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McVeigh's guilt deemed certain Letter suggesting false testimony didn't lessen his case, Ashcroft says05/03/2003 Associated Press AUSTIN – There is no doubt about the guilt of executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday, despite the disclosure of a letter sent to the Justice Department two weeks before the execution that suggested a prosecution witness gave false testimony. Prosecutors didn't disclose the false testimony allegations to Mr. McVeigh's lawyers before the execution and later tried to recover all copies of the letter in exchange for a lawsuit settlement. "The United States of America went way...

BU GHRAIB, Iraq, April 27 — They were killed perhaps three weeks ago, blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs, then shot by a government that was itself about to die. Even as American troops neared the huge prison here, Iraq continued to execute suspected spies.In the last two days, relatives looking for loved ones have unearthed 14 bodies, not inside a cemetery, but in a pit just outside Block 5, which was reserved for foreigners. Neighbors said they had found 10 more corpses on the prison grounds — like the others, all in civilian clothes and apparently killed...

<p>Fidel Castro (search) singled out America's top diplomat in Cuba as he blamed a supposed conspiracy between the U.S. government and exiles in Miami for his recent dissident crackdown and the firing-squad executions of three hijackers.</p> <p>Pope John Paul II has appealed to Castro to show clemency toward the dissidents, who were sentenced to long prison terms, the Vatican (search) said Saturday.</p>

Iraqis Discover Secret Dissident Files By NIKO PRICE .c The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The file drawers fill room after room, papers spilling out. Inside, recorded with chilling bureaucratic detail, are the informants' reports, court records, confessions and execution orders for thousands of Iraqi dissidents. The government files, shown Thursday to The Associated Press, could be the basis for Iraqis to begin to come to terms with their past - or could be the catalyst for a new wave of bloodletting. ``Saddam Hussein kept these files because he thought he would rule forever,'' said a dissident who was...

Relatives Dig Up Missing Iraq Dissidents By NIKO PRICE .c The Associated Press ABU GHRAIB, Iraq (AP) - For years there were only numbers - mound after mound in the parched dust marked by numbered metal stakes. Now this back corner of a public cemetery is filled with the wails of people who have connected those numbers to the names of loved ones who disappeared during Saddam Hussein's rule. ``They used to tell people who asked that this cemetery was for poor people who died nameless in the streets,'' said gravedigger Majid Moussa. ``But we knew it was for political...

Tied to 12 deaths, Dallas 'thrill killer' executed 04/23/2003 Associated Press HUNTSVILLE, Texas – A convicted killer believed responsible for at least a dozen slayings over a five-month period while on parole was executed Tuesday for one of five murders authorities said he committed on a single bloody night in Dallas eight years ago. Juan Rodriguez Chavez, 34, who had earned the nickname "The Thrill Killer" for the random attacks was smiling and grinning broadly as his mother, a brother and a sister came into the death chamber to watch him die. FILE / DMN Juan Rodriguez Chavez "To the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The bodies of two Iraqis who had been missing for about a month were unearthed Tuesday with their hands tied behind their backs from graves on the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison. Friends and relatives of the missing Iraqis were also looking for six others who were taken from a mosque about a month ago by Saddam's Fedayeen, a paramilitary group loyal to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). "We found one of our friends and we are trying to find the others. People told us that they were killed here," said Ali Khaled Shefeq,...

Prolific Dallas killer faces execution today 'A twisted side to him'04/22/2003 By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News One of Dallas' most prolific killers – whom authorities said derived a sadistic thrill from the more than dozen slayings attributed to him – is scheduled to die by injection Tuesday. Juan Rodriguez Chavez was a high school dropout on parole for a 1986 murder conviction when he went on a killing spree across western Dallas in 1995. The rampage peaked July 2 of that year with the shooting deaths of five people. "It struck me at the time as some...

BAGHDAD - Among the Iraqis who have recovered bodies from shallow mass graves at the country's largest prison is the family of a retired general they say disappeared after meeting with UN weapons inspectors. "We came to this place because someone told us that he may be buried somewhere here," said Abu Haldoon, the brother-in-law of retired Air Force Gen. Engineer Ali Hussein Habib. Habib retired in 1991 after heading a team of military officers in developing Iraq's chemical weapons program, Haldoon said. In early February, UN experts searching for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction interviewed the...

BUSH CONSIDERING SANCTIONS TO PUNISH CUBA FOR CRACKDOWN ON DISSIDENTS... possibility of cutting off cash payments to relatives in Cuba; halting direct flights to the island; president to issue stern warning to Castro that U.S. will not tolerate another exodus of rafters... MORE...

