Free Republic

ALBANY -- The spiritual leader of an Albany mosque repeatedly called a phone number in Syria that an FBI report indicates had been used to gather terrorist intelligence for Osama bin Laden, according to classified documents unsealed late Tuesday in U.S. District Court. The FBI report, which was based on information from a confidential informant, was among several once-secret documents that federal authorities say raise questions about Yassin Aref's connections to terrorist organizations across the Middle East. Aref, 35, a Kurdish refugee who moved to Albany with his family in 1999, is in jail without bond while awaiting trial on...

PARIS (AFP) - A group calling itself Al-Qaeda in Palestine said it carried out a bombing against the Palestinian intelligence chief and threatened more attacks in a statement posted on the Internet. "We declare our full responsibility for this operation," the group said in the statement, whose authenticity could not be independently verified. "Your mujahedeen brothers managed to place a bomb in the special lift used by the apostate Tareq Abu Rajab ... but were hasty in detonating the device which should have been triggered once the lift door was closed." Abu Rajab, overall head of the Palestinian intelligence services,...

Al Qaida on Sunday claimed responsibility for an assassination attempt on the chief of the Palestinian Authority General Intelligence Services Tarek Abu Rajab on the previous day. In one of its internet sites the Palestinian branch of the international terrorist organization also issued threats against PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and other senior Fatah officials.

A HAMAS plot to assassinate Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been thwarted after he was tipped off by Israeli intelligence. Hamas’s military wing, the Izza Din Al-Qassem, had planned to kill Abbas at his office in Gaza, intelligence sources said. Abbas, who became president of the Palestinian Authority last year after the death of Yasser Arafat, was formally warned of the danger by the Israelis and cancelled a planned visit to the territory. The murder plan is the clearest sign yet of the tensions inside the Palestinian Authority between Hamas, which swept to power after elections in January, and...

The al-Qaeda terrorist network sent 12 of its militants to Denmark in order to assasinate those who drew the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, according to Hamid Mir, the journalist who interviewed Osama bin Laden shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to an interview with the website of satellite television network al-Arabiya, Mir was brought to Waziristan, Pakistan's tribal area, in a zone believed to be run by the Taliban leader Abdullah Mahsud, where he met with some representatives of the Taliban. These sources told Mir that 12 members of al-Qaeda left Afghanistan and entered Iran with the...

Was General Patton's death the result of a traffic accident or was he the victim of an assassination plot? (By Stalin)

Trial for PM 'assassin' Turned down contract on Martin, man now faces drugs and weapons charges Toronto Sun Wed, April 26, 2006 By IAN MCDOUGALL, COURTS BUREAU BRAMPTON -- The man who said he turned down a $300,000 assassination contract on then-prime minister Paul Martin has lost his bid to get drugs and weapons charges tossed out of court. Justice Jack Bellegham dismissed Vincent Brown's abuse of process application yesterday. "I find on the evidence that there was never any agreement not to prosecute," Bellegham said. Brown had sought the application because he claimed the RCMP broke a promise...

PETATLAN, Mexico Unidentified assailants lobbed a grenade inside a restaurant near Mexico's Pacific coast today, injuring about 40 people. Several people were celebrating the birthday of the local mayor's chauffeur when the incident happened in the town of Petatlan (peh-TAHT'-lahn), about 100 miles northwest of Acapulco. The mayor wasn't present. The attack is the second in three days along the Pacific coast. Late Monday night, assailants threw a grenade at a home in the resort city of Acapulco, wounding two men and three women. Acapulco Mayor Felix Salgado said the attack was carried out by members of an organized criminal...

This May will mark the 25 th anniversary of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. It took place on May 13, 1981 in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Only a few weeks earlier, on March 30, Ronald Reagan had survived an attempted assassination in Washington. There are some remarkable similarities between the two crimes. Their would-be assassins both appeared to be lone gunmen acting on personal motives. They were within six or seven yards of their victims when they opened fire. The bullets entered both bodies, moved toward the hearts, and either stopped or passed within a few...

At around 2:25 p.m. on March 30,1981 President Ronald Reagan was shot as he exited the Washington Hilton Hotel. A volley of shots rang out from the press area where 25 year-old John Hinckley Jr., who had gotten to within 15 feet of the President, was holding a .22 caliber pistol. Hinckley shot not only President Reagan, but a Washington police officer, a Secret Service agent who put himself in the line of fire to protect the President, and White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head. A Secret Service agent pushed Reagan into a limosuine...

