WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Iranian government financed a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia and must pay $254 million to the victims' families, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth allows families of the victims of the Khobar Towers bombing to seek their compensation from assets that have been seized from the conservative Islamic regime in Tehran.
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Talk in Saudi Arabia turns to 'Iranian threat'
December 21, 2006
RIYADH: At a late-night reading earlier this week, a self-styled poet held up his hand for silence and began a riff on the events in neighboring Iraq, in the old style of Bedouin storytellers.
"Saddam Hussein was a real leader who deserved our support," he began, making up the lines as he went. "He kept Iraq stable and peaceful," he added, "And most of all he fought back the Iranians."
Across the kingdom, in both official and casual conversation, once quiet concern over the chaos in Iraq and Iran's growing regional influence has burst into the open. Saudi newspapers now openly decry Iran's growing power. Religious leaders have begun talking about a "Persian onslaught" that threatens the existence of Islam itself. In the salons of Riyadh, the "Iranian threat" is raised almost as openly and as frequently as the stock market.
"Iran has become more dangerous than Israel itself," said Sheik Musa bin Abdulaziz, editor of Al Salafi magazine, a self-described moderate in the Salafi fundamentalist Muslim movement that seeks to return Islam to its roots. "The Iranian revolution has come to renew the Persian presence in the region. This is the real clash of civilizations."
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/21/news/saudi.php
Fancy a holiday with a difference? Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed warlord who became prime minister of Chechnya last year, has declared the lawless province open for tourism. Twelve years of intermittent but brutal war may have all but devastated it, flattening its capital, Grozny, and destroying what little tourist infrastructure there was. But that failed to deter Mr Kadyrov yesterday from revealing his dream of welcoming Western tourists to a region synonymous with kidnapping.
Until the hotels were rebuilt, his government said, tourists wanting to holiday in Chechnya could always camp. Mr Kadyrov's drive to "create interest for tourist visits", drew a lukewarm response from the British travel industry, with leading tour operators saying it was unlikely that Chechnya would be included in their 2007 or even 2008 brochures. Although the Russian government, which has twice invaded the province to quell uprisings, insists the war is over, a small band of rebels in the southern mountains begs to differ.
Gun battles are common and kidnappings, though less frequent of late, still occur with alarming regularity. The Foreign Office warns against all travel to Chechnya, saying that Westerners are particularly vulnerable to abduction. Three Britons were seized and executed in Dec 1998. More recently, Mr Kadyrov's army of irregulars have taken to sticking the severed heads of enemies on stakes in at least one village.
Chechnya is also not famed for its natural attractions but Salman Dalakov, the deputy tourism minister, insisted that Chechnya had many sights: "It is like Switzerland, only without the roads."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/20/wchech20.xml