BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

Three charged over 7/7 bombings

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Three men have been charged in connection with the 7 July suicide bombings in London. Mohammed Shakil, 30, Waheed Ali, 23, and Sadeer Saleem, 26, were charged with conspiracy to cause explosions on transport or at tourist attractions.

Scotland Yard said the hunt for those involved in the bombings was not over and more arrests were expected.

Four suicide attacks killed 52 people on three London Underground trains and a bus in 2005.

Arrests

Mr Shakil, from Beeston, West Yorkshire, and Mr Ali, from Tower Hamlets, east London, who was previously known as Shipon Ullah, were boarding a flight to Pakistan at Manchester Airport when they were detained in March.

Mr Saleem, also from Beeston, was arrested at an address in Leeds.

The three are accused of conspiring with the 7 July bombers between the 1 November 2004 and the 29 June 2005 to cause explosions on the London transport system or at tourist attractions in the city.

“The allegation is that they were involved in reconnaissance and planning for a plot with those ultimately responsible for the bombings on the 7 July before the plan was finalised,” said Sue Hemming, head of the Counter Terrorism Division of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Germaine Lindsay, 19, and Hasib Hussain, 18, all died in the blasts, and the latest charges are the first to be made over the attacks.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command, said police had taken 15,000 statements and followed 19,000 leads during its 21-month investigation into the “murder of 52 innocent victims”.

“I appreciate that bringing these charges will have an impact on many people,” he said. “For some it will bring back horrible memories of that terrible day.

“For others there may be some relief that after such a length of time there is some visible progress in an investigation that has had to be kept secret.”

More arrests ‘likely’

He went on to appeal for more people, especially from West Yorkshire, to come forward to help with the investigation.

“I firmly believe that there are other people who have knowledge of what lay behind the attack in July 2005 - knowledge that they have not shared with us, in fact I don’t only believe it, I know it for a fact.”

Mr Clarke said the police particularly required information about the movements of the four 7 July suicide bombers as well as the three men who had been charged.

He said it was “highly likely” that more arrests would be made and described the 7 July investigation as a “complicated jigsaw with thousands of pieces”.

“We now have enough of the pieces in the right places for us to see the picture, but it is far from complete. Because of that, the search is not over.”

The three men are due to appear at London’s City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Saturday.

BBC

Have Your Say: Three charged over 7/7 bombings
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

McKinnon loses fight against extradition

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Gary McKinnon, the alleged Pentagon hacker, has lost his appeal against extradition to the US on hacking charges.

McKinnon, 41, failed to convince Appeal Court judges on Tuesday to overturn a 2006 ruling by Home Secretary John Reid that his extradition should go ahead. The Scot now faces a US trial of breaking into and damaging 97 US government computers in what US authorities have described as the “biggest military” hack ever.

McKinnon is alleged to have hacked into computers belonging to the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, Department of Defense, and NASA in 2001 and 2002. The Scot lost his first appeal against extradition in an High Court hearing last July but was given leave to take his case to a Appeal Court, a move that culminated in failure on Tuesday. McKinnon’s final option is an appeal to the House of Lords but there is no guarantee that Appeal Court judges will even grant this leave to final appeal.

This week’s hearing was McKinnon “last best” chance to avoid extradition.

His lawyers argued that he had been subjected to “improper threats” that he would receive a much harsher sentence and be denied the opportunity to serve out the back-end of his jail term in the UK unless he played ball. But Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Mr Justice Goldring said: “We do not find any grounds of appeal”, in dismissing McKinnon’s legal challenge against the Home Secretary’s decision to confirm a ruling that McKinnon ought to be extradited to the US.

The unemployed sysadmin has had these charges over his head since March 2002 when he was arrested by officers from the UK’s National High Tech Crime Unit. The case against him lay dormant until July 2005, when extradition proceedings were brought against him. His lawyers consistently argued that McKinnon ought to be tried in the UK over his alleged offences, rather than the US.

McKinnon (AKA Solo) admits he infiltrated computer systems without permission, but claims he did no harm. He got involved in hacking after reading Disclosure by Stephen Grea, which convinced him that the US had harvested advanced technology from UFOs (such as anti-gravity propulsion systems) and kept this knowledge secret, to the detriment of the public.

He was caught after US authorities tracked system intrusions back to the UK. UK police identified McKinnon as the attacker after obtaining records of British sales of a software tool called RemotelyAnywhere to McKinnon, who’d unwisely used his real email address to purchase the software.

Source

Have Your Say: McKinnon loses fight against extradition
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Benefit staff to use lie detector

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Lie detectors will be used to help root out benefit cheats, Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has said.

So-called “voice-risk analysis software” will be used by council staff to help identify suspect claims.

It can detect minute changes in a caller’s voice which give clues as to when they may be lying.

The technology is already used by the insurance industry to combat fraud and will be trialled by Harrow Council, in north London, from May.

It will be tested on housing and council tax benefit claims first, before being rolled out to job centres later in the year.

Announcing the pilot, Mr Hutton said: “This technology aims to tackle fraudsters while speeding up claims and improving customer service for the honest majority.”

Further evidence

The BBC’s business reporter John Moylan explained that the system first analyses the characteristics of a caller’s “normal” voice to establish a benchmark.

This ensures it takes any natural variation, for example due to nerves or shyness, into account.

The software then looks for changes in voice tone and frequency and performs thousands of mathematical calculations to identify signs that someone could be lying.

Benefits staff can then ask for further evidence to support any suspicious claims.

Callers will hear a standard message before they speak alerting them that the technology is being used.

According to government figures, benefit fraud cost the UK economy about £0.7bn in 2005/06.

Source

Have Your Say: Benefit staff to use lie detector
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

AP: U.S. interrogating at Africa’s secret prisons

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

CIA, FBI agents looking for al-Qaida militants at notorious Ethiopia jails

CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.

The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen, and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.

Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.

Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

U.S. government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.

The prisoners were never in American custody, said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaida.

An ‘outsourced Guantanamo’
But some U.S. allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering U.S. officials, said he sees the United States as playing a guiding role in the operation.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an e-mail that the United States has acted as “ringleader” in what he labeled a “decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo.”

Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.

One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 37 miles east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.

Continue…

Have Your Say: AP: U.S. interrogating at Africa’s secret prisons
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Latest News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Translate: