Chinese Officials Beat Activist and His Wife, Group Says

Mr. Chen was released from jail last year after serving a 51-month sentence for disturbing public order and destroying public property — charges linked to his uncovering of forced sterilizations and abortions in the eastern Chinese city of Linyi.

But since his release, he has been under “ruanjin,” or “soft detention,” a kind of house arrest increasingly being used by the authorities to silence people who have not violated the law. The authorities once celebrated Mr. Chen, a 39-year-old self-taught lawyer, as a symbol of the country’s efforts to build a legal system, but they turned against him when he used the law to protest government abuse. Earlier this year, a video was smuggled out showing the circumstances of his detention. Reporters who tried to visit him were turned away by undercover police officers who had encircled his home.

Now ChinaAid, a human rights group based in the United States, says it has evidence of increased harassment, including beatings and the confiscation of personal property. The group, which released Mr. Chen’s video, says it has obtained a letter from Mr. Chen’s wife, Yuan Weijing, that details the couple’s most recent travails.

Contents of the letter were confirmed by a friend of the family, He Peirong. Ms. He, who describes herself as a Nanjing-based Internet activist, said she visited Mr. Chen’s hometown in late May and spoke with people related to his family.

According to Ms. He’s account and the undated letter, Ms. Yuan said that in February and March, Communist Party officials from Shuanghou, a suburb of Linyi, stormed the couple’s home. Ms. Yuan said she was bundled into a blanket and repeatedly kicked so hard that she still cannot stand straight. She said she saw her husband being tortured by the men, who twisted his arms and neck until he passed out. The couple were denied medical aid, she said, except for one intravenous drip from a village doctor. They had to stay in bed because of their injuries, she said.

The men came back repeatedly, according to Ms. Yuan’s letter, and confiscated legal documents related to Mr. Chen’s case as well as a computer, video camera, audio recorder, flashlight and television antenna. Metal sheets were fixed over the windows, and the power was cut off. Telephone lines had already been cut.

Still later, she said, men took away their books, pictures of their daughter and calendars off the wall. The authorities installed video cameras to monitor the couple.

The house arrest extends to the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Ms. Yuan wrote, and Mr. Chen’s mother.

Local authorities did not answer phone calls seeking comment, but the use of house arrest appears to have increased in recent years as the authorities try to silence critics. Several pastors of the Beijing-based Shouwang Church, for example, have been under house arrest for months since trying to lead outdoor services after their meeting place was closed. The church refuses to place itself under government control.

The authorities seem especially nervous, with a string of political anniversaries on the horizon. On July 1, the Communist Party celebrates the 90th anniversary of its founding, and later this year is the 100th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew China’s emperor. Next year, a crucial, twice-a-decade party congress will choose the country’s leadership for the next 10 years.

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Libyan Officials Threaten to Use ‘Human Shields’

 

The warning came a day after Britain’s top general was quoted as saying that NATO would have to broaden its bombing campaign to include infrastructure targets in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from “clinging to power.”

Barely 36 hours after The Sunday Telegraph in London published its interview with Gen. Sir David Richards, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, foreign reporters in Tripoli were summoned to a news conference at which Libyan telecommunication officials announced that they would deploy human shields.

The use of human shields was a major feature of Iraq’s response to Western threats of military force after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Hussein had Western businessmen taken to oil installations and other potential targets around Baghdad, but most were released under diplomatic pressure before the brief war that ousted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991.

The most explicit warning that human shields could be used in Libya came from Mohammed Almaremi, the chief of one of Libya’s two cellphone companies, both controlled by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and, until the rebel uprising, his expected political heir.

Mr. Almaremi said that 20,000 employees of Libyana, one of the companies, would disperse to telecommunications sites along with 20,000 members of their families, to remain there as long as the bombing continued.

“We will be human shields to face any aggression,” he said.

Mohammed ben Ayad, head of the Libyan telecommunications authority, said NATO attacks had already destroyed large parts of the country’s telecommunications network, disrupting hospitals, schools and other civilian enterprises.

Mr. Ayad said the network, one of the most advanced in the Arab world, had already suffered more than $1 billion in damage from NATO raids. In a PowerPoint display, he pinpointed areas that had taken the heaviest hits, including several in and near Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, on the Mediterranean coast.

“From now on, employees and their families will act as human armor to protect these locations,” one slide said in English.

Some of the anger that Qaddafi loyalists have directed at the West since NATO began its airstrikes in March has drawn on a belief that Colonel Qaddafi made major efforts to prove himself a friend of the West in the past decade. He abandoned Libya’s programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and opened the country to a rush of Western investment in oil, telecommunications and other sectors.

That turning toward the West came after the Libyan leader saw how quickly the American-led invasion force toppled Mr. Hussein in 2003. But now, with the United States, Britain, France and other NATO countries backing Libya’s rebels and demanding that Colonel Qaddafi quit, officials say the leader feels that his turn to the West has been rewarded by Western betrayal.

