see, as accounts from investigators and
survivors portrayed a wide trail of destruction and indiscriminate
killing wherever the terrorists went.
At a gas station near the Taj hotel, attackers opened fire on two
waiting cars on Wednesday, critically injuring two occupants. When a
married couple in their 70s went to their third-floor window to see
what was happening, the terrorists blazed away with assault rifles,
killing both and leaving shards of glass that still hung in the window
on Saturday.
Down the road, when the gunmen seized Nariman House, the headquarters
here of a Jewish religious organization, neighbors mistook the initial
shots on Wednesday night for firecrackers to celebrate India’s cricket
victory over England.
But when drunken revelers in a nearby alley began throwing bottles and
stones, two attackers stepped onto a balcony of Nariman House and
opened fire on passers-by, killing a 22-year-old call center worker who
was the sole support of his widowed mother; five others were injured. A
teenage boy who stepped out onto his balcony and came within firing
range was swiftly shot and killed, a witness said.
“We still don’t know why they did this,” said Rony Dass, a cable
television installer who lives across the street from the gas station.
He lost a lifelong friend, a tailor who was locking up his store for
the night on Wednesday, only to be killed by a gunman.
At the Oberoi hotel, the second luxury hotel to be assaulted, the
gunmen called guests on hotel phones; some of those who picked up were
then attacked, their doors smashed open and the guests shot. At the
Taj, terrorists broke in room by room and shot occupants at point blank
range. Some were shot in the back.
“I think their intention was to kill as many people as possible and do
as much physical damage as possible,” said P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman
of the Oberoi Group, which manages the adjacent Oberoi and Trident
Hotels, both of which were attacked.
Evidence unfolded that the gunmen killed their victims early on in the
siege and left the bodies, apparently fooling Indian security forces
into thinking that they were still holding hostages. At the Sir J.J.
Hospital morgue, an official in charge of the post-mortems, not
authorized to speak to the press, said that of the 87 bodies he had
examined, all but a handful had been killed Wednesday night and early
Thursday. By Saturday night, 239 people had been reported injured.
Contrary to earlier reports, it appeared that Westerners were not the
gunmen’s main targets: they killed whoever they could. By Saturday
evening, 18 of the dead were confirmed as foreigners; an additional 22
foreigners were injured, said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of
Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located.
The State Department has said at least five Americans died in the
attacks. Consular officials from Britain, the Netherlands and Israel
went to morgues on Saturday to see if their missing citizens had turned
up there.
There were reports on the first night of the attacks that gunmen had
rounded up holders of American and British passports at the Oberoi and
herded them upstairs. But Rattan Keswani, the president of Trident
Hotels, said he had found no basis for such reports.
“Nothing seems to suggest that,” he said, noting that a range of
nationalities was represented among the 22 hotel guests who died, in
addition to the 10 staff members, all Indian.
The city’s police chief, Hasan Gafoor, said nine gunmen were killed,
the last of whom fell out of the terrace of the Taj hotel on Saturday
morning as the siege ended. His body was charred beyond recognition
when it was taken to the hospital. A 10th suspected terrorist was
arrested; the police say he is a 21-year-old Pakistani, Ajmal Amir
Kasab.
A senior Mumbai police inspector, Nagappa R. Mali, said the suspect and
one of his collaborators, who was slain by the police, had killed three
top police officials, including the head of the antiterrorist squad,
Hemant Karkare.
Mr. Karkare was cremated Saturday morning in a crowded and emotional
farewell.
The bodies of four other suspected terrorists were at the morgue at the
Sir J.J. Hospital in Mumbai. Officials there put their ages between 20
and 25. All four were men.
Around dawn on Saturday, gunfire began to rattle inside the Taj Mahal
hotel, one of about a dozen sites that the militants attacked beginning
Wednesday night. They never issued any manifestoes or made any demands,
and it seemed clear from their stubborn resistance at the Taj that they
intended to fight to the last.
It was not long before flames were roaring through a ground-floor
ballroom and the first floor of the Taj, a majestic 105-year-old hotel
in the heart of southern Mumbai.
But by midmorning, after commandos had finished working their way
through the 565-room hotel, the head of the elite National Security
Guards, J. K. Dutt, said the siege at the Taj was over. Three
terrorists, he said, had been killed inside.
By afternoon, busloads of elite commandos, fresh from the siege of the
hotel, sat outside the nearby Gateway of India and shook hands with
elated spectators.
“There were so many people and we wanted to avoid any civilian
casualties,” one of the commandos told a private television station,
CNN-IBN. He said they were firing from various parts of the hotel. By
the end of the siege, he said, the gunmen had holed up in one room and
barricaded the door with explosives.
The siege may have been over, but new tensions within the region were
on the rise, particularly after India’s foreign minister on Friday
blamed “elements” within Pakistan for the attack.
In an attempt to defuse the situation on Saturday, the Pakistani
president, Asif Ali Zardari, told an Indian television channel in a
live telephone interview that he supported a thorough investigation “no
matter where it may lead.”
“My heard bleeds for India,” Mr. Zardari said. “As president of
Pakistan, if any evidence points to anyone in my country,” Pakistan
will take action, he said.
Mr. Zardari said he did not rule out the possibility of the top
official of the Pakistani intelligence agency working with Indian
officials on the case. But it was too early in the investigation for
the top official to meet with his Indian counterpart to share
information, Mr. Zardari said.
Soon after Mr. Zardari’s interview on Indian television, the Pakistani
foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said the Pakistani government
was not involved in the attack.
“Our hands are clean,” Mr. Qureshi told a news conference in Islamabad,
Pakistan, after a lengthy cabinet meeting called to discuss the rising
tensions between the two rival countries. “We have nothing to be
ashamed of.”
Mr. Qureshi also stressed that the Indian government had not blamed the
Pakistani government for the attacks.
“They are suspecting, perhaps suspecting, groups or organizations that
could have a presence here,” he said. “We have said if they have
evidence they should share it with us.”
Reporting was contributed by Jeremy
Kahn and Ruth Fremson from Mumbai; Hari Kumar and Heather Timmons from
New Delhi; Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan; and Mark McDonald from
Hong Kong.
Attackers Killed at Last Site of
Resistance
NYTIMES
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and KEITH BRADSHER
November 29, 2008
MUMBAI, India – After nearly 60 hours of violence,
police officials early Saturday said that the last remaining terrorists
who conducted a series of attacks in the commercial heart of Mumbai had
been killed, according to Indian television.
Briefing reporters a short while ago outside the Taj hotel, where the
last terrorists had been holed up, J.K. Dutt, director general of the
National Security Guard, said that three of the attackers had been
killed. According to a report on the Web site of the news
network, IBN, Mr. Dutt said that one of the terrorists was shot and
killed as he attempted to lob a grenade.
"We found the dead bodies of two terrorists inside the hotel lobby,''
Mr. Dutt was quoted as saying. "They had AK 47 guns on them."
Although some news reports suggested that the killing of the attackers
Saturday morning indicated that the siege was over, Mr. Dutt said he
could not confirm that the Taj had been cleared of all terrorists.
"I can't say that our operation is over," he said, according to the IDN
report. "To make sure that there is no other threat, we are still
searching each and every room of the hotel."
The killings at the Taj came on the third day of a siege that has
shaken India, raised tensions with neighboring Pakistan and prompted
searing questions about the failure of the authorities to anticipate
the tragedy or to react swiftly enough as it unfolded.
On Friday, commandos had cleared attackers from one hotel and a Jewish
center after more than 150 people had died in the terrorists'
coordinated assaults. Most of the dead were apparently Indian citizens,
but at least 22 foreigners were killed. As myriad accounts emerged of
the carnage, a transcontinental vigil over the fate of a rabbi from
Brooklyn and his wife, who ran the Jewish center, ended in a dramatic
commando raid and, finally, with the news of the couple's deaths.
The main success of the day for the authorities came at the Oberoi
hotel. The authorities said that two gunmen had been killed and 93
foreigners — some of them wearing Air France and Lufthansa uniforms —
had been rescued, though 30 bodies were found. Exhausted survivors
offered harrowing accounts of their ordeal, trapped on the upper floors
of the high-rise hotel while gunmen prowled below. The National
Security Guard said it recovered two AK-47s, a 9-millimeter pistol and
some grenades.
For the first time, after several veiled accusations that Pakistan was
involved, Indian officials specifically linked the attacks to their
neighbor and longtime nemesis. India’s foreign minister blamed
“elements in Pakistan” for the attacks , spreading the repercussions of
the attacks beyond India’s borders. American intelligence and
counterterrorism officials said Friday that there was mounting evidence
that a Pakistani militant group — Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has long been
involved in the conflict with India over the disputed territory of
Kashmir — was responsible.
The Indian authorities were beginning to face sharp questions about why
operations to flush out a handful of assailants at the Jewish center
and a second hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, had not moved
more rapidly. And many other basic questions remained for a crisis that
unfolded so publicly, on televisions, Web sites and Twitter feeds
across the world. Who were the attackers? The police tally was at least
eight killed and one captured alive, but could so few militants have
caused such mayhem? How had they managed to plan and coordinate such an
operation and then fight off highly trained commandos for so long?
The army’s operation at the Taj was entering its “final phase” late on
Friday, the Indian military said. Commandos were battling at least one
terrorist who was moving between two floors of the hotel. The army said
two other gunmen had been killed there overnight on Thursday.
Indian commandos said the attackers at the hotels were well trained,
with one carrying a backpack packed with hundreds of rounds of
ammunition, and they seemed to know the buildings’ layout better than
the security forces, indicating a high degree of preparation and
sophistication. Some were seen arriving by boat; others may have been
guests at the hotels for days.
The leader of a commando unit involved in a gun battle on Thursday
morning inside the Taj said during a news conference on Friday that he
had seen a dozen dead bodies in one of the rooms.
His team found a gunman’s backpack, which contained dried fruit, 400
rounds of AK-47 ammunition, four grenades, Indian and American money,
and seven credit cards from some of the world’s leading banks, he said.
The pack also had a national identity card from the island of
Mauritius, off Africa’s southeastern coast.
The attackers were “very, very familiar with the layout of the hotel,”
said the commander, who disguised his face with a scarf and tinted
glasses to hide his identity. He said the militants, who appeared to be
under 30 years old, were “determined” and “remorseless.”
As the State Department reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice had called President-elect Barack Obama twice to brief him on the
attacks, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said
Friday there was mounting evidence pointing to the involvement of
Lashkar, or possibly another Pakistani group focused on Kashmir,
Jaish-e-Muhammad.
The American officials cautioned that they had reached no conclusions
about who was responsible for the attacks, or how they were planned and
carried out. An F.B.I. team was being sent to Mumbai to assist with the
forensic investigation. In a statement, President Bush said he was
saddened by the deaths.
At the Jewish center, Nariman House, commandos slid down ropes from a
hovering Army helicopter, landed on the roof and stormed the building,
home to the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch.
The bodies of at least five people were found inside, including the
slain rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, who held dual American and Israeli
citizenship, and his wife, Rivka, an Israeli citizen. Another was that
of Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, a Brooklyn native who moved to Jerusalem
several years ago, according to a statement by Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg. Israeli radio reported that a sixth body had been found at
the center as well.
The dead at the Oberoi included a 58-year-old man and his 13-year-old
daughter, members of a spiritual community visiting from Virginia, who
were shot in the lobby. Two more Americans and two Canadians, traveling
as part of the same group, were wounded.
As the day progressed, the Indian authorities kept up a steady stream
of accusations aimed at Pakistan, raising fears of heightening tensions
between the countries, nuclear-armed powers that have fought wars in
the past.
R.R. Patil, the home affairs minister of Maharashtra State, where
Mumbai is situated, said the assailant who had been captured alive was
a Pakistani citizen. The Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee,
said early evidence explicitly pointed to Pakistan’s involvement.
“Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with
links to Pakistan are involved,” he told reporters in New Delhi.
In London, officials said they were unable to confirm reports in a
British newspaper that some of the attackers had British passports.
Holding British passports is relatively common among people with ties
to former colonies.
Pakistan seemed anxious to defuse the mounting crisis in relations.
Discussions about sending a representative of the country’s powerful
Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to India were under way. Foreign
Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said India and Pakistan should join hands
to defeat a common enemy, and urged New Delhi not to play politics over
the attacks in Mumbai, Reuters reported.
“Do not bring politics into this issue,” he told reporters in the
Indian town of Ajmer during a four-day visit to India. “This is a
collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we should join hands
to defeat the enemy.”
