Sorry, but your link doesn’t prove to me that he wasn’t involved. Just that he didn’t want to associated with it. It’s easy to have your buddies commit a crime, pretend that they don’t know you, and claim that you were outraged by thier actions. Of course they didn’t cut off her head on video so it must not have been him! Please. . .
The fact that they did not give a reason for picking her out and where unwilling to release her just tells me that they didn’t want it tied to him.
How about you proving he was involved then?
Yeah, but its not like Zarqawi is shy about taking the blame for hostage killings. The article doesn’t explicitly say so, but I belive that this is the first killing unclaimed by any established group.
Hostage taking is something you do if you want to maximize the attention given to killings. If Zarqawi wanted to kill Hassin without the bad press of taking her hostage, he could have had her assasinated as has been done to the heads of other aid organizations, who later decided to pull out.
Also note that from the beginning the kidnappers didn’t identify themselves, they weren’t suddenly suprised by the bad publicity and decided to try and confuse their identitiy after the fact.
Your right none of this proves Zarqawi wasn’t involved. Applying logic to religious fanatics is always a dicey business. But this really doesn’t fit his MO, and I think the evidence is heavily in favor of this having been a new group.
Well he is the known killer/terroist in the region. Why should he be discounted from the list of suspects? It could benifit him to have people believe that there is a wider movement than just him and his followers. He is a terrorist after all, he doesn’t have to be predictable. The killing of Hassan sends a message that even people who are considered off limits to his particular jihad are still at risk, even though he may still be pulling the strings.
I can’t believe that anybody would give this SOB the benifit of a doubt.
If only he were the only one. There are several loosely allied groups. He’s the one whose name we know, mainly because of his association with OBL.
Could be, but in the past they seem to have tried to claim credit. There are very few unclaimed terrorist acts historically (Al-Queda doesn’t usually claim responsibility, but usually has distinctive simultanious bombings by which it identifies itself), and often more then one group tries to take credit.
Maybe, he is a religious fanatic, who knows what he thinks Allah is telling him to do this week. Kill people and deny it, kill people in alphabetical order, who knows. Still, even insane serial killers have MO’s, and its usually a good method to track their actions by.
Well, as has been pointed out earlier in this thread, I’m a cold, calculating machine incapable of outrage. But seriously, it’s not like we’re defending Zarqawi (he’s certainly responsible for enough murders already to hang him for in any case), but it’s worthwhile to try and understand the various factions inside the insurgency. If the kidnappers are a bunch of loosely allied groups rather then under the sway of one single master, that’s worth knowing. I haven’t lived through many wars, but I get the sense that this one is unique in how little the general public understands our enemies, their organization, their motivations or their tactics.