Indian millionaire charged with murder after ramming slow security guard

Local media reported that Mohammed Nisham, 39, rammed a 50-year-old security guard who later died in hospital

An Indian millionaire has been charged with murder after he deliberately rammed his car into his security guard.

Mohammed Nisham allegedly drove his Hummer jeep into a security guard, named only as K Chandrabose, after the man delayed opening the gate to the millionaire’s home in Thissur two weeks ago.

Mr Chandrabose, 50, succumbed to his injures yesterday. It is believed that he died of cardiac arrest after spending two weeks on life support.

Local news outlets reported that the controversial millionaire – a regular on India’s gossip pages – chased the security guard around a fountain in his car before battering him with an iron bar.

A Hummer car, pictured here in the US

Mr Nisham has now been taken in custody, police official Biju Kumar told the Mail Online.

The 29-year-old millionaire is reportedly facing several other criminal charges.

“We are planning to slap on him various provisions under Kerala Anti-Social Activities Prevention Act (KAAPA),’’ a police officertold the Indian Express. The warning is similar to a British ASBO and is more commonly used on members of local gangs.  

Mr Nisham is a well-known tobacco supplier, and has a hotel and jewellery business in the Middle East.

It is not the first time he has had a brush with the law. In 2013 he allowed his then nine-year-old son to drive his Ferrari. The incident was filmed by his wife and posted on social media, causing outrage.

In the same year he allegedly locked a female police officer in another of his cars after she pulled him over for a routine check.

The millionaire refused to allow the distressed officer out of the car after she entered to take the keys to prevent him driving away. Standing outside, he locked the car remotely and did not release the woman until the arrival of her colleagues.

Ash Wednesday 2015: What is it and why is it an important day for Christians?

Ash Wednesday is marked 46 days before Easter Sunday

Today is the first day of Lent – the period of self-restraint and abstention for Christians ahead of Easter.

What does the day signify?

It marks the first day of fasting, repentance, prayer and self-control. Luxury or rich foods such as meat and dairy are often avoided by those taking part in Lent.

Abstention from personal “bad habits” such as watching television or eating too much sugar is also commonly practised.

When is Ash Wednesday?

The day is marked on different dates each year. It falls on 18 February this year, the day after Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day.

Rich ingredients are traditionally used up before Lent on Shrove Tuesday

How is it celebrated?

During church services, clergy use ashes burned at the previous year’s Palm Sunday mixed with holy water or olive oil to mark a cross on a worshipper’s forehead as a sign of repentance.

This is to signify the Biblical passage in Genesis 3:19: “For dust you are and to dust you shall return.”

Why is it 46 days before Easter, and not 40?

Although Lent lasts for six weeks, Sundays are not included as they are considered a day for worship and rest.

Ash Wednesday is marked 46 days before Easter to imitate the full 40 days Jesus spent fasting in a desert before being blessed by John the Baptist.

Despite Show of Force, Pagoda Visit Peaceful

Deputy Phnom Penh governor Khuong Sreng, center, visits Wat Samakki Raingsey on Tuesday as part of an official investigation into what City Hall has called ‘anti-government acts’ by the pagoda. (Ehow Share)

Deputy Phnom Penh governor Khuong Sreng on Tuesday reversed course on a City Hall announcement that it was investigating Wat Samakki Raingsey over alleged anti-government behavior and secessionist designs, comments that sparked fears among its monks that the independent-minded pagoda would be shut down.
During a visit to the pagoda with more than 50 police and military police in tow Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Sreng told its head monks that Samakki Raingsey would need to secure approval from the Ministry of Cults and Religions before it was fully accredited. But he left without making an explicit threat to shut it down or curb the unorthodox activities of its residents. 

“I want the pagoda to follow the rules and laws,” he told acting chief monk Thach Ha Sam Ang. “You should not try to hide things from me. I know everything you do. When you act like this, I am not happy about it.”
Samakki Raingsey is one of the few pagodas in the country that regularly defies the country’s Buddhist hierarchy by speaking out on politically sensitive issues. Over the past year, it has raised the ire of local authorities by offering shelter to out-of-town villagers protesting in Phnom Penh against the private companies they accuse of stealing their land.
Last month, City Hall said it was investigating the pagoda over the fatal stabbing of one of its senior monks and other unspecified “anti-government acts.” In a subsequent interview, municipal spokesman Long Dimanche went so far as to claim that the pagoda’s alleged lack of cooperation with authorities was “like a secession.”
During Tuesday’s saber-rattling visit, however, the deputy governor said the city was only interested in the murder—a suspect has already been arrested and charged—and whether the pagoda was fully accredited, nothing else.
“After the notice [of an investigation], there was a war in the news between the monks, supporters and City Hall, but this is all confusion,” Mr. Sreng said. “This issue has been exaggerated because of politicians and extremists…. It is not like people say, that City Hall is coming to destroy Samakki Raingsey pagoda. It is not true.”
He said the municipal spokesman’s talk of secession was also blown out of proportion.
“You might be confused,” he said. “[Mr. Dimanche] said ‘like a secession,’ not that it was a secession. Khmer words are rich because they have 33 consonants and many vowels, so listen…. He said ‘almost like.’ This is not an issue.”
Reporters attempted to ask Mr. Dimanche, who accompanied Mr. Sreng to the pagoda, to clarify his words for himself. But the deputy governor stepped in to stop the spokesman from speaking.
“I do not allow him to speak,” Mr. Sreng said.

A municipal official records the personal information of a monk at Samakki Raingsey pagoda on Tuesday.

As for accreditation, Mr. Sreng said the pagoda would first need to get an official seal from the Ministry of Interior before going to the Ministry of Cults and Religion. But to get the seal, he said, the pagoda needs to prove it owns the land on which it stands.
Thach Ha Sam Ang, the acting chief monk, said the original title was lost in a fire and asked the deputy governor for help to replace it. Mr. Sreng said he would try, but added that it would be difficult.
After about two hours, Mr. Sreng left Samakki Raingsey to songs and cheers from monks and supporters who were relieved that the pagoda had not been shut down.
But not all of them were convinced by his claims that the city was only interested in the pagoda’s paperwork and the recent murder. Some pointed out that the murder of monks at other pagodas had not attracted the same scrutiny.
During the deputy governor’s visit, his staff recorded the name and age of every monk living at Samakki Raingsey. They instructed the pagoda to notify commune officials any time a new monk came to stay there.
Thach Thavry, the pagoda’s head of administration, said the heavy police presence was clearly meant to scare the monks out of continuing their activism.
“We can see that they want to show their muscle and threaten us,” he said. “What [Mr. Sreng] says is different from what he does…. But we will continue to protest for social justice and support the villagers because it is our right.”

Obama considers release of secret sections of report on Saudi Arabia ties to al Qaeda

Saudi officials have denied fresh allegations 

that senior figures supported Bin Laden's al Qaeda

The White House may declassify still-secret sections of an official inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attacks which refer to possible Saudi Arabian support.

Questions over the 28-page section of the congressional report have been raised this week following the deposition of imprisoned former al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui in which he claimed major Saudi figures were donors to his group in late 1990s.
Saudi officials have denied this.

According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, US intelligence last year began reevaluating the decision to classify the section following a request from congress, though no timescale for the decision was given. Earnest said: "The United States and Saudi Arabia maintain a strong counterterrorism relationship as a key element of our broad and strategic partnership."

Moussaoui said a list of al-Qaeda donors that he drafted during Osama bin Laden's time at the helm included "extremely famous" Saudi officials such as Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud, a former Saudi intelligence chief. US officials familiar with the classified section of the report, in which the involvement of Saudi families in financing terrorism is examined, are torn as to whether it should be made public. Some have argued that it should remain secret because it includes material that had not been investigated enough, but others, speaking to Reuters on the condition of anonymity, have said there was no good reason not to have it released. People familiar with the report said most of the material that remained classified originated with the FBI. Read more: Convicted terrorist says Saudis funded al Qaeda Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, a separate U.S. government inquiry into the attacks, said it was appropriate that the material was classified and there may still be reason to withhold it. "None of the people involved had been interviewed and many relevant documents had not yet been reviewed," Zelikow said.

Timber Trader Try Pheap Linked to Logging Racket

By Zsombor Peter | February 6, 2015

In a new report, U.K. environmental rights group Global Witness places Cambodian timber magnate Try Pheap at the heart of a vast illegal logging operation driving the country’s rarest tree species to the brink of extinction with the collusion of government and military officials.
“The Cost of Luxury: Cambodia’s illegal trade in precious wood with China,” released Thursday, summarizes an eight-month undercover investigation last year by the rights group during which their researchers followed Mr. Pheap’s loggers and trucks across the country, interviewed his employees and middlemen, and tracked his shipments to Hong Kong using leaked customs records. 

A man walks past shipping containers holding Siamese rosewood belonging to timber magnate Try Pheap
at the international port in Sihanoukville in early 2014. (Global Witness)

“Buyers of lavish four-post beds and vanity tables in China may be unwittingly lining the pockets of what can only be described as timber gangsters,” Megan MacInnes, the head of Global Witness’ land team, says in the report.
“Try Pheap and his network are destroying Cambodia’s last forests and robbing indigenous communities of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, the very officials in Cambodia who should be stopping them are conspiring to ensure that contraband wood enjoys safe passage and is exported as seemingly legitimate lumber,” Ms. MacInnes says.
A former adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen, Mr. Pheap has bought up land and mining concessions across the country while heaping donations on the prime minister’s wife’s charity and the very government ministries charged with keeping his operations in check.
Mr. Pheap has the exclusive rights to purchase every tree logged on land concessions in northeastern Ratanakkiri province and all the illegally logged wood seized by authorities anywhere in Cambodia, contravening the legal requirement that confiscated timber be publicly auctioned off.
The Global Witness report adds to mounting evidence over recent years that Mr. Pheap has leveraged those rights to launder vast volumes of illegally logged wood, flout a raft of local laws and ship it all out of the country using dubious export licenses.
The timber route the group’s researchers map out in the report ends in China, where carefully carved tables and beds fashioned from the rarest trees can fetch up to $1 million a piece. It begins in the remote forests of Cambodia’s Virachey National Park in Ratanakkiri.
There, Global Witness said, its team visited illegal-logging camps and watched loggers pick off the most valuable trees—plotting it all by GPS. They followed trucks hauling the wood to depots under the control of the Try Pheap Group (TPG), the parent company of Mr. Pheap’s various operations, on to his provincial depot in Banlung City, and from there to the Vietnamese border or the international port in Sihanoukville.
Rarely Legal
The country’s 2002 forestry law bans the harvesting of rare trees in natural forests, though the government never followed up with a planned directive listing those trees by name. But a 2000 government list of rare species includes thnong, neang nuon and—the most precious of the lot—kra nhung, or Siamese rosewood.
Global Witness’ researchers saw Mr. Pheap’s network logging, transporting and shipping all of these species.
“While monitoring TPG’s operations on the ground, researchers observed that forest clearance activities and timber stockpiles in TPG’s log depots in the forest, Banlung, the company’s special economic zone in O’Yadaw and main depot in Udong all primarily contained the two rosewood species,” neang nuon and kra nhung, the report says.
“Interviews with those involved in the illegal logging throughout [Virachey park] and the forests in its southern vicinity showed exactly how easy it is for TPG to harvest timber outside [concession] areas and bring it to provincial depots where it is mixed with timber transported from inside the [concessions],” it adds. “Most of the timber in the park and surrounding area is reportedly being harvested either under commission by or for sale to TPG.”
Global Witness says villagers and loggers in the province told them that Mr. Pheap’s middlemen show up with officials from the Environment Ministry about once a month to push the illegal logging a few kilometers deeper into the forest, doling out patches to “subcontractors” with their own saws, trucks and work teams. Even those who don’t want to join in, the report says, are coaxed along with a combination of gifts and threats.
“If we do not log,” one villager reportedly told the researchers, “how can we feed and raise our families? And if we do not cut the trees, the company is doing it anyway. Logging for money is better than losing the forests without anything taken.”
Global Witness says it identified at least 89 of Mr. Pheap’s middlemen by name, the most powerful among them being Hom Hoy, a major general in the army’s Brigade 70, once the personal bodyguard unit of the prime minister. It says villagers, loggers and a source close to the general all confirmed the arrangement.
It says it obtained a contract between Maj. Gen. Hoy and a group of villagers in which the general offers to build them a bridge and community hall, “apparently in return for their consent for his men to log in the area.”
“They agreed to Hom Hoy’s proposal only reluctantly, believing they had no choice. However, after all of the luxury trees had been felled, the middleman’s loggers moved on but the village hall and bridge were not built,” the report says.
Global Witness says it wrote to the general for comment in December but received no reply. Contacted Thursday by a reporter, Brigade 70 deputy commander Duong Ra said there was no one by the name of Hom Hoy in the unit.
Shady Shipping
Besides the harvesting of rare trees, Cambodian law also bans the export of round or roughly squared logs wider than 25 cm of any species.
Global Witness says its researchers watched Mr. Pheap’s depot in Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadaw district, which sits on the Vietnam border, and saw the company load several shipping containers with logs both wider than the legal limit and cut from protected species. Over two weeks, they saw an average of 15 of the containers a day cross into Vietnam. The drivers told them the wood was headed to the Vietnamese port of Qui Nhon and from there on to China.
The researchers also followed some of the containers they watched being loaded with rare wood in Ratanakkiri and elsewhere to the Sihanoukville Autonomous Port.
Over four weeks, they saw at least 30 of Mr. Pheap’s containers being trucked into the port a day.
“This amounts to an estimated 900 cubic meters of TPG-acquired timber stock passing into the port daily, an estimate which was confirmed by information given to the team by a customs officer,” the report says.
That team also obtained records from the port for one TPG shipment of 4,607 cubic meters in March.
Global Witness says the records include an export license listing the Forestry Administration as the exporter—which the group claims government procedure prohibits—and a TPG invoice with a handwritten note from a customs official more than doubling the value of the timber per cubic meter from $510 to $1,200, bringing the single shipment to $5.5 million. An export permit issued to TPG seven days later, however, lists the lower unit value.
A second set of records for another shipment of 105 cubic meters, also in March, cites a customs permit from the previous shipment the researchers had records for, a permit that had already expired. “This means that this second export of timber by Try Pheap may have been done without the correct customs permit, which could constitute fraud,” the report says.
According to the records, both shipments were headed to China via the same Hong Kong firm, the Kin Chung Transportation Company.
In Hong Kong, Global Witness found the firm operating out of an unmarked residential house with a share capital of 2 Hong Kong dollars split evenly between two directors. The company had no listed phone number or website.
None of the people the researchers interviewed at Kin Chung’s other properties had any knowledge of the firm trading timber. The firm’s directors claimed to have no idea what was in the containers they shipped and told the researchers they had never seen the records of the Cambodian shipments from March and had no idea why their company’s name and address was used.
“Such a response only further raises suspicions about…Try Pheap’s timber trading business,” the report says. “Timber harvested, processed and exported by the Try Pheap Group or its affiliates should not be considered legal until proven otherwise.”
The report offers no figures on how much rare timber Mr. Pheap is shipping to China, Cambodia’s biggest market. But Global Witness’ findings, and Chinese customs data, suggest he is shipping most of it.
Chinese customs data obtained by the Environment Investigation Agency, another U.K. environmental rights group, shows that China imported nearly 21,000 cubic meters of hongmu—a category of prized timber species for making furniture that includes Siamese rosewood—from Cambodia in 2013. That was nearly triple what the country imported from Cambodia the year before.
According to Chinese customs data obtained by Global Witness, China’s imports of hongmu from Cambodia shot past 55,000 cubic meters in the first nine months of 2014 alone and accounted for 97 percent of all the wood China imported from Cambodia over that period.
“The Try Pheap Group’s raids on Cambodia’s last forests are tantamount to daylight robbery,” Ms. MacInnes says in the report. “The company is routinely and brazenly flouting laws aimed at protecting Cambodians and the ecosystems they rely on. This is yet another example from Cambodia of political power and business interests trumping citizens’ rights and the wholesale capture of the country’s natural resources by its corrupt ruling elite.”