President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan called Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh of India to say he was “appalled and shocked” by the attacks,
Reuters reported. “Nonstate actors wanted to force upon the governments
their own agenda, but they must not be allowed to succeed,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by
Jeremy Kahn from Mumbai; Mark McDonald from Hong Kong; Heather Timmons
and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Alan
Cowell from Paris; and Graham Bowley from New York.
Op-Ed
Contributor
What They Hate About Mumbai
NYTIMES
By SUKETU MEHTA
November 29, 2008
MY bleeding city. My poor
great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s
something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists,
Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre,
profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.
Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food
vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business,
to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city
understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of
it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing
what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It
flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if
you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who
congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird.
The terrorists want to kill the songbird.
Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream
of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular
form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every
Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake
architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of
the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of
the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down
the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn’t
you know it, the keeping of songbirds.
Bollywood dream-makers are shaken. “I am ashamed to say this,” Amitabh
Bachchan, superstar of a hundred action movies, wrote on his blog. “As
the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did
something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be
in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my
licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow.”
Mumbai is a “soft target,” the terrorism analysts say. Anybody can walk
into the hotels, the hospitals, the train stations, and start spraying
with a machine gun. Where are the metal detectors, the random bag
checks? In Mumbai, it’s impossible to control the crowd. In other
cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai,
people run toward it — to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new
residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is
just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.
In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity,
like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer
or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai,
things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come
out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God.
They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to
be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques
torn down. They want temples bombed.
And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young
men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer
T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the
painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and
flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that
preachers of every religion thunder against. It is, as a monk of the
pacifist Jain religion explained to me, “paap-ni-bhoomi”: the sinful
land.
In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets — for the crime
of being Muslim in Mumbai. Now these young Muslim men murdered people
in front of their families — for the crime of visiting Mumbai. They
attacked the luxury businessmen’s hotels. They attacked the open-air
Cafe Leopold, where backpackers of the world refresh themselves with
cheap beer out of three-foot-high towers before heading out into India.
Their drunken revelry, their shameless flirting, must have offended the
righteous believers in the jihad. They attacked the train station
everyone calls V.T., the terminus for runaways and dreamers from all
across India. And in the attack on the Chabad house, for the first time
ever, it became dangerous to be Jewish in India.
The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will
get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams
have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their
Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city.
Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.
But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even
more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good
home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel
rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah
Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better
toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but
in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance;
work hard and party harder.
If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the
explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you
going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?
So I’m booking flights to Mumbai. I’m going to go get a beer at the
Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, and
watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro. Stimulus doesn’t have to be just
economic.
Suketu Mehta, a professor of
journalism at New York University, is the author of “Maximum City:
Bombay Lost and Found.”
Mumbai
Fighting Narrows to One Hotel
NYTIMES
By KEITH BRADSHER and SOMINI SENGUPTA
November 29, 2008
MUMBAI, India — The conflict in the stricken Indian city of Mumbai
narrowed to a final running battle between commandos and at least one
attacker who was still roaming the charred corridors of a luxury hotel,
the Taj, but the murderous assault on the country’s financial capital
continued to shake the nation and raised perilous tensions with
neighboring Pakistan.
A measure of the possible disturbing implications of the attacks for
regional relations, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence
organization, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was due to make an extraordinary visit
to India to assist in the investigations and calm tensions between the
two countries, as the Indian government explicitly blamed “elements
with links to Pakistan” and the full scale and death toll from the
attacks became clearer.
American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday there
was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir,
most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the deadly attacks on
Mumbai.
Indian security forces routed attackers from one luxury hotel in the
city, the Oberoi, freeing hostages held inside, and from a Jewish
community center, ending the conflicts there. More than 150 people,
including at least 22 foreigners, were confirmed killed in total in the
attacks across the city, which began on Wednesday night, as more bodies
were carried out from the two hotels and the community center.
A rabbi from Brooklyn, New York, Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife,
Rivka, were among five hostages who were killed by attackers at the
Jewish community center, Nariman House.
Also among the dead were two Americans, a 58-year-old man and his
13-year-old daughter, members of a spiritual community visiting from
Virginia, who died in the Oberoi hotel. Two more Americans and two
Canadians, traveling as part of the same retreat, were injured.
At Nariman House, the militants had executed the hostages in the center
— most of whom were believed to be Israeli citizens — as Indian
commando units stormed the attackers inside the building, the Indian
military said, adding that two attackers had also been killed. Two
French nationals, the founder of a French lingerie line and her
husband, were also among those killed in the violence in the city,
according to Agence France-Presse.
Shortly before night settled over Mumbai, the police said 24 bodies
were discovered in the Oberoi hotel, where the police had finally taken
control and many guests were set free earlier on Friday.
But the army’s operation at the second luxury hotel, the Taj, was only
entering its “final phase,” according to the Indian military, with
commandos battling at least one terrorist left inside who the army said
was moving between two floors of the hotel, including an area that had
been a dance floor for weddings and other parties. The army said two
other militants had been killed overnight in the Taj. Later, commandos
were seen rushing through the front door of the hotel, in what appeared
to be another major assault to dislodge the militants.
Indian commandos involved in the fighting in the hotels said the
attackers were well-trained and “remorseless,” with one attacker
carrying a backpack packed with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and
they seemed to know the hotel layout better than the security forces,
indicating a high degree of preparation and sophistication.
With the situation seeming to come gradually under the authorities’
control, attention was shifting to the identities of the attackers,
several of whom were reported to be seized during the onslaught.
The Indian media focused on the possible involvement of
Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group run by Pakistani
intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of
Kashmir.
As the State Department reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice had called President-elect Obama twice to brief him on the
attacks, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said
Friday there was mounting evidence pointing to the involvement of
Lashkar- e-Taiba, or possibly another Pakistani group based in Kashmir,
Jaish-e-Muhammad.
The American officials cautioned that they had reached no hard
conclusions about who was responsible for the operation, as well as how
it was planned and carried out. An F.B.I. team had also been dispatched
to Mumbai to assist with the forensic investigation of the attacks.
In a statement, President Bush said he was saddened by the two American
deaths.
Amid an atmosphere of recrimination between political parties within
India, a senior Hindu nationalist leader, L.K. Advani, said the Indian
security services had become “preoccupied” with Hindu terrorists and
missed threats from Islamists. The Indian foreign minister, Pranab
Mukherjee, said early evidence explicitly pointed to Pakistan’s
involvement. "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates
elements with links to Pakistan are involved," Mr. Mukherjee told
reporters in New Delhi.
An Indian official said one assailant had been captured alive and was a
Pakistani citizen. The assertion, by R.R. Patil, the home affairs
minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located, could further
increase tension between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed states
which have fought wars in the past.
In London, officials said they were unable to confirm reports in a
British newspaper that some of the attackers held British passports,
which are relatively common among people with ties to former British
colonies, but other officials said such a link was unlikely.
While the situation was gradually being brought under control by the
Indian army and police, there were still pockets of resistance. In the
Oberoi, some guests were still barricaded in their rooms as security
forces reasserted control of the hotel, and they were watching events
outside on television news channels. But police and military officers
did not explain why the operation to flush out a handful of assailants
in the Taj hotel and the Jewish community center had taken so long.
At the Jewish center, commandos slid down ropes from a hovering Army
helicopter on Friday morning as they stormed the building. The
blue-uniformed troopers landed on the roof and soon made their way
inside the center, home to the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch.
Throughout Friday, a gun battle raged inside the Jewish center, which
echoed to the thump of explosions and the rattle of automatic fire.
Later, Reuters reported that the commandos had blown up the outer wall
of the center, and that the bodies of five hostages were discovered,
quoting an Israeli diplomat speaking on Israeli television.
Late in the day, commandos in black uniform wearing heavy body armor
moved into buildings around Nariman House, relieving commandos in blue
or black uniforms who had been in action all day. For the first time, a
van with six medics in surgical gowns and masks parked close to Nariman
House, apparently in anticipation of casualties.
The main success of the day for the authorities came at the Oberoi
hotel where police said that 93 foreigners — some of them wearing Air
France and Lufthansa uniforms — had been rescued on Friday. Exhausted
survivors offered harrowing accounts of their ordeal, trapped on the
upper floors of the high-rise hotel occupied on lower floors by gunmen.
At the Taj hotel , several trucks carrying Indian commandos arrived at
1:15 p.m. on Friday. The troopers appeared to be starting an assault on
the hotel, where an army official said at least one militant was still
holding hostages. Throughout Friday, explosions and small arms fire
were heard from the hotel as security forces sought to free hostages.
But progress seemed cautious and slow. Outside the hotel, an Indian
army sniper took up position in a cherrypicker. By late afternoon,
smoke had again begun to billow from the roof of the hotel, parts of
which were gutted by a huge blaze after the gunmen first moved into the
hotel on Wednesday. And by nightfall, explosions and gunfire continued
to shake the building.
The leader of a commando unit involved in a gun battle Thursday morning
inside the Taj said during a news conference on Friday that he had seen
a dozen dead bodies in one of the rooms.
His team also discovered a gunman’s backpack, which contained dried
fruit, 400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, four grenades, Indian and
American money, and seven credit cards from some of the world’s leading
banks. They pack also had a national identity card from the island of
Mauritius, off Africa’s southeastern coast.
The attackers were “very, very familiar with the layout of the hotel,”
said the commander, who disguised his face with a scarf and tinted
glasses. He said the militants, who appeared to be under 30 years old,
were “determined” and “remorseless.”
On Thursday, the police said 14 police officers had been killed in the
city, along with nine gunmen. Nine suspects were taken into custody,
they said.
In a televised speech Thursday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed
forces “based outside this country” in a thinly veiled accusation that
Pakistan was involved. A day later, India’s foreign minister Pranab
Mukherjee was quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying that,
according to preliminary reports, “some elements in Pakistan are
responsible.”
But Pakistan seemed anxious to defuse the mounting crisis in relations
with its neighbor. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said India and
Pakistan should join hands to defeat a common enemy, and urged New
Delhi not to play politics over the attacks in Mumbai, Reuters reported.
“Do not bring politics into this issue,” the Pakistani foreign minister
told reporters in the Indian town of Ajmer during a four-day visit to
India. “This is a collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we
should join hands to defeat the enemy.”
President Asif Ali Zardari called Mr. Singh, Reuters reported, to say
he was “appalled and shocked” by the terrorist attacks. “Non-state
actors wanted to force upon the governments their own agenda, but they
must not be allowed to succeed,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Jeremy Kahn from Mumbai; Mark McDonald
from Hong Kong; Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Salman
Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; Alan Cowell from Paris; and Graham
Bowley and Liz Robbins from New York.
Indian
Forces Battle Pockets of Militants
NYTIMES
By KEITH BRADSHER and SOMINI SENGUPTA
November 29, 2008
MUMBAI, India — As the crisis in Mumbai neared its 48th hour, Indian
commandos were battling to overcome stubborn resistance by militants on
Friday, seeking to end the bloody assault on India’s financial and
entertainment capital that has shaken the nation and raised perilous
regional tensions with Pakistan.
Shortly before night settled over the stricken city, the police said
the death toll had reached 143 with the discovery of 24 bodies in the
luxury Oberoi hotel, where guests were set free on Friday after being
holed up in their rooms as security forces re-asserted control of the
building. But officers did not explain why the operation to flush out a
handful of assailants in other places had taken so long.
Commandos slid down ropes from a hovering Army helicopter on Friday
morning as they stormed a Jewish center that had been seized. The
blue-uniformed troopers landed on the roof and soon made their way
inside Nariman House, home to the Hasidic Jewish group
Chabad-Lubavitch. The caution and pace of their maneuvers suggested the
authorities were keen to avoid civilian casualties.
Throughout Friday, a gun battle raged inside the Jewish center, , which
echoed to the thump of explosions and the rattle of automatic fire.
There was no immediate word on the fate of hostages assumed to be held
there.
Late in the day, commandos in black uniform wearing heavy body armor
moved into buildings around Nariman House, relieving commandos in blue
or black uniforms who had been in action all day. For the first time, a
van with six medics in surgical gowns and masks parked close to Nariman
House, apparently in anticipation of casualties.
Indian security forces claimed some success in rescuing hostages from
the five-star Oberoi hotel but still appeared to be encountering
resistance inside the ornate, turreted Taj Mahal Palace and Tower
Hotel. The hotels were two of several of the city’s landmarks hit by
the attackers late on Wednesday.
