Images of a dead bin Laden still dangerous: U.S. lawyer

Accused Colorado movie gunman hearing ends with no plea

James Holmes is seen in this undated police handout photo. REUTERS/Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office/Handout

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (Reuters) - Accused movie theater gunman James Holmes made a brief court appearance on Friday, a day after he was ordered to face trial, but his lawyers asked for more time to prepare for a plea to charges he shot 12 people to death and wounded dozens of others.

As expected, a Colorado state court judge granted a defense request to postpone arraignment for the 25-year-old former neuroscience doctoral student to give his legal team more time to study the voluminous evidence and testimony presented by prosecutors in a preliminary hearing earlier this week.

Arraignment was set for March 12.

At the conclusion of Friday's brief proceedings, a spectator sitting in the section of the Arapahoe County district courtroom reserved for victims and their families shouted: "Rot in hell, Holmes!"

There was no visible reaction by Holmes, who was being led out of the courtroom.

The judge, William Sylvester, huddled with lawyers in the hallway and reconvened the hearing to admonish the spectator, Steve Hernandez, whose daughter, Rebecca Wingo, died in the massacre.

"I can only begin to imagine the emotions that are raging. I'm truly sorry for your loss," the judge told Hernandez, asking that he exert greater self control.

"I meant no disrespect to the court," Hernandez replied, promising "no further outbursts."

Sylvester ruled on Thursday that prosecutors had succeeded in establishing probable cause to believe that Holmes, described by his own lawyers as suffering from an unspecified mental illness, committed the crimes alleged against him and ordered that he remain held without bail to stand trial.

The ruling followed three days of wrenching testimony about the shooting, its bloody aftermath and the elaborate preparations that Holmes is accused of making for the attack.

The tragedy stands as one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history and one that ranked briefly as the most lethal in 2012 - until 20 children and six adults were killed last month at a Connecticut elementary school.

MENTAL ISSUES LOOM

Holmes is charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder, stemming from the July 20 rampage at a midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Denver suburb of Aurora.

In addition to the 12 people who died, 58 others were wounded and a dozen more suffered other injuries.

Some legal experts say this week's proceedings left Holmes' lawyers little choice but to mount an insanity defense for their client.

"The defense team has nowhere else to go, given the obvious premeditation and overwhelming evidence against Holmes," Craig Silverman, a former Denver prosecutor now in private practice as a trial attorney, told Reuters.

Once Holmes enters a plea, prosecutors will have 60 days to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

If Holmes were to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, prosecutors would bear the burden under Colorado law of proving that he was mentally capable of knowing right from wrong. However, juries have typically shown reluctance to accept an insanity defense, he said.

Silverman said prosecutors presented compelling evidence that Holmes knew right from wrong when they displayed his online dating profile, posted weeks before the shooting with the headline: "Will you visit me in prison?"

Holmes is accused of entering Theater 9 of the Century 16 multiplex with a ticket he bought 12 days in advance, then leaving through a rear exit minutes into the movie and re-entering moments later wearing body armor and a gas mask.

Armed with a shotgun, pistol and semi-automatic rifle, authorities say, Holmes lobbed a tear gas canister into the auditorium and sprayed moviegoers with bullets until one of his guns jammed, then surrendered to police without a struggle in the parking lot behind the theater.

Police testified that Holmes began assembling his collection of guns and ammunition two months before the shooting, scouted out the multiplex weeks ahead of time, and took photos of his arsenal and of himself posed with weapons and body armor.

Holmes had booby-trapped his apartment near the theater with explosives, which police said was intended to draw authorities away from the movie house while he was carrying out his assault. The bombs were later defused safely.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Lisa Shumaker, Stacey Joyce and Gunna Dickson)

U.N. chief dismayed by Saudi beheading of Sri Lanka maid

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed dismay on Friday at the execution of a Sri Lankan housemaid in Saudi Arabia over the death of an infant in her care.

Rizana Nafeek was beheaded in the town of Dawadmy, near the capital Riyadh, on Wednesday morning after being sentenced to death in 2007. She was accused by her Saudi employer of killing hisinfant daughter while she was bottle-feeding in 2005.

The secretary-general "is concerned about reports of irregularities in her detention and trial, as well as the increase in the use of capital punishment in Saudi Arabia," Ban's press office said in a statement.

Ban insisted that all men and women in Saudi Arabia - regardless of their migration status or nationality - be treated under international human rights law, which includes the right to a fair trial.

"Currently, in Saudi Arabia, women do not have equal access to the courts or an equal opportunity to obtain justice. The Secretary-General is concerned that this is a situation which is even more precarious for women migrant workers given their foreign status," the statement said.

The Sri Lankan government appealed the death penalty but the Saudi Supreme Court upheld the sentence in 2010. Sri Lanka said on Thursday it had recalled its envoy to Saudi Arabia over the execution.

The Saudi Interior Ministry said the infant was strangled after a dispute between the maid and the baby's mother.

Saudi households are highly dependent on housemaids from African and South Asian countries. There have been reported cases of domestic abuse in which families mistreat their maids, who have then attacked the children of their employers.

Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, is an absolute monarchy that follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam. Judges base decisions on their own interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Slaying puts spotlight on Kurdish female warriors

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — The photograph shows a young woman in guerrilla fatigues, long hair tied back, toting a machine gun. She stands next to Abdullah Ocalan, the feared leader of Turkey's separatist Kurd militants — testimony to her senior role in the insurgency.

The scene was a guerrilla training camp at the height of the Kurdish rebellion. The woman was Sakine Cansiz — the exiled Kurdish activist who was found shot dead along with two other women on Thursday in Paris.

