Three arrested after London airport scare

THREE people have been arrested at London's Heathrow airport after a security scare on a Dubai-bound Emirates flight, police say, amid reports officers stormed the plane and took the suspects off.

"Three people have been arrested at Heathrow this evening. They are currently in police custody. The airport remains open,'' a statement from London's Metropolitan Police Service said.

Friday evening's alert came amid heightened security at airports around the world following an alleged attempt by a young Nigerian to bomb a plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day by concealing explosives in his underwear.

Sky News television said police intervened after verbal threats were made and that the men arrested were English and appeared to be drunk.

The broadcaster showed a photograph purportedly of officers in black overalls inside the aircraft, taken by a passenger on the flight.

The passenger, Cameron McLean, told Sky News armed police burst onto the plane before making arrests.

"Some special police just came on the plane and arrested these two guys a few rows in front of me,'' Mr McLean said.

"The police just swarmed the guy and then rushed him out. I think he was a white male. There was another one as well, I didn't see him,'' he said.

One of the men was taken off in handcuffs, Mr McLean said.

The passenger added there were about five armed officers who were wearing helmets, body armour and carrying what appeared to be automatic weapons.

A spokesman for airport operator BAA confirmed a "security incident'' on the plane but said it only affected the Dubai-bound Emirates plane.

The alert came after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, allegedly tried to detonate a device stitched into his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam as it landed in Detroit on Christmas Day.

In a court in Detroit on Friday, he pleaded not guilty to six charges related to the incident, which has led to security being stepped at airports worldwide.

Full-body scanners are to be introduced at Britain's airports and Heathrow - one of the world's busiest air hubs - will be the first to receive the devices before the end of the month, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.

The Australian

Australia - Join Muslim Asia or perish: Taliban

Abraham Rabinovich

AN official Taliban publication warns Australia that it will have to assimilate into a dominant Asia or face the prospect of being overpowered and forced to take population overspill from Asia.

The choice is spelled out in the latest issue of the online Taliban monthly magazine, Al Sumud (Steadfastness), whose lead article offers a sweeping view of a post-war order in which a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan becomes a moral pivot for a pan-Asian renaissance that will coincide with the decline of Western power.

"The end of European leadership in the world will place the white settler diaspora in Australia before two choices," writes the author, Mustafa Hamid, a former senior al-Qa'ida member who in 2001 married Australian Rabiah Hutchinson, a Sydney mother with links to Islamic extremists.

"It can either return to its motherland in Europe or reconcile with its Asian surroundings and assimilate into it as a wealthy and active member."

Otherwise, he warns, a lengthy conflict will ensue in which Australia will be overpowered "by Asian waves that are better armed and more numerous".

"There is no doubt that the huge growth in the population of Asia, together with its economic and military development, will make Australia into lebensraum -- to use the European term," writes Mr Hamid. Lebensraum, meaning living space, was a term used by Nazi Germany as a motivation for territorial conquest.

Asia, Mr Hamid writes, is facing a population explosion "while Australia is nearly empty of people, apart from scattered groups of white residents".

Residents of "the Israeli outpost" at the other end of Asia are likewise warned to return to their countries of origin or face an "unequal conflict".

These warnings, however, are marginal to the central vision offered in the article -- the emergence of a vibrant pan-Asian identity in which Islam, and the Taliban in particular, constitutes a powerful moral and cultural force but not an exclusive one. Its emphasis on pan-Asian political identity rather than pan-Islamic sets it apart from al-Qa'ida ideology. The Taliban article does not call for jihad, although it hints at the possibility of "peaceful Islamic expansion" and the linchpin role in the "Asian Age", as the author terms it, is ceded to non-Islamic China.

Western power is fading fast, he writes, "to the benefit of Asian giants, and first and foremost among them the colossal economic and human power of China".

Even Russia, whose invasion of Afghanistan 30 years ago would prove a milestone in the emergence of militant Islam, is depicted as an ally arraigned with Asia against the "arrogance" of the West.

"Today, Russia is taking a defensive position against the Western advance which aims to break (Russia) up into statelets and to cross it on the way to China to break it up as well. Russia desires a coalition with China, with India, with Iran if possible, and even more so with Afghanistan, and even more so with the Taliban movement (which) is a serious, realistic and victorious leadership in that vital country (Afghanistan)."

