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Kandahar ‘chief’ hijacker behind plot to abduct Rahul Gandhi Pranab Dhal Samanta Terror: Three held in UP say they got ‘personal guidance’ in Pak from Ibrahim Athar, Jaish boss Masood Azhar’s brother NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 18: Eight years after he had India on tenterhooks for a week, IC-814 principal hijacker Ibrahim Athar, referred to as “chief” during the hijack, has reappeared on the Indian terror scene as the mastermind, facilitator and trainer of the foiled Jaish-e-Mohammed operation to abduct Rahul Gandhi. Younger brother of Jaish head Maulana Masood Azhar, the dangerous Athar is learnt to have imparted training to the...

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists. In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the...

KARACHI: Recent attacks on Christians and Westerners in Pakistan were part of a coordinated campaign by Pakistani Islamic militant groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, The Washington Post said on Saturday, quoting military and security sources. Hours after a grenade attack on a chapel at a Presbyterian hospital killed three people on Friday morning, top security aides to President Pervez Musharraf told him they had intelligence reports that factions of at least two banned Pakistani groups had joined forces for attacks on Westerners and Christians, senior officials familiar with the briefing said. Security officials said that the top...

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's military President Pervez Musharraf narrowly escaped a "terrorist" attack Sunday after a bomb tore up a section of road in the northern city of Rawalpindi a minute after his convoy passed, officials said. "The president's motorcade passed a minute before the blast," a military spokesman, Major General Shaukat Sultan, said. "He is safe and sound." "It is a terrorist act," Sultan said. "Whether it was an assassination attempt or not cannot be said until after the investigations." Musharraf incensed militant groups by abandoning Pakistan's support for neighboring Afghanistan's ousted Taliban rulers and backing the U.S.-led "war...

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...

Journalist perpetrates online terror hoax By DAN VERTON ComputerWorld, FEBRUARY 06, 2003 Editor's note: An online story yesterday by Computerworld reporting on terrorist claims of responsibility for having authored the Slammer worm was based on a hoax. The security reporter who wrote the story, Dan Verton, explains in this first-person account how he and others were misled by a U.S. journalist who pretended to be someone named "Abu Mujahid." The original story has been removed from Computerworld's Web site. There's an old Italian proverb that says, "Those who sleep with dogs will rise with fleas." That's the situation in which...

KARACHI: Pakistani police said on Saturday they had detained three members of a radical Islamic militant group for the May suicide car-bombing that killed 11 French engineers and three Pakistanis here. Three suspected members of Harkat ul-Mujahideen al-Alaami, an offshoot of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, are expected to face police charges in the coming days over the bombing outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. "We believe the three suspects are involved in the Sheraton Hotel blast in which 11 Frenchmen and three Pakistanis were killed," an officer said. He declined to identify the suspects. "A police anti-terrorist wing is interrogating them...

KARACHI (Reuters) - A Pakistani court has issued arrest warrants for six fugitives suspected of being involved in a car bomb attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi that killed 12 people and injured 20, defence lawyers have said. Three leading suspects in the attack -- Mohammad Imran, Mohammad Hanif and Mohammad Ashraf -- have already been arrested and appeared in an anti-terrorism court amid tight security on Saturday. The main suspects and an inspector of Pakistan's paramilitary Rangers, Waseem Akhtar, were charged with both the June 14 bombing and conspiracy to kill President Pervez Musharraf. "The court today issued...

Fifteen thousand feet high in Kashmir and armed with a Kalashnikov–that was not how friends thought Jibreel al-Amreekee would end up. All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. A soft-spoken youth with long dreadlocks, al-Amreekee had a passion for sky diving and reading books on the world's religions. One religion that drew his interest was Islam, and while he was at North Carolina Central University, that interest grew into a calling. By 1997, he had converted and was spending his...