Three Christian sisters, beating their mother’s coffin in grief, wailed and hugged each other at her funeral in Baghdad yesterday as their rapidly shrinking religious community vented anger at the foreign security guards who killed her.
Marou Awanis, a part-time taxi driver, and one of her women passengers became the latest victims to die at the hands of a foreign private security team in Iraq after they were shot dead in the centre of the capital on Tuesday.
Both women were Armenian Christians. Their deaths stunned their minority religious sect, which has seen its numbers in Iraq fall by more than a half, to 10,000, since the invasion of March 2003.
– The Times
An alleged organiser of military-style training camps in Britain for jihadis urged his followers to carry out murderous atrocities and “see how many you can take at the same time”, Woolwich crown court was told yesterday.
Mohammed Hamid, 50, who called himself “Osama bin London” and ran a religious book stall in Oxford Street, London, described the 7/7 tube and bus bombings, in which 52 people died, as “not even a breakfast for me”, the court heard.
– The Guardian
A 14-year-old boy opened fire in his school in Cleveland, injuring two teachers and two fellow students, before turning the gun on himself.
The school’s security guard was on holiday, according to a local news reports, and two other security guards had been laid off in recent years. Frank Jackson, Cleveland’s Mayor, said that two male teachers, aged 57 and 42, were seriously injured. A 17-year-old male and a boy, 14, were reported to be in a stable condition.
– The Times
The head of Russia’s FSB spy agency yesterday accused Britain and MI6 of leading a campaign to destabilise the country, and said that British agents were using old-fashioned techniques such as “bribery and blackmail” to recruit Russian citizens.
Nikolai Patrushev, director of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, said foreign spies were trying to weaken and dismantle Russia ahead of elections for the Duma (parliament) in December and a presidential poll next year. He singled out Britain for special mention. In an interview with the mass-selling Argumenty I Fakty newspaper, Mr Patrushev said the British intelligence agency MI6 was not only recruiting spies but was also attempting to meddle directly in Russia’s internal affairs.
– The Guardian
