Hitting A Sanctuary

IT was an attempt unprecedented in the history of the United Nations. The four letter bombs discovered at the world body on January 13 had been targeted at the UN bureau of the Al-Hayat, an Arabic newspaper. But the fact that the bombs had arrived at an organisation created to offer a neutral, international forum for dialogue outside the spheres of national governments caused universal outrage. "This is a house of peace and we work in the interest of all nations. This kind of activity is not something that anyone can condone," said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Several of Al-Hayat's other offices have been singled out over the past weeks. Two such bombs arrived at the paper's Riyadh bureau on January 4 and 11, while five went to the Al-Hayat office in Washington DC. All the bombs were defused, except for two which critically injured two employees at the paper's London headquarters on January 13. The London explosion prompted Rashida Dergham, the paper's UN correspondent, to immediately alert the UN secretary to screen her mail. Two bombs were detected and defused the same morning while two more were found and defused later in the day. Mail delivery to the UN, which receives approximately 15,000 letters a day, was suspended by the US postal service for a day after the bombs were received. Al-Hayat has a circulation of roughly 200,000 but is considered one of the most avidly read newspapers in West Asia. As Dergham points out, the paper's editorial policy has been consistent in that it has criticised almost everyone in West Asia uniformly, without singling out any one organisation. And journalists at the paper remain determined "to pursue their journalistic objectives with all their might, objectively and humbly". Al-Hayat has been the target of such attacks right from its early days. In 1966, Kamel Mrowa, the paper's founder, was shot dead in his Beirut office, as he was adding the final touches to the next day's edition. Supporters of the then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser were felt to have been behind the killing, spurred by the paper's criticism of the Arab nationalist movement. "My father died with two phones in his hands and his pen on his desk, because he refused to back down or shut up," Hayat Mrowa Palumbo, Mrowa's daughter, now a US resident, told New York Times.

Though UN mail is routinely put through an X-ray machine, plastic explosives such as SEMTEX—which according to US investigators are favoured by West Asia terrorists—are easily mould-able and nearly undetectable by X-rays. The bombs, FBI Director James Kallstrom disclosed, were in white envelopes with computer-generated addresses and—as the earlier ones received elsewhere—were postmarked December 21, in Alexandria, Egypt. The Egyptian postmarks and the fact that two similar bombs were received and defused at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Texas, have given rise to speculations that they were mailed by supporters of Omar Abdel-Rah-man, a radical convicted in 1995 of conspiracy to blow up New York landmarks, including the UN headquarters.

There are many other theories. Some believe the bombs were in response to Saudi Arabia's recent statement that it would cooperate with the US over the search for those who bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996.바카라 웹사이트

Others suspect Algerian Islamic militants, whom the paper has exposed, and possibly even the Algerian government itself. Yet others feel it could be Iraq, on whose arsenal of missile and chemical weaponry Al-Hayat carried an expose. And according to other rumours, the bombs are due to the fact that Al-Hayat has a bureau in Jerusalem and carried interviews with Israeli personalities like Shimon Peres. But so far, no group has claimed responsibility.

After an unusually tense day at the UN on January 13, the organisation slowly returned to normal. The Security Council met as scheduled the next day, and UN personnel returned to work after undergoing a briefing by New York City police and UN security. However, several false bomb scares broke out across New York, in Long Island, at the Iranian mission and in Queens. And over the week, the number of visitors to the UN—approximately 400,000 a year—decreased dramatically.

The letter bombs have left many people jittery about just how impenetrable the UN headquarters—which NYPD sources say is more secure than most buildings in New York City—really is. Moreover, as the editor of the Arab weekly Al-Mijala told the New York Times: "It may signal the end of the truce between Arab journalism in exile and political currents in the Arab world."바카라 웹사이트