In the article, "The Return of the Islamic Emirate: A vision of Afghanistan's role in the coming international order", Mr Hamid depicts a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan having a fundamental leadership role in the new Asian order -- "not in the field of finance, industry and interest-bearing banks" but as a moral force.

"This was demonstrated by the ability of Islam to inspire a small, poor people to resist and defeat five military campaigns of the largest armies on earth."

Source: The Australian

Taliban leader rejects U.S. attempts to lure away fighters with money

Kabul, Afghanistan :A top Taliban political leader delivered a message Friday to President Obama, calling his attempt to lure away Taliban fighters with money "an old weapon that has failed already."

"The Mujahedeen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are not mercenaries and employed gunmen like the armed men of the invaders and their surrogates," Mullah Brader Akhund said in the statement. "This war will come to an end when all invaders leave our country and an Islamic government based on the aspirations of our people is formed in the country."

Akhund is the deputy emir of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is the political arm of the Taliban.

He was referring to the Taliban reintegration provision, part of the $680 billion defense appropriation bill that Obama signed Wednesday to pay for military operations in the 2010 fiscal year.

The provision would separate local Taliban from their leaders, paying the fighters to quit the organization, replicating a program used to neutralize the insurgency against Americans in Iraq, according to the Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Akhund said 19th century British invaders and Soviet fighters in the 1980s tried the same tactic, unsuccessfully.

He said the Taliban consider the U.S. measure "a sign of weakness and complete despondency of the enemy."

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Source: CNN

Taliban call for boycott of Afghan vote, threaten violence

THE Taliban has called for a boycott of the upcoming re-run of Afghanistan's presidential election, and threatened violence against anyone who participates.

"The Islamic emirate (of Afghanistan) once again informs all the people that no one should participate in this American process and should boycott the process," said a Taliban statement emailed to the media.

"The mujahideen are fully prepared to defeat this process," it said, adding: "Anyone who participates and gets hurt will be responsible for their own losses."

Afghanistan's fraud-tainted first-round presidential election on August 20 was hit by a vicious Taliban campaign that has been blamed for keeping turnout below 40 per cent.

Source: The Australian

NY Times reporter, held captive by the Taliban, gets hit with a giant cluebat

Able to observe the Taliban close up for an extended period, a New York Times reporter discovers that they aren't actually the moderate nationalists that his own paper may have led him to believe they were. "7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity," by David Rohde in the New York Times, October 17

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become.

Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "Al Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters.

They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

And beyond. As Beitullah Mehsud put it in 2007, "We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia (a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state)."

Source: JihadWatch

Hamas hit hardliners in Gaza battle

John Lyons, Middle East correspondent | August 17

DIVISIONS within the Palestinian side of politics reached crisis point yesterday after 24 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in a seven-hour shoot-out in the Gaza Strip between Hamas and hardline Islamists linked to al-Qa'ida.

Security officers from Hamas, which runs Gaza, moved against Jund Ansar Allah - also known as Jihadi Soldiers of God, or Soldiers of the Partisans of God - after its leader Sheik Abdel-Latif Moussa, declared Gaza was "an Islamic emirate".

"We will set up the Gaza emirate on our dead bodies, and we will apply the laws and edicts of sharia," he told his followers, many of whom were armed.

Over the next several hours, a gun battle ensued between the two sides, with the majority of the 24 killed being from Jund Ansar Allah. Moussa himself was killed.

It appeared that heavily armed followers of the Sheik had helped him escape from the mosque where he had delivered the sermon back to his nearby house, where he was killed in the gun battles that followed.

Hamas claimed Moussa had blown himself and others up in a suicide action when trapped in the house, but Hamas would not allow journalists to enter Rafah to independently verify the claims.

Tensions had been growing between Hamas and Jund Ansar Allah for several months, with the latter trying to impose a strict sharia law upon the coastal strip.

While Hamas is considered a militant Islamic group, it is divided over whether sharia law should be mandatory for the 1.5million Gazans. Read more here ...

Source: The Australian