₦airaland Forum

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/kenya-shopping-mall-attack-chilling-new-footage-from-inside-westgate-shows-terrorists-casually-gunning-down-innocent-shoppers-8886653.html

Kenya shopping mall attack: Chilling new footage from inside Westgate shows terrorists casually gunning down innocent shoppers
The video also shows terrorists calmly chatting on their mobile phones and taking turns to kneel down and pray

This terrorists should be killed a thousand times over. Bunch of cowards.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/cctv-footage-shows-terror-nairobi-231946907.html

Newly released CCTV footage shows the terrifying scenes from the Nairobi shopping mall where shoppers were gunned down indiscriminately. Deborah Lutterbeck reports.

After Lola Fani-Kayode entertained us as kids with "mind Bending" chronicling the life story of her drug addicted brother i really do not give a hoot about what this obvious schizophrenic says.

Nigerians are obviously not well educated with a press full of half baked graduates that give this psycho avenues to express his insanity. Let's watch as poor leadership takes down this country in flames?( imagine that this junkie was once aviation minister)

The richest man that ever lived is from Africa. He is King Mansa Musa of the great empire of Mali before the Europeans embraced civilization. We had Egypt, Mali and Cush e.t.c

We are there to see the mighty river; the Congo, the second largest by volume of water in the world.I have never seen rapids like those on the Congo.

The Inga dams alone, if properly developed, could meet the whole of Africa’s energy needs.

Two wiry young men guide us to the Ulala rapids and 90 minutes later we are at a mighty cataract, churning water piled high in waves the size of apartment blocks. With only 15 minutes before sunset we film and then slog back uphill through the sudden African darkness.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-where-hell-is-just-a-local-call-away-8859863.html

If we can get our acts together Africa can be a growing superpower; these ideas are some of the reasons that mad man Ghaddafi was murdered. Africa is really full of enormous potentials.

This is an excerpt of a British Journalist on the Democratic Republic of Congo which is far more blessed than us in Natural Resources:-

The canyon below is choked with mud, while trucks belonging to the mine’s Canadian owners are carting loads of earth to be spun, crushed and sprayed with cyanide. They aim to produce 150,000 ounces of gold a year here. This is a smashed, brutal landscape, its mountains levelled, its rivers blocked.

The DRC contains 80 per cent of the world’s columbite-tantalite (coltan) reserves (a vital component of smartphones and iPads), 49 per cent of its cobalt reserves, and titanic amounts of copper, gold and diamonds. Yet poverty, famine, disease and war have been all that the Congolese people have reaped from their bounty.

The Congolese people I see are utterly pessimistic about their nation’s future. They tell a joke about evil men in hell being allowed a phone call by the devil. Saddam Hussein and Hitler pay a lot of money to call Iraq and Germany, but Mobutu is allowed to phone the Congo for hours at little cost. Why? “We’re in hell. Congo is a local call.”

Dan Snow’s History of the Congo is on Wednesday, 9pm, BBC2

This is an image of the true size of Africa. You will appreciate why we will become the next battle ground.

As China, India and the United States fight over fresh water, precious minerals and arable farm land with a projected world population of 9 Billion.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartography

In Mr Krause's map (above) he seems to have used the shapes of the countries from a Mercator projection, but has scaled up the outline of Africa, without changing its shape, to show the appropriate area.

An alternative and arguably more rigorous approach would be to repeat the exercise using an "equal area" projection that shows the countries' areas correctly while minimising shape distortion. These two properties are the hardest to balance when showing the whole world on one map. I decided to rework Mr Krause's map using Gall's Stereographic Cylindrical Projection (1855) with two standard parallels at 45°N and 45°S.

Distortions are still evident at the poles, but for most countries shape is maintained, and their areas are shown correctly. As you can see (below), the results are distinct from Mr Krause's map. But however you look at it, his point is a good one: Africa is much bigger than it looks on most maps.

The Director General of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Mr. Fola Akinkuotu, Sunday suspended the operations of Dana Air.

