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Ex-CIA expert: Headley plea shows Qaida-LeT nexus
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We’ve sent extra troops to India border: Pak Envoy
ISKCON banned from soliciting
at LA Airport
Ex-KGB man snaps up ‘The Independent’ for £1
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Ex-CIA expert: Headley plea shows Qaida-LeT nexus
New York, March 26 Headley’s story showed in clear contours the close relationship between Al-Qaida and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, Riedel, who led the review of the Obama Administration’s Af-Pak strategy, was quoted as saying by ‘The New York Times’. Revelations in Headley’s plea agreement around Al-Qaida’s European cell were particularly disturbing, said Riedel, who was also a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and is now at the Brookings Institution. They showed that “ Al-Qaida still has a significant operational infrastructure somewhere in Europe,” he said. The paper said the plea agreement released last week showed that Headley moved effortlessly between the US, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions. Headley’s travels included several cities in India, meeting with a senior operative of al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal belt and two trips to North Waziristan region, it said. “These and other new details of Headley’s activities, contained in the plea agreement, raise troubling questions about how an American citizen could travel for so long undetected from his home base in Chicago to well-established terrorist training camps in Pakistan,” the Times said. It was from here that Headley planned the Mumbai attacks and got in touch with an Al-Qaida cell in Europe that may still be operative, the report said. “The (plea agreement) document shows the cell was well supplied with weapons and money and primed for an attack until the moment Headley was arrested by the FBI at O’Hare airport last October,” the daily wrote. As Headley became “more intensely involved in the web of militant activities in Pakistan - sometimes training for months at a time - and then making five trips to Mumbai from 2006 to 2008 to scout locations,” he kept his base in Chicago, it said. In his plea, Headley said that LeT remained active behind the veil of a public charity, an apparent reference to JuD, and continued to be aided by ex-Pakistani military officials. The plea agreement showed that a retired Pakistani military officer, Col Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, known as Pasha, was Headley’s main contact with LeT. In early 2009, Syed introduced Headley to Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, an Al-Qaida operative in North Waziristan and then Syed served as a go-between, the paper reported. — PTI
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We’ve sent extra troops to India border: Pak Envoy
London, March 26 Hasan told London-based Financial Times that assertiveness by New Delhi was sapping his country's ability to fight Pakistani Taliban militants. "He (Hasan) said Islamabad had been unsettled by pressure on its eastern border created by the building of military cantonments close to the sensitive frontier over the past year," the newspaper reported. According to Pakistan's top officials, rising tensions with India allegedly prevented it from expanding its military campaign against Taliban militants on its western border, it said. "The government has had to send some troops down there because we don't want to leave ourselves exposed," Hasan said.
— PTI
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ISKCON banned from soliciting
at LA Airport
Washington, March 26 The California Supreme Court yesterday upheld a Los Angeles ordinance that makes it illegal to ask for money on the sidewalks and in the terminals of Los Angeles International Airport, San Francisco Chronicle reported. As such the ruling rejected a series of federal court decisions that had allowed the International Society for Krishna Consciousness - the Hare Krishna organisation - to ask people for money at the Los Angeles airport since 1997, when the local ordinance was enacted. According to The Los Angeles Times, travellers often are in a hurry, and the airport often is crowded, Justice Carlos R Moreno wrote for the court. Panhandling may increase congestion, cause travellers to miss flights, and subject them to possible intimidation and even fraud, he said. The Hare Krishna society has “ample alternative means of conveying its message,” Moreno wrote. “It can distribute literature and speak to willing travellers. It can even seek financial support, as long as it does not request the immediate exchange of funds,” he said.
— PTI
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Ex-KGB man snaps up ‘The Independent’ for £1
London, March 26 Lebedev was sold ‘The Independent’ and ‘Independent on Sunday’ newspapers for a token sum today, a year after he acquired another top British title cheaply. The former KGB agent, paid £1 for the papers, while its current owners, Independent News & Media, will pay £9.25 million in the next 10 months to his firm Independent Print Limited (IPL) for taking on future liabilities.
— PTI
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