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A hostage held alongside Mr Wood [recently released Aussie ex-hostage] has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one. Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood, was freed by his kidnappers on May 30. He has since said he shared information with US and Iraqi troops that led to the Australian's release. Now, he wants to find those responsible. "I have now put some people to work to find these bastards," he said yesterday. "I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one...

A HOSTAGE held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one. Swede Ulf Hjertstrom, who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood in Baghdad, was released by his kidnappers on May 30. Mr Hjertstrom has since claimed he shared information with US and Iraqi troops about Mr Wood which led to the release of the 63-year-old Australian engineers two weeks ago, after 47 days in captivity. Now, he wants to find those responsible. "I have now put some people to work to find these...

Ex-hostage hires bounty hunters A HOSTAGE held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one. Swede Ulf Hjertstrom, who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood in Baghdad, was released by his kidnappers on May 30. Mr Hjertstrom has since claimed he shared information with US and Iraqi troops about Mr Wood which led to the release of the 63-year-old Australian engineers two weeks ago, after 47 days in captivity. Now, he wants to find those responsible. "I have now put some people to...

/begin my translation N. Korea: 200 Dollar Bounty per Escaped N. Korean Workers in Russia  N. Koreans workers encountered in Khabarovsk     In order to encourage the arrest of N. Korean escapees(N. Korean workers who escaped from N. Korea-operated enterprise inside Russia,) N. Korean Consulate at Khabarovsk, Russia, announced that local Security Dept. of Construction Association is offering a bounty of $200 for catching an escapee, in order to root out this long-running problem.   As a result, N. Korean workers, who can barely earn $300 per month even after back-breaking work, are now abandoning all other efforts to capitalize on the only opportunity for earning large...

HAYWARD -- The owner of a pizza parlor here illegally transferred money to a bounty hunter on a rogue mission to kill terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, federal authorities said. Noor Alocozy, who owns Liberty Pizza in Hayward, illegally transferred $1 million out of the country between 2002 and 2003, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency revealed Friday. Some of that money reached Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a jailed American mercenary accused of running his own private interrogation camp in Afghanistan. Idema was a client of Alocozy's money-transfer business, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the agency, which spent two...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- They fed them well. The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing U.S. bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the U.S. government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit. A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told...

TIJUANA – Some U.S. law enforcement officials weren't amused with a cartoon published in Mexican newspapers this month depicting a reward of $10,000 for an FBI or DEA agent. In the cartoon, a drug trafficker stands near the reward sign. He's quoted as saying, "Let's see what type of hide yields more belts." The hide presumably refers to the skin of the agents. Cartoonist Osvaldo Muñoz Aceves said the drawing was his dark-humored response to recent demonstrations along the Arizona border againstillegal immigration. He believes the migrants are innocent targets, compared with drug traffickers. "The drug trafficker is doing something...

'Sighting' of Tasmanian tiger sparks £1.2m bounty hunt By Anna Gizowska in Sydney (Filed: 03/04/2005) Officially, the last of their kind died out more than half a century ago, their downfall brought about because white settlers believed they had a voracious appetite for sheep. Now the Tasmanian tiger is once again the subject of a manhunt - this time to prove that the species still exists. The Tasmanian tiger was officially declared extinct in 1986 After dramatic claims by a German tourist to have seen one of the mysterious, meat-eating marsupials lurking deep in the Tasmanian wilderness, Australian magazines and...

THE mastermind of the Madrid train bombings remains at large and security sources believe that he may be planning an attack in Britain during the general election. Documents found in a Madrid flat used by some of the bombers show how their leader, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, ordered them to strike in the final days of the Spanish election campaign last March. The coded command was sent three months earlier; Nasar left it to his lieutenants in Spain to decide what the target should be. Fernando Reinares, Spain’s counter-terrorism director, said the documents showed that the bombing on the eve of...

NewsFlash Home | More Michigan News Hockey coach suspended for offering bounty on rival player 2/22/2005, 10:17 a.m. ET By DEE-ANN DURBIN The Associated Press DETROIT (AP) — Motor City Mechanics coach Steve Shannon has been suspended without pay for the rest of the season for offering his players a $200 bounty to take out Flint Generals forward Kevin Kerr on the ice, United Hockey League Commissioner Richard Brosal said Tuesday. Brosal said Shannon never admitted to offering the money, but a UHL investigation found that he placed the bounty Feb. 2, when the Mechanics played the Generals in Flint....

A New Osama Push The U.S. State Department has begun a media blitz to remind Afghans of the $25 million bounty for al-Qaeda's chief By TIM MCGIRK Sunday, Jan. 23, 2005 With the trail of Osama bin Laden gone cold, the U.S. State Department is revving up a new publicity blitz to remind Afghans and Pakistanis of the $25 million bounty for al-Qaeda's chief. Bin Laden is still thought to be hiding somewhere along the 1,640-mile, mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but intelligence officials in Kabul and Islamabad say there has been no trace of him for the past 20 months. By...

