Assassination

The European Union "strongly condemns" the use of false EU passports in connection with the killing of a Hamas leader in Dubai last month, a top foreign policy official said Monday in Brussels, Belgium.

Baroness Catherine Ashton said the EU was concerned the killers had acquired false passports and credit cards "through the theft of EU citizens’ identities."

She did not mention Israel in the statement, although foreign ministries in the countries whose passports were doctored called in Israeli ambassadors last week to discuss the issue.

She did say she would bring up the issue with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman when they have dinner together Monday night.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

By George Friedman

The apparent Israeli assassination of a Hamas operative in the United Arab Emirates turned into a bizarre event replete with numerous fraudulent passports, alleged Israeli operatives caught on videotape and international outrage (much of it feigned), more over the use of fraudulent passports than over the operative’s death. If we are to believe the media, it took nearly 20 people and an international incident to kill him.

STRATFOR has written on the details of the killing as we have learned of them, but we see this as an occasion to address a broader question: the role of assassination in international politics.

Defining Assassination

We should begin by defining what we mean by assassination. It is the killing of a particular individual for political purposes. It differs from the killing of a spouse’s lover because it is political. It differs from the killing of a soldier on the battlefield in that the soldier is anonymous and is not killed because of who he is but because of the army he is serving in. continue

Britain last night fired the first shot in a potentially explosive diplomatic row with Israel by calling in the country’s ambassador to explain the use of faked British passports by a hit squad who targeted a Hamas official in Dubai.

The Israeli ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office to “share information” about the assassins’ use of identities stolen from six British citizens living in Israel, as part of the meticulously orchestrated assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Britain has stopped short of accusing Israel of involvement, but to signal its displeasure, the Foreign Office ignored an Israeli plea to keep the summons secret. “Relations were in the freezer before this. They are in the deep freeze now,” an official told the Guardian.

Gordon Brown yesterday launched an investigation into the use of the fake passports, which will be led by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca). The British embassy in Tel Aviv is also contacting the British nationals affected in the plot, “and stands ready to provide them with the support that they need”, the Foreign Office said in a statement last night.

“The British passport is an important part of being British and we have to make sure everything is done to protect it,” Brown told LBC Radio yesterday.

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, insisted there was no proof that the Mossad was involved in Mabhouh’s killing in a Dubai hotel last month, but added that Israel had a “policy of ambiguity” on intelligence matters.

Source/Full Story: The Guardian

Hamas claimed on Friday that Israeli agents assassinated one of the Palestinian militant group’s veteran operatives in a killing allegedly carried out last week in Dubai, and vowed to retaliate.

The militant group identified its slain figure as Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’ military wing that has been responsible for hundreds of deadly attacks and suicide bombings targeting Israelis since the 1980s. It said he was 50 years old.

Hamas blamed Israel for the slaying but gave no details on how al-Mabhouh was killed and no information on alleged Israeli involvement in the man’s death. Israel’s government had no immediate comment.

Izzat Rashaq, a top member of Hamas’ exiled leadership in Damascus, told The Associated Press that details have not been released to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation, and that Hamas’ delayed announcement was linked to an attempt to “reach the Israeli agents who implemented this operation.”

Al-Mabhouh lived in Syria and was passing through Dubai when he was killed late Jan. 19 or early Jan. 20, Rashaq said. Originally from the Gaza Strip, al-Mabhouh was married and had four children, he said.

“We in Hamas hold the Zionist enemy responsible for the criminal assassination of our brother, and we pledge to God and to the blood of the martyrs and to our people to continue his path of jihad and martyrdom,” read the statement on Hamas’ Palestinian Information Center Web site. The group pledged to “retaliate for this Zionist crime at the appropriate time and place.”

Source/Full Story: FOXNews.com

Jeffrey A. Tidus Trial Practice and Case Summaries

A prominent attorney died Tuesday after he was shot in the head outside his California home.

Jeffrey Tidus was shot Monday around 8:30 p.m. as he was fetching a laptop from his car. His wife heard a single gunshot ring out and rushed outside to find him lying in the driveway behind his blue Toyota Prius, sheriff’s homicide Lt. Dave Dolson said.

“There are certain factors about it that indicate it could be a targeted killing,” Dolson said. “We haven’t ruled anything out.”
…
Tidus, 53, had represented a string of high-profile clients including Hawthorne Savings, Isuzu Motors of America and defunct subprime lender New Century Financial, according to his Web site.

Dolson said investigators did not know of a motive but would be screening Tidus’ past.

“We will have to take a long look at his professional and personal life,” Dolson said.

Source/Full Story: msnbc.com

The former head of the CIA in Milan has been given an eight-year jail sentence for kidnapping at the end of the first trial anywhere in the world involving the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” programme.

Robert Lady was tried in his absence and convicted of helping to organise the seizure of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street in February 2003. His superior, Jeff Castelli, the head of the CIA in Italy at the time, was acquitted on the grounds that he was covered by diplomatic immunity. Most of the other 23 alleged CIA operatives on trial were given five-year jail sentences in their absence.

Extraordinary rendition involved the abduction of suspects and their forcible transfer for interrogation to third countries, often states in which torture was routinely employed.

The judge ruled that neither the former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, nor his deputy could be convicted because the evidence against them was subject to official secrecy restrictions. Two other Italian intelligence officials were given three years’ jail.

Successive Italian administrations avoided applying to the US for the extradition of the 26 American defendants, who included a senior US air force officer. Their lawyers, appointed by the court, had no contact with their clients, who were regarded in Italian law as being on the run.

Source/Full Story: guardian.co.uk
Technorati Tags: Robert Lady

The 47-year-old man, who has not been named, died after falling more than 120ft to the bottom of a stairwell.

He worked for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, an international agency charged with uncovering illicit nuclear tests.

A UN spokesman in the Austrian capital said there were no “suspicious circumstances” surrounding the man’s death, while a police spokesman said that no other person was believed to have been involved.

No suicide note has been found.

The incident happened on Tuesday as the United States, France, Russia and Iran held talks close by aimed at cooling tensions over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Investigators refused to reveal any further background information on the official but confirmed an autopsy will be held.

Four months ago another UN worker also believed to be British fell a similar distance at the same building, according to other staff working there.

Source/Full Story:  Telegraph
Technorati Tags: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

The CIA in 2004 hired contractors from the private security firm Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to track and assassinate senior al Qaeda figures, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Blackwater helped with planning, training and surveillance in a program on which the Central Intelligence Agency spent several million dollars without capturing or killing any militants, the newspaper reported, quoting former and current U.S. officials.

The Times said it was not clear whether the CIA had planned to use Blackwater executives to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives or limit the contractors to help with training and surveillance.

The North Carolina-based contractor, which recently changed its name to Xe Services, was enmeshed in controversy in Iraq in 2007 when Blackwater employees hired to guard U.S. diplomats were accused of using excessive force in a Baghdad shooting in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed.

The CIA’s use of an outside company for a covert program prompted CIA Director Leon Panetta to inform Congress in June that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the Times said.

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee is investigating why lawmakers were never informed about the program, the report said.

Source/Full Story: Reuters

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

The plans remained vague and were never carried out, the officials said, and Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, canceled the program last month.

Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?

Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved because the Bush administration sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails.

Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The program was designed in the frantic weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks when President George W. Bush signed a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to capture or kill operatives of Al Qaeda around the world. To be able to kill Osama bin Laden or his top deputies wherever they might be — even in cities or countries far from a war zone — struck top agency officials as an urgent goal, according to people involved in the discussions.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com

The president of the troubled Russian republic of Ingushetia was wounded in an assassination attempt Monday when a blast hit his convoy.

Yunus-Bek Yevkurov suffered a severe brain concussion, fractured ribs and a ruptured liver, his spokesman said.

The president underwent surgery and his life was not in danger, spokesman Kaloi Akhigov said.

Yevkurov’s motorcade was headed to his office Monday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives packed in a car parked by the side of the road, law enforcement officials told local media.

The blast killed Yevkurov’s bodyguard and driver. Three others were seriously wounded.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

Dagestan Interior Minister Adilgerei Magomedtagirov was assassinated by a sniper, a source at the republic’s law-enforcement bodies told Itar-Tass.

"At around 13:00, Moscow time, the minister together with Colonel Abdulzhapar Magomedov, director of the Interior Ministry’s tax crimes department, were standing near the Marakesh banquet hall, where the marriage of the Colonel’s daughter was to take place," the officer said.

A preliminary report said an unidentified man opened fire at the minister and the people around him from an apartment of a nine-storey house nearby.

Five people were rushed to the republic’s orthopedic-traumatological center.

"The minister was wounded in the heart and died without regaining consciousness. The other wounded people, including Col Magomedov, have been operated upon. They are in very serious condition," chief doctor at the orthopedic-traumatological center Magomed Omarov told Tass.

At present, police have launched an operation to apprehend the attackers.

Adilgerei Magomedtagirov was born on November 1, 1956. He has been Dagestan’s Interior Minister since May 1998.

Source/Full Story: ITAR-TASS

It could be the ultimate in political control — but it won’t be patented in Germany.

German media outlets reported last week that a Saudi inventor’s application to patent a "killer chip," as the Swiss tabloids put it, had been denied.

The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person’s skin, so that authorities could track him easily.

Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he’d become a public threat.

The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.

"The invention will probably be found to violate paragraph two of the German Patent Law — which does not allow inventions that transgress public order or good morals," German Patent and Trademark Office spokeswoman Stephanie Krüger told the English-language German-news Web site The Local.

Source/Full Story: FOXNews.com

Source:  CNN.com

Over a nearly one-year period starting in June 2005, the border town of Laredo, Texas, saw a string of seven murders. At first glance, the violence looked like isolated, gangland-style killings. But investigators started suspecting something more sinister.

Then Noe Flores was gunned down in a clear case of mistaken identity. Investigators found a fingerprint on a cigarette box inside the suspected shooter’s get-away car. That clue unraveled the chilling reality and led police to arrest Gabriel Cardona and Rosalio Reta.

Prosecutors say they quickly discovered these two teenagers were homegrown assassins, hired to carry out the dirty work of the notorious Gulf Cartel.

“There are sleeper cells in the U.S.,” said Detective Garcia. “They’re here, they’re here in the United States.”

The cases against Cardona and Reta — both are in prison serving long prison sentences for murder — shed new light into the workings of the drug cartels.

Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and Cardona were recruited into a group called “Los Zetas,” a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They’re considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. “Los Zetas” liked what they saw in Cardona and Reta.

Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.

The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.

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Source: NZ Herald News

A reporter and vocal government critic in Kyrgyzstan was stabbed and beaten in an attack that opposition parties described as an attempt to stamp out freedom of expression.

Syrgak Abdyldayev, a journalist with the Reporter-Bishkek weekly, was stabbed repeatedly by four assailants after leaving his office Tuesday evening, the newspaper’s editor, Turat Akimov, said.

Critics of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev say the government is trying to stifle opposition before possibly calling an early presidential election this year in a bid to shore up his power. Electricity shortages and rampant unemployment are causing widespread discontent in the former Soviet nation.

“Attacks on journalists – and even murders – have been taking place more and more often recently, endangering not just reporters themselves but also freedom of speech as a whole,” the opposition Ata-Meken party said.

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Source:  NYTimes.com

A Moscow jury ruled unanimously on Thursday to acquit three men in the 2006 murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, frustrating state prosecutors’ hopes of putting to rest a case that cast a shadow over Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.

Ms. Politkovskaya was a strident critic of the Kremlin, and her killing in 2006 underlined the shrinking freedom allowed dissenters in Russian society. Investigators and colleagues concluded that someone had ordered her death to silence her, and some suspected the hand of state officials in the crime.

But the three men who were tried on murder charges in a cramped courtroom this winter were peripheral figures: two shaggy-haired young Chechen brothers accused of acting as a lookout and a driver for the suspected triggerman, who has never been arrested, and a former police investigator accused of organizing logistics for the killing.

By skirting the single most important question — who ordered the killing of Ms. Politkovskaya — the proceedings made the case more corrosive.

“If the decision had been otherwise, it would mean that the real criminals, who are somewhere among us, could continue what they were doing,” said Murad Musayev, the lawyer defending Dzhabrail Makhmudov, one of the Chechen brothers. “The only way to stop these crimes is to find the real criminals.”

The verdict comes exactly one month after another wrenching political murder. On Jan. 19, a masked gunman killed a prominent human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, as he left a press conference a few blocks from the Kremlin. He then shot Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old reporter for Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Ms. Politkovskaya worked.

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Technorati Tags: Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova