Bogota Court Convicts IRA Rebel Mentors
BOGOTA, Colombia -- A court on Thursday convicted three men with links to the Irish Republican Army of training Colombian rebels in terrorist tactics and sentenced them to up to 17 1/2 years in prison.
A three-judge panel in Bogota overturned an acquittal of the three and ordered their immediate arrests. But the whereabouts of James Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley remained unknown.
The suspected IRA members were arrested in August 2001 at Bogota's international airport after leaving a rebel stronghold deep in Colombia's southern jungle.
Also on Thursday, Colombian security forces found a car bomb meant to be used in an attempt to assassinate President Alvaro Uribe, Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio said.
Police found 15 pounds of the explosives anfo and indugel hidden in a tire in the trunk of the car in an industrial part of the capital, Bogota. Three people were arrested, Osorio's office said, without giving further details of the plot.
Also, Uribe pledged not to extradite the country's top right-wing paramilitary leader to the United States to face drug trafficking charges provided he ceases all illegal activities and stays in peace talks.
A U.S. federal court in Washington is seeking Salvatore Mancuso, the supreme commander of the outlawed United Self-Defense Forces, or AUC, on drug-related charges.
EUROPE
• SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- International administrator Paddy Ashdown fired six Serb police officers and three other officials to punish the Serb Republic for failing to arrest war crimes suspects.
Ashdown has sweeping powers to remove politicians seen as obstructing Bosnia's 1995 Dayton peace treaty, which split the country into Muslim-Croat and Serb halves.
At the same news conference, the U.S. ambassador, Douglas McElhaney, said the U.S. government had frozen the assets of the Serb Democratic Party, founded by the wartime Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and banned its leaders as well as those of their coalition partner, the Party of Democratic Progress, from entering the United States.
• PARIS -- Ten radical Islamic militants were convicted and sentenced to prison terms for their roles in a plot to blow up a Christmas market in the eastern French city of Strasbourg on New Year's Eve 2000.
The group of Algerian nationals and French citizens of Algerian origin included an alleged associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. They went on trial in October on charges of involvement in the foiled plot and were convicted of criminal association with a terrorist enterprise that prosecutors alleged had links to radical Islamic networks in Britain, Italy and Spain.
The 10 were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to nine years.
