Times Square bomb suspect admits involvement in failed attack

Officials say Faisal Shahzad admitted to explosives training and driving the car used in the attempted attack. Related arrests are reported in Pakistan.

By Tina Susman and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times

May 4, 2010

Reporting from New York and Washington

A Pakistani American charged with plotting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square received explosives training in Pakistan's volatile Waziristan region, a Taliban stronghold, and admitted driving an SUV from his Connecticut home to Manhattan in hopes of blowing it up on a crowded corner, according to a complaint unsealed Tuesday.

Additional arrests in the case were reported in Pakistan, which according to the five-count complaint was where Faisal Shahzad, 31, began preparing for the attack as long ago as December. The allegations include the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and an attempt to kill or maim, as well as other terrorism-related charges involving the transport of the explosives.

"A far broader investigation is ongoing, and alleged facilitators in Pakistan have already been arrested," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee on Intelligence. "Our liaison relationship with Pakistan intelligence is yielding impressive results."

Harman did not identify the others arrested, but Pakistani intelligence officials said authorities in Karachi had arrested two men whom Shahzad visited in the city's Gulshan Iqbal neighborhood over the summer. The sources, who identified one man as Tauseef Ahmed and the other only as Iftikhar, did not know whether the men were linked to any Pakistani militant group.

Law enforcement officials said Shahzad, who was arrested late Monday as he attempted to fly out of the United States, confessed to the bomb plot and was cooperating with investigators. "He has been talking to us and providing us with useful information," Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said.

Investigators have said it is too early to say whether Shahzad worked alone or as part of a group, and whether he was operating on behalf of a terrorist organization such as the Pakistani Taliban, which has claimed responsibility for Saturday's failed attack.

Shahzad told investigators when he was arrested that he had "recently received bomb-making training in Waziristan," the complaint alleged.

Details contained in the 10-page complaint make it clear that despite his training, Shahzad, who reportedly once worked as a junior financial analyst, was far from smooth as he tried to complete his mission.

Among evidence collected was a key to Shahzad's Bridgeport, Conn., home; it was among those dangling from the ignition of the SUV when he left it on West 45th Street near Broadway. And cellphone records show him receiving several calls from Pakistan as he purchased the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder.

The SUV's seller, a Bridgeport resident, told investigators that Shahzad was careful to check the storage area of the SUV but did not seem concerned about the engine, and that he did not want to complete paperwork to register the sale. Instead, after paying for the car with 13 $100 bills, Shahzad showed the seller that he had his own license plate, took the key, and drove away.

Material taken from Shahzad's apartment, which was searched by FBI agents Tuesday, included fertilizer and fireworks, both of which were used in constructing the car bomb. The bomb failed to detonate properly, but New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said it would have created a "significant fireball" and sent shrapnel flying through crowded streets if it had succeeded.

Shahzad, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in April 2009, apparently was not on any watch lists before the bombing attempt, but Harman said information gleaned during a screening of Shahzad when he returned to the United States in February after a visit to Pakistan "yielded critical contact information that was entered into the system and used in his arrest yesterday.''

Shahzad was on a jet at the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport and preparing to leave for the Middle East when the flight was stopped and he was removed. Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rejected suggestions that Shahzad had nearly slipped away, and said his arrest at the last minute showed that the system had worked.

"I was never in any fear we were in danger of losing him," Holder said.

A law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly said Shahzad was added to the no-fly list only on Monday as a result of late-breaking developments in the investigation, and electronic notifications were sent to airlines. But there is a lag time in the system, and no alert was triggered when he checked in for his flight, the official said.

U.S. Customs and Border agents who had been scanning passenger manifests "identified his plane and removed him from the aircraft," Harman said.

Shahzad is originally from Pabi, a small village outside the northwestern Pakistani city of Nowshera, Pakistani intelligence sources said. He later moved to Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, where he lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and where some relatives remain, the sources said. During a visit to Pakistan last summer, Shahzad visited Peshawar, the sprawling city in northwestern Pakistan that borders the troubled tribal regions along the Afghan border.

Shahzad became the focus of the investigation after investigators were able to find the identification number of the SUV and then trace him through e-mail conversations he had with the seller, who had advertised it online last month. When he left the vehicle in Times Square, it held fireworks, plastic cans of gasoline, wires, alarm clocks, and propane tanks.

"We believe that this suspected terrorist fashioned a bomb from rudimentary ingredients, placed it in a rusty SUV and drove it into Times Square, with the intent to kill as many innocent tourists and theatergoers as possible," Holder said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ny-bomb-20100505,0,4296810,print.story

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Car bomb suspect struggled to find a place

Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani immigrant who police say has admitted parking an SUV bomb in New York, piled up debts and made few friends in the U.S.

By Geraldine Baum and Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times

May 5, 2010

Reporting from Bridgeport, Conn., and Washington

For most of the past decade, Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad struggled to find his place in America, piling up debts and bouncing from one run-down neighborhood to another.

In 2004, he and his wife, Huma Mian, plunked down savings to take out a $218,400 mortgage for a two-story house in Shelton, a gritty Bridgeport suburb. The following year, Shahzad was awarded a master's of business administration degree from the University of Bridgeport, normally a ticket to a prosperous future

But unable to pay the mortgage or a $65,000 home equity loan, the couple abandoned their home to foreclosure last summer, putting broken furniture and old clothes up for sale. A heating oil company chased them for non-payment of bills.

The portrait of failure that emerged Tuesday sheds new light on the 31-year-old former financial analyst — reportedly the son of a senior Pakistani Air Force officer — who U.S. officials say has admitted parking a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder packed with fireworks, gasoline and propane on one of New York's busiest streets Saturday. The car bomb failed to explode.

As the investigation intensified, neighbors and teachers described Shahzad as a loner who seemingly made few friends and little impression, until now.

Shazad was raised in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, and grew up in the North Nazimabad neighborhood, an upper-middle-class district of mostly Urdu-speaking, well-educated Pakistanis. Some family members still live there, officials said.

Shahzad came to America in 1998 on a student visa and studied business for five semesters at Southeastern University in downtown Washington, D.C. The college lost its accreditation last year and closed, but records found in the trash outside Shahzad's home by a Connecticut Post reporter and posted online Tuesday indicate he was a poor student, getting mostly Cs and Ds, and an F.

Shahzad managed to transfer to the University of Bridgeport in the late 1990s, and was awarded a bachelor of science degree in fall 2000, with a major in computer applications and information systems, according to spokeswoman Leslie Geary.

"He never did anything to stand out," recalled William Greenspan, who was Shahzad's academic advisor. "He was an average student. He never expressed any concerns to me."

Tax returns found in the trash Tuesday show Shahzad's income in 2000, when he earned his undergraduate degree, was $5,458. His 2001 return lists his occupation as an account analyst, and a gross income of $22,650.

He mostly worked for Accountants International, a temporary employment agency based in Burlingame, Calif. He normally clocked four days a week at Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics and spa giant, in Stamford.

Shahzad soon returned to the University of Bridgeport, and in the summer of 2005, he was awarded the master's in business administration degree.

Records show Shahzad and his wife moved repeatedly during his student days, renting apartments in Bridgeport and the other Connecticut towns of Milford and Norwalk. Neighbors said they spoke little English, and usually kept to themselves.

In 2004, the couple bought a two-story, three-bedroom house with an attached garage on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton, northwest of Bridgeport. Neighbors recall him working late at night, and then taking long walks in the flowing pants and shirts common in Pakistan.

"He was always in white and wearing those funny sandals," said Debbie Bussolar, a dental technician who lived across the street. He wore a bushy beard for a while, she recalled, but trimmed it short.

Shahzad had landed a slot as a junior financial analyst in the Norwalk office of the Affinion Group, a marketing and consulting business, the company said. And his life seemed to improve.

In February 2009, he obtained a $65,000 home equity loan from Wachovia Bank. And on April 17, 2009, he became a U.S. citizen in a ceremony before a federal magistrate at the U.S. courthouse in Bridgeport.

But two months later, in June 2009, he quit the job he had held for three years. That month, he, his wife, and their children — a girl about 4 and a boy about 1 — walked away from their home in Shelton.

Milford Superior Court records show Chase Home Finance LLC sued Shahzad last September to foreclose on the house. Wachovia sued for default on the loan. And Hoffman Fuel sued him for $793 in delinquent bills.

The family moved to a rougher neighborhood of wood, multifamily houses in east Bridgeport, a long-depressed urban area. It was a clear step down.

"There are a lot of transients in the neighborhood," said Mike Grobe, a local real estate investor.

Today, the two-story house Shahzad once owned in Shelton is empty and an eyesore, with uncut grass and garbage strewn on the lawn. A padlock hangs on the door.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ny-bomb-shahzad-20100505,0,6823874,print.story

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Free clinic not a cure-all

Some patients needed treatment beyond the scope of the event. What they'll do next is uncertain.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

May 5, 2010

As a doctor checked his back in a makeshift exam room at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, Demond Lewis, 34, braced himself for bad news.

Six years ago, the cabinet installer and handyman was pulling old pipes from a field when he heard his back pop. He did not have health insurance, so he did not see a doctor.

He has been in pain ever since. Makes it tough to work, he said, tough to even play with his 5-year-old son.

Now Dr. Mark Vaisman, a volunteer at the massive mobile free clinic that ended Monday, was telling him he needed to see another doctor for follow-up treatment.

"X-rays to start, maybe an MRI," Vaisman said as he filled out Lewis' medical paperwork.

Lewis was among the more than 6,600 uninsured or underinsured patients who saw doctors, dentists and other medical professionals during the weeklong free clinic run by the Tennessee-based nonprofit Remote Area Medical . Their stories illustrate both the short- and the long-term challenges facing the medical community as tens of millions of uninsured Americans — as many as one in four Californians — are folded into the nation's healthcare system in coming years.

