FSOC REPORTS

RUSSIAN "LORD OF WAR" BUSTED IN THAILAND SENT TO USA

BANGKOK, November 16 (Itar-Tass) - Six officers of the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are escorting Russian businessman Viktor Bout to the United States, police officials said on Tuesday. The extradition procedure was guarded by 50 police officers and several snipers.  Russian Consul in Thailand Andrei Dvornikov also confirmed to Itar-Tass that the “plane on which Russian citizen Viktor Bout was supposedly taken left Thailand at 13:30, local time (09:30 MSK).” “Neither the Russian embassy nor consulate and even relatives of Viktor Bout were notified of the coming extradition, we have to simply face the fact and still have no official information,” the diplomat stressed.  Bout’s lawyers call his extradition “unlawful, as not all procedures have been completed in the Appeals Court.”  The extradition followed a decision of the government of Thailand that approved the extradition of the 43-year-old Russian citizen to the United States on charges of complicity in smuggling arms.  Viktor Bout was detained in Bangkok in March 2008 based on Washington’ s request. New York’s federal district Attorney’s Office brought four charges against him. He is charged with conspiracy with the aim of supply of arms to gunmen of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) “known that they will be used to kill US citizens and officers.”

The Thai Appeals Court on August 20 granted the US request for extradition of the Russian citizen to the United States. In America, Bout faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted in the United States on charges including conspiracy to kill US nationals and providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organisation.  Bout has denied the US charges of trade in weapons and claims that in the period from 1993 to 2001 he owned a legal business in the sphere of international air transportation. “Many media spread information about me as a major illegal arms trader in the world, even not trying to think that no evidence proving these allegations really exist,” he said.  Touching upon the Thai court’s decision to extradite him to the United States Bout stated that it fails to meet “many norms of Thai legislation.” “I was arrested on charges of ‘support of terrorism,’ according to an article of the Thai law. In connection with the absence of evidence proving this crime the Prosecutor’s Office of Thailand did not open a criminal case against me, and the court turned down the US extradition request. However, the Appeals Court of Thailand overturned this decision and again passed a verdict on my extradition to the United States,” said the businessman.

According to The Bangkok Post, Viktor Bout was flown out of Thailand on Tuesday on a special US government jet to face trial in the United States, bringing to an end months of legal wrangling over his extradition. The 43-year-old former soviet air force pilot has been fighting extradition on terrorism charges since his March 2008 arrest after a sting operation in Bangkok involving undercover US agents posing as Colombian FARC rebels. “Bout left Thai soil at 1:27 pm (06:27 GMT) from Don Mueang airport,” Pol Col Supisarn Bhakdinarunart, commander of the Crime Suppression Division, said. “He left on a US jet escorted by six officials,” Pol Col Supisarn said. “I myself saw him off. The next destination of the flight is secret, but its final destination is the US,” he noted.  Bout’s sudden departure came shortly after the Thai cabinet approved his handover. He was escorted by police from Bang Kwang maximum security prison in a convoy of police cars with their sirens blaring. Bout’s wife Alla was waiting outside but did not have a chance to see her husband immediately before he left.

VIKTOR BOUT-AKA-LORD OF WAR FACTS

1967: Born on 13 January 1967, reportedly in the Soviet republic of Tajikistan.

1987: He visits Angola as a “lieutenant and translator in the Soviet army.”

1991: The Soviet Union collapses.

1995: He founds an air freight company called Aircess operating across Africa.

1995-2002: He stands accused of selling weapons to UNITA rebels in the Angolan civil war during this period.

1995-2003: He stands accused of selling weapons to Liberia’s Charles Taylor to help him fight two civil wars during this period.

1998-2003: He stands accused of selling weapons to participants in the Second Congo War during this period.

2001: He is alleged to have supplied weapons to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

2004: His assets in the United States are frozen and he is named by Washington as an arms dealer. Ironically, allegations surface that he flew hundreds of flights into Iraq on behalf of the US military.

2005: A film starring Nicolas Cage said to be loosely based on his life called ‘Lord of War’ appears. He rubbishes it.

2008: He is arrested in Thailand after a sting operation set up by US Drug Enforcement Agents and accused of conspiracy to sell weapons to FARC rebels in Colombia.

NORTH KOREA BURMA CONNECTION REPORT 

UN says North Korea giving nuclear equipment to Burma

UNITED NATIONS: North Korea is supplying banned nuclear and ballistic equipment to Burma, Iran and Syria using “surreptitious” means to avoid international sanctions, according to a UN report released on Saturday morning. China had blocked publication of the report which has been ready for six months, diplomats said. North Korea is involved with “the surreptitious transfer of nuclear-related and ballistic missile-related equipment, know-how and technology” to countries including Iran, Syria and Burma, said the report. A UN sanctions committee panel of experts called for heightened vigilance to stop the nuclear trade and for more detailed investigation into the sophisticated means used by North Korea to circumvent sanctions. North Korea, known officially as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “employs a broad range of techniques to mask its transactions, including the use of overseas entities, shell companies, informal transfer mechanisms, cash couriers and barter arrangements,” said the investigators. Since the last sanctions were imposed in June 2009, four “non-compliance cases involving arms exports” had come to light, the report said. It did not give details but said North Korea used “masking techniques” including mislabelling containers, falsifying ships’ manifests and destination details “and use of multiple layers of intermediaries, shell companies, and financial institutions.”

The North is increasingly using foreign-owned ships and modern air freight jets which can now easily get from North Korea’s main airports to the Middle East without refuelling and so avoid checks. The experts said the Security Council should consider ordering North Korea to declare all air cargos before countries give overflight clearance. The experts “expressed concern that certain countries, such as the Syrian Arab Republic, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Burma, continue to be associated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in regard to proscribed activities and believes that special attention should be taken by all member states to inhibit such activities. North Korea staged one nuclear test in 2006 and claims it set off another nuclear device in 2009, when the last sanctions were imposed. The UN Security Council has banned trade in nuclear and ballistic material. The UN has named eight entities and five individuals for asset freezes and travel bans. The report said the number involved was much higher and called on countries to name other banks and other entities that should be added to the list.

