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“Around 600 students of Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Fareedia have not returned to their homes after the Lal Masjid operation. These are the people called ‘missing students’ and they are hiding in madrassas and mosques in and around the two cities Islamabad and Rawalpindi. They are walking bombs and are determined to blow themselves up any time, anywhere,” said a source directly involved in the ongoing investigation of suicide blasts in the country.Lal Masjid prayer leader Maulana Abdul Aziz said that five to six hundred students of the two madrassas had been trained, equipped and brainwashed to carry out suicide...

ISLAMABAD—Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the release on bail Monday of a hard-line cleric who had been detained since shortly before soldiers stormed his mosque in 2007, killing scores of people and energizing the country's Islamist insurgency. Maulana Abdul Aziz was granted bail while the court considers the charges against him in relation to the siege of the Red Mosque in the capital, Islamabad, his lawyer Shaukat Siddiqui told reporters outside the court. Prosecutors were not available for comment. Aziz was arrested as he tried to sneak out of the mosque dressed in an all-covering burqa worn by some Muslim women....

BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, the senior aide to Saddam Hussein who gained international renown as the public face of Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Wednesday for crimes against humanity. It is the second verdict to be issued in a case involving Mr. Aziz, 73. Earlier this month he was acquitted on charges of ordering a brutal crackdown against Shiite protesters after the assassination of a revered cleric. He still faces charges in a third trial involving a massacre of Kurds in 1983. Two of Mr. Hussein’s half brothers, Watban...

Tariq Aziz guilty of Iraq murders Aziz surrendered to US troops in 2003 Tariq Aziz, for many years the public face of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, has been jailed for 15 years for his role in the execution of 42 merchants. Aziz had denied any role in the summary trials of the men accused in 1992 of profiteering during economic sanctions. Two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers were also found guilty and sentenced to death by a court in Baghdad. Another top official, Ali Hassan al-Majid - commonly known as Chemical Ali - was jailed for 15 years. Two other Iraqi...

Iraq's former deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz and Saddam Hussein's hatchetman "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid have been sentenced to 15 years in jail for crimes against humanity. Aziz and Majid, and six other defendants who were charged over the 1992 murders of 42 Baghdad traders, could have been sentenced to death.

Iraq's special criminal court Monday acquitted Tariq Aziz, the man who once served as the urbane, cigar-smoking public face of Saddam Hussein's rule, delivering the most significant not-guilty verdict in a series of prosecutions for crimes against humanity that occurred before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Aziz, who will turn 73 next month, remained in custody, facing charges in two other cases. Only hours after his acquittal, he appeared before another judge to defend himself against charges that he was involved in a massacre of Kurds in 1983. Even so, the verdict - the first in a case against him...

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark. Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI. Kashif Irfan,...

Saddam Hussein's ally Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri 'captured' in Iraq By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 12:57am BST 24/04/2008 American forces have captured Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party heir, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most wanted former regime official still at large, it has been reported. A Middle Eastern television channel said Douri, a key force in the country's devastating insurgency, had been seized in a mountain raid in Saddam's home province of Salahaddin. Most wanted: Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri Douri was King of Clubs in the deck of cards of most wanted Iraqis issued to American soldiers after the war. But...

The police chief in the northwestern Wisconsin community of Frederic says he's arrested a man wanted on felony charges that include funding terrorism. Chief R.J. Severude says one of his officers stopped a van this morning about 11:30 a.m., and when the man's Minnesota driver's license was checked there were felony warrants for him. According to the chief, the man has fugitive warrants for money laundering, drug trafficking and financing terrorist attacks inside and outside the U.S. Frederic is a Polk County village of about 1,250 people.

dubai • Iraqi former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz wants to live in Rome after his release from jail, believing he will be welcomed in the Italian capital, an Arab newspaper reported yesterday. Aziz’s plans were revealed by his lawyer in Baghdad last week, the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al Awsat said. “I want to live in Rome. The Pope and Italian officials welcomed me,” Aziz said in answer to a question about his future hopes delivered via his lawyer. Aziz was the only Christian member of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet and frequently met Pope John Paul II and his close advisers,...

Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, has told a court that Iran, not Iraq, was to blame for a 1988 gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds. Aziz, whose lawyers said is in poor health as he waits in a US military jail in Baghdad for his own trial, testified as a defence witness in the Anfal case. Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as "Chemical Ali", and five other former senior Baath party officials are on trial for their roles in a 1988 military campaign which prosecutors say killed up to 180,000 people, many of them gassed....

new insight into how San Francisco police handled the investigation into a New Year's attack on a Yale University choir. Many are saying it was mishandled. Now the story is getting coverage around the country and the world. We're doing a running tally -- it's been 10 days and 17 hours since police responded to the attack on the Yale students, and they still haven't interviewed the victims. This case is getting city officials the kind of attention they do not want, around the world. Since the I-Team broke the story of the New Year's attack on the Yale singing...

- KGO - Members of a renowned choral group from Yale University were attacked outside a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco, sending several of them to the hospital. Now the police department is coming under fire for its handling of the case. This does not look good for the city. Yale sends its popular singing group, The Baker's Dozen, on a holiday concert tour. And San Francisco sends the young men away bloody, bruised, and several of them seriously injured. Laura Aziz sent her son, Sharyar, off on a concert tour with one of Yale University's singing groups...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is demanding Congress investigate US Airway's removal last week of six imams from one of its flights. The Muslim-rights group claims the imams, who were behaving suspiciously, posed no threat. It's "very, very inappropriate to treat religious leaders that way," a spokesman fumed. According to CAIR, imams are as harmless as Buddhist monks and deserve no less respect. Tell that to flight attendant Kimberly Banducci. According to police reports I've obtained, the Delta Air Lines veteran was assaulted by a Muslim cleric in a bizarre attack aboard a flight from Miami International Airport three years...

Saudi Arabia has given Britain 10 days to halt a fraud investigation into the country's arms trade - or lose a £10 billion Eurofighter contract. The contract supports up to 50,000 British jobs and there are now fears that the deal may go to France. The Saudi government is on the verge of cancelling the contract - an extension of one brokered by Margaret Thatcher 20 year ago - because of a Serious Fraud Office investigation into allegations of a slush fund for members of the Saudi royal family, according to authoritative sources. Tony Blair has been told that the...

A man has been arrested at Gatwick Airport under anti-terrorist laws. It follows the arrest of two men near Heathrow. Gatwick's North Terminal has been closed and its flights suspended. No further details have been released by Sussex Police. Stansted Airport has announced its security is being stepped up.

the Phase II report says: “The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is leading the exploitation effort of documents (DocEx) uncovered in Iraq, told Committee staff that 120 million plus pages of documents that were recovered in Iraq have received an initial review for intelligence information. As of January 2006, 34 million pages have been translated and summarized to some extent and are available to analysts in an Intelligence Community database.” pg 62/400 And while that might mislead people into thinking that the assessments made are full and complete, it isn’t until later in the report that a little caveat is...

Many of the quasi-conclusions are based largely on claims of innocence from Saddam Hussein, “a top official in Saddam’s government, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Kattab al-Tikriti,” Tariq Aziz and Faruq Hijazi. These are 4/7 of the primary players in any involvement or potential involvement between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. The other 3 primary players are Mohammed al-Douri (He is Saddam’s VP/muscle man/Thug-In-Charge who remains at large. He is also suspected of being the primary source for most of a large portion of the insurgency and most reports place him as directing operations from inside Syria). The last 2 primary players...

As soldiers and Marines by the hundreds of thousands return home from Iraq they are telling their stories. They are telling family and friends of what they saw and of who they fought. They are writing books that tell of their experiences. Amazon.com is full of them. They have fought and lived through a dramatic and on-going historical event. To them it is real-not politics and so they tell the truth. They describe an invasion and an occupation where Islamic extremists and Iraqi thugs are the enemy. They tell tales of a fight against terrorists; people who rammed cars filled...

How many times have we heard members of the media say, “We know now that there were no ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda”? Typically, people make this claim based on any combination of four sources: President Bush’s 9/17/03 statement, Sec. Powell’s 1/8/04 statement, the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report of 7/22/04 or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) report on Pre-war Iraq intelligence reports: 7/7/04. Yet, in each of these cases, the very quotations that opponents of the war in Iraq point towards as definitive claims of “no ties” are only half quotes. When they refer to President Bush’s...