http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s04090153.htm
ASSIST News Service (ANS) - PO Box 2126, Garden Grove, CA 92842-2126 USA
E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com, Web Site: www.assistnews.net
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
GERMAN COURT CONVICTS LEFTIST OF BOMBING JEWS IN BUDAPEST
Blast was first terror attack on Hungarian soil
By: Stefan J. Bos
Eastern Europe Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
Andrea Klump talking to her lawyer during Tuesday"s court procedure.
Source: Deutsche Welle
STUTTGART/BUDAPEST (ANS) -- A German court convicted an alleged leftist terrorist Tuesday, September 28, of helping to bomb a busload of Soviet Jews in Hungary in 1991 and extended her sentence to 12 years in prison, ASSIST News Service (ANS) in Budapest learned.
47-year old Andrea Klump, who was already linked to Germany's ultra-left Red Army Faction (RAF), was found guilty by a state court in Stuttgart on 32 counts of being an accessory to attempted murder.
Six people, including four passengers and two policemen escorting the bus, were injured when a remote-controlled 25 kilogram (55 pound) bomb detonated a few seconds early near the Budapest airport. A police escort car that was driving ahead of the bus took the brunt of the blast, the first such terror attack on Hungarian soil.
It lead to increased security around the Budapest airport, as Hungarian government officials pledged the government would remain committed to Russian Jews emigrating to Israel via Hungary.
PALESTINIAN GROUP
In a statement, the court accused Klump of carrying out the bombing along with accomplice Horst Ludwig Meyer for a Palestinian group, "Movement for the Freedom of Jerusalem," which claimed responsibility for the attack.
Investigators said they found DNA evidence in 2001 linking Klump to a Budapest apartment at the time of the attack. The Jerusalem Post newspaper quoted presiding Judge Udo Heissler as saying that Klump was guilty of assisting "a particularly abominable act" by renting apartments and helping prepare the assailants' escape.
Klump denied direct involvement in the attack and has insisted she never belonged to the RAF, which launched more than two decades of attacks against NATO and industrial targets in Germany and Europe until renouncing violence in 1992. The group declared itself disbanded in 1998.
TRAVELING TO BUDAPEST
Security around Budapest airport remains tight day and night.
Source: Via Google Pictures
However Klump admitted to the court last month that she had traveled to Budapest in September of that year and stayed nearly three months saying she knew that Meyer was there on "a mission ordered by Palestinian militants", The Jerusalem Post reported. She reportedly also admitted to managing bookkeeping for the two of them, renting apartments and handling travel plans.
The Stuttgart state court ruled that she must serve a total of 12 years in prison. Klump already serves a nine-year jail sentence imposed in 2001 for attempted murder, hostage-taking and blackmail during a failed 1988 attack against a nightclub, popular with US servicemen near the Spanish city of Cadiz, BosNewsLife monitored.
She was captured in Vienna, Austria, in September 1999 over the Spanish attack, several media said. Meyer, who was with her at the time, was apparently shot dead while resisting arrest.
Read more on these and other news stories on news agency BosNewsLife at website http://www.bosnewslife.com
Award winning Journalist Stefan J. Bos was born on the 19th of September 1967 in a small home in downtown Amsterdam, in the Netherlands not far from the typewriter of his father, who was (and still is) a Reporter and ghostwriter. Already at a very young age Bos decided to become journalist and finally arrived in Hungary, the same country where his parents had smuggled Bibles during Communism.
Bos has traveled extensively to cover wars and revolutions throughout the region and received the Annual Press Award of Merit from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his coverage about foreign policy affairs including Hungary's relationship with NATO and the European Union. Stefan J. Bos can be reached at: stefan@bosnewslife.com.
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http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/9/282004e.asp
"Diplomat Cites North Korea as Among Worst Religious Freedom Violators
By Chad Groening and Jenni Parker
September 28, 2004
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "(AgapePress) - The Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom says this year's annual State Department report to Congress on religious liberty around the globe shows that North Korea is one of the worst offenders, with more political and religious prisoners than any other country on Earth.
John Hanford, head of the U.S. Department of State's Office of International Religious Freedom, says it is very difficult to confirm all the information coming out of North Korea. However, he says credible reports indicate that religious believers, particularly Christians, often face terrible persecution, or even death, because of their faith."