Cansiz, who went by the nom de guerre "Sara," was legendary among Turkey's Kurds as a founder of the separatist movement, a champion of women's rights and an unbreakable warrior who endured years of torture in a Turkish prison. A 2007 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, released by the secret-spilling Wikileaks website, shows that U.S. officials had identified Cansiz as one of the outlawed PKK's top two "most notorious financiers" inEurope and wanted her captured to stop the flow of money to the rebels.

And her life and death put the spotlight on a seeming paradox: Women have played a prominent leadership and combat role in the insurgency of an ethnic group known for its conservative, male-dominated values.

The 55-year-old Cansiz was found at a Kurdish information center in Paris with multiple bullet wounds to the head. Two other Kurdish activist women lay dead beside her. French authorities called the attack an execution and hundreds of angry Kurds immediately gathered outside the building claiming the killings were a political assassination.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Kurdish activists blamed Turkey for the deaths while some Turkish officials pointed at a possible feud between factions within the PKK, the Kurdish acronym for the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

The killings come at a time when Turkey has resumed talks with jailed rebel leader Ocalan in a bid to persuade the group to disarm and end the nearly 29-year-old conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people. Some speculate that the slayings may have been an attempt to derail peace efforts.

Cansiz and Ocalan's now-estranged wife, Kesire Yildirim, were the only two women among a core group that founded the PKK in a village in southeast Turkey in 1978. The organization has since grown into one of the world's bloodiest separatist groups, where women make up around 12 percent of the estimated 5,500 fighters.

Details about Cansiz's early years are sketchy. Turkish and Kurdish reports say she became a Kurdish and youth activist in the mainly-Kurdish province of Elazig in the 1970s before helping to found the PKK at a "congress" while in her early 20s. She was arrested during Turkey's 1980 military coup and thrown into a prison in the city of Diyarbakir that was infamous for torture and ill-treatment.

In a 2011 documentary, Cansiz recounted the torture she suffered in the now shut prison — including a beating endured while being forced to wade through "neck-high sewage water."

After her release in 1991, she spent time in PKK camps first in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, which was controlled by Syria at the time, and later in northern Iraq, where she led and organized the group's women's wings, Deniz said.

The PKK's female fighters made headlines in the mid-1990s through a series of suicide bombings that killed dozens of security force members and civilians. Some posed as pregnant women, disguising bombs strapped to their bellies.

Ocalan was initially wary of women members within the PKK, fearing they would distract male fighters. He changed his mind and actively sought to recruit women — partly for ideological reasons.

Inspired by Marxist ideology, Ocalan was convinced that more freedom for Kurdish women would help bring down the feudal, clan-based system that still reigns in Turkey's Kurdish southeast region, according to Necati Alkan, an author of a book on women within the PKK.

Alkan said Ocalan's motto was: "Free women amount to a free land and a free land amounts to freedoms."

At the height of the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish security forces, an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the group's fighters were women, according to Nihat Ali Ozcan, a terrorism expert at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey.

"Sometimes they fought alongside the men as part of a major attack, other times they fought alone," Ozcan said.

In March, Turkish security forces killed 15 women Kurdish rebel fighters in a clash in a forested area in southeast Turkey, believed to be the largest one-day casualty toll for women guerrilla fighters. A Turkish security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, said security forces did not realize they were fighting women until all were killed and they recovered the bodies.

Women undergo the same rigorous training as men in camps in the mountains of northern Iraq, but train and live separately from male comrades. The PKK bars relations between female and male fighters, fearing a weakening of the cause.

According to Ozcan, the PKK has executed fighters "who fell in love" — for breaking the groups' strict rules.

To some Kurdish women, joining the PKK was an escape from Kurdish culture's rigid social mores — forced marriages, honor killings and other restrictive practices that remain rife in the southeast. Many others joined the PKK inspired by a dream of a separate state for Kurds or to avenge Kurds killed, imprisoned or tortured by Turkish security forces.

The PKK originally set out to fight for a separate state for Kurds, who make up an estimated 20 percent of the Turkish population. It later revised its goal to autonomy and greater rights for Kurds, including the annulment of Kurdish language bans imposed in the 1980s.

A series of European Union-backed reforms have widely expanded cultural rights and freedom for Kurds in recent years: A state television station broadcasts programs in Kurdish, students can now choose to learn Kurdish in schools, and there are plans to allow detainees to defend themselves in Kurdish in courts.

Cansiz is believed to have moved to Europe in the mid-1990s, becoming a leading activist for Kurdish women's rights. Unconfirmed Turkish media reports say she was dispatched to Europe following a dispute with some PKK leaders in northern Iraq.

Cansiz received asylum from France in 1998, according to Devris Cimen, head of the Frankfurt-based Kurdish Center for Public Information.

The Wikileaks cable suggests that Cansiz and another PKK member, identified as Riza Altun, were the PKK's key financiers in Europe, helping to funnel "upward of US$50-100 million annually" to the organization. The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and its allies, including the United States.

"We must redouble our efforts to shut down the financial flows from Europe into PKK headquarters" in northern Iraq, the cable reads. "We need to narrow our focus by identifying and going after the two top targets of Riza Altun and Sakine Cansiz."

The cable suggests that the PKK raises money in Europe through fundraising and business activities as well as drugs, smuggling and extortion.

"We can help by ... coordinating with law enforcement and intelligence counterparts in Europe, to ensure these two terrorists are incarcerated," it says.

The co-leader of a pro-Kurdish political party in Turkey, however, eulogized Cansiz for her bravery.

"She spat at the face of her torturers and her oppressors," Gultan Kisanak said Thursday.