Spanish judiciary follows up probe with Israeli leaders on war crimes charges

Hezbollah cell members probe reveals detailed schemes for terrorist operations in Egypt

30 Al-Qaeda in Iraq network members arrested

Afghan president's brother survives assassination attempt

Moroccan court turns down requests by defense counsel of cell suspected of involvement in terror

A Spanish judge said Monday he will keep investigating seven current or former Israeli officials over a 2002 air force bombing in Gaza that killed a suspected Hamas militant and 14 civilians.

Prosecutors last month urged Judge Fernando Andreu of Spain's National Court to suspend the inquiry on the grounds Israel was still investigating the attack. But Andreu rejected the request on Monday, saying he has found no evidence of such an investigation in Israel.

Israel's Foreign Ministry called the decision "ridiculous" and groundless. A Palestinian human rights group hailed it as a "great victory."

Andreu first agreed to open the case in January at the request of Palestinian relatives of victims of the attack. Nine children were among the dead.

Andreu said he was acting under Spain's observance of the principle of universal jurisdiction, which holds that grave crimes such as genocide, terrorism or torture can be prosecuted here even if alleged to have been committed elsewhere.

Andreu said the 2002 bombing in densely populated Gaza City might constitute a crime against humanity. That attack with a one-ton bomb dropped from an Israeli F-16 targeted and killed alleged Hamas member Salah Shehadeh along with 14 other people. Israel has defended the attack as a legitimate strike against a terrorist.

On Monday, the Spanish judge wrote that Israel's military conducted an internal investigation but Israeli military and civilian prosecutors declined to open proceedings of their own. He said for this reason Spain has jurisdiction to keep investigating.

"In Israel there has not been, nor is there now under way, any legal proceedings aimed at investigating" the Gaza bombing, the judge wrote.

Andreu's initial decision to investigate infuriated the Israeli government. Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said in response that Spain planned to modify its law to narrow the scope of universal jurisdiction cases to those with a clear link to Spain.

But no reform to this effect has yet to make it to the Spanish parliament for debate or a vote.

Last week another Spanish judge, Balthazar Garzon, announced an investigation into alleged torture of terror suspects at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, even though the Spanish attorney general has said such a procedure is up to the United States, not Spain.

The chief justice of the Spanish Supreme Court, Carlos Divar, said Monday an amendment to this country's universal justice law is necessary because "we cannot become the world's judicial gendarme." Divar is also the chairman of a watchdog body that oversees the Spanish court system.

"This whole procedure in Spain is ridiculous," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said. "They have no basis for this procedure because there is no evidence to support war crimes and it would credit the Spanish justice system if the procedure would end promptly."

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he would speak to Spain's defense and foreign ministers "and if need be the Spanish prime minister to act in order to remove the evil decree."

Barak added: "There isn't a more ethical army than the Israel Defense Forces. I have no doubt that those who acted then to hit Shehadeh acted with a clear head and an eye locked on one target only — to protect Israeli civilians."

Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, located in the Gaza Strip, said, "We welcome this decision as the first step toward justice for the survivors of a massive extra-judicial execution operation perpetrated by the Israeli Occupation Forces ... This is a great victory."

The seven being investigated include Dan Halutz, who commanded Israel's air force at the time of the attack, and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then defense minister and now the minister of trade.

The five others are Doron Almog, who at the time was commander of the air force in Gaza; Giora Eiland, then Israel's National Security Adviser; Michael Herzog, who was with the Defense Ministry; Moshe Ya'alon, then chief of staff of the Israeli military; and Abraham Dichter, then director of the Shin Bet internal security agency, or General Security Service.

Meanwhile, Egyptian investigators say a stockpile of 266 rockets and other weapons found in the Sinai was destined for Hamas in Gaza.

The find was reported Friday by al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arab language newspaper in London, which said the munitions were discovered Monday close to the border with Israel. An official said that in addition to the rockets, there were three anti-tank missiles, 51 mortar shells, 21 grenades and 43 mines.

An Egyptian security source told al-Quds al-Arabi that more weapons and ammunition were found in an unoccupied hideout.

When Egyptian police pounded on the door before dawn and took her husband Nimr away, Sahar Zibawi had no idea that her partner was about to become a pivotal player in a convoluted political plot involving gun running to Gaza, a notorious African smuggling route once used by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, an Iranian-backed Hezbollah cell and an attempt by Egypt's aging president to reclaim his waning regional influence.

