Monday, January 30, 2012

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

9:08 AM McGhori

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...
Read more »

Posted in:

Pakistanis to visit India over Mumbai prosecution

4:13 AM McGhori

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...
Read more »

Posted in:

Bangladesh court orders seizure of disputed school book

1:59 AM McGhori

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...
Read more »

Posted in:

Syrian troops move to retake Damascus suburbs

1:56 AM McGhori

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...
Read more »

Posted in:

UN nuclear team in Tehran on three-day mission

1:55 AM McGhori

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’...
Read more »

Posted in:

Pentagon clarifies Panetta’s remarks

1:54 AM McGhori

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...
Read more »

Posted in: