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Pedro Gonçalves

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  • A key security operative of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas was under arrest in Syria tonight on suspicion of having helped an alleged Israeli hit squad identify Mahmoud al-Mabhouh before he was assassinated in Dubai, the Guardian has learned.
  • Nahro Massoud, a Hamas security official, was in detention and under interrogation in Damascus in connection with the 19 January killing, which is now widely assumed to have been mounted by Israel's Mossad secret intelligence service.
  • Killings of Palestinians by Israel have often involved Palestinian agents being used to identity the target.
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  • Middle East experts and diplomats see the Dubai plot as part of a wider clandestine struggle between Israel and Hamas – and a deliberate attempt to weaken the Palestinian organisation's links with Iran. Israel considered Mabhouh to be the point man in smuggling longer-range Iranian rockets into Gaza that would be capable of striking Israel's urban heartland.
  • Dubai police identified Austria as ­"command centre" for the assassins, after mobile phone data showed at least seven numbers originating there.
  • In December 2008 radical Islamic terrorists also coordinated their bomb attacks in Mumbai, in which 160 people were killed, using Austrian mobile phone numbers.
Pedro Gonçalves

Israel remains silent over use of forged British passports in Dubai assassination | UK ... - 0 views

  • Dubai police chief declared that he was "99%, if not 100% certain" of Mossad's involvement, and called on Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan
  • SOCA is concentrating specifically on the misuse of British passports, it is understood that MI6 is conducting a broader, parallel probe into Israeli involvement
  • US also looked likely to be drawn into the affair for the first time, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Mabhouh's assassins had used American-registered credit cards to buy plane tickets.
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  • a further two Irish passports were used in the assassination, bringing the total number of Irish travel documents involved to five as speculation grew that the size of the hit squad was bigger than the 11 originally reported.
  • In Dubai, however, the emirate's police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim, called on local television for Interpol to issue "a red notice against the head of Mossad … as a killer in case Mossad is proved to be behind the crime, which is likely now."
  • British officials said last night it was too early to speculate on what measures Britain might take against Israel if the government remained uncooperative.One possible consequence could be Britain's response to an Israeli request to change its 'universal jurisdiction' law on war crimes, under which a London magistrates court issued an arrest warrant in December for Israel's former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for her role in the Gaza offensive a year earlier.
  • Sir Richard Dalton, Britain's ambassador to Iran from 2003 to 2006 said: "All this just says how pathetic and ludicrous the claim is that Israel is Britain's strategic partner."
  • The Dubai authorities said they had asked Britain for assistance at the end of January, but the foreign office insists it was only informed of the British connection hours before it was made public.
Pedro Gonçalves

Britain denies any advance warning of plan to murder Hamas leader | World news | The Gu... - 0 views

  • Britain has flatly denied any foreknowledge of a Mossad plan to assassinate a top official of the Palestinian group Hamas, in Dubai, amidst angry accusations in Whitehall that Israel is seeking to deflect blame from itself by implicating others.British government sources dismissed as "nonsense" a report claiming the Israeli secret service had given the UK advanced warning of possible complications arising from the illicit use of British passports in an unspecified "overseas operation" – the murder of the Hamas commander ­Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
  • Officials complained of misleading briefing, apparently by pro-Israeli sources, reflected in a report in Friday's Daily Mail, which claimed that the Foreign Office was told, albeit only in general terms, of an impending assassination. The Mail story was widely reported today, both in Israel and across the Arab world.
  • if Israeli official involvement were proved Britain would, at the very least, expect a public apology and guarantees that passports would not be stolen again. A more extreme option could be expelling diplomats from Israel's London embassy.
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  • Rival Palestinian factions, meanwhile, continued to trade accusations about involvement in the Dubai killing. Hamas named two Palestinians under arrest in the emirate as Anwar Sheibar and Ahmad Hassanein, former Gazan members of Fatah's security forces with links to the senior Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan. Al-Hayat, the London-based Arabic daily, quoted an unnamed Hamas official as saying that the two had provided logistical aid to the alleged Mossad team.
Larry Keiler

BBC News - British men named as assassins shocked by claims - 1 views

  • Israel-based UK citizens whose names were on passports an alleged hit squad used insist they had nothing to do with killing a Hamas commander in Dubai.
  • Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Army Radio: "There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad, and not some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief." Israel had a "policy of ambiguity" on intelligence matters, he added.
    • Larry Keiler
       
      Use the diplomatic version of 'Follow the money' and you pretty much conclude that it's Israel which has the most to benefit. And Israel has been known to do things like this before. But in the world of realpolitik, all governmental allies of Israel (including Britain) will simply wink and look the other way. The statement: "If the Israeli government was party to behaviour of this kind it would be a serious violation of trust between nations," is merely for public consumption.
  • UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office said it believed the passports used were fraudulent and had begun an investigation.
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  • Another two men, one using a French passport and one using a German passport, are also suspected of playing parts in the assassination.
  • The French foreign ministry said it was "not able to confirm the nationality of this person", according to the AFP news agency. German officials said the passport number was either incomplete or wrong, the Associated Press news agency reported.
  • Mr Mabhouh was murdered in his hotel room in Dubai on 20 January. Reports have suggested he was in Dubai to buy weapons for the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas. Hamas has accused Israeli agents of killing him.
Pedro Gonçalves

Members of hit squad suspected of killing Hamas man 'had UK passports' | World news | T... - 0 views

  • Six members of an 11-strong hit squad suspected of killing a senior Hamas military commander in Dubai entered the country using British passports, police said last night.
  • Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 49, was killed on 20 January in his hotel room, hours after arriving in the state. Last month Hamas claimed Israeli agents assassinated Mabhouh, who was wanted for the killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989.
  • 11 people, including one woman, were wanted over the killing. He said all suspects had European passports. In addition to the six British passport holders, three were carrying Irish passports and the two others were from France and Germany
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  • Mohammed Nazzal, a Hamas leader, has previously said Mabhouh was ambushed by agents from Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, although he gave no evidence for his accusation.
Pedro Gonçalves

The truth about the Mossad | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations
  • The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.
  • Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
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  • In 1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including "Kidon" (bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to stop Ostrovsky's book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.
  • the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash'al – the same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh's murder – by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports, they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the mess.
  • It would be surprising if a key part of this extraordinary story did not turn out to be the role played by Palestinians. It is still Mossad practice to recruit double agents, just as it was with the PLO back in the 1970s. News of the arrest in Damascus of another senior Hamas operative – though denied by Mash'al – seems to point in this direction. Two other Palestinians extradited from Jordan to Dubai are members of the Hamas armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, suggesting treachery may indeed have been involved. Previous assassinations have involved a Palestinian agent identifying the target.
  • Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, worries that, as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.
Argos Media

Torture tape delays U.S.-UAE nuclear deal, say U.S. officials - CNN.com - 0 views

  • A videotape of a heinous torture session is delaying the ratification of a civil nuclear deal between the United Arab Emirates and the United States, senior U.S. officials familiar with the case said.
  • In the tape, an Afghan grain dealer is seen being tortured by a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, one of the UAE's seven emirates.
  • The senior U.S. officials said the administration has held off on the ratification process because it believes sensitivities over the story can hurt its passage. The tape emerged in a federal civil lawsuit filed in Houston, Texas, by Bassam Nabulsi, a U.S. citizen, against Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan. Former business partners, the men had a falling out, in part over the tape. In a statement to CNN, the sheikh's U.S. attorney said Nabulsi is using the videotape to influence the court over a business dispute.
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  • Under the "1-2-3 deal," similar to one the United States signed last year with India, Washington would share nuclear technology, expertise and fuel. In exchange, the UAE commits to abide by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The small oil-rich Gulf nation promises not to enrich uranium or to reprocess spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear bombs.
  • "It's being temporarily held up because of that tape," one senior official said.
  • The State Department had little to say publicly on the torture tape incident, but its 2008 human rights report about the United Arab Emirates refers to "reports that a royal family member tortured a foreign national who had allegedly overcharged him in a grain deal."
  • U.S. Rep. James McGovern -- the Massachusetts Democrat who co-chairs the congressional Human Rights Commission
  • McGovern asked Clinton to "place a temporary hold on further U.S. expenditures of funds, training, sales or transfers of equipment or technology, including nuclear until a full review of this matter and its policy implications can be completed." He also asked that the United States deny any visa for travel to the United States by Sheikh Issa or his immediate family, including his 18 brothers, several of whom are ruling members of the UAE government.
  • UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a half-brother of Sheikh Issa, is expected to visit Washington sometime next month.
  • The civil nuclear agreement was signed in January between the United Arab Emirates and the Bush administration, but after the new administration took office, the deal had to be recertified
  • The deal is part of a major UAE investment in nuclear, and it has already signed deals to build several nuclear power plants. The United States already has similar nuclear cooperation agreements with Egypt and Morocco, and U.S. officials said Washington is working on similar pacts with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Jordan.
  • When the Bush administration signed the deal in January, it stressed the UAE's role in global nonproliferation initiatives, including a donation of $10 million to establish an International Atomic Energy Agency international fuel bank.
  • Congressional critics fear the deal could spark an arms race and proliferation in the region, and the UAE's ties to Iran also have caused concern.
  • Iran is among the UAE's largest trading partners. In the past, the port city of Dubai, one of the UAE's seven emirates, has been used as a transit point for sensitive technology bound for Iran.
  • Dubai was also one of the major hubs for the nuclear trafficking network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya up until the year 2000.
  • Such ties contributed to stiff opposition in Congress to the failed deal for Dubai Ports World to manage U.S. ports.
  • Officials said they expect the deal to be sent up to the Hill for ratification within the next few weeks, given that there has been little blowback from the publication of the tape, except for McGovern's letter to Clinton. "It will be sent very soon," one official said.
  • UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba told CNN his government always expected the deal to be sent to the Senate in early May, regardless of the controversy surrounding the tape. "As far as we are concerned, the deal is on track and this has not affected the timing," he said.
Pedro Gonçalves

Dubai police chief says to seek Netanyahu arrest | World | Reuters - 0 views

  • Dubai's police chief plans to seek the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of Israel's spy agency over the killing of a Hamas leader in the emirate, Al Jazeera television reported.
Pedro Gonçalves

Arabs ponder implications of Iran's unrest | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • On the other side of the Gulf, the United Arab Emirates authorities moved quickly to shut down a newspaper which ran a critical article about the repression. In Dubai, home to a huge Iranian expatriate community, protests were banned.
  • But in Bahrain, with a Sunni royal family, a restive Shia majority and fears of Iranian subversion, there was warm praise for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "If he was a candidate in any Arab country against a current president," wrote Qassim Hussain in al-Wasat, "the public would vote for him."
  • In regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia, leader of the conservative Arab camp, there has been resounding public silence but private criticism – hardly surprising for an autocratic country with no political parties and where even local elections have been put on hold. Beneath the surface lies Saudi concern about possible unrest in the oil-producing Eastern province, where there is a Shia majority and a history of Iranian influence.
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  • In its limited, theocratic, way Iran is still more democratic than any Arab country except Lebanon and Kuwait. In Egypt, with all its weight and influence, protests over recent parliamentary and presidential elections were quickly silenced by the security forces, and attracted little western attention.
  • Equally predictably, from the other side of the ideological divide, came barely concealed glee that Iran's policies and alliances were coming under fire at home: "Iranians are now speaking out boldly against the squandering of public money on Hezbollah and Hamas … especially as Hamas only spends their money on fighting [rival Palestinian group] Fatah," commented Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, of the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV.
  • Unequivocal support for the Iranian regime came only from Syria – where President Bashar al-Assad won 97.6% in an uncontested referendum two years ago – and from Lebanon's Hezbollah, whose secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, saluted Ahmadinejad's victory as "a great hope to all the mujahideen and resistance movements who are fighting against the forces of oppression and occupation".
  • it is hard to disagree with the ever-perceptive Rami Khouri: "Arabs will not feel comfortable seeing the Iranian people twice in 30 years fearlessly challenging their own autocratic regimes, while the people of the Arab world meekly acquiesce in equally non-democratic and top-heavy political systems, that treat their own people as unthinking fools who can be perpetually abused with sham elections and other forms of abuse of power."
Pedro Gonçalves

