#security official

Two men convicted of murdering a journalist and a security official were executed in public in Somalia's capital Mogadishu on Sunday, officials said. The men, Ali Bashir Osman, 22, and Abdulahi Sharif Osman, 25, were arrested in southern Mogadishu during a raid by security forces. "The two men were behind the killing of journalist Mohamed Mohamud who worked with Universal TV and a security official. The court found them guilty in August and today they were executed publicly," national prosecutor Abdulahi Hussein Mohamed reporters. Source: AFP

Lebanese police have arrested a man who staged a sick prank by filming himself threatening to behead three Syrian refugee children left in his care, a security official told AFP on Saturday. The police also briefly arrested the children's mother, who confessed to enjoying the scene she found when she returned from work. The video, which was posted on YouTube Friday and shared widely, shows the three terrified children crying as a man standing behind a camera waves a knife and asks: "Whom do we behead first?" Adding to the pathos of the incident, the crying children respond by pointing at each other. Source: AFP

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — A top Saudi security official said Tuesday that police had arrested 88 men suspected of being part of an al-Qaida cell that was plotting attacks inside and outside of the kingdom. Source: Associated Press

Al-Qaeda militants have executed three men they accuse of planting electronic chips in the network's vehicles to help US drones target them, a security official said Monday. Scores of Al-Qaeda suspects, including some of the network's leaders, have been killed in drone strikes in Yemen. The United States is the only country operating drones over Yemen, but US officials rarely acknowledge the covert programme. "Al-Qaeda militants executed the three men with gunfire after having tortured them," the security official told AFP. Source: AFP

A policeman was killed and another seriously wounded in northern Egypt on Monday when gunmen in a parked car fired at patrolling officers, a security official said. Jihadist groups have regularly launched attacks on police and soldiers since the overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July last year by former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, now president of Egypt. Source: AFP

Seven Yemeni soldiers and 18 suspected Al-Qaeda militants were killed Wednesday in confrontations in southern and southeastern provinces, security officials and the defence ministry said. Five soldiers were killed in an ambush in the southern province of Shabwa in the third attack of its kind this month blamed by security officials on the jihadists. "Gunmen probably belonging to Al-Qaeda opened fire on an army vehicle in Habban in Shabwa province, killing five soldiers and wounding another," a security official said. Meanwhile, two soldiers were killed and two others wounded in a clash with gunmen in Sayun, in the southeastern Hadramawt province, another security official said. Source: AFP

Islamist-led militiamen stepped up their assault Sunday on Libya's main airport, two days after the collapse of a truce with rival ex-rebels who control the facility, a security official said. The renewed fighting, which killed at least five civilians, was condemned by the European Union, which urged restraint and dialogue. A coalition of militias led by Islamist fighters launched an assault on Tripoli international airport, with clashes later spreading along the road to the capital. By Sunday evening, fighting had subsided around the airport, security official Al-Jilani al-Dahesh told AFP, but clashes continued in the western suburbs of the capital, witnesses said. Source: AFP