Negative Blogs

Greek police have arrested four people after uncovering a plot to send parcel bombs to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and three foreign embassies in Athens.

The parcel addressed to Mr Sarkozy was found in the hands of two suspected far-left militants after a similar package intended for the Mexican embassy in the Greek capital detonated inside a courier company and injured an employee.

Police said one of the four people arrested was a suspected member of an obscure group that specialises in arson attacks on offices and homes of politicians, Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei.

From a postal slip found on the suspects, the police tracked down and exploded a second parcel at a neighbouring courier company, addressed to the Dutch embassy.

Two more devices found on the detainees were intended for the French President and the Belgian embassy, the police said.

The Dutch foreign ministry said it had been informed by the Greek authorities “and remain in close contact with them.”

Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei had also planted a small explosive device in a bin outside the Greek parliament in January, after police claimed to have arrested several of the group’s members in raids around the capital.

Attacks on government and police targets are relatively frequent in Greece and are commonly attributed to left-wing extremists.

By telegraph.co.uk

A police explosive expert prepares a controlled blast near a courier service in the Athens suburb of Pangrati Photo: AP

At least 32 killed in multiple attacks in Karachi where recent unrest is raising fears of instability.

At least 32 people have been killed in shootouts in Pakistan’s southern city of Karachi, police have said.

In the deadliest attack on Tuesday, at least 13 people were shot dead when six armed men on motorbikes opened fire in the Shershah Kabari market.

“The attackers came on motorcycles and started indiscriminate firing,” Raja Riyasat, a police official, told the AFP news agency.

Several others were injured and Arif Razzaq, a second police official, said the death toll may rise as some of the wounded were in critical condition.

Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said the scene of the attack was a scrap market normally frequented by labourers from other parts of the country.

“This would have been a busy area because in Pakistan, scrap dealers make a lot of money,” he said. “It’s a country where everyone cannot afford to buy brand new automobile parts.”

He said sporadic gunfights were ongoing in different parts of the city and had resulted 19 more deaths.

Election violence

About 60 people have been killed in Karachi since Saturday when violence erupted ahead of a by-election to replace a provincial legislator murdered in August.

It was not clear whether Tuesday’s attacks were related to that violence.

Our correspondent said the recent unrest stemmed from a political power struggle.

“For the last few months, various political parties have been battling for control of Karachi.

“The Awami National Party and MQM [Muttahida Qaumi Movement] are fighting what appears to be a turf war,” he said. The Awami National Party is MQM’s main rival for political posts and control of the city.

“The people of Karachi have been held hostage by these political groups.”

The MQM, which is the dominant political force in Karachi, has stepped up pressure on the government to stem the last days’ violence, saying its workers were among those killed.

Some sources said the MQM threatened over the weekend to pull out of the federal coalition government with the Pakistan People’s Party to protest the violence.

The move, which party sources say was put “on hold” on assurances of strong action to contain the violence, could lead to the government losing its National Assembly majority, or even its downfall if the MQM sides with the opposition.

Karachi has long been plagued by political and ethnic violence and there is concern that the city is being used as a haven for the Taliban. Some violence in the city is also linked to criminal gangs.

At the same time, Karachi is the commercial capital of Pakistan. It generates 68 per cent of the government’s revenue and 25 per cent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product.

By aljazeera.net

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Around 50 people have been killed in Karachi since Saturday when violence erupted ahead of a by-election [AFP

More than five years after the attacks brought terror to the capital, bereaved families will finally have the chance to ask officials questions about whether their loved ones could have been saved.

The inquest, which gets under way at the Royal Courts of Justice today, will have a wide-ranging remit to examine whether the emergency services’ response was adequate and whether MI5 and the police could have prevented the 2005 atrocities.

Four suicide bombers armed with home-made explosives packed into rucksacks launched co-ordinated attacks on three Tube trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, in Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

It has taken so long to hold the inquests because they could not start until after the trial of three men accused of helping the attackers choose their targets.

The trio were cleared of the charge at Kingston Crown Court last year, although two of them were convicted of conspiracy to attend a terrorist training camp.

Lady Justice Hallett, who will chair the inquest, is sitting without a jury.

She has already ruled the proceedings will have a wide remit, examining all four bombing scenes to determine whether more could have been done to save the victims at each bomb site.

By foxnews.com

In this July 7, 2005 file photo, a forensic officer walks next to the wreckage of a double decker bus with its top blown off and damaged cars scattered on the road at Tavistock Square in central London.

The Pakistan-Afghan crossing was closed 11 days ago after a NATO incursion that killed two Pakistani soldiers. Militants took advantage of the blockade to attack more than 150 parked trucks, killing at least 6 people.

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan — Pakistan on Sunday reopened a key Afghan border crossing used by trucks and tankers ferrying fuel and supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan, ending an 11-day blockade imposed after a NATO helicopter cross-border incursion that killed two Pakistani troops.

The first of hundreds of trucks and tankers stranded at the Torkham checkpoint at the Khyber Pass since Sept. 30 began moving across the border early afternoon Sunday. The border reopening should ease the massive bottleneck created by the blockade, which was followed by a series of militant attacks on parked NATO oil tankers and trucks across Pakistan.

More than 150 NATO trucks were set ablaze or damaged in those attacks. At least six people were killed in the attacks.

Although U.S. officials hailed the border reopening as a welcome development, relations between Islamabad and Washington remained palpably tense. The killing of the two Pakistani border soldiers by NATO helicopters on Sept. 30 was seen in Pakistan as an intolerable violation of the country’s sovereignty and came at a time when the U.S. had dramatically stepped up its drone-missile campaign against Taliban and Al Qaeda militants hiding out in Pakistan’s largely lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border.

In September, the U.S. carried out 22 drone-missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, most of them directed at the Afghan Taliban wing known as the Haqqani network in the North Waziristan region. Pakistan has balked at moving against Haqqani network fighters, a reluctance that has exasperated officials in Washington because Haqqani fighters use North Waziristan as a base for launching attacks on U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials decided on Saturday that they would reopen the Torkham crossing. That decision came four days after the U.S. government and NATO formally apologized for the deaths of the Pakistani soldiers, saying the helicopter crews mistook the men for insurgents they had been pursuing across the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Pakistan plays a vital role in keeping supply lines open for U.S. and Western troops battling Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. About 40% of NATO’s non-lethal supplies bound for Afghanistan move by truck from the Pakistani port city of Karachi to either the northwestern border crossing at Torkham or the southern crossing at Chaman. The Chaman crossing, located in Balochistan province, was not shut down after the Sept. 30 NATO helicopter incursion.

In recent years, U.S and NATO forces have established northern routes through former Soviet republics in Central Asia as alternate supply lines, which has allowed NATO to reduce its reliance on Pakistan as a transit nation. At one point, 80% of NATO’s non-lethal supplies moved through Pakistan.

By latimes.com

A truck carrying fuel for NATO forces in Afghanistan enters into Afghanistan through Pakistan's Torkham border crossing point.

Ecuadorean soldiers firing automatic weapons and concussion grenades rescued President Rafael Correa late Thursday from a hospital where he was trapped most of the day by police rebelling over a cut in benefits.

At least one security force member was wounded in the 35—minute operation, and the government said at least one person was killed and six injured in clashes earlier in the day outside the hospital between Correa’s supporters and insurgent cops.

Correa, 47, told cheering supporters from the balcony of the Carondelet palace after being spirited away from the hospital at top speed in an SUV that the uprising was more than a simple police protest.

“There were lots of infiltrators, dressed as civilian and we know where they were from,” he shouted. But he did not blame anyone specifically.

Correa was trapped in the hospital for more than 12 hours after being treated for a tear—gassing that nearly aphyxiated him during a confrontation with hundreds of angry police officers who also shoved him and pelted him with water.

Correa expressed thanks from the balcony to all his supporters who went to the hospital and “were ready to die to defend demoracy.”

The violence began when hundreds of police angry over the new civil service law plunged this oil—exporting South American country into chaos, roughing up and tear—gassing Correa, shutting down airports and blocking highways in a nationwide strike.

At the hospital, Correa had vowed to leave either “as president or as a corpse.” He also negotiated with some of the insurrectionists, but the outcome of those talks was unclear.

Hours before the rescue, the armed forces chief, Gen. Ernesto Gonzalez, declared the military’s loyalty to Correa. He called for “a re—establishment of dialogue, which is the only way Ecuadoreans can resolve our differences.”

But Gonzalez also called for the law that provoked the unrest to be “reviewed or not placed into effect so public servants, soldiers and police don’t see their rights affected.”

The law, which Congress approved on Wednesday, must be published before it takes effect and that has not happened.

After police took to the streets, the government declared a state of siege, putting the military in charge of public order, suspending civil liberties and allowing soldiers to carry out searches without a warrant.

Police took over barracks in Quito, Guayaquil and other cities. Some set up roadblocks of burning tires, cutting off highway access to the capital.

Schools shut down in Quito and many businesses closed early due to the absence of police protection that left citizens and businesses vulnerable.

Looting was reported in the capital {hbox}” where at least two banks were sacked {hbox}” and in the coastal city of Guayaquil. That city’s main newspaper, El Universo, reported attacks on supermarkets and robberies due to the absence of police.

Peru and Colombia closed their countries’ borders with Ecuador in solidarity with Correa. Along with the rest of the region’s leaders and the United States, they expressed firm support for Correa. Bolivia’s leftist president, Evo Morales, summoned South America’s presidents to an emergency meeting set for Friday in Buenos Aires of the continent’s fledgling UNASUR defense union.

This poor Andean nation of 14 million people had a history of political instability before Correa, cycling through eight presidents in a decade before the leftist U.S.—trained economist first won election in December 2006. Three of them were driven from office by street protests that plagued the country, which is a member of OPEC.

In April 2009, after voters approved a new constitution he championed, Correa became Ecuador’s first president to win election without a runoff. That success has led him at times to act with overconfidence.

Confronting the protesters Thursday morning, Correa was agitated and unyielding.

“If you want to kill the president, here he is! Kill me!” he told them before limping away with the aid of a cane as an aide fitted a gas mask over his face. Correa’s right knee, with which he has had recurring problems, was operated on last week.

Some 800 police officers in Quito joined the protest, which appeared to have arisen spontaneously. The number of participants outside the capital was unclear. Ecuador has 40,000 police officers.

Correa called the unrest “an attempted coup” spurred by his opponents in remarks to reporters at the police hospital, where he at one point was hooked to an intravenous drip. “They’re practically holding the president captive,” he said.

Correa’s leftist ally, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, claimed earlier that the Ecuadorean leader was “in danger of being killed.” Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, said at one point that insurgents were trying to enter the hospital through the roof.

Chavez’s claim was echoed by Cuba while the Organization of American States’ secretary—general, Miguel Insulza, called the situation “a coup d’etat in the making.”

The United States didn’t go that far.

“We urge all Ecuadorians to come together and to work within the framework of Ecuador’s democratic institutions to reach a rapid and peaceful restoration of order,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

The striking police were angered by a law passed by Congress on Wednesday that would end the practice of giving members of Ecuador’s military and police medals and bonuses with each promotion. It would also extend from five to seven years the usual period required for a subsequent promotion.

“They are a bunch of ungrateful bandits,” Correa said of the protesters after they set upon him.

He said the new law “is removing bonus payments and decorations from the entire public sector … to prevent abuses of state money. We know the Ecuadorean people support us in all this.”

The U.S. Embassy issued a message warning U.S. citizens “of a “nationwide strike by all levels of police, including military police.” It warned them to “stay in their homes or current location, if safe.”

