Britain Turns to Reckoning With Rioters:Cameron Faces Parliament

TimesCast | Riots Spread in Britain

LONDON — Still reeling with shock and anger over the worst rioting in decades, Britain has turned to a tough reckoning with the perpetrators, with courts sitting through the night and the police saying Thursday that over 1,200 people had been arrested, the bulk of them in London.Police officers framed by a burned vehicle in Liverpool on Wednesday.But, despite an apparent lull in the rioting that has ravaged London and other major cities, concern was growing about many of the ethnically segregated districts battered by the rampages, particularly Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, where the police and political leaders worried about a potentially explosive new pattern of interracial violence that could be set off by the past days and nights of mayhem.Three young men of Pakistani descent were killed in Birmingham on Tuesday night when a car crashed into a group of residents who had gathered to protect local businesses from attack. Witnesses said that the driver appeared to be of Afro-Caribbean descent, and the police arrested a 32-year-old man and charged him with murder.On Thursday, the London police said 888 people had been arrested and 371 charged with offenses since the violence took root on Saturday, while the Manchester police in the northwest put the total of arrests there at 145, with similar numbers detained in Birmingham in the English Midlands. Courts in London and Birmingham sat through the night. But, with thousands of police reinforcement on the streets, heavy rain in some areas and residents in some places patrolling their own residential areas, there were no new reports of major violence overnight.Meanwhile, politicians braced for the fallout from the convulsion of violence as Prime Minister David Cameron faced the most severe crisis of his 15 months in office. The wildfire spread of violence, the initial failure of the police to contain it, the slow early response of political leaders and the cruelty of the attacks have left the nation shaken and wrung by an embittered debate about whom and what to blame.Casting himself as a decisive leader taking charge of the nation’s destiny, Mr. Cameron was set to address an emergency session of Parliament — recalled from its summer recess because of the violence — on Thursday. In face of the violence, he has taken a tough line, saying the actions of those who looted and committed arson showed a lack of “proper morals” and a failure of parenting.While many Britons had initially blamed the violence on unemployed youth, however, one surprise was the presence of young men and women with regular jobs among the riot suspects lined up in police wagons outside courthouses in London and other cities. That raised questions about why they had been caught up in the kind of mayhem that has traditionally drawn on an underclass of alienated young people, with no jobs and few prospects.Many of those who were remanded for trial appeared to come from just those kinds of backgrounds — evidence, as some commentators saw it, that the root causes of the disorders lay in social deprivation and despair. But those who stood before the courts for bail hearings in London, many of them still in their jeans and hooded sweatshirts, included a graphic designer, a postal employee, a dental assistant, a teaching aide, a forklift driver and a youth worker.One 19-year-old woman was listed on court documents as living in a converted farmhouse in a leafy, upmarket area of rural Kent that is part of what Londoners call the stockbroker belt. A 22-year-old woman gave her address as an upscale block of flats in a gentrified neighborhood of Hackney, one of the worst-hit riot areas in London. Local residents said that many of the residents of the apartments, which are valued at about $500,000, belonged to a community of affluent, middle-class people with jobs in London’s news media and art world.

TimesCast | What Is Driving the Riots

Ahead of the emergency House of Commons session on Thursday, Mr. Cameron declared a “fightback” against what he condemned as the “groups of thugs” who had driven the riots. With his government jolted by the scenes of young people looting and setting fire to shops, warehouses, vehicles and police stations, he spoke with an angry vehemence that conveyed a sense that his government had settled on an unyielding crackdown, shorn of the kind of exculpatory language that British politicians have often used when confronted with youth disorder.

Officer shot at San Diego and Suspect killed in gunfight

SAN DIEGO -- A police officer was shot in the head Saturday in an apparent unprovoked attack as he waited at a stop light alongside a vehicle suspected of being involved in a shooting hours earlier.

He was shot around 5:30 p.m. when he pulled up to a black Audi in the City Heights area on the city's eastside and a passenger in that car shot him."As far as we know, it was totally unprovoked," Police Capt. Jim Collins told the newspaper. "He was not attempting to stop the suspect vehicle. He had no idea that was the suspect vehicle."

He said the shooting led police to track down the vehicle to a nearby apartment, where they got involved in a gun battle and fatally shot one suspect. Another one remained inside the apartment late Saturday as a SWAT team surrounded the building.

The Audi was suspected of being involved in a shooting at an In-N-Out restaurant about two hours earlier and 14 miles away in El Cajon. Police chased the vehicle on the freeway, but had to give up after it sped more than 100 mph.

Mumbai probe focuses on local Indian terror group

NEW DELHI (AP) — The prime suspect in the deadly bomb attack in Mumbai — the Indian Mujahedeen — has re-emerged three years after authorities believed they virtually wiped out the terror group in a crackdown that left many of its leaders dead, in jail or hiding abroad.

