REVIEW TOPICS:
Politkovskaya's murder case: defense lawyer claims the assassination was ordered by a politician
Belarus KGB accuses independent press in extremism
Ex-chief of London police: We warned late Serbian PM he was in danger
Former American defense analyst and ex-drug fighting agent claim Azeris were bribed
Former agent of the Communist secret service employed by the Czech Greens leader
Serbian website reveals ties between secret services, mafia and terrorist organizations
Politkovskaya's murder case: defense lawyer claims the assassination was ordered by a politician
The murder of outspoken journalist Anna Politkovskaya was ordered by a Russian politician based inside the country in revenge for critical articles, a defense lawyer said Tuesday, AFP reports.
The lawyer's comments -- which were based on files of the case that he had seen -- came as the judge in the case decided to reopen the trial to the public just days after declaring it closed.
"In the files of the case, the motive and the individual who ordered the killing are mentioned," said lawyer Murad Musayev, who is defending one of the four men charged in connection with the killing.
"The reason for the killing is the critical reports which exposed certain political figures."
He said that previously the prosecutors had believed that the crime was ordered by someone "big and terrible based abroad.
"But in the conclusions of the accusations of the court, we see that it was not someone so big and terrible but a politician from inside the country.
"It is not clear who we are talking about," the lawyer emphasized.
Politkovskaya, who was deeply critical of the Kremlin's actions in war-torn Chechnya, was shot dead outside her Moscow home on October 7, 2006 in an apparent contract killing.
The slain journalist's supporters have long expressed skepticism over the legal process and complained that none of the four defendants being tried is charged with the actual killing.
More than two years after Politkovskaya died, authorities have failed to arrest the assassin or identify who ordered the murder.
Meanwhile, Musayev told reporters that at Tuesday's hearing judge Yevgeny Zubov had decided to open the trial to the public.
"The judge raised the question himself and the decision was taken for the trial to be open to the public," said lawyer Musayev.
The judge had originally declared the trial open to the public but last week said it would be closed, prompting howls of protest from rights activists and even one of the jurors.
Human rights activists have said an open trial is crucial for the murder to be judged fairly.
One of the jurors even gave an interview to a radio station protesting the judge's original decision, for which he was sacked from the jury.
Politkovskaya wrote books and articles that fiercely criticized Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, notably for abuses committed by Russian forces during the second Chechen war, which he oversaw as president.
At the time, Putin called her killing "an unacceptable crime that cannot go unpunished."
One of the suspects on trial is a former agent of the FSB security service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB. Pavel Ryaguzov is suspected of providing Politkovskaya's home address to the killer.
Two of the other defendants, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, are Chechen brothers accused of following her in her last weeks.
All the defendants have already entered not guilty pleas.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media freedoms organization, ranks Russia as the third deadliest country in the world for journalists after Iraq and Algeria, with 49 journalists killed since 1992.
Belarus KGB accuses independent press in extremism
ARCHE magazine’s editor-in-chief received a letter from the Brest customs, where copies of the magazine were confiscated. It reads that in accordance with the conclusion the State Security Committee (KGB) of November 5 issue 7-8 2008 “calling to extremist activity and its propaganda were found” in the magazine, Charter 97 website reports.
Materials of the case on this were sent to the Maskouski district court of Brest “applying to recognize this information materials extremist and to destroy it,” “Nasha Niva” newspaper writes.
Which material of the commemorative issue (the magazine marks its 10th anniversary) does have extremist character? Valer Bulhakau, «ARCHE» ’s editor-in-chief, experts of the Belarusian KGB may have interpret in this way analysis of famous Belarusian politologist V. Silitski on the “parliamentary elections”, or a round table on mass detentions of opposition activists after the 3 July blast, or a film critic Rasinski’s review of Katyn film by A. Waida, where the author brings Soviet secret police into line with fascists. The issue, dedicated to pre-Soviet history of Belarus, contains two historical monographs translated from English and Polish and about thirty articles, mainly scientific and historical.