<p>This is terrible and barbaric news, but not unexpected. Pray for these fallen, whoever they may be.</p> <p>March 30, 2003 -- At least one of the bodies of the four American soldiers discovered in a shallow grave was "brutalized and mutilated," Pentagon sources revealed yesterday. The corpses were unearthed in the vicinity of the "hospital" at Nasiriyah where U.S. Marines found evidence that the Iraqis had operated a torture chamber.</p>

A court in Pakistan today convicted four men of organising last year's suicide bomb attack on the US consulate in Karachi. Two of the men were given death sentences by the anti-terrorism court, with the other two sentenced to life imprisonment. A fifth man was acquitted, Reuters reported. The judge, Syed Aalay Maqbool Rizvi, found the suspected Islamic militants guilty of filling a vehicle with explosives and ramming it into the perimeter wall of the consulate during the morning rush hour on June 14 last year. Twelve Pakistanis were killed in the attack. The explosion blew in the windows of...

The summary trials and executions of three accused Cuban hijackers Friday by the Cuban government were predictably condemned across the board by Miami's Cuban exile community.But there may be a local casualty that's less obvious: moderate viewpoints among many exiles, who until Friday had been leaning closer to dialogue with Cuba.''We didn't shut the door, Castro did,'' said Carlos Saladrigas, chairman of the Cuba Study Group, a moderate exile group that encourages increased communication between Cubans on the island and in Miami.``All I'm saying is that we are not going to shut the door. Let the Cuban government shut the...

U.S. officials believe that Cuba's execution of three ferry hijackers Friday, coupled with the biggest wave of repression against peaceful dissidents in more than a decade, may be an effort to strengthen political control by the regime of President Fidel Castro in the face of growing difficulties. ''I think the guy is scared,'' a well-placed U.S. official in Washington said. It is not unusual for Castro to step up repression in times of economic or political crisis as a way of sending a strong signal to potential opponents that his regime will not tolerate any insubordination, other officials said. Indeed,...

Three men who hijacked a passenger ferry and attempted to steer it to Florida last week were executed by firing squad at dawn Friday after summary trials, infuriating the U.S. government, international human rights organizations and Cuban Americans in Miami.The men were charged with ''very grave acts of terrorism'' and sentenced at trials Tuesday, according to an official statement read on Cuban state television. The men appealed -- but the sentences were swiftly upheld by Cuba's Supreme Tribunal and ruling Council of State and carried out shortly thereafter, the statement said.No one was hurt in the hijacking, ultimately foiled by...

HAVANA (AFP) - Amid an international outcry over its crackdown on dissidents, Cuba sent a clear message to anyone who would destabilize the regime from within, summarily executing three men who tried to hijack a ferry to get to the United States. An official statement said the men were tried "with full respect for their ... basic rights," convicted Tuesday and shot dead at dawn Friday. Another four of the men involved in the hijacking of the ferry with some 40 people aboard were sentenced to life in jail, and one man to 30 years in prison. The three women...

<p>KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo -- More than 950 civilians have been killed in a massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations confirmed Monday.</p> <p>The massacre in and around the Roman Catholic parish of Drodro, near the Uganda border, is thought to have happened last Thursday, days after warring Congolese factions signed a political settlement to end several years of conflict.</p>

HUNDREDS of bodies have been discovered in a makeshift morgue by British soldiers in what may prove the first evidence of scores of execution and torture centres across Iraq. The skulls, bundles of bone and scraps of clothing were dumped in plastic bags and row upon row of unsealed hardboard coffins in an abandoned Iraqi military base on the outskirts of Al Zubayr. Every one of the victims had been shot in the head and many had been mutilated, it was claimed. Elsewhere in the country, British troops found records of ear amputations carried out on Iraqi civilians who had...

<p>IRBIL, Iraq (AP) --  Deserters from the Iraqi army say they were beaten by their superiors and one says he saw 10 fellow soldiers executed by a commander, according to a Human Rights Watch report.</p> <p>Some of the 26 soldiers interviewed by the group said officers frequently warned of executions if they tried to escape, telling them during air strikes to stand fast and "die like men."</p>

BRIEFING: AT WAR WITH IRAQBY WORLD TRIBUNE.COM WITH MIDDLE EAST NEWSLINE Day 17 — April 5, 3003See Previous Briefings: Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Saddam regime executes senior officers LONDON — Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is said to have ordered the execution of several senior officers who had refused to kill Iraqi civilians in a dirty tricks operation. The Iraqi National Congress said four Republican Guard officers were executed for refusing to attack a street in Baghdad and ensure the deaths of a large number of civilians....