"We've been put in a whirlwind and we don't know why," Zibawi said nervously while she met surreptitiously with a McClatchy reporter in this Mediterranean coast town that's a gateway for smuggling to Palestinian-controlled Gaza.

Nimr Zibawi, a Sinai construction worker, is one of more than 40 suspects accused of joining a Hezbollah cell that Egyptian authorities claim was plotting to destabilize President Hosni Mubarak by attacking ships in the Suez Canal and hitting tourist-dependent Red Sea resorts.

After weeks of intense questioning that their attorneys said included daily beatings and torture, Nimr Zibawi and at least one other suspect recently made videotaped confessions in which they admitted to helping smuggle weapons to Gaza militants, but not to plotting attacks inside Egypt .

"If they helped the Palestinian resistance, maybe it's true, but not in the way our government claims," said Malek Adly, an attorney with the Cairo -based Hisham Mubarak Legal Rights Center, which is representing Zibawi and eight others. "Nothing they did was intended to harm Egypt."

In some ways, Mubarak's reaction has been more important to Middle East politics than the allegations themselves: "Beware the wrath of Egypt."

The 81-year-old Mubarak is looking to reclaim his role as a regional power broker at an auspicious time: President Barack Obama has chosen Egypt as the setting for his highly anticipated June 4 address to the Arab and Muslim world.

Obama is looking to transform America's image in the Middle East — and Mubarak could play a critical role in helping the new president succeed.

Israel and the U.S. have tried to enlist pro-Western, Sunni Muslim nations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan in a regional coalition to counter Shiite Iran and Hezbollah.

Until now, many Sunni Arab leaders have been reluctant to get into a public diplomatic feud with Iran. That may be changing.

"The situation has become incredibly complex because it's not just an Egypt issue, it's about where the Middle East heading next after being completely destabilized by the Bush administration," said Issandr el Amrani, a Cairo -based analyst for the International Crisis Group.

"Iran represents the revival of the rejectionist camp, which stands against everything Egypt has built over the last 30 years," el Amrani said. "There are concerns in the regime and the wider establishment in Egypt that doesn't want to see the country go back to its anti-Western positions."

The Sinai desert has become a remote battleground in this regional ideological feud.

The weapons route to Gaza is thought to run along a legendary African smuggling route that French poet Arthur Rimbaud used in the late 1800s.

Israel reportedly bombed arms convoys on the route in Sudan during the winter Gaza offensive. That put more pressure on Egypt to take stronger steps to disrupt an arms route Israeli intelligence warned was being used to smuggle increasingly sophisticated rockets into Gaza.

If the Sinai suspects were accused merely of smuggling guns for Palestinian militants, this case might not be as significant.

Egyptian police, however, said that the men were involved in plans to destabilize Mubarak by plotting attacks on popular Sinai tourist resorts, scouting out ships in the Suez Canal, and, in a pointed jab at Iran and Hezbollah, accused them of spreading Shia Islam.

"This is a case about trying to tarnish Hezbollah's image in Egypt," Adly said. "There has been a shift in politics between Hezbollah and Egypt."

Tensions between Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Mubarak have been building since Nasrallah publicly urged Egyptians to rise up in December and challenge their president for refusing to fully open his border with Gaza and allow Palestinians to escape Israel's three-week military offensive.

"Nasrallah's behavior since December 27 has been really out of bounds and doesn't happen very often in Middle East politics," el Amrani said. "It's really unprecedented and hasn't been seen in decades of inter-Arab relations."

Israeli papers reported that their government had provided Egypt with critical intelligence about Nasrallah's agents in the Sinai that led to the first arrests in December. That Egyptian sweep began three weeks before Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza.

Sahar Zibawi was rebuffed for months when she tried to find out where her husband was and what he was accused of doing. Then, four months after Nimr was arrested, Egypt announced on April 8 that it had broken up the Hezbollah cell, including the Egyptian-born construction worker with Palestinian roots.

Zibawi said she was stunned by the news and her fears compounded.

Late last month, Egyptian intelligence returned to El Arish with Nimr Zibawi for a surprising visit. Wearing normal clothes and cologne, he was ushered into the house to spend time with his wife as the birth of couple's third child neared.

"He told me: 'I'm Egyptian before I'm Palestinian. Don't believe anything you hear," Sahar Zibawi said.

Security then led Nimr into a room where he confessed to being part of a Gaza -Sinai gun smuggling group, but not to plotting against Egypt, according to his attorney, Hossam Hadad, who witnessed the confession.