Similar attempts of recognising different editions extremist were made by the KGB in another western city - Hrodna. Information materials, confiscated by vigilant customs officers were sent to court. Among them were leaflets of presidential candidate Milinkevich and different newspapers and magazines in Belarusian. Opposition figures, put on search lists, were even seized books they were reading in trains.
Fortunately, cases of Hrodna were inconclusive – the court sent the materials back having found fault in formalities. They said there were mistakes in claim of the head of the regional KGB department.
We deal with purposeful intimidation of both editors and readers, with attempt of the secret services to recover censorship functions V. Bulhakau supposes. This was practiced in totalitarian states – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
ARCHE magazine is an independent scientific and socio-political edition, its authors are tens of Belarusian intellectuals. Due to its high quality, he had become the only Belarusian edition, included in Eurozine, a network of European cultural journals.
ARCHE’s editor doesn’t exclude he will have to appeal to intellectuals and cultural editions of European countries to start a campaign of solidarity.
As it has recently become known, the authorities are going to return “Narodnaya Volya” and “Nasha Niva” newspapers to the state system of printing and distribution. The Belarusian regime called these actions “a step towards liberalization”. However, we can see that persecution of other independent editions have begun in the country.
Ex-chief of London police: We warned late Serbian PM he was in danger
Late Serbian Prime Minister Zoran ini was given advice and instructions from Scotland Yard to protect himself, former London Metropolitan Police chief John Slater says, B92 website reports.
“Germany was responsible for estimating the risk and offering advice. They stated that ini’s security was in danger because of the personal interest he showed in the fight against organized crime,” Slater said.
Slater, who is now a police adviser in the Balkans, said last weekend in Belgrade at an international conference on organized crime that he had met with ini on several occasions.
He was an adviser to the Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) in 2001, working in coordination with the Council of Europe.
“I met with ini on several occasions and talked with him about the problem of organized crime. During 2001-2002, I helped him establish a unit for investigating organized crime cases within the Interior Ministry,” Slater said. He added that this was financed by Great Britain and that “a lot of money was also given by Germany.”
“Because of political reasons and demands from America, it was insisted that the unit investigate not only organize crime but war crimes as well. That did not help make the unit more efficient, because at that time, there were people in the MUP who were involved in activities of Miloševi’s regime and it was quite possible that some of them were involved in war crimes,” Slater claims in an interview with Politika newspaper. He said that the Germans gave "a lot of technical guidance and advice to the state on how to stop the possible assassination of the prime minister".
“When the first attempt happened in the traffic incident, experts from Germany and me personally, openly warned that this was the first warning before the assassination, and we gave him concrete advice on how to change his way of life and routine in order to protect himself,” Slater said.
“But he said, 'no, I am not afraid of them, and I will continue exactly as before'. When the second crash happened, we begged him to make a change. He was injured this time, he was on crutches and he was vulnerable because he could not run or hide. But then, he also said that he was not scared,” Slater said.
The former British policeman said that he respected ini’s courage and admired him, but added that he thought the prime minister might be alive now if he had listened to the advice.
“On the other hand, when you take into consideration the fact who shot him, what training and weapons that person had, it can be concluded that if they were determined to kill him with the resources they had, they would have killed him sooner or later,” Slater said.
Former American defense analyst and ex-drug fighting agent claim Azeris were bribed
Two former U.S. officials agreed to testify at a criminal trial that government leaders in Azerbaijan were paid bribes as part of a failed oil deal by their one-time boss, Czech expatriate Viktor Kozeny, Bloomberg reports.
After leaving government service, former Defense Department analyst Christine Rastas and John Pulley, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, went to work for Kozeny in 1997. At the time, Kozeny was angling to buy the state-run oil company in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea.