North Korea had been involved in nuclear talks with China, the United States, Russia, Japan and South Korea. But the last talks were in late 2008 and the isolated North pulled out of the negotiations the following year. International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano said this week that the standoff with North Korea was now “very bad”. The UN report said there were no signs that North Korea “is ready to move forward on denuclearisation or to step back from its other existing weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile development programmes.” The North “has continued to engage in activities proscribed by the relevant Security Council resolutions and has continued to boycott the six-party talks. It continues to market and export its nuclear and ballistic technology to certain other states. China has been the North’s main ally on the international stage and it had blocked the report since it was prepared in May, diplomats said.

FSOC RUSSIA REPORTS 

China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ® shakes hands with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nov. 23, 2010.  Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies. “About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg. The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities. The yuan has now started trading against the Russian rouble in the Chinese interbank market, while the renminbi will soon be allowed to trade against the rouble in Russia, Putin said. “That has forged an important step in bilateral trade and it is a result of the consolidated financial systems of world countries,” he said.

Putin made his remarks after a meeting with Wen. They also officiated at a signing ceremony for 12 documents, including energy cooperation. The documents covered cooperation on aviation, railroad construction, customs, protecting intellectual property, culture and a joint communiqu. Details of the documents have yet to be released. Putin said one of the pacts between the two countries is about the purchase of two nuclear reactors from Russia by China’s Tianwan nuclear power plant, the most advanced nuclear power complex in China. Putin has called for boosting sales of natural resources – Russia’s main export – to China, but price has proven to be a sticking point. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who holds sway over Russia’s energy sector, said following a meeting with Chinese representatives that Moscow and Beijing are unlikely to agree on the price of Russian gas supplies to China before the middle of next year. Russia is looking for China to pay prices similar to those Russian gas giant Gazprom charges its European customers, but Beijing wants a discount. The two sides were about $100 per 1,000 cubic meters apart, according to Chinese officials last week.

Wen’s trip follows Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s three-day visit to China in September, during which he and President Hu Jintao launched a cross-border pipeline linking the world’s biggest energy producer with the largest energy consumer. Wen said at the press conference that the partnership between Beijing and Moscow has “reached an unprecedented level” and pledged the two countries will “never become each other’s enemy”. Over the past year, “our strategic cooperative partnership endured strenuous tests and reached an unprecedented level,” Wen said, adding the two nations are now more confident and determined to defend their mutual interests. “China will firmly follow the path of peaceful development and support the renaissance of Russia as a great power,” he said. “The modernization of China will not affect other countries’ interests, while a solid and strong Sino-Russian relationship is in line with the fundamental interests of both countries.”

Wen said Beijing is willing to boost cooperation with Moscow in Northeast Asia, Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, as well as in major international organizations and on mechanisms in pursuit of a “fair and reasonable new order” in international politics and the economy. Sun Zhuangzhi, a senior researcher in Central Asian studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the new mode of trade settlement between China and Russia follows a global trend after the financial crisis exposed the faults of a dollar-dominated world financial system. Pang Zhongying, who specializes in international politics at Renmin University of China, said the proposal is not challenging the dollar, but aimed at avoiding the risks the dollar represents. Wen arrived in the northern Russian city on Monday evening for a regular meeting between Chinese and Russian heads of government. He left St. Petersburg for Moscow late on Tuesday and is set to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday.

RUSSIA SOLUTION FOR USA AND MEXICO DRUG EPIDEMIC

Russia’s top drug official warned in an interview with Foreign Policy on Friday of what he called the “catastrophic” consequences of marijuana legalization measures like California’s upcoming ballot initiative, saying darkly that widespread legal drug use would produce “psychiatric deviations” and will only encourage drug addiction. Viktor Ivanov, a former KGB officer and prominent member of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, even took the unusual step of going to Los Angeles earlier this week to “conduct a campaign against legalizing marijuana in California,” as he said in the interview. He also came to Washington this week to meet with U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske and U.S. Afghan envoy Richard Holbrooke to discuss anti-poppy measures in Afghanistan and call for an intensified program of aerial eradication. The United States has largely abandoned eradicating the poppy crop in favor of a narrower strategy focusing on cutting off funding to the Taliban and cracking down on traffickers. Ivanov says that isn’t enough to counter the flow of heroin into Russia, which kills tens of thousands of users every year. 

But California’s laxity, it seems, was particularly startling to him. “I hadn’t known about it before and I was absolutely shocked when I was in the city and saw these posters saying that you can get marijuana for medical purposes,” he said. He met with Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Sheriff Leroy Baca to voice Russia’s opposition to the measure. Noting that U.S. President Barack Obama has also expressed his opposition to legalization, Ivanov described it as “one of the cases where Russia and the U.S. agree completely.” He continued: “I’m afraid that the consequences of [legalization] will be catastrophic. Even the Netherlands, where they sell marijuana legally in coffee shops, they are now reversing on this. Because there, and everywhere, drug addiction is becoming stronger and the people who are addicted develop psychiatric deviations. They say, ‘What does God do when he wants to punish a person? He deprives him of his mind.’” Ivanov, who served in Afghanistan with the KGB during the Soviet Union’s war in the 1980s expressed skepticism about the war effort in Afghanistan. “During the last five years the perception of the foreign powers by the local population has changed,” he said. “Now they take it as a military occupation of their country.”  

This was Ivanov’s sixth meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Kerlikowske. In this meeting, Ivanov sought to push usa to resume aerial eradication campaigns against poppy growing in Afghanistan. He thinks the United States should use “methods of defoliation similar to what’s used in Colombia.” According to Russian figures, heroin, nearly all of it from Afghanistan, kills 30,000 Russians every year, Ivanov said. He also believes that the Central Asian states between Russia and Afghanistan are being “destroyed from the inside” by the violence and crime associated with the drug trade. While Ivanov stressed that coordination with the U.S. side is improving, he also noted “American officials are quite disciplined and they always stick with the strategy as it’s been laid out.” That seems to apply in particular to the State Department. After a meeting last year with Holbrooke—a skeptic of the utility of poppy eradication—Ivanov says that the envoy had “confirmed our fears that they are not prepared to destroy the production of drugs in Afghanistan.” This time, Ivanov noted that, as “[Holbrooke] was a bit short of time, we started the meeting with him; then he handed us to his deputy.” He said the two still don’t completely see eye to eye.