The threat to use human shields comes after a week of some of the heaviest airstrikes of the campaign. One attack was aimed at an underground command complex in Colonel Qaddafi’s compound in south-central Tripoli, with a volley of bombs aimed at the warren of tunnels and bunkers. Colonel Qaddafi surfaced a day later with an audio message broadcast on Libyan state television defying NATO and saying that he was “in a place where you can’t get me.”

Shortly before dusk on Monday, a new round of airstrikes hit the compound, but Libyan officials, often keen to take reporters to bombing sites, gave no details of what had been struck, or of any casualties.

Along with public statements of outrage about the airstrikes, there have been growing signs that they are wearing down the government’s ability to fight the war. With no air defenses, it has resorted to a propaganda campaign aimed at establishing that NATO has killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed or damaged civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, libraries, homes and guesthouses.

The campaign has faltered, with the government’s tours of the sites of airstrikes in Tripoli failing to show convincingly that there have been any significant numbers of civilian casualties. That failure has fed a growing sense of frustration among officials, who have seemed determined to convey that NATO is engaged, not in a campaign to degrade the Qaddafi government’s fighting ability, but in willful brutality against ordinary Libyans.

 

Hidden Dangers: Japanese Officials Ignored or Concealed Dangers

If such a quake struck, electrical power could fail, along with backup generators, crippling the cooling system, the lawyers predicted. The reactors would then suffer a meltdown and start spewing radiation into the air and sea. Tens of thousands in the area would be forced to flee.

Although the predictions sound eerily like the sequence of events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the lawsuit was filed nearly a decade ago to shut down another plant, long considered the most dangerous in Japan — the Hamaoka station.

It was one of several quixotic legal battles waged — and lost — in a long attempt to improve nuclear safety and force Japan’s power companies, nuclear regulators, and courts to confront the dangers posed by earthquakes and tsunamis on some of the world’s most seismically active ground.

The lawsuits reveal a disturbing pattern in which operators underestimated or hid seismic dangers to avoid costly upgrades and keep operating. And the fact that virtually all these suits were unsuccessful reinforces the widespread belief in Japan that a culture of collusion supporting nuclear power, including the government, nuclear regulators and plant operators, extends to the courts as well.

Yuichi Kaido, who represented the plaintiffs in the Hamaoka suit, which they lost in a district court in 2007, said that victory could have led to stricter earthquake, tsunami and backup generator standards at plants nationwide.

“This accident could have been prevented,” Mr. Kaido, also the secretary general of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, said of Fukushima Daiichi. The operator of the plant, Chubu Electric Power Company, temporarily shut down Hamaoka’s two active reactors over the weekend, following an extraordinary request by Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

After strengthening the plant’s defenses against earthquakes and tsunamis, a process that could take a couple of years, the utility is expected to restart the plant.

Japan’s plants are all located in coastal areas, making them vulnerable to both quakes and tsunamis. The tsunami is believed to have caused the worst damage at the Fukushima plant, though evidence has begun emerging that the quake may have damaged critical equipment before the waves struck.

The disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, directly led to the suspension of Hamaoka here in Omaezaki, a city about 120 miles southwest of Tokyo. But Mr. Kan’s decision was also clearly influenced by a campaign, over decades, by small groups of protesters, lawyers and scientists, who sued the government or operators here and elsewhere.

They were largely ignored by the public. Harassment by neighbors, warnings by employers, and the reluctance of young Japanese to join antinuclear groups have diminished their numbers.

But since the disaster at Fukushima and especially the suspension of Hamaoka, the aging protesters are now heralded as truth-tellers, while members of the nuclear establishment are being demonized.

On Friday, as Chubu Electric began shutting down a reactor at 10 a.m., Eiichi Nagano, 90, and Yoshika Shiratori, 78, were battling strong winds on the shoreline leading to the plant here. Mr. Shiratori, a leader of the lawsuit, led the way as Mr. Nagano followed with a sprightly gait despite a bent back. The two men scrambled up a dune, stopping only before a “No Trespassing” sign.

“Of course, we’re pleased about the suspension,” Mr. Nagano said, as the strong wind seemed to threaten to topple him. “But if we had done more, if our voices had been louder, we could have prevented the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Fukushima was sacrificed so that Hamaoka could be suspended.”

Unheeded Warnings

In 1976, a resource-poor Japan still reeling from the shocks of the oil crisis was committed fully to nuclear power to achieve greater energy independence, a path from which it never strayed despite growing doubts in the United States and Europe.

 

Pornography Is Found in Bin Laden Compound Files, U.S. Officials Say

WASHINGTON — The enormous cache of computer files taken from Osama bin Laden’s compound contained a considerable quantity of pornographic videos, American officials said on Friday, adding a discordant note to the public image of the Islamist militant who long denounced the West for its lax sexual mores.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about classified material, would not say whether there was evidence that Bin Laden or the other men living in the house had acquired or viewed the material.

The discovery of the pornography, first reported by Reuters, may not be surprising in a collection of five computers, 10 hard drives and dozens of thumb drives and CDs whose age and past ownership is not known.

