Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...munitions and materials, training new recruits, and abducting and holding any kidnap victims. Indeed, officials are virtually certain AQIM has transported Kloiber and Ebner to northern Mali or southern Algeria, the same area where the GSPC kept 31 captured European tourists hidden in 2003 until Germany allegedly paid a ransom). But because AQIM action is driven in part by the need for ransom payments, French officials hope these terrorists are less prone to committing the beheadings of valuable hostages that has become the gruesome trademark of other terrorists in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan...
...terrorism - bombings, shootings, logistics, organization and recruitment - they now need to show they can humiliate and intimidate the enemy through kidnapping too," says a French intelligence official. "They also know abducting Westerners draws lots of media attention to them, and more often than not ends up with big ransom payments that help fund more jihadist activity...
...funneled as much as $300 million to the rebels and should therefore be charged with financing terrorists, who Bogota alleges are also seeking uranium to make a dirty bomb. Uribe, remarkably, even asked the U.N. to charge Chavez with "genocide." The FARC, long involved in drug trafficking and ransom kidnapping, is on the State Department and European Union's lists of terrorist organizations; but FARC experts tell TIME that the group, despite its ample wherewithal, is unlikely to seek such a weapon. President Bush, meanwhile, said unequivocally this week as he lobbied Congress for a U.S.-Colombia free-trade pact...
...border on Saturday in an operation denounced by Ecuador's leftist President and Chavez ally Rafael Correa as a brazen violation of sovereignty. But the hemisphere has cooled considerably toward Chavez's antics, and his defense of the FARC, which earns hundreds of million dollars a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting cocaine trafficking, isn't winning him much international sympathy. A war on his western border could also prove how freely the FARC roams inside Venezuelan territory - an allegation Chavez denies, along with the assertion by Colombian police that seized FARC documents show a long political and financial alliance...
...would argue that by beheading the FARC, Plan Colombia is actually fulfilling its anti-drug mandate - because at least half of the between $500 million and $1 billion the FARC is believed to earn each year is derived from protecting Colombian cocaine trafficking. The other half is made via ransom kidnapping - the FARC currently holds more than 700 hostages in its jungle redoubts, including three Americans - which is the other reason the U.S. State Department placed the rebels on its list of international terrorist groups a decade ago (as does the European Union today...