Terrorists tracked down all over the world

Davos discusses terrorism, extremism

228 arrested in Yemen on suspected involvement in terrorism

Bhutto assassination suspect arrested

Spain: Terrorist plan targeting Barcelona transport system foiled

Fears of world recession briefly took a back seat at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq focused on how to establish security in their volatile regions.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said poverty -- especially when paired with illiteracy -- was the key breeding ground for suicide bombers. Barham Saleh, deputy prime minister of Iraq, described terrorism in his country as "efforts by extremists to hijack my religion."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose country has recently seen an upsurge in suicide bombings, said the practice "isn't religious, it's criminal."

Musharraf pledged to battle the "scourge" of radicalism in regions bordering Afghanistan. And he said he would do his utmost to ensure Pakistani elections next month would be fair.

Saleh suggested that U.S. troops would remain in Iraq indefinitely.

"Our expectation is that we would need the Americans in a supporting role ... for some time to come," he said. Iraq needs America as a guarantor of security to act against "regional predators," he said.

On Wednesday, the opening day of the annual Davos meeting, the focus was the global economy and rolling stock markets as fears grew that the U.S. economic downturn would spread around the world.

Still, concerns about economic damage from a U.S. supreme mortgage crisis were bound to resurface at the five-day meeting of 2,500 government, business and academic leaders in the Swiss Alps.

Musharraf spoke at a later event as the Pakistani army was reporting that troops backed by helicopters and artillery attacked suspected militant hideouts in tribal areas close to the Afghan border, killing 40 rebels and arresting 30. At least eight soldiers also died.

The Pakistani leader, who recently gave up his position as the country's top general, said terrorism needed to be rooted out as part of his plan to stabilize a country that was rocked by last month's assassination of former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

"We have to attack al Qaeda. We have to eliminate al Qaeda. We have to deal with the militant Taliban," he said. At the same time, he said the situation in his country had to be stabilized before any full-scale assault on radical elements.

He urged Westerners at the forum to try to understand what his government has accomplished by looking at the economic performance and the well-being of Pakistanis.

"Please don't judge the country on idealistic, maybe unrealistic, Western perceptions of democracy and human rights," he said

On the other hand, a British soldier was killed and five were injured by a roadside mine in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defense revealed.

The soldier, a member of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers attached to 5th Regiment Royal Artillery, died when the vehicle the troops were traveling in struck a landmine near Musa Qala.

He was pronounced dead at the scene. Next of kin have been informed.

The five other British casualties were taken by helicopter to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) medical centre at Camp Bastion, the main British military base in the desert of Helmand province. Their injuries were not said to be life-threatening.

All the service personnel involved were traveling in a 5th Regiment Royal Artillery patrol vehicle. The Ministry of Defense said that the company was engaged in operations disrupting enemy forces and reassuring local Afghans when their vehicle was struck.

NATO forces are now busy consolidating their grip on the area, building a chain of forts in an attempt to prevent the Taliban from creeping back.

The number of British military deaths in Afghanistan since the start of operations in November 2001 now stands at 87.

According to estimates more than 6,500 Afghans - mainly militants - died violent deaths linked to the Taliban insurgency last year, the highest death toll since 2001.

Diplomatic sources in Cairo revealed that an attempted assassination of Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa was foiled near the Lebanese-Syrian borders on Saturday evening.

The incident took place while Moussa was going back by car to Beirut from the Syrian capital Damascus. There, he had met with Syrian officials as part of his efforts to implement the Arab initiative to solve the Lebanese crisis.

Lebanese security forces noticed a suspected car parked along the road near the Syrian-Lebanese borders. They quickly destroyed it from far before the arrival of Moussa's convoy, but they did not reveal whether it contained explosive material.

The sources added that Lebanese security services carried out a wide research of the car owner. It emerged that he is an Egyptian called Hisham A.D. who lives in Lebanon.