Advocates say it remains important to match patients such as Lewis with regular care now. Otherwise, chronic conditions will worsen, and costs will continue to rise as the uninsured await sweeping changes to national healthcare passed by Congress in March and signed into law by President Obama.

"You wonder about follow-up," Vaisman said as Lewis pushed his way through the tarpaulin curtain and into the arena. "What will happen after here?"

Cindy Wilson, an unemployed home health aide, lost dental coverage last summer when state lawmakers cut Denti-Cal for 3 million low-income adults. Like many at the clinic, Wilson, 48, of Twentynine Palms, came seeking dental work, only to learn during triage that she had chronic conditions — pre-diabetes and high blood pressure — that a one-time checkup could not fix.

Under national health reform, Wilson might qualify for expanded Medicaid, or Medi-Cal, coverage if she does not find a job. But her plans to start cleaning a local bank for $300 a week would put her above the new threshold for receiving Medicaid: 133% of the federal poverty level or $10,830 for an individual. In that case, she would be required to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, with help from government subsidies, or pay escalating penalties.

Wilson said she would probably pay a penalty the first year but would be hard-pressed beyond that to afford either insurance or more fines.

Gilbert Ortega, 53, of Culver City waited in line for hours to be among the first treated at the arena last week. The unemployed shop worker had five teeth pulled and got new prescription glasses and reading glasses. But he said he still needed partial dentures and a root canal and was willing to pay. Volunteers gave him a list of local clinics to contact, and he said he planned to stop by the Venice Family Clinic .

But the Venice clinic, which does not charge, relies on a single dentist to serve its 24,000 patients, according to Medical Director Dr. Karen Lamp. Often, patients seeking the services that Ortega needs are referred elsewhere.

Even without an influx of patients from the mobile clinic — which also served more than 6,300 at the Inglewood Forum in August — clinics countywide have been overwhelmed during the last year by new patients who have lost their jobs and health insurance, Lamp said.

"I am concerned where these patients can really fit in to get ongoing care," she said. "We have very limited capacity for new patients."

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a proponent of national health reform, said he followed coverage of the free clinic and discussed it with fellow members of Congress. He hopes it can connect uninsured and underinsured patients with regular preventive care.

"What we want to do is get people a permanent medical home and keep people out of emergency rooms, which is the most expensive form of care," Sanders said.

For now Penny Zellman and her family are in danger of falling through the cracks.

The Zellmans drove up to the Sports Arena from Garden Grove to get dental and medical care. Penny Zellman, 37, was recently laid off from her job as a pharmacy technician, just shy of qualifying for comprehensive health insurance.

Her uninsured husband, Jason, 37, a consultant for a vacation club, had a cracked tooth and needed two root canals. Daughter Alexis, 4, has a lazy eye and Julia, 8, needed a stubborn baby tooth pulled.

Dentists at the arena did not have time to do root canals. They pulled one of Jason's molars and Julia's baby tooth. An optometrist gave Alexis a new pair of glasses but said she really needed to see a vision specialist.

"We'd love to see a specialist," Jason Zellman told her. "That's why we're here."

The wait for treatment was so long on the first day of the clinic, April 27, that Penny never was seen. Volunteers told her to return later in the week, but she did not have time — she had job interviews. Alexis would have to wait to see a specialist until her mother got a job and the family got health insurance.

"We just hope the next employer has insurance that we can pay and use," Jason Zellman said.

Michelle Zaragoza, 43, of Santa Fe Springs has access to health insurance but said her family cannot afford to pay the $200 a week it would cost to insure everyone under her husband's work policy. So although her husband, a truck driver, pays $30 a week for Kaiser medical insurance, their three daughters, Janine, 21, Brittany, 16, and Samantha, 10, are covered by Medi-Cal.

Zaragoza is caught in the gap between Medi-Cal, which covers the poor, and Medicare, federal health insurance for seniors. She has high blood pressure but came to the Sports Arena on Saturday for a root canal and new glasses.

She works part time for about $9.50 an hour as an in-home health aide caring for her eldest daughter, who is autistic and unable to care for herself. Last month, Zaragoza joined her husband's Guardian dental insurance policy. But when she got a toothache soon after, a dentist told her she needed a root canal. Even with insurance, it would cost $2,000.

"Who has $2,000 for that?" Zaragoza said. "That's why so many people are missing their teeth."

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/topofthetimes/topstories/la-me-free-clinic-20100505,0,802422,print.story

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Mexico army handling of civilian death inquiries questioned

A military-led inquiry and another by the attorney general find the army not responsible in recent cases of civilians being killed amid the war on drug cartels. But their credibility is questioned.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

May 5, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City

The Almanzas slowed down as they drove their black pickup past what they believed to be an army checkpoint in violent northeastern Mexico. They rolled down their windows, they say, so the soldiers could see they were a family. But the masked men in uniform instead opened fire, and two Almanza children, aged 9 and 5, were killed.

Fifteen days earlier and just 100 miles away, two promising university students were killed at the gates of their school during an army battle with drug traffickers. The army initially identified the pair as shooters but later retracted the claim after the victims' families came forward.

As the Mexican government's war against drug cartels increasingly claims the lives of innocents, the handling of the two cases is being closely watched.

In the last week, the army has sought to exonerate itself in both. Three of the four victims were found to have been killed by drug traffickers and not soldiers, the army and the attorney general's office said as they released the results of investigations conducted by these same authorities. (The killer of the fourth victim — one of the university students — was not identified.)

Families of the victims decried the results as whitewashes. The situation casts a spotlight on what human rights activists say is one of the most troubling aspects of the military's conduct of the drug war: that the army is allowed to investigate itself in cases involving questionable tactics. In both these cases, the national government, under international and domestic pressure, has sought to inject civilian authorities into the investigative process. But issues of credibility remain.

In the deaths of the Almanza children, the gunmen at the checkpoint were not soldiers at all but drug traffickers fighting each other to control the disputed road from Nuevo Laredo to Reynosa, according to Gen. Jose Luis Chavez Garcia, head of the military justice office. The traffickers first opened fire on the Almanzas, then engaged a military patrol that approached, Chavez said.

"Pure lies," Cynthia Salazar, mother of the two children killed at the checkpoint, said in an interview after the report of the army-led investigation was released.

She recalled holding her 5-year-old, Bryan, in her lap on that April 3 afternoon as the family traveled to the beach from their home in Nuevo Laredo, near the border with Texas. It was Easter weekend. The truck was packed with seven children, aged 3 months to 11 years, and two men and three women.

"We've gotten used to army checkpoints," Salazar, 28, said. "We know how they are and the precautions to take."

After their vehicle moved slowly, windows down, past what Salazar described as four truckloads of masked soldiers, shots rang out. According to Salazar, the soldiers opened fire on her family, shooting out the tires of their truck and continuing to shoot and then toss grenades at them even as they begged for mercy and tried to escape toward the roadside hills.

A bullet pierced Salazar's stomach, she said, and the same bullet killed Bryan. Nine-year-old Martin was also killed, and Salazar's husband, Martin Almanza, was wounded.

Although the army led the investigation of the incident, it said civilian prosecutors were also involved, and, in conclusions released late last week, disputed Salazar's version of what happened.

Grenades used by the traffickers hit the back of the Almanza truck and killed the two children, Chavez said. He acknowledged that gunfire from the army had strafed the front of the vehicle. But he added that the military-grade grenades were of a caliber the army does not possess.

A major problem, say human rights organizations, is that the army's credibility suffers when it is involved in investigating itself. This is critical because as the number of civilian deaths rises, public support erodes for President Felipe Calderon's army-led offensive against traffickers.

Mexico's Senate voted last week to limit the deployment of troops and to assign civilian prosecutors to cases of military abuse. The lower house of Congress has yet to vote on the measures, and won't do so until autumn.

In the case of the two university students killed in Monterrey the night of March 19, the attorney general's office took the lead in an ongoing inquiry.

In a hastily called late-night news conference on a national holiday over the weekend, prosecutors suggested that the two engineering students had been caught in crossfire during a running battle between army patrols and traffickers. Jorge Antonio Mercado, 23, was killed by gunshots of a caliber used by drug traffickers, but the bullets that killed Javier Francisco Arredondo, 24, were too badly damaged to determine the caliber, attorney general spokesman Ricardo Najera said.

Peppered with questions from angry journalists, Najera insisted that "the case is not closed." He also confirmed that the army had tampered with the crime scene, and he announced the creation of "immediate response" prosecution teams to act when civilians are killed.

The students' prestigious school, Monterrey Tech, demanded a fuller report, as did relatives. Commentator Denise Maerker asked in a column, "Incompetence, or coverup?"

"If they were killed in a crossfire, then why were they inside the university installations" as video has shown, Rosa Mercado, mother of Jorge Antonio, said in a television interview. "If they were killed by gunmen, why were they initially mistaken for gunmen?"

Calderon has insisted, accurately, that the majority of the nearly 23,000 people killed since he launched the crackdown in December 2006 have been traffickers, their hit men or security forces. But killings of civilians, including many children, have risen significantly in the first four months of this year, outpacing previous years.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/topofthetimes/topstories/la-fg-mexico-dead-civilians-20100505,0,5545916,print.story

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Fast food cook arrested in attempted sex assaults, kidnappings of 5 petite teens

A 23-year-old fast food cook has been arrested in connection with at least five attempts to sexually assault and kidnap five teens in the west San Fernando Valley, police announced Tuesday.

Los Angeles police officers arrested Jose Perez of Lake Balboa in a traffic stop in Northridge on Wednesday after a man heard his 18-year-old niece scream and saw an attacker trying to force her into the back of his white SUV.

The woman was able to escape, and her uncle took down the license plate number before the attacker drove away. He gave it to officers and they pulled Perez over minutes later.

"If you were to line up these girls side-by-side, they were getting progressively smaller," said Sgt. Joel Price of the Los Angeles Police Department's West Valley Division. "I think he was getting tired of losing the battles with them."

Police said Perez attacked another 15-year-old girl in May 2009, dragging her from the gate of her apartment building toward the silver four-door Volkswagen he was driving. After they both fell to the ground in the struggle, he drove off.

In November 2009, Perez allegedly approached a 13-year-old girl who was walking to a friend's house. Police say he grabbed her arms and pulled her toward the white GMC Yukon he was driving, but she broke free and he fled.

Two more attacks took place last week.

On April 26, a 14-year-old girl was sitting in front of an elementary school in Van Nuys when Perez drove toward her in a gray Volkswagen Jetta, police said. He parked, got out of the car and asked her questions and allegedly started to fondle her. She pushed his hand aside and walked away, but not before taking down his license plate number.

On April 28, police say, Perez tried to abduct an 18-year-old while she was walking home from a school bus stop in Northridge. Her uncle heard her scream and ran toward the attacker, who fled.

Police broadcast the description of Perez's vehicle and two officers pulled him over at Parthenia Street and Reseda Boulevard about 15 minutes later. He was arrested without incident

The victims of last week's attacks identified Perez in a lineup "without hesitation," according to detectives.  They were able to link him to the three other attacks through descriptions of two vehicles he used.

"There should be lessons learned in that these girls were all able to ward off the attacker by fighting back," Price said. "They never gave up, they were not going to allow themselves to be victimized, and they put up a valiant fight."

Perez is being held on $2.13 million bail.

Police suspect that Perez may have attacked others. Potential victims and anyone with more information is asked to call Lt. Edward Pape or Det. John Doerbecker at (818) 374-7730.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/05/23yearold-man-arrested-for-attempting-to-assault-and-kidnap-5-west-valley-girls.html#more

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Terrorism shouldn't change our values

Some have argued against reading accused would-be car bomber Faisal Shahzad his Miranda rights. But terrorism does not justify compromising our values by using tactics that fall outside the law.

May 5, 2010

Are shoe bombers and car bombers facts of American life now? Sadly, they probably are, just as school shootings, gang violence and the occasional rampage by a knife-wielding mental patient at Target are lamentable features of contemporary society. Citizen vigilance and the incompetence of would-be bombers have spared American lives on a couple of occasions now, most recently in Times Square. Nimble police work and improved coordination among law enforcement agencies have saved untold more. Those successes are a reminder of what works in combatting violence, whether it is generated on the streets of Los Angeles or in the caves of Afghanistan. They are the appropriate responses of a society in which civil liberties are a source of strength, not weakness, and  in which effective law enforcement coexists with respect for privacy and personal freedom.

Britain lived with Irish Republican Army attacks for decades while fighting an urban war over Northern Ireland, just as Israel has faced decades of bloodletting by militants over its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Both countries have struggled to balance policing and democracy. The 9/11 attacks preceded the United States' war in Afghanistan, and it is debatable whether ending U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan would eliminate the threat of terrorism from Islamic fundamentalists who see the West as the enemy. But certainly these attempts will continue while we are engaged in this kind of prolonged war.

The arrest of a suspect in the Times Square attempt is a testament to excellent police work. Faisal Shahzad was captured at New York's Kennedy Airport after he had boarded a flight to Dubai. Nonetheless, some commentators seized on the attempted car bombing as further proof of an Obama administration failure to advance in a global war on terrorism; Republican Rep. Peter King of New York and Sen. John McCain of Arizona argued against reading Shahzad his Miranda rights, even though he is a naturalized U.S. citizen detained in the United States. Critics should take a deep breath. Even terrorism does not justify this and other aggressive tactics that fall outside the law, such as torture and warrantless wiretapping. Fortunately, Shahzad was read his rights after being questioned for an undetermined period under a public safety exception .

A suicide bomb or car bomb is intended to take lives, of course, but its greater purpose is to instill an incapacitating fear in the survivors and a repressive overreaction on the part of society that somehow serves as warped justification for the original attack. If that happens, a Nigerian on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit, or a Pakistani-American who allegedly bought the SUV that was left in Times Square can succeed even when his bombs fail.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-bomber-20100505,0,7209154,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Lapses Allowed Suspect to Board Plane

WASHINGTON — Why was Faisal Shahzad permitted to board a flight for Dubai some 24 hours after investigators of the Times Square terrorism case learned he might be connected to the attempted bombing ?

Though Mr. Shahzad was stopped before he could fly away, there were at least two significant lapses in the security response of the government and the airline that allowed him to come close to making his escape, officials of the Department of Homeland Security , the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies said on Tuesday.

First, an F.B.I. surveillance team that had found Mr. Shahzad in Connecticut lost track of him — it is not clear for how long — before he drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the officials said. As a result, investigators did not know he was planning to fly abroad until a final passenger list was sent to officials at the federal Customs and Border Protection agency minutes before takeoff.

In addition, the airline he was flying, Emirates, failed to act on an electronic message at midday on Monday notifying all carriers to check the no-fly list for an important added name, the officials said. That meant lost opportunities to flag him when he made a reservation and paid for his ticket in cash several hours before departure.

Top Obama administration officials and some members of Congress on Tuesday praised the government's handling of the investigation, noting that Mr. Shahzad was identified, tracked and arrested before he could escape.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, while saying he was reluctant to criticize those in charge of airport security, added: “Clearly the guy was on the plane and shouldn't have been. We got lucky.”

Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said she applauded the work of law enforcement officials in quickly solving the case. Still, she added, “A key question for me is why this suspect was allowed to board the plane in the first place. There appears to be a troubling gap between the time they had his name and the time he got on the plane.”

At a news conference in Washington, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that despite the break in physical surveillance, he had never been concerned that Mr. Shahzad would get away.

“I was here all yesterday and through much of last night, and was aware of the tracking that was going on,” Mr. Holder said. “And I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him.”

Janet Napolitano , the Homeland Security secretary, called the capture of the accused terrorist “a great team effort.” She added: “The law enforcement work in this case was truly exemplary.”

While the officials emphasized the successful outcome to the chase, a more detailed account, in interviews with officials who spoke of the continuing investigation mostly on condition of anonymity, gave a mixed picture.

On Sunday night, about 24 hours after the smoking Nissan Pathfinder was left on a bustling Manhattan street, investigators identified Mr. Shahzad as the buyer of the car. While the vehicle identification number had been removed from the passenger compartment, a detective found a duplicate number on the engine block.

But at that point, officials said, they were uncertain of Mr. Shahzad's role and did not think they had enough evidence to arrest him and charge him with a crime. Instead, they began an urgent manhunt; F.B.I. agents located Mr. Shahzad in Bridgeport, Conn., and began to follow him.

It remained uncertain Tuesday night at what time Mr. Shahzad had been found and when he was lost. Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, declined to comment on the surveillance issue.

But at about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, more certain that Mr. Shahzad was the suspected terrorist, investigators asked the Department of Homeland Security to put him on the no-fly list. Three minutes later, the department sent airlines, including Emirates, an electronic notification that they should check the no-fly list for an update. At about 4:30 p.m., more information was added to the list, including Mr. Shahzad's passport number, officials said.

Workers at Emirates evidently did not check the list, because at 6:30 p.m., Mr. Shahzad called the airline and booked a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, officials said. At 7:35 p.m., he arrived at the airport, paid cash for his ticket and was given a boarding pass.

Airlines are not required to report cash purchases, a Homeland Security official said. Emirates actually did report Mr. Shahzad's purchase to the Transportation Security Administration — but only hours later, when he was already in custody, the official said.

Mr. Shahzad had evaded the surveillance effort and bought his ticket seven hours after his name went on the no-fly list. But the system gives security officials one more chance to stop a dangerous passenger.

As is routine, when boarding was completed for the flight, Emirates Flight EK202, the final passenger manifest was sent to the National Targeting Center, operated in Virginia by Customs and Border Protection. There, at about 11 p.m., analysts discovered that Mr. Shahzad was on the no-fly list and had just boarded a plane.

They sounded the alarm, and minutes later, with the jet still at the gate, its door was opened and agents came aboard and took Mr. Shahzad into custody, officials said. The airliner then pulled away from the gate but was called back.

“Actually I have a message for you to go back to the gate immediately,” an air traffic controller told the pilot, according to a recording posted to the Web by LiveATC.net , which tracks air communications. “I don't know exactly why, but you can call your company for the reason,” the controller added.

After the plane was called back, the authorities removed two more passengers. They were questioned and cleared. They and all the rest of the passengers were rescreened, as was the baggage, and the flight took off about seven hours late.

An Emirates spokeswoman, who said she was not allowed to speak on the record, declined to comment on the claims by government officials that the airline had neglected to recheck the no-fly list. “Emirates takes every necessary precaution to ensure the safety and well-being of its passengers and crew and regrets the inconvenience caused,” the airline said in a statement.

One long-planned change in security procedures may reduce the chances of a repeat failure to check an updated no-fly list, officials said. The Transportation Security Administration is taking over the job of checking passenger manifests against the no-fly list under its Secure Flight program.

Such checks are currently being done by the T.S.A. for domestic flights, and the agency is scheduled to be checking all international flights by the end of the year, agency officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05plane.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Smoking Car to an Arrest in 53 Hours

The keys found in the ignition of the sport utility vehicle that was left to explode in Times Square on Saturday evening did more than just start cars: one opened the front door to Faisal Shahzad 's home.

The young woman in Bridgeport who last month sold Mr. Shahzad the rusting 1993 Nissan Pathfinder prosecutors say he used in the failed attack did not remember his name. But she had his telephone number.

That number was traced back to a prepaid cellular phone purchased by Mr. Shahzad, one that received four calls from Pakistan in the hours before he bought the S.U.V.

It was 53 hours and 20 minutes from the moment the authorities say Mr. Shahzad, undetected, left his failed car bomb in the heart of Manhattan until the moment he was taken off a plane at Kennedy Airport and charged with trying to kill untold numbers of the city's residents and tourists.

“In the real world,” said the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, whose detectives investigated the case with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “53 is a pretty good number.”

In the most basic calculus, the success of the investigation of the attempted car bombing in Times Square is measured by the authorities only one way: a suspect was caught and charged, and now faces life in prison if convicted.

But based on interviews and court records, those 53 hours included good breaks, dead ends, real scares, plain detective work and high-tech sophistication. There were moments of keen insight, and perhaps fearsome oversight.

The police detectives and federal agents of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, for instance, interviewed the occupants of 242 rooms of the Marriott Marquis and 92 staff workers. They spoke to theatergoers from the stages of two Broadway plays to determine if anyone had glimpsed a man fleeing the Pathfinder shortly after 6:30 p.m. on Saturday.

They did a 24-hour street canvass and fanned out to Pennsylvania and other places to talk to manufacturers of the bomb's components: two clocks, three propane tanks, gas cans, a gun box, M88 firecrackers.

But according to several people with knowledge of the investigation, federal agents who had Mr. Shahzad under surveillance lost him at one point, a development that probably allowed him to make it to the airport and briefly board the plane bound for the Middle East.

Spokesmen for the F.B.I. in New York and Washington would not comment on any possible lapse in surveillance.

If the lapse occurred, it was not final, or fatal. Mr. Shahzad, according to court papers, confessed to trying to set off a bomb in Times Square shortly after he was taken off the plane.

The route to that capture began in Midtown Manhattan, just off Broadway on a warm night of high drama.

At 6:28 p.m. on Saturday, the authorities say Mr. Shahzad steered his newly acquired Pathfinder west on West 45th Street, in Times Square, a move caught on film by a police security camera as it crossed Broadway.

He bailed out seconds later. Then a street vendor — wearing an “I love New York T-shirt” — waved down a mounted officer, who saw the white smoke collecting inside the still idling vehicle and made a call that got the bomb squad there by about 7 p.m.

It took the bomb squad, according to court papers, eight hours of work simply to render the S.U.V. safe enough to approach. Once the authorities did, they found keys hanging from the ignition. Hours later, after they towed the car to a Queens forensic garage, they found an even more important clue when a police Auto Crime Unit detective crawled underneath the vehicle.

“The break in this case took place when a New York City detective was able to go under the vehicle and get the hidden VIN number,” Mr. Kelly said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. “This identified the owner of record, who in turn, as we know, sold it to the suspect.”

It had been something of a feat to get the city's most senior officials to the scene of the attempted bombing.

Mr. Kelly had been in Washington, for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, when his cellphone rang. At 8 p.m., he walked over to where his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was sitting and spread the news. At 10:55 p.m. the two men left, taking the mayor's private jet and touching down at 12:20 a.m. at La Guardia Airport.

Fifteen minutes later, the two men, still in fancy suits, were inside a drab storage area of a building on West 44th Street, pulling up folding chairs with police and F.B.I. investigators around a Formica table and reviewing X-ray photos of the Pathfinder's contents.

And soon, investigators fanned out to find the driver.

All Sunday afternoon, the agents and police searched for the Pathfinder's owner of record — a man they knew had bought it used from a lot in Connecticut. By 6 p.m., they found the man, in Bridgeport. He said it was his daughter they needed.

“I give it to her,” the man, Lagnes Colas, said in an interview, noting that she had decided to sell it recently so she could get a better car.

Within 20 minutes, the investigators were talking with his daughter, Peggy.

She said she met on April 24 with a man who answered her online advertisements. He bargained the price down to $1,300 from $1,800, she told investigators. He paid with $100 bills. He looked Middle Eastern or Hispanic. And it was, investigators learned, a strange transaction: one conducted in a supermarket parking lot, without paperwork or receipts, and involving a man who explained that a bill of sale was unnecessary and who seemed uninterested in the vehicle's long-term prospects.

Mr. Shahzad, according to court papers, “inspected the interior seating and cargo area” but not the engine. He was told the chassis was not in good shape, but he bought it anyway.

“I thought maybe he might bring the car back,” Mr. Colas said in an interview.

The investigative trail was warming up.

Later Sunday, a sketch artist was brought in from the Connecticut State Police to work with Ms. Colas on a portrait of the man who had bought the S.U.V. The work was promising.

On Monday, police and federal agents were back. Now, they had photographs of six men. She picked out the one of Mr. Shahzad, the court papers said.

Meanwhile, officials dug through Verizon Wireless records to learn more about the number she provided, one they found was attached to a prepaid phone activated April 16.

Though they declined to say precisely how they tracked such an anonymous number, they established not only that Mr. Shahzad was the buyer of the Pathfinder, but also that he got four phone calls from a Pakistani number associated with him in the hour before he made his final calls to arrange the purchase of the vehicle, according to the papers.

But there was more. The records had logged a call made by Mr. Shahzad's disposable cellphone on April 25, the day after he bought the Pathfinder. It was to a rural Pennsylvania fireworks store, “that sells M-88 fireworks,” the court papers said.

Such fireworks were a part of the bomb in the Pathfinder: the would-be detonator.

On Monday, F.B.I. agents spoke to Mr. Shahzad's landlord in Bridgeport, the court papers said. In an interview, the landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, 44, said his tenant had signed a one-year lease for a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor around three months ago.

“He said he'd recently come from his country,” Mr. Chomiak said.

Soon after interviewing the landlord on Monday, investigators first “got eyes on” Mr. Shahzad, according to law enforcement officials. He was in another car, one registered in his name, returning to his apartment from the grocery store.

Exactly how long investigators had him under surveillance is unclear. But officials said investigators watched him come home and go inside his house. He emerged later to get back in his car, headed south.

It seems clear, according to interviews with a variety of officials, the investigators must have lost track of Mr. Shahzad at some point. He made it all the way down the jetway and into his seat.

Before the plane pulled away from the gate, though, investigators had caught up with him. He was taken out of his seat and into custody.

The 53 hours of work and uncertainty were over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05tictoc.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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From Suburban Father to a Terrorism Suspect

They took their places in the wood-paneled courtroom, 58 people from 32 countries. They listened as a federal magistrate banged the gavel and said it was “a wonderful day for the United States”— the day they would become Americans.

The magistrate talked about Thomas Jefferson and told the group that they could run for office — only the presidency and the vice presidency were off limits, according to a tape recording of the proceedings in a Bridgeport, Conn., courtroom last year, on April 17. On her instructions, they raised their right hands and repeated the oath of citizenship.

One man in the group was the Pakistani-born Faisal Shahzad , whose father or grandfather was a Pakistani military official and who, at 29, had spent a decade in the United States, collecting a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and landing a job with a Connecticut financial marketing company.

He had obtained citizenship through marriage to a woman who was born in Colorado — the authorities say she and their two young children are still in Pakistan, where they believe he was trained in making bombs last year in Waziristan, a tribal area that is a haven for militants.

On Saturday, the authorities said, Mr. Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder packed with explosives and detonators, leaving it in Times Square.

About 7 p.m., as a robot from the bomb squad was being summoned to the S.U.V., Mr. Shahzad called his landlord from the train to Connecticut and said he had lost his keys; in a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday, the authorities said the keys had been locked inside the Pathfinder.

The landlord met him at the apartment that night to let him in. “He looked nervous,” said the landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, who had rented him a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport since Feb. 15. “But I thought, of course he's nervous, he just lost his keys.”

In nearly a dozen years in this country, Mr. Shahzad had gone to school, held steady jobs, bought and sold real estate, and kept his immigration status in good order, giving no sign to those he interacted with that he had connections to terrorists in Pakistan. Nor was there any indication that he would try to wreak havoc in one of the world's most crowded places, Times Square.

His neighbors in Connecticut said the things neighbors always say about someone who suddenly turns up in the headlines — he was quiet, he was polite, he went jogging late at night. Like so many others, he lost a house to foreclosure — a real estate broker who helped him buy the house, in Shelton, Conn., in 2004 remembered that Mr. Shahzad did not like President George W. Bush or the Iraq war.

“I didn't take it for much,” said the broker, Igor Djuric, “because around that time not many people did.”

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.”

Mr. Shahzad was born in Pakistan in 1979, though there is some confusion over where. Officials in Pakistan said it was in Nowshera, an area in northern Pakistan known for its Afghan refugee camps. But on a university application that Mr. Shahzad had filled out and that was found in the maggot-covered garbage outside the Shelton house on Tuesday, he listed Karachi.

Pakistani officials said Mr. Shahzad was either a son or a grandson of Baharul Haq, who retired as a vice air marshal in 1992 and then joined the Civil Aviation Authority.

A Pakistani official said Mr. Shahzad might have had affiliations with Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant linked to Al Qaeda who was formerly associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba , an anti-India militant group once nurtured by the Pakistani state. But friends said the family was well respected and nonpolitical.

“Neither Faisal nor his family has ever had any links with any jihadist or religious organization,” one friend said. Another, a lawyer, said that “the family is in a state of shock,” adding, “They believe that their son has been implicated in a fake case.”

Mr. Shahzad apparently went back and forth to Pakistan often, returning most recently in February after what he said was five months visiting his family, prosecutors said. A Pakistani intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Mr. Shahzad had traveled with three passports, two from Pakistan and one from the United States; he last secured a Pakistani passport in 2000, describing his nationality as “Kashmiri.”

Mr. Shahzad's generation grew up in a Pakistan where alcohol had been banned and Islam had been forced into schools and communities as a doctrine and a national glue.

“It's not that they don't speak English or aren't skilled,” a Pakistani official explained. “But in their hearts and in their minds they reject the West. They can't see a world where they live together; there's only one way, one right way.”

According to immigration officials, Mr. Shahzad arrived in the United States on Jan. 16, 1999, less than a month after he had been granted a student visa, which requires a criminal background check.

He had previously attended a program in Karachi affiliated with the now-defunct Southeastern University in Washington; a transcript from the spring of 1998, found in the garbage outside the Shelton house, showed that he got D's in English composition and microeconomics, B's in Introduction to Accounting and Introduction to Humanities, and a C in statistics.

He enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, where he received a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering in 2000, followed by a master's in business administration in 2005.

“If this hadn't happened I would have long forgotten him,” said William Greenspan, Mr. Shahzad's adviser as an undergraduate. “There are a lot of students you get to know; they call you up once in awhile to say hello, they got a nice job. After he left U.B., I never heard anything from him.”

In January 2002 Mr. Shahzad obtained an H1B visa, a coveted status meant for highly skilled workers and good for three years, with a possible extension. Records show that Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics giant, applied for a visa for Mr. Shahzad; he worked there as a temporary clerk in the accounting department in 2001, through an employment agency called Accountants Inc., according to a timecard found in his trash.

Officials at the cosmetic company confirmed that they hired Mr. Shahzad to work in the accounting department at the Stamford, Conn., office on Jan. 31, 2002; he left on June 14, 2006 to join another company. In 2006, Mr. Shahzad took a job as a junior financial analyst at Affinion Group in Norwalk, a financial marketing services company. Michael Bush, the company's director of public relations, said Mr. Shahzad resigned in mid-2009; government officials said he was unemployed and bankrupt by the time of his arrest.

After his marriage, to Huma Mian, he petitioned the immigration agency in 2004 to change his status; he wanted to become a permanent resident, another step on the path to citizenship.

Ms. Mian had just graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a business degree, according to Bronson Hilliard, a university spokesman. She lived in dormitories and in family housing, sharing her quarters with a sister or a cousin, Mr. Hilliard said.

Her parents lived in the Denver suburb of Aurora. A neighbor in their condominium complex, Johnny Wright, remembered that her new husband had visited the family only once before she joined him.

“He seemed educated,” Mr. Wright said. “Didn't make a lot of conversation.”

The Mians moved out in 2008, leaving a post office box overseas as a forwarding address. Meanwhile, Mr. Shahzad applied for citizenship that October.

Shortly after his naturalization ceremony in the Bridgeport courthouse, his name appeared on a case in another Connecticut court, a foreclosure action by Chase bank.

He and his wife had bought a newly built single-family house on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton in 2004 for $273,000, with a $218,400 mortgage, according to court papers.

They tried to cash in on the real estate boom, listing it for sale for $329,000 in 2006. It did not sell, said Frank DelVecchio, an agent who picked up the listing in 2008. The price then was $299,000. Later it was marked down to $285,000, and finally, $284,500.

In Shelton, neighbors remembered Mr. Shahzad's walking early in the morning in sandals and loose-fitting shirts, and jogging late at night in black athletic clothes; his wife wore a long dress and a shawl covering her hair. They had toys in their garage and a little swimming pool in the back; last summer, friends went over for barbecues.

“He wasn't unfriendly,” said Debbie Bussolari, a 55-year-old dental technician who lives across the street. “He seemed a little different.”

The family had several tag sales last summer, offering knickknacks and kid stuff, “things that you would give to Goodwill,” said Mary Ann Galich, 55, who lives behind the house.

“She was outside dealing with the people, and he was dealing with the money,” Ms. Galich recalled.

Davon Reid, 17, who lives next door, said the family moved in December: “It seemed like they picked up everything very quickly.” A few months later, a real estate broker let him in to check the place out, and it was a wreck.

“There was spoiled food and milk everywhere,” he said. “They just left everything. They left clothes in closets, the kids' shoes, the woman's shoes. And the kids' toys.”

Three months ago, Mr. Shahzad signed a one-year lease on the two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport. Mr. Chomiak, the landlord, said he usually saw Mr. Shahzad only when the rent was due, but he described him as a nice guy who furnished the apartment sparsely, and said he made a living selling jewelry in New Haven.

Other details took on significance in light of the arrest. When Mr. Chomiak went looking for Mr. Shahzad on Monday, he noticed a distributor cap and two small bags of fertilizer in the garage.

Mr. Shahzad, Mr. Chomiak said, mentioned that he wanted to grow tomatoes.

Reporting was contributed by Nina Bernstein and Alison Leigh Cowan from New York, and Ray Rivera and Karen Zraick from Connecticut.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05profile.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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More Wander Off in Fog of Age

ASHBURN, Va. — For generations, the prototypical search-and-rescue case in America was Timmy in the well, with Lassie barking insistently to summon help. Lost children and adolescents — from the woods to the mall — generally outnumbered all others.

But last year for the first time, another type of search crossed into first place here in Virginia, marking a profound demographic shift that public safety officials say will increasingly define the future as the nation ages: wandering, confused dementia patients like Freda Machett.

Ms. Machett, 60, suffers from a form of dementia that attacks the brain like Alzheimer's disease and imposes on many of its victims a restless urge to head out the door. Their journeys, shrouded in a fog of confusion and fragmented memory , are often dangerous and not infrequently fatal. About 6 in 10 dementia victims will wander at least once, health care statistics show, and the numbers are growing worldwide, fueled primarily by Alzheimer's disease, which has no cure and affects about half of all people over 85.

“It started with five words — ‘I want to go home' — even though this is her home,” said Ms. Machett's husband, John, a retired engineer who now cares for his wife full time near Richmond. She has gone off dozens of times in the four years since receiving her diagnosis, three times requiring a police search. “It's a cruel disease,” he said.

Rising numbers of searches are driving a need to retrain emergency workers, police officers and volunteers around the country who say they throw out just about every generally accepted idea when hunting for people who are, in many ways, lost from the inside out.

“You have to stop thinking logically, because the people you're looking for are no longer capable of logic,” said Robert B. Schaefer, a retired F.B.I. agent who cared for his wife, Sarah, for 15 years at home through her journey into Alzheimer's. He now leads two-day training sessions for the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services.

Mr. Schaefer told his class of mostly police officers here in northern Virginia that unlike the ordinary lost child or hiker, a dementia wanderer will sometimes take evasive action to avoid detection, especially if the disease has made them paranoid about authority figures.

“We've found them in attics and false ceilings, in locked closets — you name it,” said Gene Saunders, a retired police officer from Chesapeake, who started a nonprofit company called Project Lifesaver 11 years ago to help find wanderers or people with other cognitive impairments. The group's technology, fitting patients with wristbands that can be tracked by police officers with radio devices, is in use in 45 states, but its widest use is here in Virginia.

Wanderers often follow fence or power lines, and tend to be drawn toward water, Virginia state rescue officials said, bound on a mission that only they — and sometimes perhaps not even they — can imagine. (A search trick: try to figure what door they exited from, then concentrate first in that direction. But don't bother calling out the person's name, which he or she has often forgotten.)

Searching for them often also means learning a patient's life story as well, including what sort of work they did, where they went to school and whether they fought in war. Because Alzheimer's disease, the leading cause of dementia, works backward, destroying the most recent memories first, wanderers are often traveling in time as well as space.

Some World War II veterans, for example, have gone huge distances believing they needed to report to base or the front lines. A man in Virginia was lost for days until searchers, in interviews with his family, learned he had long ago been a dairy farmer, rescue officials said. It turned out he had headed for a cow pasture not far from his home, believing it was time for the morning milking.

The all-too-human stories of exhausted family members caring for Alzheimer's sufferers must be taken in account as well, searchers say. The son or daughter or spouse who nodded off or was briefly inattentive, allowing a loved one to slip out, might feel guilty, and so understate, sometimes by many hours, how long the person has been gone — a crucial variable because time on the run in turn hugely increases the potential size of the search area.

Meanwhile, cold cases are piling up.

In Arizona, James Langston, the state's search and rescue coordinator at the Division of Emergency Management, is haunted by the stories of people who simply stride out into the desert in high summer and vanish. A few years ago, a 20,000-square-mile area was searched after an Alzheimer's patient's car was found on a dirt road at the desert's edge, he said. No trace of the person was ever found.

Advanced age, meanwhile, can compound health risks of exposure.

“We've had them die in as little as seven hours because they just keep going and don't recognize they're getting dehydrated,” Mr. Langston said.

Many states do not collect or fully categorize local data on search-and-rescue cases, so it is impossible to gauge the full impact of dementia wandering on law enforcement. But in Oregon, for example, the number of searches for lost male Alzheimer's patients nearly doubled just last year, to 26 from 14 in 2008, and has more than tripled since 2006, according to emergency management officials.

For many people involved in those searches — or in training rescuers for the demographic tsunami to come — the turbulent emotions and grief that swirl around Alzheimer's disease and dementia are simply part of the terrain. In the middle of his training courses, Mr. Schaefer sometimes pauses, choked up by memories of his wife, who received her Alzheimer's diagnosis at age 50. She died 17 years later, having forgotten how to swallow, he said, and then finally, even how to breathe.

On a recent afternoon at the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy, Mr. Schaefer told his class about the day he asked her if she knew who he was. He had taken steps by then to keep Ms. Schaefer from wandering away, disguising their home's doors, for one thing, covering them with posters that looked like bookshelves.

But now he could see the panic and horror in her eyes, he said, that she could not find the right answer to his question. Could she recognize her own husband?

