A SUICIDE truck bomber ripped the heart out of a northern Iraqi village today, killing at least 105 people and demolishing dozens of homes and shops, police and medics said.
Ambulances and private cars ferried dozens of bloodied corpses and wounded civilians to clinics in the nearby town of Tuz Khurmatu and the provincial capital Kirkuk, where desperate relatives waited for news of the missing.
Officials were stunned by the scale of the blast, which devastated the main market in Emerli, a small rural community of people from Iraq's Shiite Turkmen minority living in an area notorious for al-Qaeda militants.
Excerpted
http://www.news.com.au/sundaytelegraph/story/0,22049,22037458-5012771,00.html
Radicalism heating up in the Caribbean
Monday, June 4th 2007
WASHINGTON - From Argentina to Haiti, the rise of radical Islam in the Caribbean and Latin America is alarming U.S. counterterror officials and leaders in the region, who say the JFK bomb plot should be a wakeup call. All four suspects in the plot had ties to the region. Two were arrested in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, including ex-Guyanese lawmaker Abdul Kadir.
Senior U.S. counterterrorism officials confirmed fears that Islamists in Trinidad and Tobago could turn the nation "into another Mogadishu," referring to the Somali capital ruled until last year by Islamic fundamentalists with Al Qaeda ties. "Trinidad and Tobago have been a high concern for us since the late 1980s," said Michael Scheuer, who created the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit in 1996. Scheuer said the Caribbean is not home to major terror groups aside from Trinidad's Jamaat al Muslimeen, but a "loose-knit" confederation of extremists have found it easy to move around the tourist-friendly islands.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the Caribbean is a region "of increasing concern to us. It's an area we should take a closer look at." "What happened in New York was very educational," a former Caribbean leader told the Daily News. Muslim extremists in Trinidad and Tobago pose a "growing danger" to Prime Minister Patrick Manning's government, he noted. But it is strife-torn Haiti that is considered "the weakest point in the area," said the former leader, who asked not to be identified.
Before 9/11, intelligence services reported that Palestinians possibly involved in terror strikes against Israel used Haiti to lie low, he said. And suddenly, in recent years, a surprising number of mosques have sprouted up in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Haiti is predominantly Catholic. "We don't understand why there are so many mosques in Haiti," the former leader said.
In Latin America, most attention of U.S. counterterror agents is focused on Argentina, its notorious border with Paraguay and Brazil, and northern Chile. But the FBI has only about 25 legal attachés, called legates, positioned in embassies throughout the Americas, a source said. Two G-men based in Trinidad's Port-of-Spain led efforts to nab the JFK plotters.
"The threat in South America is growing," said a top counterterror manager. "Lebanese Hezbollah is gaining a real foothold there." Most of Hezbollah's efforts there are aimed at fund-raising rather than plotting attacks, sources said. But there have been exceptions. In 1992, terrorists believed connected to Hezbollah blew up the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and killed 29 people. Two years later, another bomb at a Jewish aid group's offices slaughtered 85.
Last March, five Iranians and one key Hezbollah operative, Imad Fayez Mugniyah, were targeted for the 1994 bombing in an Interpol "red notice," which alerts all law enforcement that there are warrants for their arrest.
In the mid-1990s, the CIA disrupted a plot by Middle Eastern terror group Gama'a al-Islamiya to strike in its native Egypt. The group's spiritual leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the "Blind Sheik," was convicted of plotting to destroy New York City landmarks in 1995. "The order to attack Egypt came out of the tri-border area," an intelligence source said.
Venezuela's close ties to Iran - which supports Hezbollah - have also drawn scrutiny, particularly when President Hugo Chavez recently announced direct flights with a visa waiver program from Caracas to Tehran and Damascus. "That's not for tourism - they have all the sunshine they need over there," a counterterrorism official said. "Obviously, there are a large number of people going back and forth."
Venezuela's neighbor Guyana also is home to many who have accepted scholarships to study in Iran. "It's something we want to watch very closely," said the former Caribbean leader.
UPDATE - Breaking news:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,22037487-1702,00.html
This story is from our news.com.au network Source: NEWS.com.au
“Car bomb ‘to be detonated from Australia’”
By staff writers and wires
July 08, 2007
ARTICLE SNIPPET: “SUSPECTS linked to the foiled car bomb attacks in London allegedly planned to blow up the devices using mobile phones in Australia, a British newspaper has reported.
Eight people, including Indian doctor Mohammed Haneef in Australia, are still being held by police for questioning in relation to last week’s two bomb attack attempts in central London and another at Glasgow Airport.
The British tabloid Daily Star today reported that during their investigations police had allegedly uncovered a plan to detonate one of the car bombs outside a London nightclub from Australia.
“They intended to blow it up by remote control - by calling mobile phones in the car,” the newspaper said.”