General Manager, Public Affairs, NCAA, Fan Ndubuoke, who confirmed the suspension, said it was because its flight from Port Harcourt to Lagos made on air return due to technical problem.

THISDAY investigations learnt that the aircraft lost one of its engines and this was the second time in a week that such an incident would happen.

An informed source revealed that the aircraft had flown 38 miles away from Port Harcourt when one of the engines shut down, when it called the control tower.
It was gathered that by the time it was making the air return, it had flown 45 miles with one engine, in an aircraft laden with passengers.

Last year, the airline recorded a tragic air accident in Lagos that killed 153 persons on board.

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/ncaa-suspends-dana-air-operations/160886/

I am the one that revealed the loss of its engine from abuja to lagos. After all the abuse i received on social media from what i obviously saw of loss of the right turbine on the wing of the aircraft, the same airline has repeated it again with passengers on their way FROM Port Harcourt:-

The Director General of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Mr. Fola Akinkuotu, Sunday suspended the operations of Dana Air.

General Manager, Public Affairs, NCAA, Fan Ndubuoke, who confirmed the suspension, said it was because its flight from Port Harcourt to Lagos made on air return due to technical problem.
THISDAY investigations learnt that the aircraft lost one of its engines and this was the second time in a week that such an incident would happen.

An informed source revealed that the aircraft had flown 38 miles away from Port Harcourt when one of the engines shut down, when it called the control tower.

It was gathered that by the time it was making the air return, it had flown 45 miles with one engine, in an aircraft laden with passengers.

Last year, the airline recorded a tragic air accident in Lagos that killed 153 persons on board.

THIS INDIANS NEVER LEARN TILL THEY KILL NIGERIANS ON THE ALTAR OF THEIR gOD OF mONEY!!!

May God save us from National Disasters

I hope the aviation minister is finally realising their role is to regulate for passenger safety and not just to collect taxes from the airlines. I was indeed surprised that not long after returning those Indians could still fly me in a coffin. Thank God that at last something is being done.

When i told the house of how our flight from Abuja to Lagos lost its right turbines a few weeks ago people thought i was confabulating. Now the NCAA has grounded Dana Air to perform an audit of its aircrafts.

http://www.punchng.com/news/fg-suspends-dana-air-licence-again%E2%80%A2aib-begins-probe-of-associated-kabo-airlines/

hree days after a tragic crash involving an Associated Airlines plane killed 14 people in Lagos, the Federal Government, through the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority on Sunday night, announced the suspension of Dana Air’s operations nationwide.

The decision to suspend Dana’s operations came 24 hours after the NCAA grounded the operations of Associated Airlines, whose Embraer 120 plane crashed near a fuel depot two minutes after takeoff at the Lagos airport, leaving only six survivors.

The charter plane was conveying the remains of a former Governor of Ondo State, Dr. Olusegun Agagu, to Akure for interment. It also had on board 20 people, including officials of the state government, family members and friends of Agagu.

Also, 24 hours after the Associated Airlines crash, another major air disaster was averted when a Kabo Airlines’ Boeing 747 plane carrying 512 pilgrims had a near-crash at the Sokoto airport with deflated tyres, damaging the airport’s Instrument Landing System.

The Coordinating General Manager, Corporate Communications, Aviation Parastatals, Mr. Yakubu Dati, confirmed to our correspondent on Sunday night that the government had suspended the operations of Dana Air nationwide.

Dati said the decision was to allow the regulatory agency “conduct an operational audit” on the carrier and its planes.

The latest suspension of Dana’s operations made it the third time the NCAA would be grounding the carrier over safety and other related issues.

On March 17, 2013, the government suspended the operations of Dana in order to “resolve certain safety issues,” according to the NCAA.

Some days later, the government lifted the suspension thus clearing the carrier to resume operations.

