World Watch

• Share

WAR ON TERROR
Girding for the Next Attack
With Osama bin Laden's taped threats still ringing in their ears, security agencies around the world wondered when and where the next strike might come. Governments from Britain to Australia had the impossible task of warning citizens about the danger while urging them to live normally.

German authorities debated how to improve security at streetside Christmas markets, fearing an attack similar to one foiled in Strasbourg last year; rather than spook people with armed police in riot gear, officials in Cologne decided to train plainclothesmen to guard the city's famous holiday market. Officials were especially jittery at the NATO summit in Prague, after two attempts to derail commuter trains ahead of the meeting. The unknown saboteurs were amateurish — they parked a car on the tracks in one instance and planted a homemade bomb in the other — but just to be safe, the government slapped a 30-km/h speed limit on trains in the capital.

Intelligence experts elsewhere worried that Eastern and Central European countries were not doing enough to prevent terrorist groups from funneling men and money into the E.U. Jonathan Eyal, director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London, warns that the large numbers of Middle Eastern students in the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria "could be breeding grounds for terrorist activities." The arrest in London of a North African who had lived in Slovakia for a year did nothing to dispel these fears. Rabah Kadre and two other North African Muslims were arrested under the Terrorism Act, but their specific offense remained a mystery. British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott dismissed reports that they had been plotting a cyanide-gas attack in the London Underground. But newspapers said they had received the information from security sources, suggesting that different arms of the government were not in sync.

The British weren't alone in fearing chemical weapons. The U.S. embassy in Rome was awaiting the arrival of "escape hoods" — protective gear worn over the head and shoulders to allow staff to escape a chemical attack — for all of its over 700 employees as part of a new State Department program to supply its overseas stations with safety garb. And security agencies in Australia conducted practice drills to rehearse their response to a chemical, biological or radiological strike. One Islamist website warned that an attack would come Friday, but the day passed without incident.

YEMEN
Another Big Al-Qaeda Catch In Yemen
The political calculation: the Bush Administration wanted everyone to know it had nabbed an al-Qaeda big. The security calculation: it didn't want anyone to know who the person was, while it "tickled the wires" — tried to provoke the terrorists into communications and movement that the U.S. could monitor. But the balls only stayed in the air a few days. Last week word leaked out that the captive was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a thirtyish Saudi and a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant with a taste for naval terrorism. He is suspected of masterminding the seagoing attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 and at least two other, abortive plots against Western ships. FBI agents also believe he trained the suicide bombers who carried out the 1998 East African embassy bombings.

Al-Nashiri may not be a household name, but he's a good catch. He has been in U.S. gunsights for ages. On the morning of Sept. 11, new FBI Director Robert Mueller was being shown his picture, along with those of other suspects in the Cole bombing, when word of the World Trade Center attack arrived.

Al-Nashiri's capture follows another success in Yemen earlier this month, when senior al-Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and five others were incinerated by a missile fired by a CIA-operated Predator drone. American officials hope al-Nashiri will lead them to others involved in the Cole and embassy bombings. Says one: "Clearly this is an opportunity to fill in some of the blanks." — By Johanna McGeary. Reported by Elaine Shannon/ Washington

NIGERIA
beauty and the beasts
Riots and killings spread across northern Nigeria last week in the run-up to Miss World 2002. The Dec. 7 pageant, which was moved from Abuja to London because of the unrest, had already attracted controversy because of a Nigerian Islamic court's recent decision to sentence an unmarried mother to death by stoning for adultery. Nigerian Muslims called the contest indecent and said it promoted promiscuity. When an article in local newspaper This Day suggested that the Prophet Muhammad would have chosen a wife from among the pageant's contestants, things turned ugly. Muslims in the northern city of Kaduna rioted, burning the newspaper's local office and destroying at least four churches; violence spread to Abuja. "The entire Muslim world condemns this misguided, provocative and most dangerous publication," says Malam Zubair Jibril, a Muslim leader in the north. Local Christians retaliated, killing Muslims and setting fire to mosques. The Nigerian Red Cross puts the death toll at more than 120. "Everything I had is gone," said John, a Christian, as he clutched his baby daughter and led his wife away from their burning home. "All this for a beauty show." — By Simon Robinson. With reporting by Phil Akhaine/Kaduna

FRANCE
In the Picture
A judge ordered three photographers to stand trial for taking pictures of the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, and her lover Dodi Fayed in August 1997. Jacques Langevin, Christian Martinez and Fabrice Chassery will be tried in criminal court next year after a complaint by Mohamed al Fayed, Dodi's father. They will face charges of breaching privacy laws by taking pictures of Dodi inside the wrecked car. The trial will test the part of French law that regards the interior of a car as private even if on a public road.

DENMARK
Under Suspicion
A municipal court placed the former head of the Iraqi army under travel restrictions on charges of complicity in chemical-weapons attacks on Kurds in the late 1980s. General Nizar al-Khazraji, who has lived in Denmark since 1999, was accused of participating in Operation Anfal, which included a 1988 gas attack on Halabja that killed 5,000 Kurdish civilians. Khazraji, a possible successor to Saddam Hussein, said Iraqi secret police had made up the claims to stop him from organizing a dissident movement.

KUWAIT
In the Firing Line
A Kuwaiti policeman, Khalid Messier al-Shimmari, was arrested in Saudi Arabia for shooting and seriously wounding two U.S. soldiers near Kuwait City. The attack followed the killing of another American soldier in October. Kuwait hosts 10,000 U.S. troops and the emirate is expected to be one of the launch pads for any invasion of neighboring Iraq.

SOUTH AFRICA
Race War
Police investigating an alleged plot by white extremists to topple the government found a cache of 26 bombs in the farming area of Keimoes in Northern Cape province. A group calling itself Warriors of the Boer Nation claimed responsibility for last month's Soweto bombings, which killed one woman.

PAKISTAN
Narrow Victory
After some arm-twisting by military ruler Pervez Musharraf, the National Assembly chose Zafarullah Jamali as Prime Minister, the first since a 1999 military coup. Losing candidate Shah Mahmood Quereshi claimed Musharraf used threats and bribes to persuade some assemblymen to switch sides. A last-minute waiver of rules forbidding party defections allowed Jamali to scrape through on a single-vote majority. Although he has the dictator's backing, Jamali's government is expected to be hamstrung by opposition from anti-Musharraf parties.

INDONESIA
On the Case
Police said they had captured the "mastermind" behind last month's Bali bombing in which at least 190 people died. Computer expert Imam Samudra, 35, confessed to choosing the nightclub as a target and leading planning meetings. He also confessed to a string of bomb attacks on churches in 2000.

MEANWHILE
Lightyear's Ahead
Galactic hero Buzz Lightyear took time off battling the evil Zorg to fight crime in Hereford, Britain. Police were looking for a thief who'd stolen a toy from Woolworth's, when an electronic voice crackled out: "Buzz Lightyear, permission to engage!" They found the crook hiding under a bridge.