Bomber

Six months ago, in a moving ceremony during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, President Hamid Karzai went on Afghan television to pardon about two dozen young boys, the youngest only 8 years old, who had been caught trying to carry out suicide attacks. On Monday, authorities in Kandahar province reported that two of the children, 10-year-olds, had been rearrested last week, apparently intending again to carry out bombings. Provincial spokesman Zalmay Ayubi said the boys each had a vest full of explosives when they were detained along with three adults suspected of being militants, and that they told intelligence officers they had been recruited for suicide missions.

Anwar Awlaki, the U.S. citizen killed last year in a CIA drone strike in Yemen, was instrumental in the failed plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner in December 2009, according to a Justice Department court document filed Friday. A sentencing memorandum for Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who pleaded guilty in October to attempting to down the jetliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear, makes public for the first time some of the evidence that led President Obama to order a lethal strike against Awlaki, the Al Qaeda-linked cleric who was born in New Mexico.

As the oldest brother in a single-parent home in San Bernardino, Christopher Sullivan always felt he had to look out for his family. During his teenage years, he ran with gangs to help his mother pay the bills. When he joined the Army after high school, he would sometimes send his entire paycheck home. He wanted to make sure his mom and four siblings had new clothes and nice meals. Last December, his unit was attacked by a suicide bomber in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Six men were killed in the explosion, but Sullivan survived.

Noemi Eugenio mentions her son's big smile, how he "likes going to the desert to shoot" guns with his brother and cousin, and rides his motorcycle everywhere. "He's a happy person," she says. Six weeks after her youngest child died in Afghanistan, talking about him in the past tense doesn't come naturally. It was his second wartime deployment, she said; the first was to Kuwait to support troops in Iraq. "It still makes me cry," she said. "I can't even go into his room to go through his stuff yet. " California Army National Guard Sgt. Carlo F. Eugenio, 29, of Rancho Cucamonga was among four U.S. troops and 13 others killed Oct. 29 by a suicide bomber who rammed a vehicle packed with explosives into an armored NATO convoy bus in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Bomb blasts targeting Shiite Muslim gatherings Tuesday in two Afghan cities killed at least 59 people and injured 150, a rare outbreak of sectarian violence in a country racked by 10 years of war with Taliban insurgents. A noontime blast in Kabul, the capital, involved a suicide bomber hidden among a throng of Shiite worshipers outside the Abul Fazal Abbas shrine, said Gen. Mohammed Zahir, head of criminal investigations for the Kabul police. That attack killed at least 55 people and injured 134, the Interior Ministry said.

When his parents were killed in a rocket attack, the only person to show a lonely Somali boy named Abdi any kindness, or say a caring word, was a family friend named Abdufazil. The man bought him meat and camel milk. Then he sent the 13-year-old to a training camp to become a suicide bomber. Abdufazil was a commander of the militant Islamist militia Shabab in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and he told the boy that Christians had killed his parents. He and other Shabab fighters urged him to take revenge for the attack.

The terrorism trial of the man accused of trying to use a bomb hidden in his underwear to blow up an international flight to Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 has ended with the Nigerian defendant accepting responsibility but justifying his failed attack on the United States. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab abruptly pleaded guilty to eight felonies Wednesday, halting the trial of the confessed Al Qaeda operative whose attack on a jetliner carrying 279 passengers and 11 crew members embarrassed the Obama administration and led to heightened security at many airports.

Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani was killed by a suicide bomber on Tuesday in his home in the capital, the latest in a series of high-profile assassinations to rock the country in recent months. Rabbani was the head of a government panel set up last year to try to begin negotiations with the Taliban, and his death was seen as a serious blow to those still-nascent efforts. The bomber, who apparently had explosives concealed in his turban, entered Rabbani's home in an upscale Kabul neighborhood on the pretext of visiting him, said Gen. Mohammed Zaher, the head of criminal investigation for the Kabul police.

Police are investigating whether a twin suicide bombing at the home of a top paramilitary official that killed at least 23 people in Quetta on Wednesday is linked to the recent arrest of three top Al Qaeda operatives in the Pakistani city. Brig. Farrukh Shahzad, deputy head of the Frontier Corps paramilitary force for Baluchistan province, survived the morning attack but his wife was killed, police officials in the southern city said. More than 50 people were injured in the blasts.