“No,” she answered. “But you take very good care of me.”

For John McClelland, 57, a retired volunteer fire and rescue officer who now leads training courses in Colorado, the story is even more personal: He has a diagnosis of Alzheimer's himself. The disease killed his grandfather and three other people on that side of the family. He said he has already lost the ability to remember the faces of new acquaintances, even a day after meeting them.

Knowing what is coming for him as the fatal disease takes its course has made his training work all the more important and urgent, he said.

“The mission I'm on is that I'm willing to talk about Alzheimer's as long as I'm articulate,” he said. “The hell of the disease is that I know what's coming.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05search.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Russian Says American Adoptions May Continue

MOSCOW — After nearly a month of contradictory signals, a senior Russian official is now making clear that the government has not halted the adoption of Russian children by Americans.

The official, Andrei A. Fursenko, the education and science minister, whose agency oversees adoptions , said on Tuesday night that the Russian government had not formally put in place a legal suspension of these adoptions.

Mr. Fursenko appeared to contradict the assertions of Russian foreign ministry officials, who said last month that there would be no adoptions until the United States and Russia reached an agreement on new regulations. But Mr. Fursenko's comments would appear to carry more weight because of his agency's role in the adoption process.

The Russian government had insisted on new adoption rules in response to the case of Artyom Savelyev, who was sent back to Moscow on his own last month by his adoptive mother in Tennessee.

The mother said that Artyom had severe behavioral difficulties and that the Russian orphanage had lied to her about his condition when she adopted him last year. Russian officials said there was nothing wrong with him.

Artyom's plight caused an outcry in Russia , and top Russian officials, including President Dmitri A. Medvedev , spoke out about the need for new regulations.

The State Department said last week that it had never received formal notification from the Russian government that adoptions were frozen. American officials in Washington and Moscow said this week that adoptions were continuing, though some Russian officials may be slowing down procedures because they are unsure about their government's stance.

Mr. Fursenko indicated that neither his agency nor the foreign ministry had the authority to halt adoptions by Americans.

“A suspension of adoptions is possible only by a law of the Parliament or by an act of the president,” he told reporters, pointing out that neither had addressed the issue.

Mr. Fursenko's comments should end the confusion over Russian adoption policy and offer some solace to American families who are in the middle of the process, which can be time-consuming, costly and emotionally difficult.

An American diplomatic delegation was recently in Moscow to negotiate a new adoption agreement, and both sides said they hoped to have one signed relatively soon. Russian officials were said to want assurances that there would be more independent monitoring of Russian children after they have begun living in the United States.

Russia was the third leading source of adoptive children in the United States in 2009, with 1,586, after China and Ethiopia, officials said.

More than 50,000 Russian children have been adopted by United States citizens since 1991. The adoption rate peaked at 6,000 in 2003, and then declined as bureaucratic and legal hurdles mounted.

While most adoptions turn out well, cases where adoptive Russian children have been harmed or killed in the United States have drawn widespread attention in Russia. Russian officials said that of the 18 Russian adoptive children who have been killed abroad since the Soviet collapse in 1991, 17 were in the United States.

Mr. Fursenko noted that he was just in Washington, where he discussed the overall adoption issue with Russia's ambassador there, Sergey I. Kislyak .

“Recently, the ambassador had a gathering in the embassy for adoptive children and their parents,” Mr. Fursenko said. “He said that these are happy families. Moreover, a significant number of these children are sick. They found normal families. The parents emphasize that the children are Russian, which is why they brought them to the Russian Embassy, to show that even though they now live here, their roots are Russian.”

Mr. Fursenko said Mr. Kislyak believed that it would be a mistake to ban Americans from adopting Russian children.

“This is in the interests of the child,” Mr. Fursenko said. “This should never be used to manipulate.”

He added that while there have been instances of Russian children being adopted by “inadequate” families abroad, there have been more in Russia itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/world/europe/06adopt.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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A Gang War Destroys Lives and Prods Peacemakers

The old Marine looked around the sanctuary and got nervous. As a veteran of the first Persian Gulf war and of some of the cruelest corners of Chicago's West Side, Tyrone Carr could easily see that once the funeral service for his 20-year-old stepson ended, someone in the church was going to pick up a gun and seek revenge.

“My son's friends looked mad, frustrated, defeated,” Mr. Carr said the other day, recalling the funeral last month for Novada Robinson, who was killed during an outbreak of street gang violence that besieged the Austin neighborhood in March and April. “I know that look. Back in the day, before I joined the military, I used to have that look. I used to live that life.”

As the mourners filled the pews and leaned against the walls at Joshua Missionary Baptist Church, Mr. Carr, 50, leaned over and whispered into his wife's ear, “Baby, you've got to say something.”

Veleda Wallace, 39, nodded, then mustered the strength to stand in front of her son's coffin, hold her minister's hand and speak about her “jokester” son with the megawatt smile.

“I told them, I don't want any more killing, not in my name and not in my son's name,” Ms. Wallace said last week, as she stroked the head of a young grandson who is now left without a father. “I told them that my son wouldn't want any more killing either.”

Afterward, her son's friends hugged her and said they understood.

“What she said helped a lot,” said Karl Bell, a supervisor with CeaseFire , a violence prevention organization based at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “What she said probably saved some lives.”

The recent bloodletting started with an old-fashioned fistfight over gang turf and quickly spun out of control. By the time it was over, the shootings that made walking some streets of the Austin neighborhood like a game of Russian roulette had lasted about three weeks, Mr. Bell said.

“It seemed like a lot longer,” he said. “Bodies kept dropping.”

This is a story about how a seemingly minor incident can spark a gang war and its devastating consequences.

Chicago Avenue is more than a busy thoroughfare running through Austin. It is a dividing line, invisible and sometimes deadly, that separates one gang from another. When rival factions observe the unwritten etiquette of the border, serious trouble is usually avoided.

But on the evening of March 18, a group of young men breached the code of conduct. Four members of one gang confronted three members of another for being on Chicago Avenue, according to Mr. Bell and the Rev. Robbie Wilkerson, a local pastor who had later helped broker a peace.

“The one group was only supposed to be on the avenue one or two at a time,” Mr. Bell said. “Any more than that was trouble.”

Heated words quickly turned into angry fists, and the three intruders retreated across the border, only to return with reinforcements shortly after 9 p.m. The fighting resumed. Suddenly, a battered brawler pulled a gun and started shooting.

“Everybody ran,” Mr. Bell said, “even the guys who were with him. Everybody swears they didn't know he had a gun.”

One 22-year-old man could not run fast enough. He was shot and killed. A 21-year-old was wounded. In the next 90 minutes, four people — three men and a woman — were shot and wounded nearby, Mr. Bell said. No arrests have been made, the police said.

The next day, Mr. Bell and Mr. Wilkerson sought out the gang leaders and tried to persuade them to prevent more acts of retaliation. The chieftains said that it was out of their control, that the young guys on both sides were too angry.

A week later, Novada Robinson, the father of two boys, ages 3 and 2, became a casualty of the war. He was shot several times after he parked his girlfriend's car and walked toward his mother's home, just a few hundred feet from where he was hit. He died two days later.

Mr. Robinson was a noncombatant, Mr. Bell said. He had quit the street life when his first son was born.

“He was turning his life around, taking care of his children, being a responsible man, a good guy,” Mr. Bell said. “But that didn't change where he lived.”

Up to eight other people were wounded during the outbreak of violence — combatants and noncombatants. Some were sitting on their porches when they were shot, others walking down the street, and one, a 14-year-old boy, was coming out of a grocery store early in the morning while on his way to school, holding a sucker. The boy, Danny Gilmore, was shot twice and paralyzed. He turned 15 on Tuesday — in a wheelchair.

“There was no excuse to shoot that child,” said Tio Hardiman, director of CeaseFire Illinois. “He just happened to be on that block, and those guys weren't having it that day.”

Danny's grandfather Larry Harris said there was a slight chance the boy might walk again. In the meantime, Danny is working with a therapist to build his upper body strength so he can wheel himself around.

“You shouldn't get killed or crippled because you happen to live some place,” Mr. Harris, 50, said. “The community is falling into ruin. The children are shooting each other to the last man standing. That's not natural.”

As the conflict continued, the peacemakers kept going back to the gang leaders, seeking a truce. Mr. Hardiman would meet with one side. Mr. Bell and Mr. Wilkerson would meet with the other in Mr. Wilkerson's Austin church, New Birth Christian Center. After about three weeks, the gang leaders agreed to negotiate.

Mr. Wilkerson said he and Mr. Bell told the gang leaders that the violence was making the community look bad and that, more importantly, innocent people were being killed and wounded.

“That's a big tool we used, innocent people,” Mr. Wilkerson said. “It worked.”

For now, at least, a fragile peace has settled over Austin. But the CeaseFire workers and the Rev. Wilkerson said another war could break out at any time for any reason — just like the last one. Warmer weather is coming, and with it, people will be out in the streets.

Meanwhile, the killing of her son has turned Ms. Wallace and her family into refugees. They live crowded into her grandmother's apartment, too heartbroken and afraid to return to their home near where her son was gunned down.

They are waiting for approval of their lease application on a new apartment. Her son's fiancée, Andrea Fabre, 21, plans to move in with Ms. Wallace, bringing with her Ms. Wallace's two grandsons.

While waiting, Ms. Fabre is trying to understand what happened so she can explain it someday to her toddler boys.

“When I look at my kids,” she said, “I know their daddy is still with me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02cncaustin.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From MSNBC

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Mexican traffickers get help from US prison gangs

EL PASO, Texas - When Mexican drug traffickers need someone killed or kidnapped, or drugs distributed in the United States, they increasingly call on American subcontractors — U.S.-based prison gangs that run criminal enterprises from behind bars, sometimes even from solitary confinement.

