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BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Relatives of a U.S. Marine who surfaced in Beirut nearly three weeks after an apparent kidnapping in Iraq appealed for understanding from fellow Arabs on Saturday, saying the Lebanese-born man emigrated and joined the Marines for financial reasons. Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun was doing well and recovering at a U.S. military hospital in Germany after being flown out of Lebanon on Friday, a Marine spokesman said. He is expected to return to his home unit in Camp Lejeune, N.C., next week. In Hassoun's native city of Tripoli, his family issued a statement saying he was forced...

OCEANSIDE – "You want to dance?" 18-year-old Nichole Merzi asked the Marine shuffling his feet alone in a corner of the club Margarita Rocks. Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun accepted and by the end of the night he was smitten by the friendly girl who wore a T-shirt with a heart and the word "Lebanon," her father's country. "I'm from Lebanon," Hassoun said, and so began a courtship that involved Merzi and her Oceanside family. Nineteen days ago, the Camp Pendleton Marine went missing from his unit in Iraq, and it was feared he had been beheaded by Iraqi insurgents. Yesterday,...

July 10, 2004 -- WASHINGTON — Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun is believed to have made phone calls during the period he went missing in Iraq — raising serious doubts among investigators about whether he was kidnapped by terrorists, military officials said yesterday. In the latest twist to an increasingly bizarre story, U.S. intelligence agencies, which have extensive listening posts in Iraq, picked up a handful of cellphone conversations involving a man investigators believe was Hassoun. The calls were made before and shortly after he went missing, military officials familiar with the investigation said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has put on hold the execution of a San Antonio man while the justices decide whether to consider issues he raised on appeal. Troy Kunkle had been scheduled to die tonight for the 1984 slaying of a Corpus Christi father of two young daughters. After he killed Stephen Horton, trial testimony showed, Kunkle recited from "No Remorse," a Metallica song: "Another day, another death, another sorrow, another breath." Kunkle has appealed on grounds that he does not deserve the death penalty. It was not immediately clear which issue or issues the high court will consider. The...

American Marine Cpl. Wassef Hassoun, held hostage in Iraq, has been freed, his brother tells CNN.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon (Reuters) - A Lebanese-born U.S. marine is alive and free after having been thought to have been decapitated by his captors in Iraq, the hostage's brother said on Tuesday. Wassef Ali Hassoun's brother Sami, speaking from the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, said his family had received word Hassoun was alive and had been released in the early hours of Tuesday, but declined to specify the source of the information. "We got solid assurances that my brother is alive and was released today," he told reporters. There has been confusion in the last several days about Hassoun's fate,...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi Islamist group said it had moved an abducted U.S. marine to "safety" on Monday after he pledged to leave the military, raising hopes for the fate of a man who had previously been reported as beheaded. Dubai-based Al Jazeera television said the announcement came in a statement from the Islamic Response Movement, the same group it reported on June 27 as claiming to have abducted Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun and threatening to kill him. Hassoun's relatives in Lebanon said the same statement had been faxed to them. Battling militants blamed for kidnappings and bombings, the...

QABATIYA, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian militants publicly executed an accused collaborator with Israel with machineguns in a West Bank town square on Friday after a throng of Palestinian onlookers called for him to die. Wild celebrations broke out among the hundreds of spectators after four gunmen from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, shot father-of-two Muhammad Rafiq Daraghmeh, 45, in Qabatiya. Militants had hustled Daraghmeh into the square before assembled townsfolk and told them: "This man, as you know ... gave information to Israel on the whereabouts of our fighters. What should his sentence...

KUWAIT CITY - Kuwait's information minister slammed Saddam Hussein for defending Iraq's 1990 invasion of the neighboring Gulf country during his Thursday court appearance in Baghdad and said the former Iraqi leader should be executed. "The criminal still believes he is the president of Iraq," Mohammed Abul-Hassan told The Associated Press in Kuwait after watching the televised images of Saddam appearing in an Iraqi court. "Just imagine if he was still ruling Iraq." Saddam is facing seven broad charges, including the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which was occupied by Iraqi forces for seven months until being liberated by a U.S.-led...

AP David Ray Harris was executed today for the murder of Mark Mays in a shootout outside Mays' Beaumont apartment. Harris, in an unrelated case, had given testimony that sent an innocent man to death row before the 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line cast doubt on the evidence. HUNTSVILLE -- A man whose false testimony sent an innocent man to death row before the 1988 documentary "The Thin Blue Line" cast doubt on the evidence was executed today for an unrelated murder. "Sir, in honor of a true American hero: Let's roll," David Ray Harris said when asked...

