No-Waitor News

Near a multiplex cinema and a nondescript highway junction outside Tel Aviv is the place where Israel’s secrets go when they get old.

Here, on a memorial wall, you can encounter names like Shalom Dani, a Holocaust survivor who became the Mossad’s master forger. Dani honed his skills under cover in North Africa, taking part in the Mossad’s effort to spirit thousands of Moroccan Jews to Israel before being dispatched to Argentina in 1960. There, he counterfeited the documents that allowed a team of agents to smuggle Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Nazi genocide, to his trial and eventual hanging in Israel.

The names and stories are carved into limestone walls and arranged in binders at a sleepy clump of buildings known by a misleadingly dull name the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center. They offer a unique, if fragmentary, glimpse into the exploits of the Mossad agents and intelligence operatives who have waged this country’s shadow wars.

Once Israel’s most closely guarded information, whatever appears here has aged and been deemed no longer worth keeping secret.

Nearby, in a room dedicated to people who died of old age after long intelligence careers, there is a page in a binder describing Rachel Spinner, the Mossad’s longtime cook. When Jordan’s King Hussein came to hold top-secret meetings with Israeli leaders four decades ago, when the two countries were still officially at war, it was Spinner who made supper.

Often more is hidden than revealed: The shards of information here the names of dead agents, the dates of their death, short biographies seem to be only the tips of stories still submerged in secrecy.

The center was created as a memorial to the dead of Israel’s intelligence community the Mossad, which operates abroad, the Shin Bet, the internal security agency concerned largely with the Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, and military intelligence. The only official window into this murky world, the center exists on the line between what is secret and what is not, its content carefully vetted by a committee before being approved for public consumption.

What he was doing there and how he died is still secret more than five decades later. Some of the people involved in the operation are still alive and the details could endanger them.

Take one of the forgotten names carved into the wall of the center’s memorial to the fallen: Muhammad Kassem Sayed Ahmad. A Druse Arab agent, he was killed at a border crossing between Israel and Syria on the night of November 28, 1956.

Today the Mossad chief’s name and image are in the public domain he’s a bespectacled and bland-seeming man named Meir Dagan and the agency has a Web site. So does the Shin Bet, which has even posted employee blogs.

Some ex-agents resent any details being published at all. Until the center was established in the mid-1980s, the world of Israeli intelligence was a cipher even to Israelis: The name of the Mossad chief was classified, as was virtually everything else about the service and its sister agencies.

“Society has changed, and today there’s more pressure from what’s known as ‘the public’s right to know,’” said Efraim Halevy, the former Mossad chief who heads the center. “Once these things would have been considered treason.”

It is possible to discern traces of displeasure with this turn of events, or at least of nostalgia for the cloaks and daggers of days past.

The center serves as something of a meeting place for gray-haired agents in from the cold. There are programs and lectures, a theater that screens movies about intelligence success stories, and a monthly newsletter that covers developments in the intelligence world. An issue typically includes a few obituaries of elderly operatives, sometimes with a silhouette instead of a photograph, the biography always a bit vague on the details.

David Tzur, a retired brigadier general from military intelligence who is the center’s director, says he occasionally receives complaints. “There are old Shin Bet and Mossad guys who say we’re going too far in what we release,” he said.

The eighth is Shulamit Kishak-Cohen, a colorful Beirut matron who ran a smuggling ring bringing Jews to Israel in the 1950s. Married off to a much older businessman as a teenager, Kishak-Cohen had a lengthy romantic liaison with a married French intelligence agent and used her connections with several disreputable characters, including a casino owner, to keep her network going. Eventually arrested in the early 1960s, she was released in a prisoner exchange after the 1967 Mideast War.

The center grants a prize, the “Hero of Silence,” to civilians, Israelis and foreigners, who have assisted Israel’s intelligence services. Eight people have received the prize so far; the identities of seven are secret.

Kamal Amin Thabit, a wealthy Syrian businessman with important friends in the Syrian government in the 1960s, is here on a memorial wall, though you won’t see that name. Neither will you see the name Menashe, which is how Thabit was known to the Mossad staffers who handled his incoming Morse messages from Damascus.

