Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the Israeli embassy in Mauritania yesterday, causing several injuries, witnesses said, in an attack condemned by Israel as an "act of terrorism."
Witness Ali Fall said that a group of six men had opened fire with automatic weapons, wounding five people including a "foreign woman."
Israeli Ambassador Boaz Bismuth confirmed that shots had been fired but told Israeli radio that there had been only one shooter and no embassy staff had been hurt.
The attack took place shortly after 2am.
Israel condemned the assault, as the Washington-based IntelCenter reported that al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri had called on Mauritanian Muslims to attack the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott a year ago.
"It is a clear act of terrorism that entered the long line of attacks that have targeted our diplomatic representation abroad for several years," Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Aryeh Mekel said.
ARAB ALLIES
He underlined the importance that Israel places on its links with Mauritania, one of three Arab countries -- along with Egypt and Jordan -- with which it has full diplomatic relations.
He said the ministry had sent "specialist security officers" to Nouakchott to look into beefing up embassy security.
IntelCenter, which monitors terrorist activities, said al-Zawahiri had called for an attack on the embassy in a video released by al-Qaeda's media mouthpiece, As-Sahab, on Feb. 13 last year.
"This fits the pattern of al-Qaeda announcing targeting preferences in their public messaging up to a year or more before attacks occur," IntelCenter chief executive Ben Venzke said.
Bismuth confirmed that "shots were aimed at our embassy from the street," and added that no one was wounded among the embassy staff or among the Mauritanians working for the embassy.
In an interview with Israeli radio, he said "a single individual" had fired an automatic weapon at the empty embassy building, without injuring anybody.
Fall, who was in a restaurant near the embassy at the time of the attack, said that six men wearing boubous -- long flowing African gowns -- and turbans "got out of a vehicle and walked towards" the restaurant.
After a few minutes "they said loudly in Arabic `let's go' then shouted `Allah Akbar' [God is Greatest] and opened fire" at the embassy, he said.
The embassy guards -- Mauritanian soldiers -- immediately returned fire and the assailants quickly fled, he said.
COOPERATION
In the radio interview, Bismuth praised "the cooperation between embassy security and the Mauritanians charged with protecting it, which enabled them to repel the attack."
The attack comes as pressure increases within Mauritania against the presence of an Israeli embassy there.
The president of the national assembly called on Sunday for the country to "reconsider" the country's "shameful" relations with the Jewish state following its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS