Mes: agosto 2019

(AP) RAWALPINDI, Pakistan – Osama bin Laden spent his last weeks in a house divided, amid wives riven by suspicions. On the top floor, sharing his bedroom, was his youngest wife and favorite. The trouble came when his eldest wife showed up and moved into the bedroom on the floor below. Others in the family, crammed into the three-story villa compound where bin Laden would eventually be killed in a May 2 U.S. raid, were convinced that the eldest wife intended to betray the al Qaeda leader. The picture of bin Laden’s life in the Abbottabad compound comes from Brig. Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani army officer who spent months researching the events and says he was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence’s interrogation of bin Laden’s youngest wife, who was detained in the raid. Qadir was also given rare entry into the villa, which was sealed after the raid and demolished last month. Pictures he took, which he allowed The Associated Press to see, showed the villa’s main staircase, splattered with blood. Other pictures show windows protected by iron grills and the 20-foot high walls around the villa. Qadir’s research gives one of the most extensive descriptions of the arrangements in bin Laden’s hideout when U.S. SEAL commandos stormed in, killing bin Laden and four others. His account is based on accounts by an official of...

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(AP) UNITED NATIONS – Syria’s civil war is worsening and there is no prospect of a quick end to the violence, international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said Monday in a gloomy assessment to the U.N. Security Council. The new envoy leavened his message, however, saying he was crafting a new plan that he hoped could break the impasse, but refused to give details or say when it would be ready. Despite President Bashar Assad’s refusal to end his family’s 40-year grip on power, some tentative hope of a solution remained, Brahimi said in his first briefing to the council since he took over from Kofi Annan on Sept. 1 as the U.N.-Arab League special representative for Syria “I think there is no disagreement anywhere that the situation in Syria is extremely bad and getting worse, that it is a threat to the region and a threat to peace and security in the world,” Brahimi told reporters after the closed-door talks. Activists claim nearly 30,000 people have died in the uprising which began in March 2011, including in attacks Monday by Syrian warplanes in the northern city of Aleppo. Brahimi had just returned from Syria and refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey. His gloomy report of a looming food crisis, battle-damaged schools and shuttered factories, contradicted his insistence that he saw grounds for optimism, including “some signs” that the divided Syrian...