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Thread Six: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1109459/posts |
Posted on 03/12/2004 8:23:06 PM PST by thecabal
By DANIEL COONEY, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen killed two Finnish businessmen as they drove in Baghdad on Monday, the first Finns to die in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion a year ago. In the southern city of Basra, 13 British troops were wounded in two explosions during a demonstration.
British soldiers fired tear gas at about 500 unemployed Iraqi civilians protesting a failure to get jobs with the local customs police, the chief of Basra customs Col. Zafer Abdel-Nabi said. The crowd threw rocks, petrol bombs and a grenade at troops; six civilians were injured, he said.
A British Ministry of Defense spokesman said the soldiers — three of whom were seriously wounded — were evacuated to a nearby British military hospital at Shaibah.
British television showed demonstrators throwing rocks at soldiers riding tanks and standing behind plastic shields. Two Associated Press photographs showed a British soldier running down a street with his head and shoulders on fire.
Some demonstrators shouted slogans in support of Saddam Hussein and condemned Israel's killing of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin in Gaza City, witnesses said. "We are all sons of Yassin," they shouted.
The two Finns were killed near a highway underpass in west Baghdad, according to Iraqi witnesses. The victims' Iraqi driver was unhurt.
The Finns were part of a nine-person technological delegation visiting the Iraqi capital, said Markus Lyra, a Foreign Ministry official in Helsinki. "The men were on their way to the Ministry of Electricity to make business contacts as part of a larger group," he said.
The assailants fled, and there were no reports of arrests.
The victims were Seppo Haapanen, an employee of Entso, a Finnish company that specializes in electricity and power networks; and Jorma Toronen, of Air-Ix, which builds railways, the Foreign Ministry said.
Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja conveyed the government's condolences to their families, saying he was "deeply shocked by the cruel murder."
Outside a U.S. base north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber exploded a car Monday, wounding eight members of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's deputy director of operations.
The explosion occurred near the town of Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. Earlier, Saeed Kadhim, a Civil Defense Corps official, had said two Iraqi civilians were killed and 25 wounded.
In Baghdad's western Abu Ghraib district on Sunday, a bomb exploded near a U.S. patrol, killing a 1st Armored Division soldier and an Iraqi interpreter and wounding three troops, the military said.
On Sunday, rebels fired three rockets toward the U.S.-led coalition headquarters in Baghdad. One hit inside the compound, wounding a U.S. soldier. Two landed outside the heavily guarded area, killing two Iraqi civilians and wounding five, a U.S. official said. Iraqi hospital officials said one person died. U.S. forces later arrested two suspects in the attack, Kimmitt said.
In other developments:
_ Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric told the United Nations the country's U.S.-backed interim constitution was a recipe for the break up of Iraq, it was announced Monday.
Grand Ayatollah al-Husseini al-Sistani, in a letter sent March 17 to the top U.N. envoy in Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, criticized the constitution for its three-part presidency shared by Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs. The plan "enshrines sectarianism and ethnicity," he wrote, adding that it "puts the country in an unstable situation and could lead to partition and division."
_ U.S. troops raided a house Monday in the central town of Tikrit and arrested three members of a family — one suspected of links to a bomb attack earlier this month that killed two American soldiers, Lt. Col. Jeff Sinclair said.
_ In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen shot at a vehicle Monday carrying members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, killing one person and wounding three others, hospital officials said. A bystander was also injured.
_ Unidentified assailants killed the police chief in the town of Balad on Sunday, Kimmitt said.
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Thirteen British soldiers were injured in a series of explosions in the southern Iraqi city of Basra that were not terror-related, a British military official said.
"The incident is not a terrorist action," said Lieutenant Colonel Paul Young.
"The soldiers were targeted as a result of public order disturbances that were ongoing at the time and that were being brought under control," he told AFP.
It was unclear how many explosions occured, Young said, adding that the incident was still being investigated.
In London, a defence ministry spokesman said the explosions were thought to be a deliberate attack against coalition forces.