The president’s policy coordination minister, Doris Soliz, asked Ecuadoreans to be calm and support the government.

Air force troops shut down Quito’s Mariscal Sucre airport as the protests began Thursday morning. Dozens of flights were canceled and it was unclear when international service would be restored to the Quito, Guayaquil and Manta airports.

The head of Ecuador’s civil aviation authority, Fernando Guerrero, said in a statement that international operations were suspended at the latter two airports “due to the lack of immigration and counternarcotics personnel.”

By thehindu.com

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, sitting in a wheelchair and wearing a gas mask, is rescued from a hospital where he was holed up by protesting police in Quito, Ecuador.

Clashes between police and alleged militants left six more people dead Friday in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus, even as stunned residents laid flowers in a square where a suicide car bombing killed 17 people and wounded more than 140 only a day ago.

Thursday’s bombing near the central market of Vladikavkaz, the capital of the North Ossetia republic, was the most serious attack in Russia since the March subway bombings in Moscow that killed 40 people.

Russia’s ethnically diverse North Caucasus region has been gripped by violence stemming from two separatist wars in Chechnya and fueled by poverty, rampant official corruption and alleged extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture by law enforcement officials.

In the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, the Interior Ministry said police on Friday killed four suspected militants who opened fire after a raid on a home in the village of Makhargi. The agency also said police were also trying to negotiate with three militants blockaded in a house in Derbent, near the border with Azerbaijan.

A Dagestani policeman and a prison warden were also shot to death in separate attacks, ministry officials said Friday.

The Vladikavkaz market was cordoned off Friday and investigators combed the site for clues about the bombing. Flags flew at half-staff throughout the city.

A North Ossetia health official said 107 of the wounded were in local hospitals and 11 severely injured victims had been flown to Moscow, according to state news agency ITAR-Tass.

Thursday’s blast was so powerful that glass in nearby buildings shattered. The area was cleaned of blood and shreds of clothing but twisted wrecks of several cars still littered the street.

A few blocks away, weeping relatives and neighbors mourned two bombing victims: 54-year-old Yaselin Mamedova and 18-month-old Elnur Ashinov. Their bodies were being prepared for burial later in the day in line with Muslim practice.

There has been no public claim of responsibility for Thursday’s attack, but suspicion fell on Islamic militants who launch frequent small attacks in neighboring North Caucasus republics, including Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia.

Those three provinces have a Muslim majority, but North Ossetia is predominantly Orthodox Christian with a sizable Muslim minority.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Russia’s top Muslim cleric after the blast and said Russia’s 20 million Muslims should play a key role in eradicating Islamic extremism in the nation.

“The crimes like the one that was committed in the North Caucasus today are aimed at sowing enmity between our citizens. We mustn’t allow this,” Putin said at the Thursday meeting.

By SERGEY PONOMAREV

A car bomb exploded in the Russian republic of North Ossetia on Thursday, killing at least 16 people — including an 18-month-old baby — and wounding up to 112 others, government and local health officials said.

The vehicle blew up near a market in the city of Vladikavkaz, the republic’s leader, Taimuraz Mamsurov, told Interfax.

“Information that I possess indicates that the explosion in Vladikavkaz was organized by a suicide bomber, who drove a Volga 3102 car to near the entrance to the market,” Mamsurov said.

Investigators said the explosive device contained the equivalent of 40 kilograms of TNT.

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office told CNN that 77 people were injured in the bombing.

However, local health authorities in North Ossetia told CNN that the number of injured is 112, 99 of whom were hospitalized.

At least nine of them, including one child, were said to be in critical condition.
The car bomb — inside a vehicle parked at the entrance to the central market in downtown Vladikavkaz, with a suicide bomber sitting inside it — detonated at 11:20 a.m. (3:20 a.m. ET), according to the Investigative Committee, which qualified the bombing as a “terrorist act.”

The committee also said the bomb was stuffed with various pieces of metal to increase the human damage. A natural gas canister, stored in the car’s trunk, also detonated, the committee said.