A visitor to the center can find traces of some of Israel’s most famous covert operations.

There are others who are less well known, like Sylvia Rafael.

Instead you will find his real name, Eli Cohen an Egyptian Jew who operated in the Syrian capital for three years before he was captured and hanged in 1965.

Given a five-year sentence, Rafael fell in love with the Norwegian lawyer who represented her, married him, and returned to South Africa, where she died of cancer in 2005. A photograph glued next to her biography, kept in a small memorial room, shows a dark-haired woman with long silver earrings looking away from the camera.

Rafael, who was born in South Africa and moved to Israel as a young woman, was jailed in Norway after her Mossad team mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, whom they wrongly identified as a Black September terrorist behind the deaths of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The killing in the picturesque town of Lillehammer, and the Mossad team’s subsequent bungled escape and arrest, constituted one of the service’s most embarrassing blunders and led to the elimination of many of its agent networks and safe houses in Europe.

“Dedicated to the memory of those from whom the fog cannot yet be lifted, and whose names cannot yet be revealed.”

There are also spies whose existence is not even mentioned at the intelligence commemoration center, people whom “we still can’t put on the wall,” says Tzur, the center’s director. Precisely how many is a secret. Instead, there is the following inscription:

Martin Kaymer will tee off at this weeks British Open as one of the hottest players in world golf.

Kaymers Scottish Open triumph on Sunday came seven days after he had displayed an equally cool head to clinch the French Open in a play-off with Lee Westwood.

But the rising German star has warned his growing band of admirers to think twice about backing him to complete a memorable hat-trick of victories at Turnberry on Sunday.

“Everyone is asking me if I can win three in a row but it is a major we are playing this week and the field will be the best we have all year long.

Both wins came against high-quality fields but the 24-year-old knows that contesting an Open Championship with Tiger Woods and co. represents another significant step up.

The wilting of his closest rivals, most notably Retief Goosen, meant Kraymer did not have to do anything spectacular here on Sunday, a closing 69 proving enough for him to claim the 500,000-pound winners cheque by two shots from Frances Raphael Jacquelin and overnight leader Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano .

“Im really looking forward to it though. I have not been to Turnberry before but my manager played there a couple of weeks ago and said it is going to be really, really difficult.”

By far the most experienced player in the final group, the South African had started his final round one shot adrift of Fernandez-Castano and took the overall lead after back-to-back birdies on the 5th and 6th.

Australias Adam Scott underlined his return to form with a closing 66 to share fourth place with Denmarks Soren Kjeldsen but it was a painfully frustrating Sunday for Goosen.

Goosen recovered three of the shots that got away over the closing holes but had left himself with too much to do, finally signing for a 73 and a share of sixth place with American Nick Watney .

But the two times US Open champion collapsed in spectacular fashion, dropping six shots in the space of five holes from the 7th to fall out of contention.

“Im feeling really good having put a good number on the board this week,” said Scott. “It has been a while since Ive done that and the swing is feeling good.

As Goosen retired to lick his psychological wounds, Scott was delighted with a performance which he hopes has finally drawn a line under his year-long slump just in time for the Open.

Two shots clear at the turn, Kaymer stayed steady while all his closest rivals wilted and by the time he reached the 16th tee, the German was three shots clear of the pack.

“It was good to be up there on Sunday and hopefully now I can make a couple of putts and get myself into the Open.”

But Kaymer slammed the door shut by finding the centre of the green for a rock solid par at the 205-yard 17th and, once he had split the 18th fairway with his final drive, another monster cheque (last weeks win earned him 666,000 euros) was on its way to his bank.

A poor chip after he had missed the green at that hole cost him one of those shots and offered a glimmer of hope to Jacquelin, who by that time was in the clubhouse at 13 under.

Lee Westwood, who lost to Kaymer in the play-off at the French Open, briefly looked as if he might turn the tables on the German but the Englishmans challenge fell by the wayside when a wayward drive cost him a bogey 6 at the long 13th.

