Suicide attacks scourge of 21st century, say experts

JERUSALEM, Sept 14: They are deadly killing machines, human weapons whose aim is to kill as many people as possible by killing themselves.

The devastating events in the United States on Tuesday in which hijackers seized aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were the most deadly suicide attacks ever.

But the strategy is not new. It has been cultivated for two decades in the Middle East where Israel has borne the brunt of dozens of suicide attacks by Palestinian Islamic militants opposed to its existence.

"No country is immune to such attacks," said Boaz Ganor, an Israeli expert on the phenomenon.

He said such strikes, which also have taken place in recent years in Sri Lanka, India and Turkey, were so deadly because the weapon was "a human smart bomb".

"Suicide terrorism is a growing phenomena. We see this in the number of states that suffer from this," Ganor said. "This method works for the terrorists as they achieve what they want to achieve, they get much more casualties."

Palestinian suicide bombers are given a bomb, usually packed with nails for more deadly effect, which they are told to detonate in a crowded place so that as many people as possible will be killed and maimed, Israeli experts say.

They are taught they will not be committing suicide which is forbidden by Islam but rather martyring themselves for god and will go straight to heaven.

"Those who are actually involved are highly brain-washed and indoctrinated so they do it blindly," said Palestinian analyst Khalil Shikaki.

They require no skills, other than pressing the detonator of a bomb, and are usually chosen because they are young, religious, poor and easily malleable.

But the Israeli experts say the profile of suicide attackers has changed since a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation erupted last year after peace talks broke down.

Older, more educated, men have strapped explosives to their bodies and blown themselves up in recent months.

Last week, a Palestinian teacher detonated a bomb outside a Jerusalem hospital when confronted by police a block away from a pizzeria where a bomber killed 15 people — mostly women and children — a month ago.

The first attack by an Arab Israeli suicide bomber on September nine raised the spectre for Israel of an "enemy within" the Jewish state. The middle aged man, married with 10 children, killed three other people when he blew himself up at a railway station in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya.

Ganor Dsaid a suicide attack is particularly effective because "it gives the ability to be accurate" and since the attacker is killed "it leaves no trace of the organisation".

Walking through minefields

Modern suicide operations are believed to have their roots in post-revolutionary Iran where thousands of soldiers became human minesweepers, walking through minefields towards their Iraqi enemy and certain death during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war which claimed the lives of nearly a million people on both sides.

Shi’ite Muslim guerillas in Lebanon adopted the strategy during Israel’s invasion in 1983. The guerrillas drove trucks filled with explosives into the Beirut headquarters of French and American peacekeepers and killed themselves along with 241 US marines and 58 French paratroopers. A similar attack killed 60 people at the headquarters of Israeli intelligence in the Lebanese port of tyre.

"The objective is to kill a large number of people so that you inflict greater pain and suffering on the other side and influence its cost-benefit calculation," Shikaki said.

Shortly after the Lebanon attacks, the United States and France ended their peacekeeping missions. Israel eventually withdrew its troops from Beirut to a security zone in south Lebanon, which the Army left in May 2000.

"Their success in achieving their objectives is something that could have been a factor in making other Islamic groups use suicide attacks to achieve their goals," Shikaki said.

But he said the series of Palestinian attacks against Israel in recent years had failed to pressure it to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israelis, Shikaki explained, viewed these suicide bombings as strikes against "the very existence" of the Jewish state.

The stated aim of the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups — behind the suicide bombing campaign in Israel — is to set up an Islamic state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel.

Suicide attacks spread to the Tamil tigers in Sri Lanka and India, where a suicide bomber killed former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

The Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) employed the method to carry out more than a dozen attacks against Turkish personnel in the 1990s, frequently using female suicide bombers.

"Suicide attacks are the weapon of the weak. This is clearly not something that a stronger party would use as those who have tanks or airplanes or nuclear weapons do not need to use suicide attacks," Shikaki said.

"It’s very difficult to combat someone who is determined to kill himself or herself. What you want to combat is the environment that leads to this, including political grievances and cultural issues."

Ganor said that without proper intelligence information, virtually nothing can be done to prevent suicide attacks.

