Pakistan on Tuesday rejected an Indian request to share information from a prime suspect arrested in connection with the kidnapping of US reporter Daniel Pearl. India's external affairs ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao told reporters earlier in the day that Ahmed Omar Saeed Shaikh, the suspect, had information on the hijacking of an Indian plane in 1999, as well as last year's bloody attacks on Kashmir legislature and parliament in Delhi. "Why should we share information with them?" a Pakistani government official told Reuters. "We have been asking (India) to share information on so many things which they never shared. Why should we share now?"
British-born Omar spent five years in an Indian jail for his alleged role in the 1994 kidnapping of three Britons and an American who were lured from New Delhi. He was released, together with two other detainees, in December 1999 in exchange for 155 people held on an Indian airliner hijacked to Kandahar. The Pakistani official said India previously held Omar for five years and had plenty of opportunities to question him. "Omar was in Indian custody for so many years. Why did they not interrogate him then?" he said. The spokeswoman said India had information about Omar's involvement in various terrorist acts and added that Delhi hoped Islamabad would act on its demand.
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02/20/2002 8:48:56 PM ||
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One of Kashmir's top Mujahideen leaders has condemned the world's "criminal negligence" of the disputed region's Muslim community and warned of an escalation in violence if India fails to promote a political solution. "The silence of the international community is an encouragement to the Indian government" to continue its suppression of Kashmir's Muslim population, Yasin Malik, the head of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), told AFP in an interview.
Malik, 35, slammed New Delhi for doing nothing to promote a negotiated solution to Kashmir problem where tens of thousands of people have been killed since 1989. "If the government does not provide a space (for dialogue), then violence will automatically take place," said Malik, who laid down his arms - along with the rest of the JKLF - in 1994 after several years in Indian prisons, during which he underwent open heart surgery. For Malik, the despicable attacks of Sept 11 in the United States had simply underlined the importance of working towards a violence-free world. "For that, there are certain pending disputes which need to be resolved through peaceful means. It is up to India to respond to the new situation. Until now, they have not moved." In fact, Malik insists that Indian security forces have stepped up their operations, making it all but impossible for political leaders like himself to call on the armed militant groups to enter into a cease-fire. "The atrocities have increased and the suffering of the people is still going unnoticed," he said in his simple apartment in Srinagar, currently covered in a blanket of snow.
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02/20/2002 8:53:41 PM ||
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After arriving in Saudi Arabia to perform Haj, 52 Pakistani pilgrims have died so far. Of them, 35 were buried in Makkah and 16 in Madina while the body of a pilgrim was sent to Pakistan for burial , official sources said on Tuesday.
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02/20/2002 8:51:40 PM ||
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Sixteen people â 10 Palestinians and six Israelis â were killed in the new spasm of Middle East violence yesterday that plunged the region into deeper crisis. An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at an office of Hamas movement in the Gaza Stripâs Jabalya refugee camp, killing two activists and wounding several schoolchildren, following airstrikes in Gaza and the West Bank overnight. In the West Bankâs Jordan Valley, a Palestinian activist blew himself up at the entrance to the Jewish settlement of Mehola, killing himself but causing no other casualties, security sources said. Hospital sources in the town of Khan Younis in southern Gaza said a 14-year-old girl, Mouna, a 37-year-old woman, Miriam Al-Bahaifa and a 19-year-old man, Abdel El-Wahad Al-Najar, were killed when tank shells smashed their homes overnight. Troops also shot dead two Palestinians, at least one of whom was armed, near Jewish settlements in southern Gaza overnight, and killed another two Palestinians during a gunfight early yesterday near Nablus in the West Bank, hospital officials said.
In a late-night incident, six Israelis were killed in an attack on an army checkpoint in the West Bank, Israeli security sources said. Israeli security sources said the Israelis were ambushed at Ein Ariq, northwest of the Palestinian-ruled city of Ramallah. Four Qassam rockets, fired by Hamas, landed inside Israel in an empty field across the border from the Gaza Strip, Israeli public radio reported yesterday. Meanwhile, the United States yesterday said the proposal by Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, was âsignificant and positive.â But, at the same time it said the proposal had to be looked at in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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02/20/2002 8:35:31 PM ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