Prison gangs have long controlled armies of street toughs on the outside. But in interviews with The Associated Press, authorities say the gangs' activity has expanded beyond street-level drug sales to establish a business alliance with Mexican cartels.

"They'll do the dirty work that, say, the cartels, they don't want to do" in the United States. "They don't want to get involved," said a former member of Barrio Azteca, a U.S. prison gang tied to Mexico's Juarez cartel.

The partnership benefits both sides: The gangs give drug traffickers a large pool of experienced criminals and established distribution networks in the U.S. And the cartels provide the prison gangs with discounted drugs and the logistical support of top criminal organizations.

To carry on their gang activity, imprisoned gang members resort to elaborate subterfuge: using sign language, sending letters through third parties, enlisting corrupt prison officials, holding conference calls using contraband cell phones. Some even conduct business in an ancient Aztec language to foil censors.

FBI special agent Samantha Mikeska spent nearly a decade investigating the Barrio Azteca. Last year, three leaders got life sentences, but she questioned the real value of sending them back to prison.

"I think I've made them stronger," she said.

The latest annual National Drug Threat Assessment, released in February by the Justice Department, said prison gangs were operating in all 50 states and were increasing their influence over drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Federal authorities have documented numerous links between most of the major U.S. prison gangs and Mexican drug trafficking organizations.

For instance, federal prosecutors in San Diego charged 36 people last year in a racketeering case that connected California's infamous Mexican Mafia prison gang to the Arellano Felix drug trafficking organization in Tijuana. Gang members and associates allegedly worked in drug-trafficking, kidnapping and attempted murder for the Mexican cartel.

Baldemar Rivera ran a large Texas' prison gang called Raza Unida for years while confined in isolation, which is common for gang members.

Rivera, who is known as "the Professor" and perpetuates the name with wire-rimmed glasses and calm demeanor, said he used sign language to discuss business with a subordinate who visited him in prison. When Rivera needed to communicate with gang members in other Texas prisons, he turned to his captains — who were also imprisoned — to write to the men.

"Within three or four days, everything was known," Rivera, 50, said recently from a medium-security facility near Cuero, where he is serving a 60-year murder sentence. He says he left gang life a decade ago after finishing the state's gang-renouncement program.

Rivera was running Raza Unida in the 1990s, when prisoners often used the mail to communicate with each other and the outside world. Now they have cell phones. Authorities confiscated 1,200 phones from Texas prisons last year.

Texas inmates can no longer mail letters directly to each other, but they now use third parties. For instance, a letter sent to a girlfriend is immediately readdressed and mailed to another gang member in prison.

Inmates also hold conference calls arranged by friends on the outside. To get around mail censors, some even communicate in Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztecs, which is still spoken by about 1.4 million people in parts of Mexico.

Gang members learn the language from books and use it mostly in written communications. Some leaders adopt Aztec names in Nahuatl.

The use of the language "is to honor their heritage but most importantly to conceal their messages to law enforcement," said FBI special agent Armando Ramos.

Sometimes they get help from corrupt court or prison employees. A woman who worked in the federal public defender's office was convicted in El Paso of serving as a bridge between incarcerated gang members and cohorts on the outside.

In at least two recent federal cases, gang members testified about how money from the gang's outside enterprises — extortion, drug sales and other illicit activity — was routinely funneled to gang members' commissary accounts in state and federal prisons.

In a case against Texas' Mexican Mafia prison gang last year, an FBI agent testified that the gang collected at least $8,000 per week and sometimes as much as $40,000, just in San Antonio. The proceeds were sent to gang leaders in prison, where they could spend it on food, stationery and other personal items, or they could send it to family members on the outside.

"Commissary money, all that, it just comes in," said the former member of Barrio Azteca, who left the gang and is serving a 40-year murder sentence in Texas. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety in prison and after his release.

"Drugs — you don't even got to ask for that, it just flows in towards you. Visitations from girls that mess with the same people, with the group that you're in."

The contraband is smuggled in by corrupt guards, lawyers and visitors, and paid for with the revenue from the streets — a cell phone can cost $2,000. The goods are dropped at pre-arranged locations where prisoners can retrieve them while on work detail. Once 60 phones were found in an air compressor delivered for a Texas prison's workshop.

Once released, gang members are expected to report to gang leaders on the outside, attend regular gang meetings and contribute to the gang's money-making operations, usually by selling drugs or shaking down the street dealers in their assigned part of the city.

Estimates put the number of active gang members in the U.S. near 1 million. Prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia, the Texas Syndicate, Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos, (the Brotherhood of Latino Gunmen), Raza Unida and Mexikanemi account for only about 145,000 gang members. But they control most of the local street gangs as well, particularly in southern California and south Texas.

An FBI investigation showed high-level contact between the Barrios Aztecas and the Juarez cartel, Mikeska said.

She cited recorded conversations between a Barrio Azteca captain in the U.S. and Eduardo Ravelo, who runs the Aztecas in Juarez and is known to be a close friend of the Juarez cartel's point man in that city. Ravelo is on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

In 2005, an informant and former Barrio Azteca lieutenant testified that Ravelo told him to help find fellow gang members who had stolen from the cartel. The informant testified that later he was taken to a house in El Paso where a gang member's mouth, wrists and ankles were bound with duct tape. He was delivered to the Juarez cartel and never heard from again.

George Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center in Illinois, said little formal research has been done into the ties between prison gangs and Mexican drug traffickers.

"It seems like kind of a Pandora's box that no one wants to open," he said.

Robert Walker, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent who has also worked in and consulted for state prisons, said "it's totally impossible to stop gangs inside the prison system from running outside interests."

Incarcerated gang members have 24 hours a day to devise ways to defeat guards working eight- to 10-hour shifts, Walker said. And for gang leaders who are already imprisoned, "prosecution is really meaningless when it comes to most of these cases, because they're already in there doing life sentences," he said. Each time they're prosecuted, they learn more about the investigative techniques used against them.

State prisons have become financially strapped because of the weak economy, so many officials worry that gang leaders will have even less supervision behind bars.

"They'll get away with more," Knox said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36900472/ns/us_news/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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From the White House

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The President on Times Square: "But as Americans, and as a Nation, We Will Not Be Terrorized"

Addressing the Business Council this morning, the President spoke first on the new developments regarding the recent incident in Times Square.  Between yesterday and this morning, the President has talked with Duane Jackson and Lance Orton, who were the vendors who first reported the suspicious vehicle, as well as Officers Wayne Rhatigan and Pam Duffy who were on the scene to thank them for their vigilance:

Before I begin, I hope you don't mind -- I indicated to Jim Owen that I want to give the American people a brief update on the investigation into the attempted terrorist attack in Times Square.  A suspect is now in custody and is being questioned.  The American people can be assured that the FBI and their partners in this process have all the tools and experience they need to learn everything we can.  That includes what, if any, connection this individual has to terrorist groups.  And it includes collecting critical intelligence as we work to disrupt any future attacks.  Justice will be done, and we will continue to do everything in our power to protect the American people.

Attorney General Eric Holder and other members of my national security team are going to be providing more details, but let me say this.  This incident is another sobering reminder of the times in which we live.  Around the world and here at home, there are those who would attack our citizens and who would slaughter innocent men, women and children in pursuit of their murderous agenda.  They will stop at nothing to kill and disrupt our way of life.  But once again, an attempted attack has been failed.

It has failed because ordinary citizens were vigilant and reported suspicious activity to the authorities.  It failed because these authorities -- local, state and federal -- acted quickly and did what they're trained to do.  I've had the opportunity to personally thank some of the citizens and law enforcement officers whose quick thinking may have saved hundreds of lives.  And this suspect has been apprehended because of close and effective coordination at every level, including our Joint Terrorism Task Force and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Finally, New Yorkers have reminded us once again of how to live with their heads held high.  We know that the aim of those who try to carry out these attacks is to force us to live in fear, and thereby amplifying the effects of their attacks -- even those that fail.  But as Americans, and as a nation, we will not be terrorized.  We will not cower in fear.  We will not be intimidated.  We will be vigilant.  We will work together.  And we will protect and defend the country we love to ensure a safe and prosperous future for our people.  That's what I intend to do as President and that's what we will do as a nation.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/04/president-times-square-americans-and-a-nation-we-will-not-be-terrorized

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From the Department of Justice

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Earlier this evening, Faisal Shahzad was arrested in connection with the attempted car bombing in New York on Saturday.  Mr. Shahzad, an American citizen, was taken into custody at JFK Airport in New York as he attempted to board a flight to Dubai.

Since this plot was first uncovered on Saturday night, the FBI, prosecutors and intelligence lawyers in the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorneys Offices in Manhattan and Connecticut, along with the NYPD have worked night and day to find out who was responsible for what would have been a deadly attack had it been successful.  Over the course of the day today, we have gathered significant additional evidence that led to tonight's arrest, which was made by agents from Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection.

This investigation is ongoing, as are our attempts to gather useful intelligence, and we continue to pursue a number of leads.  But it's clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans. 

FBI agents are working with their state and local counterparts in New York, Connecticut and other jurisdictions to gather evidence and intelligence related to this case.  We are also coordinating with other members of the President's national security team to ensure we use every resource available to the United States to bring anyone responsible to justice.

We continue to gather leads in this investigation, and it's important that the American people remain vigilant.  The vehicle in Times Square was first noticed on Saturday by a citizen who reported it to authorities, and, as always, any American who notices suspicious activity should report it to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.

This investigation is ongoing, it is multi-faceted, and it is aggressive.  As we move forward, we will focus on not just holding those responsible for it accountable, but also on obtaining any intelligence about terrorist organizations overseas.

