SAOIRSE32

By John Burke
Sunday Business Post
03 August 2008

Dissident paramilitaries pose a substantial threat to security in the Republic, senior gardaí have admitted in a briefing to the European police network Europol.

The gardaí have also said that criminal activity by the INLA- including kidnapping and extortion rackets against other organised crime groups - has increased fivefold.

The information is contained in a memorandum submitted to Europol’s annual report for 2008 on the threat posed by domestic terror within the EU.

The briefing is based on current Garda and Army intelligence assessments of the capability and intent of the Continuity IRA, Real IRA, and the INLA. Gardaí have also dramatically increased monitoring operations because of the increased involvement of the INLA in organised crime, according to the submission.

Gardaí arrested more than 20 suspected INLA members involved in criminal activity over the 12 months prior to submitting their briefing to Europol earlier this year.

That figure was up from just four arrests two years ago, at a time when security experts had said that the INLA had effectively disintegrated in the Republic.

A number of other people have been arrested since the start of this year and the majority of those have been charged with membership of an unlawful organisation. The Special Criminal Court last week heard that an ‘‘extensive’’ file was being compiled on the alleged leader of the INLA in Dublin.

Declan Duffy (34), of Hanover Street West, Dublin, was last month charged with membership of the INLA. He was refused bail after the court heard that gardaí believed he would continue to direct INLA activities and attempt to procure guns and explosives if freed.

Garda and Police Service of Northern Ireland intelligence has indicated a surge in INLA activity in Ireland. Senior gardaí are concerned that some members of the INLA have engaged in tit-for-tat attacks on organised crime figures in the Dublin area.

Earlier this year, gardaí made a series of arrests connected with suspected INLA activity in Cork, Kerry and Limerick, including extortion and kidnapping. Last week, it emerged that so-called dissident Irish republicans are more active than any other terrorist group in Britain.

MI5 data, leaked to the Guardian newspaper, said organisations such as the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA posed a greater danger than Islamic extremists. More than 60 per cent of all electronic information intercepted through wire taps and other covert operations related to dissident republicans, the newspaper claimed.

Belfast Telegraph
Saturday, 2 August 2008

The British government has given up hope of bringing the killer of Alexander Litvinenko to justice and is now concentrating its efforts on trying to ensure that similar murders do not take place in this country in the future, according to a senior source.

The former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi, wanted by the British authorities for the poisoning by polonium of Mr Litvinenko – also once a KGB and later FSB officer– is very unlikely to be extradited, said the official, especially as he is now a member of parliament in Moscow.

The source said: “It is most unlikely that we will be able to get Lugovoi, but we can try to make sure that we don’t have another Litvinenko.” To this end, the UK authorities took a series of punitive measures after the murder of 44-year-old Litvinenko, in London in November 2006, to “send a strong message that this kind of thing will not be tolerated”.

Britain froze links with the Russian secret service FSB, the successor to the KGB, and the suspension stays in place. The UK authorities have said they are prepared to pass information on counter-terrorism to Russian intelligence agencies other than the FSB.

Mr Litvinenko died after drinking from a cup of green tea while with Mr Lugovoi and two other Russians at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in central London. The teapot was so irradiated that the bar and several employees suffered from contamination, including a pianist who drank from the teacup after it had gone through a dishwasher.

Asked about who may have ordered Mr Litvinenko’s killing, the source said: “Litvinenko was a former member of the FSB and he became a very unpopular man. I assume as a result of that his death was either officially sanctioned or that some faction or other of the FSB tried to get him.”

The source continued: “If he [Litvinenko] had drunk the whole cup of tea he would have died instantly. It is only because he sipped it that he lingered and polonium was detected.”

The latest round of acrimonious tit-for-tat measures followed broadcasting of claims that MI5 believed the Russian state was involved in the killing of Mr Litvinenko. This was followed by the Russians accusing a British diplomat, Chris Bowers, the acting director of trade and investment at the Moscow embassy, of being a spy, a claim strongly denied by the UK government. The Russians have also forced the British Council in Moscow to stop operations, and interrogated members of staff.

Gordon Brown used his first meeting with President Dimitry Medvedev of Russia last month to present a list of British grievances, chief among them the failure to extradite Mr Lugovoi. There was also the complaint that Russian intelligence activity in the UK has significantly increased recently, with, it is claimed, up to 30 Russian agents working out of the embassy and the country’s trade mission, forcing MI5 to divert attention from combating Islamist terrorism.

But the Russian ambassador to the UK, Yuri Fedotov, maintained that Mr Lugovoi could not possibly have a fair trial in the UK “because of the political and emotional context” of the case. He also pointed out that Britain has refused to co-operate with the extradition of about 20 people wanted by the Russians, including the exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky who had called for the overthrow of Vladimir Putin, when Mr Putin was president.

The UK source said that despite difficulties, relations between Britain and Russia were thawing and there was scope for co-operation in several fields.

By Conor McMorrow
Tribune.ie
**Via Newshound
3 August 2008

TEN years after losing his wife, daughter and grand-daughter in the Omagh bombing, an 83-year-old Omagh man has spoken for the first time about the horror of losing three generations of his family.

Mick Grimes’s wife Mary (65), daughter Avril Monaghan (30), Avril’s youngest daughter Maura (20 months) and Avril’s unborn twins were killed by the Real IRA bomb in Omagh on 15 August 1998.

They had gone on a shopping trip to the town to celebrate Mary’s 65th birthday. “We are away now, bye”, were Mary’s final words before leaving.

Mick, her husband for over 40 years, had bought her flowers for her birthday but she never came home to see them waiting on the kitchen table.

Daughter Avril and her baby Maura

“For a while we clung to the hope that they had gone to some other town but as time passed that hope faded. No words could describe the feeling of helplessness that set in as we watched and waited for the car to return,” he writes in a new book.

At the inquest into their deaths, the coroner said that he could not remember any family suffering such a loss in the history of the Troubles. Grimes never spoke about his horrific loss until last week.

Some years before her death Mary Grimes and her daughter Avril gave him a professionally bound book containing all the poems he had written for their local parish newsletter for a number of decades. Mick later dismissed his wife’s suggestion that he should write a book about his life containing his poetry.

Almost 10 years since his wife was killed in the bomb, the retired dairy farmer from Beragh in Tyrone will launch his book Till We Meet Again, fulfilling his late wife’s wish in Omagh tomorrow.

He explained, “On different occasions over the years, Mary sometimes hinted that I should try to write a book. But I knew in my heart that it was beyond my capability. Then in the years after the atrocity in 1998 the fact that I had made no effort to comply with my wife’s request sometimes caused me concern. About 18 months ago I decided to make an attempt. No doubt some readers will frown at my endeavour but I like to think that somewhere beyond the great divide there is one who smiles.”

A web of stories, humorous anecdotes, poems and observations, the book tracks Grimes life from “the hungry Thirties” through wartime Ireland and up to the present day. He gives a poignant account of the horrendous loss his family suffered after the 1998 atrocity and how he has coped with it since then.

Speaking to the Sunday Tribune, Grimes explained, “The book takes in from the day I went to school in 1932 through the story of my farming life as I lived it. Not many people have written about life in the 1940s when there was no oil and no electricity and everything was done by manpower. The book goes through all my farming life right up until the last chapter that ends with that day of the atrocity in 1998.

“About 75% of the book is about country life, before it finishes with that day in August 10 years ago. In the last 10 years I never got involved in any of the groups that were looking for justice. On 15 August there will be a commemoration in Omagh and I will have to attend but I am not looking forward to it.”

Grimes is a humble man and spoke modestly about his poetry, “I call them poems but maybe the professionals would not call them that. There are over 25 poems in the book and I just like them to rhyme as well as they can.”

‘Till We Meet Again’ is priced £10 and available at selected Easons bookshops

http://tillwemeetagain.synthasite.com

Sunday Life
3 August 2008

It is estimated that there are up to 20,000 victims each year. Some estimates put the number of children kidnapped or sold on the black market closer to 70,000

Behind the glitz of the Beijing Olympics which begins this week China hides a shameful secret — up to 20,000 children are being sold on the black market each year.

The secret trade is booming due to China’s controversial one-baby rule introduced in 1979 to curb a population explosion.

Chen Jie’s parents

Parents must have a birth permit to have a child. If they don’t and they are discovered, they are fined. If couples have a second child, they have to pay a fine.

Many poor families can’t afford to raise a child, pay the fees and feed themselves, so they feel selling their child is the only way to survive, but even more children are kidnapped.

While China tries to focus the world’s attention on the Olympics, thousands of families are still desperately trying to trace their children who have been sold to strangers.

The Chen family’s son, five-year-old Chen Jie, disappeared after helping his grandmother on her vegetable stall. He was being taken home by a neighbour, Zhang, who is believed to have sold him. The going price for a boy on the black market is around £650 — six months’ wages for an average Chinese worker. (more…)