LaNUBlog™

Nine of the convicts were Saudi nationals. A Saudi court has sentenced 13 men to 14 years in prison for backing militants, aiding terrorism and helping young men go to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to fight. The 13 sentenced were nine Saudi citizens, two Jordanians, an Egyptian and a Syrian. The court said the men were convicted for owning material that glorified al Qaeda, money laundering, involvement in weapons training in militant camps and financing militants in Iraq. Saudi government said on Thursday in Riyadh that it had sentenced thousands of its citizens to prison terms for similar offences over the past decade since al Qaeda waged a campaign of attacks from 2003 to 2006 inside the country, killing hundreds of people.

Boko Haram members The military said it also captured a foreign Boko Haram fighter, The Nigerian military on Thursday said it had launched an attack on some terrorists near the Cameroonian border. The Director of Defence Information, Chris Olukolade, in a statement said the terrorists, who were cornered while trying to escape to Cameroon through Taraba and Adamawa states, came under fire from troops on patrol of the area in the ongoing counter-terrorism campaign. Mr. Olukolade said some of the Boko Haram terrorists had come out of hiding when they “could no longer bear the hunger in their make shift camps in the forest.” Those apprehended, he said, led troops to other hideouts where fierce fighting ensued.

Nigerian Consulate appeals to illegals to come forward. The Nigerian Consulate in Jeddahhas issued Emergency Travel Certificates, ETC, to 45 Nigerians in Saudi Arabia to help them return home after the Saudi authorities began a clampdown on illegal immigrants three weeks ago.

The accused was granted bail after pleading not guilty to the charge.

The accused was granted bail after pleading not guilty to the charge.

The returnees are being re-united with their family in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Government said on Monday that it received some 2,540 of its citizens from Saudi Arabia, recently declared illegal immigrants by the authorities. Officials at the

Three Ethiopians were killed by Saudi security officials. More than 100 members of Ethiopia’s opposition Semayawi (Blue) party were on Friday arrested for staging a protest at the Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Addis Ababa. Some were allegedly beaten by the Federal police during the protest. The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the party members had matched to the embassy in their hundreds protesting the killing of three Ethiopians by the Saudi security agencies. The Saudi authorities had said that there were more than 40,000 Ethiopian nationals in the country residing illegally in the country. This led to the Nov. 4 crackdown on them. However, the Blue Party Chairman, Yilekal Getachew, who confirmed the incident to journalists, said he was also arrested but later released by the police. Mr. Getachew said that the party was protesting the killing of the Ethiopians who had been molested by security agencies without adequate reason for doing so. But the Ethiopian pol...

Iran's justice minister says there is "no need" for a man who survived a hanging to be hanged a second time. Lawyers want the head of the judiciary to stop a repeat hanging after the man was found alive in a morgue. Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said executing the man would have repercussions against Iran's image, the ISNA news agency reported. The government has no direct control over the judiciary which has to decide whether a second execution takes place. Iran has one of the highest rates of execution in the world. The 37-year-old convicted drug smuggler, named as Alireza M, was found alive in a morgue after being hanged at a jail in the north-eastern city of Bojnord last week. He had been left to hang for 12 minutes after which a doctor declared him dead, reports said. But when the prisoner's family went to collect his body from the prison morgue the next day, they found he was still breathing. The man was then moved to a hospital where he was...

Kuala Lumpur - A Malaysian appeals court on Monday upheld a government ban against the use of the word "Allah" to refer to God in non-Muslim faiths, overruling claims by Christians in this Muslim-majority nation that the restriction violates their religious rights. "Allah" is the Arabic word for God and is commonly used in the Malay language to refer to God. But the Malaysian government insists that "Allah" should be exclusively reserved for Muslims because of concerns its use by others would confuse Muslims and could be used to convert them. Malaysia's Christian, Buddhist and Hindu minorities have often complained that the government infringes in their constitutional right to practice religion freely, accusations the government denies. Monday's judgment in the Court of Appeals overturns a decision by a lower court nearly four years ago that ruled against the government ban. Anger over that ruling sparked a string of arson attacks and vandalism ...

