Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Mid Day International News

Mid Day International News

A Pakistani gang causes accidents to abduct, rape women

Posted:

A gang of criminals in Pakistan's Karachi city deliberately causes an accident and then abducts women in these vehicles to loot and gangrape them, police said.

"The gang is operating in up-market areas like Clifton, Defence etc., where the streets are not too thickly populated and it is easy to carry out such crimes in deserted areas," Geo TV said on Tuesday, adding that "these criminals then throw the women at any public place and run away".

The activities of the gang have been brought to light by two girls, who lodged a formal complaint with police on Monday.

The medical examination of the victims confirmed that they were gang-raped.

"We have started investigation and will soon arrest the four accused who are on the run," said Clifton superintendent of police Tariq Dharejo.

Chief of Citizen-Police Liaison Committee Ahmad Chinoy said: "Similar incidents have been reported earlier as well but no action could be taken."

Sindh Minister for Human Rights Nadia Gabol said: "We are going to take this case to its logical end because this concerns the society and this is happening in Pakistan's largest city in broad daylight."

Gabol along with Sharmila Farooqi, who is advisor to the Sindh chief minister, visited the police station to press for an early action.

The incident has drawn huge attention in the Pakistani media and among human right activists. President Asif Zardari and Sindh Governor Ishrat-ul-Ibad have sought a detailed report on it.

Punjabi female attendant with Air Canada jailed for cocaine smuggling

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In the first case of jailing of an Indo-Canadian woman for drug trafficking, an Air Canada female flight attendant was Monday locked for eight years by a London court for smuggling four kg of cocaine into Britain.

Twenty-seven-year-old Mandeep Shahi of Toronto's suburb of Mississauga was arrested in March for smuggling the contraband worth $400,000 in her flight from Toronto's Pearson airport to London's Heathrow. She pleaded guilty to her crime in September.

According to police, Shahi managed to smuggle the contraband because she was exempted from security check-up and deliver it to her three co-conspirators in London. The co-conspirators - Simon Howard-Harwood, 28, Baljinder Nijjar, 28, and Ghulam Malik, 53 - all of whom are British citizens, were also convicted Monday.

The female flight attendant is married to co-conspirator Baljinder Nijjar's cousin here in Mississauga.

A weeping Shahi told the court during her sentencing hearing that her husband might have put the drugs in her suitcase without her knowledge.

Coming hard on Shahi for taking advantage of security exemption granted to her because of her job, the judge was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail, "'You knew from your seven or eight previous visits as air crew that the chances of your person or luggage being searched was nil, so when your husband told you, you could not say no and did not say no.

"Whether you were happy to do it or had reservations, I have no idea, but the fact is you were not acting under duress, and you could have chosen not to.''

Turning to her husband's cousin and co-conspirator Nijjer, the judge said, "As you well knew through your cousin, and perhaps Miss Shahi, Canada is not regarded as a country that poses a great risk of prohibited drugs being brought to this country.

"The fact of the matter is, as an officer who works at Heathrow told the court, there is virtually a nil risk that flights coming into this country from Canada would be subjected to random checks of crew.''

The co-conspirators were already under police surveillance for their drug smuggling activities when Shahi was caught delivering the contraband.

Police got into action March 26 when they saw Shahi check into the Danubius Hotel in central London and then found Nijjer enter her room and leave with an Air Canada bag with the drugs.

All the three co-conspirators were nabbed immediately.

Though many Indo-Canadian men have been sentenced for drug smuggling in Canada and the US, it is the first time that an Indo-Canadian woman has been jailed for a drug-related crime.

Al Qaeda plotting poison attack in US

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Terror outfit Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is planning to attack American food supplies with poisonous chemicals, officials said.

A source "with knowledge of the situation" said authorities have obtained information that indicated a possible plot by the AQAP to target food at hotels and restaurants in the US, perhaps slipping harmful agents into salad bars or buffets, Fox News reported on Tuesday.

"We don't have a specific target or time frame, just the intent," the source said.

Nevertheless, authorities are not convinced that the outfit has the capability to actually carry out such an attack, the source added.

CBS News recently reported that the plot may involve the use of ricin or cyanide.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have briefed corporate security officers in the hotel and restaurant industries about the potential threat, CBS News said.

The White House's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, has described AQAP as "now the most operationally active node of the Al Qaeda network".

Brennan, however, said they have put "appropriate resources in place" to protect against attacks during the current holiday season.

On Christmas Day last year, Nigerian national Umar F Abdulmutallab tried to detonate his explosives-laden underwear over Detroit. He was allegedly trained and equipped by the AQAP.