“The argument that now NATO and Holbrooke are using is that if we destroy poppy crops it will deprive peasants of their livelihood. It sounds so touching that they’re taking care of the peasants, but it’s not to be taken seriously,” he says. “Those peasants do not profit from poppy. They make at most $70 per year. Those who profit from it are the landlords living in Europe and American and the Gulf countries. If we could give the land back to the Afghan government and provide these peasants with wheat, they could easily make their $70 a year growing wheat, not poppy.” Ivanov also said reports of progress on shutting down opium laboratories have been exaggerated. “One of the results we discussed is a 92 percent increase in the number of laboratories destroyed. From the point of view of arithmetic, this is the case. In reality it looks a little bit different.” According to Ivanov, the number of identified drug laboratories operating in Afghanistan has actually increased from 175 in 2008 to 425 today. The real number is likely much higher. He described the efforts to crack down on laboratories so far as a “drop in the ocean.” According to Ivanov, Russian authorities have passed on the location—including GPS coordinates—of several known Afghan drug laboratories to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But because resources for drug eradication are controlled by NATO forces, no steps have been taken to eradicate them, he claims. Ivanov said he also has doubts about the very premise of the war in Afghanistan. “[In 2001] it was explained that the Taliban was a terrorist organization and that’s why [the invasion] was necessary. Now many years later, it turns out that there’s a so-called moderate Taliban—moderate terrorists—who can be reintegrated back into power. Does that mean we made a mistake nine years ago and all this time we have been correcting it?”

Ivanov suggested that the invasion of Afghanistan might have been partly motivated Western companies seeking to exploit Central Asian energy resources. “If we look back before the invasion, starting in 1997, a number of American companies were negotiating with the Taliban about putting in a pipeline in Afghanistan ... bringing gas from Turkmenistan south toward India. There were negotiations in Kabul and Houston and Washington. In 2001, those negotiations ended in a deadlock because the American side wanted a bigger pipeline, while the Taliban wanted smaller pipes in order to provide smaller towns and villages with gas. From the American side, the negotiator was Unocal and the negotiator from that company was the employee of that company, Hamid Karzai.” It has been suggested several times, notably in Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, that Karzai may have once worked as a consultant for Unocal, but both the company and the Afghan president deny it.  Despite his staunch support for anti-drug measures, Ivanov also said that efforts so far have not borne much fruit and might in fact be making the problem worse.  “In this one single location, 95 percent of global heroin production is taking place,” he told FP. “Ironically, it’s the same place where the efforts of the global community are concentrated. It’s like a surgeon who has decided to treat one organ but as a result has cut up all the organs around it.”

MEXICAN DRUG WARS

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Families mourned on Sunday the victims of one of Mexico’s worst shootings, weeping over the open coffins of teenagers as young as 14 as Ciudad Juarez residents expressed outrage at surging violence. Crowding around the bodies in white and gray coffins, parents and friends sobbed as they bid farewell to the 14 people killed at a family birthday party on Friday night in the Mexican city that is the epicenter of the country’s drug war. “This can’t be happening. Today it’s them who are killed, and tomorrow who will be next?” said a sister of one of the victims, who gave only her first name, Miriam. In Tijuana across the border from San Diego, California, suspected drug gang hitmen shot dead 13 people at a drug rehab clinic on Sunday, a member of the local police force said. And in the northern state of Coahuila, two women and a teenage boy died on Sunday after being caught in crossfire during a shootout between unidentified gunmen, police and soldiers, state prosecutors said. The shooting in Juarez on Friday was the second massacre at a party this month in the city across from El Paso, Texas. Ciudad Juarez has become one of the world’s most violent cities since drug cartels launched a turf war there in early 2008. Almost 7,000 people have been killed in the city since then.Police in the state of Chihuahua where the shooting took place declined to say if there was any progress in the search for the gunmen. They were trying to identify the killers using artist impressions based on witness reports, a source in the prosecutors’ office said. One father told newspaper El Diario the gunmen drove up to the house and asked about a local criminal. When those in the front patio said they didn’t know of him, the men started shooting. “Ah, you’re not going to talk? Give it to all of them,” they said, the paper quoted the father as saying.

UNRELENTING MURDERS

The killings put new pressure on President Felipe Calderon, who condemned the massacre but faces sharp criticism across Mexico that his war against the cartels in Ciudad Juarez has failed and may have even provoked more violence. Calderon sent some 10,000 troops and federal police to Ciudad Juarez in 2008 to fight the cartels, but killings have surged since then and even a switch of security operations to federal police from the army has had little impact. More than 200,000 people, mainly wealthy and middle-class residents, have fled the city of some 1.5 million people. Once a poster child for free trade, with its factories exporting goods across the border, Ciudad Juarez has become the worst flashpoint in the drug war that Calderon launched in December 2006. Almost 30,000 people have died since then in drug violence across Mexico. Mexican business leaders say U.S.-run factories are freezing investment in the city because of the violence, hurting its recovery from the 2008-2009 recession. Calderon flew there on October 12 in a rare visit, offering more jobs and schools to stop youths from joining drug gangs. But the city is proving to be the president’s toughest test and threatens to hurt wider public support for his drug war.

The entire police force in a small Mexican town abruptly resigned Tuesday after its new headquarters was viciously attacked by suspected drug cartel gunmen. All 14 police officers in Los Ramones, a rural town in northern mexico, fled the force in terror after gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets and flung six grenades at their headquarters on Monday night. No one was injured in the attack. the mayor told local media that the officers resigned because of the incident. The gunmen’s 20-minute shooting spree destroyed six police vehicles and left the white and orange police station pocked with bullet holes. The station had been inaugurated just three days earlier. The attack was the second in less than a week against police forces. Last week, thugs threw two grenades at police in Sabinas Hidalgo. Los Ramones is in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, which has been a war zone of turf violence between two of the country’s fiercest drug gangs, the Zetas and the gulf cartel. Police have blamed members of both cartels for attacks on several police stations throughout the area. Several mayors in the region have been assassinated. Mexico ’s municipal police forces often quit out of fear after being attacked by cartels. About 90% of forces have less than 100 officers, and 61% of cops earn less than $322 a month. Mexico ’s intelligence chief said this summer that nearly 30,000 people have died in drug related crimes since 2006. 

