Terrorism Watch

Baku, Fineko/abc.az. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has approved additional protocols signed on 24 November 2011 concerning the agreement on cooperation between National Security Ministry (NSM) of Azerbaijan and Federal Security Service (FSS) of Russia. In particular protocols №17 and №18 to the basic agreement have been approved. The first one implies that NSM’s Information Communication Technologies Centre and FSS’s Special communication Centre will cooperate in provision of open information communication networks safety provision, provide mutual safety of such networks, systems and information resources, conduct expertise on information communication systems licensing issues, suppress unsanctioned intrusion in open networks by apparatus methods, exchange information on Internet means, viruses and attacks to computers and certification of antivirus programs. The protocol №18 is dedicated to cyber crime and cyber terrorism  issues , including crimes in e-commer

Malaysia deservedly scored high praise with the arrest late last year of 13 suspected terrorists in the isolated town of Tawau on the east coast of north Borneo. Among them were seven Malaysians, five Indonesians and a Filipino who were stocking up on supplies. Their arrest and the potential carnage that has remained on the drawing boards were detailed in The Diplomat in December . According to Todd Elliott, a security analyst with Jakarta-based Concord Consulting, the operation by Malaysian Federal Police had “raised fresh concerns over the threat of a terrorist attack utilizing small arms and targeting foreigners.” Now, sources close to the operation are saying that their success was limited as three key suspects evaded arrest . These suspects are now believed to be hiding on Jolo in the Southern Philippines, where they met up with members of their long-time affiliate, the Abu Sayyaf. The three who escaped are Zulkifli Khir, Amin Bacho and Jeknal Adil, all Malay

NEW DELHI: Indicating signs of possible funds related to crime and terror trickling into the Indian casino sector, a government report has said that more than 7,000 instances of suspicious transactions have been detected in the elite gaming business during the last financial year. A total of 7,006 Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) during the 2010-11 fiscal have been reported by the casino business and allied payment operators to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), an enforcement agency under the Union finance ministry. The casino business in the country was brought under anti-money laundering laws in 2009 and the operators primarily provide slot machines and electronic games to customers. According to a 2010 report of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the top global financial body set up by G-7 nations in 1989 to combat financial crimes, India has just more than 20 casinos. While Goa, the state with numerous sun-kissed beaches, has the majority of th

THE HAGUE: The Dutch government Friday approved a ban on face-covering clothing, such as a burqa, a niqab, a forage cap, or a full face helmet, reported Xinhua. People going on the streets with one of these now risk being fined for up to 380 euros ($499). "It is very important that people in an open society meet each other in an open way," Minister of Interior Affairs Liesbeth Spies said after the cabinet meeting. The burqa ban was already part of the government coalition agreement. In September 2011, the proposal was sent for advice to the council of state, which issued a negative opinion. The council considered the proposal contrary to the prohibition of freedom of religion and contrary to the standards of non-discrimination. The government's main advisory body also wondered whether a burqa ban was too heavy a measure. However, the cabinet neglected the advice and claimed the European Convention on Human Rights offers the opportunity to limit religi

LONDON: Meredith Alexander , who first announced her resignation as ethics commissioner of the London authority to TOI, on Friday said Dow Chemicals, by buying Union Carbide , had also bought the toxic legacy of Bhopal, and it was Dow's liability to clean up the site of the world's worst industrial disaster. Alexander also disputed Olympic organizing committee chief Paul Deighton's claim that she had previously signed for the process that selected Dow Chemicals as a sponsor. Deighton has told the media, "She (Meredith Alexander) is one of the 12 members of the sustainability commission who signed off on the way we approached awarding the Olympic wrap to Dow." Speaking to TOI, Alexander said, "I did not sign off on that process. I was involved in discussions and I presented evidence about what's happened and continues to happen in Bhopal. But the final commentary, the sign off happened without my involvement. When I saw the public s

DSSS chair Tomáš Vandas making a speech in Rotava last October. Robin Siener (far right in baseball cap) is a German neo-Nazi, an NPD member, and a member of Freies Netz. Next to him, behind the banner that reads "česko-německého přátelství" (Czech-German Friendship), stands Katrin Köhler, a neo-Nazi from Saxony and NPD member. On Saturday, 29 October 2011, the Workers' Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti - DSSS) held an anti-Romani demonstration in Rotava (Sokolov district) together with neo-Nazis from Germany. The DSSS has itself been infiltrated by neo-Nazis, including its cells in the Karlovy Vary region. One section of Rotava, a small town on the border between the Czech Republic and Germany, is generally considered to have the most socially excluded locality in the entire Karlovy Vary region. Support from local residents is the main reason the DSSS is returning to Rotava this weekend. The website Ant

DAMASCUS: Syrian forces intensified their crackdown on Friday, with activists reporting 120 people killed in two days, as European and Arab nations pressed the UN Security Council to call on President Bashar al-Assad to stand down. The head of an Arab League monitoring mission said unrest had soared this week "in a significant way", especially in the flashpoint central cities of Homs and Hama and in the northern Idlib region. The violence, which on Friday for the first time also cost lives in Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, "does not help ... to get all sides to sit at the negotiating table," General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi said. For a second day, Syrian forces kept up their attacks on Homs, as Morocco presented a draft UN resolution, drawn up by Britain, France and Germany with Arab states, seeking to end months of UN deadlock. The text demands an immediate end to a government crackdown that the UN says has killed more

DHARAMSHALA: Anguished over the recent incident of firing by Chinese police on Tibetans on January 23, reportedly killing one Tibetan and injuring about 30 persons, the Tibetan parliament-in-exile on Friday sent an open letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao , regretting that his government has no regard for human rights. In a press conference called by the speaker of Tibetan parliament, Pempa Tsering, at a short notice, he said that increasing cases of brutality inside Tibet has forced them to write openly to the Chinese president. "The incident of open firing that killed innocent Tibetans and injured many, who were protesting peacefully, took place when the whole China was celebrating the Dragon's New Year," he said. The letter also cited seven points suggested by the Tibetan parliament-in-exile to restore peace and harmony inside Tibet. "As human beings, we are sure you will understand why people resort to extreme measures like self-i

YOU WANT to use the word "surreal" to describe the teen girl's night-from-hell drama "Miss Bala," but this slice of life on the Mexican border is all too real. The annual death total from that country's drug war surpassed 12,000 people last year, an international disgrace that gets confoundingly little coverage in the media, mainstream or otherwise. "Miss Bala" puts you at ground zero, Tijuana, where pageant hopeful Laura (Stephanie Sigmund) and her friend decide to enter a beauty contest. They attend the tryout, then hit the after-party. There, the girls mingle with Mexican police and DEA agents until the place is invaded by a drug gang looking for law enforcement scalps. Laura ends up a hostage to the drug kingpin (Noe Hernandez), and is ping-ponged back and forth between criminal gangs, cops, crooked cops (these last two being indistinguishable), DEA men, provincial/government military leaders - and the televised pageant! Th

UNITED NATIONS: The UN headquarters recently became the recipient of a very unusual package - 16 kg of cocaine from the notorious Mexican drug cartels valued at about $2 million. Yes, a whopping 16 kg of the highly addictive drug and that too sent in bags with fake UN symbol printed on it. The two bags containing the narcotics were seized at the mail center of the UN, New York police officials said. The suspicious bags were "intercepted by the security and safety service" last week, UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky said. The white bags had no name or address but had a poor image of the blue UN logo stamped on them. The shipment had been sent from Mexico city through DHL's center in Cincinnati . But the bags had no address on them, nor any return to sender details. Nesirky said "neither the UN nor anyone located in the UN was the intended recipient of the packets" and the bags in which the cocaine was delivered weren't UN diplomatic pouc

New Delhi : Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar has released his film 'Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror' online, that too free of any charge. It has happened after two of his earlier movies courted controversy and failed to get the censor board and court nod. According to Kumar, 'Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror' is a documentary in which Kashmiris 'recount how their freedom is conceded and replaced by fear and institutionalized oppression'.(With inputs from PTI) Here is the link to the complete film.  watch trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoy5926-D1A&feature=player_embedded Source: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/watch-full-length-inshallah-kashmir/224781-8-66.html

