Tracy McVeigh, foreign editor
Sunday January 29, 2006
The Observer
President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan told CNN that the US missile strike earlier this month, which killed 22 people near the border with Afghanistan, was a 'violation of sovereignty'. But he claimed that among the innocents killed in the drone attack was Midhat Mursi al-Sayid 'Umar - known as Abu Khabab - an al-Qaeda chemical weapons expert.
But US intelligence agencies who had been hunting Abu Khabab kept a little quiet after it was noticed last week that for a year and a half they had been appealing for the public's help in finding him by using a photograph of the wrong man on his wanted poster.
The Abu Khabab shown on a State Department Rewards for Justice website, with a $5 million bounty, was a photograph of radical London iman Abu Hamza. A CIA spokesman admitted a 'human error'.
There was more mistakes being made in Russia where a spy scandal erupted involving four British diplomats and a hollowed-out lump of rock. Caught on film by a Russian documentary team, the spy-rock sat innocously in a Moscow park while shifty looking British embassy staff trooped past in hooded jackets sending it secret electronic messages which the rock then transmitted back to London - no doubt via Tracey Island.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,176,00.html