Turkey detains 8 Europe-bound IS suspects ‘posing as refugees’
British ‘terror sponsors’ held in Hungary Franco demystified 40 years after his death
ISTANBUL: Turkish police detained eight suspected members of the Islamic State jihadist (IS) group, state media said yesterday, adding they were planning to sneak into Europe posing as refugees. Counter-terror police detained the suspects in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport after they flew in from the Moroccan city of Casablanca on Tuesday, the official Anatolia news agency reported.
The police found a hand-written note on one of the suspects detailing a migration route from Istanbul to Germany via Greece, Serbia and Hungary, including smuggler boats across the Mediterranean Sea, as well as several train and bus journeys. The eight men told police that they were just tourists who had been planning to spend a few days in Istanbul and had booked rooms at a hotel, but no reservations were found under their names. Turkey is the main launching point for migrants coming to Europe, and currently hosts over two million Syrian refugees.
More than 650,000 migrants and refugees, have reached the Greek islands so far in 2015 using the eastern Mediterranean route, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said earlier this month. The Paris attacks however threw a security spotlight on the migrant flow, after the discovery at the scene of one of Friday’s attacks of a Syrian passport registered in the Greek island of Leros on October 3. Turkey was long criticized by its Western allies for failure to take robust action to stem the flow of IS militants across its porous border. But Ankara has stepped security measures in recent months after a series of deadly attacks blamed on the extremists, including a twin suicide bombing in Ankara that killed 102 people last month.
‘Terror sponsors’held
Meanwhile, two British nationals banned from travelling abroad after serving jail terms for financing terrorism have been apprehended in MADRID: Forty years after the death of Francisco Franco, historians still work to demolish myths that the Spanish dictator spun about himself to hold on to power for decades. “Franco lied about almost everything,” British historian Paul Preston, the author of what is considered to be the definitive biography of Franco said by telephone from London. “One of his biggest lies was that he saved Spain from World War II, whereas he constantly tried to participate” on the side of the fascists, added Preston, professor of Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics.
Franco came to power after his side won Spain’s 1936-39 civil war with the help of Germany’s Adolph Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini. He then ruled Spain with an iron fist until his death on November 20, 1975. “Spain was a weakened, defeated country, and more of a problem than a solution for Hitler, who was irritated by what Franco demanded” to enter World War II, said Spanish historian Carlos Gil Andres. Although Franco did not bring Spain officially into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany, he allowed volunteers to join the German army to fight against Soviet Communism in a so-called“Blue Division”.
“When 47,000 men go fight on the Russian front on the side of the Blue division, we can’t say Spain is not at war,” said Julian Casanova, one of Spain’s leading historians who edited an anthology on Franco. He said “at least” 50,000 people were executed by the Franco regime in the decade that followed the civil war and hundreds of thousands of others were taken prisoner as Franco consolidated his grip on power.
‘Very anti-Semitic’
Preston portrays Franco in his biography as Hungary on a train headed for Romania, Hungarian police said yesterday. The two men, named as Jonathan K., 40, and Trevor B., 44, were intercepted on Saturday on an international train at Lokoshaza, a crossing point on the Romanian border. According to a Hungarian police statement, the pair each served two jail terms totaling five years in Britain.
After their release in 2009, both were barred from leaving Britain without permission. The two men were taken into custody by Hungarian police because they did not have legal documents entitling them to stay in the EU member state. One of them presented a British driving licence and the other just a Koran. Only after their detention did it emerge that both were subject to a European arrest warrant, police spokeswoman Viktoria Csiszer-Kovacs said. “The men will appear shortly at a court in Budapest to decide on the extradition,” Csiszer-Kovacs said. She added that it was unclear what their intended final destination had been, although it was possible they were on their way to Syria via Bulgaria and Turkey.
Denmark raises threat level
Meanwhile, Danish police yesterday raised the country’s threat level by one notch to the next-highest level, citing the elevated risk of a terrorist attack after last week’s Paris attacks. “Following the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Danish police is now raising its internal preparedness level” to “significantly heightened preparedness”, it said in a statement. Police cited the “uncertain situation in a number of European countries.” However, it said the Danish intelligence service PET had “not changed its assessment of the terrorist threat against Denmark, which is still considered serious.” The Danish public would not see any difference in their daily lives as a result of the change, police said. — Agencies a “lowbrow” man who was “rather mediocre”, and who displayed “enormous egocentrism” and “a calculated cruelty” fuelled by a ferocious hatred of separatism, communism and Freemasonry which he sought to eliminate from Spain. But Preston also writes that Franco was “cunning” and equipped with great intuition to adapt to changing circumstances. The regime and its ally, Spain’s Roman Catholic Church, portrayed Franco as a “saviour of Western Christian traditions”, a “master strategist” who “never made a mistake” and the author of an“economic miracle”.
Among the false claims by the regime which are still widely believed by many is that Franco was “a savior of Jews” during World War II. “Franco was not like Hitler, he did not want to annihilate the entire Jewish race but he was very anti-Semitic. He adopted a softer approach towards Jews when it started to look like the Axis powers could lose,” said Preston. The Spanish government published a brochure in 1947 which said Franco offered to let Jews move to Spain, said Preston.“A pure lie. What he offered at most was to allow them to travel through Spain, but in a very limited way,” he said.
‘Most corrupt regime’
“My entire life is work and reflection,” Franco said in 1946, a statement that contrasted with his love of golf, fishing and hunting trips where government contracts were distributed among supporters. Spanish historian Angel Vinas dismantles the image of Franco as an “austere and spartan” leader in his book “The Other Face of the Caudillo”. “While soldiers died in the trenches, suffering hunger and lice, he was becoming a millionaire,”he said. — AFP