CAMP Guillermo Nakar, Lucena City -- Suspected New People’s Army rebels commandeered and torched a Manila-bound passenger bus in Bgy. Cagbacong, Legazpi City in Albay Thursday night. Col. Generoso Bolina, spokesman of Southern Luzon Command (Solcom) based here, said the Silver Star bus was traversing the national highway from Bulan, Sorsogon when stopped by a group of rebels who pretended to be passengers at around 7:30 p.m. Bolina said the rebels, while pointing their pistols at the bus driver and passengers, introduced themselves as communist guerillas. They then commandeered the bus to a forested portion of the village where three other rebels armed with rifles were waiting. They ordered all its passengers to alight without harming them. Bolina said one of the rebels poured gasoline on the bus and lighted it using a lighter, before they fled on foot. He said the rebels were already gone when responding authorities arrived. No one among the passengers was reported hur

Illustration by Jonathon Rosen ¶ In the moral atlas of Cullen Murphy, the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the secret “black sites” of the war on terror begins in Montségur, a fortress in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, in 1244, a French army assembled at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church besieged several hundred Cathars. Their sect’s heresy was dualism, a belief in both a beneficent God and an equivalent evil deity. Enticed into surrendering by the promise that their followers would be spared, the Cathars were burned alive on a pyre. GOD’S JURY The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World By Cullen Murphy 310 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27. ¶ From the run-up to this massacre, Murphy dates the start of the Inquisition. By this, he means not only the Spanish iteration with its concentration on Jews converted to Christianity (Marranos) but several sequential inquisitions that over 700 years c

MANILA (Xinhua) -- Two suspected leftist New People's Army (NPA) rebels, including a high-ranking official, were arrested Friday night in Quezon province.   Fidel Holanda, a member of the executive committee of the South Quezon-Bundoc Peninsula, Southern Tagalog Regional Party Communist, and a certain Erwin Casino were apprehended along diversion road Lucena City by the joint police and military personnel, said Colonel Generoso Bolina, spokesman of the military's Southern Luzon Command (Solcom).   The two rebels were arrested by virtue of warrant of arrest issued by the Regional Trial Court in Gumaca town.   Bolina said authorities recovered from the suspects eight pieces of improvised explosive device, an anti-personnel explosive, four pieces of cellular phones, a laptop, subversive documents, and personal belongings.   He said the two were brought to Solcom Hospital for medical examination prior to custodial debriefing at Quezon Provincial Police

Arrests made to reduce security threat at Olympics – London Olympics 2012 It has been recently communicated that a total of 100 people have been arrested in an effort to reduce the terror threat that the upcoming London 2012 Olympic Games is facing. The city of London is taking all measures to make sure that the Olympic Games taking place this year are one of the safest that the world has yet seen. However, that involves taking severe and urgent measures in order to cater with the building terror threat that is associated with the Games. According to the orders given by the Home Secretary of the country, Theresa May, no tents or encampments will be allowed during the time of the Olympic Games as they can potentially put the events under threat. May expressed herself on the matter of security at the Olympic Games in the following words, “Like all Western countries we face a number of ongoing threats to national security. We face a real and enduring thr

KUWAIT CITY, Jan 25: The citizens have been receiving e-mails and messages through the social networking websites urging them to remain committed to ethics but it is widely believed these messages contain a hidden message to engage in terrorist activities, reports Al-Shahed daily quoting reliable security sources. The daily added the concerned authorities have warned parents to keep a watch on their children because most of these messages are the handiwork of a group of anonymous persons who have largely succeeded in brainwashing young "men" to join organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight what they call "infidels." In fact the messages which are sent in the name of religion contain a hidden message to engage in criminal activities and terrorist acts, the daily added quoting sources. The sources explained the security authorities have spotted some religious figures in Kuwait who have been inciting young people to take part in "fights"

JEDDAH — Banks in the Kingdom have sustained losses of $1 billion over the past two years because of electronic crimes, Dr. Jibril Al-Araishi, member of the Shoura Council and Deputy Chairman of the Transportation, Telecommunications and Information Technology Committee, said here at the weekend. “The year 2012 will be the year of e-crimes,” he added. His revelation coincided with calls at World Economic Forum in Davos for international action to snuff out cyber crime. Officials and business leaders warned that criminals move at Internet speed while countries drag their feet. “Many countries don’t have laws to criminalize cyber crime, they don’t have means and tools to investigate, to share information,” said Yury Fedotov, who heads the United Nations office on drugs and crime. Cyber crime is “interconnected in terms of crime, but not interconnected in collaboration” against it, he added, noting that there is not even an agreement on what constitutes cybercrime. According

