Play Video: Police: GA Suspect Wanted Utilities Turned On
Play Video: Gunman Holding Firefighters Killed; Hostages OK

This Thursday, April 11, 2013 photo shows a home damaged during a hostage standoff in Suwanee, Ga. A man held four Gwinnett County firefighters hostage for hours before they where freed when police officers stormed the house Wednesday. Authorities said the firefighters encountered an armed man who demanded that his cable and power be turned back on at the house, which was in foreclosure. (AP Photo/Kate Brumback)

SUWANEE, Ga. (AP) — A gunman who lured firefighters to his Georgia home with an emergency call, then held four of them hostage for hours before being shot to death faced a series of personal and financial calamities before he lashed out.

Lauren Brown's life apparently reached a crisis this spring. With his power, cable and other utilities cut off because of nonpayment, the 55-year-old had half a dozen guns in his house and spent weeks planning the kidnapping, targeting firefighters rather than police Wednesday so he wouldn't be shot, authorities said Thursday.

"We knew he wasn't quite normal, but this is a real shock," saidDavid Books, a former colleague of Brown's and a friend until they had a falling out years ago. He said he never noticed any signs that Brown could be violent.

The specific reasons that Brown chose to lash out aren't known, but Brown experienced personal and financial difficulties. He had separated from his wife years earlier, though he still lived across the street from her, her new husband and his two children, according to neighbors and people who knew the family. The living arrangement had long caused tension, said Books, who helped Brown move.

Books said Brown's mother eventually bought the house across from her son's ex-wife so her son could afford to live there.

"Having been a father myself, I can understand his desire to be as close to his children as possible, but given the acrimony between him and his wife — regardless of who might have been at fault — it looked to me like a situation that was going to turn out not to be very healthy," he said.

Brown worked long hours as a system engineer at IBM in the 1990s, Books said. Brown told his colleagues that he developed fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain, and left work on a medical retirement.

"For a while, he was in so much pain that he couldn't even think about working," Books said.

By 2002, Brown described himself as disabled in federal bankruptcy filings. He said he owed more than $100,000 to the Home Depot, banks and credit card companies. The records suggest that Brown was tapping into his retirement savings to make ends meet. A series of tax liens had been placed on his home, which slipped into foreclosure in recent months.

"He bragged about being an outstanding money manager," Books said. "I never really saw any evidence of that."

An insurer for IBM eventually refused to make disability payments to Brown, who was forced to return to the workforce, Books said. The two men last met at a business lunch around 2003 or 2004, though they kept in touch on Facebook since then. Brown had a live-in girlfriend for a time and wrote online of becoming a born-again Christian.

More recently, there were signs of trouble. Brown was arrested and booked into the Gwinnett County jail in 2010 after he failed to appear in court on a charge of striking an unmanned vehicle.

Brown called 911 Wednesday and said he was suffering from chest pains, and five Gwinnett County firefighters arrived at 3:48, believing it was a routine call, said Police Chief Charles Walters. Brown was lying in bed and appeared to be suffering from a condition that left him unable to move. But when they approached the bed to help him, he pulled out a handgun, Walters said.

He let one go to move the vehicles from the front of his house but kept the other four.

That began a 3½ -hour standoff. At about 7:30, police were convinced that even if they met Brown's demands, he had no intention of releasing his hostages, Walters said.

Brown had requested items from a fast food seafood restaurant for himself and his hostages, and a SWAT officer carrying the food approached the house in Suwannee, about 35 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Other SWAT members set off a stun blast to distract Brown and stormed the house. Brown opened fire on the first officer as he entered the bedroom. The man was hit in the left arm by one of the shots, but managed to return fire, killing Brown. Before Brown fired, police told him to drop his weapon, Walters said.

Exposed wooden beams could be seen through a gaping hole in the side of the house Thursday and debris littered the yard. Public records indicate the red brick house with white siding is in foreclosure and has been bank-owned since mid-November.

Next to Brown's home, another brick house with tan siding appeared to have even more damage. A large area of the side was missing, again with wooden beams and insulation exposed.

Jasmin Gutierez, 12, was at home with her family in that house Wednesday afternoon. They huddled in the master bedroom at the other end of the house.

