demon fanatics strike again

theist · December 21, 2002

Women killed over 'dress code'

Staff and wires

Friday, December 20, 2002 Posted: 1:53 AM EST (0653 GMT)

PARAOTT, Indian-controlled Jammu -- Suspected militants entered a home in a Kashmiri village and brutally killed three young women, just days after posters ordered females to wear a veil.

The attackers slit the throats of two of the women, both aged 21, and shot the third, police officials in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region said on Friday.

While the motive of the attack is still unclear, one police official told Reuters news agency it could be related to an order for women not to step outside their homes without a veil.

"There is a possibility these killings are linked with the diktat on dress code. We have sent a police party," the police official said.

The posters, which appeared in Rajori town and nearby villages, were signed by little known group Lashkar Jabbar.

More than a dozen guerrilla groups are fighting Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir, which is at the heart of more than 50 years of hostility with Pakistan.

A few groups in the past have ordered women in the Kashmir valley to wear a veil, but the order was largely ignored.

Paraott is near the town of Thanamandi in Rajori district of Jammu.

madhav · December 31, 2002

London Times

December 31, 2002

Militants Turning To 'Soft Targets'

By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor

AMERICAN aid workers and missionaries in remote parts of the world are increasingly finding themselves on the front line of the War on Terror as "soft targets" for militant Islamic groups seeking to hurt the US.

Yesterday’s murder of three American doctors in Yemen was the latest in a series of attacks by organisations opposed to America’s presence in the Islamic world. In the past Muslim radicals tended to focus on US diplomatic missions and military bases. But security improvements over the past decade have made them harder to hit and attacks are now more frequently aimed at softer targets such as aid workers or journalists.

Christian missionaries, despite being usually involved in humanitarian work, have been particularly vulnerable.

Last month Bonnie Penner, an American missionary nurse working with Palestinian refugees in the Lebanese port city of Sidon, was shot and killed by a gunman as she arrived for work.

In June Martin Burnham, a missionary working in the Philippines, was killed during a rescue attempt launched by the military against the Abu Sayyaf group, which had abducted him.

In October Larry Foley, the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Jordan, was killed by gunmen outside his home in Amman. In January this year Daniel Pearl, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and killed by Islamic militants in Pakistan.

The US State Department has stepped up its warnings to American citizens about the dangers of living and working in countries with active militant groups.

Some non-essential staff and dependants have gone home, but tens of thousands of Americans continue to work in the region and will remain possible targets for future attacks.

madhav · December 31, 2002

Washington Times

December 31, 2002

Pg. 1

Pyongyang A Master Of 'The Game'

By Marc Lerner, The Washington Times

It's a tiny nation that can't feed its people. Most of its factories sit idle, lacking energy and raw materials. Its few export dollars come from arms sales, mostly to rogue nations.

But when North Korea sits down at the negotiating table, it usually walks away with a bounty worthy of a superpower.

That reputation, analysts say, helps explain the Bush administration's reaction — communication, but no direct talks — after North Korea expelled international inspectors and restarted a nuclear program to make the fuel used in atomic bombs.

"The words crazy, irrational, erratic and bizarre are too often used to describe North Korea's negotiating behavior," said Chuck Downs, author of "Over the Line: North Korea's Negotiating Strategy."

In fact, Mr. Downs says, the North Korean strategy is "generally effective, cleverly devised, skillfully implemented."

The United States believes North Korea has culled enough plutonium from a mothballed five-megawatt, Soviet-made research reactor to build two nuclear bombs.

About 8,000 fuel rods, put in storage under the 1994 "Agreed Framework" deal that was to have halted North Korea's nuclear program, contain enough material for an additional five bombs.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made clear over the weekend that the United States is not interested in buying North Korea's cooperation.

"They want us to give them something for them to stop their bad behavior," Mr. Powell said. "What we can't do is enter into a negotiation right away where we are appeasing them."

Opponents of the 1994 deal, which made communist North Korea the largest U.S. aid recipient in Asia, denounced it as an act of appeasement by the Clinton administration, which they accused of caving in to nuclear blackmail. The deal promised North Korea oil and two new reactors if it shut down its existing program — a package worth more than $5 billion.

Those who expected that U.S. largesse would lead to a more cooperative North Korea were disappointed. Over the next few years, Pyongyang threw its energy into the production and export of ballistic missiles.

Iran's Shahab missile, which can target U.S. forces in the Middle East, was based on technology purchased from the North Koreans. And North Korean expertise was behind Pakistan's successful Ghauri missile launch in April 1998. That launch was followed a month later by India's test of a nuclear bomb. Pakistan, in turn, detonated its own bomb, unleashing a nuclear-arms race on the subcontinent. This month, North Korea delivered Scud missiles to Yemen.

Although the 1994 deal did not put restrictions on North Korea's missile program, it was hoped that it would at least curtail nuclear activity. But by 1998, spy-satellite photos showed ground being broken for what appeared to be a clandestine nuclear-weapons plant on a North Korean mountainside at Kumchang-ri.

When the United States threatened to cut off foreign aid unless the complex at Kumchang-ri was inspected by outsiders, Pyongyang demanded money.

"If the United States wants to inspect the site, it should make compensation," a North Korean official said, suggesting $300 million.

After months of negotiations, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright announced in March 1999 that U.S. inspectors would be allowed at Kumchang-ri. "We did not agree to demands for compensation," she said.

In fact, days before her announcement, Washington quietly arranged to have 500,000 tons of grain, valued at more than $200 million, delivered to North Korea through an intermediary. U.S. inspectors later found the Kumchang-ri complex, a cave dug into a mountain, empty.

Critics denounced the food-for-access deal as yet another act of appeasement in response to a crisis manufactured by North Korea solely to extract concessions from Washington.

"The Kumchang-ri deal validated extortionist techniques," says Nicholas Eberstadt, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "The End of North Korea."

Robert Gallucci, who negotiated the 1994 agreement for the Clinton administration, maintains that it was a good deal, one that kept the North Korean nuclear program in check. He cautions against ruling out direct talks with Pyongyang.

"An ideological disdain for negotiating with our adversaries seldom serves our interests, and in this case could be highly dangerous," Mr. Gallucci, now with Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, said in a recent column.

Mr. Downs — who has studied Pyongyang's negotiating strategy — describes a pattern in which North Korea appears willing to moderate its policies, uses talks to demand concessions and aid, then halts negotiations when it has gained maximum advantage.

madhav · December 31, 2002

New York Times

December 29, 2002

Pg. 4

Russia Links Arab Militants To Bombing In Chechnya

By Michael Wines

MOSCOW, Dec. 28 — Russia blamed Islamic terrorists, including Arabs, today for a pair of explosions that devastated a government center in Chechnya on Friday, as investigators tried to figure out how three suicide bombers drove unmolested through a thicket of checkpoints set up to shield the complex from just such attacks.

Tonight, Chechnya's new prime minister, Mikhail Babich, said workers had recovered 52 bodies from the ruins of the government complex. The Russian Emergencies Ministry said, however, that that the true toll was closer to 57, because families of some of the victims were believed to have taken away remains.

The suicide bombers, in a heavy truck and a car, blew up a four-story government center and an adjacent canteen that housed the top leaders and staff of the pro-Russian regional government there. Several officials were seriously wounded, but Chechnya's prime minister and the head of the civil administration were not in the building and were unharmed.

A dragnet set up by Russian and Chechen police and military forces failed today to lead to any arrests.

A Russian-language Web site often used to promote Islamic guerrilla activities in Chechnya, www.kavkazcenter.net, stated that an unnamed guerrilla commander had called to claim responsibility for the bombing. "The building of the occupying administration was blown up as a result of an attack by the Chechen shahids," or martyrs, the site said.

A Russian counterterrorism official in the Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya, said the attack was the work of Islamic militants led by a prominent Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev, and an Arab, Abu al-Walid.

The counterterrorism official, Col. Ilya Shabalkin, said Russian investigators had learned shortly before the bombings that the two men had met in the Chechen village of Stariye Atagi, 15 milies south of Grozny, to plan a series of attacks on Grozny and other Chechen towns.

On Thursday, Russian special operations troops in Stariye Atagi killed a different Arab militant, whom Colonel Shabalkin described as a coordinator of the planned attacks. "But we failed to prevent the terrorist act," he said.

He described Mr. Walid as an official of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic militant group frequently described as a financier of the Chechen separatist movement.

Colonel Shabalkin described the group in an interview last week as a rival to the official commander of the Chechen militants, Aslan Maskhadov, a former president of Chechnya. Mr. Maskhadov, who is in hiding, has been accused by some Russian officials of plotting the bombings, but he renounced them in a message issued today.

Russia has frequently charged that the Chechen separatist movement is controlled by foreign militants. There was no way to verify Colonel Shabalkin's accusation.

As investigators began reconstructing the events that led to the disaster today, it became clear that the bombers and their accomplices had meticulously planned the attack.

Officials said preliminary checks indicated that the heavy truck and a second jeeplike vehicle used to carry more than a ton of explosives into the government compound had military license plates. Their drivers, dressed in army camouflage, carried what appeared to be official passes.

The two vehicles were said to have passed freely through three military checkpoints on a major highway in Grozny, then negotiated a military guardpost on the road to the government complex without problems.

Only on the final turn toward the complex did guards at a last checkpoint try to inspect the vehicles. The drivers accelerated and broke through the checkpoint as guards fired on them, then they detonated their bombs in a courtyard directly in front of the main government building, investigators said.