Because of the fast-moving nature of this investigation, I am not able to make any further information public at this time.  But the American people should know that we are deploying every resource available, and we will not rest until we have brought everyone responsible to justice.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/May/10-ag-517.html

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From ICE

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137 criminal aliens arrested in Ohio during ICE's Operation Cross Check

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 137 criminal aliens and fugitives in central and southern Ohio over a four-day period ending late Monday.

The operation targeted foreign-born criminals and fugitives in violation of immigration laws. The arrests were made in the Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati metro areas.

Removing criminal aliens is a top ICE priority," said Rebecca Adducci, field office director for the ICE Office of Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) for Michigan and Ohio. "ICE's Operation Cross Check targets cases involving immigration violators who pose a threat to national security and community safety. Foreign nationals who violate our laws and commit crimes in our communities will be found and removed."

ICE was assisted in the operation by the officers from the following agencies: Columbus Police Department, Franklin County Sheriff, Butler County Sheriff, Morrow County Sheriff, Hamilton Police Department, Mount Vernon Police Department, Beavercreek Police Department and Union Township Police Department.

All 137 arrested were either fugitives, re-entered after having been previously removed, or have been convicted of other crimes in the United States. Because of their serious criminal histories and prior immigration arrest records, at least 25 of those arrested during the enforcement surge face federal prosecution. A conviction for felony reentry carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

Criminal histories included fraud, assault, larceny and domestic violence among other crimes.

Any of the foreign nationals arrested during this operation who have active warrants will be referred to the associated local law enforcement agency and ICE will place detainers to ensure they return to ICE custody following disposition of their criminal cases. Those who have outstanding orders of deportation, or who returned to the United States illegally after being deported, are subject to immediate removal from the country. The remaining individuals are in ICE custody awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge, or pending travel arrangements for removal in the near future.

This week's special enforcement action was spearheaded by ICE's Fugitive Operations Program, which is responsible for locating, arresting, and removing at large criminal aliens and immigration fugitives - aliens who have ignored final orders of deportation handed down by the nation's immigration courts. ICE's Fugitive Operations Teams give top priority to cases involving aliens who pose a threat to national security and public safety, including members of transnational street gangs and child sex offenders. This week's operation focused on the apprehension of criminal aliens, which are not necessarily fugitives.

The officers who conducted this week's special operation received substantial assistance from ICE's Fugitive Operations Support Center (FOSC) located in South Burlington, Vt. The FOSC conducted exhaustive database checks on the targeted cases to help ensure the viability of the leads and accuracy of the criminal histories. The FOSC was established in 2006 to improve the integrity of the data available on at large criminal aliens and immigration fugitives nationwide. Since its inception, the FOSC has forwarded more than 550,000 case leads to ICE enforcement personnel in the field.

This week's enforcement operation is just one facet of the Department of Homeland Security's broader strategy to heighten the federal government's effectiveness at identifying and removing dangerous criminal aliens from the United States. As a result of this strategy, ICE removed a total of 136,126 criminal aliens from the United States last year, a record number.

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1005/100504columbus.htm

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11 arrested in Loveland, Colo., during ICE and Loveland PD gang operation

LOVELAND, Colo. - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Loveland Police Department arrested 11 men during a five-day operation targeting individuals with ties to violent criminal street gangs. This is the latest local effort in an ongoing national ICE initiative to target foreign-born gang members and gang associates.

The multi-agency operation, which ended April 30, targeted gang members and associates engaged in organized criminal activity. Those arrested during this operation are known gang members or associates from the Sureños or Bloods criminal street gangs. Of those arrested, seven are from Mexico, and four are U.S. citizens. The U.S. citizens arrested had outstanding criminal warrants and were booked into the Larimer County Jail. The others are in ICE custody and are charged with administrative immigration violations, and awaiting deportation. All those arrested during this operation have prior criminal histories including: cruelty toward a child, domestic violence, theft, distributing/possessing controlled substances, assault, residential burglary, forgery, and possessing forged documents.

"Street gangs commit a significant amount of crime in our neighborhoods and communities," said Kumar C. Kibble, special agent in charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in Denver. "ICE and the Loveland Police Department have a common goal of combating crime and reducing the public safety threat. Deporting criminal transnational gang members contributes to those important goals." Kibble oversees a four-state area which includes: Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.

One of those arrested during this operation that ICE agents turned over to Loveland Police Department was a 34-year-old man from Mexico who had two outstanding arrest warrants for domestic violence. He'll face local charges before being returned to ICE custody for removal proceedings. He also has previous arrests for disorderly conduct, driving on a suspended/revoked license, assault, domestic violence, harassment, failure to appear, and contempt of court for failing to comply.

Loveland Police Chief Luke Hecker said, "We are very thankful for the joint effort between our agency and ICE. This was a successful operation clearly demonstrating our resolve in reducing the number of gang members in our community."

The arrests were made as part of Operation Community Shield, a national initiative whereby ICE partners with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to target the significant public safety threat posed by transnational criminal street gangs. Operation Community Shield has produced 16,700 arrests of suspected gang members nationwide since 2005, with 200 of those classified as gang leaders. ICE uses its immigration law enforcement authorities (both criminal and administrative) against gang members, as well as its customs authorities in targeting gang-related narcotics smuggling, gun smuggling, money laundering, and in seeking the forfeiture of illegally derived assets.

The National Gang Unit at ICE identifies violent street gangs and develops intelligence on their membership, associates, criminal activities and international movements to deter, disrupt and dismantle gang operations by tracing and seizing cash, weapons and other assets derived from criminal seized activities.

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1005/100504loveland.htm

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From the FBI

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http://www.fbi.gov/page2/may10/times_square_050410.html

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ANOTHER PONZI CASE

And a Warning for Investors

05/03/10

He was living the high life—taking up residence in a Miami Beach mansion worth more than $5 million, cruising around in a million-dollar yacht and his leased Mercedes-Benz, shelling out more than $400,000 for floor seats at Miami Heat basketball games, and donating thousands of dollars to the athletic program of a local university (the school was so appreciative it named a student athlete lounge after him).

But it all came crashing down on Florida businessman Nevin Shapiro last month, when he was charged with orchestrating a multi-million-dollar Ponzi scheme involving about 60 victims throughout the United States.

From January 2005 through November 2009, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court in New Jersey (where one of his victims resides), Shapiro raised more than $880 million from his investors. These individuals thought they were investing in his wholesale grocery distribution business—Capitol Investments, a Florida corporation with offices in Miami Beach that Shapiro owned and ran as CEO. In reality, there was no grocery distribution business. Shapiro allegedly used new investor money to fund principal and interest payments to existing investors—a textbook Ponzi scheme—while at the same time, taking tens of millions of dollars for his own use.

How did Shapiro convince his investors to give him their hard-earned money? According to the charges, he and others working for him showed potential investors fake documents that touted the profitability of his business, including:

• Financial statements claiming that the business generated millions of dollars in annual sales;
  
  
• Shapiro's personal and business tax returns (also fraudulent);
  
  
• Phony invoices revealing transactions that Shapiro's business had supposedly entered into with other businesses; and
  
  
• Promissory notes reflecting the amount of the victims' investment, along with a schedule for a payment of interest (at anywhere from 10 to 26 percent on an annual basis) and the return of their principal.

The scheme eventually went the way of most Ponzi schemes —collapsing in on itself when it got too big to maintain financially. The criminal complaint alleges that Shapiro defrauded investors out of at least $80 million.

This particular case was brought in connection with the recently-established Financial Fraud Task Force, led by the Department of Justice, which investigates and prosecutes major financial crimes. And the case was definitely a multi-agency effort—in addition to the FBI, it was worked by the IRS Criminal Investigative Division and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So how can you avoid being victimized by a Ponzi scheme? A few tips:

• Be careful of any investment opportunity that makes exaggerated earnings claims.
  
  
• Exercise due diligence in selecting investments and the people with whom you invest—in other words, do your homework!
  
  
• Consult an unbiased third party, like an unconnected broker or licensed financial advisor, before investing.

If you think you have already been conned in a Ponzi scheme—or are suspicious about a pending investment—contact your local FBI field office or local authorities.

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/may10/ponzi_050310.html

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$50,000 Reward Announced for Information Leading to the Whereabouts of Missing Teen

KANSAS CITY, MO—Chief James Person, Belton Police Department and FBI Special Agent in Charge Brian Truchon announced today a $50,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of missing teen Kara Kopetsky. The announcement of this reward is in addition to any other reward monies being offered.

Kara, who was 17 years old at the time of her disappearance, was last seen leaving Belton High School on May 4, 2007 at 9:20 a.m. “The passage of time can never diminish the loss of a child. We are hoping announcing this reward, in conjunction with the three year anniversary of her disappearance, may trigger someone's memory and they will come forward with valuable information” said SAC Truchon.

The FBI working jointly with the Belton Police Department will be taking tips at a 24-hour command post at 15499 Kensington, Kansas City, Missouri from Tuesday, May 4 through Thursday, May 6, 2010. “Any information, as insignificant as it may seem, could be vital to this investigation” said Chief Person.

Anyone with information regarding her disappearance can provide information confidentially through the command post or by contacting the Belton Police Department (816) 331-3500, the FBI (816) 512-8200 or the TIPS HOTLINE 816-474-TIPS.

Descriptive Information:

Kara Kopetsky

Last seen leaving Belton High School on May 4, 2007 at 9:20 a.m. wearing dark jeans, a black studded belt, a gray T-shirt with white skull print, a gray three-quarter sleeve sweater, black and white checkered tennis shoes, and a black leather hobo bag. She is described as 5'5” tall and 125lbs. She has light brown, red, and blonde hair with hazel eyes and a scar on her forehead.

http://kansascity.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel10/kc050410.htm

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