Starting Points

Dec 13, 2009

Terrorist recruiters leverage the Web

From YouTube to Pakistan: N.Va. men allegedly drafted to fight U.S. troops abroad

By Griff Witte, Jerry Markon and Shaiq Hussain
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 13, 2009

Pakistani authorities on Saturday were searching for an insurgent figure believed to have aided five Northern Virginia men who allegedly tried to join al-Qaeda, saying the case could help unravel a growing network of terrorist recruiters who scour the Internet for radicalized young men.

Investigators have identified the man, known as Saifullah, as a recruiter for the Pakistani Taliban and said he contacted one of the American men on YouTube, exchanged coded e-mails with the group, invited them to Pakistan and guided them once they arrived.

But the men, all Muslims from the Alexandria area, failed to reach the remote tribal zone that is al-Qaeda's home because the terrorist network's commanders thought they were sent by the CIA to infiltrate al-Qaeda -- and Saifullah could not convince them otherwise, a Pakistani intelligence official said Saturday.

"They were regarded as a sting operation. That's why they were rejected," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. The five men disappeared just after Thanksgiving and were arrested near Lahore on Tuesday. They have not been charged with any crime.

The developments point to the dangers posed by an extensive and sophisticated network of online terrorist recruiters, but also its limitations. Investigators and terrorism experts say recruitment worldwide has become far more Web-based, with recruiters playing a critical role in identifying potential radicals and determining whether they can be trusted.

Yet Saifullah's endorsement, secured through months of online contact with the five men, apparently did not carry much weight with Osama bin Laden's organization: It wanted someone who knew them better.

As a result, the five men wound up marooned in the eastern city of Sargodha, far from the terrorist haven in the forbidding mountains of northwest Pakistan that they were apparently trying to reach. Pakistani officials said the men were undeterred and kept trying to acquire the endorsements to gain access to al-Qaeda training camps -- with the ultimate goal of fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan -- when they were arrested.

The men, ages 18 to 24, traveled overseas without telling their families, triggering an international manhunt after concerned relatives contacted the FBI. The five -- Ramy Zamzam, 22; Ahmad A. Minni, 20; Umar Chaudhry, 24; Waqar Khan, 22; and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18 -- were transferred Saturday from Sargodha to Lahore, where they were questioned by the FBI.

The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, met with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday to discuss the men and the timing of what officials said will be their eventual handover to the United States. But Pakistani officials said they want more time to question the men in an effort to learn more about Saifullah and other radicals they may know.

U.S. law enforcement officials are considering criminal charges against the men, but they said that no charges are imminent and that a decision on whether to file them could take weeks. The young men's friends and spiritual advisers have said they never saw any sign of radical activity or beliefs. The men's family members in Northern Virginia have declined to comment.

If the emerging case, as outlined by Pakistan officials, shows the difficulties online recruiters can encounter, it was also clear that the growth of online recruiting poses unique challenges for U.S. criminal investigators.

Federal officials said they were aware of the threat and concerned about its potential to radicalize Americans who might meet recruiters online, both Muslims and non-Muslims.

"Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online," a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official said Saturday on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

But criminal investigators said the explosion of online communication made it extraordinarily difficult to monitor, and they indicated that their tracking abilities were limited by constitutional and privacy considerations. "Other countries may have different capabilities, and those are capabilities we don't have," said one federal law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.

Ironically, terrorism experts said one reason for the growth of online recruiting is the success of efforts by the United States and other nations to penetrate Islamist terrorist networks and Muslim communities since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet," said Evan Kohlmann, senior analyst with the U.S.-based NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites.

Since Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence has made it a top priority to place human assets inside al-Qaeda. The organization's recruiters act as gatekeepers, keeping out those who are not serious about their commitment to holy war as well as those who could be spies.

Would-be American recruits are treated with special scrutiny by al-Qaeda, analysts said. But they are also considered enormously appealing to the group because of their potential to access U.S. targets and because of their propaganda value.

But experts said terrorist organizations have become much more cautious in recent years about who they allow in as U.S. intelligence agencies grow increasingly knowledgeable about the groups' recruiting methods.

Terrorist group operatives, and even freelance recruiters, troll jihadi social-networking sites, attempting to establish relationships with young men who seem ideologically committed, and physically able, to commit violence in the name of radical Islam.

In one case, a recruiter named Younes Tsouli is thought to have used such sites to identify dozens of aspiring insurgents for the war in Iraq -- all without leaving his London basement.

Experts said the case of the Northern Virginia men is especially troublesome because it apparently involved recruiting on YouTube, a Web site with mass appeal that is extremely difficult to monitor.

Pakistani officials have said that Saifullah first contacted one of the men, Minni, on YouTube in August after Minni repeatedly praised YouTube videos showing attacks on U.S. forces.

A Pakistani police official involved in the investigation said Saifullah and the men exchanged coded e-mails for months thereafter. After their arrival in Pakistan, he advised them to wear the local dress and instructed them to take buses to a city near the edge of the tribal areas, from where they could be transported to North Waziristan, home base of al-Qaeda. They were arrested before they could make the journey.

The men have told investigators that Saifullah was the only one who welcomed them in Pakistan and that they were rejected by at least two other extremist groups.

Pakistani investigators say they believe that Saifullah spent time in the United States, because of his familiarity with American slang and geography. Officials said he was already wanted for his alleged role in an attack this year on the Sri Lankan cricket team as it visited Lahore for a tournament.

In most cases, experts said, potential recruits are the ones who reach out to radical Web sites and chat rooms in the hopes of finding someone to introduce them to a militant group.

"A recruiter does not radicalize a person from scratch," said Manuel R. Torres Soriano, a terrorism expert in Spain, where the Internet played a key role in influencing some of the perpetrators of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. "They deal with people who are already ready to die."

Witte reported from Kabul, Markon from Washington and Hussain from Sargodha. Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan; correspondents Craig Whitlock in Berlin and Sudarsan Raghavan in Madrid; and staff writer Joby Warrick in Washington contributed to this report.

Dec 11, 2009

Mission Impossible?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By John Barry and Michael Hirsh | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 14, 2009

How quickly can the Afghan army stand up, so American troops can stand down? It's a question that could determine the success or failure of President Obama's "surge" in Afghanistan. The U.S. training program faces some formidable challenges in meeting Obama's 18-month timeline. Among the many issues: the problem of the "professional recruit." So ingrained is corruption and double-dealing in Afghan society that the country's meager Army finds itself sometimes recruiting the same men over and over again--scamsters who make off with guns and equipment each time.

Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak recently described to a U.S. official how one man signed up for the Afghan Army five times. Deserting after a couple of months, he would sell his rifle for a good price, shave his beard, sign up again--and then regrow it. He was finally recognized on his sixth attempt, the official, who didn't want to be named discussing a private conversation, tells NEWSWEEK. "Everyone's heard of these professional recruits," says Chris Mason, who retired from the State Department in 2006 after working on Afghanistan for five years. "They sign up, get $120 a month and three hots [meals] and a cot. Then they desert, sell their equipment on Chicken Street in Kabul, and do it again." The stories, Mason says, illustrate how hard it is to answer even so basic a question as how big the Afghan Army really is.

Obama and his ground commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, hope to create an Afghan Army of 134,000 by October 2010 (the president set aside McChrystal's further goal of 240,000 as "too large and too far out," a senior administration official told reporters at a White House briefing). But is 134,000 even attainable? Mason and Thomas Johnson, an Afghanistan expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, think not. "Projections of a 134,000-man force by 2010 or a 240,000-man [Army] in the future are absurd," they wrote in a study in Military Review, the Army's professional journal, that's caused a stir.

Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template

But Lt. Gen. Richard Formica, who until this fall ran the program to train the Afghan Army, thinks McChrystal's goal is "going to be difficult but achievable." Retired Lt. Gen. James Dubik, who ran the program to train the new Iraqi Army and went to Afghanistan earlier this year, cautiously echoes Formica's optimism, though, he warns, "the training program was very well thought out, but now it will have to be changed." The biggest hurdles, Dubik and others say, are the shortage of bases and training schools; a lack of senior and noncommissioned officers; too little equipment; a near-total absence of support functions like logistics, communications, and medical services; and the Army's deep ethnic divisions. The bottom line, says a former U.S. general involved in many training missions who didn't want to be named casting doubt on the effort: "I can't think of anything like this that's been done in less than 10 years."

Google Tailors Korean Home Page to Local Tastes

Image via CrunchBase

News and links to popular topics and blogs are added; effort seeks to gain market share by appealing more to locals

By EVAN RAMSTAD

SEOUL—Google Inc. this week changed the simple look of its home page in South Korea, adding blocks of links under the main search box about topics and news that are popular with Korean Internet users.

The move marks the first time that Google has significantly altered the iconic appearance of its home page to adapt to local market conditions, said Ted Cho, engineering site director for Google's Korea unit, although the company has made cosmetic tweaks to accommodate different languages. "I think the whole company is watching," Mr. Cho said.

The move represents Google's attempt to revamp its image in South Korea and there are no signs the company is contemplating similar changes to its U.S. homepage, which it keeps deliberately sparse.

Google declined to comment about whether it plans to roll out the new design elsewhere

While Google is the leading search engine and Web service provider in the U.S. and much of the world, the company in South Korea significantly trails two domestic Web portals in usage.

The two Korean companies— NHN Corp. and Daum Communications Inc.—present users with home pages that look more like those of media outlets than a search engine. They include the latest news, photos, videos and updated lists of highly trafficked blogs and popular online chat sites.

Mr. Cho said that he has often heard from South Koreans that they don't know what to do with a search engine that just provides a blank page and search box. "They visit these portals to find information about what's going on and what everyone is talking about," he said. "Then they start a search."

In November, NHN's Naver site led the market with 66% of search queries, according to KoreanClick, an Internet-industry research firm in South Korea. Daum was next with 21%, followed by SK Telecom Inc.'s Nate portal at 6%, Yahoo Inc.'s Korea site at 3% and Google at 2%.

The success of Naver and Daum is rooted in the homogeneity and density of South Korea, which is the size of a midsize U.S. state such as Indiana but with roughly the same number of people as California and Texas, the two most populous U.S. states, combined. South Koreans tend to be interested in the same things, and it shows in Internet search requests.

Both Naver and Daum keep users captive for a longer period than Google or Yahoo by creating vast databases of popular content and linking to them first. For instance, a search for information about lung cancer on Naver or Daum will first yield results from articles the sites have acquired or commissioned from Korean doctors or hospitals.

By contrast, a Google search yields results from the broader Web ranked by Google's search algorithm. Mr. Cho said that wouldn't change in South Korea.

Google found that, on any given day in South Korea, the top 10,000 search items account for 40% to 50% of all requests, more than twice the rate of any other country and far more than in countries with diverse populations.

—Jaeyeon Woo contributed to this article.

Thousands Flee Iran as Noose Tightens

By STEVE STECKLOW and FARNAZ FASSIHI

NEVSEHIR, Turkey -- Sadegh Shojai fled Iran after government agents raided his Tehran apartment, seizing his computer and 700 copies of a book he published on staging revolutions.

Now, he and his wife spend their days in this isolated Turkish town in a cramped, coal-heated apartment that lacks a proper toilet. But Mr. Shojai, 28 years old, continues to churn out articles on antigovernment Web sites about Iranian political prisoners, and helps to link students in Tehran with fellow students in Europe.

"I feel very guilty that I have abandoned my friends and countrymen, so I make up for it by burying myself in activism here," he says.

He's part of a small but spreading refugee exodus of businesspeople, dissidents, college students, journalists, athletes and other elite Iranians that is transforming the global face of Iran's resistance movement.

"Because of new technology and the Internet, prominent figures of the opposition can be more effective outside of Iran and do things they wouldn't be able to do there," says Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University. People staying behind "are ridiculed and sidelined," or thrown in jail.

The United Nations says more than 4,200 Iranians world-wide have sought refugee status since Iran's controversial June presidential vote and bloody street violence. This provincial Turkish town -- near the famed carved-rock dwellings of Cappadocia that harbored outcasts in millennia past -- is home to 543 Iranians seeking asylum.

After sometimes spending weeks hiding in and hopping between safe houses, Iranians have turned up in countries as far away as Australia, Canada and Sweden. They typically seek refugee status.

"What good can a lawyer do in Iran if she is in jail?" says Nikahang Kousar, an Iranian political cartoonist in Toronto who formed an "underground railroad" of sorts to advise and assist other Iranians trying to leave Iran.

More on Iran

A spokesman with Iran's U.N. mission in New York declined to comment on the refugees or their claims of repression or violence.

Iran's refugee exodus is exacerbating a brain drain that has stunted the country's development for years. Mr. Dabashi, the Columbia professor, says he has fielded hundreds of inquiries from students in Iran wanting to study overseas -- more than 20 times the rate of previous years. "It's mind-boggling how many extremely accomplished young people are trying to come abroad," he says.

Not all defectors are necessarily politically active. Two athletes from the national wrestling and karate teams, a well-known anchor on state television and a young film director have applied for political asylum in Europe in recent months.

The most popular destination remains neighboring Turkey, which shares a long border with Iran. Turkey is one of the few countries that doesn't require Iranians to obtain a visa in advance, making it a relatively easy escape.