New York - Attackers swooped on a UN water convoy in Sudan's troubled Darfur region Sunday, killing three Senegalese peacekeepers, the United Nations said. It was the second deadly attack on the UN mission in Darfur, Unamid, in three days and UN leader Ban Ki-moon called on the Sudanese government to act over the incidents. Unamid did not identify the group behind the latest attack in which a fourth Senegalese soldier was also wounded. The peacekeepers were escorting a water convoy from the town of El Geneina to the UN mission's regional headquarters in West Darfur when they were ambushed, Unamid said in a statement. The assailants hijacked a vehicle that was recovered 7km away. Another Unamid patrol was attacked on the same road a year ago. The UN peacekeepers have increasingly become a target for ambushes and attacks in the western region of Sudan which has been at war for the past decade. The UN says at least 300 000 people have died in the conflict. Assailants killed...

In the town of Mushirfa in northern Israel, the quiet is only broken by the sound of crowing cockerels or the call to prayer from the local mosque. It seems a long way from the civil war in neighbouring Syria, where opposition forces have recently been involved in fierce clashes with government troops around Damascus. Yet this was the home of Mueid Aghbaria, a 28-year-old construction worker who shot to death on the outskirts of the Syrian capital last month. Videos and photographs of his bloodied corpse were posted on the internet and shown in the media. "From the information we gathered, he got a one-way ticket to Turkey and, as God knows, from there he went into Syria," his father Zaki tells me. He believed he was following his calling and his group, and that he was supporting his fellow Muslims who had fallen victim in this conflict Zaki Aghbaria He says Muied was very religious and had long had jihadist sympathies. He had previously wanted to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq...

Al-Qaeda standards for membership have slipped. The organisation is admitting a new generation of members - and expanding its reach. Osama Bin Laden did not want the Somali Islamist group al-Shabab to join the al-Qaeda network. He criticised their leaders in a letterthat was found in Abbottabad after he was killed in 2011, implying that they imposed unduly harsh penalties on "those whose offences are ambiguous". Al-Qaeda's new leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is less concerned with al-Shabab's shortcomings. Less than a year after Bin Laden's death, Zawahiri welcomed al-Shabab into the fold. "He thought it would extend the reach," says Richard Barnett, the former co-ordinator of the al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team at the United Nations. The induction of al-Shabab shows a new style of al-Qaeda leadership. Zawahiri and his cohorts are more accommodating - and also more ambitious in their scope - than their predecessors. "They've franchised them...

More on the Story- Some subcultures, such as metal, hip-hop or those based around graphic novels, are particularly fond of tattoos. They can be inspiring, says writer and critic Sam Leith, but there are pitfalls. "Your tastes will probably change fundamentally. You may really think that Catcher in the Rye is the secret to your whole personality at 15. At 50, you probably won't. Something cryptic and short is better." Victoria Beckham's tattoo quotes the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament Why the musings of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard or a Guns N Roses lyric needs to be branded across someone's back might puzzle some people. Can't someone just keep it in their head? I am my love's / And my love is mine / Who browses among the lilies Victoria Beckham's Song of Solomon tattoo Ing says the Moby Dick quote is about not wanting to forget that moment of connection. "I so wanted to remind myself. I didn't want to forget. I wanted...

It probably wasn't on Shakespeare's radar that his work would one day unite Megan Fox, Danielle Lineker and Lindsay Lohan. But it has - they all have Shakespeare quotations tattooed to their bodies. Why are more people getting such high-brow inkings? The trend for long pieces of script is part of the tattoo's journey from the margins to the mainstream. Rarely a week passes without a celebrity being spotted with a defiant rallying cry, knowing aphorism or erudite quote inked to their bodies. Angelina Jolie, the doyenne of written tattoos, was recently spotted with a long bit of text- thought to be Arabic - on her right arm. It joins a Tennessee Williams quote, the Arabic word for determination, and the geographical coordinates of her six children's birthplaces, among others. Literary quotations, song lyrics and philosophical musings are popular. Megan Fox took her Shakespearean tattoo from King Lear - "We will all laugh at gilded butterflies" - Danielle Li...

Women who drive risk damaging their ovaries and producing children with clinical problems, according to a leading conservative Saudi cleric. The comment was made by Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, a member of a council which advises the Saudi government and writes religious edicts. His intervention comes as activists step up their campaign for women in Saudi Arabia to be allowed to drive. Women are being called upon to defy the ban and drive on 26 October. The campaign, started on Twitter, has attracted more than 11,000 signatures. It is the latest in a series of campaigns over the past two decades for women to be allowed to sit behind the wheel. Women activists in Saudi Arabia say the issue of being allowed to drive is key to gaining other rights BySebastian Usher BBC News Saudi women seek right to drive The ban on women drivers, while informal, is enforced by Saudi police through fines and arrests. Only men are permitted to acquire driving licences. "If a woman drives a ca...

