Posted on 08/29/2005 5:05:33 AM PDT by Coop
PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro — Abdelmajid Bouchar, a 22-year-old Moroccan, sought for involvement in last year's train bombings in the Spanish capital Madrid, that killed nearly 200 people, was caught at the Belgrade railway station in June.
The arrest, revealed earlier this month, revived concerns that the Balkans — with its porous borders, unsophisticated security systems, rampant corruption and organized crime — could serve as a haven for Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups.
Local officials and experts have long warned that the Balkans at least is a major transit route for the terrorists, as well as for organized crime, including human and drug trafficking. They said the two often go hand in hand.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
All agree that there was no police malice in the shooting. I here add some details on the police failings. At least part of the blame goes to the surveillance team(s), who failed to realize that the Brazilian's skin color was much lighter than that of the suspect he supposedly resembled. An additional blunder was the failure of the surveillance team and / or the coordinating center to arrest the man before he entered the train. Furthermore, the Brazilian wore a light denim jacket, an unlikely hiding place for a bomb. The decision to shoot was made somewhere (we are not told exactly where) between the surveillance team, the coordinating center and the armed team, despite the lack of serious evidence that the man was a bomber. Apparently no serious effort was made to restrain the man or knock him unconscious. The whole "sophisticated" operation stinks of incompetence and stupidity. Apportioning the blame is an ongoing process.
No, duh!
(Like my tag-line, uttered by Slobodan Milosevic, when the Kangaroo Court for the Former Yugoslavia wouldn't let him show pictures of Serbs beheaded by the Islamists they were fighting says.)
. . .what this was all about.
(FR's tagline limit doesn't quite let the whole quote fit.)
Clinton Legacy ping
The truth continues to trickle out, much to the dismay of those who propagandize in support of the Islamofascists.
As NATO/EU is taking more control over the Balkans the security becomes more unsophisticated and terrorism gains ground.
I know nothing! Sgt. Schultz.
Disproven by whom? Do you have a link?
I have no idea why you are so suspicious. The Kosovar Albanians, and their brothers throughout the Greater Albania*, are a warm and friendly bunch, with many quaint and colorful customs.
These charming rustic folk are our allies, Serb, and I will not hear a word against them. Besides they come in darn handy, say if you want to know where a stolen vehicle is, or need tips on brothel management. They're good boys to have around if you need an old Orthodox church or monastery torn down, or a kidnapping attended to, as well.
*Greater Albania extends from Vladivostock in the East to Toledo, Ohio in the West, and from Iceland to Buenos Aires.
back to this Moroccan -
'But Bouchar stood out, they said. He was traveling in the wrong direction, from north to south, had no documents on him and was too well-dressed for a poor Iraqi immigrant in search of a better life in Western Europe'.
sloppy. "No documents"?
~~~~~~~~~
'News reports during the conflict in Bosnia suggested that outsiders joined Bosnia's Muslims in their conflict with the region's Serbs and Croats — though the extent of their impact in the chaos was never clear. Dragisic said that radical Islamic fighters came to the region to fight.'
Funny, ..."the extent of their impact in the chaos was never clear"...well, I am an uninformed boob and even I could read between the lines about this...and also discerned that our NATO troops were firing in the WRONG DIRECTION!
TheCrusader:
"Disproven by whom? Do you have a link?"
By CCTV footage. See, for example: As Mr de Menezes entered the station, CCTV shows him picking up a free Metro newspaper and calmly passing through the barrier. Dressed in a denim jacket, witnesses reported that he apparently only began running as he neared the bottom of the escalator and heard the train arriving.
Thanks for the ping!
(1). "Two members of the public were to become key witnesses. Christopher Wells, a 29-year-old photo processing shop manager, said: "I was coming through the barriers when I saw a man running very fast into the station. Behind him were loads of policemen all carrying weapons. There were at least 20 of them and they had big black guns".
"The man ran towards a large number of people standing around and jumped over the barriers. The police ran after him and jumped the barriers as well, shouting at the crowd to leave immediately. The man carried on running and was followed down."
(2). "Sitting in the carriage was Mark Whitby, 47, a water hygiene surveyor from Brixton. "He ran on to the train hotly pursued by three plain clothes officers, one of them wielding a black handgun. As he got on the train, I looked at his face. He looked sort of left and right but basically looked like a cornered rabbit. He looked absolutely terrified."
I don't know when the CCTV first picked up this guy's movements, but he apparently did run through the subway, leap the turnstyle, and ran onto the train, looked left then right, then realized he was caught.
I would never, ever blame the British police for what happened. The man wearing the suspiciously heavy coat ran from the authorities shortly after a major terror attack occurred in the same place, and another, similar attack was botched. The man also had just left a small building that was being surveyed by police for possible terrorists. All of London was sufficiently terrorized, and skittish police were being high-pressured to prevent another attack by capturing or killing the terrorists before they got another chance to kill.
How anyone can place blame on the cops for this particular mishap is beyond me.
Their are two key factors that tend to show the police were convinced the man was a terrorist, the numerous head shots to the guy, and the fact that the police shouted at all the people to immdediately leave the subway. Because police are trained to shoot center mass at suspects, the head shots could ONLY occur if they truly believed the man was wearing a bomb vest and might explode it. They also would not have commanded the entire subway to evacuate immediately unless they were convinced the man was about to do something awful.
Given all the coincidental facts, the man's suspicious garb, his foreign looks, his present location at the crime scene, his leaving a watched buliding, and his apparent running from police, coupled with the unparalleled fear and anxiety that had gripped all of London, I believe the police did what they had to do. I also believe the blame for this man's death falls squarely on the ISLAMIC TERRORISTS that killed so many Londoners, created fear, paranoia and the feeling of helplessness that led police to act decisevely without their usual confirmation before shooting.
Contrary to what you still claim, the man did not wear a "suspiciously heavy coat" but a light denim jacket (see also picture in this BBC article).
Despero and myself have already analyzed several additional aspects of this police blunder and have already answered the issues you continue to raise. Unless you have something genuinely new to add, let's stop dealing with this. It's an overkill!
Seems like you and Despero have a fairly high regard for yourselves, as though you're the final say in the 'facts' of this case. Actually, nobody knows all the facts yet, only what is being reported and assumed.
Funny thing here is though, the British police are rarely involved in shooting people at all, especially innocent ones. This occurance in London was certainly far more rare than shootings of innocent people in our own country. Consequently, I must trust that the London police didn't just collectively decide to choose a random victom and then go blow his head off. The link you provided to "prove" your assertions tended to make you appear wrong, very wrong. Every single story written about this event says the police were running after the suspect as he ran into the train. Unless the guy had the power of bi-location, (two places at once), I am going to continue to assume that the police RAN AFTER HIM because he was trying to elude them.
Lastly, I would like to say that as of this time it is believed that Mendez was innocent of being a terrorist. Apart from that, we don't know that he was 'innocent' of anything else. The facts will eventually all come out and be judged as they should be, by British authorities. (For the record, GB is a liberal, anti-gun nation. Most of their police still don't carry guns).
At some point in time Mendez was marked as a dead man, beleived to be a terrorist carrying a bomb. The police did what they were told to do. Somebody up higher made a horrible blunder, but under the dire circumstances that Londoners were living under something like this was just bound to happen. They keep slaughtering innocent Brits and everybody gets jumpy, anxious, trigger happy. It's just human nature.
I STILL BLAME THE TERRORISTS. No terrorism, Mendez is alive today.
I will definitely go with that! And somebody even higher up made the unforgivable blunder to allow the UK to function as haven for jihadi terrorists for 8 years. This was apparently an attempt to appease political Islam in the hope that terrorists will limit themselves to attacks in Kashmir, Chechnya, Israel/Palestine or Kosovo and leave the UK alone. Without this appeasment, 58 Britons and de Menezes would be alive today!
Amen. One can only hope that it's not too late for Western civilization to understand the dire straits we are in due to opening up our borders to our enemies. It's exactly what the Romans did prior to their fall. They let the "barbarians" (latin derivitive for 'foreignors') into their land to serve as soldiers and take menial jobs. When the rest of the barbarians decided to attack, it was too late for Rome to understand that their empire was hopelessly infested with the enemy, including in their armies.
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