Portal:Current events/2004 September 10

September 10, 2004 (Friday)

An air strike in Iraq reportedly kills Habib Akdas, a man thought to be the leader of a terrorist cell responsible for the November 2003 bombings of two synagogues, a bank, and an embassy in Istanbul. Akdas was thought to have fled from Turkey to neighboring Iraq after the 2003 bombings to escape authorities. (MSNBC)
A train crash in Sweden kills two and injures 30. The accident happened when a passenger train collided with a lorry on a railway crossing in Kristianstad. (BBC)
Zimbabwe sentences British mercenary and former SAS officer Simon Mann to seven years in prison for his role in attempting the violent overthrow of the government of Equatorial Guinea. (The Guardian)
Questions are raised about the authenticity of memos obtained by the CBS television network and broadcast on its September 7 issue of 60 Minutes. The memos were purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, one of George W. Bush's commanding officers in the Texas Air National Guard. One of the memos which was supposed to have been written in 1973, uses a proportional font, kerning, and superscripts which were unlikely to have been available in typewriters of the period. See Killian memos. (CNN)
Abdel Aziz Ashkar, 34, a Hamas chief from the Jabaliya refugee camp, is killed while attempting to fire an anti-tank rocket at invading Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip. (BBC) (Reuters)^{[permanent dead link]}
Hindu hardliners, the VHP, announce plans to pull down the controversial tomb of Afzalkhan on Sunday, in a grim echo of the 1992 razing of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya that sparked some of India's worst religious riots. (Times of India)
A United States air strike on the Iraqi city of Fallujah kills one and wounds two others. (Reuters) Archived 2005-01-05 at the Wayback Machine
A team of astronomers working on the Yepun telescope in Chile believe they have made the first direct image of a planetary system beyond the Solar System. The star, called 2M1207, is 230 light-years away and is much smaller and fainter than the Sun. (BBC)
Three men possessing homemade bullets at an illegal arms workshop are arrested in connection with the March 19, 2004, assassination attempt in Taiwan. (BBC) (Channel News Asia)