In an unusual address after the arrests were announced in April, Nasrallah admitted that one of the men picked up by Egyptian police, a Lebanese man identified as Sami Shehab, was helping to smuggle weapons to Palestinian militants in Gaza.

However, he rejected any allegations that Hezbollah planned to challenge Mubarak.

Egyptian papers responded by lampooning Nasrallah as a "monkey Sheik" and suggesting the he be tried for war crimes. Egypt summoned Iranian officials to protest that nation's reaction to the case. And Mubarak obliquely warned Iran and Hezbollah to back off.

In the Sinai, relatives of the men at the center of this case nervously gathered in a nondescript house to meet a McClatchy reporter.

With young men keeping watch on the door for Egyptian security, the wives, mothers, fathers and brothers of several of the suspects said their relatives had become political pawns.

"Our sons have been hijacked by politics," said the father of one of the suspects who gave his name only as Abu Ihab.

"We're just asking the hijackers to give us back or kids and stop making stuff up."

"I just want to know the end," said the mother of one of the men who gave her name as Umm Nasser. "Are we going to see them again, or are they gone forever?"

An official from Egypt's ruling party Jihad Awdeh revealed on Sunday that elements of the Muslim Brotherhood were members of the so-called Hezbollah cell that was arrested in Egypt recently. Arab media reported on Monday that Awdeh accused the Muslim Brotherhood of involvement in the distribution of Egyptian currency that carried a Hezbollah stamp.

Egypt said last month that it had uncovered a plot by 49 men linked to Hezbollah to destabilize the country by carrying out attacks on Egyptian institutions and Israeli tourists.

Egyptian MP Mohammad Mustafa Shardi also warned on Monday that there were groups promoting Egyptian currency which carries a Hezbollah stamp.

"There are those who are involved in the distribution of currencies of 1, 5 and 10 Egyptian pounds in the Port Said district stamped with the phrase Hezbollah, People of the House," Shardi said.

The MP said these currencies were frequently traded in the hands of ordinary people and accused Hezbollah of attempting to "play a political game through the formation of groups to attack Sunnis through the distribution of money to the naive."

Meanwhile, Egypt's High State Security Prosecution has reportedly confronted 14 Muslim Brotherhood officials after keeping close watch on them following Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's Ashoura speech in which he called on Egypt's army to take action against Israeli assaults on Gaza.

The detainees, however, denied any link or collaboration with Hezbollah, according to a report carried by Lebanon's Al-Mustaqbal newspaper.

The 14 men, headed by member of the Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Bureau Ossama Nasser, were surprised by the charge of restructuring the international branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the report.

In a speech delivered earlier in May, Nasrallah said his Shiite group has no intention of setting up a cell in Egypt to destabilize that predominantly Sunni Muslim country, adding that an alleged fierce Egyptian campaign against the group has failed to discredit it in the Arab world.

"We didn't set up a cell in Egypt and we don't intend to," he said. "We are not seeking to target Egypt, its security, its regime or its stability."

Egypt's "wide-scale political, propaganda and media campaign" has failed to "distort Hezbollah's image," Nasrallah said, but added that Hezbollah would not engage in any sort of counter-campaign against Egypt in order to allow for Arab and Lebanese mediators to work to end the dispute.

In Iraq, a toddler and four policemen have been killed in the latest violence to rock Baghdad as the US military captured three men suspected of links with a Syria-based Al Qaeda leader.

The US military says the men were arrested during joint Iraqi-US military raids on Friday and Saturday that targeted Saad Uwayid Ubayd al-Shammari, also know as Abu Khalaf, north of the troubled northern city of Mosul.

"Iraqi and Coalition forces targeted a Syrian-based Al Qaeda in Iraq network operating in Iraq and other AQI network cells," a statement said.

"The combined force was led to a residence where they captured three of Abu Khalaf's associates."

In Baghdad a rocket attack in the sprawling Shiite district of Sadr City killed the 16-month-old baby boy and wounded two of his brothers and a cousin, Iraqi security officials said.

"His two brothers aged four and six, were wounded along with a female cousin," an interior ministry official said. A medic at Baghdad morgue confirmed the death.

Two policemen were killed and seven others were wounded by a roadside bomb that targeted their patrol in the west of the city, police said.

Another two policemen were among the wounded in the blast near Abu Ghraib city, a bastion of an anti-US Sunni Arab insurrection before fighters there turned their backs on their Al Qaeda allies.

In central Baghdad a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in Al-Ghadeer district killed two officers and wounded five other people.

