Free Republic

SNIPPET: "A Black September terrorist who served only about half his 30-year sentence for planting three car bombs in New York City in 1973 was released Thursday into the custody of immigration officials to be deported. Khalid Al-Jawary, 63, was released from the Supermax maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, said Carl Rusnok, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman. Rusnok said a federal immigration judge had signed a deportation order for Al-Jawary."

Russian Mogul's Planes Took al-Qaida, Taliban Gold To Sudan9-3-2 Planes owned by Russian businessman Viktor Bout have been used to fly al-Qaida and Taliban gold to Sudan in recent weeks, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Several shipments of gold were delivered by boat from Karachi, Pakistan, to either Iran or the United Arab Emirates, the newspaper said, citing unidentified European intelligence officials. From there, the gold was flown on charted planes to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where al-Qaida has broad business contacts, the paper said. European officials believe the gold was transported by Air Bas, an airline set up...

IN A LITTLE-NOTICED DECISION in a New York courtroom on September 25, 2003, a man described as Osama bin Laden's "best friend" got some good news. U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim could not be sentenced to life in prison. Salim--who was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989 and who was for years one of bin Laden's most trusted confidants--had been captured in Germany in 1998 and extradited to the United States for prosecution related to his role in the grand conspiracy that resulted in the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in...

A previously unknown militant group claimed responsibility on a militant Web site for the slaying of a U.S. diplomat in Sudan on New Year's Day, according to an intelligence group monitoring extremist groups. "We can't authenticate this communique, which is posted by a member of the forum, but at the same time, because there is a claim of responsibility, we chose to send it out to our subscribers," Rita Katz told The Associated Press. Katz is the director of monitoring institute, SITE Intelligence Group. Katz added that she had never heard of the group before. The group calls itself Ansar...

Khartoum (4 January) - A hitherto unknown Sudanese Islamist group has claimed responsibility for the murder of an United States diplomat and his driver. They were shot dead in Khartoum on New Year's Day. The group, Ansar al-Tawhid, made the claim on the internet, saying the men were killed because the Americans were trying to establish Christianity in Sudan. The chauffeur was said to have bartered away his religion.

KHARTOUM, Sudan - An American diplomat and his driver were shot to death Tuesday in the Sudanese capital, the U.S. Embassy said, a day after a joint African Union-United Nations force took over peacekeeping in Sudan's Darfur region. It was not immediately known if the motive for the attack was political or a random crime. "This afternoon, the American officer succumbed to his injuries and passed away," said Walter Braunohler, the spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. Braunohler said the diplomat, whose name was not released, worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Sudanese Foreign Ministry identified...

Carrying swords and machetes and waving green Islamic flags, protesters marched through the streets of Khartoum yesterday demanding the execution of British teacher Gillian Gibbons. "No one lives who insults the prophet," read one of the banners outside the British embassy. More than 1,000 Muslim demonstrators in the Sudanese capital called for her to be shot or stabbed for insulting Islam after her pupils called a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons, 54, of Liverpool, was sentenced on Thursday night to 15 days in jail followed by deportation in a case that has attracted international condemnation. Last night she was moved from...

KHARTOUM -- At least 10 African Union (AU) troops have been killed and 50 reported missing from their base in Sudan's western Darfur region, in the bloodiest attack on the peacekeeping force, the AU said Sunday. "At least 10 soldiers were killed, seven wounded, and dozens are missing," African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) spokesman Noureddine Mezni said of the attack Saturday night on Haskanita base in southern Darfur. An AU statement said 50 personnel were missing after a "sustained attack by a large-and-organized group of heavily-armed men," who broke into the camp with 30 vehicles, forcing AU troops to...

July 16, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — The Sudanese government accused the US for the first time of involvement in a sabotage plot foiled yesterday. Sudanese security services on Saturday arrested the leaders of the Umma Reform and Renewal opposition party over allegations of planning sabotage actions in the country. The former presidential assistant was arrested along with a number of retired army generals, including retired general Mohamed Ali Hamid, who worked as deputy director of security in the late eighties, as well as former minister of tourism, Abdeljalil al-Basha. Sudan’s preisdential adviser Nafi Ali Nafi told Al Jazeera news channel...

July 14, 2007 (KHARTOUM, Sudan) — Sudan’s security services said that Libya made them aware of a planned coup attempt led by an opposition leader. Sudanese security forces arrested opposition party leader Mubarak al-Fadil chairman of Umma Party (Reform and Renewal) earlier today without providing reasons. Al-Fadil’s party issued a statement today recieved by Sudan Tribune saying that a group of twelve men stormed his residence during the early morning hours and "brutally assaulting members of his household". Sudan’s security services said that Al-Fadil was recruiting people from Kordofan and Blue Nile area to carry out attacks in Khartoum....

SUDANESE PLANE HIJACKED AT KHARTOUM AIRPORT BY GUNMAN, DIVERTED TO CHAD'S CAPITAL N'DJAMENA - AN OFFICIAL SAYS

Protesters demanding an end to conflict in Sudan's Darfur region are staging a day of demonstrations around the world. Activists will rally in several capital cities, calling on the government in Khartoum to allow United Nation peacekeepers into Darfur. Khartoum has dismissed the protests, saying those taking part have been misled by the international media. Tens of thousands of people have died and up to two million have been displaced in three years of conflict. The US and France have both said a genocide is taking place in Darfur, with the US directly accusing Khartoum of responsibility. On Saturday UK...

Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.7. Objected to...

Entire Darfur village of 55,000 flees after raids by Janjaweed gunmen By David Blair in Menawashi (Filed: 04/02/2006) Exhausted refugees were building ramshackle shelters in a dry river bed yesterday after 55,000 people fled a raid mounted by the Janjaweed militia in the Sudanese province of Darfur. It was the biggest movement of refugees there so far this year. The victims, many of whom have fled attacks twice or even three times before, are camped around the town of Menawashi in southern Darfur. They abandoned the nearby town of Mershing after two attacks from the pro-regime militia in the space...

Via email from Gabrielle Goldwater. U.S. Government: Arafat personally approved 1973 attack on U.S. diplomats in Khartoum   Foreign Relations, 1969-1976, Volume E-6, Documents on Africa, 1973-1976 Released by the Office of the Historianwww.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e6/67234.htm THE SEIZURE OF THE SAUDI ARABIAN EMBASSY IN KHARTOUMSummary In the early evening hours of 1 March 1973, eight Black September Organization (BSO) terrorists seized the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum as a diplomatic reception honoring the departing United States Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) was ending. After slightly wounding the United States Ambassador and the Belgian Charge d'Affaires, the terrorists took these officials plus the...

WATERVILLE -- Mainers should push the Maine State Retirement System to divest $50 million of its investments in international companies operating in war-torn Sudan, a group of activists said Friday. A bill currently in the Statehouse to force the divestment, L.D. 1758, hangs in the balance, said Wells Staley-Mays, an adviser to the Fur Cultural Revival. He was speaking at a Colby College event alongside three Sudanese refugees. "Fur" refers to a major non-Arab tribe in the Sudanese region of Darfur -- an area the size of Texas, whose name literally means "home of the Furs" -- now threatened with...

Sudan wants an investigation into strike American of 1998 KHARTOUM - the Sudanese government reiterated Sunday a request for investigation by the United Nations on strike American missiles which had destroyed in 1998 a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum. They suspected it of producing chemical weapons. Khartoum invites in an official statement the Security Council of UNO "to inquire into the charges of the United States uttered to attack factory Al-Chifa seven years ago". The text was published at the time of the 7th anniversary of strike. "This painful memory should be a lesson for the international community to include/understand...

Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer. Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell threatened the Sudanese government with unspecified U.N. Security Council action on Tuesday if it fails to crack down on Arab militias whose actions he said are approaching genocide against African villagers in the western Darfur region. "Unless we see more movement soon...it may be necessary for the international community to begin considering other actions, to include Security Council action," Powell told a news conference with Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail.The United States wants Khartoum to end attacks by the militias, provide full access for humanitarian aid and restart political talks with...

A refugee from the village of Kailek tends a camp fire in Kas, Sudan. (Sudarsan Raghavan/Knight Ridder) Muslim killing Muslim in Sudan By Sudarsan Raghavan Knight Ridder News Service     KAILEK, Sudan -- The white-robed men on horseback shot two of Hamid Rahman's boys that scorching afternoon. They were 3 and 6. But they weren't the youngest or the weakest to die. The Arab marauders targeted the blind, the disabled, the women carrying children -- anyone who couldn't run fast enough.     "They killed even babies," recalled Rahman, 40, a survivor with sad, glassy eyes.     Here, in the...

<p>Exactly 10 years ago the world stood by as a genocidal rampage by ethnic Hutus against ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda claimed as many as 800,000 lives. Now something similar may be unfolding in western Sudan, a region even more remote from the world's gaze. Will humanity bestir itself to act, or will history repeat itself?</p>

WASHINGTON: The famous African explorer Dr David Livingstone might have been impressed, even if the agenda was suspect. Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear proliferator-hero Abdul Qadeer Khan traversed the breadth of Africa in his hey day as a nuclear salesman , going to as romantic a getaway as Casablanca in Morocco and as remote an outpost as Timbuktu in Mali.   US officials might dearly like to get hold of Khan’s travel agent, or simply his itinerary, since he seems to have pretty much charted his own course during his profligate proliferating days. According to accounts now surfacing in the Pakistani media,...

ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly.

ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection. For nearly two years, starting in 1996, the CIA monitored the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The plant was known to have deep connections to Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation, and the CIA had gathered intelligence on the budding relationship between Iraqi chemical weapons experts and the plant's top officials. The intelligence included information that several top chemical weapons...

Connecting the dots in 1998, but not in 2003. ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection.For nearly two years, starting in 1996, the CIA monitored the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The plant was known to have deep connections to Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation, and the CIA had gathered intelligence on the budding relationship between Iraqi chemical weapons experts and the plant's top officials. The...

Al-Jazeera Khartoum office closed The Sudanese authorities have closed the Khartoum office of Arabic satellite television station al-Jazeera and detained one of its correspondents. The country's official news agency accused al-Jazeera and its reporter Islam Salih Bello of lies and distortion. Police raided the office on Wednesday, seizing equipment including cameras. Staff said they had often received threats from Sudan's national security forces over their coverage of events. An official statement from the Sudanese National Security Authority said al-Jazeera, through its Khartoum office and its correspondent, Mr Belo, "took to preparing and transmitting a number of programmes and materials stuffed...

Case ClosedFrom the November 24, 2003 issue: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.by Stephen F. Hayes 11/24/2003, Volume 009, Issue 11     Email a Friend   Respond to this article OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by...

The US embassy in Khartoum has announced it will suspend operations for a week from November 12 due to a "specific" threat against American interests in the Sudanese capital. "The US embassy will suspend normal operations as of November 12," the embassy said in a statement, noting it would also be closed on November 11 for the Veterans' Day holiday in the United States. "This action is the result of a credible and specific threat to US interests in Khartoum."

The US embassy announced it would suspend operations for a week from November 12 due to a "specific" threat against American interests in the Sudanese capital. "The US embassy will suspend normal operations as of November 12," the embassy said in a statement Monday. The embassy noted it would also be closed on November 11 for the Veterans' Day holiday in the United States. "This action is the result of a credible and specific threat to US interests in Khartoum," it said, without elaborating.

Oct. 23, 2003 Sudan snubs Powell, says Hamas, Jihad 'freedom fighters' By ASSOCIATED PRESS KHARTOUM, Sudan Sudan's ruling party said Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not terror groups, but forces committed to ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, according to reports published Thursday. The comments made by Ibrahim Ahmed Omar, the secretary general of the ruling National Congress Party, followed U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's call on Khartoum a day earlier to expel members of the groups. "Sudan's position toward Hamas and Jihad is clear: these are two Islamic forces struggling for the sake of (liberation of) their homeland,"...

During September 2003, mass hysteria spread through Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, which was ultimately quelled by police intervention and statements made by the health minister. The panic was caused by rumors of foreigners roaming the city and shaking men's hands, making their penises disappear. The rumors were spread rapidly by text messages on cellular phones, and diverted the public's attention from a breakthrough in negotiations in Kenya between Sudanese Vice President Ali Othman and SPLA leader John Garang. [1] Several versions of the story circulated and not all involved foreigners: Initially, it was claimed that the perpetrators belonged...

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) -- A Sudanese airliner crashed early Tuesday shortly after taking off from Port Sudan airport, killing 105 passenger and 11 crew. Only a child survived, Sudan News Agency reported. MORE...

Prominent Democrats have wasted no time accusing President Bush of using doctored intelligence about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq war, while like-minded pundits have already begun hinting darkly about the possibility of impeaching Bush if the WMDs don't turn up soon. But there was no similar outcry five years ago after the Clinton administration came up empty on evidence that Sudan was producing weapons of mass destruction, a claim the White House used to justify slamming some 20 cruise missiles into Khartoum's Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant - a facility it also claimed had ties to...

US Officials Question Link Between 9/11 and Iraq Iraq Linked to WTC Attack Tactic posted by on Wednesday, June 12th, 2002 at 23:30:12 GMT: From the USA Today article linked to below:US officials question link between 9/11 and Iraq Peter Eisler (USA Today) WashingtonOsama bin Laden‘s Al-Qaeda network has ties to Iraqi intelligence that date to the mid-1990s, when they came together in Sudan to support Islamic insurgencies in Algeria and across West Asia. The CIA had convincing evidence at the time that Saddam Hussein‘s regime was funneling money through bin Laden to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in...

The SPLA affirms to have destroyed the principal station of pumping of Sudan Wednesday October 02, 2002 - 8h36 GMT CAIRO, Oct. 2 (AFP) - the popular Army of release of Soudanrebelles Southerners) affirmed Wednesday to have destroyed the most significant station of oil pumping of Sudan, thus stopping the oil supply of Khartoum. A unit of the SPLA "attacked and destroyed in the night of Sunday to Monday the station of collection and pumping of Higleg", in the center of the country, which feeds Khartoum, the SPLA in an official statement writes. Joined on the telephone by the...