A Bosnian court on Thursday sentenced an Islamist who opened fire at the US embassy in Sarajevo last year to 18 years in prison.
"Mevlid Jasarevic committed a terrorist act by shooting 105 bullets over 50 minutes towards the American embassy," judge Branko Peric said. "This court sentences him to 18 years in prison."
Jasarevic opened fire on the embassy in October 2011 with an automatic weapon before being shot by police and arrested. One police officer was injured in the attack.
"Jasarevic wanted to express his dissatisfaction with the position of Muslims in Bosnia and the world," the judge said.
The court rejected the charges that Jasarevic had organised a terrorist group but the sentence was the heaviest ever handed out by the Bosnian judiciary on terrorism charges.
The court acquitted his two co-accused, Emrah Fojnica and Munib Ahmetspahic, charged with helping him prepare the October 28 attack and later covering up evidence.
The three defendants were not in court when the verdict was announced.
"We are satisfied with the sentence given to Mevlid Jasarevic as it is almost the maximum one for the act of terrorism," the prosecutor's spokeswoman Selma Hecimovic said.
"However, we will lodge an appeal for the part of the verdict acquitting Emrah Fojnica and Munib Ahmetspahic because we consider that they had helped Jasarevic to commit the terrorist act," Hecimovic told AFP.
Continued on Page 47
[An Nahar] Greece is seen as the most corrupt country in the EU, Transparency International said Wednesday, adding that crisis-hit nations are being held back by an inability to deal with graft.
Publishing its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, the Berlin-based watchdog ranked Greece 94th out of 176 countries.
Perceived corruption in the country appeared to have worsened despite efforts to tackle graft. In last year's index, the debt-ravaged country was ranked 80th on a scale of least corrupt to most corrupt.
Fellow eurozone struggler Italia also fared poorly, coming in 72nd -- a decline from last year's study when the country was ranked 69th.
The director of Transparency International (TI) in Germany, Edda Mueller, told a news conference that the fight against corruption was intimately linked to the economic health of a country.
"The countries that are hardest-hit by the financial crisis have performed below expectations despite the reform efforts of recent months," Mueller said.
Corruption levels in a country are "closely linked to the economic stability of a country," she added.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/06/2012 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
We're number 1.
We're number 1.
Posted by: lord garth ||
12/06/2012 0:15 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Corruption levels in a country are "closely linked to the economic stability of a country," she added.
Yeah and economic instability leads to corruption. Cantillon had it all figured out 300 years ago, but no one wants to listen, because this time "it's going to be different"
Yeah sure.
A leading ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for Turkey to show it was serious about defending religious freedoms if it wanted to join the EU, saying it should let Christians build churches without restrictions.
Volker Kauder, leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) in parliament, told a party congress he expected a "clear signal" on the issue from the Erdogan government before membership talks could continue. He said, "A country that wants to be part of Europe must accept the basic principle of religious freedom. That means, that we expect Christians in Turkey to be able to build churches without any restrictions, just as Muslims build mosques here in Germany."
Kauder's comments were seen as more of a way to appeal to members of his own party rather than an active attempt to block Turkey's membership talks, which are already stalled.
Continued on Page 47
[Shabelle] A Roman court has sentenced 11 Somali pirates to imprisonment for attacking an Italian oil tanker.
Each of them will spend three years and six months in prison.
In January the pirates fired at The Valdarno tanker off the Yemeni coast but the crew managed to escape.
Soon a helicopter with Italian marines arrived at the site and the pirates were set to sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! .
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
12/06/2012 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11132 views]
Top|| File under: Pirates
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[An Nahar] Greece is seen as the most corrupt country in the EU, Transparency International said Wednesday, adding that crisis-hit nations are being held back by an inability to deal with graft.
Somali pirates
