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Locked on 09/11/2004 12:26:18 AM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
Thread nineteen- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1212973/posts |
Posted on 08/24/2004 8:58:28 PM PDT by nwctwx
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Oh, and this monster, too:
Just heard on NPR that the two Russian plane crashes were not terrorist related . . .
That indicates hijackers with bombs. Strongly implies suicide squads. This is an al Qaeda/islamofascist/møøselimb signature.
There was speculation on another thread that it was Russian Mafia trying to discourage carriers from moving from 'their' airport:
Moscow's main airport Sheremetyevo, is run by the Russian mafia and was a complete disaster the last five times I flew out of it. Domodedovo is an up and coming competitor, and many airlines, sick of the Mafia's influence and cost, were trying to move flights to Domodedovo. I can see this as a warning to the airlines that are moving flight from SVO. ~ rebel_yell2
I think we're firmly in møøselimb territory...
WE don't wait until the fires are out. The Ruskies are slackers...
****From It's Happening forum, from a self proclaimed jihadi
Oh phew. Time to move on then. (/sarcasm)
Sorry, I cannot help because I wasn't brave enough to look myself!
_________________________________________________
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Gaza intelligence chief wounded
BBC
8/25/04
Gunmen have opened fire at a convoy carrying the acting Palestinian intelligence chief, hitting him the chest and causing his car to overturn. Brig-Gen Tariq Abu Rajab was brought to Shifa hospital in Gaza, before being transferred to an Israeli hospital.
Two bodyguards were killed and two other people were wounded.
Gaza has seen a wave of inter-Palestinian violence in recent months, as various factions vie for power ahead of Israel's planned withdrawal.
Mr Abu Rajab's convoy was attacked near the Shati refugee camp in the west of Gaza city, as it headed towards his local headquarters.
Palestinian hospital officials initially said Mr Abu Rajab was in stable condition and his injuries were not life-threatening.
However, he was then transferred to a hospital in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, where he was immediately taken to surgery.
One of the other injured was said to be in a serious condition. The dead bodyguards were named as Khamis Abdul Jawad and Samir Hijjo.
The 58-year-old has been acting as head of the General Intelligence Service since the top commander Amin Hindi resigned in July after a string of high-profile kidnappings.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/3597072.stm
That's weird because I was just scanning some wires across the globe and saying to myself how refreshing it is that most outlets are saying that "terrorism" or an "act of sabotage" has not been ruled out. Leave it to npr to be different... Actually, npr probably is not alone in doing this. So many media outlets don't want any threats in the news that interfere with their flattering coverage of johnny effin' kerry.
Ian, could you please make sure that WCG is on the ping list?
Thanks,
Vel
I'm sure it's the real thing. He has a track record of getting the beheading videos up quickly.
LOL - pure evil
Some Freeper on another thread commented on how all the beheadings are making us madder and more ready to fight rather than making up squeamish and scared. I guess that is the only possible positive to come of this. Yet, I am afraid that we will also get desensitized. I hope it never ever even approaches that point.
Added, I knew I would miss someone important...
Eerie similarities to 9/11
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10569915%255E601,00.html
IF the downing of two planes in Russia turns out to be the work of terrorists, as Russian authorities were strongly suggesting at the time of going to press, it will represent a deadly new stage in the war on terror.
Coming just days before an election in the rebel province of Chechnya, which the candidate backed by the Russian Government was expected to win, the plane crashes are seen as a possible attempt to hit back against the elections, which Chechen rebels have vowed to boycott and discredit.
Chechnya is a searing example of the way the global Islamist terrorist movement has been able to take a genuine local grievance and greatly magnify its consequences.
The similarities between the Russian plane crashes, and the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, are not only eerie.
They also indicate the way different disgruntled groups around the world have taken terrorist technique, organisation, finance, ideology and inspiration from al-Qa'ida.
Many Chechens fought with the mujaheddin against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
There they forged the connections with al-Qa'ida that have become operationally so important subsequently.
Chechen rebels also attended training camps run by Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network in Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled in Kabul.
None of this is to deny that Moscow is the author of many of its own troubles in Chechnya, where it has an unrelieved record of brutality and clumsiness.
Indeed, the process of the break-up of the former Soviet Union reflects both the abiding illegitimacy of the Soviet state from 1917 onwards among its subject people, and the failure of local leaders to build a workable political consensus.
At the same time, in virtually all of these states Russia has dabbled and interfered in internal politics, sometimes backing one side of a civil war against another.
Most of the former Soviet republics, especially in Central Asia, are a mess, ranging from chaotic to economically comatose.
Moscow is determined that Chechnya will not have independence.
Both sides in the ongoing conflict have committed human rights abuses.
A section of the Chechen separatists believe that their most effective tactic is to bring the war, through acts of terrorism, into Russian metropolitan territory itself.
This has led to a series of terrorist outrages in Moscow and other parts of Russia.
This has the potential to completely derail the nascent Russian economic recovery.
Russian stability is essential to the recovery of the regions and nations that border it.
Russia still holds thousands of nuclear weapons.
Only if it develops as a stable, economically successful society can the world feel any security about the fate of these nuclear weapons.
Terrorism is one of the big obstacles to Russia achieving that kind of stability.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is widely supported in Russia for taking a hard line against terrorists and Chechen separatists.
But if these incidents are confirmed as terrorist attacks they can only serve to further polarise Russian society and lead to further hard-line responses from the Government.
Doing some more scanning....Well, the flip flopping in this one article alone would normally make me laugh if the topic wasn't the double tragedy that occurred.
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TERROR LINK RULED OUT
Two planes that crashed almost simultaneously in Russia were not downed in terrorist attacks, Russia's security services have said.
The Federal Security Service said it was sure the planes were neither bombed nor hijacked.
But the country's chief prosecutor said it was too early to determine the cause of the crashes.
A London-based spokesman for the leader of Chechnya's main rebel group said it was responsible for the attack.
All 89 passengers onboard the planes were killed when they crashed on Tuesday night.
Investigators are exploring other possibilities such as technical failures, the use of poor quality fuel, breaches of fueling regulations and also pilot error.
Air traffic controllers lost contact with the first plane, Sibir Airlines Tu-154, as it flew from the Russian capital to the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
It dropped off radar screens near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, 600 miles south of Moscow.
"A minute before the plane disappeared from the radar screens the interior ministry received a report from an air traffic controller that there had been an attack on the crew," an Interior Ministry official was quoted as saying.
A Sibir Airlines spokesman said: "We are considering an act of terror as one possibility, especially after we received an automatically generated telegramme from the Sochi air control centre that the plane had been hijacked."
Just a minute later, the second plane, Tu-134, took off from Moscow airport bound for Volgograd.
The plane's tail was found in the Tula region, 110 miles south of the capital.
Witnesses on the ground saw an explosion on board the second plane just before it crashed, sending debris falling from the sky.
"Around 11pm, give or take five minutes, there was this strange noise in the sky, then this torn-up book fell onto our garage," a local man told NTV television.
The Volga-Aviaexpress carrier, which owned the plane, said it was in good shape and its passengers had undergone all necessary security checks.
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13204349,00.html
Maybe when the hijackers took over the passengers went beserk and attacked them so they pulled their cords. The passengers first thought was most likely that they were going to be flown into a building so they took up the fight, unfortunately the hijackers were able to get to their cord or whatever it is they do to explode themselves.
Plane Crashes Revive Terror Jitters On Eve Of Chechnya Vote
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=25475
MOSCOW, Aug 25 (AFP) - Terrorism jitters spiked Wednesday in Russia after two passenger planes crashed simultaneously but far apart soon after leaving the same Moscow airport, an improbable and unexplained event ahead of a key vote in Chechnya.
Officials said they were investigating the possibility that terrorists brought the planes down, but there were no claims of responsibility and no suggestion that the terrorism theory was being treated more seriously than any other explanation.
Nonetheless, the crashes brought the spectre of terrorism in the heart of Russia to mind for many Russians still shuddering from Chechnya-related bomb attacks in the capital earlier this year, among them an attack on the Moscow subway which killed 40 people.
"It is not a pleasant day," said one tense Moscow taxi driver as he concentrated on radio news bulletins on the twin crashes.
Police and undercover security service agents flooded the Russian capital that was shaken Tuesday by a bomb attack at a bus stop on the city outskirts that left four people wounded.
"We are investigating the hypothesis of terrorist acts," said Sergei Ignatchenko of Russia's FSB intelligence agency.
He later said the planes, with a total of 89 people on board, could also have gone down due to any number of other factors, including bad weather, pilot error or the possibility that bad fuel was pumped into the two planes.
Whatever the ultimate explanation for the plane crashes, they clearly inflamed an underlying climate of fear in the Russian capital, already used to a steady stream of bombing attacks linked either to gangster rivalries or the five-year Chechen war.
"I think the terrorism theory looks like the most likely one," said Gennady Gudkov, a pro-Kremlin official who heads parliament's security committee, in radio remarks.
One of the planes fell to the ground near the city of Tula around 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of Moscow. The other crashed in a field outside the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
They disappeared from air traffic controllers' radar screens within three minutes of each other overnight.
Both planes were heading to southern destinations relatively near Chechnya, where elections were scheduled for Sunday to replace Akhmad Kadyrov, a controversial former mufti killed in a bomb blast in Grozny last May.
President Vladimir Putin -- on vacation on Sochi on the Black Sea -- did not appear in public Wednesday, although the Kremlin said he has was being constantly informed of the latest developments.
Analysts said the public was nervous, understanding that the Chechen elections could spell trouble even if the plane crashes were in no way linked to the war.
"If this really was a terrorist attack, then the public's opinion will immediately link it to Chechnya," said Yury Korgunyuk of the INDEM research institute.
"This will not improve Putin's image. But people have been scared before, there have been so many bombings, so many attacks.
"In either case, it is clear who will win" the vote in Chechnya.
The Kremlin-annointed candidate is Alu Alkhanov, the republic's interior minister, widely expected to win the poll.
But the separatist Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov has said in a statement published on a rebel Web site that he would kill the next pro-Moscow leader since he still recognized himself as the leader of the breakaway republic.
He has also vowed future attacks on Russian territory, in the process losing complete support from Washington, which at one stage recognized him as the one man with whom Moscow could negotiate peace.
Maskhadov's influence in the region now appears to be limited, the republic overrun by various pro-Russian security forces and rebels who are splintered into rival groups.
But violence has errupted in Chechnya in recent days, with rebels killing at least 30 Russian troops and policemen over the weekend in Grozny, the rebel capital. Twelve civilians also died in the fighting.
Yeah right. I was listening to Bachelor and Loftus last night - Loftus said that in addition to the two planes going down there was also an explosion on a bus shortly before that. He thought that was a bomb intended for a third plane but the third operative either didn't make it in time or backed out at the last minute.
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