■UNITED STATES
Man accused of terrorism
An African man provided money and was trained with weapons and explosives in a bid to help a terrorist organization seeking to destabilize Somalia and attack US interests, prosecutors said on Monday. Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed was held without bail after a brief appearance before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan. He was to enter a plea at a second court appearance scheduled for yesterday. His lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said he will plead not guilty. Ahmed, a citizen of Eritrea, was brought to the US on Saturday to face an indictment accusing him of going to Somalia last year to help al-Shabaab, a group designated by the US government as a terrorist organization.
■CANADA
Air India perjury trial halted
The perjury trial of a man who gave key testimony at the trial of the 1985 Air India terrorist bombings that killed 331 people has been delayed because the jury has been dismissed. Inderjit Singh Reyat is charged with lying 27 times under oath in the trial against his alleged co-conspirators in the plot. The charges stem from Reyat’s testimony in the trial of Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik. They were acquitted of first-degree murder and conspiracy March 16, 2005, after a trial lasting almost two years. Flight 182 from Montreal to Heathrow, London, disappeared from radar off the Irish coast June 23, 1985, when a bomb exploded killing all 329 people on board.
■CANADA
US weighs Khadr return
The US government is quietly seeking a way to repatriate the youngest Guantanamo inmate, Canadian Omar Khadr, local media said on Monday. “They don’t have the stomach to try a child for war crimes,” a source with knowledge of the matter told the Canwest newspaper group. US forces in Afghanistan took Khadr prisoner when he was just 15 years old in July 2002. He was later charged with war crimes for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier. The last Westerner at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Khadr has been held at the controversial detention center for the past seven years, and is scheduled to face a US military trial in July. Officials in Ottawa have insisted they would wait until the US has dealt with the serious charges against Khadr before making any request for his repatriation.
■MEXICO
Police chief’s house attacked
Gunmen opened fire on a police chief’s house in the south, killing his 23-year-old daughter and a bodyguard and wounding three others, police said on Monday. Anacleto Flores Valle, the chief of police in the Pacific coast town of Petatlan, was uninjured when heavily armed men in two trucks opened fire on his home on Sunday. The gunmen fled and were not identified. Petatlan is near the Pacific coast resorts of Ixtapa and Zihuatenejo.
■CUBA
Paper blasts foreign media
Havana on Monday strongly criticized foreign press coverage of a dissident hunger striker as part of a campaign to discredit the island’s political system. Guillermo Farinas, a freelance opposition journalist, has refused food and water since Feb. 24 to protest the death of another hunger striker and demand the release from jail of some 26 political prisoners said to be in poor health. “Cuba will not accept pressure or blackmail,” a red-letter headline in the Communist Party daily Granma said. “Important Western media groups are again calling attention to a prefabricated lie,” the paper said.
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