A defendant in the ongoing trial of the alleged organizers of the May violence in Andijon, Uzbekistan, testified Sept. 26 that the US Embassy in Tashkent might have financed it, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Uzbek Service reported. Tavakkal Hojiev told the court that he heard from Qobil Parpiev, who has been identified by Uzbek authorities as one of the masterminds behind the violence, that the US Embassy provided funds for the uprising in Andijon. Queried by a lawyer for additional details, Hojiev said: "A big sum went for weapons and cars.

Remember all those vicious rapes and senseless murders that served to justify the shoot-to-kill policy declared by state and federal authorities in post-Katrina New Orleans? Well, weeks after the fact, it turns out most of them probably didn't really happen. Michelle Roberts writes for the AP Sept. 27 (via Newsday):

NEW ORLEANS -- On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."

Al-Qaeda's second-in-command in Iraq has been killed, reports say. Iraqi and US officials said Abu Azzam, described as an aide to leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a joint operation in Baghdad. A US military official said Azzam was killed in a high-rise block in the Iraqi capital after a tip-off from an Iraqi citizen. "During the operation, which was held with the intent of capturing him, he fired and he was killed by return fire," Maj Flora Lee said.

But US and Iraq officials differed over the timing of the raid. Maj Lee said it happened at 04:50 local time Sept. 25, while Iraq officials said it occurred on the 26th. Another US spokesman said Azzam had been tracked for some time, and his death was a "significant development."

From New York Newsday, Sept. 27:

Off-duty cop under fire for accident

BY DARYL KHAN
STAFF WRITER

The witnesses' names were not known Monday, but the stories they told painted starkly different pictures of how a girl died Friday night, and they could determine the legal fate of an off-duty police officer.

Just before 10:30 p.m., Michael Carlo, an off-duty narcotics detective, was driving his 1997 Jeep Cherokee north on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, his pregnant wife in the passenger seat, when he struck Virginia Verdee, 12, who was returning home from dance practice at a nearby church.

From the Sept. 27 NY Times, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune:

A Spanish court on Monday convicted a Syrian man of conspiring to commit the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, and found 17 other men guilty of belonging to or aiding a Spanish cell of Al Qaeda under his command.

On Sept. 19 Honduran defense minister Federico Breve ordered an investigation into a camp the Chicago-based firm Your Solutions was running in the community of Lepaterique to train security personnel for work in US-occupied Iraq. The Honduran daily La Tribuna revealed the training camp's existence, apparently based on evidence from a disgruntled sergeant identified as Wilmer Ruiz.

The company reportedly contracted to send 600 men to Iraq in or before October; it had already sent 36 Hondurans and was planning to send another 353 Hondurans, along with 211 Chileans. Benjamin Canales, Your Solutions director in Honduras, told the recruits they would be paid $900 to $1,500 a month during their six-month tours in Iraq. They were reportedly being trained by US and Chilean teachers in facilities of the state-owned Honduran Forest Development Corporation in a mountainous region 30 km northwest of Tegucigalpa. The instructors "explained to us that where we were going everyone would be our enemy, and we'd have to look at them that way, because they would want to kill us, and the gringos too," an unidentified trainee told the AFP wire service. "So we'd have to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even it was a child."

Agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shot dead fugitive Puerto Rican nationalist leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios on Sept. 23 in the western town of Hormigueros at a farmhouse where he had been staying secretly with his wife, Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa. "He opened the front door of his house and opened fire on the agents," Luis Fraticelli, special agent in charge of the FBI in Puerto Rico, told a press conference on Sept. 24. "We went to arrest him, but when the gunfire started we had to defend ourselves." Fraticelli claimed one agent was wounded. Rosado Barbosa was detained but was released unharmed a day later without charges, according to her lawyer, Julio Fontanet.

Ecuadoran troops destroyed a suspected Colombian guerilla camp near the jungle border between the two countries, Ecuador's defense ministry said Sept. 23. The camp was "probably used by irregular groups" from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the ministry said. The discovery adds to evidence that the FARC regularly crosses into Ecuador for refuge, BBC correspondents say. Bogota recently accused Ecuador of failing to crack down FARC activity.

The camp was discovered by an Ecuadoran army patrol in the province of Sucumbios. Officials said a nearby cocaine processing plant, assumed to belong to the FARC, was also destroyed. The statement appeared to contradict an earlier denial by Ecuador's Defence Minister Oswaldo Jarrin that Colombian armed groups operated in the country.