Britain thinks Saddam will be executed By Paul Waugh, Evening Standard Deputy Political Editor 30 June 2004 Britain accepts that Saddam Hussein is likely to be executed by the Iraqi government for war crimes, senior Government sources have revealed. Look here too! • Iraq battles for online independence The former dictator is facing what one senior Iraqi called "the trial of the century" after he was transferred from American to Baghdad legal custody today. He will remain in the physical custody of US forces. He is due to appear in court tomorrow along with 11 of his henchmen including former...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Debate raged on Islamic Web sites about the propriety of killing fellow Muslims who work for coalition forces in Iraq (news - web sites), after militants released three Turkish hostages they had threatened to behead. The Tawhid and Jihad movement of terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi announced Saturday it would kill the three Turks (news - web sites) within 72 hours unless Turkish companies stopped doing business with American forces in Iraq. On Tuesday, however, the movement released them "for the sake of Muslim brothers and mujahedeen in Turkey," according to a statement broadcast on Al-Jazeera television....

We're all now suppossed to be scared. Those Al Quaida guys must be tough. They're so tough they just executed a U.S. POW. This impresses me to no end. The execution of Keith M. Maupin has to constitute about the most stupid thing Al Quaida could have done. The one moral advantage these thugs still had was that in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib Prison, they could claim the Americans were barbarians for how they treated prisoners. Well, that argument is gone. There could be no more cowardly or pathetic an act than executing a person who has surrendered himself...

Report: Iraqi Militants Kill U.S. Soldier 57 minutes ago By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi militants killed an American soldier they have held hostage for nearly three months, saying the killing was because the U.S. government did not change its policy in Iraq (news - web sites), Al-Jazeera television said Tuesday. The report of the killing of Spc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, came hours after the United States returned sovereignty in Iraq to an interim government. The report did not say when Maupin was killed. The U.S. military said it could not...

BEIJING (AP) - Chinese authorities executed 17 people on drug charges to mark International Anti-Drugs Day, state news media said Sunday. The executions were carried out Saturday in Shanghai and Chongqing and came a day after authorities announced 11 other executions scheduled to mark the day. Among those executed Saturday, Lin Shengfu was convicted of smuggling 1.8 kilograms of heroin from Myanmar to Shanghai in 2003, Xinhua News Agency said. Lin was among 78 drug convicts whose punishments were imposed in Shanghai on Saturday, Xinhua said. It didn't identify any of the others or give details of their cases. Other...

CALCUTTA, India (AP) - Rights activists and intellectuals are campaigning to halt capital punishment in India ahead of this week's scheduled execution of a man convicted of raping and murdering a teenager. The death penalty is rare in this country. Friday's scheduled execution of Dhananjay Chatterjee, 39, will be West Bengal state's first in 13 years. Two people were hanged in the eastern state in 1991. Chatterjee was arrested and charged with raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl in the state's capital, Calcutta, in 1990. He'd been working as a security guard at the building where she lived, and was...

Dhananjay Chatterjee, who was to be hanged on Friday for the rape and murder of a teenaged girl, got a brief respite because the President has sought the Union home ministry's opinion on his mercy petition. In Kolkata, West Bengal's Advocate-General Balai Roy told mediapersons that a communique from Rashtrapati Bhavan said, "The President is considering this application for clemency." Friends, relatives and some jail inmates have pleaded that Chatterjee's death sentence be changed to life imprisonment. The state had been asked to stay the execution until the President decides on the application. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has also stayed...

Korean Internet Users Launch Hacking Attacks on Ogrish.com Korean Internet users have launched "Hacking of Fury" attacks on a website, Ogrish.com, which is trying to obtain and spread the video of Kim Sun-il¡¯s decapitation. This site posted the unabridged video of Nicholas Berg¡¯s beheading in May. The site enraged Korean Internet users by posting an advertisement looking for video of Kim's decapitation when Kim was kidnapped. The site is posting a message on its main page that Kim has been decapitated and is asking people to send in videos or photos of Kim¡¯s decapitation if they have them. In regards...

KOLKATA: Tuesday morning was the first time in his life that Dhananjoy Chatterjee really knew he would die at the end of a rope. It was the day's newspapers that shattered what little hopes he nursed of escaping the hangman's death squeeze. No, he did not cry. But he showed he finally knew that his time was up; that he would have to pay with his life for a crime which shook even weather-beaten policemen and doctors. It was not Chatterjee's fault if he had started believing that he would get away with a natural death. The state government sat...

LONDON (AP) — Iraq could execute former leader Saddam Hussein after trying him, the director of the country's war crimes tribunal system said Sunday. Salem Chalabi, who is in charge of setting up a special tribunal to try members of the ousted regime, said that once the Iraqi government gains sovereignty on June 30, it will have the power to end U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer's suspension of the death penalty in Iraq. "The Iraqi government has to affirmatively take that step to lift the suspension," Chalabi told British Broadcasting Corp. television's "Breakfast with Frost" program. "If the suspension...