”The petition made several allegations that several people conspired, created problems on that day. And we examined several witnesses…we are coming almost to the end of the enquiry. So, we naturally have to ask Mr Modi as to ‘what you think of all the information we have gathered.’ Then we will report to the Supreme Court,”  said R K Raghavan. SIT will be submitting its report to supreme court towards the end of April after questioning Modi.

 SIT’s action is on the wake of a complaint filed by Zakiya, Jaffrey’s wife, who alleges that Gujarat Chief Minister and other ministers in his government conspired to allow the massacre of Muslims. Naming Modi and other 62 in his cabinet, Zakiya said in the complaint that policemen and bureaucrats were instructed by Modi and his colleagues not to respond to pleas for help from Muslims being attacked during the riots.

Narendra Modi has been repeatedly accused of orchestrating the riots by many victims, including the activists and ministers and top cops in his own government. Earlier R B Sreekumar, Additional DG Intelligence at the time of riots, had said before a commission o that police and government were deliberately inactive during the riots.

Also more recently an eyewitness Imtiyaz Pathan has told the court that the police refused to come to his help desperate Jafri had called Chief Minister Narendra Modi for help when a mob started gathering outside Gulbarga Society.

Reacting to the SIT’s summons Gujarat government spokesperson Jaynarayan Vyas said “The state government and the Chief Minister would cooperate with the process of law,”. He, however, refused to comment further saying whatever is required to follow the process of law will be done by the state government.

With its own efforts to advance Palestinian-Israeli peace talks flagging, and Iran shrugging off pressure to halt its nuclear programme, Riyadh blessed Ankara’s rising assertiveness in the region in hopes that Erdogan can bring some progress, analysts said.

On a visit to Riyadh to receive the King Faisal Prize for Service To Islam — presented by King Abdullah himself late on Tuesday — Erdogan minced no words in staking out his own role.

“We are not spectators,” he told a group of top Saudi editors at lunch on Tuesday as he offered his views on conflicts involving Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, and even Yemen.

He said Turkey expected to be the intermediary for revived peace talks between Israel and Syria, and rejected US-pushed sanctions for Iran, which Riyadh has also expressed discomfort with.

“I don’t believe that any further sanctions will yield results,” said Erdogan, whose country is a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council that could vote on any new Iranian sanctions resolution by the year’s end.

The Turkish premier also insisted democratically elected Hamas be at the table for Palestinian-Israeli peace talks, which Saudi Arabia has resisted due to US pressure.

“We cannot bury our head in the sand,” he said of Hamas’ role.

“If we want to achieve positive results, then the talks must include all parties.

Mustafa Alani, research director at the Gulf Research Centre, a Dubai-based think-tank, said Turkey wanted “more involvement, and the Arab and Gulf states want them more involved.”

“Turkey has a very unique position; they have good relations with Iran and with Israel. This is an advantage for us,” said Alani.

“We look at Turkey as a counterbalance to Iran,” Alani said. Turkey had a role to play in a broader “Islamic politics.”

Turkey’s ascendancy in regional politics has been coming for several years, helping broker earlier rounds of Syrian-Israeli talks, for instance.

Erdogan further gained respect in January 2009, when he famously blasted Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Davos forum over Israel’s assault on Gaza, and then stormed out of the room.

The move contrasted with the disarray and some less-than-vehement reactions from the Arab countries.

With 1,000 top Saudi officials, academics and foreign diplomats in attendance at the prize banquet, the King Faisal Foundation lauded Erdogan as having “rendered outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the Palestinian cause and the just rights of the Palestinian people.”

“At the international level, he was a leading Muslim founder of the call for rapport between civilisations and a passionate advocate of constructive dialogue, openness, and principles of international understanding and cooperation,” said the foundation’s chief Abdullah al-Othaimeen.

The King Faisal prize comes with a hefty gold medal and 200,000 dollars cash, but for both sides that was hardly the point.

Though it came from a private foundation, the prize was clearly a sign of approval from the Saudi leadership. The King Faisal Foundation is closely tied to the Saudi foreign policy establishment.

The prize “acknowledges Erdogan personally and Turkey as well in our strategic calculation,” said Alani.

It was the second Erdogan received in as many weeks after he was granted the first UN award in memory of slain former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Turkey was the close ally with Israel leading to a diplomatic relations but with the Israel’s rude ambush in gaza triggered a strong condemn by UN Nations and thus unethical relations between Israel and Turkey was withdrawn drawing huge appreciation by middle east and supported turkish PM for the stand against the alleged war by Israel on Gaza.

]]> http://peacetimes.net/2010/03/turkish-pm-honored-with-a-king-faisal-award-for-his-service-to-islam/feed/ 1 http://peacetimes.net/2010/03/taliban-held-responsible-for-suicide-blast/ http://peacetimes.net/2010/03/taliban-held-responsible-for-suicide-blast/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:17:13 +0000 Jackson http://peacetimes.net/?p=3755 Azam Tariq, spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, suspected to claim on Monday that Taliban was behind a suicide bombing in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore that took life of approx. 13 people and wounded hundreds.

He was also suspected to have said that the attack was in response to U.S. aggression against Muslims around the world.

“I am proud to accept the responsibility of the Lahore suicide blast,” Tariq has supposedly written in a text message to CNN.

“We will follow U.S. and its allies all over the world, even if they are in Karachi, Peshawar, Lahore, Afghanistan or in U.S.” he alleged to have added.

Lahore government official Khalid Ranjha said that 7 of the dead were security personnel, and 2 were a mother and daughter on their way to school. He also added that 81 people were at nearby hospitals.

11 people were dead and more than 60 were injured, with many in critical condition, Government officials reported. Officials warned the death toll could rise.

The bombing was in a well-off part of Model Town in Lahore.

Many analysts ruled out that there is involvement of western nation’s sponsorships for political motives behind the Bomb blast. Still investigations are in progress.

Khusro Pervez, a senior government official in Lahore said that; the suspected suicide bomber targeted the Special Investigation Agency, a provincial law-enforcement agency that investigates high-value detainees. It is where suspected militants are interrogated.

In another development, 3 suspected militants were killed Monday night when a suspected U.S. drone fired 5 missiles at a compound in Pakistan’s tribal region, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The compound was in the town of Miranshah in North Waziristan, one of seven districts in Pakistan’s tribal region bordering Afghanistan, officials said.

The officials asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

[Source: CNN]

somalia al shabab spokesman

Somalia’s Al shabab group announced that they are all set to confront US and that they are not scared of the worlds superpower. Speaking to journalists, the spokesman of the group, Ali Mahmoud Rajhi said that now they are even more sure that they are on the right path since the tie-up of US with the Somali government.

The Al-shabab fighters had confronted US in 1993 in which US faced heavy causalities and humiliation, including the one in which dead bodies of US soldiers were dragged in the streets. The group is confident that once again they would fight with that zeal.

The Al-Shabab fighters will now be facing air offensive from the US, aimed at rooting out the group from its locations. The Somali troops were being trained by US for a long time now, but this time US would be sending its army to support the troops.

Continuing the program of building the nation, US had involved itself in so called relief efforts in Somali along with the UN forces. However, US along with its allies faced terrible disaster when the Al shabab fighters drove them off the land.

In October 1993, the battle which is named as the “Battle of Mogadishu”, ended up with heavy causalities from US army. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the warlord who took part in Al Shabab fighters operation, killed more than 18 US soldiers in just a single day, and dragged their bodies on the streets of Mogadishu.

Along with Sheikh Mohammed, 4 more were planned to be tried in civilian court. The attorney general, Eric Holder, was planning to conduct the trials in civilian court for all the 5 suspects. However, recommendations from presidential office is about to change this decision and the trial may shift to military tribunal court.

This decision of the senators is a backtracking from the issue on which Obama was going to change the perception of the world about US trials.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni (now officially Carla Bruni-Sarkozy), who married in February, were greeted by the Prince of Wales and by the Duchess of Cornwall after the presidential plane landed in London Wednesday.

The French president’s schedule included a full state banquet at Windsor Castle on Wednesday night, where he is staying as the guest of the queen.

On Wednesday afternoon, Sarkozy addressed both British Houses of Parliament in French and discussed many important matters of state.

But away from the politics, Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife was attracting as much, if not more, attention than her husband during the two-day visit.

The famous auction house Christie’s is to sell nude photographs of former model Bruni-Sarkozy, taken by Michel Comte in 1993, in New York next month.

Kate Moss nude and Gisele Bundchen nude photos are also nearing the same auction block, but it’s Carla Bruni – the new, wife of the French President – who has been attracting even attention of celebrity news and mainstream media.

“I have other nude photographs of Carla far more explicit, but I would never sell them,” Swiss photographer Michel Comte was quoted as saying in the daily Le Matin.

Mr Nicholas Sarkozy is said to have “no issue” with tastefully revealing images of his wife being made public.

A source at the Elysee Palace told France’s Le Post news website: He has made it clear he has no problem with this because he knows that the only images of his wife in existence are tasteful. “Some may be nude, but she is a beautiful woman who was a model and only ever posed for pictures that had artistic merit” said Nicholas Sarkozy.

Umar Shariff, who runs an educational trust known as DIET in Bangalore, when asked about the Burqa Ban in France replied instantly – “How can a man (Nicholas Sarkozy) who sells his wife’s nude pictures on the streets know the true level of modesty which Islam enjoins on dignified women?” “True dignity of a woman is preserved when she dresses up like Mary, the mother of Jesus. We Muslims are those who live by the commandments of God” he added being too conservative.

Imran Ali, another Muslim Missionary who runs a public charitable trust by the name PPC in India, commented  cynically saying “This does not really surprise me since a person who is eager to see others wives, daughters, sisters etc (by banning Hijab), would of course invite others to check out his wife.”

[Source: theInsider.com]

This was the immediate reaction after two powerful aftershocks having magnitudes of 6.0 and 5.9 let out the fear of a new Tsunami warning along the Chile’s central coast.

As soon as alert was sound, several survivors of the previous Tsunami, who were still looking for their loved ones among the killed, rushed to higher levels. However, within 30 minutes of this chaos, the alert was lifted off.

Thousands of people are still trying to come out of the previous shock and devastation, with government trying its level best to provide Aid.

[Source: AFP]

Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said that he would be asking the Prosecution of Dubai to issue arrest warrants for the Isreali Premier Binyamin Netanyahu and the Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

The Dubai police are certain that the top brass of Israel was involved in the assassination of Mabhouh, a Palestinian leader. This is not the first time that Israeli agents have been caught carrying out an assassination. The Israeli authorities have neither denied nor accepted this claim of the Dubai police, despite the fact that Dubai is taking this event as a very high profile diplomatic offence.

The assassination has led to investigations in Britain, Germany Ireland and Australia – countries whose passports the assassins were carrying. In consequence the UAE is planning a ban on all Israeli citizens carrying foreign passports from entering their country.

IN A stable political environment, these young boys would perhaps have started a music band or a fan club of some kind to expend their youthful energy. However, in the congested old town area of Srinagar — witness to intense protests in recent weeks — throwing stones at government forces is what occupies the waking hours of groups of young boys. A transition is taking place in the resistance to security forces in Kashmir — from militancy to stone-throwing. Locally, it is referred to as Intifada, the Palestinian mass movement that first began in 1988 and still employs stone-throwing as a method of popular resistance. It is a movement that is giving India’s security establishment sleepless nights.

These days, the slightest provocation — say an alleged human rights violation by the security forces somewhere in the Valley, triggers a stone-throwing protest in urban areas, and increasingly in provincial towns and villages across Kashmir.

For these young people, angered by the status-quo in the Valley which they find unbearable, even their ‘nights out’ are not fun. Rather, it is a precaution against getting picked up by the police, who might have identified them during the protests.

TEHELKA caught up with one such band of youngsters on a chilly evening near the Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. A few of them were students; others work in small private businesses. From the surrounding darkness, they emerged silently in ones and twos to make sure that it was not a police trap. With the typical belligerence of youth, one of them shot off: “We know what journalists are all about. We still came thinking that at least one person should know how we think and feel.” Extremely cynical and skeptical of political leaders — separatist and mainstream — they appear to have divorced hope of any change or a normal life.

