Suicide bombers associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network have begun carrying bombs inside their bodies in the form of suppositories to circumvent strict security controls, the French daily Le Figaro reported yesterday.
Citing information supplied by the French anti-terrorist service DCRI, the report highlighted a recent assassination bid in Saudi Arabia in which the terrorist carried the bomb within his body.
“That is to say, it was undetectable,” a French Interior Ministry official said. “The suicide bomber had only to detonate it with his cellphone, which the palace guards did not have the presence of mind to remove.”
The target of the attack, Mohammed bin Nayef, the son of the Saudi interior minister, suffered only minor injuries.
However, the method used by the bomber has forced security officials to reconsider the controls used to prevent suicide bombings, particularly at airports.
“Our aviation controls are equipped with metal detectors, but in the case of the Saudi suicide bomber only an X-ray control would have detected the explosive,” a police official said.
“It is simply unthinkable to put X-rays into general use for security controls, since we know how often some passengers fly,” an Interior Ministry official said. “The health risks ... are too great.”
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
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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.
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