MONTERREY, Mexico – The police chief and all 38 police officers of a northeastern Mexican town have quit following a series of drug cartel attacks, including the decapitation of two of their colleagues. Soldiers, state and federal police had been deployed to patrol General Teran, a town along a notorious drug-smuggling route to the U.S. border, said Mayor Ramon Villagomez. The police quit after the discovery Wednesday of the mutilated bodies of two officers who had been kidnapped by gunmen two days earlier. The killings followed three attacks on the police headquarters since December. Gunmen hurled grenades and sprayed the building with machine-gun fire. Villagomez said another police officer has been missing for weeks in the town of 14,500 people southwest of the industrial city of Monterrey. Mass police resignations have been common in small towns in Mexico. Municipal police complain they are outnumbered and outgunned by Mexico’s brutal drug cartels, who frequently stage bold attacks on security forces with semiautomatic assault rifles and grenades. President Felipe Calderon has introduced a proposal in Congress to dissolve Mexico’s more than 2,000 municipal police forces. They would be replaced by a single force for each of Mexico’s 31 states. Municipal police are generally underpaid susceptible to corruption. Many have only an elementary school education. In some towns, police have protested that they lack bullets and flak jackets. Villagomez said General Teran’s officers earned around 9,200 pesos ($760) per month.

Armed men opened fire and hurled a grenade into a crowded nightclub early Saturday, killing six people and wounding at least 37 in a western city whose former tranquility has been shattered by escalating battles among drug cartels. The attack in Mexico’s second-largest municipality took place just hours after a shootout between soldiers and presumed cartel gunmen left eight people, including an innocent driver, dead in the northeastern city of Monterrey. Monterrey is Mexico’s third-largest city. In the Guadalajara attack, assailants in a Jeep Cherokee and a taxi drove up to the Butter Club, located in a bar and restaurant district popular with young people, and sprayed it with bullets. Some of the men then got out of the taxi and threw a grenade into the nightclub entrance, said a police official, who spoke to news media at the scene and left without giving his name. The gunmen fled after the pre-dawn attack, he said. Three were killed at the scene and three more died later in hospitals, said Medical Services Director Yannick Nordin. A Venezuelan and a Colombian were among the dead. In a press conference led by state Attorney General Tomas Coronado Olmos, authorities said the attack may have been the result of a fight between two groups hours earlier in the trendy disco. Some of the people left and returned to attack the others. State authorities said they are studying surveillance video from inside the nightclub to help determine what happened. While there have been isolated grenade attacks around the city, Saturday’s was the first to be thrown into a crowd and cause so many injuries.

The U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara recently warned U.S. citizens not to drive at night in parts of the city after suspected drug-gang members burned vehicles and blocked streets. Such alerts have become common for highways in some areas of northern and western Mexico, but not for Guadalajara, which is known more for its mariachi music and tequila than as a focal point of a drug war that has claimed nearly 35,000 lives since 2006. But in recent months the picturesque colonial city has come to resemble embattled areas of northern Mexico — including the state of Nuevo Leon, where Monterrey is located. Seven presumed cartel gunmen were shot dead by soldiers near Monterrey during a chase and shootout just after midnight Friday. A civilian was also killed when the gunmen crashed into his car as they tried to flee soldiers. A soldier and a state police officer were wounded during the clash in the suburban city of San Nicolas, the military said in a news release. Soldiers also freed a woman who is presumed to have been kidnapped and was traveling in one of the vehicles. Two other vehicles, carrying an unknown number of attackers, escaped, and there were no arrests, said a spokesman for the state public security office, who was not authorized to give his name. Nuevo Leon has been hit by a wave of drug-fueled violence in recent years as the Gulf Cartel battles a gang of its former enforcers known as the Zetas. The cartels have staged a bloody turf war over drug peddling points and smuggling routes to the U.S. border 125 miles (200 kilometers) to the north, and clashes with the military and police have become almost a daily occurrence in and around Monterrey. In Guadalajara, the violence has heated up just in the past few months from cartels warring for turf. The city is key to western drug routes once controlled by former Sinaloa leader Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, who was killed in a gunbattle with soldiers in July.

MEXICAN MAFIAS ARE NOT CLOWNING AROUND

Two street clowns were found dead in southeastern Mexico along with messages allegedly from a drug gang accusing them of working as army informers, their families said Tuesday. Another 15 people were reported killed in the northern border state of Chihuahua overnight, including a woman who was beheaded, amid rampant drug violence across Mexico which killed more than 12,000 people last year alone. The clowns were found in bright costumes and makeup on a roadside Sunday in the city of Villahermosa, bearing signs of torture and a message accusing them of being army informers, their families said. The Tabasco state attorney general’s office said they were found with a message attributing the crime to the Zetas drug gang, which is known to be active in the area. Police meanwhile found a female head wrapped in a jacket in a park in the Chihuahua town of Jimenez, in the most gruesome of 15 murders uncovered overnight, the state attorney general’s office said. Eleven of the deaths occurred in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, which has Mexico’s highest murder rate. More than 30,000 people have been killed in violence related to the drug trade across Mexico since December 2006, when the government launched a major military offensive against organized crime.

RUSSIA MAFIA GLOBAL DRUG EMPIRE

NEW YORK – Federal investigators are piecing together details of an audacious new trend in drug smuggling: South American gangs are buying old jets, stuffing them full of cocaine and flying them across the Atlantic to feed Europe’s growing coke habit. At least three gangs have struck deals to fly drugs to West Africa and from there to Europe, according to U.S. indictments. One trafficker claimed he already had six aircraft flying. Another said he was managing five airplanes. Because there is no radar coverage over the ocean, big planes can cross the Atlantic virtually undetected. “The sky’s the limit,” one Sierra Leone trafficker boasted to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, according to court documents. The new air route is remarkable because of the distances involved and the complexity of flying big jets, said Scott Decker, a criminology professor at Arizona State University who studies smuggling methods. A trip from Venezuela to West Africa is about 3,400 miles — about triple the distance to Florida. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime began warning about trans-Atlantic drug planes after Nov. 2, 2009, when a burned-out Boeing 727 was found in the desert in Mali. Drug smugglers had flown the jet from Venezuela, unloaded it and then torched the aircraft, investigators said.

In some cases, executive jets have been used, including a Gulfstream II that landed in Guinea-Bissau in 2008 and another Gulfstream seized in 2007 as it tried to depart Venezuela for Sierra Leone. In the last year, a flurry of arrests has begun shedding light on how the air routes work. The cases are being prosecuted in a New York federal court because some of the cocaine was supposed to have been sent to the United States. “The quantity of cocaine distributed and the means employed to distribute it were extraordinary,” prosecutors wrote in one case. They warned of a conspiracy to “spread vast quantities of cocaine throughout the world by way of cargo airplanes.” In some ways it is a throwback to the 1970s and ‘80s, when drug pilots flew freely between Colombia and staging areas near the U.S. border, Decker said. Back then, drug lords such as Amado Carrillo, nicknamed The Lord of the Skies, sent jets with as much as 15 tons of cocaine from Colombia to northern Mexico.

Recent U.S. court cases involving trans-Atlantic flights include:

• The Valencia-Arbelaez Organization, broken up by undercover U.S. agents after it bought a $2 million plane to run monthly flights between Venezuela and Guinea. The group claimed to have six aircraft already flying between South America and West Africa.

• A ring based in Colombia and Liberia, arrested after one of its planes was seized in May with two tons of cocaine as it prepared to leave Venezuela. Prosecutors say the group was planning to fly jets twice a month. One defendant claimed to manage five other aircraft making similar hauls.

• Three Sierra Leone men, accused of scouting out airstrips and arranging for a four-ton flight of cocaine from South America in March.

Two other recent cases have involved cocaine and cargo jets, though investigators have not revealed yet whether the flights were going to Africa:

• Francisco Gonzalez Uribe, a Colombian trafficker due to be sentenced this month. Gonzalez Uribe was recorded while trying to purchase large aircraft including a DC-8, a four-engine jet.

• Walid Makled-Garcia, who prosecutors say controlled airstrips in Venezuela used to launch drug flights. Prosecutors say Makled-Garcia was behind one of the biggest drug plane shipments in recent years: a DC-9 that landed in Mexico in 2006 with more than 12,300 pounds of cocaine on board.

All five cases are being prosecuted in a federal court in Manhattan. Several factors have made trans-Atlantic air routes more attractive, said Carlos Moreno, an expert on trafficking at Icesi University in Cali, Colombia.  Cocaine use has been rising over the last decade in Europe, unlike the United States, where it has remained flat, he said. Meanwhile, better radar coverage has made it harder to move cocaine to the United States.  “Going that way, especially from South America, really gets you outside the majority of the security envelope for air traffic,” said Decker, the criminology professor.  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s decision to sever ties with most U.S. law enforcement agencies in 2005 has made it easier to bring cocaine to staging sites on the Venezuelan coast, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.  “The DEA is not present there, the Venezuelan military is making money off it, and much of the territory is just not controlled by the government,” Felbab-Brown said.  The global economic slump has also idled hundreds of cargo jets, which can be bought cheaply. Ads on websites such as Planemart.com offer DC-8s for as low as $275,000.

The cases show the extraordinary lengths that traffickers are going to exploit the new air routes. The Valencia-Arbelaez gang used detailed spreadsheets to compute flight costs and distributed codebooks to conceal their plans.  Planning sessions were held in Denmark, Spain, Romania and a Best Western hotel in Manhattan. At one meeting the gang’s leader, Jesus Eduardo Valencia-Arbalaez, sketched a map of West Africa showing points where the drugs would be delivered.  Fuel and pilots were paid for through wire transfers, suitcases filled with cash and, in one case, a bag of $356,000 in euros left at a hotel bar. The gang hired a Russian crew to move a newly acquired plane from Moldova to Romania, and then to Guinea. Most of the cocaine was destined for Europe, but part of each shipment was supposed to go on to New York.  “I sold airplanes to these people so I knew what was going on,” Manuel Silva-Jaramillo, an American aeronautical engineer, told a judge. “I knew that they were bringing the drugs to the United States.”  The gang also discussed setting up a methamphetamine lab in Liberia and exporting the drug to Japan and the United States.  The gang had access to a private airfield in Guinea, was considering buying its own airport and had sent a team to explore whether it could send direct flights from Bolivia to West Africa, Valencia-Arbelaez said in recorded conversations. A plane seized in Sierra Leone in July 2008 with 600 kilograms of cocaine belonged to the group, the DEA says.

The European drug market was hugely profitable. Silva-Jaramillo claimed the gang had as much as $82 million in euros stashed in Spain that it needed to launder, according to court documents.  Valencia-Arbelaez pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking and was sentenced in July to 17 ½ years in prison. Another conspirator, Javier Caro, received 3 ½ years. Silva-Jaramillo and two other men have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.  Drug trafficking is especially dangerous to West Africa because of the corrupting effect it has on already weak governments, Felbab-Brown said.  In the Liberia case, traffickers offered bribes to Fumbah Sirleaf, the head of the Liberian security agency and son of the country’s president. Sirleaf was secretly coordinating with the DEA.  The flights were to come from Venezuela and Panama. The ring had already sent aircraft into Liberia, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, one of the traffickers was recorded saying.

The case has attracted attention in Russia because one of the defendants, Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, says he was tortured by Liberian police before being handed over to the DEA. He and the other five defendants have denied the charges against them.  The Russian foreign ministry accused the United States of “kidnapping” Yaroshenko and failing to tell the Russian government. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called his arrest an example of the United States overstepping its bounds. The DEA denies Yaroshenko was abused. The U.S. Department of State said it mistakenly faxed Yaroshenko’s arrest notice to the wrong embassy.

RUSSIA RETURNS TO AFGHANISTAN

Russia has agreed to return to the war in Afghanistan at the request of the Western states which helped the mujahedin to drive its forces out of the country 21 years ago. The Independent has learnt that Moscow is engaged in training the Afghan army and counter-narcotics troops and has agreed in principle to supply Nato with helicopters for use in Afghanistan. A number of aircraft have already been sold to Poland, a member of the US-led coalition, for use in the conflict. Now Nato is in talks with the Russians over direct supplies of more helicopters, training the pilots, and allowing arms and ammunition to be transported through Russian territory as an alternative to a Pakistani route which has come under repeated Taliban attack. A groundbreaking agreement with Russia on the issue is likely to be announced at the Nato summit next month in Lisbon, which is due to be attended by President Dmitry Medvedev.