Indian Army and paramilitary commandos made their way through both
hotels, searching for bodies and survivors. In addition to the Jewish
center and the hotels, the attackers, armed with grenades and automatic
weapons, struck at least four other sites on Mumbai’s southern tip —
the main train station, a hospital, a cinema and a historic cafe.
While there was still no definitive word on the identity or affiliation
of the attackers, an Indian official said one assailant had been
captured alive and was a Pakistani citizen. The assertion, by R.R.
Patil, the home affairs minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is
located, could further increase tension between India and Pakistan,
both nuclear-armed states which have fought wars in the past.
In a significant development, Pakistan said on Friday it was prepared
to send its intelligence chief, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India to share
information in the investigation into the attacks.
News agencies cited police reports that 93 foreigners — some of them
wearing Air France and Lufthansa uniforms — had been rescued on Friday
from the Oberoi. Exhausted survivors offered harrowing accounts of
their ordeal, trapped on the upper floors of the high-rise hotel
occupied on lower floors by gunmen.
The Mumbai police chief, Hassan Ghafoor, said that 24 bodies had been
found at the hotel and that the security forces had completed their
operation there.
At the Taj hotel , several trucks carrying Indian commandos arrived at
1:15 p.m. on Friday. The troopers appeared to be starting an assault on
the hotel, where an army official said at least one militant was still
holding hostages. Throughout Friday, explosions and small arms fire
were heard from the hotel as security forces sought to free hostages.
But progress seemed cautious and slow. Outside the hotel, an Indian
army sniper took up position in a cherrypicker. By late afternoon,
smoke had again begun to billow from the roof of the hotel, parts of
which were gutted by a huge blaze after the gunmen first moved into the
hotel on Wednesday. The leader of a commando unit involved in a gun
battle Thursday morning inside the Taj said during a news conference on
Friday that he had seen a dozen dead bodies in one of the rooms.
His team also discovered a gunman’s backpack, which contained dried
fruit, 400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, four grenades, Indian and
American money, and seven credit cards from some of the world’s leading
banks. They pack also had a national identity card from the island of
Mauritius, off Africa’s southeastern coast.
The attackers were “very, very familiar with the layout of the hotel,”
said the commander, who disguised his face with a scarf and tinted
glasses. He said the militants, who appeared to be under 30 years old,
were “determined” and “remorseless.”
On Thursday, the police said 14 police officers had been killed in the
city, along with nine gunmen. Nine suspects were taken into custody,
they said.
On Friday, an Army general, N. Thamburaj, was quoted as saying he
expected all anti-terrorist operations in Mumbai to be wrapped up by
mid-afternoon.
There remained much mystery around the group behind the attack, which
terrorism experts said was unusual in its scale, planning and boldness.
In a televised speech Thursday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed
forces “based outside this country” in a thinly veiled accusation that
Pakistan was involved. A day later, India’s foreign minister Pranab
Mukherjee was quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying that,
according to preliminary reports, “some elements in Pakistan are
responsible.”
On Friday, Pakistan seemed anxious to defuse the mounting crisis in
relations with its neighbor. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said
India and Pakistan should join hands to defeat a common enemy, and
urged New Delhi not to play politics over the attacks in Mumbai,
Reuters reported.
“Do not bring politics into this issue,” the foreign minister told
reporters in the Indian town of Ajmer during a four-day visit to India.
“This is a collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we should
join hands to defeat the enemy.”
President Asif Ali Zardari called Mr. Singh, Reuters reported, to say
he was “appalled and shocked” by the terrorist attacks. “Non-state
actors wanted to force upon the governments their own agenda, but they
must not be allowed to succeed,” he said.
The attacks could threaten recent American efforts to reduce the
overall enmity between Pakistan and India, which were meant to enable
Pakistan to focus more military resources against the rising threat of
the Taliban in its lawless tribal areas.
Mr. Singh had issued a warning Thursday that seemed clearly aimed at
Pakistan, which India has often accused of allowing terrorist groups to
plot anti-Indian attacks.
“The group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country,
had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the
commercial capital of the country,” he said. “We will take up strongly
with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching
attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if
suitable measures are not taken by them.”
The suspicions raised by the attack seemed a blow to relations between
India and Pakistan, which had been recovering from a low earlier this
year after India blamed the Pakistani intelligence agency for abetting
the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan. India has frequently
accused Pakistan-based militant groups of fueling terrorist attacks on
Indian soil, though lately it has also acknowledged the presence of
homegrown Muslim and Hindu militant organizations.
Reporting was contributed by Jeremy
Kahn from Mumbai; Mark McDonald from Hong Kong; Heather Timmons and
Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; Alan
Cowell from Paris; and Liz Robbins from New York.
Page last
updated at 13:13 GMT,
Friday, 28 November 2008
Explosions and gunfire continue to be heard from the Taj
Mahal Palace hotel, one of several sites targeted in attacks that have
killed at least 130.
Troops battled with the gunmen for most of the day after swooping on
the building at first light. But a siege at a Jewish centre in
Mumbai, where gunmen were believed to be holding a rabbi and others
hostage, has ended, Indian media say.
India's foreign minister said "elements with links to Pakistan" were
involved. However, his Pakistani counterpart has urged India not
to bring politics into the issue, saying "we should join hands to
defeat the enemy"...
US investigators head to
India to probe
attacks
DAY
By SHARON THEIMER, Associated Press Writer
Posted on Nov 28, 4:14 AM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is sending
investigators to India to help unravel who was behind the terrorist
attacks that targeted largely foreigners in the commercial and tourist
center of Mumbai. Three Americans are confirmed among those injured.
The State Department urged Americans not to travel to the stricken city
- at least through the weekend - as U.S. officials checked with Indian
authorities and hospitals to learn more about the extent of casualties.
A U.S. investigative team headed to Mumbai on Friday, a State
Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because
the U.S. and Indian governments were working out final details of the
cooperative effort. The official declined to identify which agency or
agencies the team members came from.
Department spokesman Robert McInturff said he could not identify those
injured, but The Associated Press learned the name of one victim: Andi
Varagona of Nashville, Tenn. She called her mother from a hospital
Thursday and said she had been shot in the arm and leg while eating
dinner at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel.
She said another Tennessee woman traveling with her was also injured,
according to the mother, Celeste Varagona, but the woman's identity was
not immediately available.
Alan Scherr, 58, and his daughter, Naomi, 13, who as members of the
Faber, Va.-based Synchronicity Foundation traveled to India to
participate in a spiritual program, were missing late Thursday, said
group spokeswoman Bobbie Garvey. "Our Indian contacts there have gone
to all the hospitals, but they haven't located Alan or Naomi yet,"
Garvey said. "We're very hopeful they'll be found safe."
The group said in a statement that four members of the 25-person group
- two Americans and two Canadians - who were staying at the Oberoi
Hotel were wounded by gunfire, and were believed in stable condition.
McInturff, the State Department spokesman, said U.S. officials have
activated a phone tree to contact American citizens who registered with
the U.S. consulate in Mumbai. So far there is no information that any
American has been killed in the attacks, said McInturff.
Authorities in India said Thursday at least 100 people were killed and
at least 300 injured when suspected Islamic militants attacked 10 sites
in Mumbai. Teams of gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular tourist
attraction, hospitals and a crowded train station.
"It would be premature in view of the unfolding tragedy in Mumbai and
the corresponding investigation to reach any hard-and-fast conclusions
on who may be responsible for the attacks, but some of what we're
seeing is reminiscent of past terrorist operations undertaken by groups
such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed," a U.S. counterterrorism
official said on condition of anonymity. The two groups mentioned by
the official are Pakistani militants linked to al-Qaida who have fought
Indian troops in Kashmir.
President-elect Barack Obama spoke by telephone with Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice for an update Thursday and received several
intelligence briefings.
President Bush expressed condolences to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh in a phone call from the Camp David, Md., presidential retreat.
"The president offered support and assistance to the government of
India as it works to restore order, provide safety to its people and
comfort to the victims and their families and investigate these
despicable acts," press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.
The State Department set up a call center for Americans concerned about
family members who may be in Mumbai. The number is 1-888-407-4747.
---
AP reporters Pamela Hess in Washington, Tom Breen in Richmond, Va., and
Juanita Cousins in Nashville, Tenn., contributed to this story.
I-BBC 27 November 2008
Indian PM vows action on attacks
India's Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to take "whatever measures are
necessary" to track down those responsible for the Mumbai attacks.
He said the perpetrators were based "outside the country" and India
would not tolerate "neighbours" who provide a haven to militants
targeting it.
Gunmen targeted at least seven sites in Mumbai late on Wednesday,
killing at least 101 people and injuring 300.
An Indian general said 10-12 gunmen were still holed up at three sites.
At one, the Oberoi-Trident hotel, flames were seen rising from the
roof. Elite commandos had begun an operation to free hostages at
the
hotel, where dozens of people are said to remain trapped or held
hostage, reports said.
A home ministry official said between 20 and 30 people at the hotel
might still be hostages, while the owners said some 200 people were
trapped inside.
Police earlier said hostages had been freed from another luxury hotel,
the Taj Mahal Palace, but explosions and gunfire were still being heard
by witnesses outside.
A stand-off continues at a Jewish centre, where an Israeli rabbi and
his family are believed to have been taken hostage.
One militant reportedly phoned local TV from the centre offering to
negotiate over the release of hostages.
In other developments:
- The Indian navy said it was searching ships off the west
coast following reports that gunmen had arrived in Mumbai by boat
- The UK Foreign Office said a British national had died; a
German, a Japanese man and an Italian are also among the dead
- The Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, which
has been blamed for past bombings in India, denied any role in the
attacks
In a televised address, Mr Singh said the government "will take
whatever measures are necessary to ensure the safety and security of
our citizens".
He described the attacks as "well-planned and well-orchestrated...
intended to create a sense of panic by choosing high profile targets
and indiscriminately killing foreigners".
The perpetrators were "based outside the country", he said, adding that
they "had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the
commercial capital of the country".
India has complained in the past that attacks on its soil have been
carried out by groups based in Pakistan, although relations between the
two countries have improved in recent years and Pakistani leaders were
swift to condemn the latest attacks.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, in New Delhi for
talks, said no-one should be blamed until investigations were finished.
"Our experience in the past tells us that we should not jump to
conclusions," he told Dawn television.
Amid international condemnation of the attacks, US President George W
Bush telephoned Mr Singh to offer his condolences and support.
Claim of responsibility
In the attacks late on Wednesday night gunmen, using grenades and
automatic weapons, targeted at least seven sites including the city's
main commuter train station, a hospital and a restaurant popular with
tourists.
Police say 14 police officers, 81 Indian nationals and six foreigners
have been killed.
Four suspected terrorists have also been killed and nine arrested, they
add.
State police chief AN Roy earlier told local television that hostages
held by the gunmen at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel - one of Mumbai's most
famous hotels - had been freed.
Witnesses said civilians could be seen running from the hotel, some
with suitcases. Ambulances were also reported to be arriving.
But the BBC's Mark Dummett, outside the Taj Mahal, says the situation
has since become very confused, with the sounds of explosions and
gunfire being heard from within the hotel, suggesting the siege is not
yet over.
Earlier in the day, Indian commandos had been seen entering the hotels
but there was little detail on the operation.
Meanwhile, the bosses of the Oberoi-Trident hotel say some 200 guests
may still trapped in their rooms.
Earlier eyewitness reports from the hotels suggested the attackers were
singling out British and American passport holders.
If the reports are true, our security correspondent Frank Gardner says
it implies an Islamist motive - attacks inspired or co-ordinated by
al-Qaeda.
A claim of responsibility has been made by a previously unknown group
calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen. Our correspondent says it could
be a hoax or assumed name for another group.
Sophisticated
Attacks, but by Whom?
NYTIMES
By ALAN COWELL and SOUAD MEKHENNET
November 28, 2008
PARIS — A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed over 100
people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still
billowed from two of the city’s landmark hotels: who carried out the
attacks?
Security officials and experts agreed that the assaults represented a
marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist
attacks in India, which have singled out local people rather than
foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.
The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was “uniquely disturbing,” said Sajjan
Gohel, a security expert in London, because it seemed directed at
foreigners, involved hostage taking and was aimed at multiple “soft,
symbolic targets.” The attacks “aimed to create maximum terror and
human carnage and damage the economy,” he said in a telephone interview.