The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry is sending special medical planes to Vladikavkaz to airlift heavily injured patients to Moscow’s leading trauma clinics.

Friday was declared a day of national mourning in North Ossetia, according to a local government decree. Flags on all regional buildings will fly at half-staff and all entertainment programs on local TV will be cancelled as well as concerts and theater performances.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, speaking on national TV, pledged that all organizers of the deadly bombing will be identified and punished — or killed.

“We will do all we can to catch these monsters and animals … who have committed a terror attack, a barbaric terror attack, against ordinary people. We will do all we can to find and punish them in accordance with the laws of our country, and we will destroy them if they offer resistance or in other circumstances,” Medvedev said.

Meanwhile, the owner of the car used in the bomb attack has been identified and arrested, a local police official told the Interfax news agency. The detainee claims that he sold it to an unknown buyer on Wednesday, the policeman said.
The Russian government announced each family of those killed with receive 1 million rubles in compensation (more than $32,000).

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the bombing, saying, “The crimes like the one that was committed in the North Caucausus today are aimed at sowing enmity between our citizens. We have no right to allow this.”

North Ossetia and the rest of the Caucasus region have been plagued with violence and political instability.

The market has seen other terrorist attacks in the past.

In November 2008, a suicide bomber blew up a bus at a nearby bus station, killing 12 people and wounding more than 40. An explosion killed more than 50 people and wounded 300 in March 1999.

By the CNN

In this image made from television, the wreckage of a car destroyed in a suicide car attack is seen near the entrance to a market in Vladikavkaz, North Caucasus, Russia, Thursday, Sept. 9, 2010. A suicide car bomber hit the central market of Vladikavkaz on Thursday, killing dozens and wounding more than 100 people in one of the worst terror attacks in the volatile region in years, officials said.

Eleven policemen and four schoolchildren were among the 19 people killed in a suicide bomb attack on a police station in Lakki Marwat, a district of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa bordering Punjab. According to the police, 600 kg of explosive material were used in the blast which brought down the police station and damaged several buildings in the vicinity including a hospital, a mosque and a school.

The death toll is expected to rise as many of the 40 injured are battling for life. The suicide bomber rammed the explosive-laden vehicle into the rear wall of the police station early in the morning.

The schoolchildren were killed as their van was parked nearby.

As many of the buildings in the vicinity bore the brunt of the huge explosion, police cordoned off the area while efforts were on to pull out people buried in the rubble. After the explosion, police rounded up 10 persons suspected to be linked to terrorist groups.

Area police said this was the handiwork of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide attacks on Shias in Lahore and Quetta. Talking to reporters, a senior police officer said: “The TTP is all out to hurt us. They are targeting everyone. We have lost personnel from the level of constable to Assistant Inspector General. The frontier police is writing its history with blood.”

On Sunday, The Daily Times had reported that terrorists had resurfaced in the suburbs of Peshawar — the capital of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa — and were imposing their writ by declaring a ban on shaving beards. After holding a barber captive for a fortnight, they released him last week with the diktat that barbers would be killed if they shaved beards.

By Thehindu.

People gather at the site of suicide bombing at a police station in Lakki Marwat, Pakistan on Monday.

How many cease-fires can you announce and break before everyone stops paying attention?

Spaniards inured to cease-fire announcements by the violent Basque separatist group ETA were mulling whether the latest one holds anything different or will fail like the others to end Europe’s last major armed militancy.

The government on Monday swiftly ruled out holding negotiations on a Basque homeland and rejected Sunday’s truce as a desperate gambit by an extremist group staggering after the arrests of its leaders.

Spain claimed the cease-fire was just another gambit by ETA in order to buy time, regroup and rearm. And a major newspaper, El Mundo, ran a cartoon Monday of a hooded ETA gunman in a traditional Basque beret offering an olive branch — albeit one that stuck out of a gun barrel.

