MANAMA (AFP) – A regional centre to fight Al-Qaeda must be created to help countries join ranks and eradicate the Islamist “danger” which threatens the world, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief said on Friday.
“The danger threatens all of us and the fight against terrorism necessitates international action,” Prince Turki al-Faisal said in Manama, which is hosting a major conference on Middle East security.
“We must relaunch the idea of (setting up) a regional centre to fight” against Al-Qaeda, Prince Turki said.
“There should be no obstacles between countries on the exchange of information” about Al-Qaeda, he added.
In 2005 Saudi Arabia first floated the idea of a regional centre based in the ultra-conservative kingdom, where Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was born, to pool international resources against the Islamists.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi, whose country is the ancestral homeland of Bin Laden, told Friday’s meeting the “struggle against Al-Qaeda failed in part because we don’t see this as a global issue.”
“Each one of us is concentrating on their own national security. We need a unified strategy,” Kurbi said.
For his part, British Defence Minister Liam Fox said that “transitional terrorism by definition has no borders.”
“We have to learn to act together,” Fox said.
The annual Manama Dialogue organised by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies draws prime ministers, defence ministers, military officials, intelligence chiefs and private sector heads from across the region and beyond.
LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) – Pakistani police have arrested five suspects linked to an attack on a spy agency building in Lahore last year which killed 24 people, the city’s police chief said.
“The suspects have confessed their role in the suicide attack on the intelligence agency building,” police chief Aslam Tareen told reporters, adding that the group had been planning more terror attacks.
“The five were arrested a couple of days ago from Shahdara,” a neighbourhood in Lahore, the country’s eastern hub, Tareen told a press conference.
“We are in a warlike situation and this war on terror has spread across Pakistan, but we are trying to do our best to maintain security,” he said. It would take time to complete the investigation, he added.
Police said the suspects belonged to the previously unknown Al-Toheed-wa-al-Jihad faction which falls under the umbrella Pakistani militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and had trained in North Waziristan.
“They were activating themselves and planning terrorist activities in Lahore,” Tareen said.
The group was also engaged in kidnapping for ransom, an investigator said.
“They kidnapped people for ransom in 2009 in Faisalabad and Sialkot,” senior police investigator Zulfiqar Hameed told the press conference.
“Their next target was some security forces buildings in Lahore,” he said.
“Police have recovered four suicide vests, one rifle, 32 hand grenade pins, 13 number plates of vehicles, eight mortar shells and ammunition.”
At least 24 people were killed, including 13 policemen, civilians and security officers, in the May 2009 suicide attack on an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) building.
A group calling itself “Tehreek-i-Taliban Punjab” claimed responsibility for the blast in a Turkish-language statement posted on jihadist websites.
Around 4,000 people have been killed in suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan since government forces raided an extremist mosque in Islamabad in 2007. The attacks have been blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks.
The state intelligence agency and the military came under fire Thursday after it became known that they did not take due measures although the agency detected signs of a possible North Korean attack on the five border islands in the West Sea in August.
National Intelligence Service director Won Sei-hoon told a parliamentary intelligence committee Wednesday that the agency confirmed the possibility of a North Korean attack on the islands through wiretapping, according to lawmakers who attended the closed-door session.
Won, however, was quoted by the lawmakers as saying, “(The agency) did not expect the North to launch an attack on civilians as it has routinely shown menacing words and behaviors. The military authorities judged that the North could mount an attack just south of the maritime border.”
The lawmakers said the content of the wiretapping was that the North instructed its artillery units in the west coastal region to be ready for firing.
The Nov. 23 artillery shelling on Yeonpyeong Island near the Northern Limit Line, a de facto sea border which the North does not recognize and claims should be redrawn further south, killed four South Koreans including two civilians.
Public criticism has been rising as the military and the intelligence agency were not properly preparing troops on the islands even when the North has recently ramped up its level of provocations and belligerent verbal threats.
The North fired its coastal artillery shells in the West Sea in January, none of which fell in waters south of the NLL.
However, when the North fired its artillery rounds in August, some of them fell south of the NLL, hinting at the possibility that it could mount an attack on the civilian-inhabited islands.
The communist state has repeatedly warned of “physical retaliatory strikes” in a series of official statements, underscoring that their warnings were “by no means empty talks.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, which holds peacetime operational control, denied what the spy chief said.
“(The NIS) obtained the intelligence on North Korea instructing its coastal artillery unit to be prepared to fire back in response to our troops’ plan to stage a live-fire exercise in August,” said JCS spokesperson Col. Lee Bung-woo in a press briefing, denying that the North was preparing for an “attack on the five border islands.”
The Marine unit on Yeonpyeong Island conducted live-fire exercises with K9 self-propelled howitzers on Aug. 6 and Aug. 8.
The North fired around 110 coastal artillery shells on Aug. 9. About 10 of the shells landed south of the NLL.
Some critics also expressed concern that there might be problems with the spy agency’s analysis of the hard-earned intelligence, saying that the agency appears to have been “lax” in drawing conclusions based on its intelligence.
During Wednesday’s session at the National Assembly, Won also said that the satellite imagery showed that out of the 80 shells the South Korean military fired back, only 45 shells were confirmed to have fallen on North Korean land ? 15 shells in Mudo and 30 shells in Gaemeori.
After the artillery attack began, the South Korean military fired 50 rounds at Mudo and 30 rounds at Gaemeori.
Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a global intelligence company better known as STRATFOR, revealed a satellite imagery showing that many of the K9 shells fell on paddy fields in the North rather than on military facilities.
On the imagery posted on its website, 14 shells were seen to have landed in paddy fields in Gaemeori. It said that imagery was taken on Nov. 26 by the Digital Globe, a satellite picture firm.
This has called into question the capability of the indigenous K9 howitzer, which the military has touted for its strong firepower although some claimed that soldiers performed quite well with the howitzers without adequate intelligence gathering equipment in the emergency situation.
“We were briefed that the K9 howitzer could devastate objects within a radius of 50 meters, but (the satellite imagery) shows just little things were strewn along paddy fields. The NIS chief should scrutinize the case and report it to the president,” said Rep. Kim Moo-sung, floor leader of the ruling Grand National Party, during the party’s Supreme Council meeting.
“I was happy to hear that our military could fire back with K9 howitzers within five minutes of the North firing and was capable of devastating North Korean artillery positions … The public should know the current situation in the military and I hope this serves as an opportunity for military reform.”
During his opening remarks at the parliamentary session, Won said there is a high possibility of North Korea making additional provocations.
“The North is trying to neutralize the NLL and make the five border islands a disputed region. By ratcheting up tensions, the North is taking great pains to secure allegiance for Kim Jong-un (the heir apparent) and support from China,” Won said.
“There is a high possibility of more provocations and (the North) is seeking to divide public opinion (in the South).”
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US and British officials clashed over the use of a Cyprus air base for US spying missions in 2008, with London worried about complicity in potential rights abuses, leaked cables showed.
The government was particularly concerned about U2 spy plane missions to track militants in Lebanon, Turkey and northern Iraq that provided intelligence to Lebanese and Turkish authorities.
The newly-disclosed spat between the two close allies is the latest in a series of revelations stemming from the release of a trove of secret US embassy cables by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.
The cables describe how British officials demanded to be kept better informed about covert missions out of Akrotiri air base and whether other governments were involved, so they could decide if the operations might carry legal or other risks, according to the cables.
The acrimonious discussions, during former president George W. Bush’s administration, led a US diplomat to write that an element of “distrust” had emerged in relations between the traditional allies, according to the 2008 documents, first reported in The Guardian.
Under political pressure at home over Britain’s role in secret CIA flights to transfer terror suspects, officials ordered the Americans to provide in writing more details about planned spying flights out of the base to ensure London was not a party to “unlawful” operations, the cables said.
A British letter to Washington on April 18, 2008, said “recent U2 flights over Turkey/Northern Iraq, and the Lebanon, have highlighted important legal and political issues which require much more careful consideration by HMG.”
Britain believed “it is important for us to be satisfied that HMG is not indirectly aiding the commission of unlawful acts by those governments on the basis of the information gathered through the assistance we provide to the US,” said the letter, quoted in the cable.
London was also concerned about “sensitivities” with the government in Cyprus, to avoid operations that might anger the local government and lead to losing access to the air base, the letter said.
London’s requests angered the Americans, who saw the requirements as hampering counter-terrorism efforts.
“Embassy London is concerned by HMG?s piling on of concerns and conditions, which portend a burdensome process for getting the rest of our intel flights approved,” a cable said.
While the United States shared Britain’s human rights concerns, “we cannot take a risk-avoidance approach to CT (counter-terrorism) in which the fear of potentially violating human rights allows terrorism to proliferate in Lebanon,” the US embassy in London wrote.
London’s concerns were due to an earlier revelation that the US government had transferred captured terror suspects through the British territory of Diego Garcia “without UK permission” and London’s “need to ensure it is not similarly blindsided in the future,” the US embassy wrote.
The embassy urged a high-level US diplomat to intervene after a British official said his government expected Washington to “ensure” any detainees captured in Lebanon with the help of spy flights would be “treated lawfully” by Lebanese authorities, the cables said.
A senior administration official then met with the Foreign Office’s head of defense and intelligence, who appeared to strike a more conciliatory tone.
The foreign office official said the discussions over spy flights were “unnecessarily confrontational” and backed away from demands over detainees captured as a result of the Lebanon spy flights, the embassy wrote.
But the official said Washington had gotten “sloppy” in its use of the Cyprus base, and that the Americans need to fully inform Britain about operations involving third countries, the cable said.
Despite US objections, the official insisted that requests for future flights be made through the US embassy in London and between both governments instead of only going through military channels, it said.
The official said the then foreign secretary David Miliband believed that “policymakers needed to get control of the military.”
It was with great interest that I read your report (Foreign fighters in the shadows, 25 November) on how spy planes have been patrolling British skies trying to pick up voice signatures of British citizens suspected of travelling to Afghanistan to fight against Nato forces, after Yorkshire and Birmingham accents were detected by RAF spy planes in Helmand.
If this is true, it raises a number of serious questions. First, how often have these flights been taking place and under what authority? Second, which areas have these spy planes been operating over? One can only presume that they would be targeting Muslim majority areas in Yorkshire and Birmingham. If so, it makes a mockery of the apology offered by the West Midlands chief constable, Chris Simms, after a secret police operation to place thousands of Muslims in Birmingham under secret camera surveillance was uncovered (Report, 1 October). If spy planes are indeed also operating over Muslim areas in Britain, it once again highlights how little the government really cares about the dignity of its Muslim citizens.
Third, how is the information gathered from such surveillance being used by the authorities? Is it being used as “secret evidence” against terror suspects brought before draconian Special Immigration Appeals Commission courts, where they are unable to see or challenge the allegations against them? One of the justifications often put forward in support of the use of “secret evidence” is that to disclose it to the accused would be to compromise the intelligence services and their methods and strategies. If this is indeed one of those methods, it is understandable why the government is fighting to keep it secret. For were it to become public knowledge, it would further underline the fact that Muslims in Britain are being deliberately targeted by the authorities as a suspect community and treated as second-class citizens.