But the disclosure could fuel accusations of hypocrisy against the founder of Al Qaeda, who was 54 and lived with three wives at the time of his death, and will be welcomed by counterterrorism officials because it could tarnish his legacy and erode the appeal of his brand of religious extremism.

In a 2002 “letter to the American people,” Bin Laden denounced American culture for its exploitation of women’s bodies in dress, advertising and popular culture.

“Your nation exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them,” he wrote. “You plaster your naked daughters across billboards in order to sell a product without any shame. You have brainwashed your daughters into believing they are liberated by wearing revealing clothes, yet in reality all they have liberated is your sexual desire.”

A team of intelligence analysts under the C.I.A.’s direction has been working to review the material seized from Bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by the Navy Seal team that killed him. Officials have said the material shows that Bin Laden was making notes about new ways to attack the United States and sending instructions by courier to subordinates and Qaeda affiliates.

Asked about the contents in an interview with Bloomberg Television, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, “I’m not sure we have any plot” that the intelligence review had found.

“On the other hand, he did seem to have a goal around the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11,” Mr. Holder said. “Certainly, he wanted to harm and was in the advanced operational stage of pulling the levers in the Al Qaeda organization.”

But the Obama administration also released unflattering video footage of a gray-bearded Bin Laden, wearing a cloak and a ski cap and clutching a remote control while watching his own statements on television. The suggestion that he must have dyed his beard for video recordings and was intensely concerned with his image could erode his reputation in the Muslim world as a charismatic and selfless leader.

Also on Friday, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, confirmed that American interrogators had questioned Bin Laden’s three wives for the first time on Thursday, 10 days after they were taken from the compound by Pakistani security forces. He declined to give more details, saying, “I can’t characterize the interaction.”

The three widows, Khairiah Sabar, Siham Sabar and Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, who is also known as Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, had been held and questioned for days by Pakistani officials before the C.I.A. interrogators spoke to them. Ms. Abdulfattah, who is Yemeni, was shot in the leg during the assault on Bin Laden’s compound by Navy Seal commandos.

American officials have many urgent questions for them: where other top Qaeda operatives are, where Bin Laden lived before moving to Abbottabad and whether any Pakistani military or intelligence officers visited the compound. But the wives are believed to have lived cloistered lives, and it is unclear what they may know or be willing to tell.

 

Hague Court Seeks Warrants for Libyan Officials

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor, appeared in a briefing before the United Nations Security Council, which had unanimously called for a criminal investigation of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s use of force against civilians. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said the evidence supporting charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity included the shooting of peaceful protesters, followed by weeks of systematic persecution, including murder, imprisonment and torture.

“War crimes are apparently committed as a matter of policy,” the prosecutor said. He went on: “The evidence shows that events in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia prompted Libyan security forces to begin preparations for the possibility of demonstrations in Libya. As early as January, mercenaries were being hired and brought into Libya.” Other violations, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said, included preventing the wounded from receiving medical care; arresting, torturing and raping perceived opponents of the Qaddafi government; and the use of cluster bombs, mortars and other heavy weapons in crowded urban areas.

The prosecutor said that “efforts to cover up the crimes” — removing bodies from hospitals and preventing doctors from documenting the dead and wounded — had made it difficult to establish the number of victims. But he said 500 to 700 died from shootings in February, before full-fledged fighting broke out between the government and hastily assembled rebel forces.

“Shooting at protesters was systematic,” he said.

Lawyers familiar with the investigation said that the first arrest warrants were likely to focus on the initial violent clampdown on protesters. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo would not comment on whether the indictments involved Colonel Qaddafi or any of his sons, at least three of whom hold military positions.

The prosecutor said the Libyans had raised the issue of the killing of civilians by NATO air strikes since NATO began bombing in March. But he said he was still waiting for more information, including the results of a fact-finding mission by the Human Rights Council, before deciding whether to include NATO actions in the scope of his inquiry.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said his office was also looking into violence on the insurgent side, including the killing of prisoners. He cited violence by mobs in Benghazi and other rebel-held cities against sub-Saharan Africans, seen as pro-Qaddafi mercenaries, who had been “unlawfully arrested, mistreated and killed.” Some of them, he said, were said to have been arrested by “the new authorities in Benghazi,” and their fates were unclear.

Fearful of being attacked, many migrants from nations like Chad, Niger and Sudan made a panicked exodus toward the Egyptian border. Angry crowds attacked housing complexes where sub-Saharan Africans lived, though other Libyans stepped in to shield the migrants from abuse.

At the Security Council on Wednesday, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Moscow was concerned by the mounting toll of civilians, which he described as the responsibility of all parties involved, including NATO. “Actions by NATO-led coalition forces also lead to civilian casualties,” he said. “It is clear that violence can only be halted through an immediate cease-fire and political settlement.”

Other ambassadors said prosecuting war crimes in Libya would send a message to the rest of the region, particularly Syria, that attacks on civilians were unacceptable. Western diplomats have said it could lead to defections of Qaddafi officials and military personnel.

