Latest news with #IEDs
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A War Hero, Wounded Pride, and a Killing to Shame Us All
Four years after unsung war hero Abdul Rahman Waziri flew out of Kabul Airport to start a new life in America, his remains returned there in a coffin. The 31-year-old was shot to death by a Texas gunman on April 27 in a parking lot dispute. Waziri was unarmed, and his killer has so far escaped arrest by claiming self-defense. As Waziri was buried in an elegantly simple, stone-lined grave in the Barmal District of Paktika Province, his grief-stricken wife was 8,000 miles away in Houston with their two daughters, aged 4 years, and 9 months. The older girl was repeatedly asking a question that her family did not want to answer. 'Where is my dad?' When Waziri fled Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban had targeted him for torture and execution as a member of the Afghan National Mine Reduction Group (NMRG). This elite, highly trained unit cleared improvised explosive devices (IEDs) ahead of American Green Berets, whose missions from 2019 on were conducted entirely at night. The NMRG had demonstrated year after year, without Hurt Locker-style bomb suits, that the bravest acts are sometimes performed on hands and knees. Waziri had been on Team 7 and had disabled two dozen bombs before he became an instructor training NMRG replacements for those who died. His older brother, Abdullah Khan, was on Team 8 and disabled 40 bombs. Khan's 12-man unit lost three members. 'The hazards they undertook were immense,' former Green Beret Thomas Kasza told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year. 'From 2015 onwards, 22 Green Berets died, compared to 47 NMRG members. We owe them and their families a debt.' During the chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Waziri took the time to establish safe houses for his comrades before he escaped to America. He had communicated while still in Taliban territory via encrypted messaging apps with Shireen Connor, a U.S.-based volunteer with an Afghan evacuation team. 'I really have tried to underscore the panic and level of danger that was present at the time,' she told the Daily Beast. 'He was a high-value Taliban target, and despite that, was still putting his life at risk to set up safe houses for other people to try and wait for potential evacuation.' She added, 'That really gave me a sense of who he was; someone who's willing to step forward and keep doing the right thing for other people, people he doesn't even know. A good person down to his core.' After arriving in America, Waziri went to work for a Houston security company. He settled into an apartment complex at 3400 Ocee Street with his wife, Malalai, and their two daughters. He was returning from the gym in his white Toyota Camry shortly after 9 p.m. on April 27 when he pulled over outside the apartment complex's mailboxes. He put on his hazard lights, apparently to signal that he was just pausing there and would proceed to a parking spot closer to his apartment after he collected his mail. He never got the chance. Surveillance footage shows that a black Kia pulled up moments later. But a carport roof obscured from the camera much of what followed in the minutes before a Houston police dispatcher put out a call for that address. 'Person shot is a male, gray shorts, gray shirt,' the dispatcher said. 'Caller is a male, black, striped shirt, blue pants. Gun is in his pocket.' The caller was the shooter. 'It's about a male trying to take over this parking spot, and he shot him,' the dispatcher added. Officers arrived moments later, where they saw the man in gray shorts and a gray shirt lying in the parking lot with gunshot wounds to his head, chest, and leg. 'This guy isn't moving or breathing,' a cop reported over the radio. An ambulance responded and rushed the unconscious Waziri to Ben Taub General Hospital. There, Abdullah Khan Waziri was pronounced dead. Back at the scene of the shooting, the caller surrendered his gun to the police. 'We've got one male detained,' a cop reported on the radio. 'Suspect's on scene. He says it's self-defense.' A sergeant called over the air for the usual ritual to begin: 'Do me a favor and start putting up yellow tape.' A cop responded, 'Yeah, this is going to be a homicide most likely.' In further keeping with standard procedure, the deceased's family was notified. Word reached 36-year-old Khan in Florida, where he had settled with another brother, Gul Shabar Gul, 44. Gul had served as an interpreter with the Americans. Khan and Gul flew together to Houston and arrived at the apartment complex the following morning. They saw Waziri's blood where he had fallen. Khan asked several residents if they had seen what happened. They seemed fearful and did not respond. 'I asked them to give me a bucket,' Khan recalled. Khan poured out bucketful after bucketful of water and borrowed a brush. He crouched down just like he and Waziri often had while finding and disabling IEDs with NMRG. He set to scrubbing away what remained of his younger brother's blood. 'It was, like, in between the cracks,' he told the Daily Beast. Khan became aware of a man who was casually walking back and forth nearby, carrying clothes and other belongings from an apartment complex to a car in the lot. A resident told Khan that this was the man who killed Waziri. The police had briefly handcuffed him when they responded to the scene of the shooting, but had quickly released him. He claimed he had acted in self-defense. The 'stand your ground law' in Texas allows private citizens to use deadly force to defend their person or property, and there is no duty to retreat. He now remained at liberty. 'He was normal, walking in front of me,' Khan recalled. 'He was not feeling like, 'I did this with his brother, I should not show my face.'' A retired Green Beret who learned of this disrespectful indifference and knew Khan's physical capabilities as a highly trained special forces operator marveled at his restraint. Khan simply finished scrubbing and went with Gul to the rental office. There, the brothers viewed the surveillance video from the time of the shooting. They saw Waziri's Toyota and then the gunman's Kia arrive and largely disappear from view. At one point, Waziri and a Black male from the Kia can be seen above the upper edge of the obscuring carport roof, speaking to each other and pointing. At another point, the other man's feet appear below the lower edge of the roof, moving toward the Kia and then quickly back toward Waziri and the Camry. What appears to be the man from the Kia then strides into full view in a striped shirt and blue shorts, almost be-bopping, as if he had nary a care. The detectives in charge of the case did not speak to the brothers until the day after they arrived. They declined to identify the gunman. They would only say that the case was under continuing investigation and any charging decisions would be made by the Harris County district attorney. The D.A.'s office would only say the investigation was ongoing. But while the police officer who responded to the shooting could be heard on the radio following the usual routine, there is some question about the detectives who then took the case. A spokesman for the Houston police department says the detectives have been conducting a thorough investigation from the very start. But a lawyer for Waziri's family says that he discovered a spent 9-mm Hornady Luger shell casing in the vicinity of the Camry that almost certainly should have been taken into evidence. The lawyer, Omar Khawaja, also says the detectives failed to conduct a full canvass for witnesses with an interpreter who could allow them to communicate with the numerous Afghans in the complex who do not speak English. Five days after the shooting, Khawaja brought a woman to the police who said she had witnessed the entire incident from the balcony of her second-floor apartment. Khawaja says she told them that after Waziri continued on toward the mailboxes, the other man began kicking the Camry. Waziri had turned back before he could get his mail, and there had been a verbal dispute that turned physical. As the woman told it, Waziri had quickly subdued the man without inflicting serious injury to anything but, perhaps, his pride. The man had gone to his car and gotten a gun, loading it as he headed back toward Waziri. The witness said Waziri raised his hands to signal 'don't shoot.' The man allegedly shot him three times and then walked off with an improbable bounce in his step. That a soldier such as Waziri would meet such an end was particularly heart-wrenching for Green Berets who served with him in Afghanistan. Retired Master Sgt. Ben Hoffman remembered that when he met Waziri, he had first been struck by the size of the 6-foot-4-inch, 230-plus-pound Afghan. Hoffman then came to know Wazari as a 'gentle giant' who, at his core, embraced the U.S. Army Special Forces motto De Oppresso Liber (To Free the Oppressed). 'It's not about conquering the enemy; it's about freeing people that are being conquered by the enemy,' Hoffman said, 'And he was all about De Oppresso Liber. He saw his own crew, men and the kids and the women being persecuted by the Taliban, and he wanted to see them free, which is why he was willing to go and crawl on his hands and knees to clear IEDs for us.' Hoffman went on, 'Crawling on hands and knees at night under night vision goggles, digging up IEDs that could kill American special forces and other Afghans. I definitely saw him on multiple occasions doing stuff like that. 'And then you get into contact with the enemy, and see him rear up and return fire, and then, come back to us, and we're fighting side by side.' He added, 'It's a story of a teammate that I definitely would have gone side by side with at the gates of hell.' Hoffman says he and Waziri shared a mindset. 'Which is, we are strong, we are trained, we are absolutely capable of destroying the enemy,' he said. 'But at the same time, we are calm, and we're able to see a situation and draw back and escalate or deescalate as needed.' That was Waziri. 'He was all about bringing peace to a situation, if he could.' In the meantime, Khan and Gul brought their brother's widow and children to Florida. 'My brother's wife, she's like, 'My husband was not a person to hurt anybody. My husband was always trying to save other people's lives,'' Khan told the Daily Beast. 'She was talking the whole night and day about that, and now she's panicking and doesn't know where she is. But then we spray water on her face… and then, she gets better.' The 9-month-old is too young to even remember her father, but the 4-year-old keeps asking for him. 'She's always asking, 'Where is he? When is he coming?'' Khan told the Daily Beast at the start of last week. 'And I'm like, 'He's in work. He's coming. He's doing (his) job right now.'' The family decided to hold off telling the girl the truth, partly because that would include telling her that, so far, nothing has happened to the man who shot her father. She had become only more insistent on Wednesday. 'She said, 'Tell my father to take me back to Texas,'' he reported. 'And I'm like, 'OK.'' He told the Daily Beast that he felt the time was nearing when he would have to tell her the truth. 'I will just say, 'He's not coming to you anymore, he is not with us anymore,'' Khan said. 'Maybe that's all I can say to her.' But over breakfast on Friday morning, the girl's mother told Khan to hold off. 'She said, 'No, just keep it like this, don't tell her,'' Khan told the Daily Beast. 'I said, 'One day, she needs to know.' [The wife] said, 'Yeah, but we can say, like, 'He's here, he's there.'' And maybe she forgets later on. And then I'm like, 'OK, whatever you say.'' Khan called the police and was told he could leave a message, as he had been instructed to do on at least five other occasions. He has yet to receive a call back. 'I've been calling so many times, and nobody responded, and my message is, 'I want to know where is the investigation and what's going on?'' Khan reported. 'So they said, 'Okay, she will call you back. I'm gonna take a note and leave it on her desk with your phone number.'' A spokesman for the district attorney was saying, 'We are still awaiting investigation results before making a decision.' Khawaja told the Daily Beast that he had heard that the district attorney will turn the matter over to the grand jury and let it decide whether the gunman should be charged. He said that the witness from the second-floor balcony had become so frightened after the gunman remained at liberty despite her account that she had left the country. But the police have her statement, and when Khawaja spoke to her, she told him she would still be willing to testify. 'I don't know what the mechanics of that look like in terms of getting her back over here,' he said. Khawaja added that there was supposedly a second witness who had been smoking a cigarette nearby at the time of the shooting, but he had apparently not come forward. He had likely also seen the police handcuff and immediately release the gunman. In the weeks since the shooting, Hoffman and other Green Berets have issued calls for justice. Reports of the shooting appeared in various news outlets, including local TV stations, the Daily Mail, People, the New York Post, and then in greater detail by NBC News. Shireen Connor wrote an impassioned letter to Houston Mayor John Whitmire describing Waziri's selfless courage. 'Always helping other people in the face of significant personal peril,' she wrote. 'How do you define a human being like this?' Whatever the authorities do or do not do, the 4-year-old daughter of that magnificent human will never see her daddy again.
New Indian Express
3 days ago
- New Indian Express
Hoax bomb scare at Delhi's Udyog Bhawan, Nirman Bhawan
NEW DELHI: Udyog Bhawan and Nirman Bhawan, two key government buildings in central Delhi, were the target of hoax bomb threat emails on Friday. The emails, which contained threats related to suicide Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), were reportedly sent to a senior bureaucrat at the Ministry of Heavy Industries, according to officials. The emails were received at 6:49 am. The fire department officials said they were alerted to the threat at 1:01 pm. Upon receiving the warning, they immediately dispatched teams to the locations. The threat, which instructed the evacuation of the buildings by 3:15 pm, was flagged by the offices of the Secretary of Heavy Industries at Udyog Bhawan and officials at Nirman Bhawan to relevant security agencies, including Delhi Police, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and Delhi Fire Services (DFS). A thorough search operation was carried out at both locations, lasting for approximately four hours, but no suspicious objects were found. The operation involved a dozen sniffer dogs and four bomb detection and disposal teams from CISF, Delhi Police and Delhi Metro. Authorities are suspecting that the hoax may have been sent from Amsterdam.