But not everyone can openly cross the border. About 20 individuals (mostly journalists) have escaped Iran illegally since June because they had been jailed or been blocked from leaving, according to Omid Memarian, a human-rights activist in San Francisco who is another participant in the loose-knit global underground railroad.

Steve Stecklow/The Wall Street Journal

Maryam Sabri fled Iran in September after being jailed.

Hanif Mazroui, the son of a reformist Iranian politician, says he snuck across the border, leaving behind a wife and newborn baby he hasn't met. Today Mr. Mazroui is in Belgium where he is working as a journalist for reformist Web sites.

No matter the route, many Iranians arrive abroad carrying pictures or videos of themselves participating in post-election demonstrations in Tehran. Some also continue their antigovernment activities by blogging or distributing photos, videos, articles and news to Iranians inside and outside the country.

Relations between Turkey and Iran have warmed in recent years. Just last month, the two sides announced a trade agreement, including construction of new power plants and establishment of a free-trade zone on the border. Turkey also relies on Iran as a major supplier of natural gas.

Turkey also opposes U.S.-backed sanctions on Iran over Tehran's nuclear program. Just this past Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with President Barack Obama at the White House. "We believe that the role of Iran can only be changed through diplomacy," Mr. Erdogan said afterward.

U.S. officials view Turkey as a central player in forging an international consensus on pressuring Iran, due to Ankara's expanding economic and diplomatic ties to Tehran and Mr. Erdogan's considerable influence across the Middle East. The Obama administration also sees Turkey as a crucial ally in addressing a range of regional security issues, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Sadegh Shojai, center, operates in Turkey as an online middleman between Iranians at home and abroad.]

Steve Stecklow/The Wall Street Journal

Sadegh Shojai operates in Turkey as an online middleman between Iranians at home and abroad.

A State Department official says the U.S. is prepared to accept more Iranian refugees provided the U.N.'s refugee agency makes the referrals. The official said there is a refugee quota of about 35,000 this year for the Near East and South Asia, so "there's enough wiggle room that we could increase the number of people we take out of Turkey."

Turkey is one of the world's only countries that bans refugees from taking up permanent residence within its own borders. The U.N. has found no evidence that Turkey is treating Iranian political refugees any differently than other refugees.

Still, there is fear among Iranian refugees in Turkey of being caught or harassed by Iranian intelligence agents. Many say they are afraid to call their families back home, believing the phone lines in Iran are tapped and that relatives there will face reprisal.

Ibrahim Vurgun, project coordinator for a Turkish nonprofit that is under contract with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, to assist refugees, says Iranian intelligence operatives have infiltrated the ranks of asylum seekers.

"It's very easy to get into Turkey, and you can't differentiate between an Iranian intelligence agent and a real refugee," he says.

Steve Stecklow/The Wall Street Journal

Masoume Mohammadian is seeking work in Nevsehir.

Maryam Sabri, a 21-year-old refugee in Kayseri, an industrial city home to more than 1,000 fleeing Iranians, says two Iranian men she believes were security agents chased her in Ankara, but she ran into Turkish police and her assailants fled. She says her hope is that she can leave Turkey as soon as possible. "I am not safe here," she said.

Ms. Sabri came to Turkey in early September, shortly after spending two weeks in a Tehran prison, she says, after being arrested while protesting the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose videotaped shooting on the street in Iran became a rallying cry for the protest movement.

A miniaturist painter, Ms. Sabri says she had produced fliers for opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. In prison, Ms. Sabri says, her interrogator repeatedly raped her and warned her that she would be tracked after release. "If you do not do everything we want, we are going to finish you off somewhere, very easily," she says she was told.

The Iranian government has denied that any prisoners have been raped and has called the allegations propaganda by opposition groups.

The Turkish government requires refugees to live in remote locations far from big cities like Istanbul. This is how many wind up here in Nevsehir, about a five-hour bus ride south of Ankara. A community of Iranian asylum seekers has sprung up in a dusty hillside neighborhood of stone streets and cinder-block dwellings known as "350 Houses."

That's where Mr. Shojai, the Iranian publisher of revolutionary materials, lives with his wife, Fateme Faneian, a 25-year-old blogger who worked at an opposition Web site in Iran before the government shut it down.

They arrived in Turkey in August after hiding in Iran for more than a month while participating in demonstrations. She says that during one protest in Iran, police kicked her in the stomach, causing her to have a miscarriage.

It's their first time outside Iran. They arrived by train with four suitcases of belongings, including several bags of rice.

Mr. Shojai says he now spends eight to 10 hours a day online, acting as an intermediary for a large network of student activists within Iran to get updates on arrests, interrogations and jailings back home. He then distributes what he learns globally on Facebook, Twitter and Balatarin, an Iranian news and social-networking site.

Because of Turkey's strict rules for refugees, Iranians can find themselves in a bureaucratic limbo that can last for years.

Once here, Iranians must wait for the U.N. to approve their status as refugees, which can take several months. If approved, they then next wait for assignment to another country (typically the U.S., Canada or Australia), which can take two years because of immigration quotas. If they're rejected as refugees, they can appeal, extending the process.

"Time can be the best torturer," says Kiumars Kamalinia, an Iranian Christian living in Nevsehir who says he was forced to flee Iran two years ago because of evangelical activities. He says the U.N. recognized him as a refugee a year ago but he's still awaiting resettlement.

An official with Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who declined to be named, said the refugee issue "is very complex and should be addressed by the international community." Noting that 67,000 people have sought refuge in Turkey since 1995 -- nearly half of them from Iran -- the official said Turkey wants to avoid a "mass influx" of additional refugees.

The 1,000 or so Iranians who have arrived in Turkey since the June elections joined more than 3,000 others already waiting to be declared refugees or to be resettled. They include Christians and members of the Bahai faith who say they fled to escape religious persecution. There also is a sizable community of gay and lesbian Iranians. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran.

UNHCR officials say the number of refugees in Turkey has increased in recent years, largely because of an influx of Iraqis. Waiting periods for resettlement have also grown.

Last year, there were only about 5,000 placements for 18,000 refugees. The U.S. accepted 1,099 Iranians from Turkey. An additional 486 went to six other countries.

While refugees wait, Turkey charges them the same residential-permit fees as any foreigner, about $200 per adult and $100 per child, every six months. The fees have stirred up resentment, since Turkey also prohibits refugees from finding legal employment if Turkish citizens are qualified to do the job. Many work illegal, $10-a-day jobs like housepainting.

Hossein Salman Zadeh, an Iranian news photographer who fled to Turkey in September to avoid arrest for taking pictures of demonstrations, says he was fined $50 for failing to pay the residential-permit fees on time, even though the office that collects the money was closed for a holiday.