In October this year, two explosives-laden packages were sent from Yemen to the US, but the packages were intercepted overseas after Saudi intelligence officials shared information about the plot.

British mom gets 3 years in jail for bedding 14-year-old boy

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A 25-year-old mother of two has been sentenced to three years in prison by a British court for bedding a 14-year-old schoolboy, a media report said.

The Leicester Crown Court handed down the sentence to Susanne Divers who was caught having sex with her schoolboy lover by her partner when he came home early from work, the Daily Express reported.

The pair had met at a party and, after swapping lewd text messages, began having secret sex sessions last December, the report said. The boy, whose identity has not been revealed, would play truant from school and bragged on social networking site 'Facebook' saying: "I've got the best girl in the world."

Divers tried to end the relationship, the Leicester Crown Court heard, but after the boy tried to hang himself it resumed, and continued even after police warned her to stay away from the boy, the newspaper said.

Divers, from Melton, Leicester, who pleaded guilty to eight offences of sexual activity, has lost care of her two sons, aged six and eight. She sobbed in the dock as she was jailed, placed on the Sex Offenders Register and banned for life from working with children, the report said.

Man kills bride, best man, self at wedding

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A bridegroom fatally shot his new wife, his best man and then himself after announcing to horrified guests that he had a 'surprise' for them, authorities have said.

Witnesses reported that 29-year-old Rogerio Damascena, a sales manager in Camaragibe, outside the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, did not give any previous indication that anything was wrong at his wedding reception, police investigator Joao Brito said.

Brito would not speculate on a possible motive, saying family members were in shock and he had not interviewed them yet. Brito did say the killings are believed to be premeditated because of the groom's announcement and because he had hidden a gun in his father's pickup truck.

Twenty-five-year-old bride Renata Alexandre Costa Coelho and best man Marcelo Guimaraes were both killed in Saturday's murder-suicide. A brother of the bride was treated at a hospital and released.

The website Globo.com quoted a sister of the bride who left before the shootings as saying she didn't believe it was a crime of passion. "My sister was a wonderful person who loved and wanted to be loved," Lucia Helena Coelho was quoted as saying.

"He was happy, she was happy, the party was beautiful. His family adored her and doesn't understand this," Coelho told Globo.com. "He revealed himself as a sociopath who fooled the entire family and killed his best friend, who was ... the best man."

Assange 'had affair with a 16-yr-old girl, fathered son'

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Controversial whistleblower Julian Assange, who is in Britain after being released on bail and awaiting extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations, always kept his personal life under wraps.

However, details of his secret private life are now being leaked.
An investigation by Daily Mail throws new light on his formative teenage years - the WikiLeaks founder had an affair with a 16-year-old girl when he was 18 and fathered a boy who is now 20 years old.

In the late eighties, Assange, his mother and stepbrother were living in a tiny bungalow in Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne.

And it was at this time that he developed his obsession with the computers.

"He didn't go out much at all. He spent almost all his time in there with his Commodore computer. He rarely came out of the bedroom," said his former neighbour.

A year after, the 18-year-old Assange met a local girl of 16, with whom he developed a relationship.

Soon after, the couple moved a few miles away to a cottage. It was here his lover became pregnant. Even then he would spend hours on his computer daily, learning to hack into other computers as the web began to spread around the world.

Their son Daniel was born when Assange's girlfriend was 17, but it seems that even the arrival of a child was not enough to drag the fledgling-hacker away from his screen.

"We'd see her walking down to the shops with the baby in a pushchair. She almost always seemed to be alone...," recalled one former resident.

Assange was already a computer hacker in October 1991 when police raided the couple's house in Melbourne. He was charged with a number of offences relating to computer hacking. It was at that point that his girlfriend fled with their baby.

He and his ex-girlfriend spent nine years battling for custody of their son, which ended with a 1999 agreement.

Today, Daniel is 20 and is working for a software design company in Australia. Pictures identified as him on the Internet show he has a strong resemblance to his father.

'Syndicates exploiting Indian girls in Malaysia'

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Syndicates are targeting Indian teenaged girls, luring them to take pictures or videos of themselves, blackmailing them into having sex and forcing some into prostitution, an official of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) has alleged.

C Sivarajah, youth secretary of the MIC, the country's largest party of ethnic Indians, claimed that his findings revealed that groups were targeting schoolgirls as young as 16, promising them love and marriage before duping them into posing naked.

"After taking their nude pictures and videos, the girls were made to do whatever the guy wanted. Otherwise, their pictures would be uploaded on the Internet or circulated to others," he told the New Straits Times in an interview.

The syndicates were local, mostly based in Rawang, Selangor, with one or two in Johor state, where the presence of the ethnic Indians is high.

Malaysia is home to 2.1 million Indians, a bulk of them Tamils, who settled here during the British era.

MIC is a constituent of the ruling coalition Barisan National. Based on its findings, the MIC youth wing said it had received cases of girls being forced into prostitution after their nude pictures were taken.

Sivarajah said the youth wing had tried to help the victims by approaching and negotiating with the men who took the pictures.

"But by the time the victims came to us for help, it would have been too late and their pictures would already be circulating via MMS (multimedia messaging service)."

He added that there have been cases of parents complaining that police allegedly did not take their complaints seriously.

"We urge the police to take this matter seriously. We are willing to work with anyone who can help solve this issue, which is increasingly becoming a big problem among young people today.

"It is not difficult to trace or hunt the men behind the pictures and videos. The question is, are the authorities willing to do it?"

Sivarajah said parents should warn their children of such dangers and tactics by unscrupulous men who prey on vulnerable women.

New York cops simulate 26/11 Mumbai terror attack

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The New York Police Department (NYPD) has conducted a simulated militant attack similar to the terror unleashed in Mumbai two years ago, a media report said Tuesday.

In the simulation, a team of terrorists launch a coordinated series of bombings and gun attacks around the city. The terrorists also attack police officials visiting the wounded in a hospital. By the time the day-long attacks are over, dozens of people are killed and many wounded, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The simulation "deliberately" mirrored the 2008 massacre in Mumbai, when on the night of Nov 26, 2008, 10 gunmen attacked various locations in India's business hub, including two luxury hotels, a hospital and a railway station.

A total of 166 people were killed in the attack that went on for three days.

"Until Mumbai, NYPD counter-terrorism officials felt reasonably comfortable that they were prepared for any type of terrorist attack. But that comfort level was built on preparing for a single event, not a series of coordinated attacks that would terrorise a city for days on end," the report said.

The terrorist incidents that have actually hit New York, such as the Sep 11, 2001 attacks where terrorists hijacked planes to destroy the World Trade Center, or the foiled Times Square car-bombing attempt in May this year, were different from the Mumbai-type attacks.

"The Mumbai attack two years ago was a bit of a game changer," said Mitchell Silber, head of NYPD's intelligence analysis division, said.

"It was a model that most counter-terrorism practitioners hadn't really considered. The armed gunmen roaming around the city taking hostages, that wasn't something we had seen by any jihadist group. That was a real eye-opener," Silber said.

He said the more NYPD officials learned about the Mumbai attacks "the more similarities we saw between Mumbai city and New York City".

Both are financial centres, both are surrounded by water on three sides and both get intense media attention, he said.

More than 40 commanders took part, and a facilitator introduced complications into the exercise that took place Dec 3.

The NYPD's top brass gathered inside the department's headquarters in Manhattan, in the Police Academy on East 20th Street and a third undisclosed location.

The police officials were given a fictional scenario that began with President Barack Obama visiting New York for a bill signing. At the same time, convicted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was scheduled to appear in a federal court.

The attacks began with bombings in downtown Manhattan "that resulted in 18 dead and dozens injured". The president went ahead with the bill signing at the World Trade Center site, when another bomb went off nearby. He was whisked away.

But the attack was not over.

Six gunmen piled out of a van at Herald Square and opened fire on shoppers and pedestrians. They then entered the Macy's department store and took 26 hostages.

"As in Mumbai, police in the simulation had trouble containing and anticipating the terrorists," the report said.

At one point, police who tried to rescue hostages were shot by snipers.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Chief of Department Joseph Esposito went to Bellevue Hospital to visit wounded police officers, where both were injured when a bomb exploded inside the emergency room.

NYPD's spokesman Paul Browne said the exercise provided several valuable lessons.

Conventional wisdom was that the best way to deal with multiple subway bombings was to shut down all mass transportation and evacuate everyone by foot, he said.

But the exercise showed the advantage of continuing to use buses during an attack to shepherd civilians out of Manhattan.

The exercise also showed that the first responding officers shouldn't have evacuated people and waited for reinforcements, the traditional response in a hostage situation. Instead, the police could have minimised casualties by quickly finding and killing the terrorists who were shooting people.

Since Mumbai, Browne said, the NYPD has trained and equipped its officers to use "heavy weapons" for a prolonged siege situation and to counteract military-style assault weapons like the ones used in Mumbai.
Posted by Harshad at 7:07 AM

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