Kuwait Times

Published Date: September 14, 2009

RIYADH: The family of Osama bin Laden has announced the death of one of the terror mastermind's brothers. In a full-page notice on Sunday in Al-Riyadh newspaper, the family said Thabet bin Laden passed away and the funeral is scheduled that afternoon in the holy city of Makkah. The notice said he died Saturday but did not give the cause of death or his age. Thabet bin Laden was one of 54 children born to Mohammed bin Laden, a poor Yemeni immigrant who started the family contracting business in the 1930s th
at grew into a multimillion dollar construction empire. The bin Laden family disavowed any links with Osama bin Laden in 1994, when Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship after he called for the overthrow of the royal family.

Bomb in Shiite holy book
BAGHDAD: Iraqi militants hollowed out an ornate Shiite Muslim holy book, stuffed it with TNT and planted it inside a Baghdad shrine, but the bomb was defused before it exploded, police said. Iraqi police discovered the rigged book on Saturday in the Khadimiya shrine, a major Shiite holy site in Baghdad, after worshippers heard a suspicious ringing sound from the mobile phone detonator inside the book, a richly decorated edition of a sacred Shiite text called the "Keys to Paradise". After the bomb failed to
go off, a scan of the book showed the bomb-filled cavity and experts came in to defuse it. "It had about 500 grams of highly explosive material and contained hundreds of metal ball bearings in order to maximize casualties amongst pilgrims to the shrine," Major-General Jihad Al-Jabiri, head of an Interior Ministry unit that investigates explosions, told state-run Iraqiya TV.

Fire kills 38 in Kazakhstan
TALDYKORGAN: Fire roared through a drug treatment center in Kazakhstan with a history of safety violations yesterday, killing 38 people yesterday as patients tried to escape through barred windows, officials said. The blaze broke out around 5:30 am and quickly spread through the single-story Soviet-era building. About 40 people were evacuated from the building, emergency officials said. "I heard them screaming for 20 minutes. They were screaming 'Save us, save us," said a woman who lives across the stre
et, who gave her name only as Fatima. The cause of the fire about 120 miles north of Almaty, the country's largest city, was not immediately known. Locked doors on wards and bars on the windows blocked some potential escape routes, Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhko said.

Saudi FM undergoes surgery
RIYADH: Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal has undergone spine surgery in the United States, the royal court said yesterday. The operation was successful and Prince Saud is expected to return to Saudi Arabia soon, "after a convalescing period," the court said in a brief statement carried by SPA state news agency. Born in 1940, the kingdom's chief diplomat has suffered spine problems over the past few years. He has undergone previous operations in the United States for the condition. In office sin
ce 1975, Prince Saud is one of the world's longest serving foreign ministers.

Israeli F-16 crashes
JERUSALEM: An Israeli F-16 fighter jet crashed in the West Bank yesterday, killing its pilot, the son of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon who died in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster, officials said. The single-seat warplane crashed in a remote hilly region south of the West Bank city of Hebron, the military said, adding that it was not immediately clear what caused the accident. Military officials named the pilot as Lieutenant Assaf Ramon, the eldest son of Colonel Ilan Ramon, an Israeli fighter pilot
who became the country's first and only astronaut. Ilan Ramon was killed along with six others when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over the US state of Texas six years ago. In interviews after the Columbia disaster, Assaf Ramon said that he, too, hoped to become an astronaut. He graduated from the Israeli air force pilot's course earlier this year.