In Misurata, Libya, the coastal city besieged by Qaddafi forces, an international aid ship risked attack by entering the port and evacuating migrant workers who had been trying to leave Libya. Colonel Qaddafi’s military has vowed to prevent ships from entering the port, and tried mining the harbor and shelling the port with artillery and ground-to-ground rocket barrages.

As the ship arrived, more rockets struck near the port, hitting migrant workers waiting to board. The barrage killed a man, a woman, a small boy and a girl.

Dr. Hassan Malitan, who worked at a clinic, vented his anger. The neighborhood has been struck repeatedly by rocket fire, and civilians have been killed. “This is the real Qaddafi,” he said.

The ship departed quickly, taking hundreds of frightened workers out of the city on the beginning of the passage to the rebel capital, Benghazi.

A chief opposition spokesman there, Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, said a large explosion on Wednesday night near the courthouse had been an accident, not a deliberate act, as previously suspected.?Mr. Ghoga said a car owner had left a gelatin explosive in the vehicle, which detonated.?

The explosive is widely used for fishing and, increasingly, for the city’s frequent parades and celebrations.?Ten people were wounded in the blast.?

Marlise Simons reported from Paris, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations. C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Misurata, Libya, and Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya.

 

Tensions Rise as U.S. Officials Press Pakistan for Answers

John O. Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism adviser, said there were many questions about how the sprawling compound “was able to be there for so many years with Bin Laden resident there and it didn’t come to the attention of the local authorities.”

“We need to understand what sort of support network that Bin Laden might have had in place,” Mr. Brennan said during an interview with ABC on Tuesday.

The suspicions have intensified efforts by some members of Congress to scale back American aid to Pakistan, or cut it entirely, as lawmakers described Pakistan as a duplicitous ally undeserving of the billions of dollars it receives each year from Washington.

Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the C.I.A. has carefully constructed over the last few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.

On Monday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and delivered what American officials described as a stern message to senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders. The envoy, Marc Grossman, told them that patience in Congress was wearing thin, officials familiar with the discussions said.

Officials in Washington said they hoped to learn far more about the network that Bin Laden tapped for support by examining the trove of computer files and documents that members of the Navy Seals grabbed during Monday’s raid.

Top Pakistani officials have vehemently denied that Islamabad tried to harbor Bin Laden, and American officials said that at this point there was no hard evidence that any Pakistani officials visited the compound in Abbottabad, or had any direct contacts with Bin Laden.

Even as they pledged support for the United States’ deeply strained alliance with Pakistan, several top American officials said it was difficult to believe that Bin Laden could have spent years in a town populated by current and former Pakistani military officers — with a Pakistani military academy close by — without the complicity of some in the country’s government.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she had no evidence that Pakistan’s government knew where Bin Laden was hiding, but said the government had much to answer for.

“If they didn’t know, why didn’t they know? Why didn’t they pay more attention to it? Was it just benign indifference, or was it indifference with a motive,” she said.

A civilian official in the Pakistani government said he did not know if the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, helped Bin Laden hide or was simply unaware of his presence in Abbottabad. Either way, he said, the successful American raid was an international humiliation for the agency.

“I’m not denying the possibility,” the official said, referring to the ISI sheltering Bin Laden. “At worst, it’s that. At best, it’s total incompetence.”

He said he hoped the raid would lead Pakistanis — particularly military and ISI leaders — to recognize the deep credibility problem their county now faces internationally.

In his meetings in Islamabad, Mr. Grossman told Pakistani leaders they needed to take steps to stanch the tide of anger in Washington about Pakistan’s behavior, according to Obama administration officials familiar with the meetings.

In public, Mr. Grossman was more diplomatic, telling reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday that the United States was committed to its alliance with Pakistan and that Pakistan was “determined to curb terrorism.”

A senior Pakistani general on Tuesday repeated his government’s formal denials that the military or the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s location. Instead, he acknowledged a major intelligence lapse by the Pakistani police and security forces.

“To me, it’s a big embarrassment that the bastard was in this compound near the academy,” said the Pakistani officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Clearly, the U.S. had better intelligence than we did about what was inside that compound.”

The general said Pakistan and the United States had cooperated in other counterterrorism operations in the Abbottabad area in recent weeks, notably a C.I.A. tip that led to Pakistan’s recent arrest of Umar Patek, one of the main Indonesian suspects in the 2002 Bali bombing.

The Pakistani government statement went further, saying that the ISI had “been sharing information with C.I.A. and other friendly intelligence agencies” about the Bin Laden compound since 2009.

Several American officials said they were puzzled about the statement, pointing out that the C.I.A. did not know about the compound until last August.

The raid has fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment in Congress, yet it is unclear — perhaps even unlikely — that there would be enough support to cut aid to Pakistan.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who just returned from a congressional visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that any discussion about cutting aid or decreasing engagement with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bin Laden strike was premature and that he would strongly oppose any such move.

? “We both benefit from having a strong bilateral relationship, and I think we need to use this moment to strengthen the ties between our two countries,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “This is not a time to back away from Pakistan.”

? Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, also expressed reluctance about limiting aid to Pakistan, saying the country has been an anti-terror partner of the United States. “They’ve lost thousands and thousands of their soldiers fighting terrorists,” he said. “Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more oversight, and I’m willing to do that.” ?

In Brussels on Tuesday, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, spoke about Pakistan at a closed meeting of ambassadors to NATO. According to people present for his presentation, which was based on a December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan, Mr. Joeck said American officials had little expectation that the Pakistani government would mount a serious campaign to wipe out Al Qaeda or Taliban safe havens in the most contested border areas of the country.

“He said there were simply too many ongoing suspicions of the U.S.,” said one foreign official.?

Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse and Eric Schmitt from Washington; David E. Sanger from Brussels; and David Rohde from New York.

 

Report Implicates Kyrgyzstan Officials in Ethnic Violence Last Year

For a year, the Kyrgyz government has denied any complicity in the violence. That position became harder to defend on Tuesday when an international commission led by a Finnish politician issued a report implicating civilian and military officials, some still serving in government.

The report described circumstances during a period of fluidity and weak authority after the popular uprising that ousted Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian leader, Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev.

The subsequent disarray in the army created the conditions for an ethnic massacre, as what had begun as a jubilant liberation movement for the Kyrgyz majority soured after ethnic Uzbeks also demanded more rights. The report said that 470 people were killed, 1,900 injured and about 411,000 temporarily driven from their homes.

The report asserts that the violence rose to the level of a “crime against humanity” as defined by international conventions, if the evidence the commission saw were proved in court. “In many instances crowds of attackers seized firearms and ammunition from the military and police,” largely unopposed, the report said. Members of the crowd then committed “murder, rape, other forms of sexual violence, physical violence” against ethnic Uzbeks.

The report said uniformed soldiers also participated in the violence in several documented instances, and that their commanders failed to maintain discipline or investigate the loss of armored vehicles and weapons.

That finding is an embarrassment to President Roza Otunbayeva, who blamed Bakiyev loyalists and Islamic extremists. The report found no evidence of either.

Kyrgyz authorities, in an addendum, argued that the report’s authors gave too much credence to accounts by Uzbeks and that the research was incomplete.

Analysts said that while the report was useful in drawing international attention to the severity of the events in southern Kyrgyzstan a year ago, it could also undermine the tenuous authority of Ms. Otunbayeva.

Government officials, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, are likely to blame her for authorizing the investigation, Mars Sariyev, a political analyst at the Institute of Social Policy in Bishkek, said in a telephone interview. “It will initiate an explosion of nationalism in Kyrgyzstan,” he said.

After the April 7, 2010, uprising that overthrew Mr. Bakiyev, the new leaders first aligned themselves with ethnic Uzbek groups in the south that had set about ousting mayors and other local officials. But as the southern revolution escalated, the central government shifted its support to the old political establishment and security services.

The report concluded that officers and soldiers garrisoned in Osh, the capital of the southern region of the country, which has a mixed Uzbek and Kyrgyz population, abetted the violence, which began June 10.

The police, mostly ethnic Kyrgyz, detained a disproportionate number of Uzbeks and accused them of instigating the unrest. The report notes ethnic Kyrgyz also suffered, though in lesser numbers.

Soldiers distributed weapons, including automatic rifles and machine guns, to crowds of ethnic Kyrgyz young men, who then used them to kill Uzbeks. The young men rampaged in armored personnel carriers. The report singled out one general in particular, Ismail Isakov, then commandant of the south, for failing to use his soldiers to protect civilians. It also implicated a security force commander in the city of Jalalabad, Kubatbek Baibolov, who was prosecutor general of Kyrgyzstan until late March.

The report supports a narrative of the violence in June widely reported by foreign journalists and conveyed by witnesses in the ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods of Osh, known as mahallas.

“We thoroughly analyzed the scale of the violence,” Kimmo Kiljunen, the chairman of the commission and a former member of the Finnish Parliament, said in a telephone interview from Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. “It is not genocide, it is not war crime, but the attacks on the mahallas in June of last year were a crime against humanity.”

Because Kyrgyzstan is not a member of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Mr. Kiljunen said, the government is not obliged to cooperate in international prosecution. The designation of the violence as a crime against humanity, he said, was important all the same to elevate international pressure on the Kyrgyz authorities to impartially apply domestic law.

So far, Mr. Kiljunen said, 80 percent of those arrested for the violence have been ethnic Uzbeks while 74 percent of the victims were also Uzbeks.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe helped coordinate the work of the independent commission but was not responsible for its conclusions. Scandinavian governments, the European Union and the United States financed the $1.4 million report.

 

Tensions Rise as U.S. Officials Press Pakistan for Answers

 

John O. Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism adviser, said there were many questions about how the sprawling compound “was able to be there for so many years with Bin Laden resident there and it didn’t come to the attention of the local authorities.”

“We need to understand what sort of support network that Bin Laden might have had in place,” Mr. Brennan said during an interview with ABC on Tuesday.

