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Saturday,
September 22, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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FRG arrest warrants for two Arabs US plan to oust
Taliban, restore
king Blair, EU endorse Bush
action
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6,333 missing in WTC disaster Where is Bin
Laden? She walked 77 floors down to
safety Secret UN meeting with
envoys
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FRG arrest warrants for two Arabs Karlsruhe (Germany), September 21 The two men are suspected of links to three others who studied in Germany and are believed to have been among those who crashed planes into US buildings on September 11. Federal prosecutor Kay Nehm said the men they were seeking were Ramzi Mohamed Abdullah Binalshibh (29) from Yemen and Said Bahaji (26) a German citizen of Moroccan origin. Binalshibh was last seen in Germany in August, while Bahaji left early this month and was thought to be in Pakistan. “The whereabouts of both accused are not currently known,” Nehm told a news conference. Nehm said investigations in Germany had still not revealed any link with Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden, who Washington believes is behind the attacks. “We have no evidence that there is a link with bin Laden, but we are investigating in this direction,” he said. Nehm said both men were sought on suspicion of membership of a “terrorist organisation”, the murder of several thousand people and other serious crimes, adding that the two were believed to have been planning the attacks at least since 1999. Both men lived in an apartment in the northern port city of Hamburg with Mohamed Atta, who is suspected of flying one of the two planes that destroyed the World Trade Center. German newspaper Bild said Atta and two other suspected hijackers, Marwan Yusef al-Shehhi amd Zaid Samir Jarrah, had reported their passports as stolen two years ago during a trip to the southern German state of Bavaria. “They presumably wanted to get rid of visa entries from Iraq and Afghanistan to make it easier to travel to the USA,” Bild quoted an Interior Ministry spokesman as saying. Bahaji left Germany for Pakistan via Istanbul on September 3. DUESSELDORF: Around 100 guerrillas trained by the Taliban in Afghanistan may be living under cover in Germany, waiting for a call to act, a regional minister has said. Three of the suspects in last week’s suicide hijackings in the USA had lived in the north German city of Hamburg. Fritz Behrens, Interior Minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said the government’s anti-extremist watchdog estimated around 100 “sleepers”, or agents who lead a normal life until called upon to act, were living in Germany. The “sleepers’’ are believed to have been trained in camps run by the Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, Mr Behrens said it was extremely difficult to catch such people and prevent possible attacks: “You can’t just charge someone because they trained in a camp in Afghanistan.’’ Stern magazine reported on Wednesday that Germany’s BND intelligence agency estimated there were about 30 “sleeper nests’’ made up of “Islamic terror groups’’ in the country. WARSAW: Perpetrators of the suicide attacks on the USA may have passed through Poland, but the eastern European country is not a base for international terrorists, government leaders said on Friday. Interior Minister Marek Biernacki said there were “strong indications” that suspects believed involved in the September 11 aircraft attacks on New York and Washington had used Poland as a transit route. “There is a string of evidence which could show that the thread, or path, along which people accused of terrorism moved, went through Poland,” Biernacki told the local PAP news agency. Biernacki’s comments attempted to clarify cryptic remarks on Thursday by secret services coordinator Janusz Palubicki, who said a “significant element” of the plot behind the attack had been uncovered in Poland, but scant details. “We have found evidence that individuals with last names on the US list of suspects might have been in Poland temporarily,” police spokesman Pawel Biedziak told SANAA: A number of suspected followers of Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the devastating terror attacks in the USA, have been arrested in Yemenis, a police source has said. “Over the past four days, security services have arrested dozens of Yemenis suspected of having links with Osama bin Laden, among the Arab Afghans, in Sanaa, Aden and Abyane province,” the source said on Thursday.
Reuters, AFP |
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US plan to oust Taliban, restore
king The US Government is pressing its European allies to agree to a military campaign to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and replace it with an interim administration under United Nations auspices. Diplomatic cables from the Washington Embassy of a key NATO ally, seen by the London-based Guardian newspaper, report that the USA is keen to hear allied views on “post-Taliban Afghanistan after the liberation of the country”. The embassy cable reveals that the US administration is bent on force to evict the Taliban from power because of the shelter it has offered to Osama bin Laden, named by the White House as prime suspect for the New York and Washington attacks. The Guardian has also learned that the other day two large US Hercules transport aircraft landed in Tashkent, capital of the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, loaded with surveillance equipment to be installed along the northern Afghan border. The secret landing represented a radical departure since it appeared to herald the deployment of squadrons of US fighters at Uzbekistan’s sprawling airfield at Termez, directly on the border. Such a build-up would incur the wrath of Russia which views the central Asian republics as its backyard. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Washington last night to meet Mr Bush, suggested military strikes inside Afghanistan, targeted on Bin Laden’s training camps, could come in a matter of days. “These people, if they could, would get access to chemical biological and nuclear capability. We have no option but to act,” he said. The US strategy to depose the Taliban regime is based on more than
military thinking. A further plank appears to entail supporting the campaign of the exiled 89-year-old monarch of Afghanistan, King Zahir Shah, to return to power by encouraging the guerrilla army of the Northern Alliance opposition to fall in behind him. Diplomatic documents seen by the Guardian show that Washington is funding and organising the travel of several Northern Alliance figures to Rome to confer with the exiled monarch who is expected to call for a revolution. “The king plans to call on all the Afghan tribes to rise up against the Taliban," the diplomatic cable reported yesterday, citing the advice of the US administration. US plans to overthrow the Taliban regime were revealed when a senior European politician in Washington this week was told by the US administration that it wanted to hear his country’s views on how Afghanistan should be run after the Taliban were defeated and that “closer consultations” were necessary. The Americans also spoke of a role for the UN in the new “interim administration” for Afghanistan and for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Central Asia, without mentioning NATO. Washington is routinely sceptical of the UN and OSCE, but the key role was seen as an attempt to build as broad a coalition as possible behind the imminent campaign. The Europeans, Russia, and even China, might be swayed by the unusual US inclusiveness, diplomats said. “It’s a major change of US policy,” said one. The spying mission in Uzbekistan is also fraught with political risk. The two Hercules could not fly over Iran, but Turkmenistan, the third ex-Soviet state bordering Afghanistan, granted permission. However, diplomats said the Turkmens were less keen to grant overflying rights to US fighter aircraft heading for the Afghan border.
The Guardian, London. |
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Blair, EU endorse Bush action New York, September 21 Speaking after attending a memorial service in New York for the some 250 British victims of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Blair said his father’s generation could understand the city’s pain. “They went through the blitz, they know what it feels like,” said Blair, flanked by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. “It was one country and one people that stood by us at that time, and that country was America and those people were the American people. And as you stood side by side with us, we stand side by side with you,” he said. WASHINGTON: The USA and the European Union have pledged to boost joint anti-terrorism cooperation by working to tighten restrictions on extremist groups and expanding police powers to deal with them. In a joint statement released yesterday after a meeting here between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and three top EU officials, the two sides said their aim was to destroy terrorist groups but at the same time protect civil liberties. “We will mount a comprehensive, systematic and sustained effort to eliminate international terrorism — its leaders, its actors, its networks,” they said.
AFP |
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6,333 missing in WTC disaster New York, September 21 The remains of 40 persons have been identified among the 189 killed when a hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon, the Defence Department said. “The main reason for that is getting numbers from foreign nationals,” New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told a news conference as he gave the new toll, the first update for two days. Only five people have been found alive in the mountain of rubble, all on the night after the attack, and Giuliani said the number of dead bodies recovered had increased by eight since Tuesday, to 241. The bodies of 116 people have been recovered from the rubble of the Pentagon and transported to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for identification. AFP |
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Where is Bin Laden? Islamabad, September 21 In a despatch from the North West Frontier Provincial town of Peshawar, bordering Afghanistan, ‘The News’ daily said Bin Laden had slipped out of the country with his trusted lieutenants four days ago and was no longer on Afghan soil. In Moscow, Russia’s official news agency ITAR-TASS quoted a ‘highly placed’ intelligence source as saying that Bin Laden was still in Afghanistan and is not planning to leave the country where he has been living as a “guest”.
PTI |
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She walked 77 floors down to safety New York, September 21 Jyoti Vyas is a software tester for Baseline Financial Centre in WTC tower 2. She walked down 77 floors that day with the thought: “I had to save my baby, so I had to save myself.” Speaking from her New Jersey home, she recalls the horror after the first plane hit WTC 1. Vyas went up to the 78th floor lobby from where she thought she would take the elevator down. “It was very crowded, so I decided to stay on one side. I didn’t want people pushing me. They kept announcing tower 2 is safe, so I tried calling my husband from my cellphone.” But calls were impossible as all the lines were jammed. “There were too many people in the lobby. I didn’t want to call from the 78th floor reception as I wouldn’t be able to hear anything,” she said. “I knew our building had been hit. The roof collapsed, there was smoke and debris everywhere. There were 8-10 of us on that floor, we rushed to find a staircase.” Vyas recalls the descent: “The first few floors were horrible. I could smell the jet fuel and I didn’t want to breathe, but I forced myself to keep walking.”
IANS |
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Secret UN meeting with envoys Geneva, September 21 Mr Francesc Vendrell also confirmed that he had begun a private meeting in Geneva with envoys from Iran, the USA, Germany and Italy — members of the so-called “Geneva Initiative’’ — to assess the situation in Afghanistan. “As I have told the Taliban for some time, and they know very well, this is not an issue purely regarding one person but regarding an entire network,’’ Mr Vendrell told Reuters in an interview. “For the sake of Afghanistan and for the sake of the Afghans I think this network must be dissolved and the persons handed over. This ought to be done in a verifiable way,” he added. Reuters |
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