"The blasts occurred near a demonstration in the city, although there was no immediate indication that they were linked," he said.
There were no reports of Iraqi civilians or police being wounded.
The injured British troops were taken to Shaibah military hospital on the outskirts of Basra, the spokesman added. "Their injuries are not thought to be life-threatening."
Basra is headquarters to the 8,800 British troops who have occupied the south of Iraq since last year's US-led invasion.
News of the blast first came from Defence Minister Adam Ingram, when he briefed parliament on last week's emergency deployment of British troops to Kosovo.
Fifty-nine British military personnel have been killed in Iraq, either in combat or in accidents, since the start of the US-led war.
On March 18, two people were killed in a car bomb attack on a hotel in Basra. A third man was fatally beaten by a crowd in the aftermath of the explosion, police and hospital sources said.
By MAR ROMAN, Associated Press Writer
MADRID, Spain - Spanish police pursuing the terrorists who killed 202 people in a string of railway bombings have arrested four more suspects in Madrid, court officials said Monday.
Fourteen suspects are now in custody, five have been charged in the attacks and five others — four Moroccans and a Spaniards — were being questioned Monday by a National Court judge.
Court officials said the latest arrests, made Sunday night or early Monday, included three suspects picked up in Madrid's Lavapies district, a multiethnic neighborhood where chief suspect Jamal Zougam ran a cell phone shop. The fourth newly detained suspect in Spain's worst terrorist attack was arrested in Getafe, a suburb of Spain's capital, the officials said.
The scale of the March 11 attacks, which also wounded more than 1,800 and traumatized the country, was reflected in the government's decision to hold a state funeral Wednesday for those slain.
It is the first time since democracy was restored after Gen. Francisco Franco's death in 1975 that a state funeral has been held for anyone other than a member of the royal family, government officials said.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, England's Prince Charles and other dignitaries are to attend the service at Madrid's Almudena cathedral.
Senior intelligence officials of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain met Monday in the Spanish capital to discuss the bombings and address fears the Continent might become the next front in the war against terror.
The Spanish Interior Ministry declined to comment on the results of the meeting, one of series of European Union actions triggered by the commuter train attacks.
EU heads of state and government are to hold a special summit this week in Brussels to review security proposals including appointment of an anti-terrorism coordinator, establishment of a European terrorism database, mandatory national identity cards and increased security at train stations, airports and other vulnerable targets.
As Judge Juan del Olmo began his new interrogations at the National Court, the Spaniard, identified in news reports as Jose Emilio Suarez, was first before the bench. The news reports said he may have led Moroccans who remain at large to an explosives warehouse at a mine in northern Spain to steal dynamite used in the Madrid attacks.
Suarez, a former miner, reportedly said he did not know how the dynamite would be used.
The judge's options are to jail the suspects during further investigation, release them on bail or free them altogether. Monday's session was expected to last well into the night.
Suspicion over the 10 bombs targeting the Madrid commuter rail network has focused on the al-Qaida terror group or an alleged Morocco-based terror cell believed to have links to Osama bin Laden's organization.
Of the 10 suspects detained before Monday, a judge jailed three — all Moroccans — on charges of multiple counts of murder. One of the Moroccans was Zougam, who has been linked by court documents to members of an al-Qaida cell in Spain.
Police have also traced a cell phone found attached to an unexploded bomb to the shop Zougam ran in Lavapies. The bombs that ripped through the trains are believed to have used cell phones as detonators.
Two Indians also were jailed on charges of collaborating with a terrorist organization.
The five suspects brought before the court Monday have not been charged. They were arrested Thursday and include Mohamed El Hadi Chedadi, the brother of Said Chedadi, an alleged al-Qaida operative arrested in Spain in 2001.
Spanish investigators have analyzed a videotape in which a man claiming to speak on behalf of al-Qaida said the group carried out the Madrid attack in reprisal for Spain's backing of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
The ruling Popular Party fell in a surprise defeat in general elections March 14 to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist party which, along with a majority of Spaniards, had opposed the Iraq war.
