35 people killed in bomb blasts at Pakistan shrine

Two suicide bombers struck a popular Muslim shrine in Pakistan's second largest city, killing 35 people and wounding 175 others in the second major attack in Lahore in a month. The bombers attacked late Thursday as thousands of people visited the Data Darbar shrine, where a famous Sufi saint is buried. Lahore has experienced a growing number of attacks as Taliban fighters along the northwest border with Afghanistan have teamed up with militant groups once supported by the government in the country's heartland.

Security video from the scene showed the blasts scattering terrified worshippers as white plumes of smoke blanketed the area. The first bomber detonated his explosives in a large underground room where visitors sleep and wash themselves before praying, said Khusro Pervez, the top government official in Lahore. The attack occurred as volunteers handed out food to people visiting the shrine, said Chaudary Mohammed Shafique, a senior police official.

Minutes later, a second bomber detonated his explosives upstairs in a large courtyard in front of the shrine as people tried to flee the first attack, said Pervez.The blasts ripped concrete from the walls, twisted metal gates and left wires hanging from the ceiling, television footage showed. Blood stained the shrine's white marble floor.

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Terrorists Probing, Planning For New Aviation Attacks

Despite billions of dollars spent on securing our nation’s airports since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, experts say terrorists are still testing and targeting aviation security because an attack could kill a lot of people, undermine public confidence and cause significant economic damage.“It remains an incredibly high target for terrorists,” Erroll Southers, President Obama’s first choice to head the Transportation Security Administration, said. Southers had to withdraw his name from consideration due to political reasons. “It’s still vulnerable… and it would be a decisive economic blow to our country.”

Aviation security experts spoke at homeland security and counterterrorism forum Tuesday at the Aspen Institute which was attended by lawmakers, industry insiders, journalists and the public.

Since 1960, there have been more than 90 active attacks by terrorists on airport structures, according to the experts.

US officials: Al-Qaida operative tied to NY plot

U.S. counterterrorism officials have linked one of the nation's most wanted terrorists to last year's thwarted plot to bomb the New York City subway system, authorities said Wednesday.

Current and former counterterrorism officials said top al-Qaida operative Adnan Shukrijumah met with one of the would-be suicide bombers in a plot that Attorney General Eric Holder called one of the most dangerous since the 9/11 terror attacks.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have named Shukrijumah in a draft terrorism indictment but on Wednesday the Justice Department was still discussing whether to cite his role.
Some officials feared that the extra attention might hinder efforts to capture him.Shukrijumah's involvement shows how important the subway bombing plot was to al-Qaida's senior leadership. Intelligence officials believe Shukrijumah is one of the top candidates to become al-Qaida's next head of external operations, the man in charge of planning attacks worldwide.

Why should Australians fear from Muslims?

About 800 people gathered in Camden, NSW (the suburb located in the outskirts of Sydney's West) and raised their voice against the plan for an Islamic School to be built in the area. Their demonstration followed by a forum organized by Christina Democratic Party and other Christian Groups.

Among others Mr. Fred Nile, MP, of Christian Democratic Party was the prominent speaker. This was supposed to be an open forum to discuss the issue of the proposed Islamic School but there was no Muslim-speaker invited. Almost every speaker spoke against Islam and Muslims using inflammatory statements and warnings. In their support against the Islamic school the speakers called Muslims as terrorists and Islam as religion of hatred referring to the global situation of terrorists' attacks and bomb blasts.
The speakers argued that if the Islamic School is built in the Camden area then it would be a threat to their way of life & culture and the school will teach terrorism to the Muslim children. They warned that permitting an Islamic school in Camden would encourage Muslim community to build more Islamic centres in other areas and that will bring danger to the Australian society.

Islam is not a religion of peace

“You can’t say that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam does not mean peace, Islam means submission. So a Muslim is the one who submits. You know, there is a place for violence in Islam. There is a place for jihad in Islam.”

“The Quran is full of – you know – jihad is the most talked about duty in the Qur’an after tawhid (belief). Nothing else is mentioned more than fighting.”

On the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London that killed 52 and wounded hundreds:“For the people who carried it out, it was legitimate. If you look at the will of Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, they would be justified.
And there are many verses of the Quran and many statements to say that’s the Islamic argument. And that is a difficult Islamic argument to refute. And there are many scholars who support that argument as well.”

Suicide bomber kills five as 16 die in Iraq unrest

A suicide bomber killed five people in northern Iraq as bombs in Baghdad and other attacks raised the overall toll to 16 dead, including an Iraqi general, security officials told AFP.

