Security on high alert after al-Qaeda threat

ISLAMABAD: Interior Ministry issued directives to security agencies here to put security of a foreign airline and offices of foreign diplomats on high alert in all provinces after Saudi airline received an alleged threatening e-mail from al Qaeda, sources said on Wednesday.

According to sources, the airline received a threatening e-mail on February 14 to devastate its offices in Pakistan. Al Qaeda allegedly generated the e-mail.

Meanwhile, another alleged e-mail was received in Islamabad which threatened to destroy Saudi embassy following which embassy’s officials consulted with interior ministry to seek foolproof security measures for its offices across country, sources added.

Osama bin Laden may well be in Parachinar: Report

CALIFORNIA: Fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden is most likely hiding out in a walled compound in a Pakistani border town, according to a satellite-aided geographic analysis released today.

A research team led by geographer Thomas Gillespie of the University of California-Los Angeles used geographic analytical tools that have been successful in locating urban criminals and endangered species.

Basing their conclusion on nighttime satellite images and other techniques, the scientists suggest bin Laden may well be in one of three compounds in Parachinar, a town 12 miles from the Pakistan border. The research incorporates public reports of bin Laden’s habits and whereabouts since his flight from the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in 2001.

The results, reported in the MIT International Review, are being greeted with polite but skeptical interest among people involved in the hunt for bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind 9/11. Bin Laden’s whereabouts are considered “one of the most important political questions of our time,” the study notes.

“I’ve never really believed the sitting-in-a-cave theory. That’s the last place you would want to be bottled up,” Gillespie says. The study’s real value, he says, is in combining satellite records of geographic locations, patterns of nighttime electricity use and population-detection methods to produce a technique for locating fugitives.

source : jang.com.pk

Iraqi army finds 10 bodies in mass grave

BAGHDAD: The Iraqi army has uncovered 10 bodies in a shallow mass grave north of the capital believed to date back about two years to a period when Al-Qaeda terrorised the area, the military said on Sunday.

Army spokesman Major General Mohammed al-Askari said the skeletons were found on Saturday in Al-Taji, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Baghdad. “The graves and the bones date back to about two years ago and are believed to be the work of Al-Qaeda,” he told.