The March 17 suspension came nearly three months after the airline resumed operations following a seven-month suspension after its Boeing MD-83 crashed in Lagos, killing 163 people

The government had on June 5, 2012 revoked the operational licence of Dana, two days after the crash in Iju-Ishaga, Lagos.

The government had also at a time directed Dana to pay compensations to the families of all the victims of the June 3, 2012 crash or risk severe sanctions.

It is unclear whether the latest suspension of the airline’s operation is related to the issue of payment of compensation or whether the NCAA is having issues with it on the safety condition of its planes.

We hope these attacks will end so that we can move this continent forward. God will crush all these terrorists and protect Africa and Israel

A US navy Seal team swam ashore near Barawe, southern Somalia, before dawn prayers, US and Somali officials told the Associated Press.

They approaching a two-storey beachfront property in small boats, reportedly supported by a helicopter and naval gunfire.

The raid was carried out by members of Seal team six, the same unit that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout in 2011, another senior US military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorised to speak publicly.

This time the Seal team members encountered fiercer resistance than expected, and after a 15-20 minute firefight, the unit leader decided to abort the mission and they swam away, the official said. Seal team six has responsibility for counter-terrorism activities in the Horn of Africa.

US navy commandos killed a senior al-Qaida member in the same town four years ago.

The New York Times quoted a US security official as saying that the target was believed to have been killed, but later accounts called that into question.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/somalia/10358587/US-Navy-Seals-targeted-senior-al-Shabaab-commander-in-Somalia-raid.html

The latest attack, carried out in the early hours of Saturday, was believed to be the most significant US operation in Somalia since 2009, when a team of SEALs attacked Barawe and killed six al-Shabaab fighters, including one senior commander.

Separately, a leading suspect in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 was reported to have been either captured or killed by US forces on the streets of Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

Abu Anas el-Liby, whose real name is Nazih Abd al Hamid al-Ruqhay, was indicted by a New York court in 2000 for playing a role in planning the deadly attacks.

Since then the Libyan terror suspect has been one of America's most wanted fugitives. The FBI had offered a reward of $5 million for information leading to his capture.

A resident of Barawe - a seaside town 240 kilometers (150 miles) south of Mogadishu - said by telephone that heavy gunfire woke up residents before dawn prayers.

The U.S. forces attacked a two-story beachside house in Barawe where foreign fighters lived, battling their way inside, said an al-Shabab fighter who gave his name as Abu Mohamed and who said he had visited the scene. Al-Shabab has a formal alliance with al-Qaida, and hundreds of men from the U.S., Britain and Middle Eastern countries fight alongside Somali members of al-Shabab.

A separate U.S. official described the action in Barawe as a capture operation against a high-value target. The official said U.S. forces engaged al-Shabab militants and sought to avoid civilian casualties. The U.S. forces disengaged target after inflicting some casualties on fighters, said the official, who was not authorized to speak by name and insisted on anonymity.

The leader of the al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group al-Shabab, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, also known as Ahmed Godane, claimed responsibility for the attack on the upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya, a four-day terrorist siege that began on Sept. 21 and killed at least 67 people. A Somali intelligence official said the al-Shabab leader was the target of Saturday's raid.

An al-Shabab official, Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu Musab, said in an audio message that the raid failed to achieve its goals.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20131005-u.s.-strikes-back-at-extremists-behind-kenya-mall-attack-1998-embassy-bombings.ece?nclick_check=1

MOGADISHU, Somalia — In a stealthy seaside assault in Somalia and in a raid in Libya's capital, U.S. military forces on Saturday struck out against Islamic extremists who have carried out terrorist attacks in East Africa, snatching a man allegedly involved in the bombings of U.S. embassies 15 years ago but missing a man linked to last month's attack on a Nairobi shopping mall.

A U.S. Navy SEAL team slipped ashore near a southern Somalia town before the al-Qaida-linked militants rose for dawn prayers, U.S. and Somali officials told The Associated Press. The raid on a house in the town of Barawe targeted a specific al-Qaida suspect related to the mall attack, but the operation did not get its target, one current and one former U.S. military official told AP.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the raid publicly.