Since launching its campaign for an independent Basque homeland in the late 1960s and killing more than 825 people in the process, ETA has announced 11 cease-fires, the last of them in 2006, which it called permanent.

Promising peace talks with the government ensued but quickly went nowhere, and nine months later ETA reverted to violence with a massive car bomb that killed two Ecuadorean immigrants in a parking garage at Madrid’s Barajas Airport.

This time, inside, not outside, forces appear to have prompted three masked ETA members to declare a cease-fire Sunday in front of a ETA sign with a snake slithering around an ax. While ETA historically has called the shots, the pressure for a new halt to violence seems to have come from the group’s own political supporters.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said Monday that when ETA shocked Spain by abruptly ending the 2006 cease-fire, “many people in the Basque nationalist movement woke up and said, ‘With this ETA we are not going to get anywhere.’”

Those divisions have been growing as ETA’s banned political wing, Batasuna, apparently came to the conclusion that bombs and bullets were doing nothing to achieve the goal of Basque independence.

ETA’s last deadly attack was a July 2009 car bomb that killed two policemen on the island of Mallorca. But Spain has no tolerance for terrorism now after Islamic militants killed 191 people in a 2004 train bombing in Madrid.

By Daniel Woolls

In this video grab provided by the Basque militant separatist group ETA to the newspaper website Gara.net on Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010, three masked ETA members declare a cease-fire in their efforts to establish an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Three Americans were killed in Afghanistan Saturday, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said.

Two of the U.S. service members died in a bombing in southern Afghanistan. The third death followed an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan. No other details were immediately available.

The casualties came as the top American diplomat and top U.S. general in Afghanistan reassured the troubled nation of U.S. support.

“Now looking ahead, we’re all focused together on the upcoming parliamentary elections and the key test will be the satisfaction of the Afghan people with the progress that’s going to come from their hard work as they approach the elections — their incredible reputation for perseverance and their indomitable spirit,” said Amb. Karl Eikenberry, speaking to Afghan journalists with Gen. David Petraeus.

Meanwhile, Afghan and coalition soldiers fought off assaults on two military bases that left more than 20 insurgents dead, ISAF said.

The fighting occurred in Khost province, a volatile region on Afghanistan’s rugged border with Pakistan.

Insurgents clad in U.S. military uniforms and wielding rocket-propelled grenades and small arms “simultaneously launched attacks” against Forward Operating Base Salerno and Forward Operation Base Chapman, ISAF said.

Chapman is the same base where a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers on December 30.

Troops killed about 15 insurgents at Salerno and six at Chapman. Five insurgent fighters were captured and were in ISAF custody.

A Haqqani network operative who helps carry out bombings and two other insurgents died in an airstrike while fleeing Salerno in a vehicle. Two insurgents who got into Salerno were killed by soldiers. The Haqqani network is a militant group with ties to al Qaeda.

“We are tightening our grip on the insurgents and as a result they are attempting anything and everything as a last ditch effort,” said U.S. Army Col. Rafael Torres, ISAF spokesman. “The insurgents gave their best effort and came up short.”

Afghan police and ISAF members seized a car bomb and a vehicle carrying ammunition. Forces also seized suicide vests, rifles and unexploded munitions.

Four ISAF soldiers were injured, and three have returned to duty. The fourth was set to return to duty soon. No base facilities were damaged.

Also Saturday, an Afghan civilian was killed by a suicide attacker in southeastern Paktika province, ISAF said. Seven people also were wounded when the insurgent detonated a suicide vest.

By the CNN

EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT- An Afghan National Army soldier stands near the body of a suicide attacker near a NATO base in Khost province of Afghanistan, Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010. Insurgents launched pre-dawn attacks Saturday on a major NATO base in eastern Afghanistan and a nearby camp where seven CIA employees were killed last year in a suicide bombing. NATO said there were no coalition casualties and the attacks were repelled. It said 13 insurgents were killed, four of whom were wearing suicide vests, and five captured. (AP Photo/Nishanuddin Khan)