By empty (8/25/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Two passenger jets crashed simultaneously in different places after taking off from a Moscow airport, leaving 89 people dead and raising fears of terrorism in the heart of Russia. The planes departed within about an hour of each other late Tuesday bound for destinations in southern Russia and went down at almost precisely the same moment 770 kilometers (480 miles) apart in two regions south of the Russian capital. Wreckage and bodies lay strewn across fields outside the central city of Tula and the southern city of Rostov-on-Don as hundreds of emergency workers used cranes to sift through the detritus and extract corpses.

By empty (8/23/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Nearly 200 Territorial Army soldiers are working alongside former Soviet bloc troops in Kazakhstan. Soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment have already completed six months in Iraq. Now the challenging, sandy terrain and hot weather of Kazakhstan is being seen as a good place to train for the Gulf.

By empty (8/23/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The murder of an Uzbek citizen whose body was discovered in Shymkent, Kazakhstan may be linked to terrorism attacks in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan\'s Channel 31 reported on 20 August. The report quotes unidentified \"first-hand\" sources as saying that an Uzbek citizen found dead in a Shymkent sauna was an Uzbek detective who arrived to investigate reports that some of the defendants in the Hizb ut-Tahrir trial trained in southern Kazakhstan. In a bizarre twist, the Channel 31 report claimed that Kazakh police found near the body of the murdered Uzbek citizen \"an ordinary shoe into the sole of which a gun in the form of a ballpoint pen had been installed.