"No country is invulnerable to suicide attacks," he said. "When you have people who are ready to commit suicide all the defensive measures become not irrelevant, but it’s very problematic to try stopping suicide terrorism (once it starts)."

And, Ganor said, copy cat attacks could follow Tuesday’s suicide strikes in the United States.

"When a ‘successful’ terrorist activity is executed, there are other terrorist organisations that try to imitate it." (REUTERS)

US keeps security tight, Manila plot suspected

TOKYO, Sept 14: Security at airports and US facilities throughout the world remained tight today, with nerves further frayed by the apparent discovery of a plan to bomb the American embassy in Manila.

Three days after hijacked commercial jetliners slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Philippine Police said militants may have planned a simultaneous bomb attack on the Manila Embassy.

Three men, all nationals from Oman, were taken in for questioning in the city last week after they were found video-taping the Embassy, Police Intelligence Director Robert Delfin told Reuters.

There was no evidence to hold them further and the three left for Thailand on Sunday, Delfin said. But a later search of their room at the bay view hotel, which is opposite the Embassy, indicated residue of bomb-making material, he said.

"The feeling is they may have planned to attack the embassy before September 11 or on September 11," a presidential spokesman told Reuters.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, currently on a visit to Tokyo, had earlier told a news conference here that no one had been arrested.

Elsewhere in Asia, police have reinforced security at 150 US-related facilities across Japan, National Public Safety Commission Chairman Jin Murai said today, declining to specify exact locations.

Members of the Japan Coast Guard dressed in bullet-proof vests have been guarding the US navy’s Yokosuka base southwest of Tokyo around the clock since early wednesday, local media said.

Strict security checks continued in Malaysia and the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents US businesses, said the measures imposed this week would continue indefinitely until it gets a clearer picture on the US Government’s response.

Security was tighter than ever in the United States.

The secret services expanded a security cordon around the perimeter of the White House yesterday. They also evacuated Vice President Dick Cheney to the Camp David presidential retreat to ensure that America’s two top officials were not in the same place, officials said.

Interceptor aircraft were on "strip alert" across the country, ready to scramble into the air within minutes if needed, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday.

Under strip alert, planes must be airborne within 15 minutes of being called to action. Aircraft continued to patrol the area between Washington and New York.

"We have continued to fly so-called ‘path’ aircraft in the Washington-New York corridor. I have not made a decision as to when I will call that down," Rumsfeld said.

The three main New York area airports were shut down and remained closed early today.

Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said one person carrying false identification had been arrested at New York’s Kennedy Airport yesterday and "five or six" others were detained.

New security regulations were introduced at airports on yesterday, withdrawing Kerb-side baggage check-in and preventing passengers from carrying knives on board.

But a pilot and two ground crew employees of northwest airlines breached security at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport yesterday in an apparent deliberate test of new regulations that took effect nationwide, officials said.

The incident prompted the evacuation of about 200 people at the airports terminal 3, Pastor said.

There were many false alarms and hoaxes around the world.

In Singapore, reports of a bomb jangled nerves until police revealed that construction workers had unearthed a mortar round dating from the second world war.

Police in Singapore also said an IBM employee from New Zealand would face court charges over a hoax e-mail message claiming a bomb was on board a Singapore Airlines plane bound for South Africa.

The phony threat — made just a day after the devastating terror attacks — had delayed flight sq 422 from Singapore to Johannesburg for six hours on Wednesday.

Ammunitions test by the Canadian navy yesterday prompted a flood of calls to emergency lines by people already on edge because of the terror attacks.

Americans were not alone in feeling threatened as anti-Muslim feeling simmered around the world.

A mosque was firebombed in Brisbane overnight, Australian police said on Friday. Two molotov cocktails were thrown at the mosque, but there were no injures and only minor damage, police said.

There was a further bomb threat at a Mosque in Washington.

In Europe, too, Muslims found themselves the focus of unwelcome attention.

World leaders including US President George W Bush have issued pleas that Muslim communities be treated with tolerance. (REUTERS)

Officials pledge to wage first war of century
Military on alert, US ponders next move

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, Sept 14: Military aircraft patrolled the skies over major US cities as officials pledged to wage "the first war of the 21st century" against shadowy militants believed responsible for the worst attack ever staged on American soil.

A nervous nation reopened its airports while countless bomb threats emptied buildings across the country — including the US capitol, where lawmakers were interrupted by evacuation orders as they met to discuss emergency funds to help the nation recover from Tuesday’s terror attack.

President George W Bush, wiping tears from his eyes, vowed to "whip terrorism" and officials focused on exiled Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden, an implacable US foe with a global network of supporters.

Officials decided to move Vice President Dick Cheney from the White House to the camp David presidential retreat in Maryland as a "precautionary measure," separating the nation’s two top leaders.

In New York, rescue workers searching the ruins of the World Trade Center, where officials said 4,763 people were still unaccounted for after two hijacked planes destroyed the twin towers that anchored the nation’s financial district.

Tearful New Yorkers clutching pictures of missing friends and relatives roamed the streets, while across the country anxious Arab-Americans worried about reprisals.

Worried international economic officials sought to counter growing fears the terror attack could trigger a global recession, while the resumption of stock trading was postponed until Monday.

Secretary of State Colin Powell became the first senior US official to publicly identify Bin Laden as a suspect for Tuesday’s airplane attacks, which crumbled the 110-story World Trade Center towers and left 20,000 people either killed or unaccounted for at the Pentagon.

But aides to Bin Laden, accused of engineering attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 from his Afghanistan headquarters, told journalists in Pakistan that the shadowy leader denied involvement in the attacks, which he described as "punishment from almighty allah."

With officials mulling retaliation options ranging from heavy bombing to elite troop strikes, one senior official told reporters that more than one extremist organization may have been involved and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States had yet to decide if Bin Laden was to blame.

Fears the terror could continue were stoked Thursday when officials at New York’s Kennedy Airport — opened for business after being closed for two days — arrested one person carrying false identification and detained "five or six" others.

Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told a news conference that some of those detained were Arabs, and that the arrested man attempted to clear security with false identification and a pilot’s license.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said later that officials did not believe other attacks were imminent.

Tuesday’s attack — relived repeatedly on video as television networks went to 24-hour news coverage — sent two passenger planes smashing into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, which later collapsed.

One other passenger jet was sent hurtling into the Pentagon, the nerve-center of the US military, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers, told of the earlier attacked, apparently sought to resist the hijackers.

Officials said they had located the black box flight recorder from this flight, which might provide valuable new evidence of the events aboard. Officials said they also believed they were zeroing on a black box in the Pentagon wreckage.

In Washington, Ashcroft told reporters that officials believed they had identified at least 18 hijackers, all of whom had tickets as passengers, who comandeered the four planes.

He added that the hijackers were believed to have a "significant" number of associates presumably still at large.

Calling the attacks the start of "the first war of the 21st century," an emotional President Bush said the United States and its allies were ready to "whip terrorism" and declared Friday a national day of mourning for the victims.

He planned to visit New York that day to support the thousands of volunteers risking their lives to help others in an extraordinary outpouring of heroism by ordinary people.

Defense officials, promising a "sustained engagement" against extremist forces, sent military aircraft into the skies over Washington DC and seven other cities, and officials said rumsfeld was considering calling up thousands of military reservists to help maintain security and join active military units being prepared for possible relatiatory strikes.

In New York, Mayor Rudi Giuliani said the situation around the devastated high-rise was "horrible and gruesome."

"I’m sorry that I have to describe it that way, but that’s unfortunately the situation that we’re facing," he said, adding that 4,763 people were missing from the twin towers.

While the official death toll from the World Trade Center rose to 94, officials said body parts were being recovered and ordered more than 6,000 body bags. Around 3,800 were injured.

Outside hospitals, desperate people clutching pictures of friends and loved ones gathered in hopes of locating some of those still missing. Buildings across the city were heavily guarded by security staff, and police said there had been about 90 different bomb scares since Wednesday night — including one that evacuated the empire state building.

At the attack site, rescue work in the hellish ruins was hampered as authorities kept a wary eye on one liberty plaza, which was feared unstable after sustaining damaged in Tuesday’s attack on the the huge commercial complex.

"It is a fight," said Joe Allbaugh, director of the federal emergency management agency. "The rescue workers are putting their lives on the line. Time is not on our side."