However, he is not in Lebanon at the moment and searches are currently underway, in cooperation with security services in Egypt and some other Arab countries, to find him, his address and to determine his political orientations.

According to the sources, Amr Moussa did not pay attention to this incident and described it as something "simple". Moreover, he affirmed that nothing would stop his mission in Lebanon and that he would continue his efforts to solve the complicated crisis there.

A car bomb had exploded one day before Amr Moussa's current visit to Lebanon. The blast hit an illusionary convoy of the US Embassy in Beirut, killed a person and left a few Lebanese and an American wounded

In Yemen, security forces arrested 228 persons accused of terror and criminal crimes during 2007, the military-run 26sep.net reported.

The website quoted security sources as saying that Yemen freed 136 persons of the detainees and referred others to prosecution before they were found guilty.

On the other hand, by Arab countries handed over in 2007 five wanted persons to Yemen and it handed over eight convicted ones to Arab and foreign states during the same year.

Security services are searching for 494 defendants wanted by Arab and foreign countries and they asked some countries to find five persons wanted by the Yemeni government.

Two Belgian women tourists were among four people killed, and four more Belgians were wounded, when suspected Al-Qaeda gunmen opened fire on them in Yemen on Friday, a local official told AFP.

The official, who declined to be named, blamed the local branch of the terror network for the attack, in which the tourists’ Yemeni guide and driver were also killed.

The attackers were said to have opened fire on a bus carrying 15 Belgian tourists in the eastern province of Hadramut’s Do’an Valley, before they fled the scene in a car.

In Turkey, Officials from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) are expected to gather to end a controversial ban on women wearing headscarves at universities.

The AK Party and MHP officials are scheduled to convene in Parliament to discuss the details of an agreement they reached on Thursday to remove the ban. They will negotiate on several technical details about the constitutional amendments in today's meeting.

The AK Party and the MHP decided on Jan. 24 to amend Articles 10 and 42 of the Constitution to lift the ban on the headscarf on university campuses and party officials announced then that negotiations on more technical amendment details would be handled this week.

The MHP had previously proposed amending Article 10 to lift the headscarf ban but the AK Party, when discussing the MHP's suggestion at a meeting of its central executive board, decided that such an amendment would be insufficient and on Jan. 23 submitted its own proposal to the MHP that contained amendments to three articles of the Constitution. The AK Party suggested that Articles 13 and 42 be amended in addition to Article 10. Senior executives from both parties convened on Thursday to negotiate the AK Party's proposal and eventually reached an agreement on how to abolish the ban.

Officials from the AK Party and the MHP will discuss in today's meeting whether the planned amendments to Articles 10 and 42 will be satisfactory to solve Turkey's never-ending headscarf problem. During the meeting, party officials will discuss whether an article on freedom of expression needs to be amended in line with changes planned for the two articles in question.

AK Party leader and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and MHP Chairman Devlet Bahceli are expected to make the planned changes public after the meeting.

A teenager who said he was part of a team of assassins sent to kill former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was arrested near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials said.

The teen also confessed to taking part in a plot to attack Shiites during the Ashoura festival, even as police in Pakistan's far south said they had foiled suicide attacks planned for the Shiite Muslim festival.

In Karachi, police chief Azhar Farouqi said officers detained five men who were in the possession of explosives, detonators and a small quantity of cyanide intended for attacks on this week's Ashoura processions.

''With these arrests we have foiled major attacks,'' Farouqi said.

The intelligence official said the 15-year-old told investigators that the five-person squad was dispatched to Rawalpindi, where Bhutto was killed, by Baitullah Mehsud, a militant leader with strong ties to al-Qaeda and an alliance with the Taliban in nearby Afghanistan, on Afghanistan's northwest border.

The senior official from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the teen was arrested on Thursday and was involved in a plot to attack Shiites during an Ashoura festival on Sunday.