But the central riddle was the extent to which local assailants had
outside support. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said the
attacks probably had “external linkages,” reflecting calculations among
Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and
coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced
terrorists, particularly groups affiliated to Al Qaeda. The planning of
the attack has profound political implications for both India and its
neighbor, Pakistan.
But the identity of the Mumbai attackers remained a mystery.
An e-mail message to Indian media outlets taking responsibility for the
attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from a
group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Almost universally, experts and
intelligence officials said that name was unknown.
Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also
describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the
Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy
fighters. But the combination of the two, said Mr. Gohel in London, is
a “front name. This group is nonexistent.”
“It’s even unclear whether it’s a real group or not,” said Bruce
Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
University and the author of the book “Inside Terrorism.”
An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to
a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string
of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.
On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said
to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened
potential “deadly attacks” in Mumbai. The message warned
counterterrorism officials in the city that “you are already on our
hit-list and this time very, very seriously.”
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of
the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed,
reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at
the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the
terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the
attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely
to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba,
another violent South Asian terrorist group.
“There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the
attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints
of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades.”
By contrast, Mr. Gohel in London said “the fingerprints point to an
Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group.”
Mr. Hoffman said the attacks, which he called “tactical, sophisticated
and coordinated,” perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the
perpetrators.
The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to
Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the
conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday,
the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India blamed
Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in
December, 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.
In London, Mr. Gohel said the Mumbai assaults seemed to blend the
tactics of the attack on Parliament and an event two years earlier —
the 1999 hijacking of an Air India flight to Afghanistan that affected
foreigners and involved hostage-taking.
The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack
might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students.
Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers
carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.
“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said.
“The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to
publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on
this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been
radicalized.’ But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not
true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global
landscape of Islamist jihad,” she said. “Indians will have a strong
incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. ‘Al Qaeda’s in your toilet!’ But
this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”
That, too, was disputed by the Indian official. “This was Mumbai’s
9/11,” he said. The consequences of the attack, the official said, may
be to disrupt any overtures to Pakistan and to ignite a backlash
against Indian Muslims.
Reflecting a widespread assessment in Pakistan, Moonis Ahmar, a
professor of international relations at the University of Karachi,
called the attacks a well-thought out conspiracy designed to
destabilize relations between India and Pakistan and sabotage efforts
at reconciliation.
Hindus make up about 80 percent of India’s 1.13 billion population and
Muslims 13.4 percent. A European security official, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of his organization’s rules, said it was
“too soon for a proper analysis” while Indian forces were still seeking
to end the crisis. Theories about outside involvement, including the
potential role of Al Qaeda, were not yet proven, he said.
Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and
Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Mark McDonald contributed reporting
from Hong Kong, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Commandos
move to free hostages in Mumbai hotels; Militant attacks have killed 104
Hartford Courant
By ANITA CHANG Associated Press Writer; AP writers
Ramola Talwar Badam, Erika
Kinetz and Jenny Barchfield in Mumbai, Raphael G. Satter in London and
Cristian Salazar in New York contributed to this report.
8:49 AM EST, November 27, 2008
MUMBAI, India (AP) Black-clad Indian commandos moved painstakingly,
room-by-room, through two massive five star luxury hotels Thursday in a
bid to free dozens of people trapped by suspected Muslim militants who
attacked at least 10 targets in India's financial capital of Mumbai,
killing 104 people. The rescue efforts, which continued
throughout the
day, were punctuated by frequent gunshots and explosions and orange
flames billowed from the Taj Mahal hotel. Hostages and several bodies
trickled out of the buildings.
More than 300 were also wounded in the highly coordinated attacks
Wednesday night by bands of gunmen who invaded two five star hotels, a
popular restaurant, a crowded train station, a Jewish center and at
least five other sites, armed with assault rifles, hand grenades and
explosives.
After dusk Thursday, the soldiers ushered several dozen captives out of
the Oberoi hotel, another Mumbai landmark.
One of the freed hostages who did not give his name told reporters he
had seen many bodies inside the hotel. But he refused to give more
details, saying he had promised police not to discuss the rescue while
it was ongoing. The Maharashtra state home ministry said 45
captives
had been freed from the Oberoi and 35 were still trapped inside.
Police said they were going slowly to protect the captives.
"The safety of the people trapped is very important," said A. N. Roy, a
senior police officer. "It will take time but it will be completed
successfully," he said.
A previously unknown Islamic militant group claimed responsibility for
the carnage, the latest in a series of nationwide terror attacks over
the past three years that have dented India's image as an industrious
nation galloping toward prosperity. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
blamed "external forces."
"The well-planned and well-orchestrated attacks, probably with external
linkages, were intended to create a sense of panic, by choosing high
profile targets and indiscriminately killing foreigners," he said in
address to the nation.
Among the dead were at least one Australian, a Japanese and a British
national, said Pradeep Indulkar, a senior government official of
Maharashtra state, whose capital is Mumbai. An Italian and a German
were also killed, according to their foreign ministries. Police
said
104 people were killed and 314 injured. Officials said eight militants
were also killed.
The most high-profile target was the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel,
a landmark of Mumbai luxury since 1903, and a favorite watering hole of
the city's elite.
Police loudspeakers declared a curfew around the Taj Mahal hotel
Thursday afternoon, and black-clad commandos ran into the building as
fresh gunshots rang out from the area. Soldiers outside the hotel
said
the operation would take a long time as forces were moving slowly, from
room to room, looking for gunmen and traps. In the afternoon,
bodies
and hostages slowly emerged from the building. At least three bodies,
covered in white cloth, were wheeled out.
Throughout the day, explosions and gunfire were heard and toward dusk
flames again blossomed from a window of the Taj.
About a dozen people, including foreigners, were also evacuated from
the hotel and whisked into a waiting ambulance. Several of them carried
small pieces of luggage. One older man was carried into the ambulance
by police. The attackers, dressed in black shirts and jeans, had
stormed into the hotel at about 9:45 p.m. and opened fire
indiscriminately.
"I was in the main lobby and there was all of a sudden a lot of firing
outside," said Sajjad Karim, part of a delegation of European lawmakers
visiting Mumbai before a European Union-India summit.
Suddenly "another gunmen appeared in front of us, carrying machine
gun-type weapons. And he just started firing at us ... I just turned
and ran in the opposite direction," he told The Associated Press over
his mobile phone.
The shooting was followed by a series of explosions that set fire to
parts of the century-old edifice on Mumbai's waterfront. Screams were
heard and black smoke and flames billowed, continuing to burn until
dawn. Dalbir Bains, who runs a lingerie shop in Mumbai, was about
to
eat her steak by the pool at the hotel when she heard the sound of
gunfire. She said she ran upstairs, taking refuge in the Sea Lounge
restaurant, with about 50 other people.
They huddled beneath tables in the dark, trying to remain as quiet as
possible while explosions were going off.
"We were trying not to draw attention to ourselves," she said. The
group managed to escape before dawn.
The gunmen also seized the Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-orthodox
Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch. Around 10:30 a.m., a
woman, a
child and an Indian cook were seen being led out of the building by
police, said one witness. The child was identified as Moshe
Holtzberg,
2, the son of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, the main representative at
Chabad house. The child was unharmed, but his clothes were soaked in
blood.
Sandra Samuel,44, the cook who pulled the boy out the building, said
she saw Rabbi Holzberg, his wife Rivka and two other unidentified
guests lying on the floor, apparently "unconscious.
Among those foreigners still held captive in all three buildings were
Americans, British, Italians, Swedes, Canadians, Yemenis, New
Zealanders, Spaniards, Turks, a Singaporean and Israelis.
"We're going to catch them dead or alive," Maharashtra Home Minister R.
R. Patil told reporters. "An attack on Mumbai is an attack on the rest
of the country."
At least three top Indian police officers — including the chief of the
anti-terror squad — were among those killed, said Roy.
The attackers appeared to have been targeting Britons and Americans.
Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told
Sky News television that a gunman ushered 30 to 40 people from the
restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered
everyone to put up their hands.
"They were talking about British and Americans specifically. There was
an Italian guy, who, you know, they said: 'Where are you from?" and he
said he's from Italy and they said 'fine' and they left him alone. And
I thought: 'Fine, they're going to shoot me if they ask me anything —
and thank God they didn't," he said.
Chamberlain said he managed to slip away as the patrons were forced to
walk up stairs, but he thought much of the group was being held
hostage. The United States and Pakistan were among the countries
that
condemned the attacks. In Washington, White House press secretary
Dana
Perino said the U.S. "condemns this terrorist attack and we will
continue to stand with the people of India in this time of tragedy."
The motive for the onslaught was not immediately clear, but Mumbai has
frequently been targeted in terrorist attacks blamed on Islamic
extremists, including a series of bombings in July 2006 that killed 187
people.
Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist with the Swedish National
Defense College, said there are "very strong suspicions" that the
coordinated Mumbai attacks have a link to al-Qaida. He said the
fact
that Britons and Americans were singled out is one indicator, along
with the coordinated style of the attacks.
"There have been a lot of warnings about India lately and there are
very strong suspicions of a link to al-Qaida."
Later Thursday the Indian navy said its forces were boarding a cargo
vessel suspected of ties to the attacks. Navy spokesman Capt.
Manohar
Nambiar said Thursday that the ship, the MV Alpha, had recently come to
Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan.
The navy has "located the ship and now we are in the process of
boarding it and searching it," he said. Earlier, Indian media showed
pictures of black and yellow rubber dinghies found by the shore,
apparently used by the gunmen to reach the area.
Mumbai, on the western coast of India overlooking the Arabian Sea, is
home to splendid Victorian architecture built during the British Raj
and is one of the most populated cities in the world with some 18
million crammed into shantytowns, high rises and crumbling mansions.
An Indian media report said a previously unknown group calling itself
the Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attacks in e-mails
to several media outlets. There was no way to verify that claim.
Among
the other places attacked was the 19th century Chhatrapati Shivaji
railroad station — a beautiful example of Victorian Gothic architecture
— where gunmen sprayed bullets into the crowded terminal, leaving the
floor splattered with blood.
"They just fired randomly at people and then ran away. In seconds,
people fell to the ground," said Nasim Inam, a witness.
Other gunmen attacked Leopold's restaurant, a landmark popular with
foreigners, and the police headquarters in southern Mumbai, the area
where most of the attacks took place. Gunmen also attacked Cama and
Albless Hospital and G.T. Hospital, though it was not immediately clear
if anyone was killed.
India has been wracked by bomb attacks the past three years, which
police blame on Muslim militants intent on destabilizing this largely
Hindu country. Nearly 700 people have died.
Since May a militant group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen has
taken credit for a string of blasts that killed more than 130 people.
The most recent was in September, when explosions struck a park and
crowded shopping areas in the capital, New Delhi, killing 21 people and
wounding about 100.
Relations between Hindus, who make up more than 80 percent of India's 1
billion population, and Muslims, who make up about 14 percent, have
sporadically erupted into bouts of sectarian violence since
British-ruled India was split into independent India and Pakistan in
1947.
Islamic group claims
India blasts that killed 45
DAY
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, Associated Press Writer
Posted on Jul 27, 10:02 PM EDT
AHMADABAD, India (AP) -- An obscure Islamic militant group warning of
"the terror of Death" claimed responsibility for bombings that killed
at least 45 people and authorities stepped up security Sunday after
India's second series of blasts in two days.
The city's police commissioner, O.P. Mathur, said that 30 people had
been detained for questioning, but there was scant information about
the Indian Mujahideen, the little known group that took credit for the
bombings in western India.
"In the name of Allah the Indian Mujahideen strike again! Do whatever
you can, within 5 minutes from now, feel the terror of Death!" said an
e-mail from the group sent to several Indian television stations
minutes before the blasts began.
The e-mail's subject line said "Await 5 minutes for the revenge of
Gujarat," an apparent reference to 2002 riots in the western state
which left 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead. The historic city of
Ahmadabad was the scene of much of the 2002 violence.
Saturday's e-mail, sent from a Yahoo account and written in English,
was made available to AP by CNN-IBN, one of the TV stations that
received the warning.
State government spokesman Jaynarayan Vyas said 45 people were killed
and 161 wounded when at least 16 bombs went off Saturday evening in
several crowded neighborhoods.
The attack came a day after seven smaller blasts killed two people in
the southern technology hub of Bangalore.
Investigators in Surat, a city about 160 miles south of Ahmadabad,
found a car carrying detonators and a liquid that police suspect may be
ammonium nitrate, a chemical often used in explosive devices, city
police Chief R.M.S. Brar told reporters.
The e-mail was sent by a group calling itself Indian Mujahideen that
was unknown before May, when it said it was behind a series of bombings
in Jaipur, also in western India, that killed 61 people.
In its e-mail, the group did not mention the bombings in Bangalore and
it was not clear if the attacks were connected. But both Ahmadabad and
Bangalore are in states ruled by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party, as is Jaipur, raising suspicions that whoever was behind the
attacks may have wanted to make a political statement.
There were reports the e-mail may have been sent from a suburb of
Mumbai, India's financial capital. But the city's police chief, A.N.
Roy, said, "We are inquiring into that. We haven't traced it yet."
The Saturday bombs went off in two separate spates. The first, near a
busy market, left some of the dead sprawled beside stands piled high
with fruit, next to twisted bicycles. The second group of blasts went
off near a hospital.
The side of a bus was blown off and its windows shattered, while
another vehicle was engulfed in flames. Most of the blasts took place
in the narrow lanes of the older part of Ahmadabad, which is tightly
packed with homes and small businesses. Bomb-sniffing dogs scoured the
areas.
Distraught relatives of the victims crowded the city's hospitals. One
of the wounded was a 6-year-old boy whose father was killed in the
blasts. He lay in a hospital bed with his arms covered in bandages and
wounds on his face.
Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat state where Ahmadabad is
located, said the bombings appeared to have been masterminded by a
group or groups who "are using a similar modus operandi all over the
country."
India has been hit repeatedly by bombings in recent years. Nearly all
have been blamed on Islamic militants who allegedly want to provoke
violence between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority, although
officials rarely offer hard evidence implicating a specific group.
The perpetrators also rarely claim responsibility - a fact that raised
doubts about the Indian Mujahedeen when it took credit in May for
attacking Jaipur.
But fears that an attack could spark religious riots are real in India,
which has seen sporadic violence between Hindus and Muslims since
independence from Britain in 1947.
Those fears were amplified by the recent history of the 2002 religious
riots. The violence was triggered by a fire that killed 60 passengers
on a train packed with Hindu pilgrims. Hindu extremists blamed the
deaths on Muslims and rampaged through Muslim neighborhoods, although
the cause of the blaze remains unclear.
Ahmadabad is also known for the elegant architecture of its mosques and
mausoleums, a rich blend of Muslim and Hindu styles. It was founded in
the 15th century and served as a sultanate, fortified in 1487 with a
wall six miles in circumference.
Israel: 6 men arrested for al-Qaida
links, 1 wanted to shoot down President Bush's helicopter
Hartford Courant
By MATTI FRIEDMAN | Associated Press Writer
6:57 AM EDT, July 18, 2008
JERUSALEM (AP) _ Israeli investigators have arrested six men
suspected of trying to set up an al-Qaida-linked terror network,
including one who wanted to shoot down President Bush's helicopter, the
Shin Bet security service said Friday.
Two of the men are Arab citizens of Israel, both of them students at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, according to the statement. The other
four are Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem. The men range in age
from 21 to 24.
The new charges follow the arrest this month of two Israeli Arabs on
suspicion they gave strategic information to al-Qaida. Those arrests
marked the first time Israel had accused any of its citizens of
cooperating with the terror network.
Investigators found bomb-making instructions on the personal computers
of several of the six new suspects, the Shin Bet said. But the
statement gave no indication that their activities ever moved beyond
the planning stage.
None face charges of active involvement in any attacks.
One of the Israeli Arabs, a 24-year-old chemistry student, lived in a
Jerusalem college dormitory overlooking a helicopter landing pad used
by Bush during a visit in January, the statement said.
Using his cell phone, the student filmed helicopters taking off and
landing, and sent a message to a Web forum linked to al-Qaida asking
about shooting Bush's helicopter down, according to the Shin Bet.
The men were arrested in June and July, the statement said. But the
information was only approved for publication on Friday, the day the
men were to be indicted in a Jerusalem court.
The two men arrested earlier this month, Bedouin Arabs from southern
Israel, gave al-Qaida operatives information about strategic sites like
army bases, skyscrapers and Israel's international airport that could
serve as targets, Shin Bet said.
It is a
fact that historically, French law is different--you are never "presumed
innocent"
France’s Terrorism Strategy Faulted
NYTIMES
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: July 3, 2008
PARIS — France’s much-praised
system of using sweeping arrests and aggressive interrogations and
prosecutions to combat terrorism violates the rule of law and prevents
suspects from receiving a fair trial, according to a human rights
report released Wednesday.
France prides itself on having the
most efficient counterterrorism strategy in Europe. French
counterterrorism officials insist that the flexibility of French law
and the French judicial system has been crucial in their ability to
respond to the threat of international terrorism and has helped prevent
attacks on French soil.
But an 84-page report issued by
New-York-based Human Rights Watch, entitled “Preempting Justice,”
argues that that French practices result in too many arrests and
convictions based on scanty evidence, putting the country “on the wrong
side of the law.”
Specifically, the reports states
that the broad and much-used charge of “criminal association in
relation to a terrorist undertaking” is so sweeping that it is in
essence “guilt by association” that allows authorities to arrest and
interrogate large numbers of people even when they have nothing to do
with suspected terrorist activity.
The charge is used in a number of other countries in continental
Europe. Spain, for example, uses the charge much more aggressively than
France, particularly against the Basque separatist group ETA.
“No specific terrorist act need be planned, much less executed, to give
rise to the offense,” the report says, adding that even family members,
friends, neighbors and casual acquaintances can be detained.
The Justice Ministry defended the country’s counterterrorism strategy,
but said there would be no official comment on the report itself.
“Our judicial anti-terrorist system is exemplary, accepted as a model
around the world, notably because it lets justice intervene while
respecting the rights of the individual,” said Guillaume Didier,
spokesman for the Justice Ministry, in a telephone interview. “We can
catch terrorists before they act.”
The report also faults the French judicial system for giving suspects
only minimal access to legal counsel, particularly in the early stages
of an investigation. Suspects are allowed to see a lawyer for the first
time only after three days in custody, and then only for 30 minutes.
The lawyer does not have access to the case file.
Suspects can be held up to six days without being placed under formal
investigation or sent before a judge. They may be subjected to what the
report calls “oppressive questioning, at any time of the day or night,
without a lawyer present.” Unlike the United States, for example, the
report notes that “police are under no obligation to inform suspects of
their right to remain silent.”
The use of information gathered from foreign intelligence services that
use torture to extract confessions only worsens the problem, the report
says. Indeed, French investigative judges have the ability to verify
material for prosecutions in those countries.
“Some defendants in France who credibly allege they were tortured in
third countries have successfully had the confessions excluded as
evidence,” the report said.
The report cites testimony from people held in police custody on
suspicion of terrorist activity suggesting the routine use of “sleep
deprivation; disorientation; constant, repetitive questioning; and
psychological pressure.” It adds that there are “credible allegations”
of physical abuse of terrorism suspects in police custody.
The report also says that suspects can face long periods of detention —
sometime years — before trial,
French authorities have been highly critical of the United States for
holding detainees at Guantánamo indefinitely, without according
them the rights guaranteed by American law, and failing to bring them
to trial.
In unveiling a strategic plan last month for a major overhaul of the
French military, President Nicolas Sarkozy, identified terrorism as the
main threat facing the country, adding that France’s armed forces
needed to adapt to confront that reality. He credited France’s
prevention strategy as responsible for preventing attacks on French
soil in recent years.
“Thanks to the effectiveness of our security forces, France has not
been attacked in recent years,” he said. “But the threat is there, it
is real and we know that it could tomorrow take on a new form, even
more serious, by nuclear, chemical and biological means.
In the 1980s, France was targeted by a series of attacks on trains,
subways and department stores. Then in 1995, a blast by Algerian
Islamic radicals in the Saint-Michel train station in the heart of the
Left Bank killed eight people and injured 150.
Asked by a French newspaper last October why France, unlike Spain and
Britain, had been spared terrorist attacks in recent years, Bernard
Squarcini, the chief of France’s domestic and police intelligence
service, credited investigative, intelligence and judicial methods
implemented after the attacks in the mid-1990s.
These methods “make it possible to neutralize, before they go into
action, any group or individual liable to perpetrate an attack in
France,” he said. “So we adopt the principle of precaution and
preventive action.”
What
kind of culture does this? They
don't understand the diference between "finger prints" and "fingers?"
Severed Fingers Reportedly Sent to US
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 13, 2008
Filed at 3:14 p.m. ET
Severed fingers of five Western contractors were sent to the U.S.
military in Iraq, giving the men's relatives hope that they are still
alive, a brother of one of the missing men said.
The men were abducted in two separate incidents that occurred a month
and a half apart more than two years ago, a U.S. government official
said Thursday in Washington. The Austrian weekly magazine News
first reported the delivery of the five fingers in Wednesday's edition,
citing unidentified authorities working on the case.
Patrick Reuben, a Minneapolis police officer whose twin brother, Paul
Reuben, is among the missing, said late Wednesday the FBI told his
family members that ''the fingers were confirmed to be those of the
hostages.''
Patrick Reuben said the news of the severed fingers was ''shocking,''
but that the initial word the family got was ''much more serious than
that. Later on we found that it was fingers that were recovered and
that the DNA confirmed it was the hostages.''
Four of the men were guards for a convoy ambushed near the Kuwaiti
border on Nov. 16, 2006. The fifth, Ronald J. Withrow, 40, of Lubbock,
Texas, was a contractor working for JPI Worldwide and abducted on Jan.
5, 2007 near Basra.
In addition to Reuben, those abducted in the earlier incident were
Jonathon Cote, 25, of Getzville, N.Y.; Joshua Munns, 25, of Redding,
Calif.; and Bert Nussbaumer, 26, of Vienna, Austria, said the U.S.
government official in Washington. The official spoke only on condition
of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about
the matter. A fifth hostage taken in the Nov. 16, 2006, ambush
was John Young, 45, of Lee's Summit, Mo. None of his fingers was sent
to the U.S. military. In a statement, the FBI declined to confirm
the men had been identified by fingers.
''The FBI has received DNA evidence and is conducting an examination,''
spokesman Richard Kolko said. ''We understand this is a very difficult
time for the families and discussing this matter further in the media
is not appropriate.''
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack on Thursday declined to
comment on the matter except to say: ''We continue to demand these
hostages' immediate release so that they can be returned safely to
their families.''
The four men kidnapped in the Nov. 16, 2006, incident were working for
Crescent Security Group, a Kuwait-based private security company. Men
in Iraqi police uniforms ambushed a convoy near the southern city of
Safwan.
Patrick Reuben said his family is ''certainly hopeful, but there's
nothing definite right now.''
The father of Cote said he and other families were visited by the FBI
two to three weeks ago, when they were told DNA samples had been
identified as those of the hostages. The agents would not say how they
had gotten the samples.
When Francis Cote read a news report about the fingers, he contacted
the State Department but was given no confirmation or denial.
''They told us the FBI would visit us,'' Cote said.
Cote received calls Wednesday from Paul Reuben's wife, who was in
tears, and Munns' mother. The hostages' families frequently contact
each other to share news and compare notes, he said. Cote assured the
women that the hostages were still alive.
''It's possible they did sever (the fingers) to show proof of life,''
Cote said. ''I'm sure somebody from our government was asking for proof
of life and I guess proof of life was severing a finger versus
delivering a video.''
Munns' mother said the FBI asked her for a DNA sample about a month
ago, saying they had some evidence to test it against.
''A couple weeks later they called me back and said yes, we did have a
match,'' said Jackie Stewart of Ridgefield, Wash.
The FBI did not tell her at the time where her son's DNA came from, she
said. Cote said he was frustrated by the government's reticence.
''We have no news, we have activity,'' has been the extent of
officials' comments on the hostages for months, Cote said. ''It's very
vague.''
Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Rudolf Gollia said the report that
the severed fingers had been sent to U.S. authorities was being treated
as a rumor. He said U.S. officials in Baghdad forwarded
information to the Austrian Embassy in Amman, Jordan, that the
Americans described only as ''based on fingerprints and DNA profiles.''
He said Austrian officials were trying to get more information from
U.S. officials and other sources in the Middle East.
|
|
| Benazir
Bhutto followed her father into politics, and both of them died because
of it - he was executed in 1979, she fell victim to an apparent suicide
bomb attack.
Ms Bhutto had a volatile political
career
|
Her two brothers also suffered violent deaths.