Within hours of the Somalia attack, relatives of a Libyan al-Qaida leader wanted for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania said he was kidnapped outside his house Saturday in Tripoli, Libya. A U.S. official said it was American forces who captured Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, who has been wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-commandos-seize-al-shabaab-leader-nairobi-attack-211536128.html

"It was prompted by the Westgate attack," he added, referring to a militant assault on a Nairobi shopping mall two weeks ago in which at least 67 people were killed.

The Times quoted witnesses as saying that the firefight lasted more than an hour, with helicopters called in for air support.

The Times report quoted a spokesman for al Shabaab as saying that one of its fighters had been killed in an exchange of gunfire but that the group had beaten back the assault.

The U.S. officials said it was unclear whether the SEAL team's target was taken alive or killed.

The paper said a senior Somali government official confirmed the raid, saying, "The attack was carried out by the American forces and the Somali government was pre-informed about the attack."

Matt Bryden, the former head of the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, said the tactics used in the Westgate attack were similar to those used by the Shabab in a number of operations in Somalia this year. But he also said that local help was needed to pull off an attack on that scale, and that several of the men identified as taking part in the attack were connected to group’s Kenyan affiliate, known as Al Hijra.

“We should certainly expect Al Hijra and Al Shabab to try again,” Mr. Bryden said. “And we should expect them to have the capacity to do so.”

The raid on Saturday morning appeared to have been intended to blunt those capabilities. A witness in Baraawe said the house was known as a place where senior foreign commanders stayed, though he could not say whether they were there at the time of the attack.

The F.B.I. sent dozens of agents to Nairobi after the shopping mall siege to help Kenyan authorities with the investigation. United States officials fear that the Shabab could attempt a similar attack on American soil, perhaps employing several of the group’s Somali-American recruits.

Another United States official said it was still unclear whether any Americans were involved in the Westgate mall episode, though there were growing indications that fewer attackers took part in the siege than the 10 to 15 militants the government had previously announced.

The footage, broadcast on Kenyan television on Friday night, showed four of the attackers moving about the mall with cool nonchalance, no hint in their demeanor that they had stormed a shopping center and massacred dozens of people, much less that they feared an imminent counterassault from Kenyan security services.

One loitered in the grocery checkout aisle, talking on his cellphone. Another slouched in a storage room like a worker on break.

At least one of the four men, Mr. Nabhan, is Kenyan, and believed to be related to Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the Qaeda mastermind killed four years ago near Baraawe.

The elder Mr. Nabhan was a suspect in the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002 and the attacks on the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

He was one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa when American commandos killed him in September 2009 in an audacious daytime attack. Four military helicopters shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert, killing six foreign fighters, including Mr. Nabhan, and three Somali members of the Shabab.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/world/africa/mall-attack-also-involved-kenyans-official-says.html?_r=0

NAIROBI, Kenya — A Navy SEAL team targeted a senior leader of the Shabab militant group in a raid on his seaside villa in the Somali town of Baraawe on Saturday, American officials said, in response to a deadly attack on a Nairobi shopping mall for which the group had claimed responsibility.

The SEAL team stealthily approached the beachfront house by sea, firing on the unidentified target in a predawn gunbattle that was the most significant raid by American troops on Somali soil since commandos killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Qaeda mastermind, near the same town four years ago.

The Shabab leader was believed to have been killed in the firefight, but the SEALS were forced to withdraw before that could be confirmed, a senior American official said. Such operations by American forces are rare because they carry a high risk, and indicate that the target was considered a high priority. Baraawe, a small port town south of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, is known as a gathering place for the Shabab’s foreign fighters.

“The Baraawe raid was planned a week and a half ago,” said an American security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity about a classified operation. “It was prompted by the Westgate attack,” he added, referring to the mall in Nairobi that was overrun by militants two weeks ago, leaving more than 60 dead.

Witnesses in the area described a firefight lasting over an hour, with helicopters called in for air support. A senior Somali government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed the raid, saying, “The attack was carried out by the American forces and the Somali government was pre-informed about the attack.”

A spokesman for the Shabab, which is based in Somalia, said that one of its fighters had been killed in an exchange of gunfire but that the group had beaten back the assault. American official initially reported that they had seized the Shabab leader, but later backed off of that account. The deadly assault on the Westgate shopping mall was a stark reminder of the power and reach of the Islamist group, which had a series of military setbacks in recent years and was widely viewed as weakened.

Close to the UN line, shots are fired to our right. The war in the DRC has claimed the lives of five million people since 1998; stories of barbarism abound and countless million women and girls have been raped.

Here we join a Human Rights Watch interview with a woman whose face is taut with anguish. Her eyes occasionally flick to mine but then dart away as her hands work at the folds in her yellow and brown dress. In a whisper she describes how an M23 rebel came to her house and raped her repeatedly in front of her children. It was a month ago and she was three months pregnant at the time. The HRW team notes down the details; they are the only people who keep a record and the woman has travelled for hours to get there. Reporting it is her only recourse.

We are here to film Mobutu’s jungle Versailles. We pass an airport with a runway built for Concorde, which Mobutu would hire for his shopping trips. The marble-clad terminal building is derelict; where the French President François Mitterrand once sipped champagne, families live in lean-tos. We eventually reach the palace to which Mobutu retreated as the Congo collapsed and undiagnosed cancer tore at his insides.

We are there to see the mighty river; the Congo, the second largest by volume of water in the world.I have never seen rapids like those on the Congo. The Inga dams alone, if properly developed, could meet the whole of Africa’s energy needs. Two wiry young men guide us to the Ulala rapids and 90 minutes later we are at a mighty cataract, churning water piled high in waves the size of apartment blocks. With only 15 minutes before sunset we film and then slog back uphill through the sudden African darkness.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-where-hell-is-just-a-local-call-away-8859863.html

This is an excerpt of a British Journalist on the Democratic Republic of Congo which is far more blessed than us in Natural Resources:-

The canyon below is choked with mud, while trucks belonging to the mine’s Canadian owners are carting loads of earth to be spun, crushed and sprayed with cyanide. They aim to produce 150,000 ounces of gold a year here. This is a smashed, brutal landscape, its mountains levelled, its rivers blocked.

The DRC contains 80 per cent of the world’s columbite-tantalite (coltan) reserves (a vital component of smartphones and iPads), 49 per cent of its cobalt reserves, and titanic amounts of copper, gold and diamonds. Yet poverty, famine, disease and war have been all that the Congolese people have reaped from their bounty.

The Congolese people I see are utterly pessimistic about their nation’s future. They tell a joke about evil men in hell being allowed a phone call by the devil. Saddam Hussein and Hitler pay a lot of money to call Iraq and Germany, but Mobutu is allowed to phone the Congo for hours at little cost. Why? “We’re in hell. Congo is a local call.”

Dan Snow’s History of the Congo is on Wednesday, 9pm, BBC2

Praise God for His mercies

May God help the Nigerian economy

Is the Nigerian Government broke?

This followed the suspension of the Wholesale Dutch Auction System (WDAS) at the official foreign exchange market.

It said that the RDAS would allow only customers of deposit money banks to buy foreign exchange at the CBN through their banks.

This is against the WDAS where the deposit money banks bought foreign exchange at the CBN on their own accounts and in turn sold to their customers.

“The re-introduction of the RDAS is expected to prevent round tripping of foreign exchange purchased at the CBN official window to unauthorised channels.

“Also, a circular has been issued mandating all deposit money banks to redeem all inward money transfers in naira to the recipients at the prevailing inter-bank foreign exchange rate.

“This is in line with best practice,’’ it said.

- See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/10/cbn-bans-importation-foreign-currency/#sthash.6L7TlUme.dpuf