But renewed hope swept through exhausted rescue teams after word that five firefighters had been pulled alive from the wreckage of towers where 40,000 people once worked. There were conflicting reports as to whether they had been buried in the initial collapses or had been trapped since then.

The nation’s air transport system slowly began resuming operations, although with severe new security measures in place and warnings of long delays. German shepherd dogs patrolled at one airport and officials put an end to such conveniences as driving up to terminals in passengers cars and checking baggage at the curb.

But air traffic around the world remained in chaos, with thousands of passengers stranded at european airports. Several flights bound for the United States were forced to turn back thursday after US authorities said no foreign-flagged carriers would be allowed to land at US airports.

Arab-Americans feared backlash attacks and reports of vandalism, threats and other kinds of intimidation surfaced coast to coast as the investigation pointed toward a Middle East connection.

One Muslim woman in Suburban Chicago said she, her husband and their eight children endured a night of terror. "We had people riding up and down our block shouting obscenities. ‘Go home you bleeping ragheads, bleeping a-rabs, we’re gonna get you," said the woman.

Economic fears were also increasing as US stock markets remained closed and New York’s financial district lay stricken. Central banks declared themselves ready to defend their currencies, and US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill declared himself confident in the US economy.

Equity markets faced a third straight day of paralysis, the longest shutdown since world war one. Trading in treasury bonds resumed but was thin with many traders unable to see prices once provided by firms in the destroyed World Trade Center.

Central banks worked together to inject 120 billion dollars into the global financial system to help it beat back fears of a global recession, and expectations grew that the US federal reserve might cut interest rates soon — by as much as a half a percentage point — to bolster the world’s richest economy. (REUTERS)

Indonesia Muslims angered but scared by US attacks

JAKARTA, Sep 14: Muslim leaders in Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic nation, have joined the international outrage over the terror attacks against the United States, but warned the world to avoid an anti-Muslim backlash.

They also called on Washington and the western media against hasty condemnation of Muslim Arabs over the attacks, warning such action could stoke anti-Islamic passions.

"Such attacks on such a grand scale — it’s very outrageous, it’s worth every condemnation," Muslim cleric Yusuf Muhammad from the powerful nation awakening party told Reuters.

"Whoever carried out the attack did not have a right to do it in the name of the religion, namely Islam... Killing innocents to achieve a target has never been the heart of the religion."

Suspicion is increasingly focusing on Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden. Although his aids have denied his involvement, and Washington has yet to decide if he was behind the violence, the shadowly leader described this week’s carnage as "punishment from almighty Allah".

As millions of Muslims crowded into mosques around Indonesia for today’s Islamic sabbath, clerics prayed for the victims but also warned against painting Muslims as killers.

Masduki Baidhowi, a top official with Indonesia’s largest Muslim group, the 40 million strong Nahdlatul Ulama, condemned the New York and Washington attacks, but urged the United States to protect its Muslim citizens from revenge.

"Needless to say, we strongly condemn these acts of terror... But we also regret the retaliation against our brothers," he told Reuters. "The people should not generalise wrongdoers as one whole group.

"This was not an act of religion."

He added the U.S. Government should not reinforce stereotypes of Arab-Americans as terrorists.

There have been reports of anti-Muslim violence in the United States and Australia after the deadly attacks, which have killed hundreds and left thousands more missing.

A mosque was firebombed in Australia’s conservative northern state of Queensland and Islamic groups said a busload of Muslim schoolchildren was stoned in the southern city of Melbourne.

Australian Muslims came under attack during the Gulf war in 1991 and after the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing in the United States.

"The Muslim community has grown used to being the victims during the immediate aftermath of almost every terrorist act," said Aishah Amini, a legislator with Indonesian vice president Hamzah Haz’s Muslim-oriented United Development Party.

"The whole popular concept of terrorism needs to be changed."

Malaysia and Bangladesh, both asian countries with large Muslim populations, have also offered support for stern action against people or states involved in terrorism after the attacks on the United States.(REUTERS)

| home | state | national | business | editorial | advertisement | sports
| international | weather | mailbag | suggestions | search | subscribe | send mail |