Germany's Spies Refuted the 2007 NIE Report - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany's highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."
  • According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing "the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran's acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea."
  • It's important to point out that this was no ordinary agency report, the kind that often consists just of open source material, hearsay and speculation. Rather, the BND submitted an "office testimony," which consists of factual statements about the Iranian program that can be proved in a court of law. This is why, in their March 26 opinion, the judges wrote that "a preliminary assessment of the available evidence suggests that at the time of the crime [April to November 2007] nuclear weapons were being developed in Iran." In their May press release, the judges come out even more clear, stating unequivocally that "Iran in 2007 worked on the development of nuclear weapons."
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  • A lower court in Frankfurt refused to try the case on the grounds that it was unlikely that Iran had a nuclear program at the time of the defendant's activities in 2007, citing the NIE report as evidence. That's why the Supreme Court judges had to rule first on the question of whether that program exists at all. Having answered that question in the affirmative, the court had to rule next on the likelihood of the defendant to be found guilty in a trial. The supreme court's conclusions are unusually strong. "The results of the investigation do in fact provide sufficient indications that the accused aided the development of nuclear weapons in Iran through business dealings."
  • The case itself sheds light on how these networks function. According to the supreme court judges, the businessman has brokered "industrial machines, equipment and raw materials primarily to Iranian customers," for Iran's nuclear weapons program. According to the same decision, the defendant's business partners in Tehran "dealt with acquiring military and nuclear-related goods for Iran and used various front companies, headquartered for example in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, to circumvent existing trade restrictions." According to the judges, Mohsen V. also tried to supply to Tehran via front companies in Dubai "Geiger counters for radiation-resistant detectors constructed especially for protection against the effects of nuclear detonations."
  • BND sources have told me that they have shared their findings and documentation with their U.S. colleagues ahead of the 2007 NIE report -- as is customary between these two allies. It appears the Americans have simply ignored this evidence despite repeated warnings from the BND.
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Europe | Prominent Chechen killed in Dubai - 0 views

  • The Russian authorities have confirmed a prominent opponent of the pro-Kremlin Chechen President, Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot dead in Dubai on Saturday. Diplomats said Sulim Yamadayev's body had been identified by his relatives. Mr Yamadayev fell out with Mr Kadyrov last year and was sacked as commander of an elite security forces battalion. Saturday's killing is the fourth of a prominent Chechen since September, when Mr Yamadayev's brother Ruslan was shot dead while driving in central Moscow. The Chechen leader has denied any involvement in the killings.
  • Russia is poised to declare a formal end to its 10-year war in Chechnya this week, says the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow.
  • Mr Yamadayev became commander of the elite Vostok security forces battalion, a unit of former rebels who have helped quell separatist resistance. In 2005, he was named a Hero of Russia, the top national honour. But last year, he was dismissed after falling out with Mr Kadyrov and later fled to the United Arab Emirates.
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  • In January, Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard for Mr Kadyrov who had accused him of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead on a street in Vienna. Then last month, a former deputy mayor of Grozny was shot dead in Moscow. In 2004, two Russian intelligence agents were convicted of killing a former Chechen president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, in the nearby state of Qatar.
Argos Media

US floats plan to tempt Taliban into political peace dialogue | World news | The Observer - 0 views

  • America has signalled a radical new initiative to bring the Taliban into the Afghan political process as part of growing efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the war in Afghanistan.The US ambassador to Kabul told the Observer that America would be prepared to discuss the establishment of a political party, or even election candidates representing the Taliban, as part of a political strategy that would sit alongside reinforced military efforts to end the increasingly intractable conflict.
  • Other ideas being discussed include changing the Afghan constitution as part of potential negotiations, taking senior Taliban figures off UN blacklists to establish dialogue and possible prisoner releases.
  • William Wood, the outgoing US ambassador to Afghanistan, told the Observer that "insurgencies, like all wars... end when there is an agreement". He said while the US saw "no way there could be power-sharing or an enclave" for the Taliban, "there is room for discussion on the formation of political parties [or] running... for elections. That is very different from shooting your way into power." The key requirement would be respect for the constitution, Wood added.
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  • Taliban and other insurgents are currently flowing into Afghanistan from Pakistan as milder weather allows passage over the mountains.
  • Last week, the head of Nato forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, admitted to the Observer that his troops "were not winning" in the south and parts of the east of the country, though progress was being made elsewhere. This year will be "critical" and "tough", he said.
  • In Kabul, the Observer has discovered at least four attempts at exploratory negotiations between insurgents, their representatives and the Afghan government. One involves Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Islamist warlord and former prime minister, whose militants are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of international and Afghan soldiers and civilians in the east of Afghanistan. Two weeks ago Hekmatyar's representatives and government emissaries met in a hotel in Dubai, according to Senator Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban minister who is a key intermediary.
Pedro Gonçalves

Millionaire Mullahs - Forbes.com - 0 views

  • As minister of the Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, Rafiqdoost played a key role in sponsoring Hezbollah in Lebanon--which kidnapped foreigners, hijacked airplanes, set off car bombs, trafficked in heroin and pioneered the use of suicide bombers. According to Gregory Sullivan, spokesman for the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau at the U.S. State Department, the foundations are the perfect vehicles to carry out Iran's shadow foreign policy. (One of them offered the $2.8 million bounty to anyone who carried out Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa to kill British author Salman Rushdie.)
  • The largest "charity" (at least in terms of real estate holdings) is the centuries-old Razavi Foundation, charged with caring for Iran's most revered shrine--the tomb of Reza, the Eighth Shiite Imam, in the northern city of Mashhad. It is run by one of Iran's leading hard-line mullahs, Ayatollah Vaez-Tabasi, who prefers to stay out of the public eye but emerges occasionally to urge death to apostates and other opponents of the clerical regime.
  • The Razavi Foundation owns vast tracts of urban real estate all across Iran, as well as hotels, factories, farms and quarries. Its assets are impossible to value with any precision, since the foundation has never released an inventory of its holdings, but Iranian economists speak of a net asset value of $15 billion or more. The foundation also receives generous contributions from the millions of pilgrims who visit the Mashhad shrine each year.
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  • What happens to annual revenues estimated in the hundreds of millions--perhaps billions--of dollars? Not all of it goes to cover the maintenance costs of mosques, cemeteries, religious schools and libraries. Over the past decade the foundation has bought new businesses and properties, established investment banks (together with investors from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), funded real estate projects and financed big foreign trade deals.
  • The driving force behind the commercialization of the Razavi Foundation is Ayatollah Tabasi's son, Naser, who was put in charge of the Sarakhs Free Trade Zone, on the border with the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. In the 1990s the foundation poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this project, funding a rail link between Iran and Turkmenistan, new highways, an international airport, a hotel and office buildings. It even paid $2.3 million to a Swiss firm to erect a huge tent for the ceremonies inaugurating the Iran-Turkmenistan rail link.
  • Then it all went wrong. In July 2001 Naser Tabasi was dismissed as director of the Free Trade Zone. Two months later he was arrested and charged with fraud in connection with a Dubai-based company called Al-Makasib. The details of the case remain murky, but four months ago the General Court of Tehran concluded that Naser Tabasi had not known that he was breaking the law and acquitted him.
Pedro Gonçalves

