Word: yousef
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Yousef Abu Ghannam's family holds the key (and the souvenir concession) for the Mosque of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives; it was a Christian shrine until Saladin took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. Abu Ghannam reports sadly that business is down. "We used to get 700 to 800 people a day," he says. "Now we're lucky to get 150. People are afraid." The few visitors who brave Jerusalem today encounter a metropolis again edgy and turbulent. In the sanctuary of the city's churches, mosques and synagogues, pilgrims can find momentary tranquillity. But the streets bear...
...invited the couple to visit one of his organization's camps. But family ties didn't do much for Schilling - soon after his arrival, the group accused him of working for the CIA and warned that he would be beheaded unless the U.S. releases World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef. The connection isn't entirely arbitrary: Abu Sayyaf was founded by Filipino Muslims returning from Afghanistan, where they took part in the U.S.-backed jihad against the Russian-backed government. Yousef had not only been their comrade-in-arms in Afghanistan, he'd also allegedly spent a few years...
...tourists were now linked to a crisis in the southern Philippines. A month earlier, Abu Sayyaf fighters had kidnapped 53 people, including 22 children, from schools on Basilan Island, 50 miles northeast of Jolo. They demanded that the Philippine government persuade U.S. President Bill Clinton to release Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, who is serving a life-plus-240-year sentence in Colorado. When Philippine President Joseph Estrada rejected the demand, the rebels announced that they had beheaded two hostages. Estrada ordered his military to launch an assault on the Abu Sayyaf camp...
...group, which has boasted of links with Osama bin Laden, only a month ago seized some 50 students from schools on the island of Basilian and demanded that Manila secure the release by Washington of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and other convicted terrorists held in U.S. prisons. In this instance, they're assumed to want money, and the Philippines government isn't interested in paying. But the multinational makeup of the hostages has raised the pressure on Manila to do whatever it can to avoid bloodshed. With no solution in sight a week after the latest hostage drama...
...have issued no demands as yet, in previous kidnappings Abu Sayyaf has made demands ranging from insisting that the government include a popular local Muslim film star on its negotiating team (a demand that was met) to a call for the release of imprisoned World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and others convicted of terrorism in the U.S. The group also announced just last week that it had beheaded two Filipino hostages from a previous kidnapping as a "birthday present" to President Joseph Estrada. As the Philippine navy searches the countless small islands and inlets of its vast archipelago...