A US soldier was also killed in fighting in southern Iraq on Saturday, the US military said, without providing further details.

The death brought to 4,296 the number of American losses since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to a count based on an independent website.

Also in southern Iraq the remains of hundreds of bodies believed to be those of Iraqi Kurds were found in a three mass graves, a human rights ministry official said.

The gruesome find was the second of its type to be reported since this week.

In Afghanistan, a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he narrowly escaped assassination Monday morning Taliban attackers lying in wait for his motorcade while it traveled from the eastern city of Jalalabad to the capital.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in Washington that the United States could not succeed in Afghanistan if the American military kept killing Afghan civilians, and the military provided its most detailed accounting yet of the airstrikes that killed an undetermined number of Afghan civilians in Farah Province two weeks earlier.

Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, said in a telephone interview that his convoy was on its way to Kabul, the capital, when it was ambushed at Sorobi by attackers using rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.

“I was leading the convoy,” he said, “but all of the bullets hit the second vehicle that my bodyguards were driving.” He blamed the Taliban for the attack, which killed one of his bodyguards.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, a prominent politician in southern Afghanistan, leads the provincial council of Kandahar Province. News organizations have reported on allegations of links between him and the drug trade in the region, including in an article in The New York Times in October.

He strongly denied the allegations, saying they were “baseless.”

On April 1, five suicide bombers stormed the offices of the Kandahar provincial council, and at least 13 people, including two provincial officials, were killed. The president’s brother was not in his office at the time.

In Washington, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the American airstrikes in Farah Province had jeopardized the United States strategy in Afghanistan.

“We cannot succeed in Afghanistan or anywhere else — but let’s talk specifically about Afghanistan — by killing Afghan civilians,” Admiral Mullen said to an audience of scholars, national security experts and the media at the Brookings Institution, adding, “We can’t keep going through incidents like this and expect the strategy to work.”

At the same time, he said, “We can’t tie our troops’ hands behind their backs.”

The airstrikes have caused uproar in Afghanistan, and Admiral Mullen’s comments reflect deep concern in the Pentagon about the intensifying criticism from Kabul against the American military.

Admiral Mullen, who noted that commanders in the region had in recent months imposed more restrictive rules on airstrikes to avoid civilian casualties, said, “We’ve got to be very, very focused on making sure that we proceed deliberately, that we know who the enemy is.”

According to a senior spokesman for the military, Marines Special Operations forces called in airstrikes in Farah Province at mid-afternoon on May 4, after a battle between the Taliban fighters and the Afghan Army and police had raged for hours.

Initially, over a period of several hours, three F-18 fighter-bombers dropped five laser-guided and satellite-guided bombs against Taliban fighters, who were firing at the American and Afghan forces, the spokesman, Col. Gregory Julian, said in an e-mail message from Afghanistan late Sunday.

Villagers, however, have reported that a heavier bombardment took place after 8 p.m., when they said the fighting appeared to be over and the Taliban had left the area.

The military has disputed this version of events, saying the Taliban fighters continued to fire at American and Afghan troops, making additional airstrikes necessary. These came from a B-1 bomber, which dropped a total of eight satellite-guided bombs, some of them weighing 500 pounds and others 2,000 pounds, on a tree grove and two buildings, Colonel Julian said.

Villagers have said they sought safety from the first airstrikes in a compound of buildings, but it was not clear whether these were the same buildings the American aircraft later bombed.

In all, Colonel Julian said, eight targets were attacked over seven hours. He denied reports from villagers that a mosque had been damaged in the strikes.

Afghan government officials have accepted handwritten lists of 147 dead civilians compiled by the villagers. An independent Afghan human rights group said it had accounts from interviews of 117 dead. American officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration but have yet to issue their own count.

In Algeria, negotiations have started for the release of a Briton and a Swiss national being held hostage by al Qaeda militants in the Sahara desert, an Algerian newspaper quoted a security source as saying on Monday.

Al Qaeda's North African wing has threatened to kill the British hostage on May 15 unless Britain releases Sheikh Abu Qatada, a Jordanian Islamist it is holding in prison.

Algeria's El-Khabar newspaper said the talks were being conducted with the hostage-takers' leader using mediators from local tribes and Islamists based in Europe. It cited an unidentified security source for the story.

No official confirmation was immediately available that any negotiations were under way. Diplomats and security sources say the hostages are probably being held in Mali.

