Pakistan-born student found guilty of supporting LeT

Pakistan Students Trained to be Terrorists

A Pakistan-born student of Georgia Tech in Atlanta has been found guilty of conspiring to support terrorist groups including Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistan based outfit blamed for the Nov 26 Mumbai attacks.

Syed Haris Ahmed, who provided videos of important places in Washington to LeT and Al Qaeda operatives, now faces up to 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)said Wednesday after a trial court in Georgia found Ahmed guilty of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

'This case has never been about an imminent threat to the United States, because in the post-9/11 world we will not wait to disrupt terrorism-related activity until a bomb is built and ready to explode,' said David E. Nahmias, US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

'The fuse that leads to an explosion of violence may be long, but once it is lit - once individuals unlawfully agree to support terrorist acts at home or abroad - we will prosecute them to snuff that fuse out,' he said.

'This investigation is connected to arrests and convictions of multiple terrorist supporters in Atlanta and around the world-all before any innocent people were killed,' Nahmias said adding, 'This prosecution underscores the importance of international and domestic cooperation in combating terrorism.'

In April 2005, the FBI said Ahmed and his principal co-conspirator travelled to the Washington D.C., area to take the casing videos of infrastructure targets for potential terrorist attacks, including the US Capitol, to establish their credentials with 'the jihadi brothers' as well as for use in violent jihad propaganda and planning.

Ahmed's co-conspirator allegedly sent several of the video clips to Younis Tsouli, a propagandist and recruiter for the terrorist organisation Al Qaeda in Iraq, and to Aabid Hussein Khan, a facilitator for the Pakistan-based terrorist organisations, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Both Tsouli and Khan have since been convicted of terrorism offences in the UK.

The government also presented evidence at trial that in July 2005, Ahmed travelled from Atlanta to Pakistan in an unsuccessful attempt to enter a training camp and ultimately engage in violent jihad.

Ahmed was arrested in Atlanta on March 23, 2006, on the original indictment in this case, which charged him with one count of material support of terrorism.

The initial indictment was unsealed and publicly announced on April 20, 2006, after the arrest of the alleged principal co-conspirator in Bangladesh. Superseding indictments added three additional charges.

Chinese passing off fake drugs as ‘Made in India’

Chinese passing off fake drugs as ‘Made in India’

Are fake drugs manufactured in China being pushed into various African countries with the `Made in India' tag? The Indian government
has long suspected this to be the case, but it now has definite evidence for the first time.

Last week, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) of Nigeria issued a press release stating that a large consignment of fake anti-malarial generic pharmaceuticals labelled `Made in India' were, in fact, found to have been produced in China.

New Delhi has registered ``strong protest'' with the Chinese mission and China's foreign trade ministry, according to sources in the commerce ministry.

India's High Commissioner in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, Mahesh Sachdev, had earlier written to then commerce secretary GSK Pillai, alerting him to the large seizure: ``While this is a case of a Chinese company exporting fake `Made in India' labelled medicines which has been accidentally exposed, it is unlikely to be an isolated incident. Indeed there is no reason for Nigeria to be the only country to be receiving such consignments.''

His letter went on to say: ``Fake foreign-made generics carrying `Made in India' label can do tremendous harm to our interests. It not only dents our image and takes our legitimate market share, it also erodes the distinction between generic and fake medicines that we have been campaigning for at WHO and WTO''.

Commerce ministry sources said: ``We have had many complaints about such fake drugs from China being offloaded as Indian drugs in countries like Ghana, South Africa, Ivory Coast and West Africa — in general, where India has a substantial market share. But so far there has been no formal complaint. This is the first time that such a large international consignment has been seized and this will be taken up strongly with the Chinese side.''

Sachdev in his letter said that he had spoken to the director-general of NAFDAC Dr Paul Orhii who said that the Nigerian preference for generics made such cases of fake drugs more common. He expressed NAFDAC's determination to curb circulation of substandard fake medicines.

India and China have been held primarily responsible for fake drugs in the Nigerian market in particular and Africa in general. About 60% of drugs in Nigeria are imported. Between 2001 and 2007, more than 30 Indian and Chinese companies were banned in Nigeria for exporting fake drugs to the country.

However, Dr Mira Shiva of the Initiative for Health Equity and Society (IHES) told TOI that both India and China being large manufacturers of generics, multinational firms would look to discredit the two countries and label their drugs as substandard, so that they would have greater access to the African markets. She warned against the two countries trying to run each other down before ascertaining the full facts in the case to rule out any orchestration, but added that India ought to be more careful to ensure the quality of the drugs exported as well as sold domestically.

ISI maintains link with militant commanders, says Musharraf : The Former Chief Of Army Staff

Former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has conceded that his country's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) maintains link with militant commanders like Sirajuddin Haqqani, suspected of having masterminded the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Musharraf said that ISI had "used Haqqani's influence" to get Pakistan's Ambassador to Afghanistan, who was kidnapped by Tehrik-e-Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, released.

Haqqani, "is the man who has influence over Baitullah Mehsud, a dangerous terrorist, the fiercest commander in South Waziristan and the murderer of Benzir Bhutto, as we know today," Musharraf said in an interview to German newspaper Der Spiegel.

"Mehsud kidnapped our Ambassador in Kabul and our intelligence used Haqqani's influence to get him released. Now that does not mean that Haqqani is supported by us. The intelligence service is using certain enemies against other enemies. And it is better to tackle them one by one than making them all enemies," he said.

On US media reports that ISI had systematically supported Taliban, the former Pakistan President said, "Intelligence always has access to other network -- that is what Americans did with KGB, that is what ISI also does."

Sirajuddin Haqqani is the son of renowned Mujaheedin commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, who is now one of the foremost commanders of Afghan Taliban. Haqqani brothers have been accused of masterminding the attack on Indian embassy in Kabul on July seven, 2008.

Pakistan frees Mumbai attack accused Terrorist - Hafiz Saeed

Terrorist Country (Pakistan) Frees Their Terror Dogs

Pakistani authorities have freed detained Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the leader of Lashkar-e-Toiba front Jamaat-ud-Dawa from house arrest in his house in eastern Pakistan on Tuesday. The release was ordered by the Lahore High Court.

Saeed had been put under house arrest on Thursday December 11, 2008 following international hue and cry over the JuD's involvement in the Mumbai terror attacks of 26 November 2008.

In December 2008, the UN Security Council had listed the group as a front for LeT. Saeed's home in Johar Town area of Lahore was declared a "sub-jail".

Saeed's associates freed too

PTI reports that Saeed's close aide Col (retired) Nazir Ahmed too was freed along with him nearly six months after they were detained following the Mumbai terror attacks.

A three-member bench of the Lahore High Court freed Saeed and Ahmed after hearing arguments by the JuD chief's counsel A K Dogar, who claimed the detention of the two men violated Pakistan's constitution and laws.

The three-judge bench, hearing the case, said it will give a detailed order later.

Dogar, who addressed the bench for about 45 minutes, said the UN Security Council had only sought a freeze on the JuD's assets and a travel ban on its leaders and the world body had not demanded the arrest of JuD leaders.

He claimed it was not binding under Pakistani laws to implement UN Security Council resolutions.

This is not the first time Hafiz Saeed has been under house arrest or released therefrom. He was first placed under house arrest in August 2006 but later Lahore High Court had ordered his release.

Authorities rearrested him hours after that, only to set him free again a few weeks later.

In January 2009, Pakistani authorities had extended by two months the detention of Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and seven other activists of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

The Mumbai terror strikes had left over 170 people dead and horrified the world.

The Jamaat leaders have been detained under the Maintenance of Public Order ordinance, which allows a person to be held for up to 90 days.

The then Pakistani Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar had told reporters that Saeed and other militant leaders detained by Pakistani authorities could not be tried in the absence of evidence against them.

The Punjab government spokesman had also said 10 schools and 18 dispensaries run by the Jamaat in the province had been taken over by authorities. Seven Jamaat publications had been banned and all copies had been confiscated.

Though Pakistani authorities had detained Jamaat leaders, sealed the group's offices across the country and frozen its bank accounts, local media reports had described the measures as "half-hearted".

The reports had said Saeed, also the leader of the LeT, had been allowed to leave his home and that the Jamaat's sprawling headquarters at Muridke near Lahore was still fully operational.

Taliban torched over 200 schools in Swat in 2 years

Pakistan Created Monster Taliban Devouring Pakistan Itself

Taliban militants have burnt down more than 200 schools in Pakistan's restive Swat valley in the last two years and made all out efforts to prevent girls from receiving education, a media report here said on Sunday.

The militants told the residents in the valley that if they were good Muslims they would stop sending their daughters to schools, 'The Sunday Times' said in a report from Mingora, the capital of Swat.

"Every evening (Taliban commander) Maulana Fazullah, nicknamed 'Radio Mullah', broadcast the names on the radio of girls who had stopped going to school - it would be, 'Congratulations to Miss Kulsoon or Miss Shahnaz, who has quit school.' Then he warned others if they continued with their education they would go to hell," the paper said.

The Taliban have torched over 200 of Swat's 1,500 schools in the last two years, it said.

The military offensive against the militants resulted in what Martin Mogwania, the acting UN humanitarian coordinator, called "the most dramatic displacement in the world."

According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, more than 1.7 million people have been rendered homeless in just three weeks. On Friday, the UN appealed for 340 million pounds, while officials urgently tried to find new sites for camps.

The newspaper also gave a graphic account of the havoc created by Taliban in Swat. A 22-year-old medical student from the valley had secretly catalogued the horrors of life in Swat under the Taliban.

The burning-down of schools, bodies hanging upside down, public lashings and decapitated heads with dollars stuffed in their nostrils and notes reading, 'This is what happens to spies,' were all captured on the student's mobile phone at great personal risk, the report said.

The paper noted that Fazullah in December announced a deadline of January 15 for all girls to stop attending school.

The medical student's account was corroborated by Ziauddin Yusufzai, who ran two schools in Swat and was spokesman for the private school association until he fled the bombing three weeks ago.

"Once, my wife went shopping in a market popular with women and a man with long hair and a gun came and terrorised them and shouted, 'Haven't we warned you women not to come to shops? Next time we'll kill you.'"

Yusufzai, too, admitted that Fazullah won widespread popularity early on. "Fazlullah used his radio to spread venomous propaganda," he said.

"He was winning the support of many people. The whole town would go to Friday prayers and he would arrive on a horse, his long hair flowing, as if he were the prophet."

Fazlullah's call for the restoration of Islamic law was broadly supported. The Taliban were also seen by many as a class movement - occupying the homes of wealthy residents. Yusufzai estimated that by the end of 2007 the Taliban controlled 30 per cent of Swat.

Two army operations intended to remove the Taliban merely tightened their grip, the paper said. "The army would tell people to leave their villages, but instead of clearing them of militants it seemed they were cleared for militants."

It was the combination of international pressure and the militants' proximity to the federal capital Islamabad that finally persuaded the army to act. "They're not going to salute a Mullah Omar, no way," explained President Asif Ali Zardari in an interview to the newspaper.

"It was fine when the militants were just tools but now the tools have come to threaten the masters. It's a different fight," he said.

Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, said: "We had a choice: either we hand over the country to the Taliban or we fight, and we have decided to fight. We will not stop now until we have cleared them all."

About 15,000 members of the security forces are fighting between 4,000 and 5,000 militants in Swat. According to the army, more than 1,000 militants and 50 soldiers have been killed, though the lack of media access to the area meant it was impossible to verify those figures.

According to the Interior Minister, Fazullah's forces have been receiving help from Al-Qaeda. Malik said that among those captured in Swat were four Saudis, a Libyan and an Afghan, all currently under interrogation.

Pakistan multiplying Nuclear weapons, increasing Danger to World Civilization

Rogue Pakistan is multiplying its nuclear arsenal much beyond its present stable of 60 to 100 weapons and increasing their destructive power and deliverability system, according to latest satellite photos released.

