Two found guilty of ‘terrorist plot’ in Danish cartoon case

OSLO: An Oslo court on Monday sentenced two men to prison for planning to bomb the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), in Norway’s first-ever guilty verdict for “plotting to commit a terrorist act.”

Norwegian national Mikael Davud, a member of China’s Uighur minority considered the mastermind behind the plot against the Jyllands-Posten daily, was sentenced to seven years behind bars.

Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak, an Iraqi Kurd residing in Norway, meanwhile received a three-and-a-half-year prison term.

According to the prosecution, the two men had in liaison with al Qaeda planned to use explosives against the offices of the Danish newspaper and to murder Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist behind the most controversial of the 12 drawings of the Muslim Prophet published in September 2005.

Westergaard’s drawing, which has earned him numerous death threats and an assassination attempt, showed the Prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The prosecution had demanded prison sentences of 11 and five years respectively.

“There is no doubt that it was Davud who took the initiative in the preparations for a terrorist act and that he was the central character,” the three judges said in their ruling.

“The court also believes that it was he himself who would have carried out the terrorist attack since he has explained that he planned to lay out the explosives himself,” they added.

The judges also said the prosecution had proven “beyond any doubt that Davud knowingly and voluntarily plotted with al Qaeda to carry out a bomb attack against Jyllands-Posten with a bomb that was so powerful that he understood human life could be lost.” The court did not however find it proven that the men had planned to assassinate Westergaard.

According to Norway’s intelligence service PST, Davud, a short, bearded 40-year-old, received training in making and using explosives from al Qaeda members and sympathisers in Pakistan’s region of Waziristan between November 2008 and July 2010.

Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed provoked violent and even deadly protests across much of the Muslim world.

On Monday, the Danish paper refused to comment on the verdict in Oslo.

David Jakobsen, an Uzbek arrested at the same time as Davud and Bujak in July 2010, was meanwhile acquitted Monday of the most serious charges but was sentenced to four months behind bars for helping the two others to procure the materials needed to create the explosives.

The three men had all pleaded not guilty to the charges when the trial opened and their lawyers asked for their acquittal.

Davud however did confess to planning an attack, but said it was directed at Chinese interests in Norway and not at Jyllands-Posten.

The member of the oppressed Uighur minority in China said he had been acting out of purely personal motives and that he had manipulated the two others so they would help him get hold of chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, which he needed to build a bomb.

Bujak, 39, meanwhile admitted that he had spoken with Davud about the possibility of punishing Jyllands-Posten for the cartoons, but insisted the comments were vague and did not constitute a terrorist plot.

“Bujak helped Davud with the preparations … and there is no doubt that he was very much involved,” the judges ruled, nonetheless lending credence to his insistence he had had no intention of participating in the attack itself.

As for Jakobsen, who contacted police voluntarily in November 2009 and was the only one of the three to have been released from custody until the verdict, he categorically denied any intention to participate in the plot.

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Pakistanis to visit India over Mumbai prosecution

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani investigators and lawyers will visit India next month to gather more evidence for the prosecution of seven suspects linked to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, they said Monday.

Pakistan indicted seven alleged perpetrators over the attacks but says that its own commission needs to gather more evidence in India.

Delhi has called for “decisive” action from Pakistan against the perpetrators of the attacks and accuses its efforts so far of being a “facade”, saying it has already handed over enough evidence to convict the accused men.

“If all goes well, the visit will take place between February 4 to February 10,” senior public prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali told AFP.

Both sides, he said, agreed that the Pakistani commission could visit India between February 1 to February 10 to cross examine witnesses of the carnage in which 166 people were killed.

But Ali said there is a “possibility that the visit may be delayed” by the death of the lawyer representing alleged mastermind, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

The deceased’s son, Khwaja Harris Ahmad, has applied to replace his father and the issue would be taken up by the court on February 4, Ali said.

The commission is made up of two senior prosecutors, a director from the Federal Investigation Agency and five lawyers representing the suspects.

“We can proceed to India before February 10 if our authorities address all the legal requirements,” Ahmad told AFP.

Pakistan had wanted Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving gunman from the Mumbai attacks, to testify.

But Ahmad said Kasab, who has appealed a death sentence in India, was not included on the list of witnesses whom the panel wish to cross-examine.

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Bangladesh court orders seizure of disputed school book

DHAKA: A Bangladesh court has ordered millions of copies of a school textbook to be seized in a dispute over credit for the nation’s 1971 independence struggle, a state prosecutor said Monday.

The high court in Dhaka instructed police to confiscate the book, a compilation of essays taught in high schools, for “distortion” in its account of how the country then known as East Pakistan emerged as Bangladesh.

“The court ruled that the book wrongly said major general Ziaur Rahman was the proclaimer of the country’s independence in 1971,” deputy attorney general Altaf Hossain told AFP.

Bangladesh’s independence remains a bitter political issue as Rahman’s widow is now leader of the opposition, while the country’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the father of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

“Police have been ordered to confiscate all copies of the books from schools, shops and markets in 15 days,” Hossain said.

The writer, editors and head of the government’s textbook authority have been summoned to the court on February 2, he added.

An angry, decades-long debate about who actually called on the population to launch armed resistance against Pakistan still divides national politics in Bangladesh.

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Syrian troops move to retake Damascus suburbs

DAMASCUS: Syrian troops backed by tanks launched an assault to retake Damascus suburbs from rebels on Sunday, activists said, a day after the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission in Syria because of worsening violence.

They said 19 civilians and rebels were killed as the soldiers in buses and armoured personnel carriers moved in at dawn, along with at least 50 tanks.

The forces of President Bashar al-Assad pushed into the Ghouta area on the eastern edge of Damascus to take part in an offensive in the suburbs of Saqba, Hammouriya and Kfar Batna.

Tanks advanced into the centre of Saqba and Kfar Batna, the activists said, in a move to flush out rebel fighters who had taken over districts just a few kilometres from Mr Assad’s centre of power.

“It’s urban war. There are bodies in the street,” said one activist, speaking from Kfar Batna. Activists said 14 civilians and five insurgents from the rebel ‘Free Syrian Army’ were killed there and in other suburbs.

The escalating bloodshed prompted the Arab League to suspend the work of its monitors on Saturday. Arab foreign ministers, who have urged Mr Assad to step down and make way for a government of national unity, will discuss the crisis on Feb 5.

A Syrian government official was quoted by state media as saying Damascus was surprised by the Arab League decision to suspend monitoring, which would “put pressure on (UN Security Council) deliberations with the aim of calling for foreign intervention and encouraging armed groups to increase violence”.

Mr Assad blames the violence on foreign-backed militants.

State news agency SANA reported funerals on Saturday for 28 soldiers and security force members killed by “armed terrorist groups” in Homs, Hama, Deraa, Deir al-Zor and Damascus province.

Another 24 soldiers were reported killed on Sunday.

SANA said six soldiers were killed in a bombing southwest of Damascus, while the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said 18 soldiers were killed in two attacks by army deserters in the northern province of Idlib.

The SOHR claimed in statements received in Nicosia that at least 66 people were killed on Sunday across the country, including 26 civilians.

Its head, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP that the clashes near Damascus were the fiercest since the revolt broke out in mid-March.

The ‘Free Syrian Army’ said 50 more officers and soldiers turned their back on Mr Assad and in a “steady progression of fighting towards the capital” clashed with army regulars only 8km from Damascus.

“The more the regime uses the army, the more soldiers defect,” Ahmed al-Khatib, a local rebel council member on the Damascus outskirts, told AFP.

Other rebel sources reported heavy fighting in Rankus, 45km from Damascus, and heightened tension in Hama, further to the north.

Rankus was “besieged for the past five days and is being randomly shelled since dawn by tanks and artillery rounds,” rebel Abu Ali al-Rankusi said.

In Hama, pro-regime snipers were deployed on the rooftops, according to activists, with security forces leaving “bodies of dead people with their hands tied behind their backs” on the streets across several neighbourhoods.—Reuters/AFP

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UN nuclear team in Tehran on three-day mission

TEHRAN: UN atomic watchdog officials began a visit to Iran on Sunday to discuss Tehran’s suspect nuclear drive, as Iranian lawmakers held off retaliatory action against a looming EU oil embargo.

The three-day International Atomic Energy Agency mission is to address evidence suggesting Iran’s activities including nuclear weapons research.

“In particular we hope that Iran will engage with us on the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme,” Herman Nackaerts, the IAEA’s chief inspector leading the delegation, told reporters in Vienna as he left.

“We are looking forward to the start of a dialogue, a dialogue that is overdue since very long.”

Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, called the visit a ‘test’ for the UN agency, according to the website of the official IRIB state broadcaster.

If the IAEA officials were ‘professional’, then “the path for cooperation will open up”, he said.

“But if they deviate and become a tool (of the West), then the Islamic republic will be forced to reflect and consider a new framework” for cooperation, Mr Larijani added.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi welcomed the visit.

“I’m hopeful and very optimistic about this trip of the high delegation of the IAEA to Iran,” he told reporters in Addis Ababa, where he was attending an African Union summit.

“Right from the beginning we have indicated explicitly, expressed explicitly, that Iran is never, ever after nuclear weapons,” he said.