Eleven Islamist rebel groups in Syria have announced they do not recognise the authority of the main opposition alliance, the National Coalition. A joint statement says: "All groups formed abroad without having returned to the country do not represent us." They also call for the opposition to unite under an "Islamic framework". Islamist rebel forces have become increasing prominent in the conflict in Syria, and they are believed to command tens of thousands of fighters. The signatories include members of the Free Syrian Army as well as more radical Islamists - among them the powerful al-Nusra Front, which has links to al-Qaeda. It comes amid fighting on the ground between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and more moderate rebel forces, especially in areas along Syria's northern and eastern borders. 'Unite under Sharia' In a video statement published online on Tuesday, 11 of the most powerful Islamist groups...

She was a "shy" girl from Buckinghamshire but the name Samantha Lewthwaite is once again being linked to a global atrocity. The media have linked her to the Kenyan shopping centre attack and the speculation has been fuelled by the Kenyan foreign minister who has said one of the militants from the Somali-based al-Shabab group was a British woman. But BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said Whitehall officials continue to advise caution about the reports. There has been no confirmation of Ms Lewthwaite's involvement, either as an attacker, organiser or fundraiser. Al-Shabab has denied that any women were involved. Ms Lewthwaite was first thrust into the spotlight after the 7 July bombings in London in 2005, as the widow of bomber Germaine Lindsay, who killed 26 people when he blew up a Piccadilly Line Tube train near King's Cross. A Muslim convert dubbed the "White Widow" by much of the media, she has no terrorism record in the UK but is currently...

US President Barack Obama has said recent moves by Iran should offer the basis for a "meaningful agreement" on its nuclear programme. Speaking at the UN General Assembly's annual meeting, Mr Obama said words now had to be "matched by actions that are transparent and verifiable". The US leader recently exchanged letters with his newly-elected counterpart over the nuclear issue. Mr Obama also called for a strong UN resolution on Syria's chemical arms. He said the purpose of such a resolution should be "to verify that the [Bashar al-Assad's] regime is keeping its commitments" to remove or destroy its chemical weapons. He said it was an "insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution [the UN] to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out" a sarin gas attack which UN inspectors have verified took place on 21 August. Mr Obama referred to Iranian suffering from chemical weapons at the hands of Iraq when he ...

~Continuation,......... He defeated ex-President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed - a former Islamist rebel fighter, whose three years in power were criticised by donors who said corruption was rife. Al-Shabab has denounced the process as being a foreign plot to control Somalia. Somalia is pretty much a failed state. It has not had an effective national government for about 20 years, during which much of the country has been a constant war-zone. This made it easy for al-Shabab, when it first emerged, to win support among Somalis. It promised people security - something they welcomed. But its credibility was knocked when it rejected Western food aid to combat the 2011 drought and famine. Al-Shabab advocates the Saudi-inspired Wahhabi version of Islam, while most Somalis are Sufis. Al-Shabab has destroyed a large number of Sufi shrines, causing its popularity to further plummet. However, with Mogadishu and other towns now under government control, there is a new feeling of hope in the c...

Somalia's al-Shabab, which has carried out the deadly attack on a shopping centre in neighbouring Kenya, is linked with al-Qaeda. It has been pushed out of all of the main towns it once controlled in southern and central parts of Somalia, but still remains a potent threat. Who are al-Shabab? Al-Shabab means The Youth in Arabic. It emerged as the radical youth wing of Somalia's now-defunct Union of Islamic Courts in 2006, as it fought Ethiopian forces who had entered Somalia to back the weak interim government. There are numerous reports of foreign jihadists going to Somalia to help al-Shabab It has imposed a strict version of Sharia law in areas under its control, including stoning to death women accused of adultery and amputating the hands of thieves. How much of Somalia does al-Shabab control? Al-Shabab At A Glance *."The Youth" in Arabic *.Formed as a radical offshoot of the Union of Islamic Courts, which controlled Mogadishu, in 2006 *.Previously ran much...