Two "Finnished" Businessmen Killed in Baghdad.
Sorry, just couldn't pass on the easy one.
By CHRIS TOMLINSON, Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The battlefield conditions are familiar. A group of al-Qaida fighters is under siege in fortified hideouts. Intercepted radio conversations reveal foreign tongues. A top terrorist leader is reportedly trapped and allied militias have supposedly cut off all escape routes. U.S. forces are providing technical assistance.
The al-Qaida standoff in Pakistan's South Waziristan region bears deep similarities with the December 2001 battle of Tora Bora, and could yield similarly disappointing results. On Monday Pakistani forces discovered a mile-long tunnel, evidence that suspected al-Qaida leaders had again planned ahead, and possibly escaped.
In the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan, the "high-value target" was Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials at the time suspected that his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, was already dead. But al-Zawahri has since made several statements released on audiotape, the most recent in February.
The fact that top Pakistani officials think al-Zawahri now may be trapped in a mud fortress in South Waziristan shows how wrong intelligence estimations could be then, and perhaps now.
But the tactics used by the al-Qaida fighters in both places are remarkably similar and lend credence to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's speculation that only a top leader would warrant such a spirited defense.
Then, as now, the fighters appeared to be mostly Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks and ethnic Uighurs from China's predominantly Muslim Xinjiang province. The foreign fighters used hand-held radios to communicate, even though the signals can easily be intercepted and are a key source of intelligence.
At Tora Bora, the pro-American mujahedeen often used similar radios to argue with their enemy and to try to persuade them to surrender.
A dozen American intelligence agents are helping the Pakistanis in the Waziristan operation. At Tora Bora, dozens of U.S. and British special forces played the same role.
On Monday, Pakistani tribal elders entered the Waziristan battleground to discuss a peaceful surrender.
The Chechens and Uzbeks at Tora Bora would agree to cease-fires in order to continue negotiations with tribal elders, but they always began fighting again. In the end, they fought until they could no longer lift a weapon, either because they were badly wounded or dead.
"A cease-fire is no good," said Mohammed Zaman, an Afghan militia leader who fought at Tora Bora, when asked Monday about the fighting in Pakistan. "The operation should continue to get results."
Only after the Tora Bora battle was over, the wounded captured and the dead buried did al-Qaida's strategy become clear. The defenders were a "rear guard," holding out as long as possible to allow their leaders to escape in small groups.
The border with Pakistan, then supposedly sealed by Afghan militia and Pakistani troops, proved to be porous.
Afghan militia leaders later revealed to The Associated Press that they had been betrayed by two of their own, Din Mohammed and Yunnis Khalis. Bin Laden and other top leaders had escaped into Pakistan with their families and had disappeared into the tribal areas, where they had prearranged safe passage, according to Afghans familiar with the plan.
In the recent Waziristan fighting, Pakistani troops have discovered that al-Qaida again had an exit strategy.
"There is a possibility that the tunnel may have been used at the start of the operation," Brig. Mahmood Shah told journalists. He said the tunnels began at homes and led in the direction of a mountain range that straddles the border.
Zaman, reached in Peshawar, said that's exactly where he would expect them to go.
"Those people cannot stay in an open field. They are in the mountains," he said. "Life for those people is easier and safer in the mountains."
Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the Pakistani commander leading the fight in Waziristan, said Saturday that his men have formed two cordons around the 20-square-mile area containing the al-Qaida fighters in Waziristan and they might still be caught.
But in reality, a cordon that big can easily be penetrated by a small, determined group moving at night. Escape would be made easier since the bulk of the Pakistani forces have been busy fighting a fanatical rear guard defending fortress-like family compounds.
Hussain, like the Afghans more than two years ago, must also contend with residents, whose knowledge of the area and loyalty to the foreigners make them a formidable force.
And since his forces will remain in the tribal areas for generations to come, the general must take into account local sensibilities and consider the long-term implications of his tactics.
___
Chris Tomlinson covered the battle of Tora Bora for The Associated Press.
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