In return for help in Afghanistan Moscow is seeking what it terms as more co-operation from Nato. President Barack Obama has already scrapped missile-defence shields in Poland and the Czech Republic, proposals for which had led to prolonged protests from Moscow, and Nato has agreed that Russia will be consulted on the replacement system. Moscow would also like Nato to accept a fait accompli over Georgia, where Russian troops remain in South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the war of two years ago. American and European officials maintain that the occupation of a member state’s sovereign territory is not a matter for compromise. The helicopters are needed for the use of Afghan forces which Isaf (International Security and Assistance Force) is training to take over security as part of the West’s exit strategy from the war. It was the supply of American Stinger missiles by US and British intelligence to Afghan rebels, enabling them to shoot down Russian helicopters, which changed the course of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and helped to hasten the collapse of the Communist government in Moscow.

That war, with its acts of brutality committed by both sides, has left bitter memories among many in the country, and the news that the Russian military is playing a part in the war is likely to be exploited by the Taliban. The former Cold War enemies have been drawn together by the common threat of Islamist terrorism, some of it directly spawned from Western aid to jihadists in the 1980s. Moscow is also concerned about a flow of heroin through central Asia to its cities from Afghanistan. And it urgently wishes to reassert its influence in the region. The Nato secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asked for helicopters during a visit to Moscow last year. “Russia has reflected on that and there are now bilateral talks between Russia and the United States on such helicopters,” Mr Rasmussen said on Monday in Brussels. He added that he “would not exclude that we could facilitate that process within the Nato-Russia Council”, a body which acts as a discussion forum with Moscow.

Russian and Western defence sources told The Independent that Moscow has provided five Mi-17 military helicopters to Poland for Afghanistan, with the first two to be delivered by the end of the year. Afghan military officers are already being trained in a number of Russian defence institutes, according to the Russian deputy foreign minister Aleksander Grushko. Mr Grushko underlined that Moscow wanted a binding mutual restraint agreement with Nato and an agreement to delink the Georgia crisis from an arms treaty. He added: “We are ready to co-operate with Nato, because we think we are doing a common job.” Anatoly Serdyukov, who became the first Russian defence minister to visit the Pentagon where he met the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, last month, said that Russia was willing to sell or lease Mi-17s for use by Afghan forces, and will countenance similar deals with Nato member countries. “It is a matter of several dozen Mi-17s that Nato will purchase from us,” Mr Serdyukov said.

“I hope that Western peacemaking troops will not withdraw before they have fulfilled their mission. We are watching things in Afghanistan very closely and we are exchanging our experience with the Americans. Russia is ready to pass on to America the experience gained by our veterans of the war in Afghanistan. “Withdrawal of the [Western] troops would naturally affect the situation in central Asia, we currently cannot even imagine how. For this reason we want to help the West, among other things with helicopters, whose delivery we are now discussing.” Securing new supply routes for Nato forces in Afghanistan – which now number more than Russian troops during their war – has become urgent for the West with attacks on convoys in Pakistan by insurgents, some of which, claim Western officials, are instigated by members of the Pakistani military and intelligence service. Russia allows some movements of supplies along its territory, but restricts the types of weaponry being moved. Nato would like this removed. According to defence sources, Moscow has indicated that it may agree to this after carrying out security checks along the route, which starts at the all-weather Latvian port of Riga and arrives in Afghanistan through Russia, and the former Soviet territories of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Russia’s changing role-July 1979 Operation Cyclone launched by the CIA, using US and Saudi money and help of the Pakistani military regime to start arming the mujaheddin. December 1979 Soviet intervention at request of Afghan government. Moscow falls out with President Hafizullah Amin, his palace in Kabul is attacked and he is killed. March 1980 to April 1985 Soviet forces begin offensives, especially near the Pakistani and Iranian borders. US and British supply Stinger missiles enabling mujaheddin to shoot down Russian helicopters. New Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev increases troop levels to 110,000. April 1985 to January 1987 Russian exit strategy based on training up Afghan security forces to take on insurgency. Rebels are still aided by the West. January 1987 to February 1989 Soviet forces withdraw from Afghanistan with loss of 14,427.

The United States last summer brought accusations that Russia was still fighting the Cold War two decades after the Soviet collapse. But some believe the Kremlin leaked this week’s news that they were exposed by a top Russia intelligence officer to justify taking a real step back toward the Soviet Union by reconstituting a security service that would closely resemble the communist-era KGB. That’s one of the possible moves discussed in Moscow about what’s expected to be a major shake-up of the foreign intelligence service, the SVR. “Kommersant” newspaper broke the story on November 11, reporting that a “Colonel Shcherbakov” defected to the United States after exposing 11 so-called illegal agents, who worked without diplomatic cover and legal protection. One escaped after disappearing in Cyprus.

Internal Disputes-The news has prompted speculation the Kremlin wants to fold the SVR into the domestic Federal Security Service, the FSB. They were the two major agencies created when the KGB was split after Boris Yeltsin came to power in 1991, in what was seen as a major step toward dismantling the Soviet security system. Intelligence expert Leonid Velikhov of the Sovershenno Secretno publishing house told RFE/RL’s Russian Service the two “Kommersant” reporters who reported the defection this week had previously never written about intelligence affairs. “All of a sudden they conduct a grandiose research project, citing several unnamed sources who all say the same thing,” he says. “In fact, there was probably only one source who made the leak for domestic political purposes.” Legislators have demanded SVR chief Mikhail Fradkov be sacked. Some believe the calls are meant to clear the way for presidential administration chief Sergei Naryshkin, a reputed former KGB officer with close ties to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, to replace him. After the spies were exposed in July, many believe Putin—a former KGB officer who has often praised the service—hinted he’d known about the betrayal, saying, “This was the result of treason and traitors always end badly. They finish up as drunks, addicts, on the street.”

“Kommersant” reported that Shcherbakov headed the American department of Directorate S, which runs illegal agents. “Kommersant” reported that he handed the FBI the personal file of one of the illegals, Mikhail Vlasenko, known as Juan Lazaro, a longtime spy who’d been awarded the most prestigious Hero of the Soviet Union award and promoted to general. Those who criticize the SVR say Shcherbakov’s refusal to accept a promotion last year—possibly because he would have had to take a lie-detector test—should have raised alarm bells, along with the fact that such a high-ranking intelligence officer had a daughter living in the United States. His son, who worked for the Russian Federal Drug Control Service, left Russia last June, “Kommersant” reported. Infiltrating Policy-Making Circles-Former KGB officer Viktor Cherkashin, who recruited the KGB’s two biggest-ever spies, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, in Washington in 1986, says spying on that level should never have been able to take place. “The head of a department shouldn’t have had access to that amount of information about so many people,” he says.

The FBI says Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, tasked its agents with infiltrating U.S. policy-making circles, from which they gathered no sensitive information. The alleged operatives aren’t even charged with espionage, only for failing to register as agents of a foreign government and for money laundering. Military analyst Alexander Golts says the information about Shcherbakov may have been leaked because it’s easier to explain intelligence failures by blaming them on a traitor. He says it makes little sense for Russia to run illegal agents, which he says are a holdover from the Cold War, when the Soviet Union groomed them partly for use as possible saboteurs in case real war broke out. “Kremlin officials see illegals as a necessary attribute of a great power,” he says, “along with nuclear weapons.” Former KGB London station chief Oleg Gordievsky escaped from Moscow after he was found to have spied for Britain in the 1980s. He says the maintenance of so many spies in the United States reflects Russia’s growing authoritarianism. “All the killings on the streets, all the manipulated court cases, all the rigged elections show Russia is becoming a new totalitarian country,” he says, “although to a lesser degree than before.”

Gordievsky says the latest news about the spy scandal won’t affect relations between the two countries because Moscow and Washington have agreed “not to let such an insignificant group of spies” affect ties. But Golts says the presence of so many Russian spies in the United States shows the countries are returning to a situation in which “they constantly spy on one another.” “In that case, how can you talk cooperation over missile defense or Afghanistan?” he says. “At the very least, this story reflects Moscow’s very deep mistrust of the United States.” Moscow’s intelligence services have seen major leaks of information in the past, including KGB archivist Vassily Mitrokhin, who fled Russia in 1992 with a massive trove of hand-copied archive information that came to be known as the Mitrokhin archive.

DASSK BURMA UPDATE

RANGOON BURMA– Myanmar’s military government freed its archrival, democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, on Saturday after her latest term of detention expired. Several thousand jubilant supporters streamed to her residence. A smiling Suu Kyi, wearing a traditional jacket and a flower in her hair, appeared at the gate of her compound as the crowd chanted, cheered and sang the national anthem. “If we work in unity, we will achieve our goal. We have a lot of things to do,” she told the well-wishers, who quickly swelled to as many as 5,000. Speaking briefly in Burmese, she said they would see each other again Sunday at the headquarters of her political party. The 65-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose latest period of detention spanned 7 ½ years, has come to symbolize the struggle for democracy in the Southeast Asian nation ruled by the military since 1962. The release from house arrest of one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners came a week after an election that was swept by the military’s proxy political party and decried by Western nations as a sham designed to perpetuate authoritarian control. Supporters had been waiting most of the day near her residence and the headquarters of her party. Suu Kyi has been jailed or under house arrest for more than 15 of the last 21 years. As her release was under way, riot police stationed in the area left the scene and a barbed-wire barricade near her residence was removed, allowing the waiting supporters to surge forward.

Her release was immediately welcomed by world leaders and human rights organizations. Obama called Suu Kyi “a hero of mine” said the United States “welcomes her long overdue release.” “Whether Aung San Suu Kyi is living in the prison of her house, or the prison of her country, does not change the fact that she, and the political opposition she represents, has been systematically silenced, incarcerated, and deprived of any opportunity to engage in political processes,” he said in a statement. British Prime Minister David Cameron also said the release was long overdue. “Aung San Suu Kyi is an inspiration for all of us who believe in freedom of speech, democracy and human rights,” he said in a statement. “It is now crucial that Aung San Suu Kyi has unrestricted freedom of movement and speech and can participate fully in her country’s political process,” European Commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso said.

Critics allege the Nov. 7 elections were manipulated to give the pro-military party a sweeping victory. Results have been released piecemeal and already have given the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party a majority in both houses of Parliament. The last elections in 1990 were won overwhelmingly by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, but the military refused to hand over power and instead clamped down on opponents. Suu Kyi’s release gives the junta some ammunition against critics of the election and the government’s human rights record, which includes the continued detention of some 2,200 political prisoners and brutal military campaigns against ethnic minorities. It is unlikely the ruling generals will allow Suu Kyi, who drew huge crowds of supporters during her few periods of freedom, to actively and publicly pursue her goal of bringing democracy to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. But some see hope in her release.

“There is no formal opposition (in Myanmar) so her release is going to represent an opportunity to re-energize and reorganize this opposition. So in that sense, of revitalizing the opposition in some concrete way, Suu Kyi’s release is going to be very pivotal,” said Muang Zarni, an exiled dissident and Myanmar research fellow at the London School of Economics.  Suu Kyi herself earlier cautioned about optimism.  “My release should not be looked at as a major breakthrough for democracy. For all people in Burma to enjoy basic freedom, that would be a major breakthrough,” she said after her earlier release in 2002.  Suu Kyi was convicted last year of violating the terms of her previous detention by briefly sheltering an American man who swam uninvited to her lakeside home, extending a period of continuous detention that began in 2003 after her motorcade was ambushed in northern Myanmar by a government-backed mob.

Suu Kyi has shown her mettle time and again since taking up the democracy struggle in 1988.  Having spent much of her life abroad, she returned home to take care of her ailing mother just as mass demonstrations were breaking out against 25 years of military rule. She was quickly thrust into a leadership role, mainly because she was the daughter of Aung San, who led Myanmar to independence from Britain before his assassination by political rivals.  She rode out the military’s bloody suppression of street demonstrations to help found the NLD. Her defiance gained her fame and honor, most notably the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.

Charismatic, tireless and outspoken, her popularity threatened the country’s new military rulers. In 1989, she was detained on trumped-up national security charges and put under house arrest. She was not released until 1995 and has spent various periods in detention since then.  Suu Kyi’s freedom had been a key demand of Western nations and groups critical of the military regime’s poor human rights record. The military government, seeking to burnish its international image, had responded previously by offering to talk with her, only to later shy away from serious negotiations.  Suu Kyi — who was barred from running in this month’s elections — plans to help probe allegations of voting fraud, according to Nyan Win, who is a spokesman for her party, which was officially disbanded for refusing to reregister for this year’s polls.  Such action, which could embarrass the junta, poses the sort of challenge the military has reacted to in the past by detaining Suu Kyi.

