The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Mexican police arrest three in killing of politician's son
- NYPD informant who tracked militants quits, denounces police
- Britain to double number of drones in Afghanistan - report
| Mexican police arrest three in killing of politician's son Posted: 22 Oct 2012 08:51 PM PDT MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican authorities arrested three suspects, two of them police officers, on Monday for involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Jose Eduardo Moreira, the son of a prominent politician. Both Victor Landeros, alias "The Iguana," and Jorge Tenorio, or "The Taka," served as municipal police officers in Ciudad Acuna, the northern border town where Moreira, the son of Humberto Moreira, ex-chairman of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was killed on October 3.
The three suspects were found in Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila state, with four different cellphones and two small arms, police said in a statement. On the day of Moreira's murder, police said, Landeros and Tenorio tricked him into meeting them. The pair then handed Moreira over to two members of the Zetas drug cartel who took him away. His body was found a few hours later. The third man, Roberto Barcenas, acted in an auxiliary role, providing food and accommodation to Landeros and Tenorio, the federal police said. Mexican police are frequently implicated in violent crimes, as drug cartels infiltrate their ranks, bribing the poorly paid officers. Roughly 60,000 people have died since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began a military offensive against the warring drug cartels in 2006. Humberto Moreira was a critic of Calderon's tactics until he stepped down as PRI party chairman last December after a scandal over his handling of Coahuila's state finances. The state's debt ballooned under his watch. (Reporting By Gabriel Stargardter; editing by Christopher Wilson) Copyright © 2012 Reuters | ||
| NYPD informant who tracked militants quits, denounces police Posted: 22 Oct 2012 07:58 PM PDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An informant recruited by the New York Police Department to collect information on suspected Islamic militants has quit and denounced his police handlers, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the case. The informant, a 19-year-old American citizen of Bangladeshi descent, was recruited by the NYPD recently as part of an expansive intelligence-gathering program the department launched after the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. His assignment was to make contact with suspected Islamic extremists to try to determine if they had any inclinations to engage in violence, the source said.
On October 2, however, the informant, whom the source did not name, posted a message on his personal Facebook page exposing himself as an informant to people he had been in contact with. He declared that he had quit as a police informant. "I was jus (sic) of pretending to be friends with ya cuz I honestly thought i was fighting terrorism, but let's be real, it's all a f...king scheme," the informant wrote, according to the source. "It was all about the money," he added. The source said that the informant was not involved in an investigation that led to the arrest of a Bangladeshi man last week in connection with an alleged scheme to bomb the New York Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan. New York law enforcement sources have said that the NYPD has used foreign-born confidential informants to uncover several alleged plots by militants, including one involving a possible attack on a subway station at Herald Square and another involving alleged plans to kill U.S. soldiers returning to New York from Afghanistan and Iraq. NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said that candidates to join the force as sworn officers must be U.S. citizens. But he said 20 percent of the department's recruit classes were foreign-born. "We have a deep bench of foreign speakers whose first languages include Urdu, Arabic, and scores of others," Browne said. "Most CIs (confidential informants) perform invaluable, life-saving service; some don't work out," he added, while declining to comment on the specific current case of the informant who quit. (This story corrected to show informant was U.S. citizen not Bangladeshi) (Reporting by Mark Hosenball Editing by Warren Strobel and Eric Walsh) Copyright © 2012 Reuters | ||
| Britain to double number of drones in Afghanistan - report Posted: 22 Oct 2012 07:39 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is to double the number of armed drone aircraft flying combat and surveillance operations in Afghanistan, the Guardian reported on Tuesday. In a new squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), five Reaper drones will be sent to Afghanistan and be in operation within six weeks, with control coming, for the first time, from terminals and screens in Britain, the newspaper said. Pilots based in a high-tech site at RAF Waddington, a military base in England, will fly the recently bought American-made UAVs, according to the Guardian. Britain's existing five Reaper drones, which are used to target suspected insurgents in Helmand province in Afghanistan's southwest, have been operated from a U.S. Air Force base in Nevada because Britain has not had the capability. The government has yet to decide whether the aircraft will remain there after the end of 2014, when most NATO soldiers are scheduled to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. (Reporting by Stephen Mangan; editing by Christopher Wilson) Copyright © 2012 Reuters |
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