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Thread ID: 5753 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-03-23
2003-03-23 06:11 | User Profile
Attack at U.S. Camp in Kuwait Kills One
** Attack at U.S. Camp in Kuwait Kills One 13 minutes ago
By PATRICK McDOWELL, Associated Press Writer
KUWAIT CITY - Grenades exploded at a 101st Airborne command center in Kuwait early Sunday, killing one and wounding 13 servicemen, and a U.S. soldier was detained as a suspect in the attack, the Army said.
Three others who sustained serious injuries were undergoing surgery, the military said.
The attacker threw three grenades into three tents, including the command tent, military officials said. The motive in the attack "most likely was resentment," said Max Blumenfeld, a U.S. Army spokesman. He did not elaborate.
The name of the soldier who died was not released because family members had not been notified, said George Heath, civilian spokesman for Fort Campbell, Ky., the storied 101st Airborne Division's home base.
"Incidents of this nature are abnormalities throughout the Army, specifically in the 101st," Heath said. "Death is a tragic incident regardless of how it comes, but when it comes from a fellow comrade, it does even more to hurt morale. Our hearts and prayers go out to the families of the soldier. We pray that incidents of this nature do not happen again in any military organization."
The suspect, found hiding in a bunker, is an engineer from an engineering platoon in the 101st Airborne, said Col. Frederick B. Hodges, commander of the division's 1st Brigade.
The attack in the command center of the 101st Division's 1st Brigade at Camp Pennsylvania happened at 1:30 a.m. (5:30 p.m. EST Saturday) and apparently involved only grenades, Blumenfeld said.
One of the grenades went off in the command tent, he said. The tent, the tactical operations center, runs 24 hours a day and would always be staffed by officers and senior enlisted personnel, Blumenfeld said.
Ten of those wounded had superficial wounds, including puncture wounds to their arms and legs from fragments of the grenade, Heath said.
Helicopters evacuated 11 to Army hospitals, Blumenfeld said.
Names of the wounded were not released, and Blumenfeld did not say if any high-ranking officers were hurt.
Hodges said he was asleep when a sergeant woke him up.
"I immediately smelled smoke," the commander told Britain's Sky News television. "I heard a couple of explosions and then a popping sound which I think was probably a rifle being fired. It looks like some assailant threw a grenade into each of these three tents here."
The suspect, whose name was not released, has not been charged, Blumenfeld said, adding that investigators did not know if others were involved.
Two Middle Eastern men who had been hired as contractors were detained and later released, Heath said.
Earlier, Heath said the attack appeared to have been carried out by terrorists. Military officials had said the attacker used two grenades and small-arms fire.
Camp Pennsylvania is a rear base camp of the 101st, near the Iraqi border. Kuwait is the main launching point for the tens of thousands of ground forces ââ¬â including parts of the 101st ââ¬â who have entered Iraq (news - web sites).
Near Camp New York, another encampment in Kuwait, a Patriot missile hit an incoming missile, a military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. There were no reports of injuries or where debris from the missile might have landed. Camp New York, which is near Camp Pennsylvania, was the largest of the desert staging camps.
Jim Lacey, a correspondent for Time magazine, told CNN that he was about 20 yards away when explosions at Camp Pennsylvania went off at what he said were two tents that housed division leadership.
"The people who did it ran off into the darkness," he said.
He said he interviewed an Army major who was sitting outside the tent. "He said he saw the grenade roll by him," Lacey said.
After the attack, troops fanned out around the compound to find the perpetrators, Lacey said.
"When this all happened we tried to get accountability for everybody," Hodges told Sky News. "We noticed four hand grenades were missing and that this sergeant was unaccounted for. We started looking for him and found him hiding here in one of these bunkers. He is detained and he is being interrogated right now."
The 101st Airborne is a rapid deployment group trained to go anywhere in the world within 36 hours. The roughly 22,000 members of the 101st were deployed Feb. 6. The last time the entire division was deployed was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War (news - web sites), which began after Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait.
Most recently, it hunted suspected Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan (news - web sites). Its exploits are followed in Kentucky with much pride.
News of the attack at the camp compounded the anxiety of relatives of the division's soldiers.
"I get a little worried but when I think I should be crying, I'm not," said Chelsey Payne of Clarksville, Tenn., whose husband, Sgt. Robert Payne, is with the division. "I just don't get scared about my own husband, I just know that he's a good soldier and he's coming home. He promised me."
Kuwait is the main launching point for the tens of thousands of ground forces who have entered Iraq. Before the war with Iraq broke out, Americans had come under attack four times in the oil-rich emirate since October. Three of the attacks were blamed on Muslim extremists.
url: [url=http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=540&ncid=716&e=1&u=/ap/20030323/ap_on_re_mi_ea/war_kuwait_attack]http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...r_kuwait_attack[/url] **
2003-03-23 06:15 | User Profile
Daniel Pipes must be esctatic
2003-03-23 06:58 | User Profile
Upshot of a brother among a band of brothers?
[img]http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2003/images/03/22/top.grenade.suspect.timemag.jpg[/img]
[SIZE=2]CAMP PENNSYLVANIA, Kuwait (CNN) -- A soldier wounded in a grenade attack at a 101st Airborne Division base in Kuwait has died, U.S. Central Command said. [/SIZE]
[url=http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/22/sprj.irq.101.attack/index.html]Full Story [/url]
. . . Video obtained by CNN showed the suspect sitting on the ground with his legs in front of him. His head was partially covered by his camouflage jacket, and he appeared to have bloodstains on his leg and his back or arm.
. . . Military criminal investigators said the suspect was recently reprimanded for insubordination and was told he would stay behind when his unit left camp for Iraq, Lacey said.
2003-03-23 12:08 | User Profile
Originally posted by Sisyfos@Mar 23 2003, 06:58 ** Upshot of a brother among a band of brothers?
**
You beat me to the punch. If it'd been a white guy, we'd been seeing interviews with his wife and father and we'd have had his life story by now. Since it's one of the protected minorities, we get a distance shot and NO mention of ethnicity.
Hmmmm....
On a different subject, something else I've noticed: the only terrorist acts or terrorists caught in the US since 9/11 have been... tribe members... what's that about and why isn't any one mentioning it? (it's a rhetorical question...)
What ever happened to the portorican taliban brother they were holding without any of his constitutional rights remaining in tact... any body heard anything about him in the last 10 months? He still being held prisoner for undisclosed evidence?
2003-03-24 02:16 | User Profile
Well it is a Black Man with an Arab name. The Neocons will use this to Attack Muhammudism, but the problem in this case is a carzy muderous Black. Most Blacks in America with Arab names are not real Muhammudans and many are not even NOI member. Many Blacks took Arab names in the 1960's because they thought it was more "African."