OK a piece of speculation but there are some links between a man now held in Zambia and the 7 July bombings in London. The man was arrested trying to enter Zambia from Zimbabwe over the border at Livingstone, an unusual route.
More details below the fold.
First, why would Mugabe have common cause with presumed radical muslims to attack London? Well pressure on him after the corrupt elections, deliberate starvation of opposition supporters, forced demolition of structures built without planning consent (not all “shanty towns” as it portayed sometimes) and his desperate economic situation where he is scrabbling aroung trying to get loans from South Africa and is selling off Zimbabwe to China in order to get money to run the country. To divert from his own incompetence and corruption, Mugabe’s favorite ploy is to blame the ex-colonial power’s critcising his running of Zimbabwe as a neo-colonialist plot to re-establish a colony (particularly ironic in view of his dealings with the Chinese). Mugabe is more batty than Blair so the idea of him believing his own propaganda is not inconceivable.
Now the evidence of the Zambian detainee. This BBC report from Friday gives some details of his arrest. Further information has emerged but this is not yet up or only on Sky News. While that is Murdoch owned, it has a better reputation than Fox but I am aware some do not like the linkage. Faroon Aswat was wanted by the US authorities and they requested extradition. That apparently has now been refused and there seems to be more interest in him now in connection with the London bombings than there was previously. He was brought up in the same area as one of the 7/7 bombers. After leaving the US he was reported as trying to settle in South Africa.
Now he has been arrested in Livingstone, Zambia. That is just over the border from the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls so the question becomes – why was he trying to cross there? Frankly about the only attraction for tourists coming from Zim to Livingstone is the railway museum. A bit like the Canadians with Niagra, the Zim side has the better views and much more developed tourist facilities. If you stay in Livingstone. you visit these on a day visa, not the other way round.
So was he trying to get to Lusaka, the Zambian capital? Well there is a railway from Livingston to Lusaka – I’ve used it and if I tell you that they will only sell you a ticket when the train arrives from the other end of the line, you can judge the reliability. “Greyhound” like buses make the journey and a recently completed well paved road links the two – it was built to serve a luxury hotel complex on the Zambian side of the Falls that opened at the turn of the decade. Both these options are very strange for somebody travelling from South Africa to Lusaka. If you look at the map, you will see the capital is well east of Livingstone. Buses go directly from Lusaka to Johannesburg and cross nearer Lusaka at the other, eastern. end of the land border and then virtually directly north/south through Harare and Beit Bridge. So if Aswat was entering Zambia, he was doing so in an uncoventional way that must have been to avoid detection.
So this raises all sorts of questions – how long had he been in Zimbabwe and what was he doing there? Did he link up with the Zim regime to get funding or other support to plan the London bombings?
We may be well into tin hat territory here but Blush (Blair/Bush) used far weaker evidence to justify a link between Iraq and the 9/11 New York attacks. Oh I forgot, no oil.