Washington: A federal appeals court on Tuesday backed the US government's decision not to release photos and video taken of Osama bin Laden during and after a raid in which the terrorist leader was killed by US commandos.
The three-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia turned down an appeal from Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the images.
The Defense Department said it didn't turn up anything pertinent to the FOIA. The CIA had found 52 such records, but withheld all of them, citing exemptions for classified materials and information specifically exempted by other laws.
In Tuesday's ruling, the appeals court said that the CIA properly withheld publication of the images of the al Qaeda leader. The court concluded that the photos used to conduct facial recognition analysis of bin Laden could reveal classified intelligence methods, and that images of bin Laden's burial at sea could trigger violence against American citizens....
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10:46 PM, May 21, 2013
Washington: A purported new issue of an English-language al Qaeda magazine, linked to the Boston terrorist attacks, has been posted on the web but its contents were hacked. The "Inspire" magazine, produced by al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate - al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which regularly includes how-to instructions for followers to carry out terrorist attacks in the West - has received significant scrutiny in recent weeks. Investigators believe that...
05:42 PM, May 17, 2013
Washington: In an unusual move, US Justice Department secretly obtained two months' of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press, an action termed by the global news wire as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how it gathers the news. The Justice Department obtained secret records as part of a year-long investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a failed al-Qaeda plot in 2012. The Associated Press,...
10:56 AM, May 14, 2013
Islamabad: Former premier Yousuf Raza Gilani's son Ali Haider, kidnapped by gunmen while campaigning for Pakistan's landmark elections, had received threats from the banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba. Though no group has claimed responsibility for the abduction, Gilani and other members of his family told The Express Tribune that Ali Haider had been receiving "death and kidnapping threats" from the LeJ and Sipah-e-Sahaba. Ali Haider, 27, was kidnapped on Thursday while...
12:13 PM, May 10, 2013
Baghdad: At least 27 people were killed and dozens more wounded on Thursday when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a Baghdad cafe popular with teenagers using the Internet, police and hospital officials said. Police and witnesses said emergency workers were still pulling out victims trapped when the blast collapsed part of the building in the west of the Iraqi capital. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing,...
02:36 AM, Apr 19, 2013
Mogadishu: At least 19 people were killed in the Somali capital on Sunday in suicide bombings and assaults by al Shabaab militants linked to al Qaeda, breaking a fragile return to peace in Mogadishu. A bomb exploded outside law courts in the city as gunmen stormed the compound. Security forces then arrived and battled the fighters inside. Later, a bomb exploded near an African Union and Turkish Red Crescent convoy...
07:20 AM, Apr 15, 2013
New York: Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, charged in New York last month with conspiring to kill American nationals, will face trial in January next year, a US judge has ruled. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith had appeared with bin Laden and his then-deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri after the 9/11 attacks and spoke on behalf of al Qaeda and in support of its mission. He had warned that 9/11 type attacks would continue. US...
10:49 PM, Apr 10, 2013
New York: A federal trial for a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden accused of conspiring to kill Americans will begin in January 2014 in Manhattan, a judge ruled on Tuesday. Suleiman Abu Ghaith, who acted as an al Qaeda spokesman in videos, is one of the highest-ranking al Qaeda figures to face trial in the United States for crimes related to the September 11 attacks. He was captured in Jordan...
06:53 AM, Apr 10, 2013
Imphal: A young Manipuri, serving as a Lieutenant in the British Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service, Khwairakpam Robin Singh, will receive the Star of Gallantry and the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross from the United Kingdom, for his exceptional bravery in week long fierce battle against the Al Qaeda in interior Afghanistan in 2011. The 27-year-old lead scout was part of a 47 member special force team, including 40 commandos, called in as...
07:58 AM, Mar 25, 2013
The al Qaeda-linked North African warlord Abou Zeid was killed in combat with French troops in Mali in February, France said on Saturday, ending weeks of uncertainty about whether one of the group's leading commanders was dead. ...
09:00 PM, Mar 23, 2013
Security forces in the Afghan capital have defused a truck bomb packed with nearly eight tonnes of explosives, the biggest of its kind discovered in the country, the spy agency said on Friday amid heightened security. Intelligence forces discovered the explosives in eastern Kabul, wired and ready for detonation, security officials said. ...
05:56 PM, Mar 15, 2013
Seven foreign hostages kidnapped last month by a Nigerian Islamist group from a construction company compound have been killed, the Italian and Greek foreign ministries said on Sunday. The al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansaru announced on Saturday that it had killed the hostages seized on February 7 in the northern state of Bauchi because of attempts by Nigerian and British forces to free them. ...
02:55 PM, Mar 11, 2013
A son-in-law of Osama bin Laden pleaded not guilty in a New York court on Friday to conspiring to kill Americans, becoming one of the highest-ranking al Qaeda figures to face trial in the United States for crimes connected to the September 11, 2001 attacks. ...
09:29 AM, Mar 09, 2013
Chadian soldiers in Mali have killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the al Qaeda commander behind a bloody mass hostage-taking at an Algerian gas plant in January, Chad's military said on Saturday. ...
03:26 AM, Mar 03, 2013
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Islamist movement's most active branch, has released an English-language magazine advising would-be terrorists on how to torch parked cars and cause traffic accidents. ...
10:53 PM, Mar 02, 2013
Nearly two years after the killing of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the UN Security Council has deleted his name from its sanctions list. The powerful 15-member council, however, will continue a freeze on bin Laden's assets to prevent them from being used by others for terrorist activities. ...
05:13 PM, Feb 27, 2013
President Barack Obama on February 14 promised to be more forthcoming with the American public on his administration's campaign of lethal drone strikes amid criticism over the targeting of suspected US terrorism suspects abroad. Obama, under pressure from the left and right to allow greater scrutiny of the secret decision-making process for killing Americans overseas, vowed to work with Congress to craft a "mechanism" to be more open about how...
10:53 AM, Feb 15, 2013
In their hurry to flee last month, al Qaeda fighters left behind a crucial document: Tucked under a pile of papers and trash is a confidential letter, spelling out the terror network's strategy for conquering northern Mali and reflecting internal discord over how to rule the region. ...
02:21 AM, Feb 15, 2013
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday said the daring operation to kill Osama bin Laden at his Abbottabad safe house in Pakistan was very risky as the al- Qaeda chief's presence there was not 100 per cent confirmed. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Panetta played a leading role in the finding and killing of bin Laden. Subsequently he was made the Defense Secretary by President Barack Obama....
02:04 PM, Feb 14, 2013
US President Barack Obama said Tuesday he will bring home within a year about half of the 66,000 US troops now in Afghanistan, shrinking the force to the size he found it when he entered the White House vowing to reinvigorate a stalemated war. ...
09:27 AM, Feb 13, 2013