The suspicions have intensified efforts by some members of Congress to scale back American aid to Pakistan, or cut it entirely, as lawmakers described Pakistan as a duplicitous ally undeserving of the billions of dollars it receives each year from Washington.

Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the C.I.A. has carefully constructed over the last few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.

On Monday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and delivered what American officials described as a stern message to senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders. The envoy, Marc Grossman, told them that patience in Congress was wearing thin, officials familiar with the discussions said.

Officials in Washington said they hoped to learn far more about the network that Bin Laden tapped for support by examining the trove of computer files and documents that members of the Navy Seals grabbed during Monday’s raid.

Top Pakistani officials have vehemently denied that Islamabad tried to harbor Bin Laden, and American officials said that at this point there was no hard evidence that any Pakistani officials visited the compound in Abbottabad, or had any direct contacts with Bin Laden.

Even as they pledged support for the United States’ deeply strained alliance with Pakistan, several top American officials said it was difficult to believe that Bin Laden could have spent years in a town populated by current and former Pakistani military officers — with a Pakistani military academy close by — without the complicity of some in the country’s government.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she had no evidence that Pakistan’s government knew where Bin Laden was hiding, but said the government had much to answer for.

“If they didn’t know, why didn’t they know? Why didn’t they pay more attention to it? Was it just benign indifference, or was it indifference with a motive,” she said.

A civilian official in the Pakistani government said he did not know if the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, helped Bin Laden hide or was simply unaware of his presence in Abbottabad. Either way, he said, the successful American raid was an international humiliation for the agency.

“I’m not denying the possibility,” the official said, referring to the ISI sheltering Bin Laden. “At worst, it’s that. At best, it’s total incompetence.”

He said he hoped the raid would lead Pakistanis — particularly military and ISI leaders — to recognize the deep credibility problem their county now faces internationally.

In his meetings in Islamabad, Mr. Grossman told Pakistani leaders they needed to take steps to stanch the tide of anger in Washington about Pakistan’s behavior, according to Obama administration officials familiar with the meetings.

In public, Mr. Grossman was more diplomatic, telling reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday that the United States was committed to its alliance with Pakistan and that Pakistan was “determined to curb terrorism.”

A senior Pakistani general on Tuesday repeated his government’s formal denials that the military or the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s location. Instead, he acknowledged a major intelligence lapse by the Pakistani police and security forces.

“To me, it’s a big embarrassment that the bastard was in this compound near the academy,” said the Pakistani officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Clearly, the U.S. had better intelligence than we did about what was inside that compound.”

The general said Pakistan and the United States had cooperated in other counterterrorism operations in the Abbottabad area in recent weeks, notably a C.I.A. tip that led to Pakistan’s recent arrest of Umar Patek, one of the main Indonesian suspects in the 2002 Bali bombing.

The Pakistani government statement went further, saying that the ISI had “been sharing information with C.I.A. and other friendly intelligence agencies” about the Bin Laden compound since 2009.

Several American officials said they were puzzled about the statement, pointing out that the C.I.A. did not know about the compound until last August.

The raid has fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment in Congress, yet it is unclear — perhaps even unlikely — that there would be enough support to cut aid to Pakistan.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who just returned from a congressional visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that any discussion about cutting aid or decreasing engagement with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bin Laden strike was premature and that he would strongly oppose any such move.

? “We both benefit from having a strong bilateral relationship, and I think we need to use this moment to strengthen the ties between our two countries,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “This is not a time to back away from Pakistan.”

? Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, also expressed reluctance about limiting aid to Pakistan, saying the country has been an anti-terror partner of the United States. “They’ve lost thousands and thousands of their soldiers fighting terrorists,” he said. “Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more oversight, and I’m willing to do that.” ?

In Brussels on Tuesday, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, spoke about Pakistan at a closed meeting of ambassadors to NATO. According to people present for his presentation, which was based on a December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan, Mr. Joeck said American officials had little expectation that the Pakistani government would mount a serious campaign to wipe out Al Qaeda or Taliban safe havens in the most contested border areas of the country.

“He said there were simply too many ongoing suspicions of the U.S.,” said one foreign official.?

Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse and Eric Schmitt from Washington; David E. Sanger from Brussels; and David Rohde from New York.

 

Afghan Officials Try to Limit Damage From Prison Break

 

Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar Province, where the prison break occurred, announced that security forces had detained steadily mounting numbers of escaped detainees throughout the day. By day’s end, however, he conceded that while 71 people had been detained, the descriptions of only 41 men matched those of escapees.

The effort to reassure people with news of the captures failed to instill much confidence, and the most immediate effect of the jailbreak was a mounting sense among Afghans that government corruption, incompetence and complacency were as much to blame as the Taliban.

In comments on a Facebook page linked to an interview program on Tolo, a major television network here, viewers expressed anger and a complete lack of faith in the government.

“The escape of 500 Taliban from prison?” Jahanbakhash Ahmadi wrote. “This is impossible that it can happen without the help of the government.”

Another, Mard Arya, said: “Is it possible for prisoners to dig tunnels more than 100 meters long over five months and none of the prison officials knew about it? Don’t be ridiculous.”

