Mumbai: A Dubai-bound Emirates flight with 356 passengers, including crew, on board was grounded here after a terror alert call, an airport official said.

The flight EK 505 was grounded after an anonymous call was received saying that there were some suspected terrorists on board the plane, a Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) spokesperson said.

The aircraft had pushed back for the runway at 0959 hours when the Air Traffic Control (ATC) informed MIAL about a security hazard on board, the spokesperson said.

The plane was taxied to Tango Bay at 1047 hours. All the passengers were deplaned and a thorough checking of the passengers and luggage was carried out by the security agencies.

One or two passengers have been held back and they are being questioned by the security agencies, the spokesperson added. According to police, the caller, who identified himself as Suresh Chavan, claimed one of the passengers on board by name Shahbaz Khan was an ‘Al-Qaeda’ terrorist.

“The caller identified himself as Suresh Chavan. He had called the cargo supervisor of Emirates flight claiming that he overheard someone saying Shahbaz was a terrorist,” the police said.

Hi Readers,

Well, we posted many articles from the open source (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) related to the following topics:

1. Terror

2. Terrorism

3. Islamic Terrorism

4. Motivations and Islamic Terrorism

We posted this article under the following categories: Terrorism and What-do-you-think

You can read those articles and get more details from (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) on this and other topics.

We would like to invite our readers to propose the solutions to the Terrorism and Islamic Terrorism, solutions which are meaningful, intelligent and thought provoking.

Your solution should be free from Hate,  terrorism for terrorism, kill-all type of solutions.

We are looking forward to your posts and comments.

~Muslims Voice of America

Motivations and Islamic Terrorism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Islamic terrorism is inspired by media and numerous Quranic verses that justify or encourage the attacking of infidels. Robert Pape, has argued that at least terrorists utilizing suicide attacks — a particularly effective^[9] form of terrorist attack—are driven not by Islamism but by “a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”^[10]

However, Martin Kramer who debated Pape on origins of suicide bombing, countered Pape’s position that reason for suicide terrorism is not just a strategic logic but also terrorist’s reinterpretation of Islam to provide a moral logic. For example, Hizballah initiated suicide bombings after a complex reworking of the concept of martyrdom. Kramer explains that the Israeli occupation of Lebanon raised the temperature necessary for this reinterpretation of Islam, but occupation alone would not have been sufficient for suicide terrorism.^[11]. “The only way to apply a brake to suicide terrorism,” Kramer argues, “is to undermine its moral logic, by encouraging Muslims to see its incompatibility with their own values.”

In particular, scholar Scott Atran, research director and involved in NATO group studying suicide terrorism, points out that there is no single root cause of terrorism. Greatest predictors of suicide bombings, Atran concludes, is not religion but group dynamics: “small-group dynamics involving friends and family that form the diaspora cell of brotherhood and camaraderie on which the rising tide of martyrdom actions is based”.^[12]

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer‘s states that the Al Qaeda Islamic terror attacks against America are motivated not by a hatred of American culture and religion but by the belief that U.S. foreign policy is a threat to Islam,^[13] condensed in the phrase “They hate us for what we do, not who we are.” U.S. foreign policy actions Scheuer believes are fueling Islamic terror include

• Unconditioned US support to Israel
• U.S. troops on Muslim holy ground in Saudi Arabia (See: United States withdrawal from Saudi Arabia)
• U.S. support for “apostate” police states in Muslim nations such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, and Kuwait^[14]
• The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq
• U.S. support for the creation of the Christian state of East Timor from territory previously held by Muslim Indonesia.
• Perceived U.S. approval or support of counterinsurency against Muslim insurgents in India, Philippines, Chechnia, Uyghur separatists in western China, Palestine.^[15]

Some other academics argue that terrorism should be seen as a strategic reaction to American power,’ – that America is an empire, and empires provoked resistance in the form of terrorism. The Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires, for example, all suffered from terrorist attacks and had terrorist organisations – the Black Hand, Young Bosnia, Narodnaya Volya – spawned from their multiple ethnic, religious, and national peoples (Serb, Macedonian, and Bosnian).^[16]

Islamic terrorism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article’s title and/or subject matter is disputed. This is a dispute over the neutrality of viewpoints implied by the title, or the subject matter within its scope, rather than the actual facts stated. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.(December 2009)

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Islamic terrorism is the common term for violence,^[1] rooted in Islamism, and aimed at propagating Islamic culture, society, and values in opposition to the political, allegedly imperialistic, and cultural influences of non-Muslims, and the Western world in particular (cf. “Dar al-Harb“).^[2]

There are also political dimensions to the ideology, and the history of Western influence and control after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, is the common stated reason used within the ideology to justify and explain its use of violence as resistive and retributive against western influences.

The term, (or discourses using the term), have been attacked as “counter-productive”, “unhelpful”, “highly politicized, intellectually contestable” and “damaging to community relations”.^[3]

Terror

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Terror may refer to:

• Fear, an emotional response to threats and danger
• Horror and terror, standard literary and psychological concepts, especially as applied to Gothic literature
• Terrorism, a policy or act intended to intimidate or cause terror, usually for the furtherance of ideological goals
• State-sponsored terrorism, terrorism sponsored by nation-states
• State terrorism, acts of terrorism conducted by governments
• Political repression, persecution of individuals or groups for political reasons, often a policy of some states towards their own citizens

guardian.co.uk

Afghan policemen guard a burning public market building in Kabul following clashes between Taliban-linked militants and security forces. Photograph: MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images.

The daily business of government was already in full swing by the time a man wearing a white shalwar kameez walked towards the front gate of Afghanistan’s central bank. Close by, deep inside his presidential palace, Hamid Karzai was finally getting round to swearing-in members of his new cabinet. It was just before 10 o’clock in the morning.

The guards at the central bank were already on high alert after recent intelligence warnings suggested a spectacular attack was on the cards and the man in white was behaving extremely suspiciously.

“He was about 10 metres away from the main gate of the bank and the guards told him to stop,” said Ahmad, a plain clothes member of the elite counterterror group Task Force 24, who was at the bank at the time. “But he didn’t say anything or explain himself, he just carried on walking and tried to climb over the barrier.”

Convinced they were being approached by a suicide bomber, the guards opened fire. The man’s device detonated, causing a huge explosion that narrowly missed killing a group of British bodyguards, sheltered from the main force of the blast by another vehicle.

That was the first assault of the day. efore too long a fire, triggered by two bombers detonating their explosive vests, ripped through a nearby shopping centre, sending a plume of smoke high into the sky above central Kabul.

And minutes after the foiled central bank attack, explosions and gunfire could be heard from the nearby ministry of justice, on the other side of Pashtunistan Square, as the insurgents mounted another attack. Either from there or from a nearby vantage point the attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades into the ministry of finance, which hit reinforced shelters in its grounds where government security forces had taken cover.

After the first blast all that was left of the attacker, says Ahmad, were his two legs lying on the ground. Attached to them were a pair of size 41 shoes that in Ahmad’s view were clearly of a “Pakistani” design, hinting at the already widely held view among the country’s counter-terrorism chiefs that this was a plot that originated from outside Afghanistan’s borders.

Hanif Atmar, the softly spoken interior minister, added to that sentiment , saying: “There is no school for training suicide bombers in this ­country” – although there are plenty of radical madrasas that do so in the borderlands of Pakistan.

And, in his view, it was the quick-­wittedness of his security forces at the central bank that forced the team of insurgent gunmen and suicide bombers to leave and instead run amok in the nearby shopping centre, a far softer target.

“Our officer who was killed, he was the one who detected the first suicide bomber trying to enter the bank,” Atmar said. “He detected him and before [the bomber] was able to get to the front gate he was killed. That detection forced the others to go and choose the shopping centre.”

