Death penalty for Iraq bank robbers

Four men have been sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for their part in a multi-million dollar bank robbery in the capital during which eight police guards were killed.

The four men, all Iraqi security force members, were convicted on robbery and murder charges on Wednesday.

The court said the men would have a month to appeal the sentence.

The accused were named as Ali Eidan, Basheer Khalid, Ali Ouda and Ahmad Khalaf, who was found to have killed six of the police guards in the Baghdad raid.

Ouda previously testified that Jafar Lazim Eshkaya al-Timimi, a captain in the presidential guard, and lieutenant Amin Karim, his nephew who also previously served in the unit, had masterminded and carried out the robbery.

'On the run'

Al-Timimi and his nephew were among four men being tried in absentia for the robbery but who were not sentenced at Wednesday's hearing.

The judge said: "There will be another court convened for those who ran away ... if they are not arrested, there will be a further court hearing in absentia."

Armed men broke into the state-run Rafidain Bank on July 28, killing three guards who were on duty and five others on the premises, according to investigators.

About 5.6 billion Iraqi dinars ($4.8m) was stolen, the bank's chief testified during the trial.

'Politically motivated'

Most of the money was later recovered in the office of a newspaper owned by Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the Iraqi vice president and a senior member of Iraq's largest Shia party, investigators said.

Abdul-Mahdi has denied any involvement saying one of those charged in the robbery worked as part of his security team.

He has said any suggestions of wrongdoing on his part were a politically motivated attempt to sabotage his bid to be re-elected in next January's polls.

A fifth defendant, who worked at the newspaper, was acquitted.

India minister's helicopter missing

A helicopter carrying the chief minister of India's Andhra Pradesh state has gone missing.

The aircraft carrying YS Rajasekhara Reddy disappeared in bad weather on Wednesday as it flew over forests where Maoist rebels operate after took off from Hyderabad, the state capital.

A massive operation involving police on the ground and helicopters and fighter jets has been launched to try to locate the aircraft.

Reddy is an important member of India's ruling Congress party.

"We hope that he would be safe but we could not establish any contacts as the forest is dense and heavy rains are continuing in the area," said K Roshaiah, the state's finance minister.

'No attack'

The minister said the helicopter might have made an emergency landing because of the heavy rain.

Officials said they were worried about the ministers safety as there were many Maoist rebels in the district.

M K Narayanan, the national security advisor, ruled out the possibility of Maoists bringing down the helicopter, saying a technical snag or pilot error could have occurred.

"A Naxal [Maoist] strike seems extremely improbable. I would almost entirely rule it out," he said.

"I do not think the Naxalites have the capability to bring down the helicopter," Narayanan said in New Delhi, the national capital."

The Andhra Pradesh Aviation Corporation Limited (APACL) said it was highly probable the helicopter had made a safe landing in a remote area and said it had an emergency locator transmitter capable of automatic transmission in case of any crash landing

The National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad, under the Indian Space Research Organisation, is flying a plane to photograph the forests in western Andhra Pradesh where the chief minister's helicopter went missing.

Yemen steps up attacks on Houthis

Yemen's army has intensified its three-week-old offensive against Shia Houthi fighters after government security chiefs rejected a truce offer.

Fighter jets hit several Huthi positions on Wednesday near the northern city of Saada, military officials said.

Hasan al-Lawzi, the Yemeni information minister, confirmed that military operations would continue until the government's conditions for a ceasefire agreement were met.

The United Nations is warning of a disaster as up to 150,000 flee the fierce attacks concentrated in the north.

An offshoot of Shia Islam, Zaidis are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen but form the majority community in the north, some of whom want a return to the imamate overthrown in a 1962 coup.

Humanitarian crisis

Andrej Mahecic, a spokesman for the UN refugees' agency, stressed that the "humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Saada ... the situation is deteriorating by the day".

Meanwhile, the military has launched a second phase of its operation Scorched Earth in the Harf Sufyan region in an attempt to reopen the road between the Yemeni capital Sanaa and Saada that has been cut for three weeks.

The escalation comes after an offer of truce from Zaidis led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi was rejected by the government.

"The so-called ceasefire initiative announced recently by the rebels offers nothing new," said an unnamed spokesman for Yemen's high security commission, which is supervising the military operation.

Among Sanaa's demands are the withdrawal of rebels from official buildings, the reopening of roads in the north, and the return of weapons seized from security services. The Huthis have already rejected these demands.

There is no official figures of casualties, but the situation is unlikely to improve quickly. Ali Abdallah Saleh, the Yemeni president, says the army needs several more weeks to crush the rebellion.

UN says Afghan opium harvest down

Opium farming in Afghanistan has declined by 22 per cent this year as prices for the drug tumbled, causing farmers to switch to other crops, the UN has said.

About 800,000 fewer Afghans are involved in the illegal drugs trade compared to last year, according to an annual report from the world body, released on Wednesday.

The West, which has made wiping out the crop part of its eight-year battle against the Taliban in the country, is likely to welcome the findings.

But the decline, the second in the last two years, seems to be a result of simple economics, rather than law enforcement efforts.

Only four per cent of the crop was eradicated and two per cent of the harvested product was seized.

The West has long said that money from the drugs trade funds the Taliban and fuels corruption and crime in Afghanistan, weakening the state it is attempting to support.

Drugs trade

Afghanistan has long been the producer of about 90 per cent of the world's opium, a thick paste from poppy that is processed to make heroin.

In 2007, it broke all records, but cultivation has since started to decline.

"The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market. These results are a welcome piece of good news and demonstrate that progress is possible," said Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

This year, 123,000 hectares were used to grow opium poppy, compared to 157,000 hectares in 2008, UNDOC said.

Helmand province, the main focus of US and British war efforts, saw the greatest reduction.

Cultivation there fell by a third to 69,833 hectares, from 103,590 hectares in 2008.

Despite the decline in cultivation, the amount of opium produced fell by only 10 per cent - farmers produced 6,900 tonnes of opium were produced in 2009, compared to 7,700 tonnes in 2008.

That is far more than the 5,000 tonnes the world's users consume, leading to a glut that has depressed prices to lows unseen since the 1990s.

"All of that has created stocks, an excess supply, and on the whole has driven conditions such that it has become less and less attractive for farmers to cultivate opium," Costa said.

Overproduction

The fall in price drove the total value of Afghanistan's opium crop down 40 per cent to $438m.

Costa cautioned it was "too early to tell whether the decrease in cultivation and production over the past two years is a market correction that could be reversed, or a downward trend".

With Afghanistan still producing more opium than the world can consume, there is a risk that massive stockpiles of the drug could fund instability for years to come.

"They don't know where that [stockpiled] supply is," James Bays, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Kabul, reported.

"They believe it is in a number of stashes, possibly buried underground, either in Afghanistan or a number of neighbouring countries."

Opium now makes up just four per cent of Afghan GDP, compared to 7 per cent in 2008 and a record 27 per cent in 2002, a year after the Taliban were ousted.

President Saleh arrives in Morocco

SANA'A, Sept. 2 (Saba) - President Ali Abdullah Saleh has arrived at Agadir city in Morocco in a private visit in which he is scheduled to meet Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz for assuring his health.

During the visit, Saleh and Sultan will hold talks on the joint cooperation relations between the two brotherly countries and means of booting them.

Saudi Crown Prince Sultan is staying in Morocco for convalescence since months.

Iran 'ready for new nuclear talks'

Iran's senior nuclear negotiator has said his country is ready for fresh talks with world powers over its nuclear programme.

Saeed Jalili said that Iran had revised its proposal to the West, which accuses Tehran of using its nuclear programme to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is for purely civilian purposes.

"The Islamic republic's package of proposals is updated and ready and will be presented [to world powers]," Jalili said.

"We hope a new round of talks will be held for reaching a world full of progress and justice," he was quoted by al-Alam, Iran's Arabic-language satellite television channel, as saying.

Iran has previously said it is ready for "constructive" talks, but has dismissed demands to halt or freeze uranium enrichment.

New proposal

The move comes just a few weeks before a deadline this month, set by Barack Obama, the US president, to accept six-party talks.

Obama had given Iran until the end of September to negotiate its nuclear enrichment activities, or face harsher sanctions.

Jalili said the package will be directed at the so called five plus one - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and the US) plus Germany.

Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Tehran, said it was still unclear exactly what the package would contain, but it was likely Iran would attempt to soften the focus on nuclear issues.

"I think it's far more than just a nuclear proposal package," he said

"Iran wants to take its nuclear programme out of focus and the best way to do this would be to use Iran's full capacity to co-operate to solve regional problems.

"Iran wants to say that we have various capacities to work with the world and with the global community, it's not just the nuclear issue."

It was unclear how different Iran's updated offer in the nuclear dispute would be to previous exchanges.

'Positive development'

Paul Brannan, a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, told Al Jazeera: "The very fact that they have come back with what they call an updated proposal is a very positive development ... it gives the impression that there is new language agreeable to the so-called five plus one.

Brannan said that he detected a greater willingness to engage on both sides.

"I don't think it would ever be fair to depict [the new proposal as a delaying tactic]. This is what the five plus one have asked of Iran and we see today Iran coming back and fulfilling that.

"So I think that we should look at the proposal ... and take the simple fact that Iran is ready to come back into negotiations as a very positive note."

Brannan added that his organisation's analysis had said that Tehran probably had the capacity to build a nuclear weapon but, "certainly Iran has not taken the decision yet to make a nuclear weapon."

Spokesman: Houthi rebels' initiative invites outsiders for backing

SANA'A, Sep. 02 (Saba)- The state spokesman and Minister of Information Husein al-Lawzi said on Tuesday that the initiative of al-Houthi rebellion gangs to stop army confrontations in Sa'ada shows their evil spirit and it is meant to get foreign support for their criminal acts.

He noted that this initiative is not directed locally as there are contacts with Sa'ada dignitaries and Islamic scholars in order to end the bloodshed and persuade al-Houthi elements to accept the six points presented by the Supreme Security Committee (SSC) to end the crisis.

During his weekly conference in Sana'a, the minister affirmed Arab and international supportive stance for Yemen to eliminate rebellion in Sa'ada which threatens security and stability in the country.

He reaffirmed that the al-Houthis should commit to the six points which the state has presented to them as a prime condition to cease fire and to ensure the state control over all districts of the governorate to settle security and end banditry and smuggling committed by the rebels.

The minister made clear that the six points are the withdrawal from all districts of Sa'ada and removal of all check points hindering citizens movement, descending from mountains and ending banditry and destruction acts, handing over all military and civil equipment they overtook,
explaining the situation of the foreign kidnapped people as information indicate al-Houthis behind their abduction, handing over kidnappers from Sa'ada, and not to intervene into the Local Authority affairs in any form.

As for foreign influence or logistic and media support presented to al-Houthis, the minister said "there are details concerning this issue and the Foreign Minister is entrusted to this file to study it to ensure no hasty in giving any information."

He pointed out that the state knows who works, in a way or another, to shake security and stability in the country.

Asked about the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) stance, the spokesman said they have contradicting stances affecting them and the country as well as their political future.

He referred the unavailability of a record of the number of victims and displaced people due to the constant exodus and the increased number on a daily basis as result of the continuous military confrontations.