It did not help that the prison escapes came after a month of security lapses, which have left people feeling insecure and distrustful of the government, even though assassinations and attacks in Kandahar have fallen sharply this year.

In early April, Kandahar security forces fired on crowds, killing nine people, during protests over the burning of the Koran by a pastor in the United States. On April 15, the security forces were unable to protect the Kandahar police chief (or were bribed not to), allowing a suicide bomber to enter the police headquarters and reach an area near his office where the bomber killed him and two other police officers.

Then, early Monday, despite the presence of dozens of prison guards and police officers, nearly 500 prisoners escaped, leaving many Kandahar civilians fearful that the escaped prisoners will soon launch attacks in Kandahar.

“We don’t know what the security forces are doing,” said Hajji Khairullah, a shopkeeper in central Kandahar. “If you look at the prison, it is fortified with berms and T-walls all around — you can’t imagine that an ant could get in there — but now we heard the huge and shocking news that hundreds of inmates have managed to escape through an underground tunnel.”

“This escape will affect the civilians,” he added. “I blame these security forces for not taking action. This is not the first time.”

The provincial governor, who has been critical of the security forces after each of the recent breaches, has seemed powerless to improve the situation, leaving people unsure whom to turn to.

“How do prisoners break locks in jail?” asked a Kandahari who has watched the security forces closely over the years, but asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. He was referring to prisoners’ ability to leave their cells in order to go to the cell with the tunnel entry.

“How can it be that no one noticed? What was the National Directorate of Security doing?” he said, referring to Afghanistan’s intelligence service. “Why weren’t they watching?”

A memorandum from the Justice Ministry to President Hamid Karzai’s senior aides appeared to confirm people’s fears that there was no one who could be trusted — a point the Taliban have been eager to make in carrying out their attacks.

“This is an information campaign by the Taliban; that’s the main point of these operations,” said a Western official, adding that the insurgents want to send the message that the Afghan government is weak.

The Justice Ministry’s memo raised questions about complicity by people working in the prison and the surrounding neighborhood where the tunnel emerged. The memorandum noted that digging such a long tunnel and emptying the soil could not have gone unnoticed by neighbors and security forces because “it takes a lot of time and a means of transportation to carry the soil away.”

Also noted in the memo was that the police supposedly searched the house where the tunnel began two and a half months ago, yet noted nothing suspicious.

Finally, the memo said: “Escape of all inmates through a tunnel in one room indicates cooperation and planning from inside the prison.”

The head of the team investigating the escape, Mohammed Tahir, further cemented the likelihood that there was complicity from a number of people. He described the tunnel as so carefully planned and sophisticated that it appeared that engineers must have been involved, not merely men with shovels.

“The tunnel was dug in a very professional way,” he said. “They have used an electrical system and a ventilation system and small shovels and pickaxes for digging and wheelbarrows for removing the soil.”

The conclusion reached by some Kandaharis was almost melancholy: the Taliban care more about their fighters than the government of Afghanistan does about its own people.

“The prison break indicates how much the Taliban are loyal to each other,” said Abdul Naji, a businessman in Kandahar.

“It shows how much they are trying to free their men, even digging a several-hundred-meter-long tunnel despite heavy security forces in the area,” Mr. Naji said. “It is beyond imagination.”

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

 

Russian Officials Said to Reap Wealth in Tax Case

 

Mr. Magnitsky’s claims have never been fully investigated, and on Monday, a year and a half after his death, his former colleagues unveiled information that they said showed that the officials he implicated had become astonishingly wealthy.

The findings are the latest in a series of independent investigations into Russian officials by Mr. Magnitsky’s supporters, including William F. Browder, the owner of Hermitage Capital Management, the fund that Mr. Magnitsky represented. A $12 million country house outside Moscow and seaside villas in Dubai and Montenegro are some of the purchases made by the officials since Mr. Magnitsky made his accusations against them, according to the investigation.

Details about the inquiry appear on a Web site called Russian Untouchables and in a short documentary film released on YouTube on Monday.

Officials have not yet responded to the accusations, which, if true, could prove to be a major embarrassment for the Kremlin. President Dmitri A. Medvedev has made fighting corruption the focus of his presidency, and he has personally ordered an independent commission to investigate Mr. Magnitsky’s death, though the inquiry appears to have stalled.

Just before his arrest, Mr. Magnitsky accused Interior Ministry officials of having used three Hermitage subsidiaries in a scheme with tax officials to receive an illegal tax refund of $230 million.

The Interior Ministry has since said that Mr. Magnitsky masterminded the scheme. The police officials Mr. Magnitsky accused of devising the fraud have been promoted.

Officials from Hermitage and Mr. Magnitsky’s former law firm, Firestone Duncan, have called the charges absurd. The bureaucrats involved in the tax scheme, they say, have stashed millions of dollars away in offshore bank accounts and shell companies and spent millions more on luxury goods like cars and homes.

Among the officials they investigated is Olga Stepanova, the former head of Moscow’s 28th District Tax Inspectorate.

Three weeks after her office was said to have approved a portion of the tax refund in question, Ms. Stepanova put a $629,030 down payment on a luxury apartment in Dubai, according to financial documents gathered in the investigation and reviewed by The New York Times. The purchase, documented in a bank statement from Credit Suisse, was made under the name of Ms. Stepanova’s husband, Vladlen Stepanov, a construction worker.

Days later, two of Ms. Stepanova’s colleagues at the tax office also bought luxury apartments in the same elite Dubai neighborhood, taking money from the same account, according to the documents.

In addition to the Dubai apartment, Ms. Stepanova and her husband bought a large villa in Dubai and another in Montenegro, and built an 11,900-square-foot house outside of Moscow, according to the investigation. In total, Ms. Stepanova acquired nearly $39 million in assets and cash after her office authorized the tax refund.

According to tax returns available on the Untouchables Web site, Ms. Stepanova and her husband had been making a combined salary of just under $40,000 annually.

Reports from previous investigations by Mr. Magnitsky’s supporters have unveiled purchases of luxury cars and apartments in Moscow and elsewhere by the police officers involved in Mr. Magnitsky’s arrest.

It is unclear whether the new investigation will prompt a response from the authorities.

Earlier this year, Ms. Stepanova became the subject of a tax fraud investigation that the authorities said was unrelated to the Magnitsky case. She has since resigned as head of the 28th District Tax Inspectorate.

Mr. Magnitsky’s former employer, Jamison Firestone, wrote in an e-mail that he planned to file an official complaint with the Russian Investigative Committee this week, on the basis of the latest findings.

He wrote, “I fully expect it to be ignored,” because the Interior Ministry and prosecutor’s office “have been protecting Stepanova and the criminals who organized this fraud for years.”

 

Japanese Officials on Defensive as Nuclear Alert Level Rises

  A volunteer in Ofunato, Japan, cleaned photographs that were found in the tsunami debris.

TOKYO — Japanese officials struggled through the day on Tuesday to explain why it had taken them a month to disclose large-scale releases of radioactive material in mid-March at a crippled nuclear power plant, as the government and an electric utility disagreed on the extent of continuing problems there.

A policeman watched colleagues prepare to transport a body by van in Minamisoma, Japan, on Thursday, inside a deserted nuclear evacuation zone.

The government announced Tuesday morning that it had raised its rating of the severity of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to 7, the worst on an international scale, from 5. Officials said that the reactor had released one-tenth as much radioactive material as the Chernobyl accident in 1986, but still qualified as a 7 according to a complex formula devised by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Japan’s new assessment was based largely on computer models showing very heavy emissions of radioactive iodine and cesium from March 14 to 16, just after the earthquake and tsunami rendered the plant’s emergency cooling system inoperative. The nearly monthlong delay in acknowledging the extent of these emissions is a fresh example of confused data and analysis from the Japanese, and put the authorities on the defensive about whether they have delayed or blocked the release of information to avoid alarming the public.

Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, an independent government panel that oversees the country’s nuclear industry, said that the government had delayed issuing data on the extent of the radiation releases because of concern that the margins of error had been large in initial computer models. But he also suggested a public policy reason for having kept quiet.

“Some foreigners fled the country even when there appeared to be little risk,” he said. “If we immediately decided to label the situation as Level 7, we could have triggered a panicked reaction.”

The Japanese media, which has a reputation for passivity but has become more aggressive in response to public unhappiness about the nuclear accident, questioned government leaders through the day about what the government knew about the accident and when it knew it.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan gave a nationally televised speech and press conference in the early evening to call for national rebuilding, but ended up defending his government’s handling of information about the accident.

“What I can say for the information I obtained — of course the government is very large, so I don’t have all the information — is that no information was ever suppressed or hidden after the accident,” he said. “There are various ways of looking at this, and I know there are opinions saying that information could have been disclosed faster. However, as the head of the government, I never hid any information because it was inconvenient for us.”

Junichi Matsumoto, a senior nuclear power executive from the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, fanned public fears about radiation when he said at a separate news conference on Tuesday morning that the radiation release from Daiichi could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.

“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” Mr. Matsumoto said.

But Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said in an interview on Tuesday evening that he did not know how the company had come up with its estimate. “I cannot understand their position,” he said.

He speculated that Tokyo Electric was being “prudent and thinking about the worst-case scenario,” adding, “I think they don’t want to be seen as optimistic.”

Mr. Nishiyama said that his agency did not expect another big escape of radiation from Daiichi, saying that “almost all” the material that is going to escape has already come out. He said that the rate of radiation release had peaked in the early days after the March 11 earthquake, and that the rate of radiation had dropped by 90 percent since then.

The peak release in emissions of radioactive particles took place following hydrogen explosions at three reactors, as technicians desperately tried to pump in seawater to keep the uranium fuel rods cool, and bled radioactive gas from the reactors in order to make room for the seawater.

Mr. Nishiyama took pains to say — and other nuclear experts agreed — that the Japanese accident posed fewer health risks than Chernobyl.