Police: Taliban executes eloping lovers

 Taliban gunmen executed a young couple for trying to elope in rural Afghanistan, a local police chief told CNN Tuesday.

The woman was forced by her parents to become engaged to a man she did not like, said Police Chief Gabar Furdali, and decided to leave home with another man.

Local Taliban commanders found out and set out to punish them, said the police officer in the village of Man De Khe in the Kash Rud district of Nimruz province, a remote southwestern province that borders on Iran and Pakistan.

The Taliban gathered residents of Kash Rud to watch the execution of the two. The man, Abdul Aziz, and the woman, who was not named, were shot to death, the police officer said. He did not say when the killings took place.

NATO troops who patrol the country have “limited presence in that particular area,” a spokesman told CNN.

The killings were not “within our area of responsibility, but we are aware of the reports” said the spokesman for the NATO mission who declined to be named, in line with policy

Filed under: Terrorism , lover, police, Police: Taliban executes eloping lovers, taliban

Somali pirates hijack 2 freighters in 1 day

Pirates off the coast of Somalia seized two freighters Tuesday, proving they remain a force to contend with just days after the U.S. Navy dramatically rescued an American captain held by other pirates.

A Kenyan police officer guards the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama at a Mombasa port Sunday.

First, pirates in the Gulf of Aden on Tuesday hijacked the MV Irene EM, a 35,000-ton Greek-owned bulk carrier, according to a NATO spokesman and the European Union’s Maritime Security Center.

The crew of the Greek carrier was thought to be unhurt and ships have been warned to stay clear of the area for fear of further attack, the Security Center said.

Later Tuesday, pirates on four skiffs seized the 5,000-ton MV Sea Horse, a Lebanese-owned and Togo-flagged vessel, said Cmdr. Chris Davies of NATO’s Maritime Component Command Headquarters in Northwood, England.

Details about the ship and its crew weren’t immediately available.

NATO has an ongoing anti-piracy mission off Somalia called Operation Allied Protector. The mission involves four ships covering more than a million square miles, Davies said.

A U.S.-led international naval task force, Combined Task Force-151, is also patrolling in the region.

Tuesday’s hijackings came two days after sharpshooters from the U.S. Navy SEALs killed three pirates who had been holding U.S. Captain Richard Phillips hostage on the water for days.

Phillips had offered himself as a hostage when pirates attacked his vessel, the Maersk Alabama, on Wednesday, officials said. The ship had been on its way to deliver an aid shipment to Mombasa, Kenya.

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The pirates set off with Phillips on one of the Alabama’s covered fiberglass lifeboats. They then drifted about 300 miles off Somalia as the U.S. Navy sent ships to the region.

After a five-day high seas standoff, and with negotiations faltering, Navy snipers managed to kill each of the three pirates on the lifeboat with a single bullet to the head, a senior defense official told CNN.

The fourth pirate had been aboard the USS Bainbridge when the shootings occurred and was taken into custody. Watch the tough tactics the Navy uses »

Federal prosecutors will now determine whether that pirate will be prosecuted in the United States, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.

The 20 crew members of the Maersk Alabama, who remained free during their captain’s ordeal, are already in Mombasa awaiting a reunion with Phillips. They are relaxing at a beach resort in the coastal city under the watchful eyes of the Kenyan military while the Bainbridge takes Phillips to meet them, a U.S. military spokesman said.

Maersk, the company that owns their vessel, announced Tuesday that Phillips and the crew will return Wednesday to the United States aboard a chartered flight from Mombasa.

They are to land at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where they are to be reunited with loved ones in a private reception area.

The two freighters seized Tuesday are the third and fourth vessels hijacked in two days off the Somali coast.

Pirates on Monday hijacked two Egyptian fishing boats carrying a total of between 18 and 24 people, the Egyptian Information Ministry told CNN.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry is working to end the hijacking, the ministry said.

Egyptian boats are known to use Somali waters illegally for fishing, taking advantage of the lawless state of the country and the lack of enforcement of its maritime boundaries.

Those who have tracked pirate activity in Somalia say it started in the 1980s, when the pirates claimed they were trying to stop the rampant illegal fishing and dumping that continues to this day off the Somali coast.

Piracy accelerated after the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s and began to flourish after shipping companies started paying ransoms. Those payments started out being in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

Some experts say companies are simply making the problem worse by paying the pirates.

Filed under: Terrorism , day, freighters, hijack, somali

Smith: 60,000 in training to deal with terror attacks

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, yesterday pledged to end the “secret, behind closed doors” approach to tackling terrorism as the government prepared to launch a fresh strategy this week.

A new 60,000-strong civilian force, including security guards at shopping centres and hotel workers, will be hailed as one of the most important instruments in confronting the terrorist threat.

Smith outlined the new thinking in an interview on BBC One’s The Politics Show programme. “It’s the nature of this work that quite often in the past it’s been the sort of thing that’s happened in secret, behind closed doors,” she said.

“We’re clear that if we’re going to address the threat from terrorism, we need to do that alongside the 60,000 people that we’re now training up to respond to a terrorist threat, in everywhere from our shopping centres to our hotels. We need to do it alongside the 3,000 police officers, now working on counter-terror, out and about doing that, and we need to do it with international partners.”

Ministers believe they need to adopt a twin-track approach in which the authorities take a hardline to people directly involved in terrorism, but avoid alienating young people who might be tempted by radical Islamism by avoiding heavy-handedness with the wider Muslim community and by showing that Britain’s belief in democracy and human rights is open to everyone.

Gordon Brown outlined the approach in an article in yesterday’s Observer. On the need to confront terrorists, the prime minister wrote: “Al-Qaida terrorists remain intent on inflicting mass casualties without warning, including through suicide bombings. They are motivated by a violent extremist ideology based on a false reading of religion … We must remain vigilant at all times.

“On Tuesday, we will publish our updated counter-terrorism strategy, showing why this vigilance remains so vital and showing also the success we have had, thanks to the hard work of the thousands of brave, skilled and dedicated people working to keep us safe.”

But Brown also made clear it was important to wage a battle for what he has in the past called hearts and minds. “The approach we are taking tackles the immediate threat through the relentless pursuit of terrorists and disruption of their plots, builds up our defences against attacks and our resilience to deal with them, and addresses the longer term causes – understanding what leads people to become radicalised, so we can stop the process.”

The prime minister also threw his weight behind Barack Obama who has warned that Pakistan-based terrorism represents a grave threat. “In 2001, al-Qaida were based in Afghanistan. While they are still active there, core al-Qaida has shifted across the border into Pakistan. More than two-thirds of the plots threatening the UK are linked to Pakistan.”

Filed under: Terrorism , 000 in training to deal with terror attacks, 60000, attack, smith, Smith: 60, terror

Can the science of biogeography find Osama bin Laden?

Osama bin Laden, the FBI’s most wanted terrorist, has proved an extremely elusive quarry. Could biology and geography help crack the case—and net the man with a $25-million bounty on his head for plotting numerous terrorist strikes?

Two geography professors and five of their undergraduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.), recently published an analysis (pdf) in MIT International Review proposing that biogeographic theories, in conjunction with readily available mapping data, could help pinpoint the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts, assuming he’s still alive. Their “musing” over this possibility, the researchers wrote, led them to three buildings in Parachinar in Pakistan, where they believe bin Laden may be holed up.

They fingered the spots based on two theories on the distribution of biological species. One of them, the so-called distance-decay theory, states that the similarity and correlation between species at two locations decreases as the distance between them increases. As such, the geographers figure bin Laden can’t have gone far—he is believed to have fled Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region at the end of 2001—if he wished to remain on similar terrain in a familiar cultural environment.

Island biogeography, the other tool in the team’s theoretical analysis, posits that large, closely spaced pockets of life (islands) support more species and are less ravaged by extinction than small, isolated islands. With cities standing in for islands, the researchers speculate that bin Laden would most likely hide out in a large town with minimal isolation, because even though there’s more risk of being spotted he would also have access to resources needed to stay alive as well as under cover.

These theories, they say, point to Parachinar in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Within the town, whose relative populousness was determined by its nighttime glow, the U.C.L.A. group identified three structures that best fit a list of characteristics that might be necessary for bin Laden, based on his height (believed to be 6′4″ to 6′6″), his requirements for security and privacy, and his possible need for dialysis (to filter waste from blood, a process normally done by kidneys, but bin Laden’s are rumored to be damaged), which would require electrification. At the very least, the study’s authors write, U.S. intelligence agencies should closely monitor Parachinar and the three suspect buildings to disprove their hypotheses, perhaps refining the predictions in the process.

A geographic information systems (GIS) scientist we contacted, who asked to remain anonymous at the request of his employer, says that in theory, “spatial models of some sort could be used with the latest technology to predict” bin Laden’s whereabouts. But he added quickly that “whether or not the predictions of such models are valid is another matter.”

Distance-decay and island biogeography theories, the GIS scientist adds, “were developed for purposes of understanding the distribution of species, not the movements of individuals.” Another problem with the U.C.L.A. team’s approach is that it is untested, he says: “Why didn’t the authors use historical information on bin Laden’s whereabouts to both train and test the models?”

Filed under: Terrorism , terrorist, Osama bin Laden, biogeography, science