Palestinians say he is a member of Hamas’s political wing rather

Palestinians say he is a member of Hamas’s political wing, rather than its military, leadership.Later yesterday a soldier shot dead five-year-old Mohammed al-Araj in the nearby Balata refugee camp Doctors said he was hit in the chest. They then went in and arrested Adnan Asfour, the Islamic militia’s top West Bank spokesman. Israel claimed he was also the local Hamas commander.During the 1990s Mr Asfour, 38, served two years in a Palestinian prison for subversive activities. Israeli troops captured a Hamas leader and shot dead a five-year-old Palestinian boy during search operations yesterday in the West Bank town of Nablus.
Palestinian sources said that the army surrounded a five-storey block of flats and called on all the residents to leave. At the same time, US troops were reported to be carrying out raids at various flashpoints – Fallujah, Samarra and the western town of Rawah.

The US announced it had detained 111 people in Samarra alone. Of those, 15 were suspected of direct involvement in attacks on US forces.General Myers said he expected about 100,000 US troops to remain stationed in Iraq at least until the end of next year. The only word I have is that he is not being co-operative,” he added.In the latest attacks, Iraqi insurgents blew up an oil pipeline and fired on petrol storage tanks in southern Baghdad over the weekend. But he made clear that Saddam himself was supplying no information “We’ve put our best interrogators on him.

“We think they are some of the leadership of this insurgency, some of the cell leaders.” He supplied no names or details.In a subsequent interview, General Myers refined his numbers, saying the arrests totalled “more than 200″. The United States military said yesterday that it had made more than 200 arrests in the week since Saddam Hussein’s capture, including suspected leaders of the resistance that has kept up its attacks on both US and Iraqi targets.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the arrests were a direct consequence of intelligence acquired through Saddam’s arrest – presumably a reference to the briefcase found with the deposed Iraqi leader in his hiding place.”Some of the information gleaned when we picked up Saddam Hussein led to a better understanding of the structure of the resistance from the former regime elements and we have actually picked up more than several hundred at this point,” General Myers said. British backpacker Mark Henderson was released by his kidnappers in Colombia today, his parents said. The ELN said it kidnapped the backpackers to raise awareness about the alleged hardship inflicted by outlawed right-wing paramilitary factions and the army on the mainly Indian inhabitants of the Sierra Nevada..