Defend and Deny
Contacted Thursday, government officials and TPG employees either declined to comment, denied the report’s claims or defended their own work.
Chey Sith, who heads a shipping company that has handled Mr. Pheap’s exports, said he no longer worked with the timber tycoon but declined to say when the arrangement ended or discuss their past work together.
A spokesman and an administration chief for Mr. Pheap could not be reached for comment. Neither could Pol Visal, the head of his operations in Ratanakkiri.
Sei La, who manages Mr. Pheap’s operations in Preah Vihear province, however, rejected all of the report’s allegations.
“What Global Witness says in the report is not true because we never log inside or outside of economic land concessions. We only buy confiscated illegally logged wood from the government for export,” he said.
The deputy director of the Commerce Ministry’s customs department, Sem Meng, said he could not comment on exports from the Sihanoukville port because they were under the jurisdiction of the port authority. The port’s director, Lou Kimchhun, could not be reached.
Sao Sopheap, a spokesman for the Environment Ministry, which oversees Virachey National Park, declined to comment because he had yet to read the report.
In a prepared response, the Forestry Administration denied any wrongdoing.
“Until now no licenses have been issued to harvest, transport or export forest products irregularly or contrary to the law. The harvesting of forest products was carried out in compliance with the permit principles of the Cambodian government,” it says.
It says the rare timber the country exports comes only from what authorities take from illegal loggers or forests being cleared for development projects. It boasts of a 1,900-hectare plantation in Siem Reap province just for growing luxury-grade wood.
The Forestry Administration also notes the government’s decision in 2013 to join 176 other countries in signing an international convention giving special protection to Siamese rosewood.
Under the rules, the government has to issue a license for any shipment of Siamese rosewood in unprocessed form out of the country. Despite what Global Witness’ researchers saw and recorded during most of 2014, Cambodia has yet to issue a single such license.

