This Week's Global Terrorist Stories - 20-5 - Israel, Thailand-2, Nigeria

At least 47 dead, 37 wounded
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Hebron Terrorist Arrested After Attacking

IDF Soldier with Fire

By Hana Levi Julian 
Jewish Press

An Israeli Border Guard police officer catches fire after Palestinian Authority rioters throw a Molotov cocktail at him during a protest against US President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan in Hebron on Feb 3, 2020.

IDF soldiers have captured a Palestinian Authority terrorist who is accused of setting an Israeli soldier afire. He was arrested and transferred to security personnel for interrogation.

The soldier, Shachar Madioni, is an officer who was dispersing Arab rioters in Hebron last Monday when he was hit in the shoulder by a Molotov cocktail (fire bomb) thrown by a terrorist.

His uniform immediately went up in flames. Miraculously, Madioni extinguished the fire.

In a subsequent interview with the Hebrew-language Israeli daily Yediot Ahronit, Madioni said, “Fortunately it caught fire on my vest and I immediately put the fire out with my hands. I estimate that it took two or three seconds, during which I felt a strong heat on my body.

“I experienced a miracle,” he said. “What prevented the fire from igniting on me was the protective equipment – the vest is built of flame retardant material that is made precisely for protection against firebombs. Fortunately it didn’t catch through to my clothing.”

Arab terrorists have continued to use Molotov cocktails in attacks on Israeli soldiers a number of times since that attack, and several times managed to directly hit IDF soldiers.

Each time, they failed to burn the soldier — miraculously, the soldiers were able to extinguish the flames immediately.

Soldier Kills at Least 20, Wounds 31, in

Thailand Shooting Spree

The soldier shot a superior officer at a military base, then went on a shooting rampage at a mall, the authorities said.

The authorities helped people leave the Terminal 21 shopping mall in Korat early Sunday while the gunman remained at large.Credit...Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

By Muktita Suhartono, Ryn Jirenuwat and Richard C. Paddock

KORAT, Thailand — A soldier armed with an assault rifle went on a shooting rampage at a military base and a shopping mall on Saturday, killing at least 20 people and wounding 31 while broadcasting himself on Facebook Live, officials said.

The authorities said the gunman, a Thai soldier who was still at large early Sunday, shot a superior officer and injured several others at the military base. He then drove a stolen Humvee about nine miles to the mall, a huge, seven-story complex in the city of Korat, where he killed some of his victims, officials said.

“I was really terrified. At that moment, I could not think about anything,” said Kul Kaemthong, a mall cleaner who rushed into a room in the fourth-floor food court with about 40 other people to hide before emerging hours later. “When we heard a gunshot, everybody started running for our lives.”

The motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.

A soldier believed to be connected to the attack posted footage of himself on his Facebook page on Saturday wearing a helmet.

“I’m tired now,” he says at one point. “I can’t move my finger anymore.” The Facebook page was taken down soon after.

Security forces taking cover behind an

ambulance near the Terminal 21 mall

Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

Security camera footage from the mall that was shared on social media showed what appeared to be the gunman walking past shops with a long gun.

A Defense Ministry spokesman, Lt. Gen. Kongcheep Tantravanich, said that the soldier had “shot and killed his superior officer” at Suthampitak Army Base in Nakhon Ratchasima Province. “He also shot and injured military officers,” he added.

The public health minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, told reporters that 20 people had been killed and 31 injured. Four sustained serious injuries, he said, and were undergoing surgery early Sunday.

The suspected gunman’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have been removed, the company said, though it did not immediately answer questions about when his live stream went online or how long it had remained online before being taken down.

A spokesman for Facebook, Andy Stone, said its staff would “remove any violating content related to this attack as soon as we become aware of it.”

3 mi.5 km.

The area around the mall in Korat was cordoned off as the siege continued past midnight amid fears that many people were trapped inside. Video broadcast on Thai television showed dozens of people, many carrying small children, fleeing the mall with the help of police and soldiers.

The gunman’s actions mirrored the tactics of other mass shootings in which the attackers streamed their violent rampages on Facebook Live. The company has taken down such videos in the past, but they have still been shared elsewhere on the internet.

On Saturday, several violent videos of the Thai gunman’s attack could be seen on the internet forum 4chan.

