icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk Feb 17 2003   A 37-year-old man has been charged under the Terrorism Act after a hand grenade was allegedly found in his luggage at Gatwick Airport.

Scotland Yard said Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan was charged with three offences following his arrest on a British Airways jet from Venezuela.

These charges include possessing an article for the purpose of committing a terrorist act.

He is due to appear at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court to be formally charged tomorrow.

Rahaham-Alan was arrested by Sussex Police before being taken to a central London police station to be quizzed by detectives from Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch.

Passengers at Gatwick were immediately evacuated from the airport's North Terminal following the incident and outbound flights were suspended.

The terminal remained closed for several hours from around lunchtime until it was reopened at 7.45pm that evening.

At the time the country was on high alert with light tanks and more than 400 soldiers being deployed at Heathrow airport amid fears that terrorists were planning an attack.

www.itv.com Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan, 37, is charged with having explosives with intent to endanger life or damage property

11.33AM GMT, 17 Feb 2003

A man arrested at Gatwick Airport allegedly with a live hand grenade in his luggage has been remanded in custody after a brief court appearance.

Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan, 37, faces three charges in connection with the alleged discovery by customs officers.

He appeared before London's Bow Street Magistrates Court but did not enter a plea.

Rahaham-Alan was stopped by customs officers on Thursday after arriving on a British Airways flight he had boarded in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas.

He was quizzed throughout the weekend by detectives from Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch, who have been liaising with their counterparts in South America.

The US Department of State has said Venezuela's Margarita Island is home to a large expatriate population from the Middle East, many of whom work in the oil industry.

Following the incident, passengers at Gatwick were evacuated from the airport's North Terminal and outbound flights were suspended.

The terminal remained closed for several hours, at a time when the country was on high alert with light tanks and more than 400 soldiers being deployed at Heathrow airport amid fears of attack.

www.nytimes.com By JUAN FORERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — The story line is usually simple: poor girl meets rich man, falls in love and is in for madcap high jinks as parallel worlds collide. Or it is about a fiercely independent, successful woman who, following years of loneliness, finds love, loses love, then finds it again.

This is the world of Venezuelan soap operas — the sappy, drippy daily dramas that captivate millions by sticking to a proven formula. For more than 40 years, it has worked — soap operas are as much an symbol of Venezuela as oil and beauty queens. The telenovelas, as they are known, dominate nightly programming and rival their Mexican and Brazilian counterparts for their popularity overseas. Advertisement

However, with Venezuela in political tumult, coming off an economically devastating two-month antigovernment strike, the scriptwriters of such soaps as "My Fat Beauty" and "Intimate Underwear" are asking themselves whether they should not inject something new into the fables.

It is not that love is going by the wayside. "Every telenovela is a story of love," a prominent program director said emphatically.

But several leading scriptwriters are convinced that soaps need to reflect the reality of Venezuela, and that reality is a country roiled by protests and the daily rants of a pugnacious left-leaning president, Hugo Chávez, and his determined opponents. It is a society so polarized that government backers refer to the upper classes as the Squalid Ones, and the president's adversaries see his supporters as uncouth riff-raff.

Leonardo Padrón, a scriptwriter with the huge Venevisión television station, sees delicious possibilities. He plans to be the first to infuse a soap — his next one, "Sweet Thing" — with a bit of today's crumbling Venezuela.

"As a writer, I am absolutely seduced by the idea of making a chronicle about what is happening," said Mr. Padrón, who has made a string of successful soaps over 10 years.

"I'm going to tell a story of love, but in the context of what we are living," he said. "I am going to try to create a cocktail that will have a dose of escapism, a dose of humor, but also a dose of reality."

His work, though, does not promise to be easy in a world where television executives flinch at untested experiments. That is especially true now because Mr. Chávez, angry about antigovernment news programs, is proposing restrictions on the media.

So instead of Mr. Padrón's initial idea — a poor girl from a pro-Chávez barrio falls in love with a Squalid One — his tale will be largely metaphorical. The antagonist, he said, will be the president of a company who becomes intoxicated with power, a clear reference to Mr. Chávez.

"Perhaps by the 15th show, people will say, `That guy is just like Chávez,' but this will be without my saying that I am telling the story of the president," Mr. Padrón said with a wry smile.

Not everyone is convinced a new formula will work. Scripts must speak to the largely poor masses, many of them Chávez supporters who might reject telenovelas with a political bent. Indeed, scriptwriters say the big question they face as they embark on writing 150-hour stories is whether viewers really want more politics in a country where everything is infused with politics.

"The conventional telenovela where the story is about love — that is what the people want to see, romance," said Arquimedes Rivero, a Venevisión producer who has done as much as anyone to create the Venezuelan telenovela. "The people do not want discussion and conflict."

Still, as the two main telenovela studios here prepare to film a new string of soaps this year, scriptwriters and producers are discussing ways of carefully incorporating the everyday into scripts that will remain heavy on love and betrayal, intrigue and jealousy.

"It is inevitable," said José Simón Escalona, who overseas dramatic programming for Radio Caracas Television. "The telenovela looks to appeal to the masses, and to do that it has to explore the intimacies, how the people feel. We look to do telenovelas that talk to Venezuelans, that understand Venezuelans."

It's not that political or social commentary has never made it into soaps. "Along These Streets," a telenovela of the early 1990's written by Ibsen Martínez, used street-smart characters and compelling dialogue to tell stories about poverty, corruption and killings. The program was such a hit that it lasted years, while most telenovelas have eight-month spans.

Scriptwriters like Monica Montañés point to "Along These Streets" as a model for what a political soap could be — and as an expample of how ignoring political realities could lead to a telenovela's downfall.

Ms. Montañés said the telenovela she wrote last year, "La González," sank in the ratings because it avoided mentioning the short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez last April and the turmoil that followed. "It was stupid not to have the characters participating in protests and marches, and I think people resented it," Ms. Montañés said.

That is not to say that scriptwriters are planning hard-hitting real-life dramas about intrigue in the presidential palace.

Instead, there may be subtle references to the political stalemate that has paralyzed Venezuela or plots that incorporate such daily realities as the long gas lines in this oil-rich nation. Radio Caracas Television, in an experiment, is rerunning "Estefania," a 24-year-old telenovela that focused on the waning 1950's-era dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez — clearly drawing a parallel with the Chávez government.

Some scriptwriters said they would follow the old recipe, until Mr. Padrón or others succeed with telenovelas that deal with the political. Perla Farias, a scriptwriter who is sticking to the basics, said, "I do not have anything finished just now, but it is going to be about love, a very complex love story."

www.guardian.co.uk Jeevan Vasagar Monday February 17, 2003 The Guardian

The man allegedly caught with a hand grenade at Gatwick airport has been charged under the Terrorism Act, Scotland Yard said last night. He will appear before Bow Street magistrates in London today.

The 37-year-old Venezuelan is charged with possession of an article for committing a terrorist act, possession of an explosive substance with intent to endanger life or damage property, and carrying a dangerous article on a British-registered aircraft.

Earlier he was named by Venezuelan authorities as Rahaman Alan Hazil Mohammad. The Venezuelan ambassador, Alfredo Toro-Hardy, said a copy of his passport had been sent to Caracas to check its validity.

The envoy denied links between his country and Islamist terrorism. "Venezuela is a country in the western hemisphere that has no relation with the Islamist movement," he said. "There may be some individuals who may have some personal position, as was the case with [the shoe bomber] Richard Reid, who was an Englishman."

He also insisted Venezuelan airport security was good.

Anti-terrorist officers were yesterday still questioning Mr Mohammad, who was arrested on Thursday after he arrived on a British Airways flight from Caracas. He was in custody at the high-security Paddington Green police station in west London. Scotland Yard refused to confirm the suspect's name.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, said yesterday that al-Qaida terrorists had a "substantial presence" in Britain, and the risk of attacks remained high.

While most of the security work needed to thwart the terrorists had to go on in secrecy, some successes had been achieved. Eight arrests had been made near airports in England last week.

www.brunei-online.com

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - Nigerian oil workers launched an indefinite strike on Saturday that could shut down crude exports in the world's sixth largest oil exporter.

The strike over pay and working conditions comes as the threat of war in Iraq and a prolonged strike in Venezuela have pushed oil prices to a two-year high. Half of Nigerian exports go to the United States.

The action was launched by employees of the Department of Petroleum Resources, a key government unit overseeing operations of oil multinationals like ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Royal Dutch/Shell and TotalFinaElf. It is backed by the country's powerful Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, or PENGASSAN.

The strike aims to paralyse the loading of crude oil at export terminals, but PENGASSAN is threatening to shut down operations across the industry if the government does not meet its demands by the middle of next week.

"We started shutting down today," PENGASSAN spokesman Femi Familoni said, but added that the effect would likely not be felt until Monday.

A Shell spokesman, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said the company was taking steps to minimise the impact of the strike. He declined to elaborate. Officials at other companies could not immediately be reached for comment.

Strikers are demanding more than a year's worth of back pay, including unpaid overtime, expenses and travel allowances.

They are also demanding greater autonomy and better financing for the department, which they say is crippled by inefficient government bureaucracy.

"As things stand, most of the time we rely on ... oil companies to perform our duties, which is not how it should be," Familoni said.

President Olusegun Obasanjo's energy adviser, Rilwanu Lukman, offered to meet with the strikers Feb. 25, according to union officials. But strikers rejected the proposal, saying it did not reflect the urgency of their demands.

Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

The government can ill-afford a prolonged strike as it seeks to tackle widespread poverty and repair infrastructure left to decay during decades of corrupt rule.

Nigeria produces close to 2 million barrels of oil a day, more than 95 percent of which is pumped by joint ventures between the government and major oil companies.