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Tuesday,
November 13, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Four Western scribes die in Taliban ambush
When Pak
offered to help Taliban on nukes Pak
‘jehadis’ desert Taliban Benazir to
be retried: Pervez No plan to
step down: Musharraf |
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Flash
flood toll 575 in Algeria Koreas
try to close gaps
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Four Western scribes die in Taliban ambush Dushanbe, November 12 Ambassador for the Afghan government-in-exile in Dushanbe, said Ibragim Hikhmat, confirmed that two French reporters and a German photographer died in the attack yesterday, 30 km from the city of Taloqan. He said a fourth journalist, possibly American, who was travelling with them on a tank, had also been killed. The bodies of the journalists were due to be brought by helicopter to the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, Mr Hikhmat added. Some 30 Northern Alliance troops were also killed or wounded in the ambush, according to the envoy. The Herald’s reporter in Afghanistan said the three journalists killed included French radio reporter Johanne Sutton, another French woman and a German man who fell from an armoured personnel carrier when it was attacked. Herald reporter Paul McGeough said he was among the six reporters who came under mortar and machine gun attack as they sat on the roof of a Northern Alliance armoured personnel carrier. The vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade which did not explode on impact but exploded when it hit the ground. The vehicle turned quickly and the three reporters tumbled off the roof. “Three of us clung on for grim death and we survived,” said McGeough. The Herald said the armoured personnel carrier had left the three journalists behind and that their bodies were later found by the Alliance troops. Radio France International (RFI) has said Ms Sutton (34), was on an assignment for the RFI when she was caught in an ambush and killed. The Herald said the others killed were a French woman who worked for Luxembourg-based radio RTL and a male reporter for the German Magazine Stern. PESHAWAR: Pakistani journalist Irfan Qureshi has said — the day after release from a month in Taliban custody — that Afghanistan’s ruling militia were in a state of utter confusion. “Practically, nothing is going on there, chaos is ruling everywhere,” said Qureshi on Sunday, who had been held in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad after being arrested with French reporter Michel Peyrard and another Pakistani journalist, Mukkaram Khan, on October 9. Qureshi, who was freed on Saturday, said his month in detention had been marked by uncertainty and contradictory signals from his Taliban captors. Peyrard was freed on November 3, while Khan is still in detention in Afghanistan. Qureshi described a traumatic first day after their arrest when the three journalists were paraded in public as US spies. “That hour, that was very horrible,” Qureshi said.
Reuters |
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Is the wrong country being bombed? London Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. ‘The Observer’ has learnt that Atta’s talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent links between Iraq, the September 11 hijackers and Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network. Senior US intelligence sources say that the CIA has `credible information’ that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the USA. They are believed to be Atta’s closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the ‘German cell’ who lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s. In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: ‘Yes, you cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey, weather and other topics. But I am not so sure. In Washington and Whitehall, a furious political battle is raging over the scope of the anti-terrorist war, and whether it should eventually include action against Iraq. According to the Foreign Office, British Ministers have responded to this prospect with `horror’, arguing that an attack on Saddam Hussein would cause terrible civilian casualties and cement anti-Western anger across Middle East. Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, heads a clique of determined, powerful hawks, most of them outside the administration — among them James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. The doves argue that an Al-Qaida-Iraq link is improbable, given the sharp ideological differences between Saddam’s secular Baathism and Islamic fundamentalism. They also say that claims of Iraqi involvement are being driven by the agenda of the hawks — a group which has for years been seeking to finish the job left undone at the end of the Gulf war in 1991. Nevertheless, Saddam does not lack a plausible motive: revenge for his expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, and for the continued sanctions and Western bombing of his country ever since. US investigators have traced the movements of the 19 hijackers going back years, and have amassed a detailed picture of who did what inside the conspiracy. Yet what lay beyond the hijackers is an intelligence black hole. If they had a support network in America, none of its members has been traced, and among the hundreds of telephone records and emails the investigators have recovered, nothing gets close to identifying those ultimately responsible. It still seems almost certain, intelligence sources say, that parts of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network actively backed the conspiracy: about half of the estimated US dollars 500,000 the hijackers used reportedly came from Al-Qaida sources, while some of the terrorists are believed to have passed through bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, evidence is emerging of direct Iraqi links with the US hijackers in particular, and with radical Islamic terror groups in general. The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany, was the hijackers’ overall leader. He personally handled more than $ 100,000 of the plot’s funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 — all of which appear to have had some operational significance. Investigators lay stress on a captured Al-Qaida manual which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means. The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy’s `muscle’, Saudi Arabians who entered the USA at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts’ passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by Al-Qaida. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that Al-Qaida is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. If the emerging evidence of Iraqi involvement in 11 September becomes clearer or more conclusive, the consequences will be immense. In the words of a State Department spokesman after Powell’s briefing by the Czech leader on Friday: ‘If there is clear evidence connecting the World Trade Center attacks to Iraq, that would be a very grave development.’ At worst, the anti-terrorist coalition would currently be bombing the wrong country. At best, the world would see that some of President Bush’s closest advisers — his father, Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney, to name but three — made a catastrophic error in 1991, when they ended the Gulf war without toppling Saddam. The case for trying to remove him now might well seem unanswerable. In that scenario, the decisions Western leaders have had to make in the past two months would seem like a trivial prelude.
The Observer, London |
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When Pak offered to help Taliban on
nukes Washington, November 12 Fears of an Indian attack on nuclear sites were so great in the summer of 1999, after Pakistani-supported guerrillas invaded Indian territory at Kargil in Jammu and Kashmir, that military officers secretly contacted the Taliban about moving some nuclear assets to Afghanistan, according to a recently retired Pakistani military officer familiar with the talks. “The option was actively discussed with the Taliban after some indications emerged that India may open hostilities at the eastern border,” the official was quoted as saying. “The Taliban accepted the requests with open arms.” The official also said the talks were “exploratory” and that no nuclear-related assets were actually placed in Afghanistan. At the time, Pakistan’s military and intelligence services had close relations with the Taliban, providing training, weapons and other support. Pakistan’s nuclear programme has always been under the control of the military, which has often hidden its most basic details from civilian leaders. In the weeks since Pakistan joined the US campaign against terrorism, said the Post, General Musharraf ordered an emergency redeployment of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to at least six new secret locations and has reorganised military oversight of the nuclear forces. Another reason for the movement, the report said, was to remove them from airbases and corridors that might be used by the USA in an attack on Afghanistan. General Musharraf also created a new Strategic Planning Division within Pakistan’s nuclear programme, headed by a three-star general, to oversee operations. This decision, not previously disclosed, was part of the shuffle of top military and intelligence leaders just hours before the US bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7 to flush out terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden. The shake-up was designed to sideline officers considered too sympathetic to the Taliban or other extremist religious factions, officials said. Although Pakistan’s nuclear programme remains one of the world’s most secretive, the country is believed to have the materials to assemble between 30 and 40 warheads and has test-fired intermediate-range missiles that potentially could be used to launch them, according to intelligence reports and nuclear experts. Pakistan and India tested underground nuclear devices in 1998 and many security experts view the two countries as the globe’s most worrisome nuclear flashpoints.
IANS |
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Pak ‘jehadis’ desert Taliban Kabul, November 12 The group said they had entered the country about 10 days ago after the fundamentalist Taliban militia allowed in the Pashtoon tribesmen from Pakistan’s semi-autonomous border tribal areas. “They were bombing constantly and we seemed unable to stop it,” the group leader told newsmen before leaving Kabul. “We were told by the Taliban to leave and we are going back to our village in Bajaur,” he said referring to the tribal agency in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province from which thousands of tribesmen have crossed into Afghanistan in the last few weeks. Carrying their assault rifles and small bags of belongings, the bearded fighters ranging in age from 30 to 60, boarded a coach to drive them back home. The group said their 10 days at the front line had been frightening as U.S. jets raided repeatedly, dropping their huge bombs. Armed with rocket launchers and swords, thousands of pro-Taliban Pakistanis have crossed into Afghanistan to wage “jehad”, or holy war, against the USA. Mocking Pakistan’s support for the US war against the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden, firebrand Islamic leader Maulana Sufi Mohammad, head of the radical Tehrik Nifaze Shariat Mohammadi group had won permission from the fundamentalist militia that rules Afghanistan to send in the tribesmen.