Millionaire Mullahs - Forbes.com - 0 views

  • The 1979 revolution transformed the Rafsanjani clan into commercial pashas. One brother headed the country's largest copper mine; another took control of the state-owned TV network; a brother-in-law became governor of Kerman province, while a cousin runs an outfit that dominates Iran's $400 million pistachio export business; a nephew and one of Rafsanjani's sons took key positions in the Ministry of Oil; another son heads the Tehran Metro construction project (an estimated $700 million spent so far). Today, operating through various foundations and front companies, the family is also believed to control one of Iran's biggest oil engineering companies, a plant assembling Daewoo automobiles, and Iran's best private airline (though the Rafsanjanis insist they do not own these assets).
  • The gossip on the street, going well beyond the observable facts, has the Rafsanjanis stashing billions of dollars in bank accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg; controlling huge swaths of waterfront in Iran's free economic zones on the Persian Gulf; and owning whole vacation resorts on the idyllic beaches of Dubai, Goa and Thailand.
  • Rafsanjani's youngest son, Yaser, owns a 30-acre horse farm in the super-fashionable Lavasan neighborhood of north Tehran, where land goes for over $4 million an acre. Just where did Yaser get his money? A Belgian-educated businessman, he runs a large export-import firm that includes baby food, bottled water and industrial machinery.
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  • Until a few years ago the simplest way to get rich quick was through foreign-currency trades. Easy, if you could get greenbacks at the subsidized import rate of 1,750 rials to the dollar and resell them at the market rate of 8,000 to the dollar. You needed only the right connections for an import license. "I estimate that, over a period of ten years, Iran lost $3 billion to $5 billion annually from this kind of exchange-rate fraud," says Saeed Laylaz, an economist, now with Iran's biggest carmaker. "And the lion's share of that went to about 50 families."
  • One of the families benefiting from the foreign trade system was the Asgaroladis, an old Jewish clan of bazaar traders, who converted to Islam several generations ago. Asadollah Asgaroladi exports pistachios, cumin, dried fruit, shrimp and caviar, and imports sugar and home appliances; his fortune is estimated by Iranian bankers to be some $400 million. Asgaroladi had a little help from his older brother, Habibollah, who, as minister of commerce in the 1980s, was in charge of distributing lucrative foreign-trade licenses. (He was also a counterparty to commodities trader and then-fugitive Marc Rich, who helped Iran bypass U.S.-backed sanctions.)
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Thai 'yellow shirt' leader shot - 0 views

  • The leader of Thailand's yellow-shirted protest movement has been shot and hurt in an apparent assassination attempt. Sondhi Limthongkul's People's Alliance for Democracy helped oust ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006 and brought down a pro-Thaksin government last year.
  • The BBC's Alastair Leithead in Bangkok says it is not known who is responsible, but Mr Sondhi has many enemies in the reds, the police, the army and the current government.
  • In the wake of the attack, security was increased around the current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who is working out of an undisclosed location because of fears for his safety.
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  • Mr Vejjajiva said a state of emergency imposed on Sunday in Bangkok would remain in place.
  • Red-shirted supporters of Mr Thaksin, who is now in self-imposed exile in Dubai, have held protests in recent weeks. The largely peaceful demonstrations that paralysed parts of Bangkok turned violent earlier this week; two people died and more than 100 others were injured. Protest leaders called off the action amid a major military crackdown to quell the riots.
  • The red shirts took to the streets demanding that Prime Minister Abhisit step down, and fresh elections to be held. They say that he was illegally installed by parliament in December after courts ousted the government led by Mr Thaksin's allies, and dissolved their parties.
  • The red shirts have expressed anger over the detention of several protest leaders in recent days, while Mr Sondhi and his allies were never prosecuted for their political action. Last year, the yellow shirts occupied Government House for three months and seized Bangkok's two airports for a week, stranding hundreds of thousands of travellers.
Argos Media

Russia ends anti-terrorism operations in Chechnya | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Russia today agreed to end its counterterrorist operations in Chechnya, in a move that signals the formal end of the Kremlin's war in the republic and enhances the power of Chechnya's president, Ramzan Kadyrov.
  • Russia's national anti-terrorist committee said military restrictions in force in Chechnya would be abolished from today. Moscow has maintained a strict security regime for a decade in Chechnya, the scene of two wars against separatist rebels.
  • This morning Kadyrov, a close ally of Putin, welcomed the decision to end anti-terrorist operations. "We are extremely satisfied. The modern Chechen republic is a peaceful and budding territory. The end of the counterterrorist operation will spur on economic growth in the republic," he told the Russian news agency Interfax.
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  • Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, sent troops into Chechnya in 1999. His aim was to win back the region, which had enjoyed de-facto independence since the first Chechen war in 1994-1996. The security regime included arbitrary arrests, roadblocks, curfews and restrictions on journalists.
  • In return for abandoning their struggle for independence, Akhmad Kadyrov and other ex-separatists were granted sweeping powers and autonomy denied to other Russian republics. Moscow also agreed to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses. The policy appeared to work. Chechnya's shell-ridden capital, Grozny, was transformed.
  • some inside the Kremlin have questioned whether Putin's policy of entrusting power to Chechens - known as "Chechenisation" - has gone too far. Kadyrov has been repeatedly accused of murdering his enemies, including the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic who described him as a "coward armed to the teeth". He denies involvement in her death.In January, a Chechen exile, Umar Israilov, who had accused Kadryov of torturing him was shot dead in a street in Vienna. And last month, Sulim Yamadayev, a former Chechen rebel commander who fell out with Kadyrov, was shot dead in Dubai. Police in the United Arab Emirates accused Kadyrov's cousin and heir apparent, Adam Delimkhanov, of ordering the assassination.
  • Russian newspapers today suggested that some inside the Russian government now believe Kadyrov has grown far too powerful, but have little idea how to keep control of him. One analyst said Chechnya now enjoys the kind of autonomy that its separatist leaders in the 1990s had failed to achieve, while remaining a part of the Russian Federation.
  • "It would be difficult to describe Chechnya as peaceful. But Kadyrov has achieved 'stability' in the Russian and Chechen definition of the word," Sergei Markedonov, of Moscow's Institute for Political and Military Studies, wrote in theMoscow Times.
  • "Nonetheless this stability has come at a very high price. The flip side is that Chechnya's internal political issues are largely resolved without Russia and with minimal adherence to federal laws," he added. "In this sense, a new type of separatism has won out in Chechnya."
Argos Media

Thousands Rally Against Thai Leader - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In an attempt to show the continued strength of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, tens of thousands of his supporters massed in central Bangkok on Wednesday and demanded the resignation of the government.
  • Wearing the red shirts of Thaksin loyalists, the demonstrators streamed into Bangkok throughout the day from his political strongholds in the rural north and northeast and by early evening the police estimated the crowds at 100,000.
  • The protesters gathered in front of the prime minister’s office and outside the home of Prem Tinsulanda, a former prime minister who is a top adviser to King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The protesters accused Mr. Prem of orchestrating a coup that ousted Mr. Thaksin in September 2006 while the prime minister was out of the country.
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  • Kavi Chongkittavorn, a columnist and editor at The Nation, an English-language newspaper, said that despite the numbers in the streets, Mr. Thaksin’s challenge was fading in strength.
  • Mr. Thaksin, a former telecommunications billionaire, was convicted last year on charges asserting he had abused his power. He left the country before his conviction — he was sentenced to two years in jail — and now lives in exile, principally in Dubai.Mr. Thaksin faces other charges in Thailand, and the courts have frozen an estimated $2 billion in his and his family’s assets. But he insists that he wants to return to Thailand — and to Thai politics.
  • The protests were reminiscent of the political paralysis that gripped Thailand last year. Those demonstrations, which were sometimes violent, forced the previous government to abandon Government House, paralyzed the workings of the administration and eventually shut down Bangkok’s two major airports. The protests were led by the “yellow shirts” of the People’s Alliance for Democracy.
  • The protests ended in December when — with the airports blockaded, tourism crippled and the economy at a virtual standstill — the Constitutional Court found the governing party guilty of election fraud. The court ruling led eventually to Mr. Abhisit’s selection as prime minister by Parliament in December.
  • The dismal state of the Thai economy has been another cause of anger among protesters. Just this week the World Bank revised its growth prospects downward: The bank now expects a 2.7 percent decline in Thailand’s gross domestic product in 2009, the country’s first contraction in more than a decade.
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