In affidavits made public yesterday in Manhattan federal court, where Kozeny and co-defendant Frederick Bourke face bribe-paying charges, Rastas and Pulley say they learned Kozeny was bribing Azeri leaders, including then-President Heydar Aliyev. They say they’ve agreed to testify against Kozeny and Bourke and that the U.S. has agreed not to prosecute them. Azeri government leaders have denied that they were paid bribes.
Rastas, who worked for a Kozeny-run investment bank, says she attended a dinner where Egyptian businessman Shafik Gabr, an investor in Kozeny’s project, asked why the Azeris would sell the oil company, according to the court documents. Kozeny said “he thought the Azeri government would do what Kozeny wanted because he was paying the president of Azerbaijan,” Rastas said.
Pulley, Kozeny’s security chief from 1995 to 2000, says he witnessed Kozeny’s lawyer, Hans Bodmer, creating Swiss bank accounts for Azeri officials, other documents show. He says he inferred Kozeny “might be giving things of value to Azeri officials.”
At least six people have now said they were aware of wrongdoing in the deal. In addition to Rastas and Pulley, a Kozeny aide, a Kozeny investor and Bodmer have pleaded guilty and are aiding prosecutors. Kozeny admits he paid bribes to Azeri leaders, although he says the U.S. law doesn’t apply to him because he’s not an American citizen.
U.S. prosecutors in 2005 accused Kozeny, who had a home in Colorado, of paying millions of dollars in bribes in his 1998 attempt to win control of the oil company, known as Socar. As part of the scheme, Kozeny is accused of giving Azeri leaders a secret two-thirds stake, valued at $300 million, in his venture.
Bourke conspired with the Czech in violation of a U.S. anti-bribery law, prosecutors said. Bourke, who invested $8 million with Kozeny and was one of about a dozen investors, is scheduled to go on trial in March.
Dubbed the “Pirate of Prague” in news reports, Kozeny now lives in the Bahamas and is fighting extradition to the U.S. He is also wanted by authorities in the Czech Republic, where he’s accused of stripping Czech companies of $1.1 billion.
Contacted at their homes today, Rastas and Pulley declined to comment. Janice Oh, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia, also declined to comment. A call to the Azeri embassy in Washington wasn’t immediately returned.
In affidavits from November 2005, Rastas and Pulley say their deal with prosecutors requires them to “cooperate fully with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” Rastas says she left the Defense Department in 1993 and moved to Russia. In 1997, a friend asked if she wanted to work for Kozeny. She took a job at his bank for a $120,000 salary, she said.
“Kozeny and I discussed the importance of good relationships with government officials in order to get anything done in that part of the world,” Rastas says.
Rastas said that at one point she helped Kozeny create an organizational chart of purported “family trusts” that she said was “designed to conceal” the true owners. “The recipients of this money would be Azeri government officials,” she wrote.
Pulley says he accompanied Nadir Nassibov, then chairman of the Azeri State Property Committee, on a 1998 trip to New York for medical treatment. The trip and medical visit were financed by Kozeny, Pulley said.
The affidavits were entered into court records as part of Bourke’s effort to force prosecutors to search U.S. intelligence agency databases for records relating to the case. Bourke denies wrongdoing and says he’s a whistle-blower who disclosed to the government Kozeny’s theft of $180 million in investor money, which Kozeny denies.
Bourke also wants U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin to review records to determine if the government is prosecuting him unfairly because he interfered in sensitive U.S.-Azeri negotiations. At the time Bourke says he complained to Azeri leaders about Kozeny, the U.S. was negotiating to build a pipeline through Azerbaijan.
“Credible allegations of official corruption -- such as Mr. Bourke’s -- had the potential to thwart the Caspian pipeline project, dealing a blow to the United States’ strategic energy interests and to the profits of the major oil companies who had heavily invested in the Azeri oilfields,” Bourke’s lawyer, Dan Webb, wrote in the legal submission.