The suicide attack in the refinery and power station town of Baiji targeted a police patrol and also wounded 18 people, police in the Salaheddin provincial capital of Tikrit said.

In Baghdad, the general, whom police identified only by his first name Khodr, was blown up by a magnetic bomb in Aden Square in the Shiite shrine district of Kadhimiyah in the north of the city.A second magnetic bomb killed one person and wounded two outside an army officers' club in Al-Hurriya in northwest Baghdad, police said. There was no immediate word on whether the casualties were soldiers or civilians.

Dozens of Americans Believed to Have Joined Terrorists

Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests overseas, the president’s most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday.

“There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in various parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us,” said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Brennan said he would not talk about lists of targeted American terrorists.
However, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been following down U.S. nationals and U.S. passport holders who pose security threats, like the Yemen-based al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, he said.

Terror suspect 'A-chef'

A suspected member of the Basque nationalist group Eta wanted in Spain for questioning about terrorist attacks had been working as a chef in Belfast under an assumed name for the last two years, a court has heard.

Police also found several false ID documents belonging to Fermin Vila Michelena, 40, when they raided his rented flat where he lived alone, Belfast Recorder Tom Burgess was told.Michelena was detained in the city centre last Friday under a European arrest warrant issued by the Spanish authorities who are seeking to interview him about several attacks, including a car bomb which killed a senior army officer and a policeman.
The Spanish interior ministry claimed he was part of Eta's Madrid cell which was responsible for four bombings in 2001. The court heard that he left his home in the Basque region the previous year. Spanish police had sought him for three months before to the attacks he was wanted for.

Pakistani court sentences Americans for terrorism

The students, in their 20s, were arrested in December in Pakistan's central city of Sargodha, 190 km (120 miles) southeast of Islamabad. Deputy Prosecutor Rana Bakhtiar said the men were condemned on two counts each, with one carrying a 10-year sentence and the other carrying five years, to be served concurrently. They were also fined a total of 70,000 rupees ($820).

"Both these sentences will begin concurrently and in practice they will spend 10 years in jail. We will appeal in the high court to enhance the sentence," Bakhtiar said. Waqar Hussain Khan, Ahmed Minni, Ramy Zamzam, Aman Yemer and Umar Farooq were each charged with five counts of conspiracy, raising funds for terrorist acts, planning war against Pakistan, directing others to launch attacks and attempting to cross the Afghan border illegally.

Deputy prosecutor Bakhtiar said the court issued the 10-year sentences for conspiracy and five years for raising funds. The other charges were dropped.

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Parcel bomb kills Greek security minister's aide

A parcel bomb enveloped as a gift exploded last night inside the offices of the minister in charge of security in Greece, killing a senior aide who tried to open the box. The explosion was meters away from where the minister, Michalis Chrysohoidis, was sat at his desk on the seventh floor of the heavily-guarded building in Athens.

Giorgos Vassilakis, 52, leader of the minister's security team, died instantly when the device, thought to have been gift-wrapped as a box of sweets, went off in his hands. So strong was the blast that workers in the building thought it had been struck by an earthquake.

Visibly shaken, Chrysohoidis vowed the "cowardly murderers will be brought to justice".

The unprecedented assassination attempt had clearly been aimed at him, he said, since as minister he has sought to break down on the medley of domestic armed groups active in Greece. By late last night no group had claimed responsibility for the explosion.

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The weapons of Mass Destruction

Several terrorist groups have actively sought weapons of mass destruction (WMD) of one kind or another. In particular, the Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo, al Qaeda and its associates -- notably the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Jemaah Islamiya and Lashkar al Tayyib -- figure most prominently among the groups that have manifested some degree of intent, experimentation, and programmatic efforts to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

To date, however, al Qaeda is the only group known to be pursuing a long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks. The evidence suggests that the al Qaeda senior leadership was not directly involved or apparently even aware of attack preparations until late stages of planning.

Moreover, there is no evidence that the al Qaeda leadership regarded the use of crude toxins and poisons as being suitable for conducting what would amount to pin prick attacks on the United States; on the contrary, Zawahiri canceled the planned attack
on the New York City subway for "something better," suggesting that a relatively easy attack utilizing tactical weapons would not achieve the goals the al Qaeda leadership had set for themselves.

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Morocco sentences 2, including German, to prison on terror charges

A Moroccan court sentenced two suspects, including a German national, to prison on terrorism- related charges, state-run MAP news agency reported.

The appeal court in Sale, the twin city to capital Rabat, sentenced a 29-year-old Moroccan-born German national, identified by the report as M. H., to 10 years in jail after finding him guilty of "forming a criminal gang to plan and carry out terrorist attacks" in the kingdom.

According to the report, he was arrested last September by Moroccan security forces for alleged involvement in terrorist acts.

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The root cause of Terrorism - Unleashed

A religion is at the root of the terrorism that we observe across the world today. All Religions initiate from a psychiatric paranoia, based on a misunderstanding of the unknown universe as a god. This suspicion becomes a threat to civilization when a religion insists that everyone should accept that, the way in which this religion misunderstands the unknown universe as a god, is the ONLY right way (to misunderstand the universe!).

Missionary religions are a contagious psychiatric paranoia and Violent Missionary religions are a criminally infectious psychiatric paranoia that threaten human civilization. While all religions are psychiatric paranoias, only Islam is a criminally contagious psychiatric paranoia.

With the Quran setting the principles for forcible conversion of all non-Muslims to Islam and using compulsion of treating non-Muslims like 2nd class beings, the base is prepared for the Madaressahs (Islamic theological-terrorism schools) to inculcate these Quranic principles into the minds of every growing generation of Muslims to have this attitude of paranoid coercion. Further at every prayer (Ibadat/Namaz), the Muslim priest (Maulavi) moralizes the practice of terror to his audience. This is how a terrorist is born. So the Quran, and what is preached in the Madaressahs and the Mosques are the real roots of terror. And until the world over, we do not wipe out these; the problem of terrorism will not end.

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Guilty on Terror Charges -- Voice of America

A Pakistani court has sentenced five Americans to 10 years each in prison after finding them responsible of terror offenses.

Pakistani officials declared the verdict Thursday in the eastern city of Sargodha. They said the court condemned the Americans, all Muslims in their early 20s, on two terror charges and also fined each $821.

Prosecutors had been asking for life in prison, and Deputy Prosecutor Rana Bakhtiar said officials will plea to the country's high court for a longer sentence.

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Army officer and LeT ‘commander’ killed in separate encounters in Jammu and Kashmir

A senior Army officer, Colonel Neeraj Sood, commanding officer of Rashtriya Rifles (RR, 18th Battalion), was killed in an ambush by the militants at Saiwan village in the Lolab Valley of Kupwara District, Police said on June 23.

Colonel Neeraj was critically wounded in the militant attack… However, he succumbed to his injuries in the hospital late on Tuesday night," a senior Police officer said. Separately, the operation launched by the Security Forces (SFs) at Baghat in Sopore town of Baramulla District ended on June 22 with the recovery of the dead body of a top Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) ‘commander’, Abu Zubair, from debris of the house where he was hiding, reported Daily Excelsior.

An AK rifle, two magazines, one pistol, five live pistol rounds and a mobile phone were also recovered from the debris of the house, official sources said. Zubair, a resident of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), was ‘deputy divisional commander’ of the LeT in North Kashmir and was involved in planning and execution of several attacks on SFs and civilians in the area, they said.

An unnamed senior Police official said intelligence inputs had put the number of militants in the house at two. We are hopeful of finding another body also as there is still some part of the debris to be searched," he added. As reported earlier, the operation began on June 21 in which a Policeman was killed and several others sustained injuries.

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43 Taliban militants executed in FATA

43 Taliban (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, TTP) militants were executed in clashes with Security Forces (SFs) in the Orakzai Agency in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on June 22. Militants had attacked the SFs with deadly weapons and mortar shells in the Sawar Kot area. Around 43 militants were executed in the gun battle that followed.

At least 12 soldiers were also harmed in the shootout. Also, around 22 Taliban (TTP) militants laid down their weapons and yielded before the SFs in the Bajaur Agency. Separately, SFs grabbed a large number of weapons including Russian manufactured Kalashnikov rifles during search operations in various parts of Mohmand tehsil (revenue unit).

Further, the Taliban (TTP) militants recognized that they were holding 33 missing Frontier Corps (FC) soldiers who went missing since militants attacked a check-post near the Afghan border in Mohmand Agency on June 14 as hostages and offered prisoner swap with the Government.

The offer was made in telephone calls to journalists from maintained Taliban spokesman Ikramullah Mohmand. “We are ready to exchange prisoners with the government as our comrades are in government custody too,” the Taliban (TTP) spokesman revealed. He warned that the Taliban (TTP) would kill the captives if the Government refused their demand.

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Afzal Guru’s Mercy Plea finally got Rejected

The Home Ministry has requested the President to reject Afzal Guru’s mercy petition and award him a death sentence.

They argue that his crime - attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001 – is so critical that it doesn’t deserve any mercy.

Mohammed Afzal Guru and five others had attacked the Parliament killing nine security personnel. He was charged with plotting the attack a few days later.

December 18, 2002: A year later, a local court sentenced Guru the death sentence. He moved the Supreme Court.

October 29, 2003: Delhi High Court retains Guru’s death sentence.

August 4, 2005: The apex court retained the death sentence.

A committee consisted of academicians, lawyers and human rights activists such as Nirmala Deshpande with Mahasweta Devi, Rajni Kothari, Prabhat Patnaik, Ashish Nandy, Prashant Bhushan, Sumanta Banerjee, Mihir Desai, and others as members, held a press conference within a week of the judgment by the Supreme Court.

They took up Afzal’s case and requested for further inquiry as they felt he, ‘a surrendered militant,’ “was practically unrepresented in the trial” and a victim of whatever the police fed the courts.

October 20, 2006: Afzal Guru was to be hanged, but his wife Tabassum filed a mercy petition, so his execution was held. According to procedure, the then President of India APJ Abdul Kalam asked for the Home Ministry’s views on the defence.

The Home Ministry then sent the Afzal file to the Delhi Government where it was retained up for four years.

March 2010: Afzal had filed an application in SC persisting an early decision on his clemency plea. In fact, he pleaded for a death sentence instead of the solitary confinement saying “life in jail was worse than death”.

May 18, 2010: Several reminders didn’t yield any response till Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna sought explanations on the Afzal Guru mercy petition last month.

June, 2010: Only two weeks ago, the Delhi Government sent the file back to the Home Ministry saying it supported the Supreme Court’s verdict of a death sentence.

Interestingly, the President has only commuted 10 death sentences to life imprisonment out of the 77 mercy petitions that have been filed in the last 30 years.

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One person killed in Karachi

Unidentified assailants shot dead a person and injured his two brothers on June 21 in Gulistan-e-Jauhar in the remit of Shahrah-e-Faisal Police Station in Karachi in Sindh. The deceased was identified as Abdul Wahab. Separately, a watchman was shot and injured in Block 17 of the same area.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Extremist Cell (AEC) of the Crime Investigation Department (CID) arrested a Tehreek-e-TalibanPakistan (TTP) militant from Kunwari Colony. The arrestee, identified as Azmatullah alias Asmatullah, is the brother Wahabullah, a TTP ‘commander’ for
North Waziristan in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Asmatullah had played an important role in the Karsaz carnage of October 18, 2007 which claimed more than 140 lives of Pakistan People’s Party activists and injured hundreds others.

Two civilians shot dead in Manipur

Suspected militants shot dead Nongthombam Sarat (55), Assistant Horticulture Officer in Bishnupur District, on June 20. Police said that four militants tried to abduct Sarat from his house around 7pm. Failing to abduct, the militants shot him dead.

Also, armed militants shot dead a youth, identified as Md. Akbar alias Ithem (20), at Sunulok at the adjoining area of Thoubal District and Chandel, according to Imphal Free Press. Sources said that the bullet riddled dead body with bruise mark was recovered by the locals on June 19.

Meanwhile, a suspected militant belonging to Noyon faction of the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP), Moirangthem Anand (33), was arrested by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) amidst a gunfire incident and later handed over to Imphal West Police on June 19, reports Imphal Free Press.
According to reports, the incident occurred when five militants came to office of District Fishery Officer (DFO) Imphal East cum project co-coordinator of directorate of fishery, H. Biramani, in relation with monetary demand. Reports said that one Bajaj pulsar motor cycle and one empty case of 7.65 mm ammunition were recovered from the possession of the arrested militant.

US supreme court: Nonviolent aid to banned groups tantamount to 'terrorism'

The US Supreme Court has upheld a broad-ranging law that permits Americans who offer advice to banned organizations, including legal assistance and information on conflict resolution, to be prosecuted as terrorists.

The case raised out of human rights advice given by a California group to Kurdish and Tamil organizations that are listed as terrorist groups in the US.

The Supreme Court upheld the Obama administration's argument that also advice intended to be used for peaceful purposes amounted to "material support" for terrorism.

That includes a lawyer submitting a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a banned group or helping a banned organization to petition international bodies to bring an end to a violent conflict.

"The supreme court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists," declared David Cole, a Georgetown university law professor who argued the case before the court.