If last week was anything to go by, the Germans celebrations will be modest. “My father came over to see me in France. On the way back to Germany we stopped at a gas station on the autobahn and had a beer. That was the celebration: cheers, lets go!.”

Ernie Els suffered alongside compatriot Goosen. The Big Easy started the day six shots off the lead but saw his outside chance evaporate with a double bogey six on the second hole and, after a closing 72, was in no mood to talk to waiting reporters.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has cancer and may not live more than five years, a South Korean cable news channel has reported.

The TV news channel said the leader of the isolated nuclear-armed nation was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer around the time of his suspected stroke last August.

Seouls unification ministry said it had no information on the YTN report, which came days after Kim, 67, appeared on television looking gaunt.

YTN, quoting medical sources in Beijing, said Kim may not live more than five years given the high mortality rate for such a cancer and his advanced age.

It cited intelligence sources in Seoul and Washington.

TBS reported that Kim has been resting and is being treated at his villa in the southeastern area of Wonsan by a team of specialists.

Seouls National Intelligence Service said it could not confirm the report, which came three days after Japanese TV network TBS reported Kim is suffering from a “serious disorder” of the pancreas.

Tensions between the hardline communist state and the international community are currently high over its missile and nuclear programmes.

Kims health is the subject of intense international attention since there has been no announcement to the outside world about who would succeed him.

State TV last week showed Kim limping slightly and with thinning hair when he made a televised appearance to pay homage to his late father Kim Il-Sung at a national memorial service.

Seoul intelligence officials have been quoted as saying that Kim has nominated his youngest son Jong-Un, 26, as his successor.

Britains media Monday hailed most of Englands cricket team as conquering heroes after they salvaged a draw against Australia in the first Ashes Test in Cardiff.

“England tasted one of those glorious dramatic draw yesterday that only Test cricket at the highest level of intensity can deliver,” Simon Barnes wrote in The Times newspaper.

James Anderson and Monty Panesar were praised for their gritty determination after the last-wicket duo saw out the final 40 minutes at Sophia Gardens during a 69-ball stand that took England to safety on Sunday.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Panesar also said he realised England had a “big chance” when Australia brought on part-time spinner Marcus North.

Bowler Panesar, for his part, said he just tried to stay calm and focused in the final minutes of the match.

“Collingwood, unshaven, sunburnt and mired in sweat and dust, batted for 17 minutes shy of six hours, 245 balls of sheer bloody-mindedness and self-restraint to take England to the brink of safety,” The Times Mike Atherton, a former England captain, said.

Paul Collingwood was also singled out in the press for his patient last-day innings of 74 which spanned nearly six hours.

“The rest of the England batting, as it had been for most of the match, was at times pitiful in its application or ability to absorb fundamental lessons, ” the Guardian newspapers Mike Selvey - an ex-England pace bowler - wrote.

But the press rounded on some of Englands top-order batsmen for their poor performances, saving savage criticism for Kevin Pietersen who made eight in the second innings and 69 in the first.

There was also little sympathy for Australian captain Ricky Ponting, after he complained of time-wasting by the home side during the tense final stages of the match.

“Pietersen has run into real trouble in this Test. Ritual defiance will not protect him from the suspicion that his lone wolf tendancies are now hurting his team,” the newspaper also said.

Ponting, writing in the same newspaper, described Englands tactics as “pretty ordinary” but said the Australian team would not dwell on them ahead of the second Test starting at Lords on Thursday.

The Daily Telegraph said “in similar circumstances most teams would have pushed their luck” as well.

“We will play by the spirit of the game and leave the England team to whatever they do,” Ponting said.

Chinas President Hu Jintao personally endorsed an investigation into global miner Rio Tinto that led to the detention of four of its China-based staff, a newspaper said on Monday, citing Chinese government sources.

Rio Tinto is the worlds second largest iron ore miner and was locked in intense price negotiations with China when Stern Hu and the three others were detained in Shanghai, accused of stealing state secrets and bribing Chinese steelmakers for information.

The investigation appears to be part of a realignment of how China managed its economy in the wake of the global financial crisis, with spy and security agencies promoted to top strategy-making bodies, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said. The detention a week ago of Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tintos top iron ore salesman in China, Australian Stern Hu, and three of his Chinese subordinates has cast a shadow over Australia-China relations and unnerved the iron ore trade.

“One of the issues for Chinese authorities to contemplate is the extent to which the circumstances of this case will cause the international business community to have any cause for concern,” Smith said.

Australias Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said on Sunday he was urging Chinese authorities to handle the case expeditiously, and to consider the wider risks for international business confidence.

The nine-member standing committee of Chinas Communist Party, led by President Hu, had taken more control over economic decisions at the expense of the State Council, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, the Herald said, quoting anonymous Chinese economic advisers.

Chinese state-owned companies, which have been trying to portray themselves as independent, commercial entities as they roam the world buying up companies and sourcing raw materials, may now face suspicions they are fronting for the Chinese government, analysts say.

“This is certainly not revenge for the Chinalco deal not going through,” the Herald quoted one Chinese government source as saying.

The inquiry began before Rio Tinto broke off its 19.5 billion investment deal with Chinese metals firm Chinalco and instead formed an iron ore joint venture with rival BHP Billiton on June 5, the sources told the paper.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who returned on Monday from a week-long overseas trip, is under pressure from the opposition to personally intervene in the case.

The collapse of the Chinalco deal was immediately followed by the establishment of a high-level group that would assess the political and economic risks of large overseas investment deals, the paper said.

Chinese media reports say information from an internal meeting of the China Iron and Steel Association on the negotiations was leaked, and have reported the investigation has extended to several senior figures in the Chinese steel industry, including within the association itself.

“Pick up the phone Mr. Rudd, pick up the phone Mr. Smith, speak to your Chinese counterparts and make it absolutely clear there must be procedural justice immediately,” opposition frontbencher Greg Hunt told Sky News. “They are worried about the relationship, they are not worried about the Australian citizen.” Australian authorities were pressing for details of the allegations against Hu, Smith said, adding that China had still not revealed to them any evidence supporting the detentions.

Sources say some Rio Tinto computers were removed in the course of the investigation, which could potentially expose the companys negotiating strategy as well as contractual terms with the mills it supplies. Rio has not commented on the computers.

A senior executive at Shougang, Chinas eighth-largest mill, has also been detained.

The matter has so far been confined to Rio Tinto, but rival Australian iron ore miner BHP Billiton and Brazils Vale are watching events closely.

Foreign firms operating in China are already alert to the problem of Internet and phone communications being monitored for commercially sensitive information.

Chinese law allows people to be held without charge and interrogated without access to legal counsel for some time, before being formally arrested.

Australian consular officials met Hu in detention on Friday, and Canberra reported him to be in good health, but Smith said there was no timetable for whether or not charges would be laid.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has life-threatening pancreatic cancer, a news report said Monday, days after new images of him looking gaunt spurred speculation that his health might be worsening following a reported stroke last year.

The report cited the officials saying the disease is “threatening” Kim’s life.

The 67-year-old Kim was diagnosed with the cancer around the time he was felled by a stroke last summer, Seoul’s YTN television reported, citing unidentified intelligence officials in South Korea and China.

South Korea’s spy agency said it could not confirm the report.

Pancreatic cancer is usually found in its final stage, and considering Kim’s age, he is expected to live no more than five years, the report said.

Monday’s report came after Kim last week made a rare public appearance, in an annual memorial for his late father and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung.

Kim’s health is a focus of intense media speculation due to concerns about instability and a power struggle if he were to die without naming a successor. His third and youngest son, Kim Jong Un, has widely been reported as being groomed as heir, but the regime has made no announcement to the outside world.

The images touched off speculation that he could have other health problems.

Television footage showed him markedly thinner and with less hair only the second state event he has attended in person since the reported stroke. He also limped slightly, and the sides of his tightlipped mouth looked imbalanced in what were believed to be the effects of a stroke.