In Restive Pagoda, City Sees Threat of ‘Secession’

Villagers displaced from Kratie province’s
Snuol district mingle with CNRP officials, monks
and laymen at Phnom Penh’s Samakki Raingsey pagoda
in May. (Siv Channa)

Phnom Penh City Hall has created an ad hoc committee to investigate whether monks at the restive Samakki Raingsey pagoda—a hotbed of anti-eviction activism that has raised the ire of local authorities over the past several months—have been properly ordained.
Rights groups and monks at the pagoda say the move is a ploy to silence one of the few pagodas in the city not under the thumb of the ruling CPP and to stamp out legally protected dissent. 

In a statement posted to its Facebook page on Friday, City Hall said the committee was created in the wake of the fatal stabbing last month of the pagoda’s second deputy chief monk by a fellow monk “to resolve illegal controversies and other anti-government acts” there. It said Phnom Penh deputy governor Khuong Sreng presided over a meeting of the committee on Tuesday to review the work of the pagoda’s monks and other inhabitants.
For the past half-year, Samakki Raingsey has offered shelter to communities from the provinces that have come to Phnom Penh to press the government to intervene in their land disputes with private companies. Police have repeatedly blocked the visitors and their hosts from leaving the pagoda to protest, and in November arrested a pair of monks who were on their way to a planned rally there.
Contacted Sunday, municipal spokesman Long Dimanche said the newly formed committee includes representatives from the city’s police, military police and department of religion. He accused the pagoda’s chief monks of being bad Buddhists and went so far as to suggest that they had designs to break away from the government’s control.
“All their actions are in contravention of Buddhist rules and discipline, and we have never seen Samakki Raingsey cooperate with the authorities. It is like a secession in the city, and we cannot let them do it,” he said.
Mr. Dimanche said municipal authorities would visit the pagoda sometime this month.
“We will check whether the pagoda has been created legitimately. We will look at the laws and procedures and check the monks who stay there to see if they joined the monkhood in compliance with the law,” he said. “We do not know if Samakki Raingsey is legitimate.”
Thach Ha Sam Ang, Samakki Raingsey’s acting chief monk, said the January 12 murder was being used as an excuse for City Hall to intimidate monks at one of the few pagodas that refused to toe the CPP line, and possibly close down the pagoda.
“The government is afraid of the pagoda because it supports the people and dares to speak out against the government,” he said. “It is not right to use this excuse [the murder] to shut down the pagoda.”
“All the actions of the monks at Samakki Raingsey are meant to help people with land disputes,” the acting chief monk added. “This does not violate the law and it is the right thing to do. We are not causing insecurity.”
Am Sam Ath, technical supervisor for rights group Licadho, also said that the city was scrutinizing the pagoda now—some 17 years after it was established—because the pagoda was supporting protesters, and not because of the recent murder.
He scoffed at the city spokesman’s suggestion that a secessionist movement was brewing there.
“They cannot use the word ‘secession’ for the pagoda; it is a serious word,” Mr. Sam Ath said. “Secession means the pagoda wants to separate from the state. But how can they separate when the monks have no weapons?”
Mr. Sam Ath said the new committee was further proof that the government feared losing control of the monkhood.
Before and after the 2013 national election, hundreds of monks defied their Buddhist patriarchs by joining the opposition CNRP in protest marches against the CPP in Phnom Penh and staging their own marches in the countryside. The CPP narrowly won the poll, according to the official count, but the ruling party had its worst showing in 20 years.
In November, the leaders of the country’s two main Buddhist sects called on the government to pass a law that would prevent monks from voting.