Word: australian
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Alastair Gaisford, now retired, was consul of the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh at the time and in charge of assembling the case file after Wilson's death. He says it includes cables between top-level Australian and Cambodian officials showing that in the run-up to the standoff, Canberra made a commitment of military assistance to Phnom Penh regardless of the outcome of the hostage negotiations - a pledge Gaisford says "was effectively the signing over of [the hostages'] death warrant," since the Cambodian army was more focused on proving its prowess than on collateral damage to the hostages...
Almost 16 years after Australian backpacker David Wilson was kidnapped and killed in Cambodia by a Khmer Rouge militia, the Australian government is resisting fresh demands for full disclosure of the case file on his death. Wilson was 29 when he was kidnapped in July 1994, along with Briton Mark Slater and Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet, in a Khmer Rouge ambush on the train they were riding from the capital Phnom Penh to the seaside town of Sihanoukville. Six weeks later, the three tourists were executed at a remote Khmer Rouge stronghold after negotiations for their release broke down. Parties...
...years, Wilson's murder has been surrounded by intrigue. Shortly after the abduction, a wealthy Australian businessman offered to pay the $150,000 ransom the Khmer Rouge holdouts were demanding. Retired Australian commandos proposed launching a Rambo-style rescue mission. Opportunistic local middlemen muddled the ransom talks, communicating inflated figures to both sides so they could pocket the difference. Wilson's abduction occurred at a time when foreign journalists and adventurous travelers were returning to Cambodia to witness the country's Wild West atmosphere. The nation had just returned to being a nominally self-governed democracy following years of civil...
...with the Victorian state coroner who is relaunching the inquest, has been denied access to 157 pages of the several-thousand-page case file at Canberra's insistence to protect its intelligence-gathering methods. Wilson's family, which still lives in Victoria, believes the documents will show that the Australian government did not discourage the Cambodian army from shelling the site where the hostages were being held - a rash move believed to have directly led to their killings in the following days. The army had wanted to swiftly topple prominent Khmer Rouge positions in order to restore the legitimacy...
...extremism. The FBI is tracking more than a dozen Somali Americans who disappeared from their homes and are suspected of joining al-Shabab, and in November, 14 Minnesota men with connections to Somalia were charged with offenses like aiding a terrorist organization; four have pleaded guilty. In August, Australian police arrested five men from the Somali community in Melbourne on suspicion of plotting to attack an army barracks outside Sydney. The September call to Cape Town was picked up because a group of ethnic Somalis in the city were already under surveillance on suspicion of raising funds for al-Shabab...