South Carolina – Deputies Discover Grenade at Restaurant Parking Lot

Lexington deputies are investigating a Hardee’s parking lot in West Columbia, after they discovered a live grenade there.

Major John Allard with the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department say they received called at about 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

Deputies say they found what appeard to be a live grenade that was in rear of parking lot at Hardee’s, near the Wal-Mart Supercenter in West Columbia.

Lexington County Bomb Squad investigators sent a truck to remove the grenade. They say they will dispose of the grenade at a later date.

Authorities are still investigating how the explosive made its way to the restaurant.

Deputies say there was no indication of the grenade being used to damage the building or harming anyone.

Source

The Way to Contain the Conspiracies – New Message From Osama bin Laden Forthcoming

SITE Intelligence Group has learned that a new message is forthcoming from Osama bin Laden, the head of Al-Qaeda, addressing Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq.

The message is produced by As-Sahab, the multimedia arm of Al-Qaeda, and is titled, “The Way to Contain the Conspiracies”. The announcement of this impending released was posted to jihadist forums today, Thursday, December 27, 2007, and gave the duration of the tape as 56 minutes and 10 seconds.

It also stated: “May Allah demean the Front of Shame and Dinar, and may the Merciful One reveal the confusion of Al-Jazeera, the station of the infidels.”

Developing…

Terror Threat Was Issued Hours Before Bhuttos Assassination

A terror threat was issued in Pakistan just hours before former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The threat specifically stated that authorities had information that suicide terrorists may target religious and spiritual leaders and that additional security would be provided for Bhutto.

Security agencies in the Pakistani capital have been put on high alert following an intelligence report that terrorists may strike in the city and target top politicians and religious leaders.

A senior officer said police and the city administration had been warned by the Interior Ministry that suicide attacks could take place in Islamabad.

According to the Interior Ministry’s letter, terrorists could target high-profile politicians and religious leaders.

Security had been tightened in and around the capital and the high alert would stay in force till the January 8 general election, the officer told Dawn newspaper.

Three wings of the paramilitary Pakistan Rangers, personnel from the “Elite Force” of Punjab Constabulary and city police have been deployed at sensitive places in Islamabad to avert any attack.

A senior police officer said security has been provided to top politicians, including Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chairperson and former premier Banazir Bhutto, and religious leaders who faced threats. They have been provided with police motorcades for moving around the city and police forces have been deployed at their homes.

The administration and police have reviewed security arrangements in the city and started restructuring police pickets. Law enforcement personnel have also started checking hotels, inns and bus stands.

“We have been keeping a strict vigil on suspicious people staying in hotels and inns and moving around bust stops,” an officer said.

Intelligence agencies have been asked to keep an eye on suspicious people and send reports to the city administration.

The federal government has also directed all provinces and the Islamabad capital territory to step up security around 10 Shia individuals and political leaders following intelligence reports that Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud had placed them on his hit list.

Sources said the hit list prepared by Mehsud, who was recently named chief of newly formed Tehrik Taliban-e-Pakistan, contained the names of 10 individuals.

The Tehrik Taliban-e-Pakistan, which comprises Pakistani Taliban groups from different parts of the country’s restive northwestern tribal areas, recently claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on an army convoy in Swat that killed nine persons.

The sources also said militants from the Dara Adam Khel area had been given the task of targeting persons on the hit list.

Among the persons believed to be on the hit list are retired judge and PPP leader Ibn-i-Ali; his son, Additional Sessions Judge Ehtisham Ali; former provincial assembly member Qalb-i-Hassan; and Fazal Abbas, the Pir of Kalaya. The list also includes the caretakers of three Shia ‘imambargahs’ in Kohat.

Source

BREAKING: Benazir Bhutto Assassinated at Rally in Pakistan

Update: 9:07 (PST) al Qaeda Takes Claims Responsibility In Bhutto Assassination

A spokesperson for the al-Qaeda terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the death on Thursday of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.

It is believed that the decision to kill Bhutto, who is the leader of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), was made by al-Qaeda No. 2, the Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri in October.

Death squads were allegedly constituted for the mission and ultimately one cell comprising a defunct Lashkar-i-Jhangvi’s Punjabi volunteer succeeded in killing Bhutto.

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Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday, shot in the neck and chest at a campaign rally before a homicide bomber blew himself up, killing 20 others.

The death of the 54-year-old charismatic former prime minister threw the campaign for Pakistan’s Jan. 8 parliamentary elections into chaos and created fears of mass protests and violence across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.

The attacker struck just minutes after Bhutto addressed thousands of supporters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, 8 miles south of Islamabad. She was shot in the neck and chest by the attacker, who then blew himself up, said Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s security adviser.

Bhutto was rushed to the hospital and taken into emergency surgery.

“At 6:16 p.m., she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital.

“The surgeons confirmed that she has been martyred,” Bhutto’s lawyer Babar Awan said.

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Live Streaming Coverage – CNN 

15 Year Old Suicide Bomber Stopped at Bhutto Rally

Police in Pakistan have stopped a 15-year-old boy they say was carrying a bomb made of dynamite and nails from gettnig into a rally by opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

The boy got past the first of four security checkpoints set up outside the rally in the northwestern city of Peshawar but was caught at the second, said police officer Rahim Shah, according to the Associated Press.

In October, suicide bombers struck a parade celebrating Ms Bhutto’s return from exile, killing more than 140 people in the southern city of Karachi.

Georgia State Capitol Offices Evacuated – Suspicous Packages

State employees are returning to work at the Georgia Capitol after suspicious packages discovered there prompted a partial evacuation this morning. Trooper Larry Schnall, a spokesman for the Capitol Police, says part of the Capitol was evacuated while a bomb detection unit investigated. The packages were removed and employees were allowed back to the building.

Buzz Weiss, spokesman for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, says State Capitol Police and the Atlanta Police Department’s bomb squad were investigating material that was
discovered on the second floor of the Capitol.

Weiss says that parts of the governor’s office and the office of the secretary of state were evacuated.

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Video Shows Car Carrying 6 Al Qaeda Leaders Blown Up By U.S. Helicopter

A grainy videotape released Tuesday shows a carload of important Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq being blown up by missiles from a U.S. Army chopper, military officials said.

At least one of the dead operatives was a “high-value” target linked to suicide bomb attacks, including the car bombing of the Australian Embassy in Baghdad, an Army spokesman told FoxNews.com.

Of the six men killed in the Sunday attack, one was “believed to be an Al Qaeda cell leader known to facilitate attacks and orchestrate suicide bomb attacks,” Maj. Alayne Conway of the 3rd Infantry Division told Fox.

Conway did not release the insurgent’s name but said he was arrested Nov. 11 and later released. It is believed he had conducted two attacks on coalition forces, including one on Thanksgiving, Conway said.

The black-and-white 31-second video was shot from the sky and shows a small black sedan idling before it was hit byHellfire missiles shot from an Apache helicopter.

Military officials told Fox that a tip from local Iraqis put the operation in motion.

Story and Video Link

TSA Airport Profilers Watch Expressions and Behavior

If a pair of Transportation Security Administration officers strolling by a Sea-Tac Airport ticket counter wish you happy holidays and ask where you’re traveling, it might be more than just Christmas spirit.

Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.

TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program — called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) — that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions — a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

“In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip,” said Maccario from his office in Boston. “When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, … there are behavior cues that show it. … A brief flash of fear.”

Such people are referred for secondary screening, which can include a pat-down search and an X-ray exam. The microfacial expressions, he said, are the same across many cultures.

Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.

Maccario will not say whether the teams have disrupted any terrorist operations. But he did say that there are active counterterrorism investigations under way that began with referrals from the program.

SPOT began spreading out to airports across the nation two years after initial testing began in 2003 in Boston, Providence, R.I., and Portland, Maine. It’s now at more than 50 airports and continues to grow.

Lynette Blas-Bamba manages Sea-Tac’s 12-officer behavior-detection team. Since the program started here in November 2006, more than 600 people have been referred for secondary inspections, she said. Of those, 11 were arrested.

The officers ask simple questions:

“How are you today?”

“Where are you heading?”

“Is this all your property?”

“It’s almost irrelevant what your answers are,” Maccario said. “It’s more relevant how you respond. Vague, evasive responses — fear shows itself. When you do this long enough, you see it right away.”

Maccario emphasized that the program takes into account the typical stress many of us experience when traveling, especially during the holidays.

Ordinary people who are feeling anxious are “much more open with their body movements and their facial expressions as compared to an operational terrorist (thinking) ‘I’ve got to defeat security,’ ” Maccario said. “We’re looking for behavior indicators that show a certain level of stress, fear or anxiety above and beyond that shown by an anxious member of the traveling public.”

The detection teams look for those indicators to spike when a traveler with something to hide approaches security checkpoints.

Blas-Bamba and her team were trained in fall 2006. She says she did behavioral detection of a sort in her last job as a probation officer. “We all do it to a degree. It’s just a matter of understanding and articulating what we see.”

Part of the training is a cultural awareness component, Maccario said. For example, in some cultures people don’t make eye contact with people in authority.

And to emphasize the sensitivity TSA is bringing to the program, he recalled a meeting with an association for people with Tourette’s disorder to assure them that having a tic will not result in a pat-down.

The TSA considers the program a powerful tool to root out terrorists, but also an antidote to racial profiling.

“We don’t care where you are from,” Maccario said. “It’s no longer subjective. If you are acting a certain way, that’s what is going to attract our attention.

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Sydney Australia – Train Evacuated After Bomb Threat

Police are searching for a man who was allegedly overheard talking about making a bomb threat while traveling on a Sydney train this morning.

A police spokeswoman said the man was overheard having an “inappropriate conversation” on his mobile phone by a passenger on the city-bound train at Strathfield about 9.30am this morning.

The spokeswoman said the passenger alerted police, but the man alighted the train at Redfern before he could be questioned by police.

“The area was canvassed but the man was not located,” the spokeswoman said.

Passengers were asked to leave the train at Central station, where it was thoroughly searched as a safety precaution.

Nothing suspicious was found.

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American Airlines Flight 838 Diverted To Miami After Passenger Threatens Attendant

An American Airlines flight was diverted to Miami International Airport Tuesday night after an unruly passenger got into an argument with a flight attendant.

Flight 838 departed from Miami for Montego Bay, Jamaica, about 6:38 p.m. and returned to the airport about a half hour later so police could question the passenger.

No charges were filed because the passenger did not have a criminal record and no physical altercation took place, said airport spokesman Greg Chin. “The pilot decided it was enough of an issue that he wanted to return to the airport,” he added.

The plane, an Airbus A300-600 with 127 passengers on board, was allowed to depart for Jamaica about 8 p.m. although the unruly passenger was not allowed to re-board and told to re-book a different flight, Chin said.

Source

55 Year Old Woman Caught With Bomb Under Burqa

Afghan intelligence agents said Monday they had detained a woman hiding a bomb-filled waistcoat of the type used in Taliban suicide attacks under her all-covering burqa.

The 55-year-old woman was followed from the eastern province of Kunar after a tip-off and arrested in the town of Jalalabad, an official in Kunar’s intelligence department told AFP.

“She was carrying the suicide waistcoat for the Taliban. We had intelligence reports that she was working for the Taliban,” said the official, who asked not to be identified by name.

The woman was being questioned “to find out more about her network,” he said.

Most Afghan women still wear the burqa, which was mandatory under the 1996-2001 Taleban government, and cannot be searched by men at security checkposts.

The Taleban, the main Islamic militant group behind a bloody insurgency, have stepped up their attacks in recent years, notably their use of suicide bombings.

Hundreds of people, most of them civilians, have been killed in about 140 such attacks in Afghanistan this year alone.

In neighboring Pakistan, also facing a wave of Taliban-linked unrest, a woman in a burqa blew herself up at an army checkpost in early December, killing only herself.

It was the country’s first such attack involving a woman, police said.

Source

FedEx Truck Hijacked In New York City – Strange Event

Many aspects of this story just don’t make sense to me. Maybe I’ve just been doing this too long and I over analyze things.

On one hand it appears to be a planned crime and not a crime of opportunity (guns, handcuffs, badge). However, if that was the case why didn’t the hijackers bring along some type of tools to break open the seals on the containers?

Next, the hijackers had the truck for nearly 9 hours. To me that seems like plenty of time to figure out some method for opening the containers (hack saw, bolt cutters, etc), even if you hadn’t planned for this.

This is where I begin to over-analyze. What if the truck was hijacked for some other purpose and the hijackers hadn’t planned on it being full of merchandise? What if they were actually hoping to take control of an empty truck just before Christmas and use it for some other purpose?

What other purpose you ask?

Oh, I don’t know… Do you suppose that a large FedEx truck might be able to access some area of a mall or airport during the holidays without raising suspicions?

When you add to this, the hijackers talk of their Albanian homeland, the driver being released and given $60.00 to get back to Manhattan, and the fact nothing was missing when the truck was located, this story just doesn’t add up.

For now, I’ll chalk it up to too much coffee on a Sunday afternoon and an over-stimulated imagination.

The hapless hijackers who stole a loaded FedEx truck and kidnapped its driver only to abandon both after they were unable to get at the locked-up loot told their captive stories about their supposed lives in Albania and stopped for pizza during an odd five-hour odyssey, the driver said.

Forced to ride face-down and handcuffed in a sport utility vehicle with a gun to the back of his head, “I kept saying to myself, ‘If they’re going to kill me, I hope it’s fast and doesn’t hurt,” Robert McGarry said Saturday, a day after he was released on a Brooklyn street. “It was a nightmare.”

Police said Sunday no arrests had been made in the case.

McGarry, 47, said he was ambushed shortly after driving out of a FedEx facility on Manhattan’s West Side around 8:30 p.m. Thursday. A swerving SUV cut him off on 11th Avenue, and one of the hijackers leaped out, rammed a gun against the FedEx truck window, flashed a badge and yelled “police,” McGarry said.

Two forced him into the SUV while a third drove off in his delivery truck. McGarry’s captors drove him through the city, one threatening him while the other struck a more congenial, calming tone, he said.

The 18-wheeler was laden with holiday shipments, but the thieves weren’t able to get at them. They let the driver go at about 1:30 a.m. Friday in the Williamsburg neighborhood. He said the robbers gave him $60 so he could get back to Manhattan; instead, he quickly waved down a police car.

The truck was found abandoned, its contents still locked in metal air freight containers, at about 5:30 a.m. in nearby Greenpoint, police said.

Representatives for Memphis, Tenn.-based FedEx Corp. said no packages were missing.

Source

Police in Metro Vancouver Seeing New Gang Fashion – Armored Vehicles

As if police don’t have enough difficulty combating the ever growing arsenals of street gangs…. Vancouver Metro police are now reporting that gang members there are equipping their vehicles with bullet-proof glass, armored plating and high-tech surveillance cameras.

Police in Metro Vancouver have had their hands full for years trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to control gang-related violence and killings that make Vancouver look like Chicago in the Al Capone era.

Last week, they found something they hadn’t seen before – street vehicles outfitted with armour, surveillance cameras and bulletproof glass.

Police forces in the city have had little success in arresting and charging people involved in the dozens of murders in the past several years.

And it appears they won’t have any greater success in curbing these fortified vehicles.

It’s not illegal to outfit your vehicle with bulletproof glass or surround it with armour as long as it’s inspected and passes safety regulations and Insurance Corp. of B.C. licensing requirements.

“That’s pretty much what we’re left with from what I can see at this point,” said Sgt. Shinder Kirk, a member of the Abbotsford police department and the spokesman for the Integrated Gang Task Force.

“Our enforcement opportunities with respect to this issue lie strictly with the motor vehicle regulations that prohibit this type of modification.”

The anti-gang unit, set up in November after a rash of gang-related murders, has begun to make more traffic checks as well as frequent the bars and nightclubs where police say gang members hang out.

Recently, the unit seized seven guns, body armour and two vehicles equipped with bullet-proof glass, armour plating and high-tech surveillance cameras.

The vehicles were impounded because they failed inspection standards for the Insurance Corp. of B.C.

But police are handicapped because outfitting the vehicle is not illegal. It’s also not illegal for a body shop to do the work.

“If a vehicle is modified from the original, then that vehicle, before it is insured and put into service, must be re-inspected to determine if the modifications are in keeping with safety standards in the province and the Motor Vehicle Act,” said Kirk.

People buy various vehicle accessories all the time.

“They are not illegal to sell and illegal to put on your car. But for that car to then operate on a public street, they must meet the same safety standards as any other vehicle.”

An SUV is not designed to carry the type of weight that’s going to be added, he said.

Last month, police stopped a luxury SUV and found the vehicle had been fitted with bullet-proof windows and it also had a secondary rear gate that police described as having “ballistic integrity.”

Southwest Airlines Flight Makes Emergency Landing in Omaha After Bomb Threat

A Southwest Airlines flight made an emergency landing here after a bomb threat was received Saturday night.

No explosives were found, and the 137 passengers on Flight 1018 from Las Vegas continued on to Hartford, Conn., after the unexpected layover of just over three hours, Southewest spokeswoman Christi Day said Sunday.

The threat was specific to Flight 1018 and was received by the airline at 8:40 p.m. CST, Day said. The plane landed at Eppley Airfield at 9:37 p.m., she said.

Passengers were bused to a field maintenance building while security personnel, using bomb-sniffing dogs, searched passenger and baggage compartments. Individual pieces of luggage also were searched on the tarmac.

Passengers went through a security screening before reboarding the plane, which departed Omaha at 12:49 a.m. CST and arrived in Hartford at 3:14 a.m. EST.

Day said she didn’t know where the threatening call originated or where it was received.

Source

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