At a joint briefing with Afghanistan’s other security chiefs Atmar said the day also saw attacks on the former Bamiyan hotel, an explosion near a mosque and fighting in the Ariana cinema. He said an intelligence agent was killed, two policemen, two civilians and a child. He said 71 other people were wounded, including 35 civilians and that most of the injuries were caused by insurgents triggering hand grenades.

For the hundreds of civil servants and international consultants trapped in the government buildings there was little to do but listen to the five hours of explosions and raging gun battles and hope that their offices had not been penetrated by insurgents. Security officials told them to lie on the floor and not look out of their windows.

Others did not have the advantage of such sensible advice. Khalid Stanekzai, 23, the boss of Afghanistan’s main Nokia dealership, stood at his office window high up in the recently built Gulbahar shopping centre. He was captivated by the scene below him.

“I had never seen the face of the war before, but I could see it all from there,” he said. “I took my phone and got a picture because it was amazing to me. I filmed it all on my mobile phone.”

At around 11 o’clock, amid all the pandemonium, he noticed an ambulance approach his building. On the ground the security forces were suspicious after the driver failed to respond to their challenges. One of them was close enough to see that he had some sort of a detonation device strapped to his right leg, and yelled to his colleagues to dive for cover.

But Stanekzai did not hear the warning as the ambulance blew apart on the street below him, leaving behind a deep crater in the road.

“The soldiers were running and they were shooting at the ambulance and then it made a very big explosion,” – the last thing he remembered as shrapnel and glass tore into his face.

Meanwhile the police force was rapidly shutting down the city, sending thousands of people streaming away from the epicentre of violence as shopkeepers ­rapidly boarded up their houses.

In Shar-e-Naw, a considerable distance from the fighting, cars turned back on themselves into the one-way system. People who tried to walk towards the fighting, including a few foreign photographers, had pistols waved angrily in their faces.

After it became clear that the attackers were using police uniforms, the Afghanistan National Army and the National Directorate of Security ordered the withdrawal of police from the centre of town and took over the counter-offensive, according to western officials.

They manned positions at the top of the ministry of finance from where they opened fire on the insurgents in the ministry of justice, across Pashtunistan Square.

It was only a matter of time before all the attackers were dead and the situation was brought back under control, leaving relatives to wait anxiously outside the city’s hospitals for the wounded, many complaining bitterly about the government’s failure to secure the capital.

By early evening Stanekzai was finally discharged from Kabul’s Italian-run emergency hospital with 52 stitches in his left cheek and six in his right hand where he had been clutching his mobile phone in front of him…

To read more please click below…
Kabul’s day of terror

A Pakistan army offensive against al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in South Waziristan has entered its second day with dozens of casualties reported.

A BBC correspondent in the region says there is a stalemate as 30,000 Pakistani troops, backed by tanks and artillery, encounter stiff resistance.

The army operation – the biggest for six years – comes after weeks of air strikes against militant targets.

Thousands of refugees are streaming into camps just outside the area.

There have been several co-ordinated Taliban attacks in recent days, killing more than 150 people in cities across Pakistan.

Dozens of casualties have already been reported by local officials as both sides used heavy weapons.

The bodies of three Pakistan soldiers were taken to the northern town of Razmak. There have also been unconfirmed reports of militant deaths.

Nearly all communications in the region were down after the Taliban destroyed a telecommunications tower at Tiarza, local officials said.

Reports from the area are sketchy as it is difficult and dangerous for foreign or Pakistani journalists to operate inside South Waziristan.

Aerial bombardments in the the Makeen area, a stronghold of the Mehsud tribe and a key army target, were also reported by local officials and witnesses.

The ground operation comes after weeks of air and artillery strikes against militant targets in the region, which lies close to the Afghan border.
To read more click below…
Pakistan army continues assault