Like the Nehru-Gandhi family in India, the
Bhuttos of Pakistan are one of the world's most famous political
dynasties. Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was prime minister of
Pakistan in the early 1970s.
His government was one of the few in the 30
years following independence that was not run by the army.
Born in 1953 in the province of Sindh and
educated at Harvard and Oxford, Ms Bhutto gained credibility from her
father's high profile, even though she was a reluctant convert to
politics.
She was twice prime minister of Pakistan, from
1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996.
Stubbornness
On both occasions she was dismissed from office
by the president for alleged corruption.
The dismissals typified her volatile political
career, which was characterised by numerous peaks and troughs. At the
height of her popularity - shortly after her first election - she was
one of the most high-profile women leaders in the world.
Young and glamorous, she successfully portrayed
herself as a refreshing contrast to the overwhelmingly male-dominated
political establishment.
But after her second fall from power, her name
came to be seen by some as synonymous with corruption and bad
governance.
Asif Zardari has faced numerous
corruption charges
|
The determination and stubbornness for which Ms
Bhutto was renowned was first seen after her father was imprisoned and
charged with murder by Gen Zia ul-Haq in 1977, following a military
coup. Two years later he was executed.
Ms Bhutto was imprisoned just before her
father's death and spent most of her five-year jail term in solitary
confinement. She described the conditions as extremely hard.
During stints out of prison for medical
treatment, Ms Bhutto set up a Pakistan People's Party office in London,
and began a campaign against General Zia.
She returned to Pakistan in 1986, attracting
huge crowds to political rallies.
After Gen Zia died in an explosion on board his
aircraft in 1988, she became one of the first democratically elected
female prime ministers in an Islamic country.
Corruption charges
During both her stints in power, the role of Ms
Bhutto's husband, Asif Zardari, proved highly controversial.
He played a prominent role in both her
administrations, and has been accused by various Pakistani governments
of stealing millions of dollars from state coffers - charges he denies,
as did Ms Bhutto herself.
Many commentators argued that the downfall of
Ms Bhutto's government was accelerated by the alleged greed of her
husband.
None of about 18 corruption and criminal cases
against Mr Zardari has been proved in court after 10 years. But he
served at least eight years in jail.
He was freed on bail in 2004, amid accusations
that the charges against him were weak and going nowhere.
Ms Bhutto also steadfastly denied all the
corruption charges against her, which she said were politically
motivated.
She faced corruption charges in at least five
cases, all without a conviction, until amnestied in October 2007.
President Pervez Musharraf held
secret talks with Ms Bhutto
|
She was convicted in 1999 for failing to appear
in court, but the Supreme Court later overturned that judgement.
Soon after the conviction, audiotapes of
conversations between the judge and some top aides of then Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif were discovered that showed that the judge had
been under pressure to convict.
Ms Bhutto left Pakistan in 1999 to live abroad,
but questions about her and her husband's wealth continued to dog her.
She appealed against a conviction in the Swiss
courts for money-laundering.
During her years outside Pakistan, Ms Bhutto
lived with her three children in Dubai, where she was joined by her
husband after he was freed in 2004.
She was a regular visitor to Western capitals,
delivering lectures at universities and think-tanks and meeting
government officials.
Army mistrust
Ms Bhutto returned to Pakistan on 18 October
2007 after President Musharraf signed into law an ordinance granting
her and others an amnesty from corruption charges.
Observers said the military regime saw her as a
natural ally in its efforts to isolate religious forces and their
surrogate militants.
She declined a government offer to let her
party head the national government after the 2002 elections, in which
the party received the largest number of votes.
In the months before her death, she had emerged
again as a strong contender for power.
Some in Pakistan believe her secret talks with
the military regime amounted to betrayal of democratic forces as these
talks shored up President Musharraf's grip on the country.
Others said such talks indicated that the
military might at long last be getting over its decades-old mistrust of
Ms Bhutto and her party, and interpreted it as a good omen for
democracy.
Western powers saw in her a popular leader with
liberal leanings who could bring much needed legitimacy to Mr
Musharraf's role in the "war against terror".
Unhappy family
Benazir Bhutto was the last remaining bearer of
her late father's political legacy.
Her brother, Murtaza - who was once expected to
play the role of party leader - fled to the then-communist Afghanistan
after his father's fall.
From there, and various Middle Eastern
capitals, he mounted a campaign against Pakistan's military government
with a militant group called al-Zulfikar.
He won elections from exile in 1993 and became
a provincial legislator, returning home soon afterwards, only to be
shot dead under mysterious circumstances in 1996.
Benazir's other brother, Shahnawaz - also
politically active but in less violent ways than Murtaza - was found
dead in his French Riviera apartment in 1985.
|
Bhutto Assassinated in Attack on Rally
NYTIMES
By SALMAN MASOOD and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: December 28, 2007
RAWALPINDI, Islamabad — An attack on a political rally killed the
Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto near the capital, Islamabad,
Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto was fired upon before the blast,
and an official from her party said Ms. Bhutto was further injured by
the explosion, which was apparently caused by a suicide attacker.
At least a dozen more people were killed. “At 6:16 p.m. she expired,”
said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Ms. Bhutto’s party who was at
Rawalpindi General Hospital where she was taken after the attack,
according to The Associated Press.
Hundreds of supporters had gathered at the rally, which was being held
at Liaqut Bagh, a park that is a common venue for political rallies and
speeches, in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital.
Amid the confusion after the explosion, the site was littered with
pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the
asphalt, and shards of glass were strewn about the ground.
Farah Ispahani, a party official from Ms. Bhutto’s party, said: “It is
too soon to confirm the number of dead from the party’s side. Private
television channels are reporting 20 dead.” Television channels were
also quoting police sources as saying that at least 14 people were dead.
The attack immediately raised questions about whether parliamentary
elections scheduled for January will go ahead or be postponed.
Ms. Bhutto was the target of a suicide attack in October in Karachi
when she returned from exile to Pakistan. That attack, caused by two
bombs exploding just seconds apart, narrowly missed Ms. Bhutto but
killed scores of people, including many of her party workers.
The attack is the latest blow to Pakistan’s treacherous political
situation. state of emergency
Ms. Bhutto, 54, returned to Pakistan to present herself as the answer
to the nation’s troubles: a tribune of democracy in a state that has
been under military rule for eight years, and the leader of the
country’s largest opposition political party, founded by her father,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and
democratically inclined prime ministers.
But her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly
performed since her return -- one moment standing up to General
Musharraf, then next seeming to accommodate him, and never quite
revealing her actual intentions -- has stirred as much distrust as hope
among Pakistanis.
A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she brought the backing of Washington
and London, where she impresses with her political lineage, her
considerable charm and her persona as a female Muslim leader.
But with these accomplishments, Ms. Bhutto also brought controversy,
and a legacy among Pakistanis as a polarizing figure who during her two
turbulent tenures as prime minister, first from 1988 to 1990 and again
from 1993 to 1996, often acted imperiously and impulsively.
She faced deep questions about her personal probity in public office,
which led to corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and
Britain, as well as in Pakistan.
Ms. Bhutto saw herself as the inheritor of her father’s mantle, often
spoke of how he encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female
leaders ranging from Indira Gandhi to Joan of Arc.
Following the idea of big ambition, Ms. Bhutto called herself
chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a
seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and
one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat
Bhutto, in the early 1990s.
Saturday night at the diplomatic reception, Ms. Bhutto showed how she
could aggrandize. Three million people came out to greet her in Karachi
on her return last month, she said, calling it Pakistan’s ”most
historic” rally. In fact, crowd estimates were closer to 200,000, many
of them provincial party members who had received small amounts of
money to make the trip.
Such flourishes led questioning in Pakistan about the strength of her
democratic ideals in practice, and a certain distrust, particularly
amid signs of back-room deal-making with General Musharraf, the
military ruler she opposed.
“She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of Bhutto
and everything else is secondary,” said Feisal Naqvi, a corporate
lawyer in Lahore who knew Ms. Bhutto...
AGAINST
TERROR
Bhutto says she might allow U.S. strike on bin Laden
Reuters
1 Oct. 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
said on Monday that she might allow a U.S. military strike inside
Pakistan to eliminate al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden if she were the
country's leader.
"I would hope that I would be able to take Osama bin Laden myself
without depending on the Americans. But if I couldn't do it, of course
we are fighting this war together and (I) would seek their cooperation
in eliminating him," Bhutto said in an interview on BBC World News
America.
Bhutto, who has vowed to return to Pakistan on October 18 after eight
years of exile, was speaking less than a week before an October 6
election that President Pervez Musharraf is expected to win despite his
slumping popularity.
She has been in talks with Musharraf about a post-election
power-sharing deal that would shore up his position, which has become
more precarious amid violent clashes with Islamist militants.
U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden and other al Qaeda
leaders are being protected by tribal leaders in an area of
northwestern Pakistan near the Afghanistan border that is largely
inaccessible even to Pakistani forces.
Bush administration officials fear that unilateral U.S. action against
the al Qaeda safe haven could destabilize Pakistan and jeopardize the
government of Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in Washington's struggle
against militants.
Asked by the BBC whether she would agree to let the Americans take
action against bin Laden in Pakistan, Bhutto said her decision would
depend on the strength of the evidence.
"I think one really needs to see the information. So I would really,
really need to see the evidence," she said, according to a transcript
of the BBC interview.
"But if there was evidence, my first reference would be to go in myself
and if ... there was a difficulty on that I'd like to cooperate with
the Americans."
Bhutto has remained in exile rather than face corruption charges at
home. On Monday, one of her lawyers filed an application for bail in
case authorities arrest her when she returns.
ACROSS THE POND...
On July 1, a day after a Jeep Cherokee rammed into a
terminal at the Glasgow airport, investigators marked evidence at the
scene. Underground attack "7/7"
came prior to more recent
plot.
Remember
this?
Doctor Convicted in British Bombing Case
NYTIMES
By JOHN F. BURNS
December 16, 2008
LONDON — A terrorism trial centering on the use of a
bomb-laden Jeep to crash into Glasgow’s main airport terminal on a
Saturday in June 2007 ended on Tuesday with the conviction of a
29-year-old British doctor with family roots in Iraq who was one of the
two men who mounted the attack.
A jury found the man, Bilal Abdulla, a passenger in the Jeep Cherokee,
guilty of two charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to
cause explosions in a series of three bungled car bombings in Glasgow
and London over a 24-hour period that caused widespread alarm in
Britain. The judge in the case will sentence Dr. Abdulla on Wednesday.
Both charges carry potential life sentences.
The driver of the jeep, Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian-born engineer who made
the bombs, died of burns received in the Glasgow airport attack, which
failed when the flaming gasoline did not ignite gas canisters in the
jeep’s trunk. Two Mercedes-Benz sedans, also laden with gas canisters
designed to be ignited by blazing gasoline, failed to detonate in
London’s West End theater district the previous night.
A third man, Mohammed Asha, 28, an Indian-born doctor who, like Mr.
Abdulla, was employed in Britain’s National Health Service, was
acquitted of all charges. Dr. Asha had been accused of providing cash
and advice to Dr. Abdulla, but his defense counsel said that he had
been duped into cooperating with the two bombers and that it was Dr.
Abdulla who loaded incriminating documents indicating terrorist
sympathies onto Dr. Asha’s laptop computer.
The trial, at Woolwich Crown Court in London, was one of a series of
sensational terrorism trials in the past two years that have combined
to foster widespread public anxiety in Britain about the risk of a
major terrorist attack succeeding.
Only one such attack, the quadruple suicide bombings on London’s
transit system in July 2005, succeeded, killing 56 people, including
the four bombers. But Britain’s intelligence agencies have repeatedly
warned that the country remains at high risk of new attacks.
Dr. Abdulla contended in his trial that he and Mr. Ahmed, the driver of
the jeep that crashed into the air terminal in Glasgow, had intended
only to “scare” people and to draw attention to what Dr. Abdulla
described as the outrages committed by the foreign troops in Iraq.
But prosecutors said the intention of the Glasgow and London attacks
had been to kill hundreds of people and to cause chaos across Britain.
Experts at the trial testified that the “fuel air” bombs, though
amateurishly constructed, had the capacity to cause widespread death.
A notable feature of the trial was that it did not directly involve
Islamic militants with a history of family ties or training in
Pakistan, in the pattern of many of recent terrorist trials in Britain.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said during a weekend visit to the Indian
subcontinent that three-quarters of all terrorist plots investigated by
Britain’s intelligence and security agencies involved links to
Pakistan, the ancestral homeland of about two-thirds of Britain’s
Muslim population, which has been estimated at between 1.5 million and
2.5 million people.
The 2005 London transit bombings, as well as an alleged plot in 2006 to
bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners in midair with liquid
bombs disguised in soft-drink bottles, involved extensive ties to
Pakistan. The airliner bombing trial ended in September with a jury,
also sitting at the Woolwich court, convicting three men of conspiring
to commit mass murder through suicide bomb explosions, but failing to
reach verdicts on charges that the men conspired to attack aircraft.
A new trial on those charges will begin early in 2009.
In the case of the Glasgow and London attacks, the plot had its origins
in Iraq. Dr. Abdulla, the man convicted on Tuesday, was born in Britain
as the son of an Iraqi physician who migrated from Baghdad.
The prosecution said he masterminded the attacks as a revenge for the
role of British and American troops in the invasion and occupation,
including the bombing onslaught on Baghdad in March 2003 that began the
war, witnessed by Dr. Abdulla on a visit to his family in the Iraqi
capital.
The prosecution said Dr. Abdulla was also influenced by links to the
Sunni insurgency in Iraq that began shortly after the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein. In a tape-recording played to the court, Dr. Abdulla
was heard condemning coalition troops for what he described as their
indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians. “The soldiers killed the
young and the old,” he said. “They do not discriminate between men and
women, so why should we?”
Disclosures during the trial showed prescience by Britain’s
intelligence services about the risk of the Iraq occupation leading to
terrorist attacks in Britain. In 2004, a warning that Iraqi militants
“will come to the U.K.” to launch terror attacks was given in 2004 by
the Joint Intelligence Committee, a powerful coordinating body.
The committee
was heavily criticized for its role in preparing the so-called dodgy dossier in 2002 that asserted that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a empowering finding for
former prime minister Tony Blair as he prepared to join President Bush
in the Iraq invasion.
At the trial, prosecutors noted that all three men implicated in the
London and Glasgow bombings were middle class, with professional
educations, and not from the poorer backgrounds common among many of
the Islamic militants who have engaged in terrorist plots in
Britain. Jonathan Laidlaw, the chief prosecutor, told the jury
that it might find it hard to believe that doctors dedicated to
preventing suffering could become terrorists.
“Frankly, who would have believed that doctors would involve themselves
in this sort of murderous activity on the streets of this country”, he
said.
Dr. Abdulla, a Baghdad medical school graduate, was a junior doctor at
a state-run hospital in Paisley, a Glasgow suburb only a few miles from
the airport at the time of the attack. Mr. Ahmed, who died in the
Glasgow attack of 90 percent burns to his body, was the son of two
Indian doctors who migrated to Saudi Arabia, and was studying for a
doctorate in computational fluid dynamics at Anglia Ruskin University
in Cambridge at the time of the attacks.
Dr. Asha, found not guilty on Tuesday, was a neurologist at a state-run
hospital in Newcastle-under-Lyme in the British midlands.
“This case demonstrates, does it not,” Mr. Laidlaw told the jury, “that
nothing can be taken for granted when you are dealing with extremists
of this sort?”
British
Inquiry of Failed Plots Points
to Iraq’s Qaeda Group
NYTIMES
By RAYMOND BONNER, JANE PERLEZ and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: December 14, 2007
LONDON — Investigators examining the bungled terrorist attacks in
London and Glasgow six months ago believe the plotters had a link to Al
Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which would make the attacks the first that the
group has been involved in outside of the Middle East, according to
senior officials from three countries who have been briefed on the
inquiry.
The evidence pointing to the involvement of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia
includes phone numbers of members of the Iraqi group found on the
plotters’ cellphones recovered in Britain, a senior American
intelligence official said.
British authorities have said that the plotters, Bilal Abdulla, a
British-born doctor of Iraqi descent, and Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian
aeronautical engineer, parked two vehicles laden with gas canisters and
explosives near a popular nightclub in central London at the end of
June. The cars, apparently positioned to strike people leaving the
nightclub, failed to ignite.
The next day, the two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas
canisters into the Glasgow airport. It erupted in flames, and the
driver, Mr. Ahmed, was severely burned and died several weeks later.
British intelligence agencies have feared a blowback from Britain’s
involvement in the Iraq war, and after the events in London and Glasgow
officials and terrorism experts speculated that Iraq-based groups could
have been involved. More recently, as the investigation progressed,
British intelligence officials told foreign diplomats that they
believed the attacks were the first sign of such a reaction, said a
senior diplomat of a country allied with Britain.
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is a homegrown Sunni extremist group that
American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.
The American intelligence official noted several similarities between
the events in Britain and attacks in Iraq attributed to Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia, including the use of vehicle-borne explosives aimed at
multiple targets. The officials agreed to talk about the attack only on
the condition of anonymity because they were discussing secret
intelligence information.
While officials stopped short of saying that the plot originated with
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or was directed by the group, they did say it
was the closest collaboration they knew of between the Iraq group and
plotters outside the Middle East. The American official who noted the
evidence found on the recovered cellphones was unable to provide
details about how often the accused plotters called Iraq or how soon
before the bungled attacks calls were made.
Two other American counterterrorism officials generally concurred with
this assessment of the link to the Iraqi group, but one of them
cautioned against overstating the role of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also
known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or A.Q.I., saying, “The event is best viewed
as A.Q.I.-related, rather than A.Q.I.-directed.”
However, none of the officials would divulge the exact nature of the
group’s involvement in the operation.
Recent
terrorist attacks in Britain, including the July 2005 bombing of
London’s transit system that killed 52 commuters, and several foiled
plots appeared to have some connection to Pakistan. They have been
conducted mostly by Britons of Pakistani origin, and some of the
suspects trained in Pakistan.
Yet before the failed attacks in London and Glasgow, the British
intelligence services suggested in a quarterly review on the terrorist
threat that an attack against Britain was possible from Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia.
“While networks linked to A.Q. (Al Qaeda) Core pose the greatest threat
to the U.K., the intelligence during this quarter has highlighted the
potential threat from other areas, particularly A.Q.-I (Al Qaeda in
Iraq),” said the report by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center based at
the headquarters of MI5, the domestic intelligence service. Parts of
the report were published in The Sunday Times in April. According to
the newspaper’s account of the intelligence report, British
intelligence officers wrote that “we are aware that A.Q.-I networks are
active in the U.K.”
According to officials who have been briefed on the inquiry,
investigators suspect that Dr. Abdulla, the British-born doctor reared
in Baghdad, was the connection to the Iraq-based network, although it
is not clear what they see as the nature of the link.
Dr. Abdulla was working at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in
Paisley, Scotland, after qualifying for a limited registration in the
diabetes department at the time of the attacks. After his arrest,
colleagues told Scottish newspapers that Dr. Abdulla was hard to
motivate to do medical rounds because he seemed preoccupied by
following Islamic affairs on his computer.
Dr. Abdulla has been charged with conspiracy to use explosives, and the
trial is expected to begin next year. Six people were initially
detained in Britain in connection with the attack. Three have been
released; two others in addition to Dr. Abdulla have been charged.
Martin Rackstraw, a lawyer for Dr. Abdulla, said he was unable to
comment on the case under British law.
The son of a prominent doctor, Dr. Abdulla returned to Britain in 2004
with his new Iraqi medical degree, said Shiraz Maher, a British Muslim
who knew him when they both lived in Cambridge. Before joining the
hospital, Dr. Abdulla worked part time at a Staples store in Cambridge,
while studying for the exams he needed to pass to practice medicine
here, Mr. Maher said in an interview.
Mr. Maher, who at the time was a member of the radical Islamic group
Hizb ut-Tahrir, said he remembered Dr. Abdulla from that period as
being obsessed by the war in Iraq, and as someone who practiced an
intense and “austere” form of Wahhabism, a conservative strain of
Islam. He was outraged, Mr. Maher said, by the American attack on
Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. Dr. Abdulla was not a member of Hizb
ut-Tahrir, Mr. Maher said.
He was with Dr. Abdulla on almost a daily basis for prayers, he said.
Mr. Maher, who left Hizb ut-Tahrir in mid-2005, said he did not see Dr.
Abdulla again after that.
Mr. Maher described Dr. Abdulla as “defiant” and said that Mr. Ahmed,
the man who died of burns suffered in the Glasgow attack, was more
passive. “They had a close relationship,” Mr. Maher said.
Whatever the extent of assistance or inspiration the plotters may have
gotten from Iraq, counterterrorism officials and experts said they were
struck by the amateurish nature of the attacks. The cars parked at the
London nightclub were packed with propane gas tanks, but they failed to
explode because the plotters did not leave the windows open enough to
allow air in to ignite the fuel in the gas tanks, said two terrorism
experts with knowledge of the case.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and professor of international
relations at Georgetown University, said the plotters appeared to be
relatively efficient at organizational planning but had failed to pay
enough attention to making the bombs. “Technical expertise is different
from operational sophistication,” Mr. Hoffman said.
Three
Doctors Among Terror Suspects;
Eight now in custody in attacks in Britain
DAY
By David Stringer , Associated Press Writer (a "stringer"
perhaps [not on staff] ?)
Published on 7/3/2007
London — At least three physicians were identified Monday among
suspects arrested in Britain's failed car bomb attacks, and authorities
announced three new arrests — including a doctor in Australia — as the
investigation spread overseas.
British media reports said an Indian doctor also was among the eight
people in custody and another outlet said at least five of the
detainees in Britain were physicians. British police confirmed a
Palestinian doctor and Iraqi physician were among those held, while
Australian officials said a foreign doctor working there had been
detained in the case.
Officers used heightened stop-and-search powers and armed response
vehicles to hunt for anyone else who might have been involved in the
plot, and police put on a show of force to bolster security at airports
and train stations and on city streets.
Hours after police announced the arrests of two more people in the
Glasgow area, officials said an eighth suspect was detained “abroad by
local authorities” Monday.
Australian authorities later said he was arrested at the airport in
Brisbane while trying to leave the country. Queensland state Premier
Peter Beattie described the suspect as a 27-year-old man but withheld
his identity. Australian Attorney General Philip Ruddock said the
suspect was a doctor at a hospital in Queensland state but was not a
citizen.
A British security official said earlier in the day that Pakistan and
several other nations were asked to check possible links with the
suspects. British-born terrorists behind the bloody 2005 London transit
bombings and others in thwarted plots here were linked to terror
training camps and foreign radicals in Pakistan.
“We have asked partners overseas to check possible links and that work
has begun,” the security official said, adding that it was still
possible some British-born people were involved in the plot. The
official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of
the case.
Authorities said police searched at least 19 locations as part of the
“fast-moving investigation,” which has come at a time of already high
vigilance before the anniversary of the suicide bombings in London that
killed 52 people on July 7, 2005.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has said the group behind the weekend
attacks was “associated with al-Qaida,” got a call from President Bush
commending him for Britain's response.
“President Bush concluded by reiterating that the United States is
prepared to offer any assistance desired, and noted the importance of
continued cooperation,” said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White
House's National Security Council.
Two U.S. counterterrorism officials, who agreed to discuss the case
only if not quoted by name, said the attackers in Britain were Islamic
extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida, but investigators were still trying
to figure out whether there were any direct links.
One of the officials also said there continued to be concerns about
possible plots to attack the United States, including the potential for
a large-scale assault by al-Qaida. Among the factors contributing to
the worry are al-Qaida's efforts to recruit in Pakistan's tribal areas
and its increased flow of public messages, the official said.
In the latest attacks, two car bombs failed to explode in central
London on Friday and two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas
cylinders into the entrance of Glasgow International Airport and then
set it on fire Saturday.
The British government security official said investigators were
working on one theory that the same people may have driven the
explosives-laden cars into London and the blazing SUV in Glasgow.
The unidentified driver of the Jeep was being treated for serious burns
at Royal Alexandra Hospital in Glasgow, where he was under arrest by
armed police. Bomb experts carried out a second controlled explosion on
a car at the hospital Monday, after a similar blast Sunday. Police said
the car was linked to the investigation, but no explosives had been
found.
Police announced Monday that they arrested two men the previous day at
residences at the hospital, but would not say whether they were
doctors. Britain's Sky Television described them as trainee physicians,
without citing a source for its report.
Four men and a woman were detained earlier.
Authorities identified Bilal Abdulla, an Iraqi doctor who worked at the
Glasgow hospital, was the other man arrested at the airport and said he
was being held at a high-security police station in Glasgow.
