The Pentagon has said it is charging a Saudi Arabian detainee with “organizing and directing” the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and will seek the death penalty.
Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser to the US military tribunal system, said on Monday that charges were being sworn against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, who has been held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006.
The charges still must be approved by a US Department of Defense official, who oversees military tribunals set up for terrorism suspects. If they are approved, al-Nashiri would be the first person charged in the US in connection with the attack nearly eight years ago.
Hartmann said the allegations include conspiracy to violate laws of war, murder, treachery, terrorism, destruction of property and intentionally causing serious bodily injury.
Seventeen US sailors were killed and dozens wounded when the Navy destroyer was attacked in the Yemeni port of Aden as it refueled.
Al-Nashiri is also accused of a role in the Oct. 6, 2002, suicide attack on the Limburg, a French oil tanker, Hartmann said. The attack killed a Bulgarian crew member and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Aden.
Al-Nashiri told a hearing at Guantanamo Bay last year that he confessed to helping plot the Cole bombing only because he was tortured by US interrogators.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said early this year that al-Nashiri was among terrorist suspects subjected to waterboarding in 2002 and 2003, while being interrogated in secret CIA prisons.
Asked at a Pentagon news conference if evidence obtained from the waterboarding is tainted, Hartmann said that would be considered at any trial.
“We will look at the evidence, all of the evidence that is associated with the case,” Hartmann said.
“While there has been an admission that there was waterboarding, there may well be other evidence in the case. That’s not ... necessarily the only part of evidence in the case,” he said.
According to US intelligence, al-Nashiri was tasked by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to attack the Cole and was also al-Qaeda’s operations chief in the Arabian Peninsula until he was caught in 2002.
Hartmann read a charge sheet, alleging the following against al-Nashiri:
• He is a member of al-Qaeda and met with bin Laden on several occasions.
• He rented apartments overlooking the port of Aden in 1999 to prepare for the Cole attack.
• His co-conspirators failed in an attempt to blow up the USS The Sullivans in January of 2000. Al-Nashiri and others salvaged the explosives and refitted the boat from that plot, then he went to Afghanistan to discuss reorganization of the plot with bin Laden.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS