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| Al Qaeda leader, 17 others killed in Iraq jail clash Posted: 08 May 2011 07:14 AM PDT BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Eighteen people, including an al Qaeda leader and a senior Iraqi counter-terrorism official, died in a battle between inmates and security officers during a jailbreak attempt in Baghdad on Sunday, security officials said. Huthaifa al-Batawi, known as al Qaeda's "Emir of Baghdad" and the alleged architect of a deadly attack on a Catholic church, was killed along with 10 other senior al Qaeda militants, said Baghdad's security spokesman Major-General Qassim al-Moussawi. The skirmish at an Interior Ministry counter-terrorism unit jail complex in Baghdad's central Karrada district began when a prisoner grabbed a gun from a guard, killed several guards and ministry officers, and gave a weapon to other inmates, Moussawi said. Inmates controlled a section of the facility for several hours before a SWAT team brought the siege to an end, security officials said. The jail housed about 250 inmates, many of them members of al Qaeda, one source said. "Security forces and guards responded to the jail of the counter-terrorism department and killed 11 terrorist-prisoners ... including Huthaifa al-Batawi, the Emir of Baghdad, who was in charge of planning the church attack," Moussawi said. Moussawi said seven security officers -- including Brigadier Muaid Mahdi, head of investigations at the counter-terrorism unit -- were killed in the skirmish and one other was wounded. A senior security official who asked not to be named said eight terrorism suspects, most facing death sentences, were killed along with nine security officers, three of them senior officials. Batawi was arrested along with 11 others in late November in connection with the Oct. 31 assault on Our Lady of Salvation church during Sunday mass. Dozens of hostages and police died when Iraqi forces tried to free more than 100 Catholic hostages. The attack was the bloodiest against Iraq's Christian minority since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Security officials said it was Batawi who started the jail battle by seizing a guard's gun in an attempt to flee. Moussawi said the situation at the jail was under control and no prisoners had escaped. Iraqi security forces have been on high alert for revenge attacks by al Qaeda since U.S. commandos killed the group's leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Monday. Iraq became a major battlefield for the Islamist militant group after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. One Iraqi security official estimates the group is behind 70 percent of the scores of bombings and other attacks carried out in Iraq every month. (Additional reporting by Suadad al-Salhy and Waleed Ibrahim; Writing by Jim Loney; Editing by Andrew Heavens) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. | ||
| Was bin Laden really calling the shots? In Pakistan, serious doubts Posted: 08 May 2011 06:44 AM PDT ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - It didn't figure. U.S. Intelligence released footage of a grey- bearded, dishevelled figure wrapped in a shawl and wearing a woollen hat, and then it said that this same old man had been calling the shots on al Qaeda's plots around the globe.
There was doubt and derision in Pakistan on Sunday at the suggestion that Osama bin Laden's hideout north of the capital, Islamabad, was somehow an "active command and control centre" for al Qaeda. "It sounds ridiculous," said a senior intelligence official. "It doesn't sound like he was running a terror network." For one thing, there was no internet connection or even telephone lines into the compound that U.S. commandos raided a week ago, killing the world's most-wanted man. More critically, analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden's death, al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralised group that operated tactically without him. "It's bullshit," said another senior Pakistani security official, when quizzed on a U.S. intelligence official's assertion that bin Laden had been "active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions" of the Islamist militant group from his secret home in the town of Abbottabad. "They will say whatever they like. I can say tomorrow that he was planning to make nuclear or chemical weapons ... Would you believe it? I think there's an element of exaggeration. They're playing it up." A senior U.S. intelligence official said in Washington information carted away from the compound by U.S. forces after the May 2 raid, including the videos, several clips of which were released, represented the largest trove of intelligence ever obtained from a single terrorism suspect. The official said the materials showed that bin Laden had remained an active leader of al Qaeda, which made the operation that led to his death "even more essential for our nation's security". TWO COUNTRIES, TWO VERSIONS Pakistan's military, caught off guard by the Abbottabad swoop and now facing accusations that it was either too incompetent to catch bin Laden or complicit in hiding him, has sought to depict the al Qaeda leader as a man of diminished influence. Both countries have an interest in peddling their own versions of the clout that bin Laden carried from behind the walls of his compound. Stressing bin Laden's weakness makes his discovery in the middle of a garrison town less embarrassing for Pakistan, but playing up his importance makes the U.S. operation all the more glorious. Analysts say that bin Laden's centrality to the network had already faded. While the man behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States served as an inspirational figure, strikes on Western targets were increasingly plotted and instigated by autonomous splinter groups. "As a matter of leadership of terrorist operations, bin Laden has really not been the main story for some time," Paul Pillar, a former senior U.S. Intelligence official told Reuters last week. Talat Masood, a Pakistani defence analyst and retired general, said bin Laden distributed videos occasionally and he may have passed computer disks with ideas for strikes to his couriers, but it was hard to see how that would put him at the nerve centre of operations. "The only thing he could have done in that house is to record video and audio messages," a senior security official said in Islamabad. "How could he control the whole of al Qaeda from there while he has no communications system? How can he control the entire al Qaeda when he was living with two guards, an 18-inch television and no big weapons. It's just an exaggeration." (Additional reporting by Zeehan Haider, Chris Allbritton and Kamran Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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