March 30, 2006, Rudy Awakening America's mayor recalls the Reagan assassination attempt. Today is the 25th anniversary of the attempted assassination of the late president Ronald W. Reagan, and it's a day former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani remembers vividly. "The morning of March 30, 1981, the White House had a breakfast with the president for newly appointed" sub-Cabinet officials, Giuliani recalls. He had occupied a Justice Department office for the previous fortnight while awaiting Senate confirmation as Ronald Reagan's associate attorney general. "Everyone took a picture with the president," Giuliani continues. "And then we had breakfast with him...

Al Qaeda High - Alleged Bush Assassin a Graduate of Local Saudi Madrassa Stella Jatras, who normally follows the Balkans for us, reports on efforts to establish yet another Saudi Madrassa outside Washington, D.C. Nestled snuggly in the Northern hills of Virginia, lies the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), better known as Al-Qaeda High. ISA's most notable graduate - so far - is Ahmed Omar Abu Ali. Ali was arrested recently for plotting to assassinate President Bush. Ali was born in Houston and later moved to Falls Church, Va., where he was valedictorian of his class at ISA. After graduation, a...

ASSOCIATED PRESS A former high school valedictorian accused of joining al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President Bush pleaded not guilty yesterday in federal court to providing material support to terrorists and to other charges. An Aug. 22 trial date was scheduled for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23, of Falls Church. He was indicted last month and charged with six counts that would allow a maximum prison term of 80 years. Prosecutors say Mr. Abu Ali, a U.S. citizen who was valedictorian of his class at an Islamic private school in Northern Virginia, joined al Qaeda while studying overseas in...

A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a U.S. man convicted of plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush and conspiring with al Qaeda to 30 years in prison. In November, Abu Ali was found guilty of all charges in a nine-count indictment, including conspiracy to assassinate Bush, conspiring to support al Qaeda and conspiracy to hijack aircraft.

EVER since Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, shot the late Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 in St Peter’s Square in Rome, investigators have tried to solve one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries: did Agca act alone or was he obeying communist orders? This week an Italian parliamentary commission will officially conclude that Agca was part of a huge conspiracy masterminded by the GRU, the Soviet military secret service, on the orders of the politburo and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist party. The findings are already being considered by a Rome prosecutor who may...

<p>BASRA, Iraq (AP) - Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed ``Chemical Ali'' by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.</p> <p>Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment told The Associated Press that his superiors had confirmed the death of the man who is also President Saddam Hussein's first cousin.</p> <p>Jackson said the body was found along with that of his bodyguard and the head of Iraqi intelligence services in Basra.</p>

Israel tried to kill bin Laden in 1996: paper Thu Jan 26, 2006 10:57 AM ET JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's Mossad spy service and a foreign counterpart enlisted a confidante of Osama bin Laden to kill the al Qaeda leader in 1996 but the plan fell apart over a political dispute, a newspaper said on Thursday. Mossad picked up bin Laden's trail while helping U.S. and Egyptian agents probe an attempt by Islamist militants on the life of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak as he visited Ethiopia, Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth said citing security sources. According to the report, Mossad recruited...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Two bombs exploded in a bank and outside a government building Tuesday, killing six people and injuring 46 in a southwestern city with a history of violence involving members of Iran's Arab minority, the official news agency reported. The president had been expected to meet his Cabinet in the city on Tuesday but canceled the visit. Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said the attacks in Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province which borders Iraq, were foreign-inspired and related to last year's bombings in the same city. Ahvaz was the scene of bombings in June and October...

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma and leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party has suggested that the Soviet Union and its surrogate states would have been justified to kill Pope John Paul II who, he claims, was planted in the Vatican by the CIA to wrest Poland from its pro-Soviet rulers. In an interview with a Russian radio statio, on the day the Pope's would-be assassin, Ali Agca, was released from an Istanbul jail, Zhirinovsky was asked whether the KGB, had commissioned the attack. "There is no direct evidence necessarily of a Russian connection here, but...

The release from prison of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who narrowly failed in his attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, has understandably revived interest in one of the great unsolved whodunnits of the 20th century. At the time of the shooting, which took place as the Pope rode around the piazza in front of St Peter's Basilica in his Popemobile, it was initially thought that Agca had acted as a lone fanatic. He had, after all, previously written to the Pope informing him of his murderous intentions - hardly the modus operandi of the professional assassin....