Word: ambusher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...government called it the work of "bad people." "Ruthless killers" would have been more to the point. How else to describe the heavily armed gunmen who staged a roadside ambush in northern Laos last week, killing at least 12 people, including two European tourists and a Chinese national? One diplomat who visited the scene told TIME the attackers clearly wanted a "maximum casualty count...
...attack will inevitably scare off many tourists, thus depriving the impoverished state of a rare source of foreign currency. Yet, in the immediate aftermath, authorities acted as if catching the killers was at best a secondary concern. According to Western diplomatic officers, local police were busily cleaning up the ambush site instead of collecting evidence or interviewing witnesses. By midday, phone lines were cut in Vang Vieng, and the road around the town sealed. "They were trying to hush it up," claims a diplomatic official, to "pretend it didn't happen...
Patricia Spier was heading home from a mountaintop picnic in Indonesia's eastern province of Papua when the ambush began. Out of nowhere, a hail of automatic-weapon fire perforated the two Toyota Land Cruisers in which the American schoolteacher and a group of her colleagues and husband were traveling in. "I was shot in the back and fell to the floor," Spier recalls. "The attackers kept shooting and shooting for about 45 minutes ... it felt like thousands of bullets and pieces of shrapnel [were] ripping through the vehicle... People were screaming." By the time the gunfire stopped, three people...
...police is at best circumstantial but intriguing. Investigators found 100 spent shells in the area of the attack, yet the poorly armed rebels are not known to waste precious ammunition. In addition, the military produced the body of an unidentified Papua man shot by soldiers the day after the ambush, and claimed it was one of the assailants. But an examination of the corpse revealed that not only had the man been dead longer than the military insisted, he also had a medical condition?massive enlargement of the testicles?that would have made it difficult...
...Minutes claimed he would not warn American troops in a war zone if he knew they were walking into a trap. “They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover,” he said of the journalists who knew of the ambush. Wallace’s stolid “objectivity” gained him the enmity of government officials and demonstrated just how coldly doctrinaire journalists can be when faced with real ethical challenges. According to Wallace, the imperative is to get the story, period. Let those Americans...