Medical doctor and professor Min Yang-ki of Seoul’s Hallym University Medical Center has said diabetes usually leads to weight loss. The neurologist also said Kim’s limping appears to be a result of a stroke. However, he said, overall it appeared Kim has recovered from that reported illness.

South Korea’s spy agency has long suspected that Kim has diabetes and heart disease.

North Korea experts said the latest images of Kim show he is still fit enough to rule.

Kim walked on his own into a Pyongyang auditorium for last week’s memorial at a normal pace and bowed while standing during a moment of silence.

Kim Jong Il took over North Korea after his father died in 1994 of heart failure at age 82, though he did not take on his father’s title of president. He runs the North from his post as chairman of the National Defense Commission.

The totalitarian leader, whose rule is buttressed by an intense cult of personality, knew that the people of North Korea would pay great attention to the memorial, and his appearance there is a message that he is in charge, Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, said last week.

In early April, he presided over a parliamentary meeting where he was re-elected as leader.

A bomb blast killed two U.S. Marines in Afghanistan’s dangerous south, where thousands of American troops have deployed in a massive operation to oust Taliban fighters from the country’s opium poppy region, officials said Sunday.

“These terrorist attacks are hard to prevent, can be carried out by a few individuals, and do not require a military force capable of confronting the Marines,” said Arturo Munoz, an expert on the tribal environment in Helmand province with the Washington-based RAND Corp.

Some 4,000 Marines moved into Helmand province this month, the largest Marine operation in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S. invasion. They have met little head-on resistance but remain vulnerable to guerrilla tactics like suicide and roadside bombs.

The two Marines were killed Saturday in Helmand. Military officials did not release any other details nor give a specific location. The military initially reported four Marines had died but later corrected the figure, saying the deaths were mistakenly double-counted.

“I would expect the Taliban to avoid pitched battles with the Marines in order to avoid a large number of casualties,” he said. “This does not mean they will avoid violence.”

In an interview broadcast Sunday, President Barack Obama called Britain’s contribution critically important and said U.S. and British troops face a difficult summer ahead of elections in Afghanistan late next month.

The American casualties come after eight British deaths in Helmand in a 24-hour period ending Friday, triggering debate in Britain about its role in Afghanistan. Britain has now lost more troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan will help keep extremist groups from launching attacks inside Britain. And he told Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a telephone call Sunday that Britain would stand “shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of Afghanistan for the long haul,” according to a statement by the Afghan presidency.

“We’ve got to get through elections,” Obama told Sky News. “The most important thing we can do is to combine our military efforts with effective diplomacy and development, so that Afghans feel a greater stake and have a greater capacity to secure their country.”

But in an editorial Sunday, The Observer newspaper predicted the British public will soon decide the war is not worth the casualties.

The embattled prime minister told his troops in an interview Sunday with the British military radio network that it was proving to be a “difficult summer” in Afghanistan but that operations in Helmand were making “considerable progress” toward defeating the Taliban.

Another American service member died Friday in the U.S. of wounds suffered in Afghanistan in June, said Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, who confirmed the deaths of the two Marines.

“Lives saved by bringing soldiers home will seem a surer benefit than the unproven hypothesis of preventing terrorism with a war thousands of miles away,” the newspaper said.

Obama ordered 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan earlier this year to help put down an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency. Some 10,000 Marines and 4,000 soldiers from the Stryker Brigade the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division based in Fort Lewis, Wash. are deploying in the south, the Taliban’s spiritual birthplace and stronghold.

The three deaths bring to 104 the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year, a record pace. Last year 151 U.S. troops died in the country. Overall, 193 international troops have died in Afghanistan this year, according to an Associated Press count based on official announcements.

Violence flared elsewhere around the country over the weekend, illustrating again that security is deteriorating. At least 22 people were killed, including seven police officers, officials reported on Sunday.

The troops will help provide security for the Aug. 20 election, when Afghans will choose a president and provincial councils, and help train army and police units that the U.S. hopes one day can provide security for the country. By fall, a record 68,000 U.S. troops will be in Afghanistan.