Iran, which maintains its programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes, is increasingly furious at western measures aimed at making it halt uranium enrichment.

It has defiantly stepped up enrichment at a new bomb-proof bunker in Fordo near the holy city of Qom.

It has also reacted fiercely to new sanctions targeting its oil and finance sectors, notably the European Union’s announcement of a ban on all Iranian oil imports within the next five months.

But Iranian lawmakers on Sunday delayed taking action on a proposed bill to immediately cut oil exports to Europe in retaliation for the EU embargo.

“No bill has been designed nor has it come to the parliament,” energy commission spokesman Emad Hosseini told Mehr news agency, adding he hoped negotiations on preparing the bill would be finalised before Friday.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told Welt am Sonntag newspaper the EU was resolute on preventing Iran from “acquiring an atomic weapon.”

“We will find ways in the EU to compensate for delivery stoppages” of oil, he said.

Iran, Opec’s second-biggest producer, has repeatedly brandished threats to use oil as a weapon if it is backed up against the wall.

Officials have warned they could even close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint at the entrance to the Gulf, in a move analysts say could send oil prices soaring by 50 per cent.

Saudi Arabia has promised to make up for any shortfall should Iranian oil be curbed, but it too depends on the strait.

The United States, which has called any attempt to close the strait a ‘red line’ not to be crossed, is reportedly planning to send a large floating base for commando teams to the Middle East.

It already has two aircraft carrier groups in and near the Gulf, and has broadened arms deals to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.—AFP

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Pentagon clarifies Panetta’s remarks

WASHINGTON: The United States still believes that Pakistani officials were unaware about the presence of Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, says the Pentagon while commenting on Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta’s statement that somebody “somewhere probably had that knowledge”.

Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said the interview, which quoted Mr Panetta as making this claim was old and the US was uncertain about the presence of Osama in Pakistan at the time of the interview.

“Secretary Panetta made clear his belief — which other senior US officials have also expressed — that Osama bin Laden had some kind of support network within Pakistan,” Mr Little said.

“The secretary indicated in the same interview that he had seen no evidence that Bin Laden was supported by the Pakistani government or that senior Pakistani officials knew he was hiding in the Abbottabad compound. Since the Bin Laden operation, Secretary Panetta and his colleagues in the government have been working hard to improve US-Pakistani relations.”

Diplomatic observers in Washington, however, see Mr Panetta’s interview against the backdrop of the ongoing tensions between the United States and Pakistan.

They believe that both countries are entering a decisive phase for redefining their relations after months of tensions, which started with the May 2 US raid on Bin Laden’s compound and reached unprecedented heights with the November 26 Nato strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in Mohmand.

Pakistan’s new ambassador to the United States, Sherry Rehman, also hinted at this in her first address to the Pakistani-American community this weekend.

“A comprehensive parliamentary review, now in its final phase, will establish new principles for this relationship, resetting the bilateral relationship in a transparent, consistent and predictable manner,” she said.

“The Pakistani government is involved in an internal review of its relations with the United States, and we will wait for them to complete this process,” said US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland while stressing that Washington wanted to rebuild a strong relationship with Islamabad, “which is beneficial to both”.

Diplomatic observers in Washington believe that both sides are now spelling out various issues they want settled before a final framework for the new relationship is defined.

They point out that in the same interview in which Mr Panetta discussed the support network that Osama bin Laden might have had in Pakistan, he also emphasised that Islamabad would “ultimately” have to release Dr Shakil Afridi, a physician who helped the CIA trace the Al Qaeda chief.

“Dr Afridi’s release may be part of the demands the United States would like to be met before a new relationship is finalised,” said a diplomatic observer, “or he may be a bargaining chip for something bigger. We do not know yet”.

Ambassador Rehman, however, did not get into “details” discussed in Washington’s diplomatic circles.

Instead, she stressed an important point that she spoke as a representative of “one united government” including the country’s defence establishment.

“The elected government will stand firm in its resolve to protect our military, when our soldiers are martyred in the line of duty, as they were on the border post of Salala (on Nov 26,) which has triggered a review in our relationship,” she said.

This surprised many in the audience who were not used to seeing the Pakistani ambassador defend the country’s armed forces.

“What we are doing here is to tell our American friends that our future relationship will look after the interests of all government institutions, including the armed forces,” the diplomat said.

“We want to remain friends with the United States and we want a strong relationship that is equal, sovereign, based on mutual respect and shared values,” Ambassador Rehman explained.

She said she had not come to Washington with a grievance narrative, but to explain Pakistan’s desire to become economic and political partner of the United States and not just a battlefield ally.

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