NDTV
4 days ago
- Politics
- NDTV
Bomb Threats At Delhi's Udyog Bhawan, Nirman Bhawan Turn Out To Be Hoax
New Delhi: Threats via e-mails to blow up two government buildings in central Delhi -- Udyog Bhawan and Nirman Bhawan -- prompted security agencies to carry out an extensive sanitisation exercise. The threat later turned out to be a hoax. The threat, sent via email at 6.49 am to senior officials at the two central government complexes, claimed that "ammonium sulfur-based Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have been twinned" within the premises and warned, "Evacuate All by 3.15 pm." The "suicide IEDs" threat was issued through identical e-mails sent at 6.49 am to the top officials of the ministries housed in the two facilities. Udyog Bhawan houses offices of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry along with the Ministry of Heavy Industries, while Nirman Bhawan is home to the Union Health and Housing and Urban Affairs ministries. Security officials told PTI that the hoax e-mails are suspected to have been sent from abroad, possibly Amsterdam, and the central cyber protection agencies are tracking their trail. The office of the secretary of Heavy Industries and officials from the adjoining Nirman Bhawan flagged the e-mail contents to security agencies including the Delhi Police, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and the Delhi Fire Services (DFS). The CISF is tasked to provide a counter-terrorist cover to the two buildings. A multi-agency sanitisation and anti-sabotage check was initiated in the two Bhawans early this morning. No incriminating or suspicious items was recovered and the threat was declared a "non-specific or hoax" by late afternoon, security officials said. The official staff and other people present in the ministries housed in the buildings were not evacuated as per the standard operating procedure (SOP), they said. Around a dozen sniffer dogs, four bomb detection and disposal teams of the CISF, Delhi Police and Delhi Metro were pressed in for conducting the sanitisation exercise, they added. "The anti-sabotage operations lasted for around two hours till 5.10 pm. The threat has been declared hoax after thorough check of the premises," a DFS officer said According to fire service officials, they received a call regarding the threat email at 1.01 pm and a team of fire brigade was rushed to the spot. The security apparatus at the two buildings was further strengthened with CISF officers seen checking vehicles before allowing entry into premises and visitors being thoroughly checked.
India Today
4 days ago
- Politics
- India Today
Bomb threat at Delhi's Udyog Bhawan, security forces on alert
An alert was issued at Udyog Bhawan in New Delhi on Friday after a threatening email warned of a possible bomb attack using IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices).The mail, addressed to the Secretary of the Ministry of Heavy Industries, claimed that suicide IEDs would be used inside the Udyog Bhawan the threat, the Union Secretary issued a letter to the CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) Assistant Commandant, directing the force to take immediate and appropriate action. The building was asked to be evacuated as Security has been stepped up in and around the area, and officials are taking all necessary a bomb threat call was also received by the Chandigarh Police on Friday, triggering a high alert around the Haryana Chief Minister's office and other key government to sources, the caller threatened to blow up the Haryana Chief Minister's office, prompting immediate action by law enforcement has been tightened at the Haryana Secretariat and the Chief Minister's residence. Bomb disposal squads, along with heavily armed personnel, were seen conducting searches in and around both locations as a precautionary are working to trace the source of the threat call. As of now, no suspicious object has been found, but the situation is being closely
New Indian Express
4 days ago
- Politics
- New Indian Express
NIA joins probe into Maoist loot of 4,000 kg explosives in Odisha's Sundargarh
BHUBANESWAR: Two days after suspected left-wing extremists (LWEs) looted a huge cache of explosives from a truck headed to a stone quarry in Sundargarh district, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday joined the investigation considering the sensitive nature of the incident. While security forces in neighbouring states have doubled down on anti-Naxals operations by targeting and eliminating key leadership of the outlawed outfit, the loot has come as a worry since Maoists operating in Jharkhand's Saranda forests rely on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to carry out attacks. This prompted Odisha Police and its anti-Naxal agency Special Operation Group (SOG) to launch a major flush-out drive along the bordering region. 'An NIA team visited Rourkela to investigate the incident. Preliminary probe suggests left-wing extremists operating from Saranda forests in West Singhbhum district of Jharkhand were involved in the loot of the blasting explosives,' western range DIG, Brijesh Rai told mediapersons. Sources said looted explosives weighed about 4,000 kg. There were about 200 boxes consisting of blasting explosives. Each box had about nine gelatin sticks and weighed about 20 to 25 kg. 'As vigorous anti-Naxal operations are continuing in Chhattisgarh, the ultras are wary that security forces' next target could be their stronghold in Saranda forest,' said a senior police officer.
