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A Sudanese man used a knife from the in-flight meal to threaten crew members after the plane left Turkish airspace and demanded that the flight be diverted to Jerusalem, the official said.

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- An appeals court commuted the death sentences for four men convicted of killing an American diplomat and his Sudanese driver after the driver's family decided to pardon the murderers, a news agency reported Thursday. Sudanese law stipulates that if a victim's family chooses to pardon the murderer, the person cannot be sentenced to death and the prison term cannot exceed 10 years. The case will be referred back to the initial court for a new sentence, said the Sudan Media Center.

Four men accused of planning to kidnap two Roanoke County women and hold them for ransom were indicted Thursday in U.S. District Court in Roanoke. Joshua Kasongo, 19, of Roanoke; Mohammed Hussein Guhad, 19, of Roanoke; Luke Musa Elbino, 19, of Vinton; and Anthony Eugene Muse, 18, of Roanoke are each charged with conspiring to kidnap and attempted kidnapping. Guhad and Muse are students at Patrick Henry High School. Elbino is a student at Virginia Western Community College.

SNIPPET: "In recent days Egypt has been disclosing details about uncovering a major Hezbollah espionage ring on its soil. AP cites a cabinet minister saying 25 of its 49 members have been arrested so far. The arrests began back in November, but the disclosures have started only now. The leader of the espionage ring—who is among those detained—was a Hezbollah agent named Sami Shehab, and the group he recruited included Lebanese, Syrians, Sudanese, and Palestinians along with 12 Egyptian Shiites. Not surprisingly, they planned attacks on Israeli vacationers in the Sinai, apparently as revenge for the February 2008 killing of...

CONTINGENCY OPERATING BASE SPEICHER, Iraq, March 13, 2009 – The two soldiers -- one a Christian from the south, the other a Muslim from the north -- have nothing against each other, despite the past which tore their homeland of Sudan apart in more than 20 years of civil war. Army Spc. Magdi Ahmed, second from right, and Army Spc. Marlesh Mbory, far right, become naturalized U.S. citizens along with other members of the 25th Infantry Division’s 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team in a ceremony at Al Faw Palace in Baghdad, March 3, 2009. U.S. Army photo by Staff...

It was an extraordinary coup: in the late 1990's, federal prosecutors sat down to interview their first major informer against Al Qaeda — Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a former payroll manager for Osama bin Laden who would become the government's chief witness in its first trial of Qaeda operatives. But it was followed by an extraordinary blunder: for two years, even as the authorities cloaked Mr. Fadl in the secrecy of the federal witness-protection program, keeping him in undisclosed locations and communicating with him in videoconferences through a special telephone hookup, many hours of those conversations were recorded on videotape. The...

KHARTOUM, Sudan - An Al-Jazeera cameraman released from the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay detention center last week described it Monday as the worst prison mankind has ever seen. Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese citizen, was whisked from his hospital bed in a convoy escorted by police cars with flashing lights and wailing sirens to an outdoor event in his neighborhood organized by his family. His speech was broadcast live on Sudanese television. "After 2,340 days spent in the most heinous prison mankind has ever known, we are honored to be here. Thank you, and thank all those defended us and of our...

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

WASHINGTON – The brother-in-law of alleged terrorist co-conspirator Sami al-Arian attended engineering classes at the same college and time as the suspected mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terror plot, records at the North Carolina college show. The overlap raises questions about the extent of al-Arian's ties to terrorist groups. He and his brother-in-law, Mazen al-Najjar, have been accused by federal authorities of supporting Hamas, a Palestinian militia responsible for anti-Israeli suicide bombings, through an elaborate network of terrorist front groups and fund-raising arms. Mazen al-Najjar Al-Najjar, a Palestinian refugee, was arrested in 1997 and deported last year. Al-Arian, who also...

Sudanese gangs afflict Cairo streets By Heather Sharp BBC News, Cairo Maliah Bekam, 24, came to Egypt to escape the civil war in southern Sudan, but he died in a pool of his own blood in a Cairo street. The fatal machete blows came from members of his own community. The crowning irony is that the attack happened outside an event marking World Refugee Day. Rap music is popular among many Sudanese youth Maliah is the latest casualty of violence between rival street gangs from Cairo's Sudanese community. Unofficially (there is no official figure), the death toll is at least...

Egyptian police shot and killed a Sudanese woman and seriously injured four others Sunday on the Sinai Peninsula as they tried to sneak into Israel, a local police officer said. Many refugees trying to enter Israel from Egypt have been detained, and some hurt, by police, but Haja Abbas Haroun's death was the first of its kind. Haroun, 28, died instantly by police gunfire, while four others, including a woman and young girl, were critically injured and taken to a local hospital, said Capt. Mohammed Badr of the northern Sinai police force. The border guards detained 22 refugees with Haroun...

AUSTRALIA is set to drastically reduce its Sudanese refugee program this year. With growing community concern about the behaviour of the refugees, Federal Cabinet will soon consider a proposal from Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews to reduce the intake from Horn of Africa nations. Australia's humanitarian program has allowed thousands of Sudanese refugees to come to Australia in recent years. But there are growing doubts about the wisdom of the decision, especially with the rise of gangs of Sudanese youths and drunk drivers. There are about 18,000 Sudanese in Victoria, with many traumatised by their experience of civil war -- and...

BAGHDAD: An Iraqi court has sentenced a Saudi, a Syrian and a Sudanese to death after finding them guilty of Al-Qaeda related terrorist offences, the US-led coalition in Iraq said on Wednesday. The alleged foreign fighters were among 48 detainees convicted by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq between December 8 and 28 last year. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in March 2003, hundreds of Muslim volunteers have flooded into Iraq to fight against US forces and, increasingly, the Shiite-led government. The Syrian and the Saudi "were captured on June 19 in a targeted raid on Al-Qaeda members,"...

US Laments Sudanese Inflexibility Over Darfur Force By David Gollust State Department 29 September 2006 The United States said Friday it is not abandoning its drive for a U.N. peacekeeping force to replace the African Union force in Darfur despite what it says is Sudanese intransigence on the issue. Sudan is also blocking a visit by the Bush administration's new envoy for Darfur, Andrew Natsios. Head of AU Commission Alpha Oumar Konare, right, inspects an honor guard during an arrival ceremony at AU headquarters at Darfur town of Al-Fasher (File photo - June 20, 2006) The Sudanese government has been...

Racist Arab Quoteswww.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/911racist arab quotes Posted By: SopdetDate: 20, August 02, at 6:56 a.m. Arab/Iranian/Indian views on black Africans during the medieval era "In both Arab and Iranian Islamic writings, blacks are accused of being stupid, untruthful, vicious, cowardly, sexually unbridled, ugly and distorted, excessively merry, and easily affected by food and drink." Minoo Southgate, 1984, Negative Images of Blacks in Some Medieval Iranian Writings Arabs called African Blacks (typically East Africans) the 'Zanj'. Most Arab writers who spoke disparagingly of black Africans had never traveled to subSaharan Africa. Many of their tales were based on hearsay. In the Arab...

A newly arrived Sudanese refugee who went on a sex-crime spree after taking amphetamines, has told a Catholic Prison Ministry chaplain that he was an "evil person" for the terrible thing he had done. Hakeem Hakeem was found guilty last month of the rape of a 16-year-old girl, a court was told yesterday, according to an Age report. He also took amphetamines for the first time before raping and bashing a 63-year-old woman in her home the next day. Prosecutor Michele Williams said Hakeem choked the elderly woman and slashed her throat twice. "She thought she was going to die,"...

EL ARISH, Egypt - Egyptian police captured six Sudanese, including a one-year-old boy, who were trying to cross into Israel early Friday to seek asylum, a security official said. The six were arrested at dawn as they tried to get over the coil of barbed wire that marks the border in Egypt's northeast Sinai desert, said Brig. Gen. Adel Fawzi, the chief of the North Sinai criminal investigation department.

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Insurgents exploded 13 car bombs across Iraq on Sunday, including eight in Baghdad within a three-hour span, but the New Year's Day onslaught killed no one and injured only 20 people, police said. A Sudanese official, meanwhile, announced that six kidnapped employees were freed after Sudan announced it would close its Baghdad embassy as demanded by the kidnappers. A Cypriot man kidnapped four months ago also was freed after his family paid a ransom, a relative said. The day's first car bomb in Baghdad exploded at about 8:15 a.m., wounding two Iraqi soldiers in an army patrol...

ARAB RACISM & ISLAMIC JIHAD!!! Are Militant Muslims DECAPITATING Tourists in S. Philippines? IT'S ARAB MUSLIM FANATICS' RACISM + JIHAD!!! Did Sadistic Saddam attack Arab Kuwaiti 'brothers' tortured them horrifically? IT'S ARAB MUSLIM FANATICS' RACISM + JIHAD!!! Did Sadistic Saddam BUTCHER/GASSED/TORTURED HIS OWN PEOPLE? IT'S ARAB MUSLIM FANATICS' RACISM + JIHAD!!! Do Arab Muslim Militant Hamas/Islamic-Jihad/other 'Palestinian' Militants (& often Fatah - connected to the official 'Palestinian' authority) TARGET BABIES, (not as the West targets terrorists) Yes or no? IT'S ARAB MUSLIM FANATICS' RACISM + JIHAD!!! Did Arab Islamists attack French subways? (1985) IT'S ARAB MUSLIM FANATICS' RACISM +...