According to the British General Medical Council's register, a man
named Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla was registered in 2004 and
trained in Baghdad. Staff at the Glasgow hospital said Abdulla was a
diabetes specialist.
A man arrested late Saturday on a highway in central England was also a
physician, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, police said. A Jordanian
official said Asha was of Palestinian descent and carried a Jordanian
passport.
Britain's The Independent and The Muslim News newspapers reported that
a man arrested in Liverpool late Saturday was a 26-year-old doctor from
Bangalore, India, who worked at Halton Hospital in Cheshire, northern
England. Police would not immediately comment on the reports.
The Muslim News also said the Indian doctor had used the car, cell
phone and Internet account of a fellow physician who had moved from
England to Australia around a year ago. It said police had asked
friends of the Indian for details about the man who went to Australia.
“This case could be the final proof that an idea those involved in
these type of attacks are all young, angry and poorly educated is a
mistake,” said Paul Cornish, a former British army officer and director
of defense studies at London's Chatham House think tank.
“It's wrong to suggest al-Qaida are ignorant hill men. They are often
middle or upper class and well educated,” Cornish said.
Former U.S intelligence officer Bob Ayers, now a security analyst based
in London, said wealth or intelligence matters little to people
committed to extremism.
“We shouldn't be surprised that educated men are as involved as poor
youngsters,” he said. “They all subscribe to the same radical ideology,
that's the only criteria they need to fill.”
Salil Vengalil, a doctor at North Staffordshire Hospital, near the
Midlands town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, said Asha worked in the
neurology department at that hospital.
A doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Glasgow, who refused to
give his name, said he recognized Asha as a doctor who also kept an
office there. The hospital would not confirm that.
In Amman, Jordan, Asha's father, Jamil, denied his 26-year-old son had
any terrorist leanings.
“My son is a moderate Muslim and carried out his religious duties, but
he never embraced fanaticism,” he told The Associated Press.
Information also surfaced Monday suggesting authorities had been close
on the trail of the alleged plotters before the attack at the Glasgow
airport.
Rental agent Daniel Gardiner, whose company leased a Glasgow-area house
searched by police, said officers contacted his firm just before the
airport blaze to say they had tracked phone records linked to the
property.
Officials recovered at least one cell phone from the car bombs in
London, Rep. Peter King of New York, the senior Republican on the U.S.
House Homeland Security Committee, said Friday after being briefed
about the London situation.
As the investigation spread, police flooded London's subway and train
stations, even clamping down on access to the Wimbledon tennis
tournament, where concrete blocks were set in front of the main
entrance.
In a statement to the House of Commons, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith
urged Britons to remain united.
“Let us be clear: terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all
walks of life, communities and religious backgrounds,” she said.
“Terrorists attack the values that are shared by all law-abiding
citizens. It is through our unity that the terrorists will eventually
be defeated.”
Mastermind of 9-11 attacks, below, center. Pleads
"guilty" Dec. '08, seeks martyrdom...
At left, above,
not a page
from your high school yearbook...
Above, from the files,
(bottom row, second from left - the individual in the article
below); "crotch" bomber from Nigeria by way of Yemen and his
"undies" at right.
Page last updated
at 13:12 GMT, Monday, 4 January 2010
France follows
Britain and US in shutting Yemen embassy
It is not
clear when the embassies in Sanaa will reopen
|
France has become the third Western
nation to shut its Yemen embassy, after threats from an al-Qaeda
offshoot, the foreign ministry in Paris announced.
The US and UK missions, which closed on Sunday, remain shut.
Yemeni security forces, meanwhile, shot dead two militants
north of the capital, Sanaa, said officials.
Al-Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula last week said it planned an alleged plane
bomb attempt on Christmas Day and urged attacks on "crusaders" in
embassies.
From Monday all travellers flying to America are being
subjected to new security measures, introduced by the US government.
|
WHERE NEW MEASURES APPLY
Flights from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
(countries classified by US as state sponsors of terror)
Also, flights from Afghanistan, Algeria,
Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen
|
Airport staff will now carry out extra screening of people
from 14
countries, including those the US considers to be state-sponsors of
terrorism - Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.
Yemen and Nigeria - through which the alleged bomber
travelled - also face the new restrictions.
Passengers travelling from other countries will be checked at
random.
On
Monday in Paris, French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told
reporters their Yemen ambassador had decided a day earlier to suspend
public access to their embassy.
French citizens in the country had been warned to remain
vigilant and to limit their movements, he added.
The
US was the first to announce the closure of its embassy on Sunday,
citing "ongoing threats" by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP),
and the UK followed suit.
|
YEMEN FACTS
Population: 23.6 million (UN,
2009)
Capital: Sanaa
Language: Arabic
Major religion: Islam
Oil exports: $1.5bn/24.5m barrels
(Jan-Oct 2009)
Income per capita: US $950 (World
Bank, 2008)
|
A US diplomat told the Reuters news agency on Monday: "The
embassy
is still closed again today... We are continuing to make the security
review."
The Yemeni authorities have tightened security measures at
Sanaa's airport, as well as around several other embassies.
The
US embassy was the target of an attack in September 2008 in which 19
people died, including a young American woman. The attack was blamed on
AQAP.
On Sunday, the US deputy national security adviser for
homeland security and counter-terrorism said there were "indications
that al-Qaeda is planning to carry out an attack against a target
inside of Sanaa, possibly our embassy".
John Brennan told ABC the group had "several hundred members"
in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and was posing an increasing threat.
Last
week, AQAP urged Muslims to help in "killing every crusader who works
at their embassies or other places" and said it was behind the failed
attempt to destroy the Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 on Christmas Day.
Speaking to CNN, Mr Brennan said there were "indications" a
radical US cleric of Yemeni origin had links both to the Nigerian
charged with the bomb plot, and the man accused of the Fort Hood
shootings in November.
He said the preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki,
had had direct contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, while he was
allegedly being trained by AQAP operatives last year.
|
Mr Brennan said Anwar al-Awlaki seemed to
be linked to the bomb plot
|
It was clear, he said, that Mr Awlaki had also been in touch
with
Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army major charged with shooting dead 13
people at Fort Hood.
On Saturday, the head of US Central
Command, Gen David Petraeus, visited Yemen's President Ali Abdallah
Saleh to pledge support for its fight with al-Qaeda, after Washington
doubled its counter-terrorism aid.
Yemeni officials last week
said they had sent more troops to hunt down al-Qaeda militants in the
provinces of Abyan, Baida and Shabwa.
Correspondents say the
security situation in Yemen is complicated by an abundance of firearms,
an insurgency in the north and a secessionist movement in the south.
But
the prospects of re-asserting central government authority over the
lawless areas where al-Qaeda is based look, in the opinion of some
analysts, remote - even with beefed-up American support.
Cole killer confusion
NYPOST
Last Updated: 3:14 AM, August 28, 2010
Posted: 12:12 AM, August 28, 2010
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is a man with blood on his hands.
A year before 9/11, the Saudi al Qaeda operative masterminded the
bombing of the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 sailors as
the vessel refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden. A Guantanamo
tribunal was ready to arraign him last year, but since the Obama
administration took office, it's been a case of trial and error.
No trial -- plenty of error.
As the 10th anniversary of the Oct. 12, 2000, attack looms, the White
House has inexplicably frozen the prosecution. The Justice
Department said this week that "no charges are either pending or
contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future."
And it's not the first time the Obama White House has meddled with
Nashiri's case.
Nashiri's charges were held in abeyance for nine months last year as
the Justice Department conducted a review of all cases against
Guantanamo detainees. In the end, White House officials chose to
discard years of careful legal work by the Navy's JAG lawyers when they
removed the 9/11 suspects' cases from military jurisdiction and turned
them over to the federal courts. But Nashiri's case stayed where
it was.
Attorney General Eric Holder said last year that because the Cole
bombing was an attack on the military, Nashiri's trial should proceed
in a military tribunal. Did it really take nine months to figure
that out?
It's not apparent why the administration is delaying Nashiri's trial
now. What is clear is that the White House has called off any
action until after the November elections, learning a lesson -- the
wrong lesson -- from their troubles.
"It's politics at this point," one military official told The
Washington Post.
Correction: It's been politics from Day One, when Obama made a
foolhardy promise to close Gitmo within a year of taking office.
And it's been politics ever since, as the administration has bumbled
its way toward 9/11 trials, which now appear years away from even
beginning. We've always been skeptical that you could use the
"rule of law" to handle terrorism cases, a worry borne out by the
administration's fumbling so far.
If this administration can't figure out how to convict the monster
behind the murder of 17 sailors, then let Nashiri simply rot in
prison. Just don't let him out.
Airliner suicide mission blessed by
imam
Washington Times
Victor Morton
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner had
his suicide mission personally blessed in Yemen by Anwar al-Awlaki, the
Muslim imam suspected of radicalizing the Fort Hood shooting suspect, a
U.S. intelligence source has told The Washington Times.
The intelligence official, who is familiar with the FBI's interrogation
of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said the bombing suspect has boasted of
his jihad training to the FBI and has said it included final
exhortations by Mr. al-Awlaki.
"It was Awlaki who indoctrinated him," the official said. "He was told,
'You are going to be the tip of the spear of the Muslim nation.' "
Mr. al-Awlaki, an American-born imam who once led a large Northern
Virginia mosque but now lives in Yemen, has gained notoriety in recent
months because of his influence on Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S.-born
Muslim accused of killing 13 people at the Texas military base.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took credit Monday for the Christmas
Day attack on Northwest Airlines 253, an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight.
The al Qaeda group and U.S. officials both say that Mr. Abdulmutallab
was able to smuggle explosive powder in his underwear and only a
detonator failure prevented him from blowing up the plane and killing
almost 300 passengers and crew.
On Tuesday, President Obama made his second public address on the
attack, saying there had been a "systemic failure" in
intelligence-sharing among U.S. agencies.
He characterized the lapse as "totally unacceptable," distancing
himself further from Sunday's widely derided comments by Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that "the system worked."
Also Tuesday, Democrats reacted to criticism that the Transportation
Security Administration, which oversees U.S. flight security, still
does not have a top administrator. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,
Nevada Democrat, vowed to ensure confirmation of Eroll Southers and
blamed Republicans for holding up the nomination.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he has learned of
personal ties between Mr. Abdulmutallab and Mr. al-Awlaki, though he
said he could neither confirm nor deny that the two men had been in the
same Yemeni prayer room.
"From what I've heard, the relationship would have been closer than
what Awlaki had with Hasan," Mr. Hoekstra told The Times. "He trusted
[Mr. Abdulmutallab] more."
Mr. al-Awlaki had e-mail contact with Maj. Hasan as many as 20 times
between December 2008 and the shootings at Fort Hood. Mr. al-Awlaki
praised Maj. Hasan as a "hero" and said all Muslims in the U.S.
military should "follow the footsteps of men like Nidal."
Monday's al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula statement spoke similarly,
calling on every "soldier who works for the crusader armies" to
"emulate the example of the heroic [mujahedeen] brother, Nidal Hasan."
According to the U.S. intelligence official, Mr. Abdulmutallab cited
Maj. Hasan in his interrogations, but only to cite him as "an example
of how Islam accepts even American soldiers." Mr. Abdulmutallab did not
show any operational knowledge of the Army major or the Fort Hood
attack.
In his FBI interrogation, according to the U.S. intelligence official,
Mr. Abdulmutallab spoke of being in a room in Yemen receiving Muslim
blessings and prayers from Mr. al-Awlaki, along with a number of other
men "all covered up in white martyrs' garments," and known only by code
names and "abu" honorifics.
The official said such clothing and the lack of familiarity among the
men suggests that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula intends to use the
men in that room in suicide missions.
The intelligence official's description comes in the wake of several
reports that Yemen is breeding scores of jihadists ready to strike the
West.
Yemen's top diplomat said Tuesday that hundreds of al Qaeda militants
are in his country and pleaded for foreign help and intelligence in
rooting them out.
"They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in
Detroit. There are maybe hundreds of them -- 200, 300," Foreign
Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi told the Times of London.
The Sun also reported Monday that "British extremists in Yemen [who]
are in their early 20s and from Bradford, Luton and Leytonstone, East
London ... are due to return to the U.K. early in 2010 and will then
await Internet instructions from al Qaeda on when to strike."
The British tabloid quoted an unnamed Scotland Yard source as saying,
"We know there are four or five radicalized British Muslim cells in
Yemen."
While the U.S. intellig
