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Fighting terror notebook
Compiled from Times wires Teen claims he sent anthrax letter to DaschleBRENTWOOD, N.H. -- A teenager who told police he sent an anthrax-laced letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is a compulsive liar who has been treated in a state psychiatric hospital, his father said Saturday. Elijah Wallace, 18, made the claim when he was arrested for breaking into a vacant home Friday. Police found him hiding in a closet with a gun and two knives. Investigators also found five letters addressed to local businesses and a bag of white powder in the house with Wallace. Preliminary tests on one of five letters found with the teen was negative for anthrax. Wallace told police he was preparing to send anthrax-laced letters and had sent four others, including one mailed last week to Daschle, Fremont Police Chief Neal Janvrin said. But officials said they do not believe Wallace sent the Daschle letter because, with heightened security measures, it would have taken up to three weeks for a letter to reach Daschle, D-S.D. The Daschle letter contained a white powder and threatening letter. Army scientists and the FBI said Friday that the substance was talc and contained no trace of the deadly bacteria. 15 suspected terrorists arrested in SingaporeSINGAPORE -- Authorities have arrested 15 suspected militants, some of them trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, for allegedly plotting bombings in this city-state, the government said Saturday. The suspects were arrested last month, and detailed information on bomb construction and photographs and video footage of targeted buildings in Singapore were found in their homes and offices, the Ministry of Home Affairs said. Al-Qaida-linked material, falsified passports and forged immigration stamps also were found, a ministry statement said. The suspects have links to militant groups in Malaysia and Indonesia, the statement said. Malaysian police have arrested 13 people since Dec. 9 on suspicion of being members of an extremist group with possible links to three men accused of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. The 15 were detained under Singapore's Internal Security Act, which allows people to be held indefinitely without trial. All except one is Singaporean. The other suspect used to be Singaporean and is now a Malaysian citizen, it said. Thirteen of the suspects are members of a clandestine organization called Jemaah Islamiah, the statement said. It is unclear if the other two belong to the group, it said. Trade Center terror fliers go on national exhibitSANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- They are headstones in a cemetery without grass. The 175 torn and weathered pages form a tapestry of human loss comparable to those other modern rosters of death, the Vietnam Wall and the AIDS Quilt. The images drawing crowds to the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum here -- "Missing -- Last Seen at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001" -- are familiar to almost everyone. Yet seeing these artifacts of tragedy up close carries a power so overwhelming that viewers have burst into tears. On the first leg of what promises to be an international tour, this collection offers the first intimate look at an American tragedy most of the outside world could only watch on television. "This is poignant beyond words," said Mary Lou LaBarge, visibly moved as she left the museum earlier this week. "We didn't feel the immediacy of it out here." To LaBarge and other visitors, seeing the fliers up close brought the World Trade Center tragedy home. Some of the papers are faded, others bear duct tape that attached them to light posts, street signs or walls. Others look like they were rescued from the trash. For Louis Nevaer, the exhibitor behind the display of the famous missing persons photos that blanketed New York in the days after the World Trade Center disaster, communicating the tactile sense of the tragedy to those outside New York City was an important part of what he was aiming for when he created the exhibit. "I find a helplessness among people here," said Nevaer, a 39-year-old author and activist from New York. "You were all sleeping when it happened." The reason he brought the exhibit here first, he said, was that the planes that crashed into the towers were bound for California. "In a sense we're completing that journey," Nevaer said. While the Smithsonian and the Museum of the City of New York plan to preserve many of the fliers, Nevaer said his exhibit marks the first time they have been seen outside New York. Nevaer said he was moved to start gathering the fliers in the days after the tragedy. "After a week or two they started to tear in the rain," he said. "It seemed disrespectful that they should be destroyed as litter." After collecting the fliers, Nevaer tried to contact the families who posted them. Uniformly, he said, relatives liked the idea of exhibiting the fliers outside New York. In that way, the exhibition is similar to the AIDS Quilt that has traveled the country. Also . . .BOOK DEAL: Former Afghanistan aid workers Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer have agreed to a book deal to tell the story of their Taliban imprisonment, the women's agent said Saturday. The women will work with a professional writer to explain their motivations for going to Afghanistan and what they encountered there, said Wes Yoder, president of the Ambassador Agency in Nashville, Tenn. The book, to be published by Doubleday, should be out in about five months, Yoder said.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