Pakistan is expanding its plutonium producing production capacity to build smaller, lighter plutonium-fission weapons and deliverable thermo-nuclear weapons.

The new lighter nuclear weapons would use plutonium as a nuclear trigger and enriched uranium in the secondary, a report by US arms control institute said.

Satellite images have revealed that Pakistan now has the fastest nuclear weapons programme and it has considerably expanded two sites producing fissile material for nuclear weapons, the report by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said.

The new plutonium producing sites are located near Rawalpindi and could be engaged in activities to build two new plutonium production reactors. Islamabad so far has only uranium-based nuclear weapons.

"Pakistan's ongoing expansion of its plutonium production programme, which includes new undeclared, unsafeguarded reactors and plutonium reprocessing facilities, is likely linked to Pakistan's strategic plans to improve the destructiveness and deliverability of its nuclear arsenal," ISIS said.

The other sites being expanded, according to the satellite photos released by the ISIS, are located near Dera Ghazi Khan in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which produces natural uranium hexafluoride (UF6) and uranium material, two materials used for making Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

Satellite photos taken in August last year, of the chemical plants in Dear Ghazi Khan, show new industrial buildings, new anti aircraft installations and several settling ponds that have come up as part of the expansion.

The satellite photos of the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability come as top US military commander Admiral Mike Mullen confirmed last week that Pakistan was building up its nuclear arsenal.

With the Pakistani security forces waging a war against militant groups in the NWFP, ISIS said that security of country's "nuclear assets remains in question".

"An expansion in nuclear weapons production capabilities, needlessly complicates efforts to improve the security of Pakistani nukes," the report said.

Dera Ghazi Khan nuclear site in the recent past had been a target of at least one ground attack by more than a dozen gunmen, the report said adding that a nearby railway line had also been bombed.

CIA chief Leon Panetta said yesterday that US intelligence doesn't have complete track of Pakistani nuclear weapons, but was sure that they were "pretty secure".

The US report has urged the American government to prevail upon Pakistan to halt production of fissile material and join talks that would ban production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium.

Pak Nuclear Sites already in Radical hands: Report

India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are"already partly" in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington's confidence in the security of the troubled nation's nuclear arsenal.

Claims about the high-level exchange between New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline "Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost." The brief story said the Indian prime minister had named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds and said the sites are already partly in the hands of "Muslim extremists." A sub-head to the story said "India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear neighbor."

There was no official word from either Washington or New Delhi about the exchanges, with India in the throes of an election and US winding down for the weekend. But US experts have been greatly perturbed in recent days about what they say is Washington's misplaced confidence in, and lackadaisical approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets. The disquiet comes amid reports that Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.

"It is quite disturbing that the administration is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production of fissile material without as much as a public reproach," Robert Windrem, a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday. "Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions... and Pakistan has a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other country in the world."

Windrem, a former producer with NBC whose book "Critical Mass" was among the first to red flag Islamabad's proliferation record going back to the 1980s, referred to recent reports and satellite images showing Pakistan building two large new plutonium production reactors in Khushab, which experts say could lead to improvements in the quantity and quality of the country's nuclear arsenal. The reactors had nothing to do with power-production' they are weapons-specific, and are being built with resources who diversion is enabled by the billions of dollars the US is giving to Pakistan as aid, he said.

Windrem also pointed out that Khushab's former director, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and offered a nuclear weapons tutorial around an Afghanistan campfire, as attested by the former CIA Director George Tenet in his memoir "At the Center of the Storm." Yet successive US administrations had adopted an attitude of benign neglect towards Pakistan's nuclear program and its expansion at a time the country was in growing ferment and under siege within from Islamic extremists.

US officials, going up to the President himself, have repeatedly said in public that they have confidence the Pakistani nuclear arsenal will not fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, and they have Islamabad's assurances to this effect. But scholars like Windrem fear Pakistan's nuclear program may already be infected with the virus of radicalism from within, as demonstrated by the Sultan Bashiruddin incident.