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21 March 2004 NEWSFLASH |
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News,
Views, & Analysis Governments,
Lobbies, & the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know
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"The most honest, the
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and most mobilizing
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Hamas chief killed in air strike
Israeli helicopter gunships hit Sheikh Yassin's car as he left for a mosque at daybreak, local residents said. Mosques reportedly announced his death over loudspeakers and urged people to take to the streets in protest. Israel had warned it would target the Hamas chief after the militant group killed scores of Israelis in suicide bombings over the past three years. Ambulances and fire engines raced to the scene of the attack. Yussef Haddad, 35, a taxi driver, said he saw the missiles hit and kill Yassin and the bodyguards. "Their bodies were shattered," he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. al-Qaida
No. 2: We Have Briefcase Nukes
SYDNEY, Australia (AP - 21 March) - Osama bin Laden's terror network claims to have bought ready-made nuclear weapons on the black market in central Asia, the biographer of al-Qaida's No. 2 leader was quoted as telling an Australian television station. In an interview scheduled to be televised on Monday, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir said Ayman al-Zawahri claimed that ``smart briefcase bombs'' were available on the black market. It was not clear when the interview between Mir and al-Zawahri took place. U.S. intelligence agencies have
long believed that al-Qaida
attempted to acquire a nuclear device on the black market, but say
there is no evidence it was successful. In the
interview with Australian
Broadcasting Corp. television,
parts of which were released Sunday, Mir recalled telling
al-Zawahri it was difficult to believe that al-Qaida had nuclear
weapons when the terror network didn't have the equipment to
maintain or use them.
``Dr Ayman
al-Zawahri laughed and
he said `Mr. Mir, if you have
$30 million, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any
disgruntled Soviet scientist, and a lot of ... smart briefcase
bombs are available,''' Mir said in the interview.
``They have
contacted us, we sent
our people to Moscow, to
Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated, and we
purchased some suitcase bombs,'' Mir quoted al-Zawahri as saying.
Al-Qaida has
never hidden its
interest in acquiring nuclear
weapons.
The U.S.
federal indictment of bin
Laden charges that as far
back as 1992 he ``and others known and unknown, made efforts to
obtain the components of nuclear weapons.''
Bin Laden, in
a November 2001
interview with a Pakistani
journalist, boasted having hidden such components ``as a
deterrent.'' And in 1998, a Russian nuclear weapons design expert
was investigated for allegedly working with bin Laden's Taliban
allies.
It was
revealed last month that
Pakistan's top nuclear scientist
had sold sensitive equipment and nuclear technology to Iran, Libya
and North Korea, fueling fears the information could have also
fallen into the hands of terrorists.
Earlier, Mir
told Australian media
that al-Zawahri also claimed
to have visited Australia to recruit militants and collect funds.
``In those
days, in early 1996, he
was on a mission to organize
his network all over the world,'' Mir was quoted as saying. ``He
told me he stopped for a while in Darwin (in northern Australia),
he was ... looking for help and collecting funds.''
Australia's
Attorney-General
Philip Ruddock said the government
could not rule out the possibility that al-Zawahri visited
Australia in the 1990s under a different name.
``Under his
own name or any known
alias he hasn't traveled to
Australia,'' Ruddock told reporters Saturday. ``That doesn't mean
to say that he may not have come under some other false
documentation, or some other alias that's not known to us.''
Mir describe
al-Zawahri as ``the
real brain behind Osama bin
Laden.''
``He is the
real strategist, Osama
bin Laden is only a front
man,'' Mir was quoted as saying during the interview. ``I think he
is more dangerous than bin Laden.''
Al-Zawahri -
an Egyptian surgeon -
is believed to be hiding in
the rugged region around the Pakistan-Afghan border where U.S. and
Pakistani troops are conducting a major operation against Taliban
and al-Qaida forces.
He is said to have played a
leading role in orchestrating the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. |
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