Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (47894)	2/27/2005 6:43:39 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50167

Televised ‘confessions’ claim Syrian involvement in Iraq BAGHDAD: Alleged Sudanese, Egyptian and Iraqi extremists have been queuing up to “confess” on television how they were trained by Syrian intelligence officers to bomb Iraqi security forces and behead policemen and civilians. “I took part in the decapitation of 10 Iraqis, all of them policemen,” a man, who gave his name as Mohammed H’moud Mohammed Moussa and said he was Sudanese, told the US-financed Iraqiya television station. “I was paid 50 dollars for each beheading even though I’d been promised a lot more,” he said. Moussa’s “confession” came in one of three programmes this week in which a string of men detained by security forces were brought forward one by one to tell a police interviewer of their alleged crimes. The programmes are part of the Iraqi government’s bid to stamp out a mostly Sunni Arab insurgency that has left thousands dead since the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein in April 2003. There was no way to verify the statements or the identities the men gave, while the Syrian government has roundly denied the claims. “These reports are false and without basis,” said a Syrian security official quoted by the official SANA news agency. “Syria cares a lot about the security and the stability of Iraq and does not interfere in its internal affairs,” the official added. The men said they were part of a group that calls itself Jaish al-Tahrir, or the Army of Liberation, which they said was trained in a town on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. “I was trained by a Syrian intelligence officer called Abu Bakr,” said Adam Doum Omar, 41, a Sudanese who was presented as the leader of the group. “The cell that I ran was made up of Sudanese and Egyptians split into two groups, one of which specialises in beheadings and the other in planting bombs,” he said. The United States, as well as the Iraqi administration, has frequently accused Syria of involvement in Iraq’s insurgency. The men’s statements suggested they were active in the Mosul region, which lies close to the Syrian border and where the decapitated bodies of dozens of policemen, soldiers and civilians have been found in the streets in recent months. “I shot dead 10 people without knowing if they were Iraqis or Americans because they were hooded,” said Omar. The policeman who was interviewing him, whose face was not shown, said Omar had been living in Iraq for 15 years and that he had been arrested on February 20. An Egyptian who gave his name as Mohammed Samir Mohammed Ramadan said that along with two other Egyptians he had “cut the throat of six Iraqi soldiers in a hotel”. “Our group abducted the six men and took them to the Our Hotel,” he said calmly. “Each member of the group killed two soldiers. We helped each other by holding the soldiers down.” afp