Five jailed for Guatemala killing

21 March 2012 Last updated at 01:45 GMT  The men will only serve 50 years each, the maximum allowed by Guatemalan law Five former members of right-wing Guatemalan paramilitaries have been sentenced to a total of 7,710 years in jail for their role in a 1982 massacre.

The men were charged with guiding the army to Plan de Sanchez, a rural community in northern Guatemala, and taking part in the ensuing massacre.

Many of the victims were women and children.

Nearly a quarter of a million people were killed in Guatemala's civil war which ran from 1960 to 1996.

Judge Jazmin Barrios set a sentence of 30 years for each of the 256 victims of the former paramilitaries, plus 30 years for crimes against humanity.

However Judge Barrios said that the five men would only have to serve 50 years each - the maximum sentence allowed under Guatemalan law.

The massacre at Plan de Sanchez was one of 600 documented by a United Nations Truth Commission.

The men were part of the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil, a civilian militia created by the army to help fight leftwing rebels.

In 2004, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Guatemalan state responsible for the killings at Plan de Sanchez and demanded it investigate the case and prosecute those responsible.

Last week, a former Guatemalan soldier was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in a massacre of 201 people in the village of Dos Erres, also in 1982.

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Kosovan admits killing 2 US airmen

FRANKFURT, Germany — A Kosovo Albanian man confessed Wednesday to killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt airport, saying at the opening of his trial that he had been influenced by radical Islamic propaganda online.

Arid Uka is charged with two counts of murder for the March 2 slaying of Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia.

The 21-year-old Uka also faces three counts of attempted murder for wounding two more airmen and taking aim at a third before his gun jammed.

Although Germany has experienced scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, there have been about a half-dozen other jihadist plots that were either thwarted or failed — including a 2007 plan to kill Americans at the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base.

Uka went to the airport with the intent "to kill an indeterminate number of American soldiers, but if possible a large number," prosecutor Herbert Diemer told a state court in Frankfurt.

No pleas are entered in the German system, and Uka confessed to the killings after the indictment was read, telling the court "what I did was wrong but I cannot undo what I did." He went on to urge other radical Muslims not to seek inspiration in his attack, urging them not to be taken in by "lying propaganda" on the Internet.

Uka, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a crisp white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, smiled at his attorneys as he was brought in and his handcuffs were removed. But he wept repeatedly as he recounted the attack and watched the jihadist videos he said motivated him.

"To this day I try to understand what happened and why I did it... but I don't understand," he said, at times speaking so softly that court officials had to bring in a microphone and put it directly in front of him.

Cooperating with authorities and confessing can help reduce a defendant's sentence — but Uka refused to tell the court where he obtained the 9mm semi-automatic pistol he used, which Presiding Judge Thomas Sagebiel said meant his confession was incomplete.

Uka described becoming increasingly introverted in the months before the attack, staying at home and playing computer games and watching Islamic extremist propaganda on the Internet.
The night before the crime, Uka said, he followed a link to a video posted on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 anti-war Brian De Palma film "Redacted," taken out of context.

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He said he then decided he should do anything possible to prevent more American soldiers from going to Afghanistan.

"I thought what I saw in that video, these people would do in Afghanistan," he told the court, his voice choking with emotion as he wiped away tears.

Uka conceded when asked by prosecutor Jochen Weingarten that the airman driving the bus had not been going to Afghanistan. On the bus on the way to the airport to look for victims, he said he listened to Islamic music on his iPod while nursing doubts that he'd be able to follow through with his plan.

"On the one hand I wanted to do something to help the women, and on the other hand I hoped I would not see any soldiers," he told the court.

He says he now does not understand why he went through with the killings.

"If you ask me why I did this, I can only say ... I don't understand anymore how I went that far."

Video: German suspect said to be Islamic radical

Prosecutors introduced evidence from Uka's laptop, cell phone and iPod, which included hundreds of files containing jihadist videos, literature, sermons and songs.

One song went, "Mother be strong, your son is on jihad," and "do not mourn for me." A video showed rifle-toting Islamic fighters in Pakistan, and a bullet-holed target with "Obama" scrawled on it.

The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside Terminal 2, he spotted two U.S. servicemen who had just arrived and followed them to their U.S. Air Force bus.

After 16 servicemen, including the driver, were on or near the bus, Uka approached one of the men for a cigarette, prosecutors said. He confirmed they were U.S. Air Force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon," the indictment said.

He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head, the indictment alleged. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is great" — and shot and killed Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others.

He seriously wounded two other airmen — Kristoffer Schneider, 26, lost the sight in his right eye, and Edgar Veguilla, 22, was hit in the jaw and elbow.

Then Uka's pistol jammed and he fled into the airport, where he was chased down by police, prosecutors said.