Reuters |
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Benazir to be retried: Pervez New York, November 12 Musharraf’s remarks to a U.S. TV programme, “Meet the Press,” come just two days after Pakistan’s Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider told reporters in Karachi that Bhutto was unlikely to be arrested if she returns to Pakistan to present her defence in court. Bhutto, who was convicted of corruption in Pakistan in 1999, lives in self-exile in London and Dubai. Haider did not categorically commit that she would not be arrested, explaining if she were ready to cooperate with the court on her return, there would be no reason for her arrest. “She has been Prime Minister twice. She will not run away,” he said, pointing out that only those people were arrested who were likely to run away to avoid court proceedings. An Interior Ministry spokesman later said Bhutto would be treated strictly in accordance with the law and added that Haider’s remarks were general in tone. Bhutto filed an appeal through her lawyers last week, seeking a return to Pakistan to present her defence in person on corruption charges. Bhutto, who has been elected Prime Minister twice — from 1988-1990 and again from 1993-1996 — was convicted on corruption charges in 1999 while she was outside Pakistan. She was sentenced to five years in prison by an accountability court. The Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned that conviction last year following wide ranging allegations that the then government of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had interfered in the conduct of the trial and sought to pressurise the judge.
— Indo-Asian News Service |
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No plan
to step down: Musharraf Washington, November 12 General Musharraf’s remarks were the first time he explicitly counted out including the presidency in October 2002 national and provincial election. “I myself will remain as the President, and that is for sure, beyond 2002,” he said yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” General Musharraf said participating in election would undermine his status as a unifying figure. “I would rather like to remain in my position as implementing something for the good of the country. I’ll be a neutral figurehead.” Opposition parties fear that General Musharraf will rewrite the nation’s constitution before the elections to broaden the President’s power. Before September 11, General Musharraf had been under pressure from the West to democratise Pakistan.
AP |
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Flash flood toll 575 in Algeria Algiers, November 12 Interior Ministry figures, provided by Algerian state radio and news agency, said at least 316 people were injured. Most of the victims were in Algiers’ district of Bab-el-Oued, where residents were swept away by raging muddy waters cascading down a main road, buried under the rubble or their homes or trapped in their cars. As authorities mobilised all state rescue services, only 34 bodies were found since yesterday.
Reuters |
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Koreas try to close gaps Seoul, November 12 The South’s Unification Ministry said talks between ministers of the capitalist South Korea and the communist North Korea would be extended one day until tomorrow with Seoul pressing Pyongyang for agreement on the original agenda of reviving the exchanges. An objection from the North to the emergency alert against terrorism South Korea put in place after the September 11 attacks on the USA has stalled ministerial negotiations in the North Korean resort of Mount Kumgang. North Korea has postponed a series of promised meetings, saying Seoul’s security alert since the suicide attacks on America has made South Korea unsafe as a venue for contacts. South Korea has rejected the complaints as irrelevant, but North Korea has repeated its demand that the alert be lifted every day since talks opened on Friday. Officials were meeting informally on Monday to iron out the dispute, pool reports said. The South Korean government has come under fire in the media and from political opponents for making unilateral concessions to North Korea. Reports by South Korean journalists attending the talks said the two sides agreed in principle to hold the fourth round of reunions of separated families at Mount Kumgang in December. In return, the South offered to discuss 3,00,000 tonne of grain aid.
Reuters |
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A
French journalist who worked for Radio France
International was killed in an ambush in northeastern
Afghanistan.
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