This is a generation that grew up amid turmoil in the wake of the armed insurgency, and the crushing military response to it. “Kashmir mein izzat se zinda rehna hai to India se ladtey rehna hai (To live with honor in Kashmir, you have to keep fighting India all the time),” said one of them. In his twenties now, he alleges that as a kid he saw an Indian soldier slit his brother’s throat and kill him. Another brother, he says, was killed when an unknown attacker hit his head with a shovel.

Each of them narrates a different story of brutality they have witnessed from close. Angrily, they talk about experiences, when police and paramilitary forces enter and ransack their homes and “misbehave” with men and women alike. They believe that the only way to keep the security forces away from their area is to turn “themselves into weapons”. “If they catch one of us, ten others will emerge. How many can they catch?” asks one of the youngsters, undeterred.

Security officials feel these protests have become more difficult to deal with than the armed militancy. “It’s part of a combined effort to keep the pot boiling,” says Kuldeep Khoda, the state police chief. As if in response, one of the youths said that the government wants to “brand us terrorists” to justify arrests and killings, and discourage others. “On most occasions, a few of us would throw the first stones. The hundreds who would then follow, did so on their own,” he says.

In an effort to quell the dissent last year, a Senior Superintendent of Police, Srinagar, invoked Islam to discourage stone throwers. A hadith (instance from the Prophet’s life) quoted by him, triggered an intense media debate on the issue. However, it didn’t achieve any results. “Our clerics and some leaders tell us that stone-pelting is not good. But they don’t tell us how else we can change our situation,” says one of the stone throwers, who appeared from an educated and economically well-off family.

LAST MONDAY, the death of 11-dayold Irfan, amid protests near Baramulla, spread anger, condemnation and gloom across Kashmir. The vehicle in which the family was taking the baby to hospital was stopped and surrounded by “protestors in two vehicles”, police said. “While they were being dragged out, the infant fell from the mother’s lap and was injured,” said AQ Manhas, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police, Baramulla. The baby died before the family could reach the hospital. Police have registered a case of murder but it is unclear who were there in the two vehicles. For the first time, ‘unusually’ according to the police, the protesters used cars.

Meanwhile, the police enquiry on the January 31 tear gas shelling that had killed Wamiq Farooq, a 13-year-old in Srinagar, has raised the temperature even further. The authorities had initially suspended the Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) responsible for the firing. But now it has emerged that the dead boy is also going to be charge sheeted. “It is not that we hold the police officer prima facie guilty. The boy had attempted to attack and murder other policeman earlier — in response to which more tear gas shells were fired. We have submitted a report on this to the court of law,” said Hemant Lohia, DIG, Kashmir.

In response, the government plans to decongest Srinagar’s old city. Sources say, a “package is seriously being worked out”, to resettle multiple families living under a single roof to new areas and provide modern housing. If the plan materialses, it could take away some of the immediate motivations of the stone-throwers in Srinagar. But it will take time. For the moment, the concerns remain. “I also want to do normal things. Why should I have to worry about my folks and they about me all the time,” says one of the stone throwers, reflecting the complexity of their myriad insecurities.

[Source: From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 09, Dated March 06, 2010]

Traumatised ‘I will never travel anywhere in India again,’ says Gulzar Ganai, second from left

“I WILL NEVER travel anywhere in India again,” Gulzar Ahmed Ganai, 23, declares. And well he might for his only trip outside Kashmir — to Delhi in 2006 — completely changed his life and that of his cousin Mohammad Amin Hajam, 32, a junior assistant in the Jammu and Kashmir Revenue Department in Pattan. Ganai, a BA student at the time, arrived in Delhi on November 23, 2006 with Hajam, who wanted to buy gold ornaments for his elder sister’s marriage and get his camcorder repaired.