The Terminal 21 shopping mall is a huge, seven-story complex. 

Narong Sangnak/EPA, via Shutterstock

Two months later, in May, Facebook announced it would take stronger action in response to those who shared copies of violent videos: It would bar people who did so for up to 30 days on a first offense. Multiple offenses could draw a ban.

In Thailand, a country where most weapons are in the hands of the police and the military, mass shootings are extremely rare.

An exception is in Thailand’s south, where an ethnic Malay Muslim insurgency is battling the majority Buddhist state. In one of the country’s bloodiest episodes in recent memory, gunmen killed at least 15 people in November at a security checkpoint in Yala Province.

Early Sunday, the heavily armed Thai soldier remained holed up in the mall as police and soldiers tried to help those trapped in the building and senior police and army officials arrived at the scene.

A video clip widely shared on social media provided audio of what appeared to be a shouting match between a civilian in the mall and the gunman. The two traded insults and obscenities, prompting the gunman to fire two rounds. Neither person was depicted in the video, which shows a set of escalators.

The standoff continued past midnight.

UPDATE: Feb 9, 2020

Security forces in Thailand have finally managed to neutralize the gunman who killed at least 21 people during his shooting rampage that lasted for nearly 17 hours, according to the country’s health minister.

“The police have killed the perpetrator and rescued eight hostages. Some were wounded,” a security source told Reuters on condition of anonymity pending an official press conference.

Korat, Thailand

15 Killed in Southern Thailand in the Worst Violence in Years

The attack on a security checkpoint puts new focus on a bitter but often forgotten conflict that has killed both Buddhists and Muslims for years.

A bomb squad inspecting the site of an attack in Yala Province in southern Thailand on Wednesday.Credit...Tuwaedaniya Meringing/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Hannah Beech and Ryn Jirenuwat

Nov 6, 2019

BANGKOK — Gunmen killed at least 15 people at a security checkpoint in southern Thailand on Tuesday night, the worst outbreak of violence in years in the country’s insurgency-plagued border region.

The attackers stormed several spots around the checkpoint, in the Muang Yala District in Yala Province. The post was guarded by a mix of village defense volunteers, police officers and other security personnel, officials said.

Eight people were killed on the spot, while seven died in the hospital, hospital staff said. Three more people sustained serious injuries. Officials said that the gunmen also stole weapons from the checkpoint.

“Everywhere I stepped with my feet, it was all blood,” said Saritphan Sae-jang, a rescue worker who rushed to the scene Tuesday night but was delayed by the nails and fallen trees that the militants had scattered across the road to foil any rescue effort.

Mr. Saritphan has worked for the Mae Kor Neaw Foundation, a local charity, as an emergency rescuer for nearly 15 years. “I have never seen so many dead people at the scene of one incident,” he said.

Since an ethnic Malay Muslim insurgency renewed its campaign against the majority Buddhist state 15 years ago, more than 7,000 people in southern Thailand have been killed counting both sides of the divide. The assault on Tuesday claimed victims from both faiths, but no one has claimed responsibility, which is common for such attacks, officials said.

“This is a dreadful incident,” said Lt. Gen. Kongcheep Tantravanich, a Ministry of Defense spokesman, adding that orders had gone out to “the forces to bring the culprits to justice as soon as possible.”

The three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia, which are the only Muslim majority part of the country, are not far from some of the powdery beaches that lure foreign tourists to Thailand. But violence rarely extends beyond the confines of those provinces, once an independent Muslim Malay sultanate before Buddhist-majority Thailand imposed its political will.

The body of a person killed in the attack being brought to a hospital in Yala Province. Tuwaedaniya Meringing/Agence France-Presse Getty

The attacks usually come in the form of ambushes on checkpoints or bombs targeting military outposts or crowded locations, like shopping malls or hotels. Drive-by shootings of village chiefs and others seen as tied to the state are common. Beheadings and the burning of bodies, particularly of female teachers, have horrified Thais.

Unlike some other Muslim insurgencies, which have tied themselves to transnational organizations like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, the militants in southern Thailand so far have focused more on localized grievances than calls for a global jihad.

Yet their ambitions for southern Thailand are hardly unified. Some militants have pushed for autonomy, while others have demanded outright independence. Others do not say anything at all, preferring to let the violence, which at its peak was claiming dozens of lives each month, speak for them.