In Logar, four policemen died when a roadside bomb hit their car in Charkh district Saturday, said provincial police chief Gen. Mustafa Mosseini.

In southern Uruzgan province, international troops and Afghan police killed 12 militants in a gunbattle Saturday, police spokesman Mohammad Musa said.

In a gunbattle in eastern Paktia province between insurgents and Afghan police, two militants and one police officer were killed, said Rahullah Samon, a spokesman for the governor.

In Helmand, two police were killed in a roadside bombing in the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah late Saturday, said Dawood Ahmadi, the governor’s spokesman.

Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.

In eastern Kunar province, one civilian was killed and five wounded when shells from a gunbattle between insurgents and Afghan and coalition forces hit a house. Provincial Police Chief Gen. Abdul Jalal Jalal said it was unclear which side fired the shots that hit the house.

Nigerias main rebel group, which has so far targeted oil facilities in the south, has claimed responsibility for an audacious strike on an oil jetty in Lagos in its first attack on the countrys economic capital.

“The depot and loading tankers moored at the facility are currently on fire,” it said of the facility, located in the Lagos harbour area.

“Heavily armed MEND fighters today, Sunday, July 12, 2009, at about 2230 hours (2130 GMT) carried out an unprecedented attack on the Atlas Cove Jetty in Lagos,” the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said in a statement.

Lagos residents, including AFP correspondents, heard a loud explosion reverberating across the bustling, sprawling city of around 16 million people.

MEND has thus far confined its attacks to the oil-rich but volatile Niger Delta and kidnapped several foreign and local oil workers.

The attack came just hours before treason charges against a top MEND leader were expected to be dropped at a court hearing on Monday as part of a government amnesty deal offered to rebels.

Atlas Cove Jetty is the first point of contact for vessels as they enter Nigerian territorial waters from the west. Oil tankers are loaded here.

Nigerian President Umaru YarAdua on June 25 declared an unconditional pardon for militants in the Niger Delta, if they “surrender their weapons and renounce militancy.”

Lawyers for MEND leader Henry Okah and top government officials agreed on the unscheduled hearing at a meeting Sunday, Okahs lawyer Femi Falana told AFP.

The MEND, which launched an armed rebellion in the swamps and creeks of oil-rich southern Nigeria in 2006, say they are seeking greater share of the oil wealth for the locals of the Niger Delta.

The release of Okah, incarcerated since September 2007 and who has been facing treason charges, is one of the rebels main demands to give up violence.

“The two-pronged approach of combining dialogue and intensifying attacks throughout the course of negotiations, will be the unique characteristics of Moses,” MEND said, referring to its new oil war.

But the group adopted a pugnacious tone in Sundays statement, replete with Biblical references.

“The mother of all plagues will be used as a last resort if the Nigerian Pharaohs show stubbornness over reasoning …” it said, without elaborating.

“We want to assure our people and well wishers that we will not sell our birthright for a bowl of porridge,” it said.

The state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has painted a grim picture of the fallout of the violence, saying monthly oil revenue this year dropped to around one billion dollars from an average of 2.2 billion dollars in 2008.

“We sincerely hope for the sake of avoiding a total calamity that (the Nigerian government) will nor harden its heart,” it added.

Demonstrations against Chinese consulates in Europe and the United States show that ethnic riots in Urumqi were orchestrated, Chinas state-run Xinhua news agency said on Monday.

“Supporters of the East Turkestan separatists started well-orchestrated and sometimes violent attacks on Chinese embassies and consulates in several countries soon after the riots occurred last Sunday,” Xinhua said.

Demonstrators threw eggs, Molotov cocktails and stones at several Chinese embassies and consulates, including in Ankara, Oslo, Munich and the Netherlands, Xinhua said, after reports of rioting in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province.

Uighurs attacked Han Chinese in Urumqi on July 5 after police tried to break up a protest against fatal attacks on Uighur workers at a factory in south China. Han Chinese in Urumqi launched revenge attacks later in the week.

“The attacks against Chinas diplomatic missions and the Urumqi riots seemed to be well-organized.”