The newspaper also said a joint operation by states in the region to flush out the militants had been suspended at the request of an unnamed European country to avoid jeopardizing the talks.

"The two hostages will be released within weeks, at a date no later than July, if the negotiations are carried out in the desired way," the newspaper quoted the source as saying.

Mali last week sent three combat units to track down suspected al Qaeda militants in the north of the country, part of a vast desert tract that in the past few years has become a haven for Islamist insurgents.

Other states around the Sahara desert, including Algeria, Mauritania and Niger, are also preparing a joint offensive against the militants, media reports and military sources in the region said last week.

Regional governments are under pressure from Europe and the United States to stamp out the al Qaeda presence in the Sahara desert.

Al Qaeda's North African wing, known as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), has been waging a campaign of bombings and shootings, primarily along Algeria's Mediterranean coast.

A security crackdown there has forced elements of the group to switch their focus to the Sahara, with its sparse population, porous borders and weak government control.

The group's highest profile activity in the Sahara has been kidnapping. AQIM said it kidnapped 32 foreign tourists in 2003 as well as two Austrian tourists in Tunisia in early 2008.

It also claimed responsibility for kidnapping two Canadian diplomats and four European tourists in the past five months. The two diplomats and two of the tourists were released in Mali last month.

Britain has not released the name of the remaining British hostage. A Foreign Office spokesman said Britain was "continuing to work with the Malian government to help secure a safe, swift and unconditional release."

In Islamabad, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari secured large aid pledges after concluding official visits to Libya, Britain, the United States and France. The visits took place in the midst of Islamabad's battle with Taliban militants in the country's volatile northwest.

Pakistan's armed forces, are seeking to defeat militants fighting for the imposition of strict Islamic law in Swat and surrounding districts.

The president's spokesman Farhatullah Babar said in a statement that the visits concluded with the approval of $1.9 billion dollars in aid by the United States House of Representatives.

In addition, the United Kingdom said it would give 640 million pounds over the next four years, while France offered its civilian nuclear technology after decades of embargo, in addition to aid specifically for the immediate rehabilitation of displaced people and broadening of partnership to fight the scourge of extremism and militancy.

"The wide-ranging measures announced during the visit would strengthen Pakistan’s economy on the one hand and garner international political support to a democratic Pakistan engaged in a major battle against the militants in the Frontier and tribal areas on the other," said Babar.

Significantly, the approval of $1.9 billion was above the Obama administration’s own request for economic assistance to Pakistan for battling the Taliban.

"No less significant was French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s offer of a wide-ranging civil nuclear deal to Pakistan to help it overcome its energy crisis to make the industries run and create job opportunities," said Babar.

Pakistan’s case for immediate rehabilitation of the internally displaced people received attention internationally as the UK and France each announced 12 million euros and the US House of Representatives made a special provision in the aid bill.

In a week that saw the National Assembly backing operation against the militants, wire services and TV channels transmitting pictures of displaced people lining up for food in camps, President Zardari cautioned the international community how critical it was that the refugees were rehabilitated to prevent them from falling prey to the militants’ propaganda.

The president also flew into New York from Washington to urge the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to make a global appeal to help Pakistan deal with the ‘human catastrophe’ resulting from the action against militants in Swat, a request which the UN chief readily accepted.

"It is critical that the international community was persuaded to help rehabilitate uprooted people back to their homes after the operation was over," said the president’s message to Ban Ki-Moon and other leaders.

The spokesman said the presidential brief included a multi-dimensional plan prepared by the government to defend the country’s democratic system against the onslaught of militants who had publicly denounced parliament, democracy and the superior judiciary and wanted to impose by force their own world view on the people of Pakistan.

The over half-a-dozen items in the plan contained details ranging from massive investments in education to strengthening of the civilian law-enforcement agencies, from recruitment of another 100,000 special police force to building bomb-proof police stations and from improving the border security regimen to overcoming the energy crisis.

In New York, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has welcomed the release from an Iranian prison of journalist Roxana Saberi, who was convicted of spying for the United States, a United Nations spokesperson said.

“He had discussed the matter on several occasions with the Government of Iran, most recently with President Ahmadinejad in Geneva, and he is pleased that the case has been resolved,” Farhan Haq told a news conference at UN Headquarters in New York.

Ms. Saberi, a 32-year-old who has dual US-Iranian citizenship, was convicted last month of spying for the US and sentenced to eight years in prison, according to media reports.

She was freed from prison on Monday after an appeals court reduced her jail term to a two-year suspended sentence.