Some of the American airmen are expected to testify. At least one relative of the victims — Cuddeback's mother — has joined the trial as a co-plaintiff, and officials from the State Department and Air Force are observing the trial.

© 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Kandahar Mayor's Killing Another Blow to U.S. Afghanistan Effort (Time.com)

An honest man in a city of thieves, Kandahar mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi once exemplified hopes that the U.S.-led nation-building effort would leave behind a better Afghanistan. His killing by a suicide bomber on Wednesday, less than two weeks after the slaying of Kandahar's strongman provincial council chairman Ahmed Wali Karzai, underscores the declining prospects of the Western military mission there. His killing by a suicide bomber on Wednesday, less than two weeks after the slaying of Kandahar's strongman governor Mohammed Wali Karzai, underscores the declining prospects of the Western military mission there.

"More than 50 percent of the violence comes from these corrupt people, the ones who sit with you and smile," Hamidi told the Washington Post earlier this year. The former accountant had returned to Kandahar in 2007 after 30 years in the United States. Having been invited to serve as mayor by his childhood friend Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Hamidi said goodbye to the comfort of his northern Virginia home and threw himself into the maelstrom of the southern Afghan city's politics. He initiated a slew of projects - from paving roads, collecting taxes and building schools - intended to revitalize the city, and made a name for himself trying to root out graft and curb the power of local strongmen and warlords on whom he blamed Kandahar's ills. (See photos from the battle in Kandahar.)

Some of the enemies he made in the course of trying to clean up Kandahar appear to have caught up with him Wednesday. Clashes had erupted in the city Tuesday afternoon, with police accused of accidentally shooting three children as bulldozers moved in to demolish houses built illegally on government land. The following morning Hamidi met with elders who had come to protest. He heard their grievances in the corridor outside his office. Shortly before 11 a.m. a man stepped out of the crowd, took Hamidi's hand and detonated explosives hidden in his turban. The blast caught Hamidi square in the face, killing him instantly.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the hit, saying it was to avenge the children killed the previous day. But an official with Afghanistan's secret police offered a more nuanced version of events. "All those illegal houses Hamidi destroyed belonged to powerful [former] jihadi commanders living in the district," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told TIME. Hamidi had been the first person to stand up to these warlords, the official went on, turfing them off land they'd stolen from the government or the poor. "The warlords didn't like Hamidi, so they turned to the Taliban, who killed him." (See how the Taliban are unleashing a spring offensive in Afghanistan.)

It's a cynical reflection of Kandahari politics that Hamidi survived four years of an escalating Taliban insurgency only to die when he angered commanders whose personal financial interests diverged from those of the government. The episode is also a fitting illustration of Kandahar's war economy, where a murky nexus of insurgents, criminals, strongmen and government officials vie for resources, often with overlapping interests and shifting allegiances.

The killing is also the latest blow to Karzai, who has lost a string of key allies in southern Afghanistan just as NATO looks to start sending its troops home. Last week, gunmen killed Jan Mohammad Khan, a confidante and erstwhile mentor of the president, as he sat down for dinner with a parliamentarian at his villa in Kabul. On July 12, a trusted lieutenant killed Ahmed Wali Karzai, de facto ruler of Kandahar. Both of Hamidi's deputies were assassinated last year, and Kandahar's chief of police was killed in April.

Analysts believe the Taliban intent is to mirror the intensity of Nato's own campaign of 'kill/capture' raids against insurgent commanders. "Partially that has an impact in the battlefield, and partly on morale, and part is also to project a certain position of strength," says Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a repected Kabul think-tank. (See TIME's video: "A New Season of Fighting in Afghanistan.")

But Hamidi's death has a significance beyond simply reflecting the violent, murky nature of Kandahari politics, or bolstering the Taliban narrative that no government official, no matter how close to Karzai, is safe. Hamidi had been one of the leading contenders to become Kandahar's next governor, a position that would likely convey considerable power. Close to the Karzais, but without a powerbase of his own, he would have been a conduit President Karzai could have used to project his family influence across southern Afghanistan in the absence of Ahmed Wali. Well-connected Kandaharis saw him as a serious contender for the job. His removal from the scene leaves the way open for Gul Agha Sherzai, a strongman who dispenses patronage like an old-fashioned potentate. A nominal Karzai ally, Sherzai is excepted by many observers to direct lucrative NATO contracts and revenues from all manner of formal and informal economic activity towards his own family if he gets the nod, diminishing Karzai's influence in the south.

Hamidi's death, then, is another blow to Karzai's prospects for holding Kandahar once foreign troops leave the southern crucible. But who benefits from that weakening in the long-term may be a question still in play.

See photos of the coalition raid that ended an attack on a Kabul hotel.

See photos of the fight against the Taliban.

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