Ay-Pee. What? Ramsey Clark was unavailable?
Wikileaks says it has hired Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon to lead the legal team representing the group and its founder, Julian Assange.
Garzon won global fame for aggressively taking on international human rights cases. He is best known for indicting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998. But he's got 11 years of free time
Wikileaks said Tuesday that Garzon recently met with the Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the group's founder is holed up seeking asylum, to discuss a "new legal strategy." "We are innocent under the Federation of Planets Rules"
Assange is currently fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct. he reeaaaaallly doesn't want to go back. Perhaps Roman Polanski could make a film about him?
Wikileaks said in a statement posted on its Twitter account that Garzon has expressed "serious concerns" about "the lack of safeguards and transparency" with which actions are being taken against Assange. "Plus he damaged the West. I consider that a plus!" Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/24/2012 21:00 ||
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[An Nahar] A Lebanese man was on Monday ordered cooled for a few years You have the right to remain silent... in Cyprus police custody for a further week over allegations he was helping to plan an attack on Israeli tourists, state radio reported.
The 24-year-old, who holds a Swedish passport, appeared at a closed-door hearing under tight security at a court in the island's second city Limassol, which agreed to a prosecution request he should remain in detention for a further seven days, the radio said.
Cyprus police have refused to comment publicly on the case on the grounds that it is a "sensitive political issue" but did say Sherlocks have found no evidence to suggest he had any accomplices.
Monday's daily Phileleftheros said phone records suggest he was working alone on Cyprus to collect information and then leave.
Online news website Sigmalive said the suspect was tossed in the slammer Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! in a Limassol hotel room on July 7 after flying in from London.
Police suspect he was in Cyprus to track movements of Israeli tourists and find out when group tours arrived on the holiday island, it added.
Reports say his arrest followed a tip-off from foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel's Mossad.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
07/24/2012 00:00 ||
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[An Nahar] The jacket wallah in last week's deadly attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria entered from neighboring Romania, spoke decent Russian and had a female companion, local media reported on Monday.
Citing Sherlocks probing last Wednesday's bombing of a bus at Burgas airport that killed five Israeli tourists and the driver, television channel bTV said that the attacker was in the city of Varna for at least a day before the bombing.
While in Varna, which is further up the Black Sea coast from Burgas, he left behind "biological evidence" at a hotel, BTV said.
Newspaper Troud meanwhile reported that police were looking for a woman believed to have been staying in the Varna hotel with the bomber, naming it as the three-star Hotel Perfekt.
This woman is also believed to be linked to a possible second man whom police think may have been the bomber's accomplice, the newspaper said, also citing unnamed Sherlocks.
The daily also cited a taxi driver who said he drove the suicide bomber from Ravda and Pomorie, two small towns north of Burgas, the day before the attack, and that he spoke "decent Russian."
Bulgarian authorities have declined to comment on the investigation, saying only that they believe the bomber was aged around 36, had a fake U.S. driving license, was not Bulgarian and had been in the country "not less than four days."
They have also released CCTV footage from the airport of the man they believe was the suicide bomber. He is shown wearing typical tourist clothes and has long hair, possibly a wig, and appears to be white.
Unconfirmed report adds to confusion over bombing; other report says two accomplices still on the lam
US citizen named David Jepson is suspected of having been an accomplice to last Wednesday's terrorist attack at Burgas Airport, a Bulgarian news site reported on Sunday.
Jepson was based in the Bulgarian coastal city of Varna, north of Burgas, and gave "guidance" to the bomber, according to the report on the site novonite.com. The site stressed this information was unconfirmed.
It said Jepson was captured on CCTV footage at Varna airport at the end of June, had spent a few nights staying at a hotel near the Festival Congress Center in downtown Varna, and had disappeared since the bombing. Police suspect he is still in Bulgaria, the report claimed.
The name "David Jepson" first surfaced on Friday, in a report in the Hebrew daily Maariv. It claimed that Jepson is the man in the artist's sketch being distributed by Bulgarian police. There have been conflicting reports as to whether the man in the sketch is believed by the Bulgarians to have been an accomplice to the bombing, or the bomber himself.
Maariv's report on Friday claimed the Bulgarian authorities were searching frantically for Jepson because they believed he had a second bomb in his possession.
Bulgaria's Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said on Saturday that "there may have been a second man" directly involved in the bombing. "We have not ruled that out."
The Bulgarian Daily Standard claimed Sunday that a second accomplice to the bomber might also still be on the lam. Both of the accomplices were at Burgas's Sarafovo Airport at the time of the bombing, it said.
One of them was a back-up bomber ready to replace the bomber if things went wrong. The second one had orders to shoot one or both of the others in the event that they were caught by security officials, the report claimed.
Bulgarian officials last Thursday released CCTV footage filmed in the airport terminal of a long-haired western-looking man with a backpack who they said was the bomber. According to novonite, however, "a witness said on Friday the suspect was a dark-skinned man with short brown hair and an Arabic accent, and appeared to be wearing a wig."
According to Bulgarian journalist Elena Yoncheva, meanwhile, the gun-hung tough guys had planned for the backpack containing the bomb to detonate after the bus had set of from the airport terminal, not in the terminal parking lot where it did explode, so that "the corpse count would have been much higher."
The report added that the bomber had not intended to kill himself in the attack, but rather to plant the bomb and detonate it from afar.
Working with a local CNN team, Yoncheva pointed at a series of security faults at the Burgas airport, including the lack of security measures in the parking lot and surrounding areas.
Five Israelis and the bus driver were killed in the attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, saying it was the latest of many Iranian-directed attempts to attack Israeli targets across the globe.
Continued on Page 47
#3
"Bulgarian officials last Thursday released CCTV footage filmed in the airport terminal of a long-haired western-looking man with a backpack who they said was the bomber. According to novonite, however, "a witness said on Friday the suspect was a dark-skinned man with short brown hair and an Arabic accent, and appeared to be wearing a wig."
Anybody else find this confusing - because I sure do. So who was the guy carrying the backpack in the video they released? Was he David Jepson ... the backup bomber? Was he involved at all? I'm hoping that Mossad and the FBI are making faster progress - than the Bulgarian police.
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