Instead, the cousins were paraded publicly by the Special Cell of Delhi Police on December 10, 2006, as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) members from whom 1.5 kg of RDX and Rs 6 lakh had been recovered. Police claimed they had intercepted a call from Mohammad Akmal alias Abu Tahir, a LeT divisional commander in Kashmir, saying that he was sending two men to collect a consignment of explosives, arms and hawala money meant for terrorist activities. On the basis of this intercept, a police team led by the late Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma claimed to have arrested Ganai and Hajam as they alighted from a Delhi bus on route No 729 from Dhaula Kuan to Mahipalpur on December 10. The police even produced a photograph of the accused from the arrest site.

But Ganai has a different story, which Additional Sessions Judge Dharmesh Sharma of the Patiala House Court agreed with, while setting the cousins free on November 12 last year. Justice Sharma was critical of “the way proceedings and documentation work was done at the spot”, saying “it smacks of a very unprofessional attitude”. He added, “… I wonder if it is a human mistake [by the Special Cell] or something else”, and asked “if the mistakes are bonafide or mistakes committed while attempting to cook up the entire story”.

Ganai says Hajam and he had been in Delhi for four days and were about to return to Kashmir when “about 30 armed men in civilian dress stopped and encircled the auto-rickshaw we were travelling by Kashmiri Gate [near Red Fort]. We were pushed into a white Santro and then blindfolded and handcuffed. We were then taken to what we later found was the office of Special Cell in Lodhi Colony. We were tortured and abused and electric shocks were followed by 12 days of relentless questioning.” ‘You’re from Lashkar. You have come here to carry out bomb blasts’, they were repeatedly told.

Around 9.30 pm on December 10, 2006 Ganai and Hajam were told: “Come, we have to take you somewhere.” “We thought they were going to kill us,” Ganai recalls. The cousins were handcuffed, made to board a white jeep that had small “windows covered with thick gauze” and driven to “some market place near a flyover”. Their handcuffs were opened there and they were told to step down and sit on the road “in front of a few shops”, he says. “They put my bag in front of me and opened it. It had a lot of money and something else in it. None of it was mine.”

One of the armed men who was in the vehicle with them, carrying “AK-type guns and pistols” took some photographs. Ganai says police told passers-by “we have caught terrorists with money and RDX”. The “terrorists” were then driven back to the “same place [the Special Cell office]”. The next day, they were produced in the Tees Hazari court where the “judge didn’t ask” them anything, remanding them to five days’ police custody. “During those five days they made me sign on many sheets of blank paper,” says Ganai. What followed was three years in Tihar Jail.

However, the evidence the Special Cell had so triumphantly produced before the media was shown up to be fabricated. When Sonu Dahiya and Thati Ram, the conductor and driver respectively of the bus on which police claimed the cousins were traveling appeared in court, the case fell apart. On being questioned by lawyer MS Khan, Dahiya and Ram said the last trip of the bus had been canceled on December 10, 2006 and no vehicle was plying at 9.15 pm — the time at which police claimed to have arrested the cousins as they alighted at Mahipalpur. “What stunned all of us was the brazenness with which the whole thing was planted on Ganani and Hajam. The police did not even bother to check whether the bus ran on that day or not,” Khan says. But this was not all. After looking at the “site” photographs, the court said it was “astonishing” that “the background of the place” was not visible. “This is a grave lapse in investigation; the photo should have been taken from a better angle,” it added. The Special Cell never produced the camera memory card to authenticate its claim.

Worse still, ACP (Special Cell) Sanjeev Yadav, under whose supervision the case was handled, admitted in court that the form accompanying the RDX that was sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory for testing was wrongly prepared. Contradicting its own case, the form that the Special Cell filled showed that the RDX had been recovered from Hajam and the detonator and money from Ganai; the police had claimed the opposite in public. “There is no explanation about the error in filling up the CFSL form and the contradiction in the statements of ACP Sanjeev Yadav,” Justice Sharma said.

They may have been released but such has been their trauma that Hajam does not even want to talk about the episode and Ganai refuses to be photographed. “Not even my house,” he says. As we leave his house, a village elder walks up to Ganai. “My son is also in jail for the last one year. He was picked up outside the village while going to work. Can you help?”

[Source: From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 09, Dated March 06, 2010]