Awaiting her release in neighboring Thailand was the younger of her two sons, Kim Aris, who is seeking the chance to see his mother for the first time in 10 years. Aris lives in Britain and has been repeatedly denied visas.  Her late husband, British scholar Michael Aris, raised their sons in England. Their eldest son, Alexander Aris, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on his mother’s behalf in 1991 and reportedly lives in the United States.  Michael Aris died of cancer in 1999 at age 53 after having been denied visas to see his wife for the three years before his death. Suu Kyi could have left Myanmar to see her family but decided not to, fearing the junta would not allow her back in.

CAMBODIA UPDATE

Old anti-tank mine kills 14 in Cambodia: police

PHNOM PENH - Wed Nov 17 2010-Fourteen people, including a one-year-old girl, were killed after their vehicle hit an old anti-tank mine in northwestern Cambodia, police said Wednesday. The child and 11 other passengers were killed instantly in Tuesday’s blast in the province of Battambang, said Buth Sambo, police chief of Banan district. One person died on the way to the hospital and another on Wednesday morning, he said. “It is a tragedy that 14 people from five families were all killed,” he told AFP. The group was returning from a day’s work at a chilli farm when the driver decided to take a short cut through a field and set off the anti-tank mine. Landmines and other unexploded ordnance left over from decades of civil war in Cambodia are still killing people on a weekly basis, new figures released on Wednesday showed. From January to October of this year, 53 people died because of mines or other ordnance, according to CMVIS, the government’s data collection body. The total number of casualties from unexploded ordnance recorded between 1979 and October 2010 stands at 63,754, said CMVIS.

For three days, as Hmong custom has it, his family and friends would have mourned in high-pitched chants, feasted on freshly slaughtered beef and burned a giant pile of paper money to buy his soul into the spirit world.  But Gen. Vang Pao was no plain Hmong elder, and his death last month at age 81 has brought forth no ordinary grief. He is known to his people as the general, the hero of the Central Intelligence Agency’s long-ago secret war in the jungles of Laos, a man who was leaving behind 25 children, 68 grandchildren and an uprooted nation of Hmong refugees who regard him as something near a king.  So his funeral — six days and nights, with 10 cows slaughtered and stir-fried each day — has become a send-off for the ages.  It began last Friday, his body borne on a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of downtown Fresno, throngs of grieving Hmong lining the way. Scottish bagpipers played “The Green Hills of Tyrol” and two T-28 planes, the aircraft piloted by Hmong guerrilla fighters in the Vietnam War, flew overhead.  And the funeral rolled down a long red carpet through the weekend, as thousands more Hmong from across the country, and some from as far away as Thailand and France, strode into the convention center of this farming capital of California to say goodbye.  Many of the Hmong here — tens of thousands of tribal people who immigrated from Thai refugee camps in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s — wanted to see General Vang Pao buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, befitting a man, they say, whose Hmong battalions saved the lives of many downed American pilots. On Friday, however, the Pentagon announced that it had denied the family’s request to waive the policy that restricts military burials at Arlington to American service members.

THAILAND SPECIAL REPORT

In the past two months there has been a rash of unsolved deaths of Farangs in Phuket. One Canadian man in Patong,shot multiple times in dispute over property, one British man living and working out of a shop house, head bashed in, near-by the Lotus Super Store By-pass road, poisoning of an American lady, a Norwegian lady and two other foreign persons on Kho Pi Pi island, and lastly one British lady found face down in the sand on Keron beach strangled to death. None of these cases have been found to have any weight within the public news media in Thailand other than reports in the local Phuket Gazette, when it reports and then never follows up as is the norm here on the island. To date no person or persons have been found by local police and prosecuted for any of the alleged crimes/murders. Foreign Embassy Staff have registered their dismay along political circles, but as is common practice this leads to embarrassing faces all around. The recent death of the American lady on Kho Pi Pi was said to have the body taken to Bangkok for a autopsy by local police, however it was later established that the body was subsequently cremated without an autopsy having been performed. It has been established that the Thai authorities did however provide slices of the deceased skin for further examination by the deceased family at their own cost back in America. I’m wondering if this is some sort of pattern being established regarding expected follow-up by local and Bangkok police following foreigners deaths in the Kingdom Of Thailand? Is this a cover-up to save face for the future safety of foreign visitor’s and tourists. It seems a backward way of doing so since all the foreign press are covering these as well as multiple other stories regarding life within Thailand.

PHUKET, Thailand (8 May 2009) — A Swiss woman was found dead on a beach in Krabi where she may have been strangled and robbed. Edith Jungen, believed to be in her 30s, was found in shallow water on Noppharat Beach in Tambon Ao Nang in Krabi’s Muang district. According to unconfirmed reports, Jungen was found with the strap of her handbag tied around her neck as if she had been strangled to death. Police said the victim checked in to the Andaman Sunset Hotel on Tuesday and checked out a day later. Her body was found near the hotel. Witnesses told police Jungen had been upset and feared that she would be attacked. While the mainstream media continues to promote Thailand as a holiday paradise, violence against tourists, especially women, has increased sharply in recent years. In March, a British tourist was murdered on his sailboat. Last January police arrested a local Thai man for the murder of a German woman who was killed during a full moon party on a beach in southern Thailand. In 2007, two young female tourists were murdered on the beach in Pattaya. In January 2006, two Thai men were convicted of raping and killing 21-year-old British tourist Katherine Horton on Koh Samui. The next day, a Swedish woman who was visiting Thailand with her husband and children, was also raped on Koh Samui. Chetn Dadhwal, a 24-year-old Indian, who was trying to stop a fight during a Full Moon party at Koh Phangan on March 22 .A 23-year-old Japanese woman, Tomoko Kawashita, who was murdered in Sukhothai Historical Park during the Loy Krathong water festival during an attempted robbery on Nov 25 last year .Russians Tatiana Tsimfer, 20, and Liubov Svikova, 25, who were shot dead while they were sitting in beach chairs on Pattaya’s Jomtien Beach on Feb 25 last year. American actor David Carradine has been found dead, hanging by a nylon rope in a hotel room closet in Bangkok, Thailand, according to a Thai police official. Carradine became famous in the 1970s when he starred in the television series “Kung Fu.”

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