The return of the shadowy extremist network, which Indian officials have linked to Pakistani extremists, could herald a new wave of terror attacks across the country after three years of relative calm and threaten the recently renewed peace process with Islamabad.
The July 13 rush hour attacks in three busy Mumbai neighborhoods killed 20 people and rekindled memories of 2008, when deadly explosions across the country struck fear in Indians.
Police said the Mumbai bombs, fabricated from ammonium nitrate, were similar to those used by the Indian Mujahedeen in the past, leading police to focus on the group.
"It is one of the most likely targets for us," said Deven Bharti, a senior Mumbai police official.
The coordinated bombings followed three smaller attacks in the past 10 months, two of which the group claimed responsibility.
The Indian Mujahedeen was not destroyed, said Ajit Doval, the former head of India's Intelligence Bureau. "It was reorganizing itself," he said.
Though similar to earlier bombings, the Mumbai attacks were not accompanied by an email claiming responsibility, which had been a hallmark of Indian Mujahedeen attacks, Bharti said.
A Western diplomat following the case said the lack of a claim of responsibility was surprising, but most people were working under the assumption the group was responsible.
Nevertheless, investigators have been cautious about attributing blame for the new attacks to a group accused of ties to Pakistan, especially with fragile peace talks between the two countries' foreign ministers under way this week.
                                               Until arrests are made, "I cannot say with 100 percent comfort level that this is IM," Bharti said.The Indian Mujahedeen, which sprang out of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India, is "a radical fringe of technically savvy disaffected Indian Muslims who embrace Islamic extremism in response to perceived injustices by the Hindu majority," according to a 2008 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi obtained by WikiLeaks.
The youth were galvanized by Hindu extremists' 1992 destruction of the 16th century Babri Mosque — and the bloody riots that followed — as well as a 2002 spasm of communal violence in the western state of Gujarat that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim.
Militants in rival Pakistan took advantage of this anger, recruiting Indian Muslims they met on trips to Saudi Arabia and giving them weapons and bomb-making training in camps run by the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba group in Pakistan, said a former Indian intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The recruits were then sent back home to India to wreak havoc, the official said. While their specific attacks were not organized by Lashkar, they did receive funding from the extremist group through the unregulated hawala Islamic banking network, the recently retired official said.
Because of the clear operational links to groups in Pakistan, the Indian Mujahedeen is not really seen as an indigenous terror group, said the Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss intelligence matters.
Pakistani officials were not available for comment, and Pakistani militants denied any connection with the group.
"We do not have any links with the Indian Mujahedeen and had never had even historic links with them," said Yahya Mujahed, spokesman for Janaat-ud-Dawaa, the new name given to Lashkar-e-Taiba after it was banned in Pakistan several years ago.
In his book, "Indian Mujahedeen: The Enemy Within," journalist Shishir Gupta describes how two brothers, the top Indian Mujahedeen leaders Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal, ran terror training camps on the beaches of the southern Indian state of Karnataka with the help of militants trained in Pakistan in preparation for a series of strikes.
At 1 p.m. on Nov. 23, 2007, the previously unknown group sent an email to TV news channels declaring it was about to attack courts in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Five minutes later, blasts shook courthouses in the cities of Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad, killing 16 people.
Another coordinated bomb attack claimed by the group hit the crowded markets and streets outside Hindu temples in the city of Jaipur on May 13, 2008, killing 80 people.
Two months later, the Indian Mujahedeen sent an email daring police to stop a planned attack in Ahmedabad. Five minutes later the first of 16 bombs exploded in the city in a strike that killed 45. Two months after that, there was another email followed by another series of blasts, this time in New Delhi, where 21 were killed.
Six days later, police in the capital raided an Indian Mujahedeen hide-out, leading to a series of arrests across the country that nearly destroyed the group, Gupta said.
Some members were killed in shootouts. Others fled.
Last year, India gave Pakistan a dossier containing the names of Indian extremists — including the Bhatkal brothers and other group leaders — believed to be hiding out in Pakistan. Pakistan dismissed it as "literature."
Aside from the February 2010 bombing of a cafe in the city of Pune that has been linked to the group, the threat from the Indian Mujahedeen appeared to have dissipated.
But smaller attacks in recent months led to fears the group might be reforming.
Last Sept. 19, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and wounded two Taiwanese men outside a famous New Delhi mosque. A few minutes later, a bomb rigged to a nearby car malfunctioned and caught fire. An email from the Indian Mujahedeen claimed responsibility. On Dec. 7, another bomb exploded on the banks of the Ganges River in the city of Varanasi, killing a 2-year-old. The group claimed responsibility for that as well. On May 25, a small explosion that appeared to be a failed car bomb hit the parking lot of the High Court in New Delhi.
Then came the deadlier Mumbai bombings.
Over the weekend, a man was arrested in Nepal on suspicion of having links to the Mumbai blasts, according to Nepal's government-run Gorkhapatra newspaper. But authorities there would not comment Tuesday and the significance was not known. Indian Mujahedeen members have been accused in the past of hiding across the relatively porous borders with Nepal and Bangladesh.
Doval, the former intelligence chief, said the group has little support among India's Muslim community and is making no political demands of the government.

Norwegians fill Oslo cathedral to mourn

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, center, his wife Ingrid Schulerud, and Eskil Pedersen, leader of the Labor Party youth wing, lay flowers before a memorial service at an Oslo cathedral. (July 24, 2011)

OSLO, Norway—
"Today we are mourning. Today we want to stop and remember those who died," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said at the service, as attendees in the pews wept.

In all, 92 people were killed and 97 wounded in the Oslo bombing and Utoya Island shooting rampage. There are still people missing at both scenes, and divers were searching the waters around the island for bodies.

Stoltenberg grew emotional as he recalled a woman named Monica who had worked at the island youth camp for 20 years. "She has died, shot and killed while she tried to create safety and happiness for young people," Stoltenberg said.

"Soon we will be given the names and pictures of those who have died, and then the size and scale of this cruelty will become apparent. This will be a new trial for us, but we will manage that one as well. In the middle of all this tragedy I am proud to live in a country that is able to stand at such a critical moment, to stand together."

Also Sunday, Oslo Deputy Police Chief Sveinung Sponheim said the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, was cooperating, and that "the dialogue between him and police has been good."

Police would not comment on the long right-wing online manifesto attributed to Breivik, saying only that it was part of the investigation.