MAKKAH/MADINAH: Over three million Muslims attended special prayers at the Grand Mosque in Makkah and the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah on Sunday, the 27th night of Ramadan, seeking the blessings of Lailat Al-Qadr (the Night of Power).

The Grand Mosque in Makkah overflowed with hundreds of thousands of Muslims as they came to perform Umrah, attend Taraweeh and Qiyamullail prayers. They also offered special prayers seeking the blessings of Lailat Al-Qadr, which is worth more than a 1,000 months in terms of rewards.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) has said: “Whoever offers voluntary prayers during the Night of Power out of belief and expecting its reward from Allah will have his past sins forgiven.”

The government has made all arrangements to receive the large crowds of worshippers from within the Kingdom and other parts of the world. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah is in Makkah to supervise the services being rendered to the guests of God.

About 4,500 police officers have been deployed to maintain law and order in the city. The Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques and the Makkah Municipality have deployed nearly 10,000 cleaning workers to keep the mosque and its surroundings neat and tidy.

About 20,000 water coolers have been kept in different parts of the mosque to supply drinking water to the faithful round the clock. Despite the huge crowd of worshippers, the traffic in Makkah was smooth and no major accidents have been reported. Special security officers had been deployed to arrest pickpockets and other criminals. The Civil Defense Department has kept its firefighting and rescue units ready inside the central region of Makkah.

All hotels and furnished apartments in Makkah were fully occupied. Sales of prayer mattresses went up on Sunday as many people bought them to pray outside the mosque. The price of such mattresses went up from SR10 to SR25 because of the huge demand.

The Saudi Public Transport Company operated a large number of buses to transport pilgrims from the large parking areas around Makkah to the mosque and back. Taxis were making a lot of money as they charged inflated fares of up to SR90 for taking pilgrims from the Haram to the parking lot, while mini buses were charging SR15 to SR20 for each pilgrim.

Municipal officials inspected fast-food shops around the mosque to make sure they fulfilled hygiene conditions.

At the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah, a large number of Muslims including expatriate workers and foreign visitors attended Taraweeh and Qiyamullail prayers. The mosque was crowded with worshippers, including about 10,000 who were performing etikaf (a form of deep worship involving a period of retreat in a mosque).

Yemen plans to offer next month the rights to develop 15 offshore hydrocarbon blocks as the smallest producer on the Arabian Peninsula seeks to boost production, Oil Minister Amir al-Aidarous said.

“Expanding explorations is one of the priorities of the government,” al-Aidarous said in an interview in Sana’a on Sept. 1. Yemen will offer the blocks to international companies during a two-day conference in Sana’a in October, he said.

Yemen, which relies on oil for 75 percent of its income, is looking to attract foreign expertise to revive falling production. The country’s crude output declined to 288,000 barrels a day last year from as much as 440,000 barrels a day in 2001, according to U.S. Energy Department data.

A lack of exploration activity over the last ten years caused the production drop, al-Aidarous said. “There is a decline not because of the non-availability of oil, but because of the absence of an exploration vision.”

Yemen postponed a fourth bidding round for 11 offshore oil blocks in August 2009 in part due to international concerns regarding security in the Gulf of Aden and higher insurance rates, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on its website, citing the Yemen Times.

Security Concern

The impoverished Arabian Peninsula nation has become a base for al-Qaeda as the terrorist group comes under pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, raising concerns about security. Al- Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch, which tried to blow up a U.S. airliner in December, stepped up violence since June, killing dozens of security personnel in raids in southern cities.

Security forces battled al-Qaeda militants for days in August in the southern city of Loder before flushing them out. The army began the assault on the city after 11 soldiers died in an ambush by militants on Aug. 20.

“I understand that security is a big concern,” al- Aidarous said. “The oil sector has continued to operate without trouble. Some companies have been producing oil for over 20 years without stopping for a single day.”

Hunt Oil Co. operates a 10,000 barrel-a-day refinery in Marib. Total SA, Europe’s third-biggest oil company, bought in June a 36 percent stake in the Block 72 production-sharing agreement in Yemen. Korea Gas Corp. also owns 6 percent of Yemen LNG Co.

Yemen’s government hasn’t yet reached an agreement with Korea Gas to increase the price at which it buys liquefied natural gas from Yemen LNG, al-Aidarous said in the interview.

“We are taking political and diplomatic moves to exercise pressure on Korea Gas to improve the set price, which is unfair as prices of gas in the market have tripled,” al-Aidarous said. The 20-year contract with Korea Gas states that Yemen has the right to change the price every five years, he said.

Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh ordered a review of contracts signed between Yemen LNG and its customers to try to bring them into line with current gas prices, the official Saba news agency reported on June 15.

RAMALLAH: Jewish occupiers on Friday seized control over 130 dunams (32 acres) of Palestinian land in the West Bank village of Qaryout, to the south of Nablus, an official said.

Ghassan Daghlas, the Palestinian Authority official monitoring settler activity in the northern West Bank, said that the occupiers from nearby settlements of Shilo and Eli “arrived at the land and seized it.” He added that the occupiers installed barbed wires around the piece of land, started bulldozing it and planting olive tress.

Daghlas added that the occupiers brought water tankers with them. According to the official, the move is part of the occupiers’ ‘Price tag’ policy after the shooting attack near West Bank city of Hebron that left 4 occupiers dead.

Meanwhile, about 300 occupiers of the Beit Hagai settlement and the Hebron region held a march in memorial of the four occupiers killed in the shooting. “We will all go out and march to strengthen our faith and our presence in the land,” organizers of the march said. Dozens of young occupiers took the opportunity to dismantle pipes that were attached to Israeli water lines by Palestinian farmers.

Israeli army’s reserve soldiers who reside in the West Bank’s settlements have decided to conduct independent patrols of the area’s major traffic arteries in an effort to boost the army’s presence, the Israeli Army radio said.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen Palestinian fighter groups pledged to step up joint and separate attacks on Israeli targets to foil Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations kicked off in Washington Thursday.

“The factions agreed that all means are open to the Palestinian resistance to deal with Israel in the coming phase,” Abu Obaidah, spokesman of the Hamas armed wing, read a statement of the 13 Gaza-based groups in a press conference held in the Gaza Strip.

The armed groups, including the Islamic Jihad movement, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), who participated in the conference, blamed the Palestinian leadership for accepting the negotiations without an Israeli commitment not to continuing Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories. Abu Obaidah said that the factions met “and agreed to bring the Palestinian resistance into an advanced phase of high-level coordination for effective work against Israel.”

He added that “the escalation comes to reject all shameful projects that include dangerous concessions and to stand against all conspiracies that target the Palestinian rights through playful negotiations,” he added.

The statement also called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to stop cracking down against Hamas supporters, the number of whom have increased in the wake of the attacks on the occupiers. Hamas said that up to 550 supporters had been arrested during the last couple of days.

New Zealand authorities say a strong earthquake that shook the country’s second largest city of Christchurch has caused significant damage to infrastructure, but no deaths.

Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker declared a state of emergency Saturday after the pre-dawn quake on New Zealand’s South Island. Government seismologists put the magnitude at 7.1, while the U.S. Geological Survey gave a lower figure of 7.0.

Only two serious injuries were reported – one man hit by a falling chimney and another hurt by glass. New Zealand Civil Defense Minister John Carter says his nation is “extremely lucky” that there were no fatalities.

The earthquake threw people out bed as they slept and sent panicked residents running into the streets. The facades of many buildings collapsed, crushing cars and littering the ground with bricks and glass. But there were no reports of entire buildings collapsing.

The quake ruptured underground utility lines for natural gas, water and sewage. It also damaged bridges and disrupted power supplies and phone networks.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key was expected to visit Christchurch to assess the cost of the disaster.
Police reported some incidents of looting at damaged stores in the city, whose population numbers about 350,000. The Christchurch airport was closed after the quake as a precaution but re-opened later Saturday.

Strong aftershocks continued to shake the city during the day, with the largest measuring 5.3. New Zealand is situated on the boundaries of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates and experiences around 14,000 earthquakes a year, most of them relatively minor.

DUBAI: Concerns over Israeli access to BlackBerry data, and the use of the device by the United States to spy on the United Arab Emirates are behind the Gulf state’s moves to curb the smartphone, Dubai’s police chief said.

“The Unites States is the primary beneficiary of having no controls over the BlackBerry, as it has an interest to spy on the UAE,” Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said in remarks carried by the website of the daily Al-Khaleej on Friday.

“The West has accused us of curbing the liberties of BlackBerry users, while America, Israel, Britain and other countries are allowed access to all transferred data,” Tamim added.

Tamim, who has been outspoken in blaming Israeli agents for the assassination of a top Palestinian militant at a Dubai hotel in January, did not say why Washington had an interest in spying on Western-allied UAE.

The UAE, where BlackBerry maker RIM  has 500,000 users, has said it would suspend BlackBerry Messenger, email and Web browser services from Oct.11 until the government could get access to encrypted messages.

Blackberry won a reprieve on a shutdown in India last month, after RIM agreed to give India access to secure BlackBerry data, according to an Indian government source.

BlackBerry’s Messenger application has spread rapidly in the Gulf where it is a popular business and social networking tool. But because the data is encrypted and sent to offshore servers, it cannot be tracked locally.

That has raised fears in security-conscious Gulf states, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, that a lack of access could fetter their ability to ferret out potential spies, assassins or Islamic militants, analysts say.

DUBAI, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) — A U.S. cargo plane crashed in an unpopulated area between two highways in Dubai late Friday, killing two pilots on board, authorities of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) said.

The plane, a Boeing 747-400 belonging to U.S. parcel delivery company UPS, caught fire after the crash, the General Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement, according to the state news agency WAM.

All measures had been taken to extinguish the fire and the two pilots’ bodies were recovered, the statement said.

“The concerned authorities are conducting necessary investigations to identify the cause of the crash,” it added, without confirming if there were more casualties on ground.

Earlier, Dubai-based Al Arabiya TV channel said a cargo plane crashed on a busy highway in Dubai, setting some cars on fire.

Ambulances were rushing to the area, located near a residential district, Al Arabiya said, adding that preliminary reports indicated that all crew members might have been killed.

A UAE senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a fire broke in the plane as it attempted to land at the Dubai International Airport, causing its crash, according to the TV channel.

Meanwhile, Dubai-based English daily Khaleej Times said on its website that the police have confirmed the crash.

The cargo plane crashed near a military campus, Col. Omer Al Shamsi, deputy director of Operations Room of Dubai Police, was quoted as saying.

UPS also confirmed on its website that one of its planes had been involved in an accident, saying the plane headed from Dubai to Cologne, Germany, with two crew members aboard.

Headquartered in Atlanta, UPS is the world’s largest package delivery company with operations in more than 200 countries and regions.

In October last year, six crew members were killed when a Sudanese Boeing 707 cargo plane crashed in Sharjah, a neighboring emirate of Dubai.

THE HAGUE, Sep. 01 (Saba) – Dutch prosecutors released without charge on Wednesday two Yemenis arrested in Amsterdam Monday on suspicion of planning a possible terrorist attack, the 26sep.net reported on Wednesday.

“Two men from Yemen in custody since Monday on suspicion of possible involvement in the planning of a terrorist act, were freed this evening,” the Dutch prosecuting authority said in a statement, justifying the release by lack of evidence.

Investigations with the two Yemenis have shown there has been no indication of the men’s possible involvement in any criminal act, the Dutch prosecutors said.

According to U.S. media, the two men were identified as Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al-Soofi, of Detroit, Michigan, and Hezam al-Murisi, were arrested at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Monday after a flight from Chicago.

Dutch security authorities have arrested the two men Monday morning, saying that there was considerable suspicion that the men had been making a dry run for a future attack.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that the two men had been arrested for a suspicion of possessing some materials in their luggage.

The materials found in their luggage were no dangerous, the DHS said. Under the information exchange accord, we have informed our international partners, Dutch authorities, with our suspicions.

The luggage contained a shampoo bottle strapped to a hand watches and mobile phone strapped to a medicine bottle.

SANA’A, Sep. 01 (Saba) – Yemen and Comoros are currently carrying out a technical investigation on false allegations on the approaching of a Yemeni aircraft to one belonging to the France Astral Aviation in the atmosphere of the island of Madagascar on August 24, an official source in Yemenia Airways announced on Wednesday.

The investigation is carried out by Yemeni civil aviation authorities and civil aviation authorities in the island of Madagascar and Moroni of Comoros.

The source added that the Yemenia Airways had two flights in the aforementioned date and the aircraft operation crew confirmed there was not any convergence with another aircraft during the two flights.

The results of the Yemeni aircrafts recording devices did not show the alert system started during the two flights to prove there was a kind of a close alignment between the two planes, the source said.

The two aircrafts have not exceeded the allowable height till they got the permission from air traffic control (ATC) authorities according to the adopted system.

Yemenia Airways asked France Astral Aviation to carry out more investigations on those allegations, otherwise it would reserve its right to legally prosecute the French aviation company if these allegations have been proved invalidity.

SANA’A, Aug.29 (Saba) – An official source has criticized the rumors of existing American military bases in Yemen which have been moved from Iraq into Yemen, the state-run website 26sep.net reported on Sunday.

In a statement to 26sep.net, the official expressed his surprise from some lies and calumnies revealed lately in some mass media on the presence of British soldiers and the arrival of American forces for combating terrorism in Yemen.

“Yemen doesn’t accept any foreign military existence in its land and it has a strong security and military institutions able to carry their tasks in combating terrorism and to conquer in this area”, the official affirmed.

The source added Yemen cooperation with the International Community to combat terrorism is restricted only to information exchange in order to facilitate the process of tracking terrorist elements and present them to justice.

HODIDAH, Aug. 28 (Saba)- Yemen Coast Guard Police Sector in the Red Sea have said that Eritrean pirates hijacked 4 Yemeni fishing boats with 21 sailors on board in the international waters, the Interior Ministry has reported .

The Eritrean pirates forced the Yemeni fishing boats to head to the area of Tiawa of Eritrea where they confiscated the contents of the boats and deported 10 Yemeni sailors who arrived today at the fishing port of Hodeidah governorate on an Eritrean boat .

Investigation is underway to restore the fishing boats with 11 sailors detained by the Eritrean pirates.