Afghan forces arrested three Americans, including a purported former Green Beret, after raiding a jail they were allegedly running in the Afghan capital and finding prisoners hanging from their feet, officials said Thursday. The U.S. military, facing a widening inquiry into prisoner abuse, quickly distanced itself from the three, who had been posing as American agents before being detained Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday "the U.S. government does not employ or sponsor these men." Afghan officials also dismissed claims by the apparent ringleader, Jonathan K. Idema, that he was a "special adviser" to their security forces, saying...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A portly Shiite cleric, Abu Qusai sheds his black robe for a training suit and exchanges his white turban for a baseball cap, an effort to mask his identity for a risky trip through what has become known as the "triangle of death." The region has become a death zone for many Shiite Muslims, Westerners and members of the Iraqi security services, many of whom have become the victims of Sunni Muslim insurgents and gunmen - some who receive bounties of several thousand dollars. The triangle, formed by the cities of Youssifiyah to the northwest, Latifiyah to...

COOKSVILLE, ILL. – On the 800 acres John Sutter farms just east of Bloomington, rich black soil now appears below the remnants of corn stalks, the product of fresh tilling. The barn by his parents' sagging Victorian farmhouse is shut, the combine put away for the season. Mr. Sutter finished his harvest early this year, bringing in all the corn and soybeans in less than a month. And he's thrilled - or as thrilled as a farmer, raised to believe that truly good news doesn't exist, can be. "It's always nice to have a good crop," he says, ticking off...

SYDNEY, Australia -- Six men were convicted of a string of sex attacks on Pitcairn Island, the isolated Pacific territory that is home to descendants of the 18th century Bounty mutineers, after trials that exposed a culture of sex abuse in the tiny community, media on the island reported Monday. Among those convicted was the island's mayor, Steve Christian, who claims to be a direct descendant of mutiny leader Fletcher Christian. He was cleared of four indecent assaults and one rape but was convicted of five other rapes, New Zealand's TVNZ television network, which has a reporter covering the trials,...

ex-crime trials threaten to devastate the isolated colony on Pitcairn, as British authorities insist the 'island way' is criminal. Far from reach of law SYDNEY, Australia — When Fletcher Christian and his crew of Bounty mutineers landed 214 years ago on tiny Pitcairn Island, its remote location halfway between New Zealand and Peru made it the perfect place to hide. Its isolation has protected the little colony's customs — some quaint and some sinister — ever since. Now the Pitcairn way of life is under challenge by a modern world that believes basic legal standards, including laws against rape, sex...

$10m bounty offered for Chechen rebels The two leaders have been wanted by Russia for years Russia has offered 300m roubles ($10m) for information leading to the arrest of Chechen rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov, reports say. Security services want any information that could help to "neutralise" the two following the Beslan school siege. In a separate development, the president of North Ossetia has said the republic's government will resign. Alexander Dzasokhov told protesters that ministers would step down within two days. He said he was also considering his own position. The announcement came as Beslan residents buried...

RUSSIA’S Federal Security Service today offered a reward of £5.8million for information about two Chechen rebel leaders. And military officials said that Russia had the right to strike at terrorists all over the world. Shamil Basayev ... wanted The announcements came a day after shocking pictures of rebels holding parents and children inside the Beslan school gym emerged. The Federal Security Service said rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov had been responsible for "inhuman terrorist acts on the territory of the Russian Federation." Russian officials have accused the two of masterminding last week’s attack in the small city in...

DUBAI, July 17 (AFP) - Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the fugitive Jordanian Islamist who has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, offered a reward of his own for anyone who kills Iraq's pro-US prime minister, in a statement posted on an Islamist website Sunday. "The Khalid ibn Al-Walid Brigade announces to the Iraqi people a reward of 200,000 Jordanian dinars (285,000 dollars) for the one who cuts the head of (Iyad) Allawi," said the statement. It was signed in the name of the "military wing" of Zarqawi's Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unification and Holy War) group. "In the unit of candidates...

AS Saddam Hussein's trial started, the US Government increased to $US25 million ($36.25 million) its reward for the capture of Iraq's most wanted man, Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The increase, from $US10 million, puts the al-Qa'ida-affiliated Zarqawi on the same level as September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the new reward, a senior Iraqi official was seriously wounded in a roadside bombing, one of the signature methods of Zarqawi's terror campaign. Finance Ministry official Ihsane Karim was wounded and three unidentified civilians were killed in the attack west of Baghdad...