MOSCOW: Annual financial damage to the world economy from drug money equals $2 trillion, Russia's Federal Drug Control Service head Viktor Ivanov said. "Narco-dollars form a market with a volume of over $500 billion annually, while negative consequences for the real economy exceed this amount two or three times over. The annual damage to the world economy amounts to $2 trillion," Ivanov said in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, late Thursday. "This amount equals the levels of gross domestic product in such countries as France and the United Kingdom," he added quoting UN experts' information. Drug money has become a necessary part of the international monetary system and one of the sources of the financial crisis. The world's largest banks depend on "dirty" but liquid money from drug sales and indirectly encourage the further production of drugs. As for drug trafficking from Afghanistan, Ivanov

NEW YORK: New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is under fire from civil rights group, who are demanding his resignation over his appearance in an inflammatory anti-Muslim film shown to his department's officers during training. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne should immediately resign from their positions for taking part in the production of the 'Third Jihad', "a blatantly bigoted and hate-filled film vilifying the American-Muslim community". The 72-minute film shows Muslims shooting Christians in the head and conveys a message that the community cannot be trusted. It also shows a doctored photo of an Islamic flag flying over the White House , car bombs exploding, executed children lying covered by sheets. Its message is that the true agenda of much of Islam in America is to "infiltrate and dominate America". The group said Kelly had "lied" to the co

America’s soldiers might be returning from Iraq, but we’re far from done paying the costs of war. In fact, at the same time President Barack Obama is reducing the number of soldiers in Iraq, he’s replacing them with military contractors at far greater expense to the taxpayer. In this way, the war on terror is privatized, the American economy is bled dry, and the military-security industrial complex makes a killing — literally and figuratively. The war effort in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan already has cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion, and could go as high as $4.4 trillion before it’s finished. At least $31 billion — and as much as $60 billion or more — of that $2 trillion was lost to waste and fraud by military contractors, who do everything from janitorial and food service work to construction, security and intelligence. Those jobs used to be handled by the military. During the past two decades, America has become increasingly dependent on military contractors t

SANAA — A Norwegian UN employee kidnapped by tribesmen in Yemen earlier this month was back in the capital Sanaa on Friday after being freed by his captors in the restive east. “I am very pleased and relieved that the Norwegian who was kidnapped in Yemen has been released and that he is unharmed,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said in a statement. The 34-year-old, identified by Norwegian media as Gert Danielsen, was “freed around midnight (2200 GMT) on Thursday following tribal mediation,” said Sheikh Sultan al-Arada, a tribal chief in Marib province, who was involved in the negotiations. The Sanaa office of the United Nations Development Programme said in a statement that the staffer arrived on Friday in a “UN safe haven” in the capital. “I am happy to be free again and I wish to thank all those who have worked hard for my release,” commented the freed staffer in the statement. “I am relieved that this experience is over,” he added. UN res

J ust days after the United States rescued two kidnapped humanitarian aid workers in S omalia , pirates in the country are saying : don't try it again T hey're telling the American government that if it tr ies to rescue another A merican being held hostage they'll kill him in the process. T he threat has raised concerns for all aid workers in S omali a, and t hat includes some who work there with the M innesota-based nonprofit A merican R efugee C ommittee. It has a paid staff of more than 75 people in S omalia and dozens more volunteers--many of them from M innesota. T his new threat isn't changing the way they operate -- at least not yet -- but they say it does create concern. "I t's the most dangerous place in the world right now for for humanitarian workers ," said T yler Z abriskie . He has just returned from three days in M ogadishu, S omalia in his role as an international programs leader. "I would typifiy it as a large city tha

Pirates have moved American hostage three times in 24 hours after Wednesday's rescue 'If they try again, we will all die together,' a Somali pirate connected to the gang holding the hostage Rescued hostages are now at US. Naval Air Base in Sicily Somali pirates have threatened to kill an American hostage after a daring night-time U.S Navy SEAL mission to rescue two foreign aid workers. The pirates have moved the hostage at least three times in 24 hours in reaction to the rescue of the U.S. woman and Danish man. Their response has now raised questions about whether other Western captives are now in greater danger. Danger: The pirates have moved the American hostage at least three times in 24 hours after U.S. Navy SEALs parachuted into Somalia to rescue a US woman and Danish man earlier in the week (graphic) Mission: Two teams of U.S. Navy SEALs rescued the hostages after a gun battle with the pirates in the middle of the night (file pict