Afghan lawmakers back reporter's death sentence

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghanistan's upper house of parliament lauded the death sentence handed down against a local journalist who was found guilty of insulting Islam, an official said Wednesday.

In a statement signed by Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the chamber's chairman, the Senate also condemned what it called "international interference" to have the sentence annulled, spokesman Aminuddin Muzafari said.

The journalist, 23-year-old Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, was sentenced to death last week by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif for distributing a report he printed off the Internet to journalism students at Balkh University.

The article asked why men can have four wives but women can't have multiple husbands.

The court in Mazar-i-Sharif found that the article humiliated Islam. Members of a clerical council also pushed for Kaambakhsh to be punished.

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U.S. Officials Analyzing Usama Bin Laden Video

CAIRO, Egypt — The U.S. government obtained a new video of Usama bin Laden before Al Qaeda could release it to the world to mark the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Officials on Friday were analyzing the tape, which could contain the first new images of the Al Qaeda leader in three years.

Soon after Washington announced it had the video, all the Islamic militant Web sites that usually carry statements from Al Qaeda went down and were unaccessible, in an unprecedented shutdown.

The reason for the shutdown was not immediately known. Evan H. Kohlmann, a terrorism expert at globalterroralert.com, said he suspected it was the work of Al Qaeda itself, trying to find how the video leaked to U.S. officials.

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Videotape supposedly shows suicide bomber 'graduation'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A videotape supposedly showing a suicide bomber "graduation ceremony" at an al Qaeda-Taliban training camp is part of a propaganda campaign from the terrorist network and the former rulers of Afghanistan, a U.S. counterterrorism official said Monday.

The video was said to have been shot June 9 by a Pakistani journalist who was invited to take pictures as the suicide bombers were supposedly sent off on their missions in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany.

The video was obtained and first aired by ABC News. CNN could not immediately verify the tape's authenticity.

One of the suicide bomber team leaders spoke in English on the tape. The video also included images of Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah. His brother, Mullah Dadullah, was a Taliban military commander who was killed last month by U.S. forces.

The U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke with CNN said the tape is "consistent with the more sophisticated propaganda" that these groups have been using, but said it is a "bit of a stretch" to conclude from the tape that people have been sent to carry out attacks.

There is "genuine concern," the official said, whenever threats are made against the West from that part of the world, however, and the training camps present a "real potential source of operatives."

The official said that there have been more such tapes recently, including tapes using multiple languages. The official said the use of multiple languages in the tapes suggests that they are for propaganda purposes.

-from CNN.com-