Word: terrorists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...miles away, Italian police were still trying to make sense out of the bizarre maunderings of Mehmet Ali Agca, the gaunt and hollow-eyed Turkish gunman who felled John Paul in what he termed a "protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States." The terrorist told interrogators that he had first wanted to kill the "King of England" as well as the President of the European Parliament. He said he changed his mind after discovering that Britain was ruled by Queen Elizabeth II and the Europarliamentary President was a woman, Simone Veil. Agca told police that...
...associated with the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he was really a right-wing fanatic. Agca was a frequenter of the "idealist youth associations," which are known to be satellites of the National Action Party (N.A.P.), a neofascist group with 586 members currently facing trial for terrorist acts in Turkey. Of those indicted, 220, including N.A.P. Leader Alpaslan Turkes, could receive the death penalty. There was also no doubt that Agca had been convicted of murdering a Turkish newspaper editor, that he had escaped during psychiatric observation with the connivance of more than a dozen members...
...Terrorist spectacles have grown repetitious, even common place by this stage of a violent century. The global village that is the audience for such homicidal attention-getting may even be building up a sad, resigned tolerance for most of it. The world absorbs with only temporary disturbance the shocks of assassination attempts, skyjackings, long hostage melodramas and the bomb that levels the airport waiting room in the name of someone's liberation...
...terrorist assassin's goal is always drama and publicity; his chief professional concern is (to put it grotesquely) one of casting. So there was something tragically spectacular in Mehmet Ali Agca's choice of victim. A strike of such reptilian malice against one of the globe's few authentic moral and spiritual leaders was a fiercely pure example of terrorist logic: the act should produce a profound moral dislocation, shattering not only state law but also human sensibility. The terrorist seizes what people value most and crucifies it upside down; he aims to induce a paralysis...
Outgoing French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who escaped a terrorist bomb in Corsica last month, sent a wire to the Vatican expressing "profound emotion," and he obviously did not exaggerate his feelings. An associate who was conferring with Giscard when the news came reported that the French President, who is noted for his icy reserve,' experienced "an enormous shock." Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told reporters: "I am too shocked for words. What more...