The aim of much of the bloodshed, which overwhelmingly targets civilians, appears to be terrorism for its own sake, said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, the director of Deep South Watch, which monitors insurgent activity.

“The number of violent incidents has decreased over the past three or four years but the movement of insurgent cells is alive and well,” he said. “The military doesn’t know exactly whom to talk to, whom to negotiate with, whom it’s fighting, so it spends a lot of money on security with marginal, insignificant returns.”

Over the years, the central government has transformed the region into what feels like a giant occupation zone, with checkpoints, barbed wire and armored vehicles dotting a landscape of mosques, rubber plantations and palm trees. Around 60,000 Thai security forces are stationed in the three southernmost provinces.

To protect themselves from the insurgents, villagers, including Buddhists who were encouraged to move down south by economic incentives, have banded together in corps of armed volunteers. After receiving a modicum of military training, the volunteers are assigned to checkpoints. The homegrown militias are given names like “the eye of the pineapple,” in reference to the spots that pepper the fruit.

Soldiers stood guard during a Buddhist procession near the market in Yala in October.

Minzayar Oo for The New York Times

Most of those who died on Tuesday night were members of such a volunteer defense squad. The majority were elderly residents, said Mr. Saritphan, the rescue worker.

“They sacrificed their time to take care of the village,” he said. “It’s very sad. Nobody wanted this to happen.”

Lt. Gen. Pornsak Poonsawat, the chief of the 4th Army Region, which includes Yala, said that the insurgents deliberately targeted checkpoints staffed by “volunteers or villagers, who work by day and volunteer by night, so that they can create news to shock Thais.”

Three months ago, four other village defense volunteers were killed in a raid on a checkpoint in Pattani, another of Thailand’s southern provinces.

Last month, a Buddhist judge in Yala shot himself in a courtroom to protest what he said was pressure from above to sentence Muslim defendants to the death penalty, despite a lack of evidence in the case. The judge survived the bullet wound to his torso.

Some ethnic Malays say that even if they do not support independence, they chafe against a Buddhist Thai kingdom that imposes its language and laws on a culturally distinct region. Some have called for Islamic law in the deep south and have urged the teaching of Jawi, the local language, in schools.

With a state of emergency recently extended in southern Thailand, due process continues to elude Muslims accused of aiding the insurgency, human rights groups say. The memory lingers of the deaths in 2004 of nearly 80 Malay protesters who were crowded into trucks by security forces and suffocated in the heat or were crushed.

Last year, a well-known ethnic Malay activist was held incommunicado in a military detention camp for a week. Recruitment of militants profits from such injustices, said human rights defenders.

“The Thai government is fighting a violent separatist insurgency, but that does not empower the military to detain people without access to a judge, lawyer, or their family,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, at the time. “By holding people incommunicado, the military authorities are only increasing distrust among the local population.”

Church Diocese in Nigeria Confirms Murder of Entire Bridal Party by Islamic Militants

January 1, 2020

The communications director of a Catholic Diocese in Nigeria has confirmed that Martha Bulus, a bride-to-be, and all of the members of her bridal party were murdered by suspected Boko Haram insurgents at Gwoza on Dec. 26.

Father Francis Arinse told the Catholic News Service the group was on the way to the Bulus wedding which was scheduled for Dec. 31, when they were captured and killed by Islamic militants.

“They were beheaded by suspected Boko Haram insurgents at Gwoza on their way to her country home,” Arinse told CNS. He added that Bulus used to be his parishioner at St. Augustine Catholic Church, Maiduguri, after he was first ordained.

Arinse also said there had been a number of abductions recently in Borneo State. He stressed that the Nigerian government needed to strengthen its security forces in the area to prevent more abductions and stop the killing.

As CBN News reported, a terrorist group linked to the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP)  killed 11 Nigerian Christians on Christmas Day.  A video of the executions was released by the group. An earlier video revealed they were captured in the northeastern Nigerian states of Borno and Yobe.

The terrorists said the captives were executed as revenge for the killing of ISIS leaders Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and Abul-Hasan al-Muhajir.

Killing innocent people as revenge for the killing of terrorists is typical, blood-thirsty, Islamic insanity.