Former agent of the Communist secret service employed by the Czech Greens leader
Czech Greens leader and Environment Minister Martin Bursik employs a former agent of the Communist secret service StB, Olga Zubova, a Greens' deputy who left the party's deputies' group on Saturday, said in an e-mail sent to the media today, Ceske Noviny website writes.
Zubova said Miloslav Malek, the alleged agent, "has her and her family as a mission."
Bursik has been unavailable for comment.
Malek confirmed to CTK that he had been an StB agent focusing on the struggle with the "internal enemy" which means with dissidents.
"The information can be found. It is correct. But it is absolutely rubbish I have been assigned the mission of dealing with Zubova as she is claiming," Malek said.
Zubova said Malek "has been attacking me and my husband for several months, disseminating false information and discrediting my family." Zubova said she had been informed by her friends and fellow party members about Malek, chairman of one of the Greens branches hastily established before a party congress held in Teplice, North Bohemia, earlier this year.
Zubova said she had not wanted to react to unverified information, but she now received a written statement by dissident Petr Uhl that he was detained by Malek on November 19, 1989.
"In the light of recent events concerning deputy Morava, I am afraid that Miloslav Malek was assigned the mission of me and my family," Zubova said.
"It is another episode of the 'serial' on positive and negative motivations. This time, I am not faced by any amateur, but by a former StB senior officer," Zubova said.
She spoke about an e-mail from Bursik she had received by chance instead of the real addressee. In it, Bursik spoke about "force" with which he wants to make disobedient deputies collaborate with him.
In September, Morava, a former deputy for the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), gave up his mandate in the Chamber of Deputies as he collected compromising material on his colleagues in order to blackmail them.
Morava had also photographed himself along with a daughter of Zubova. The snaps were reportedly to be used to blackmail her.
Morava was also secretly filmed. He spoke about the case of Zubova, a rebel among the Greens, as a mission of his and about "positive and negative" motivations of the deputy. This may have meant bribery and blackmail.
Zubova and Vera Jakubkova, another Greens rebel, left the deputies' group at the weekend.
They said their long-term disputes with the present party leadership are the reason for leaving the group.
However, they said they would not leave the party.
Zubova and Jakubkova had different views on several crucial points, especially the planned stationing of a U.S. radar base on Czech soil that is being pushed through by the coalition government of Mirek Topolanek.
Bursik said he did not mind that the two MPs left the group.
He said he would vote for the U.S. radar base in the lower house. "If Olga Zubova is seeking a reason for her departure, I can give it to her. She may leave immediately," he said.
The Greens are the smallest party in parliament and they now have only four members after Zubova and Jakubkova's leave. The Green Party entered parliament for the first time in 2006.
Serbian website reveals ties between secret services, mafia and terrorist organizations
Secret services are combating terrorism, but their parts which are in the mafia or within the terrorist core for high profits or “higher goals” work for terrorist groups. Inside terrorism is becoming a soft connection between the mafia and political and ethnic extremist organizations, Serbian Emportal website writes.
The detention of three Germans in connection with a recent bomb attack on a European Union office in Pristina, Kosovo, has highlighted tensions over a plan to replace a nine-year UN presence with an EU mission and raised once more many question over the "New Kosovo".
Last Saturday, a judge ordered the three suspects held for one month while prosecutors gather evidence for terrorism charges. The three are accused of carrying out a Nov. 14 dynamite attack that shattered glass windows at the EU office, but harmed no one.
The Pristina EXPRESS daily has published that the three German citizens, suspected of placing a bomb in front of the seat of the International Civilian Office, are actually members of German secret service BND.
The paper reported that BND has admitted that some members of its have been arrested, but rejected the allegations that it was they who mounted the bomb attack. Quoting its sources, the daily states that the arrested persons have ordinary and not diplomatic passports and that they have been in Kosovo for several months now.
Citing court documents, the Associated Press reported that the Kosovo prosecutors believe the Germans "intended to disrupt the bloc's efforts to deploy its new police mission."
Prosecutor Feti Tunuzliu alleged that the three suspects wanted to "hamper and hinder" the mission, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Tunuzliu wrote that one of the suspects threw 300 grams (0.6 pounds) of dynamite at the EU offices from a building across the street Nov. 14 as the two others kept watch. But the BBC reported that the three detained men insist they were themselves investigating the blast site.
German and Kosovo media report that the men are German intelligence agents but officials in Berlin refuse to comment.
Lawyers for the detainees say the prosecution is seeking terrorism charges that carry a maximum 20-year sentence.
The German weekly Der Spiegel said the men worked for the German intelligence agency BND, and that they told investigators they had been examining the scene of the explosion, but had not been involved in it.
The Christian Science Monitor reported, and later brokered a deal with Serbia over the deployment of a replacement EU mission. But now some in Kosovo reject the deal as an affront to the nation's fledgling sovereignty.
A Reuters report noted that the Nov. 14 attack came four days after Kosovo leaders rejected the UN deal. The AP reported that Kosovo can't accept Serbia's terms for the EU mission's deployment. The Bundestag should be officially informed on Thursday about the arrests of three alleged agents of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) in Kosovo, Radio Deutsche Welle said on Monday, stressing that German public security experts believe Albanian extremists are in fact behind the relevant bomb attack in Pristina.
All the circumstances involving this incident should be presented at a session of the German parliament's intelligence oversight committee by BND Chief Ernst Uhrlau.
Politicians in Berlin also doubt that any German intelligence service members in Kosovo actually took part in the bomb attack on November 14 which resulted in material damages alone, Deutsche Welle said. "Such things are beyond my imagination. It seems that these are arbitrary accusations, but they must be looked into, even as such," Bundestag's Supervisory Committee President, Social Democratic Party MP Thomas Oppermann said.
"It all smacks strongly of a plot that could be connected with the Kosovo government and its interests, and perhaps also with other (foreign) intelligence services or the local judiciary," Committee member, Green Party MP Hans-Christian Stroebele said.
Secret services are combating terrorism, but their parts which are in the mafia or in the terrorist core for high profits or “higher goals”work for terrorist groups.
Inside terrorism is becoming a soft connection between the mafia and political and ethnic extremist organizations. The core activity of the influence of the mafia and terrorists is concentrated in the Albanian political movement, which skillfully uses the mafia as its allies and partners aiming at the independent Kosovo and great-Albanian politics in the western Balkans.
In the western Balkans there is a connection between the secret services, national and international, and criminal cartels, which are, indirectly or directly, influenced by terrorist groups.
The mafia has a major influence in the western Balkans and represents a “branch of economy” with a substantial profit. Included in the mafia affairs is the majority of “soldiers” and those considered to be “manpower”. Secret services are waging a global war against organized crime, but at the same time they are part of the system. The mafia gives support to financing or ethnic terrorism in the other logistics.
Secret services are combating terrorism, but their parts which are in the mafia or within the terrorist core for high profits or “higher goals”work for terrorist groups. Inside terrorism is becoming a soft connection between the mafia and political and ethnic extremist organizations.
In Kosovo and Metohija there is the strongest connection between the mafia and separatist movement on the one hand, and terrorist groups on the other.
The secret service of Kosovo, which is in the process of establishment, largely builds on the former police structures of Albanians that were educated till 1991 and after 1991 in Albania.
The Albanian movement has a big influence on the network of secret services in Kosovo and Metohija (over 20), which are, in various ways, present in the country with their interests and goals.
The core activity of the influence of the mafia and terrorists is concentrated in the Albanian political movement, which skillfully uses the mafia as its allies and partners aimed at the independent Kosovo and great-Albanian politics in the western Balkans.
The strategy for combating terrorism is to focus on organized crime and the reform of secret services whose information is of importance to the mafia that uses it excessively because of the connection.
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