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| Europe |
| Italian Coppers Arrest 15 Pak Al Qaeda |
| 2002-09-12 |
| By Vladimiro Pantaleone, Reuters Gawd, I love that name! I'll bet the girlies are elbowing each other to get to him... PALERMO, Italy - Italian police, working with U.S. naval intelligence, said on Thursday they had arrested 15 Pakistanis believed to be members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. The men were taken into custody last month after arriving in the southern Sicilian port of Gela on a merchant cargo ship from Morocco. They are charged with conspiracy to commit terror acts. I love it when they come halfway around the world to blow something up and then get caught when they get off the boat... "We are certain that these people are part of a terrorist organization, and we are almost certain that that organization is al Qaeda," Santi Giuffre, chief of police for the Sicilian province of Caltanissetta, told a news conference. "We have found interesting documents that would prove the accusations." He means how-to manuals, laptops, CDs, that sort of stuff... He said police had seized telephone numbers, including several in Spain and France, which linked the men to al Qaeda. The men had also used codenames and codewords which raised suspicion of an al Qaeda connection. Notes and documents referring to al Qaeda were found on board their Romanian-registered vessel, which set sail from Casablanca in mid-July and was scheduled to visit Tunisia, Malta and the Libyan capital Tripoli. All the men were carrying an open return air ticket from Karachi to Casablanca. "Hokay. You fifteen, you get on the boat and go blow up the European parliament. When you're done, beat it to Casablanca and fly home to GHQ. And try not to get caught, okay? And stay out of Rick's. I don't want to hear about you guys drinking again!" |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #2 Pretty easy to determine if they are: Turbans + Pashtun or Urdu = Pak. It's pretty distinctive. Presumably the Navy intel guys were monitoring their communications, and they weren't in Arabic; or if they were, they "had a fonny assent." |
| Posted by: Fred 2002-09-12 14:21:42 |
| #1 The Paks say they ain't theirs: A Pakistani embassy official in Rome said there was no evidence the arrested men were Pakistanis and said his embassy had been allowed no access to the suspects to find out. "I think at this point it is false and misleading to say that they are from Pakistan. We told the Italian authorities three days ago that the suspects possessed false documents," Qasim Muttaqi, the embassy's councillor for consular affairs, told Reuters. |
| Posted by: Steve 2002-09-12 11:51:40 |