China blamed Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled Uighur businesswoman, for instigating the unrest.

The official death toll now stands at 184, of which 137 were Han Chinese, who form the majority of Chinas 1.3 billion population, and 46 were Uighur, a Muslim people native to Xinjiang and culturally tied to Central Asia and Turkey.

Deadly riots in Lhasa in March 2008, and a subsequent Chinese crackdown across the Tibetan plateau, also spurred a series of demonstrations at Chinese embassies in countries with a significant exile Tibetan population.

Xinhua also blamed the World Uighur Congress, an umbrella group for organizations of exiled or overseas Uighurs, for the demonstrations at the embassies.

On the worst days, kidnapped Italian Red Cross worker Eugenio Vagni couldn’t stop himself from picturing how he feared his monthslong jungle captivity in the southern Philippines would end: with his decapitated head in a basket.

Vagni was reunited with his wife and daughter Sunday in Manila. After six months of fraught negotiations and periodic pursuit by Philippine troops, his Abu Sayyaf captors released him after the government agreed to free the two arrested wives of the kidnappers’ leader.

Gaunt, exhausted and barely able to walk due to a hernia, the 62-year-old engineer did not believe his al-Qaida-linked captors when they told him he would finally be freed until a government negotiator showed up Sunday morning to escort him away.

Still, that did not ease his near-constant fear of being beheaded. He told ABS-CBN network Sunday that he often imagined seeing “my head in a big basket.”

Vagni had lost about 44 pounds (20 kilograms). He said he was fed mostly rice and fish by his captors, who treated him well, calling him “Apo,” a local term of respect for the elderly. The militants also helped treat his cholera and carried his backpack when he got tired.

The Red Cross kidnappings were the most high-profile of a recent spate of Abu Sayyaf abductions. Vagni’s two colleagues were freed by the militants months earlier, but five more hostages remain in their hands two fishermen and three teachers held on nearby Basilan Island.

The Jan. 15 kidnapping of Vagni and two Red Cross colleagues from Switzerland and the Philippines on Jolo Island has raised fresh concerns over the Abu Sayyaf, a smaller Muslim separatist insurgency that the government has long dismissed as a spent force of bandits.

While Vagni’s release brought relief, officials acknowledged the Abu Sayyaf threat was far from over.

In Vatican City, Pope Benedict XVI felt relieved that the abduction was over and took Vagni’s release as a “sign of hope and of faith,” Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA.

The militants have turned to kidnappings in recent years, raising concerns among Philippine and U.S. security officials that ransom payments could revive the group, which has been weakened by years of U.S.-backed offensives.

Washington has blacklisted the 400-strong group as a terrorist organization because its bombings, ransom kidnappings and beheadings of hostages have rattled the southern Philippines for decades. The group is suspected of receiving funds and training from al-Qaida.

However, the Philippine military threatened to renew full-blown offensives, saying in a statement that now that Vagni is safe, troops “shall pursue the perpetrators relentlessly and hold them accountable for these incident.”

Sen. Richard Gordon, who heads the local Red Cross, said it is time for the government to reconsider a comprehensive approach that includes dialogue in ending the extremist threat.

But the government negotiator, Sulu Vice Gov. Lady Ann Sahidulla, said she gave 50,000 pesos ($1,042) to the militants “for cigarettes.”

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in an interview with state TV that no ransom had been paid for Vagni’s release.

Sahidullah insisted it was not a “prisoner swap,” adding that one of the wives had helped her persuade Parad to free Vagni, telling him many militants and troops had died due to the abductions.

She said she agreed to release two arrested wives of Abu Sayyaf commander Albader Parad she handed one of them over to Parad personally Sunday because there was no evidence linking them to any crime. The military arrested the women last week on suspicion they were supporting the Abu Sayyaf.

Waving to waiting journalists, they boarded a convoy and vanished from view.

The latest Abu Sayyaf hostage crisis drew to a close with Vagni’s flight to Manila, where he was reunited with his Thai wife and daughter, hugging and kissing them.