"The fee itself is a serious burden, every six months having to come up with that money in a country where you cannot work legally," says Brenda Goddard, a refugee-status determination officer at UNHCR in Ankara.

The Turkish foreign-ministry official said the government is considering changes in the permit fees to benefit the refugees.

However, Turkish unemployment is fairly high at around 11%, and because of that, it's "not really an option to allow these applicants to work in Turkey," another government official said. The official added that Turkey is worried that if it allowed refugees to remain, the country would soon become "a huge warehouse for asylum seekers from European Union countries."

Write to Steve Stecklow at steve.stecklow@wsj.com and Farnaz Fassihi at farnaz.fassihi@wsj.com

Gunmen Hold Dozens at School in Philippines

Image via Wikipedia

By CARLOS H. CONDE

MANILA — Gunmen took 75 people hostage at an elementary school in the southern Philippines on Thursday, later releasing 27, including all the children, officials said.

The standoff, about 500 miles south of Manila in a restive region that has been the scene of recent violence, began when 15 to 20 assailants took the hostages after police officials tried to serve an arrest warrant on one of their leaders, said Maj. Randolph Cabangbang, an army spokesman.

The leader, identified as Ondo Perez, is suspected of heading a criminal organization called the Perez Group and is wanted for the murder of a resident of the town of Prosperidad, in Agusan del Sur Province on the southeastern island of Mindanao.

Senior Superintendent Nestor Fajura, operations chief of the Philippine police in the region, told ABS-CBN television that Mr. Perez and his group took the hostages at a school in Prosperidad to prevent his arrest. Mr. Fajura said that the abductors were demanding the withdrawal of the murder charge against Mr. Perez and a halt to police and military operations against the group.

The hostage takers initially released 17 children and an older woman, Major Cabangbang said. Also among the hostages were a teacher and two employees of a logging company, he said. Police officials have not yet established the identities or the conditions of the remaining hostages, he said.

Early Friday, The Associated Press reported the release of nine more hostages, eight women and one man, reducing the number of captives to 48.

Major Cabangbang said negotiators had been sent to the village to try to persuade the men to surrender. “The situation remains fluid at this point,” he said by telephone.

Mr. Perez is a former member of a paramilitary group that the military armed and trained to help in counterinsurgency operations, police officials said.

Such groups have often been accused of criminality and human rights violations.

A recent massacre on Maguindanao Province, also in Mindanao, of 57 people — most of them journalists and media workers — was attributed to militiamen who the authorities say were under the command of Andal Ampatuan Jr., a scion of the province’s most influential family.

Cambodian Monarch Pardons Thai Held as Spy

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By CARLOS H. CONDE

Two things may help to explain the violent power politics in this impoverished part of the southern Philippines: the red-roofed and high-walled mansions that have long dominated the center of this town, and the men in uniform carrying automatic weapons who guarded them.

The opulent mansions, the only ones here in the capital of Maguindanao Province, are owned by the family of Andal Ampatuan Sr., the patriarch of the political dynasty that has ruled this part of the island of Mindanao for much of this decade.

Today, the mansions are surrounded by soldiers and police officers, while family members face multiple charges of murder for alleged involvement in a massacre that shocked a country seemingly inured to political violence.

On Nov. 23, a convoy of vehicles — carrying the wife, three sisters and an aunt of Esmael Mangudadatu, the vice mayor of a small town nearby, as well as supporters, journalists and lawyers — was stopped by dozens of armed men at a checkpoint outside Shariff Aguak. At gunpoint, the vehicles, along with another car that had happened to be behind them, were forced down a dirt road to a windblown hilltop.

The armed men — who the authorities say were working for the Ampatuans — then shot and hacked 57 people to death. Some of the women, investigators say, were raped and sexually mutilated.

“They were so confident with their power that they carried out something like this and believed they could get away with it,” said Kim Bagundang, a Maguindanao resident and president of the Liguasan Youth Association for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization.

The reason for the massacre was clear, the authorities said. Mr. Mangudadatu’s relatives and supporters had been on their way to file his candidacy papers for governor of Maguindanao in elections next year — a direct challenge to the Ampatuans, who have ruled virtually unchallenged.

The Ampatuans’ control of Maguindanao is almost absolute. Most of the province’s 36 towns are run by mayors and deputy mayors who are either sons, grandsons, cousins, nephews, in-laws or close allies of the senior Mr. Ampatuan, according to a study by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

Since he became governor in 1998, Mr. Ampatuan has carved out at least eight towns from existing ones and named all of them after his sons and other relatives. The entire Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which is composed of five predominantly Muslim provinces, including Maguindanao, is run by Governor Zaldy Ampatuan, one of his sons.

The Ampatuans’ control of Maguindanao was enforced with guns and a culture of fear in towns governed by the family, residents and the authorities said. Many residents are afraid to talk at all about the Ampatuans. “No, no, no,” a resident in the town of Datu Unsay said when asked to comment on the massacre.

“People here live in fear,” a driver who lives in nearby Cotabato City, said of Shariff Aguak. “No one will dare go against the Ampatuans.”

One factor in what experts have called the “culture of impunity” that the Ampatuans have enjoyed in Maguindanao may be suggested by the enormous billboards erected at infrastructure projects around the province lauding the accomplishments of the family. Almost all of them also thank President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for her help in making the projects possible — highlighting the political connection between the Ampatuans and the central government in Manila.

“The Ampatuan family dynasty has backed President Arroyo since 2001, and its rise to power is likewise attributed to Mrs. Arroyo’s support,” said Bobby Tuazon, an analyst at the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a Manila nonprofit organization that has studied the political dynamics of the provinces. The Ampatuans, he said, were “an extension of Arroyo’s political base.”

In the 2004 elections, Mrs. Arroyo won resounding victories in Maguindanao; in at least three towns, her opponent, the late actor Fernando Poe Jr., got no votes at all, according to the official results. An independent election monitor found widespread fraud in the election that year.

For the Ampatuans, as well as for the chiefs of other impoverished provinces, there are very lucrative reasons for chasing political patronage in Manila.

Maguindanao is the second-poorest province in the Philippines, according to government statistics. It is mainly agricultural and has no industry to speak of. What it does have, however, is a lot of voters who can be delivered to national candidates in return for tax revenues and political patronage that can keep local politicians firmly in power.

Francisco Lara, at the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics, says the potential for making money from politics has given rise to a class of “ruthless political entrepreneurs” in the Philippines.

“Political office has become more attractive due to the billions of pesos in I.R.A. remittances that electoral victory provides,” Mr. Lara said, referring to the internal revenue allotment, the share of national taxes for local governments. “The ‘winner-takes-all’ nature of local electoral struggles in Muslim Mindanao also means that competition is costlier and bloodier.”

And often more corrupt, according to Mr. Tuazon and other experts.

Figures from the Department of Budget and Management show that Maguindanao’s overall revenue in 2006 was 603 million pesos, or about $13 million — of which 570 million pesos came from national taxes. At least a third of these funds went to personnel and operating expenses. According to the Philippine Center of Investigative Journalism, which has closely examined the issue, such funds are a major source of corruption within the Philippine bureaucracy.

The Commission on Audit’s annual reports on Maguindanao have consistently highlighted deficiencies in bookkeeping. For instance, in its 2008 audit report, the commission found that it could not ascertain the validity of the provincial accountant’s claim that the province had more than 107 million pesos deposited in banks. It also could not verify the existence of properties and assets worth 345 million pesos that the province said it had.

In 2006, the position of the Ampatuans was strengthened by Mrs. Arroyo’s decision to allow local government chiefs to set up armed militias to support the police and the military in their fight against criminals and insurgents.

Abhoud Syed Lingga, executive director of the Institute for Bangsamoro Studies in Cotabato City, who has studied the rise of the militias, said local chiefs across the country had used the order to create their own private armies.

The Ampatuans, he said, did so with more enthusiasm than anyone else. The police and military estimate that the Ampatuans employ between 400 and 600 of these armed men.

Up to now, the military has been supportive of the Ampatuans, Mr. Lingga said, because the clan actively fought the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the insurgent rebels fighting for a Muslim homeland in Mindanao.

All that changed on Nov. 23, when the armed men who the authorities say were working for the Ampatuans — among them police officers and militiamen — killed the 57 people on the hillside.

When soldiers, who had been alerted about the abduction, arrived at the mass graves — at a site overlooking the town of Ampatuan — several bodies remained unburied. Some were still in vehicles; in one van the driver was slumped, dead, on the steering wheel.

The backhoe used to dig the graves, its claw stuck in the ground, was still running — a “mute witness to this atrocity,” as Felicisimo Khu, the police superintendent who oversaw the recovery of the bodies, put it. Printed in black ink on the side of the backhoe, as on most of the equipment at infrastructure projects around Maguindanao, was the name of Andal Ampatuan Sr.

According to Chief Superintendent Leonardo Espina of the Manila police, who serves as spokesman for the investigation, the primary suspect in the massacre, Andal Ampatuan Jr., was present when the armed men stopped the convoy. According to the Justice Department, he ordered his men to carry out the slaughter. He did this, investigators said, in full view of witnesses, some of whom have agreed to testify.

Mr. Ampatuan Jr., who is in custody and has been charged with 25 counts of murder, has denied the allegations. This week, the authorities said they had filed rebellion charges against more members of the Ampatuans, days after the government put the whole of Maguindanao Province under martial law. Raids have been conducted by the police and the military in which at least 1,500 firearms and more than half a million rounds of ammunition have been found. On Wednesday, the police said they had named 161 suspects in the massacre.

Andal Ampatuan Sr., his family members and lawyers for the family did not respond to requests for interviews.

With the Ampatuans on the ropes, power in this province appears likely to shift to the family of Mr. Mangudadatu, the Buluan mayor — which has controlled the neighboring province of Sultan Kudarat for years.

Mr. Mangudadatu, 41, has brothers and uncles and cousins holding local positions in Maguindanao and in Sultan Kudarat Province. Unlike Andal Ampatuan Sr., however, not one of his eight children is in power, Mr. Mangudadatu said in an interview.

That may change next year. “I want my eldest son,” he said, “to run as vice mayor to replace me.”

Just days after the massacre, Mr. Mangudadatu filed his candidacy papers for Maguindanao governor and said that only death could stop him from running. At this point, he seems certain to win.

On the day he filed his papers, he was accompanied by Gilberto Teodoro, who will be Mrs. Arroyo’s candidate for president in the election next year. Mr. Mangudadatu will run as a candidate of Mrs. Arroyo’s party, Lakas-Kampi, the same party that helped nurture the Ampatuans for years.

Philippine troops moved in on the southern strongholds of about 4,000 government-armed militiamen loyal to the Ampatuans, the military said Thursday, The Associated Press reported from Manila.

Lt. Col. Romeo Brawner, a spokesman for the armed forces, said the possibility of clashes with the militiamen had risen since a deadline for them to surrender passed and troops headed to their hide-outs in at least seven townships of southern Maguindanao Province.

“We have started moving in and positioning our troops, but there is no actual firefight yet,” Colonel Brawner said, adding that the operation was meant to pressure the militiamen to surrender.

The operation was started after the militiamen failed to heed the warning on thousands of leaflets dropped by helicopters Tuesday for them to surrender in 24 hours.

More leaflets were dropped Thursday, Colonel Brawner said.

Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids

Image via Wikipedia

By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials had acknowledged. Blackwater’s partnership with the C.I.A. has been enormously profitable for the North Carolina-based company, and became even closer after several top agency officials joined Blackwater.

“It became a very brotherly relationship,” said one former top C.I.A. officer. “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, would not comment on Blackwater’s ties to the agency. But he said the C.I.A. employs contractors to “enhance the skills of our own work force, just as American law permits.”

“Contractors give you flexibility in shaping and managing your talent mix — especially in the short term — but the accountability’s still yours,” he said.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Blackwater, said Thursday that it was never under contract to participate in clandestine raids with the C.I.A. or with Special Operations personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.

Blackwater’s role in the secret operations raises concerns about the extent to which private security companies, hired for defensive guard duty, have joined in offensive military and intelligence operations.

Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, said in an interview that “the use of contractors in intelligence and paramilitary operations is a scandal waiting to be examined.” While he declined to comment on specific operations, Mr. Holt said that the use of contractors in such operations “got way out of hand.” He added, “It’s been very troubling to a lot of people.”

Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, has come under intense criticism for what Iraqis have described as reckless conduct by its security guards, and the company lost its lucrative State Department contract to provide diplomatic security for the United States Embassy in Baghdad earlier this year after a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.

Blackwater’s ties to the C.I.A. have emerged in recent months, beginning with disclosures in The New York Times that the agency had hired the company as part of a program to assassinate leaders of Al Qaeda and to assist in the C.I.A.’s Predator drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, recently initiated an internal review examining all Blackwater contracts with the agency to ensure that the company was performing no missions that were “operational in nature,” according to one government official.

Five former Blackwater employees and four current and former American intelligence officials interviewed for this article would speak only on condition of anonymity because Blackwater’s activities for the agency were secret and former employees feared repercussions from the company. The Blackwater employees said they participated in the raids or had direct knowledge of them.

Along with the former officials, they provided few details about the targets of the raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, although they said that many of the Iraq raids were directed against members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. To corroborate the claims of the company’s involvement, a former Blackwater security guard provided photographs to The Times that he said he took during the raids. They showed detainees and armed men whom he and a former company official identified as Blackwater employees. The former intelligence officials said that Blackwater’s work with the C.I.A. in Iraq and Afghanistan had grown out of its early contracts with the spy agency to provide security for the C.I.A. stations in both countries.

In the spring of 2002, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, offered to help the spy agency guard its makeshift Afghan station in the Ariana Hotel in Kabul. Not long after Mr. Prince signed the security contract with Alvin B. Krongard, then the C.I.A.’s third-ranking official, dozens of Blackwater personnel — many of them former members of units of the Navy Seals or Army Delta Force — were sent to provide perimeter security for the C.I.A. station.

But the company’s role soon changed as Blackwater operatives began accompanying C.I.A. case officers on missions, according to former employees and intelligence officials.

A similar progression happened in Iraq, where Blackwater was first hired for “static security” of the Baghdad station. In addition, Blackwater was charged with providing personal security for C.I.A. officers wherever they traveled in the two countries. That meant that Blackwater personnel accompanied the officers even on offensive operations sometimes begun in conjunction with Delta Force or Navy Seals teams.

A former senior C.I.A. official said that Blackwater’s role expanded in 2005 as the Iraqi insurgency intensified. Fearful of the death or capture of one of its officers, the agency banned officers from leaving the Green Zone in Baghdad without security escorts, the official said.

That gave Blackwater greater influence over C.I.A. clandestine operations, since company personnel helped decide the safest way to conduct the missions.

The former American intelligence officials said that Blackwater guards were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to C.I.A. officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents or other targets.

“They were supposed to be the outer layer of the onion, out on the perimeter,” said one former Blackwater official of the security guards. Instead, “they were the drivers and the gunslingers,” said one former intelligence official.

But in the chaos of the operations, the roles of Blackwater, C.I.A., and military personnel sometimes merged. Former C.I.A. officials said that Blackwater guards often appeared eager to get directly involved in the operations. Experts said that the C.I.A.’s use of contractors in clandestine operations falls into a legal gray area because of the vagueness of language laying out what tasks only government employees may perform.

P.W. Singer, an expert in contracting at the Brookings Institution, said that the types of jobs that have been outsourced in recent years make a mockery of regulations about “inherently governmental” functions.

“We keep finding functions that have been outsourced that common sense, let alone U.S. government policy, would argue should not have been handed over to a private company,” he said. “And yet we do it again, and again, and again.”

According to one former Blackwater manager, the company’s involvement with the C.I.A. raids was “widely known” by Blackwater executives. “It was virtually continuous, and hundreds of guys were involved, rotating in and out,” over a period of several years, the former Blackwater manager said.

One former Blackwater guard recalled a meeting in Baghdad in 2004 in which Erik Prince addressed a group of Blackwater guards working with the C.I.A. At the meeting in an air hangar used by Blackwater, the guard said, Mr. Prince encouraged the Blackwater personnel “to do whatever it takes” to help the C.I.A. with the intensifying insurgency, the former guard recalled.

But it is not clear whether top C.I.A. officials in Washington knew or approved of the involvement by Blackwater officials in raids or whether only lower-level officials in Baghdad were aware of what happened on the ground.

The new details of Blackwater’s involvement in Iraq come at a time when the House Intelligence Committee is investigating the company’s role in the C.I.A.’s assassination program, and a federal grand jury in North Carolina is investigating a wide range of allegations of illegal activity by Blackwater and its personnel, including gun running to Iraq.

Several former Blackwater personnel said that Blackwater guards involved in the C.I.A. raids used weapons, including sawed-off M-4 automatic weapons with silencers, that were not approved for use by private contractors. In separate interviews, former Blackwater security personnel also said they were handpicked by senior Blackwater officials on several occasions to participate in secret flights transporting detainees around war zones.

They said that during the flights, teams of about 10 Blackwater personnel provided security over the detainees.

“A group of individuals were selected who could manage detainees without the use of lethal force,” said one former Blackwater guard who participated in one of the flights.

Intelligence officials deny that the agency has ever used Blackwater to fly high-value detainees in and out of secret C.I.A. prisons that were shut down earlier this year. Mr. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesman, said that company personnel were never involved in C.I.A. “rendition flights,” which transferred terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation.

Barclay Walsh contributed research.

Last Chance for Justice in Malaysia

Image via Wikipedia

By JON GORVETT

On the anniversary of the 1948 killing of 24 unarmed workers by British troops on a rubber plantation north of Kuala Lumpur, the victims’ families are once again calling for a full inquiry and compensation.

“We are calling for justice to finally be done,” said Quek Ngee Meng, a lawyer and coordinator of the Batang Kali Massacre Action Committee, a group representing the families. “It is very urgent that justice be done, too, as the survivors are getting old and frail. We are not looking for criminal prosecutions, either, as the survivors can forgive, although they cannot forget.”

The shootings on Dec. 12, 1948, at a settlement of plantation workers by the Batang Kali River, took place during the early days of the conflict known as the Malayan Emergency, when British and Commonwealth troops, along with their Malay allies, fought guerrillas from the Communist Party of Malaya.

The incident was at first praised by the British colonial authorities as a major military victory, with the plantation workers described as terrorists. British troops had been engaged in a weeklong operation in the area after receiving reports of Communist guerrilla activity there. The workers, like many of the Communist guerrillas, were ethnic Chinese, a community widely suspected of Communist sympathies by many in the security forces.

Even at the time, though, the account of a “victory” failed to ring true for many.

“I remember it very clearly when the report first came through that day at brigade intelligence,” said Anthony Short, who was a young soldier serving in Malaya at the time.

“I thought, ‘Christ, this is extraordinary.’ There was no report of prisoners taken or wounded, and no exchange of fire,” said Mr. Short, who later taught history at the University of Malaysia and was commissioned by the post-colonial government to write the official record of the Emergency (“The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960”).

A few weeks after the shootings, a brief inquiry was conducted under the supervision of the colonial attorney general, Sir Stafford Foster Sutton. It found that all the workers who were killed had been unarmed. Most were shot in the back. But it concluded that they had been shot while trying to escape.

Tham Yong remembers it differently, though. Now 78, she is one of the few surviving witnesses to what happened that day at Batang Kali.

“When the soldiers came that day,” she recalled in a recent interview at her home in Ulu Yam Bahru, “they were much more aggressive than we were used to, much more angry.”

When those soldiers left the village the following day, 24 of Tham Yong’s neighbors, family and friends — including her fiancé — lay dead. “I am still angry,” Ms. Tham Yong said. “Why shouldn’t I be? They killed these people. They killed them, and nothing was done.”

The men were separated from the women and children, and both groups were locked into different sides of a partitioned kongsi, or hut, for the night.

“The next day, the soldiers told the women to pack all their belongings and leave, because they were going to torch the village,” she said “They took us and placed us on a truck. Then I saw the men being led down from the other side of the kongsi and divided into three or four groups. The soldiers led them out toward the trees of the rubber plantation. Then I heard the gunshots from five different places. We knew they had all been killed.”

The revelations of U.S. military killings of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968 revived interest in Britain in similar episodes in their own earlier counterinsurgency campaign in Southeast Asia.

In 1970, Britain’s Scotland Yard opened another inquiry, after several of the soldiers who had been there that day — all members of the elite Scots Guards regiment — signed sworn testimonies that they had indeed killed unarmed villagers.

Their statements were printed in a now-defunct British tabloid, The People. “Once we started firing we seemed to go mad,” the People article quoted William Cootes, one of the soldiers, as saying in his testimony. “I remember the water turning red with their blood.”

Yet the commander of the patrol, Charles Douglas, a sergeant at the time, continued to deny that a massacre had taken place.

The 1970 inquiry ended, however, when the newly elected Conservative government said there was insufficient evidence to warrant further proceedings. A plan to send investigators to interview Malaysian witnesses was canceled.

Then, in 1992, a BBC TV documentary titled “In Cold Blood” re-examined the case, prompting the Malaysian authorities to open their own investigation.

This time, the Malaysian witnesses were interviewed, but the inquiry was also dropped before Malaysian detectives could travel to Britain to interview the surviving soldiers. The Malaysian attorney general’s office said that insufficient evidence had been found to charge anyone, and in 1997 the case was closed.

“What we want to do now is put the two halves of the puzzle together,” said Mr. Quek, the lawyer. “Half the inquiry has already been done in the U.K., and half in Malaysia.”

His group is petitioning the Malaysian authorities to release their files to Scotland Yard, and vice versa, creating sufficient evidence to warrant a new inquiry.

Rosalind Britton-Elliott, a spokeswoman for the British Ministry of Defense, said in an interview this month that the ministry stood by a statement it made to the families’ lawyers last August. The statement said that while the ministry recognized the seriousness of the allegations made by the Batang Kali Action Committee, “Very little documentary evidence survives and previous investigations identified concerns about the reliability of this evidence.”

The ministry statement said there were no plans to hold an inquiry, but it also noted that a final decision on whether any further action would be taken on the case had yet to be made. No date has been set for that decision, although lawyers for the victims’ families are planning to open legal proceedings in Britain, if the decision is not to their liking.

“There is no doubt in my mind that it was a massacre,” said Mr. Short. “It is also a disgrace that nothing has been done all these years.”

A frail Ms. Tham Yong — now using a wheelchair after a recent fall — agrees.

“I have been through a very difficult life,” she said. “We were not Communists. We didn’t even know what one was. All these people were killed, but we have never even had an apology.”

Image by Dr.S.Ali Wasif via Flickr

By JANE PERLEZ, SALMAN MASOOD and WAQAR GILLANI

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Investigators from the F.B.I. continued Friday to question five Muslim American men who were arrested in Pakistan earlier this week, but it remained unclear whether the men would be deported to the United States, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said.

“It all depends on the investigations, and things will be clear in a day or two,” said the spokesman, Rashid Mazari.

Officials say the men, from the suburbs of Washington, were en route to North Waziristan for training with the Taliban and al Qaeda to fight American troops in Afghanistan. The police arrested them on Wednesday in Sargodha, a major city in Punjab Province that has become a growing center of militancy.

The F.B.I. said in a statement on Thursday that it wanted the men returned to the United States. The five have not been charged under Pakistani law and it is not clear what they would be charged with in the United States, American officials said.

The minister of law in Punjab, Rana Sanaullah, said Friday the Pakistani authorities wanted to complete their investigation into the links between Pakistani extremist groups and the Americans before granting extradition.

The young men had told investigators they planned to meet near the border between Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, with a person who would then take them to their destination in the tribal areas where the Taliban and al Qaeda are based, Mr. Sanaullah said.

He added that it was important for the Pakistanis to understand which militant groups the young men were in touch with before letting them return to the United States. A United States consular officer was scheduled to see the men on Friday, an American Embassy spokesman said, and they would be asked if they wanted a lawyer to represent them.

The questioning by the American investigators of the five men, aged from their late teens to mid twenties, started early Friday as each of the men was called separately into a room at the Sargodha police headquarters, a local police official said. The senior Pakistani police officials from the city were killing time outside the headquarters building as the Americans conducted their investigation, the local police official said.

On Friday, the Pakistani police also released photographs taken of the men at the police station. According to the police, three are of Pakistani origin, one is of Ethiopian descent and another is of Eritrean background.

The Pakistani police said all five were American citizens, but the American Embassy official said one of the five did not hold an American passport.

The police said Khalid Farooq, the father of Umer, one of the young men, had been arrested and was also being questioned Friday on the grounds that he knew the young men were wanted by the F.B.I. but had not reported their whereabouts.

Mr. Farooq and his wife, who run a computer business in northern Virginia, were in Sargodha when the young men turned up there after landing in Karachi on Nov. 20, police said. Mr. Farooq immigrated to the United States 20 years ago and is an American citizen, the American embassy said. Whether the men acted on a lark or were recruited as part of a larger militant outfit, the case has renewed concerns that American citizens, some with ethnic ties to Pakistan and other Muslim countries, are increasingly at the center of terrorist plots against the United States and other nations.

The youths, from Virginia, may end up being at least the fourth case prosecuted this year in which Muslim Americans traveled to Pakistan to link up with what remains a sprawling network of militant groups in the country.

Earlier this week, an American citizen of Pakistani background, David Coleman Headley, was charged in Chicago with helping plot the 2008 rampage in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 160 people.

In September, F.B.I. agents and police detectives arrested Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Denver airport shuttle bus driver and former coffee-cart vendor, who prosecutors say had traveled to Pakistan for explosives training with two friends from New York. In January, Bryant Neal Vinas, a convert to Islam with family roots in South America, pleaded guilty to receiving training from Al Qaeda after traveling to Pakistan in 2008.

The five men in the current group all said on their visa applications that they were going to a wedding in Karachi, and all five gave the same address in Karachi for their stay in Pakistan, a Pakistani official said.

Their militant contact booked them into a hotel in Lahore, the official said. But once they got there, their contact went to ground and they were stranded.

They then went to Sargodha, home to the central command of Pakistan’s air force, and a city known as a center for anti-India militant groups.

The men were arrested at a four-room home in a government housing complex belonging to an uncle of the eldest of the group, Umer Farooq, 25, according to Chief Anwar.

“We had tips from local people and work of field officers that some foreigners were residing in some area of the city,” the chief said. “We watched them for a day or so and then arrested them.”

Mr. Farooq’s parents were staying at the house at the time, and his father, Khalid, was arrested as well. The police chief said the elder Mr. Farooq knew that his son and the other men were being hunted by the F.B.I., but had failed to inform the authorities of their presence.

Umer Farooq’s mother, Sabria Farooq, who was wearing a traditional chador, was interviewed Thursday at the house. She said she and her husband emigrated to the United States 20 years ago from Sargodha and returned in September to start a computer business, similar to the one they have in the Virginia suburbs close to Washington.

The five men seemed to have plenty of money, according to the police. Mrs. Farooq said one of the men, Waqar Khan, had brought $25,000 from the United States for the trip. In Karachi, the men stayed in a “good local hotel” before moving to Hyderabad, Pakistan, to make contact with a religious school, the police said.

The police identified the others arrested in Sargodha as Ramy Zamzam, 22, a dental student of Egyptian background at Howard University, who was described as a sort of “ringleader”; Ahmed Abdullah Minni, 20, born in Eritrea; and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18, a native Ethiopian. Mr. Khan is of Pakistani background and was reported to have family connections in Karachi. The spellings of the men’s names in various documents and provided by various officials have varied.

The five men bonded together in the jihadi cause, watching jihadist video clips on YouTube that showed attacks by the Taliban on allied forces in Afghanistan, he said. The group also maintained a common e-mail address, Chief Anwar said, employing a technique widely used among militants.

Before they left the United States, the men appeared to have come to the attention of an Islamic militant, identified as Saifullah, through their YouTube activities, the police chief said. Saifullah, who has links to Al Qaeda, traced their e-mail addresses through YouTube, Chief Anwar said.

After establishing the Internet connection with the militant, the men planned their journey to Pakistan and into North Waziristan, where they intended to train near Miram Shah, a headquarters of the Afghan Taliban, the police said.

The men were carrying laptops and maps of Miram Shah, and also of Kohat and Hangu, two major towns in the North-West Frontier Province that serve as the gateway to the tribal areas, the police said.

Sargodha is increasingly well traveled by Pakistani militants from Punjab who head to the Waziristan region for training in explosives and weapons conducted by Taliban and Qaeda operatives.

In the past six months, 24 militants have been arrested in Sargodha, all with ties to the Taliban and Waziristan, the police said recently. “They want to hit America,” said one investigator, who requested anonymity while discussing security matters. “They were highly emotionally motivated.”

Waqar Gillani reported from Sargodha, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Sabrina Tavernise also contributed reporting.

Brazil: Curb Police Violence in Rio, São Paulo

Image via Wikipedia

Extrajudicial Killings Undermine Public Security

December 8, 2009

(Rio de Janeiro) - Police officers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo routinely resort to lethal force, often committing extrajudicial executions and exacerbating violence in both states, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 122-page report, "Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo," examined 51 cases in which police appeared to have executed alleged criminal suspects and then reported the victims had died in shootouts while resisting arrest.

Rio and São Paulo police together kill more than 1,000 people every year in such alleged confrontations. While some of these "resistance" killings by police are legitimate acts of self-defense, many others are extrajudicial executions, the report found.

"Extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "The residents of Rio and São Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police."

Unlawful police killings undercut legitimate efforts in both states to curb criminal violence, much of which is carried out by heavily armed gangs. In Rio, these gangs are largely responsible for one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere. In São Paulo, despite a drop in homicides over the past decade, gang violence also poses a major threat.

Human Rights Watch obtained credible evidence in 51 "resistance" cases that contradicted police officers' claims that victims died in a shootout. For example, in 33 cases, forensic evidence was at odds with the official version of what took place - including 17 cases in which autopsy reports show that police shot their victims at point blank range. The 51 cases do not represent the totality of potential extrajudicial killings, but are indicative of a much broader problem, the report concluded.

The report also draws upon extensive interviews with more than 40 criminal justice officials, including top prosecutors who view extrajudicial executions by the police as a major problem in both states.

Official government statistics support the prosecutors' assessment that the problem is widespread:

The Rio and São Paulo police have killed more than 11,000 people since 2003;

The number of police killings in Rio state reached a record high of 1,330 in 2007 and in 2008, the number was third highest at 1,137;

The number of police killings in São Paulo state, while less than in Rio, is also comparatively high: over the past five years, for example, there were more police killings in São Paulo state (2,176) than in all of South Africa (1,623), a country with a much higher homicide rate than São Paulo.

The high number of police killings is all the more dramatic when viewed alongside the comparatively low numbers of non-fatal injuries of civilians by police and of police fatalities.

The São Paulo Shock Police Command killed 305 people from 2004 through 2008 yet left only 20 injured. In all of these alleged "shootouts," the police suffered one death;

In Rio, police in 10 military policing zones were responsible for 825 "resistance" killings in 2008 while suffering a total of 12 police fatalities;

Rio police arrested 23 people for every person they killed in 2008, and São Paulo police arrested 348 for every kill. By contrast, police in the United States arrested over 37,000 for every person they killed in alleged confrontations that year.

"Police officers are permitted to use lethal force as a last resort to protect themselves or others," Vivanco said. "But the notion that these police killings are committed in self-defense, or justified by high crime rates, does not hold up under scrutiny."

In addition to the many "resistance" killings each year by police on duty, officers kill hundreds more while off-duty, often when they are acting as members of militias in Rio and death squads in São Paulo.

Police officers responsible for unlawful killings in Rio and São Paulo are rarely brought to justice. The principal cause of this chronic failure to hold police to account for murder, the report found, is that the criminal justice systems in both states currently rely almost entirely on police investigators to resolve these cases.

Human Rights Watch found that police officers frequently take steps to cover up the true nature of "resistance" killings. And police investigators often fail to take necessary steps to determine what has taken place, helping to ensure that criminal responsibility cannot be established and that those responsible remain unaccountable.

"So long as they are left to police themselves these executions will continue unchecked, and legitimate efforts to curb violence in both states will suffer," Vivanco said.

The report provides recommendations to Rio and São Paulo authorities for curbing police violence and improving law enforcement. The central recommendation is the creation of specialized units within state prosecutors' offices to investigate "resistance" killings and ensure that officers responsible for extrajudicial executions are brought to justice.

The report also details measures that state and federal authorities should take to maximize the effectiveness of these special units. These include:

Requiring police officers to notify prosecutors of "resistance" killings immediately after they take place;

Establishing and strictly enforcing a crime scene protocol that deters police officers from engaging in false "rescues" and other cover-up techniques;

Investigating potential police cover-up techniques, including false "rescues," and prosecuting officers who engage in them.

Also available in: