You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Submit your comments on this article
India-Pakistan
Karachi bomb suspects "absconders"
2003-02-25
KARACHI, Feb 24 (AFP) - A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Monday formally declared as absconders five of the seven suspects in the killing of 11 French naval engineers last May, court officials said. A police officer told a hearing presided over by Judge Feroz Mohammad Bhatti that a search for five suspects still at large had been fruitless. "Two were not available at their addresses and three were untraceable," police process server Javed Ahmed said. Bhatti declared them absconders, and adjourned the hearing until March 5.
Can anyone think of any reason not to consider Pakland an enemy country? If they were ever on our side, they've switched. It's probably time to start treating them like what they are, which is a terrorist state.
Two other suspects, Asif Zaheer and Mohammad Bashir who were captured in December and January respectively, are being held in custody and have been charged with murder, terrorism and illegal possession of explosives. They could face the death penalty.
Doubt if it'll come to that, though. Maybe a few months' house arrest, with no teevee...
Police say Zaheer and Bashir have confessed to their role in the May 8 attack, in which a suicide bomber ploughed an explosives-laden Volkswagen Beetle into a Pakistan navy bus carrying the French nationals. The blast occurred outside the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Karachi, the southern port city of 14 million people that suffered a chain of deadly attacks on Western and Christian targets last year. A month after the attack on the French, a suicide car bomb attack outside the US consulate killed 12 Pakistanis. Police have said that among the five absconders is a militant believed to be the mastermind of the anti-Western violence that has plagued Karachi since the US-led campaign in Afghanistan to crush the the Taliban leadership and al-Qaeda terrorists was launched 16 months ago.
Inspector Mahmoud ("Fatty") Arbuckle and the Keystone Karachi Koppers are no doubt hot on their tail...
Zaheer belonged to the militant group Harkat Jihad-ul Islami and Bashir, who had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, belonged to the banned Kashmiri militant outfit Harkatul Mujahedin. Bashir told reporters after his arrest that the man who had ploughed the car bomb into the French engineers' bus was a 26-year-old Pakistani named Rashid, also from Harkat Jihadul Islami.
Both are Kashmir-based terrorist groups...
Bashir said he met Rashid on the eve of the attack. The next day he drove in the explosives-filled car with Rashid towards the Sheraton hotel and stepped out of the car before it reached its target. He said Rashid wanted to avenge the killings of Muslims around the world. Zaheer and Bashir have both said they mistakenly thought their targets were Americans and regretted that the victims turned out to be French.
"Drat."
The French engineers were assisting Pakistan's navy in developing its second Agosta 90-B class submarine.

Posted by:Seafarious

#1  It may appear out of topic but readers would remember that Pakistan in 1973 was offered a plutonium-reprocessing technology by France but the controversial deal was finally scrapped under US pressure in 1979. The French as scavengers ended up selling Citroens and Airbuses.

For the Agosta submarines, French heavily bribed the former Prime Minister Benazir’s husband. It is one of the allegations the government of present potentate president is investigating against.

Similar 70-megawatt reactors (two of them) along with six charges of 26 points of uranium enriched to 93 percent -- in other words, enough weapons-grade uranium to produce three to four nuclear French devices were also sold to Baghdad. In fact, the latter country also purchased another one-megawatt research reactor, and France agreed to train 600 Iraqi nuclear technicians and scientists -- the core of Iraq's nuclear capability today.

The same Mr.Jacque Chirac then, the French Premier travelled to Iraq, in late 1974, and conducted deals on a broad range of issues, the most important of these were Iraq's purchase of nuclear reactors.

Later in 1975, Hussein travelled to Paris, where Chirac personally gave him a tour of a French nuclear plant. During that visit, Chirac said, "Iraq is in the process of beginning a coherent nuclear program and France wants to associate herself with that effort in the field of reactors”.

In June of 1981, Israeli warplanes struck the Osirak nuclear facility near Baghdad. This "unprovoked" action by Israel was a pre-emptive strike to deny Iraq the capability of producing nuclear weapons; weapons Israeli intelligence believed were in the works. Iraqi defences were taken by surprise and opened fire too late. The whole operation lasted one minute and twenty seconds, the reactor lay in ruins.

Israeli intelligence had followed the Iraqi military buildup in the late 1970s. Saddam Hussein had assembled an army of 190,000 men organized into 12 divisions, augmented by 2,200 tanks and 450 aircraft. Both the Isreali Labor government of 1974-77 and the Likud government of 1977-81 closely watched with apprehension what to do with the reactors. This was the same site at Osirak constructed with considerable French help.

The point to prove is that France has been a source of lot of troubles that the US has to go and clean up and why the French continues to obsessively harp on, “more time to inspectors” and “peaceful methods”. There is method in their madness.The concept of egalite,liberty, fraternity can be interpreted in more than one way.
Posted by: ISHMAIL   2003-02-25 18:30:37  

00:00