A senior district police officer in Dera Ismail Khan, a town 168 miles southwest of Islamabad, confirmed the teen's arrest there and said the suspect made ''a sensational disclosure.'' The officer also asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

In Islamabad, Interior Ministry spokesman Jawed Iqbal Cheema said he had no information about any arrests in the border area, or about any new developments in the Bhutto case.

Maulvi Mohammed Umar, a purported spokesman for Mehsud, denied his group had links with the teen, and said he had not been dispatched by Mehsud to kill Bhutto.

Spain's interior minister said the suspects in a Barcelona terror plot were clearly ready to strike, but police have not yet found explosives "in sufficient quantity" to be used for the assault.

Spanish police move suspected terrorist detainees following last weekend's arrests in Barcelona.

"This cell was preparing to attack. It's clear they were going to try, whether last weekend or within 15 days," Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.

The 10 men, mainly Pakistanis, were arrested last weekend in Barcelona, and appeared on Wednesday before Judge Ismael Moreno, who ordered them to be held in prison.

In his rulings, Moreno wrote they were planning an attack between Jan. 18 and Jan. 20 against public transport in Barcelona, but police moved in first to make arrests.

An informant told authorities that the attack would be against Barcelona's metro system last weekend, Rubalcaba said in the radio interview. The informant, he added, also told authorities about potential links between the Barcelona group and suspected extremists in other countries, and that's under investigation.

But for now, Rubalcaba said, "there is only the testimony of an informant" regarding the imminent nature of the attacks.

"We have found a modest quantity of explosives," Rubalcaba said, adding that may have been used for training the suspects.

The judge in his rulings wrote that the group "had achieved human operational capacity and were very close to achieving full technical capacity with explosives, with the aim of using those explosives for a jihadi terrorist attack."

Rubalcaba said that for a suspected terrorist cell like this one, "the time from getting explosives to carrying out the attack can be very short."

The judge wrote that police found nitrocellulose and mechanical and electrical elements that could be used to make one or more bombs.

The judge also cited the informant for providing information that three of the men were suspected suicide bombers who had come to Barcelona from Pakistan since last October, and a fourth man was a suspected explosives expert. The judge cited two other men as ideological leaders of the group.

But Spain's attorney general, Candido Conde-Pumpido, later said publicly that there could have been six suicide bombers, two explosives experts and two ideologues.

Spain's largest circulation newspaper reported on Friday the informant worked for French intelligence, which could not immediately be independently confirmed.

A total of 14 men were arrested last weekend in Barcelona, but Civil Guard investigators released two before the arraignments began and the judge released two more after the arraignments, for lack of evidence, holding just 10 in prison.

More than 300 suspected Islamic extremists have been arrested in Spain since the Madrid train bombings killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800 on March 11, 2004, Rubalcaba said in the radio interview.

Last October, more than a dozen Islamic extremists were convicted in Madrid for their roles in the train bombings.

Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on its website that Spain's authorities had warned France, Portugal and Britain of the possibility of attacks during Musharraf's eight-day trip.

Small groups composed principally of Pakistanis were preparing to carry out attacks "imminently," the report cited Spanish intelligence agency sources as saying.

Then on Saturday, the interior ministry said that Spanish police had smashed a suspected Islamist terror cell, arresting at least 14 people -- 12 of them Pakistanis -- and finding bomb-making equipment in raids in Barcelona.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero praised the intelligence services for the overnight swoop but said not to jump to conclusions about those arrested.

Despite this, Belgian authorities do not plan to boost security beyond that which would be in place for a visit by any other head of state or government.

Germany's domestic security service has warned the country's Jewish community and the Israeli embassy of an increased danger of terrorist attack.

The general secretary of the Central Council of German Jews, Stephan Kramer, has confirmed weekend news reports that increased precautions were being taken Germany-wide. However, he also warned against scaremongering.

Kramer said that the Council had been approached ten days ago by the German security authority, the BKA, following the arrest of a suspected Al Qaeda member in Lebanon.