"We started, like, at least trying to get in a group hug to save ourselves because we got scared," she said. "I mean there was a lot of people, like the SWAT teams and the police."

After a while, they heard a loud bang and then they heard shooting and black smoke started to fill their home and police knocked on the door to make sure they were all right.

After the hostage-taking was reported, dozens of police and rescue vehicles surrounded the home and a negotiator was keeping in touch with the gunman, police said. The situation remained tense until the blast rocked the neighborhood of mostly two-story homes and well-kept lawns.

"The explosion you heard was used to distract the suspect, to get into the house and take care of business," Gwinnett County Police Cpl. Edwin Ritter said in a news conference minutes after the ordeal ended. He said the situation had gotten to the point where authorities believed the lives of the hostages were in "immediate danger."

"It's an unfortunate circumstance we did not want to end this way," Ritter said. "But with the decisions this guy was making, this was his demise."

Firefighters were able to use their radios to let the dispatch center know what was going on and that's how negotiators communicated with Brown initially, Walters said. Once they got his cellphone service turned back on, they were able to speak to him by phone.

Fire officials did not believe there was any danger in responding to the initial call that seemed routine and dispatched the usual one engine and one ambulance to the house.

This was the second time in recent months that firefighters have been targeted.

On Dec. 24, a man in upstate New York set his house ablaze and shot and killed two firefighters as they arrived, then himself. Two other firefighters and a police officer were wounded.

___

Associated Press writers Johnny Clark and Phillip Lucas contributed to this report.

Smoke rises after shells exploded in the Syrian village of al-Jamlah, close to the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria, as seen from the Israeli occupied Golan Heights in this March 7, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Baz Ratner/Files

By Maayan Lubell

TEL HAZEKA, Golan Heights (Reuters) - The slopes of the Golan Heights, with springtime wild flowers now in full bloom, are dotted with discarded rusty tanks that are remnants of a 1973 war. For decades, the Israel-Syria front has been quiet - but not anymore.

Small Israeli military lookout posts abandoned for years have been put into action and regular military and special forces have replaced reservists at many points.

Israel is worried that the Golan, which it captured from Syria in 1967, will become a springboard for attacks on Israelis by jihadi fighters, who are taking part in the armed struggle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In recent months, battles between Assad loyalists and rebels have raged in some villages on the Syrian foothills of the Golan, with mortar shells and machinegun fire spilling across into Israeli-occupied territory.

Israel, which returned fire in some of those incidents, believes that around one in 10 of the rebels are Sunni Muslim radicals.

"Tension in the Golan Heights is the highest it has been since 1974," a senior Israeli military officer in the area told Reuters this week. "We simply do not know who will control the territory next to the border."

While the fall of Assad, an ally of Israel's enemy Iran, could be in the Jewish state's interest, a descent into chaos on the Golan Heights would pose a new security challenge.

Some 20,000 Israeli settlers live on the Golan and the strategic plateau overlooks Israeli towns and villages along the Sea of Galilee.

On its southern borders, Israel has long faced rocket attacks from armed Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip and has watched with concern the rise of Islamist militancy in Egypt's Sinai desert.

One Israeli general, the commander of forces in the north, raised the possibility in an Israeli newspaper interview last month of creating a buffer zone in Syria, in cooperation with local forces wary of jihadist fighters, should Assad be toppled.

"Some very key decision-makers are opposed," an Israeli official said. "(Army chief) Benny Gantz, for example, was the Israeli commander who literally closed the door on south Lebanon when we withdrew from the security zone there in 2000, and he has shown little interest in seeing a repeat on the Golan."

Alon Liel, a former diplomat who led secret peace talks with Damascus, said Israel had limited room for maneuver over Syria. "Israel is paralyzed from a diplomatic perspective," he said. "We may be strong militarily but any intervention in a neighboring country would draw deep objection from both sides in Syria because Israel is so weak in the region diplomatically."

SYRIA STRATEGY

World powers trying to craft a Syria strategy, and weighing whether to arm the rebels, have been struggling to distinguish between mainstream fighters who might stabilize the country should Assad fall, and jihadi insurgents.

"There's no unified position on that yet," a senior Israeli official said. "No one really knows what post-Assad Syria would look like. No one really knows who the rebels are as a collective."

Israel has been wary of being seen to take sides in the Syrian conflict and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has avoided echoing calls from Israel's main ally, the United States, for Assad to step down.

One senior Western diplomat in Israel told Reuters Syria has been moving up a list of Israeli security concerns topped by Iran's nuclear program.

"Syria is starting to edge ahead of Iran as far as the (Israeli) military is concerned, but also among politicians, partly because of U.S. reassurances over Iran but also because the situation in Syria is getting so alarming," he said.

One Israeli official said the fluid situation in Syria meant that Israel had to assess events there almost daily.

"That makes for a far more intensive examination (by Israeli decision-makers)," the official said. "Add to that the fact there is a new (Israeli) government, with new ministers who have little time to get up to speed on these things."

One of Israel's main worries is the possibility of Syria's chemical weapons falling into the hands of Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah, with which it fought a 2006 war, or ending up in the hands of jihadis.

Israel has cautioned it will not allow that to happen. In an attack it has not formally confirmed, Israeli planes bombed an arms convoy in Syria in February, according to Western sources, destroying anti-aircraft weapons destined for Hezbollah.

END OF UNDOF?

The green expanses and snow-capped mountains of the Golan are a major attraction for Israeli tourists who flock to the plateau. On a sunny spring day, a group of hikers admired the view as an elderly farmer slowly drove through his apple orchard.

A few miles away, Israeli troops on patrol stopped their armored vehicles near an old abandoned tank for a break. Asked if it was quiet that day, one soldier made a "so-so" hand gesture. "When it's quiet, that's when it's scariest," he said.

In another sign Israel was keeping a close eye on the area, two drones, visible from the road, were parked in a fenced-in facility.

Among those battling against Assad's forces are fighters from the Nusra Front, an Islamist militant group linked to al Qaeda and blacklisted by the United States as a "terrorist group".

Nusra Front forces, which include foreign fighters, have come to prominence in the revolt and last month fought in battles near the Israel-Syria ceasefire line

Last month, Assad's forces appeared to push back the rebels in the area. "There is a still a visible (Syrian army) troop presence there, though it is unclear whether they have significant control or even a unified central command," an Israeli official said.

Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai, Israel's chief military spokesman, told Army Radio last week that global jihad groups were fighting under the rebels, and "exploiting the anarchy", some of them have moved into the Golan Heights.

"In the future we will have to deal with terrorism from the Golan Heights, after 40 years of impressive and exemplary quiet," Mordechai said.

An Israeli military officer said new Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon had ordered "that no fire from Syria into Israel, be it deliberate or stray, is left without response."

Israel is building a new, 5-metre tall fence on the Golan beside the older, partly rundown barrier that runs along the 70 km (45 mile) front.

The ceasefire line has been monitored since 1974 by a 1,000-strong U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). Arming the Syrian rebels could have implications for the peacekeepers, posing another potential headache for Israel.

Austria has cautioned that lifting the embargo to arm rebels would make the European Union a party to the conflict and make it difficult to keep the 375 Austrian peacekeepers on site.

UNDOF has faced increasing difficulties in the Golan and U.N. diplomats have expressed concern over its future. Last month, rebels held 21 Filipino UNDOF observers for three days, prompting the force to scale back on patrols.

Israeli military sources said they fear the peacekeeping force will not hold up under the insurgency in the Golan.

In the past three months, Japan and Croatia said they were withdrawing their troops. Should the Austrians leave, it could spell the end for the UNDOF mission because they are the biggest contingent and it is unclear who would want to replace them.

Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger met Netanyahu on Thursday and is due to visit U.N. peacekeepers on the Golan Heights Friday.

"We have some of the world's most dangerous weapons and we cannot allow them to fall into the world's most dangerous hands: Hezbollah, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups," Netanyahu told reporters as he and Spindelegger met.

"That is one of the great concerns for us and a great concern for you as well and I want to discuss with you how to prevent that from happening," the Israeli leader said.

Spindelegger said Austria would try to stay as long as it could but that would not be possible without security guarantees from both rebel and government forces in Syria.

(Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer and Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Michael Shields in Vienna; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Giles Elgood)

Article: Canada backs UN probe into Syrian chemical weapons

BEIRUT (AP) — President Bashar Assad has exploited his greatest advantage in the Syrian civil war — his air power — to push back rebel advances and prevent the opposition from setting up a rival government in its northern stronghold.

Along the way, fighter jets and helicopters have hit civilian targets such as hospitals, bakeries and residential buildings, according to a report released Thursday by a U.S.-based human rights group. It accused the regime of committing war crimes with indiscriminate airstrikes that have killed more than 4,000 civilians since summer.

The Human Rights Watch report said Assad's air force has dropped "imprecise and inherently indiscriminate" munitions, including cluster bombs, on civilian areas.

In recent months, large parts of northern Syria near the border with Turkey have fallen to the rebels, including several neighborhoods of Aleppo, the country's largest city. With the recent influx of more advanced weapons and other foreign aid, the rebels have also made major gains in the south, seizing military bases and towns in the strategically important region between Damascus and the border with Jordan.

Two years into the uprising, however, the Assad regime's control of the skies is hampering rebels' efforts to hold on to territory they capture with any efficiency. An interim leader of the opposition has been elected, but he and others opposed to Assad have made only a few, brief forays into rebel-controlled areas.

"The air force is extremely important for Assad right now," said Joseph Holliday, a Syria analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

"It has allowed Assad to prevent rebels from establishing a part of Syria where people can be safe and the opposition can focus on governing the place," he said. "It very difficult to do that without a space that is free from constant harassment from the aircraft."

Although the rebels have been able to shoot down several aircraft after capturing some heavier weapons from military bases, they are largely helpless when it comes to Assad's air supremacy.

The opposition has repeatedly asked their foreign backers for weapons that can shoot down the regime's aircraft and help hasten the fall of Assad. But the United States and its European allies have been reluctant to provide opposition fighters with anti-aircraft missiles for fear they may end in the hands of radical Muslim groups that have been the most organized fighting force on the opposition side.

The rebels also want a no-fly zone established over northern Syria, but the countries opposed to Assad have taken no action on that option, either.

The top U.S. military commander in Europe, Adm. James Stavridis, said last month that some NATO nations are looking at a variety of military operations to end the deadlock and assist the opposition forces, including using aircraft to impose a no-fly zone, providing military assistance to the rebels and imposing arms embargoes.

As with U.S. and international involvement in Libya in 2011, a resolution from the U.N. Security Council and agreement among the alliance's 28 members would be needed before NATO takes a military role in Syria, Stavridis said.

Late last year, NATO deployed Patriot batteries along Turkey's border with Syria, with the alliance's leaders emphasizing that the missiles will not be used to shoot down aircraft operating in Syrian airspace.

Military experts say it is unlikely the West will revisit the no-fly zone any time soon.

"It's not easy to just go on and establish a no-fly zone, and the West has said so before," said Beirut-based military analyst, Brig. Gen. Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese army officer who heads the Middle East Center for Studies and Political Research in Beirut.

"They know that the Syrian army remained strong, the air force is behind Assad, and they also know that Syria has a very sophisticated air defense system," he said.

Jaber said Syria has about 400 operational aircraft, although analysts say it is difficult to come up with reliable figures on the Syrian air force and air defenses because of the extreme secrecy that blankets its military matters.

Like his late father and predecessor, Hafez, the younger Assad stacked key military posts with members of their minority Alawite sect in the past 40 years, ensuring the loyalty of the armed forces by melding the fate of the army and the regime. The air force is particularly close to the regime. Hafez Assad was an air force pilot and commander before seizing power in 1970.

However, many pilots are Sunni Muslims, and defections from the air force since the beginning of the uprising in March 2011 have been rare.

In the most dramatic escape from Syria, a fighter pilot on a training mission flew his MiG-21 warplane to neighboring Jordan in June. Only three other pilots have reportedly defected, crossing into Jordan by land last summer.

Syrian officials denounced the pilot, who is a Sunni Muslim, and military experts with knowledge of Syria suggested that the regime has grounded Sunni pilots, relying on Alawites to carry out airstrikes instead. No order has appeared in public to support their claims.

While the air force is an important tool in Assad's battle for survival, it's not his last one, said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

"It's the 3 million Alawites who believe that they will be ethnically cleansed by the opposition if the rebels overthrow Assad," Landis said. "It's because of the fear of those who could come after him that has spread around Syrian minority communities in the past year of the revolution, that many — including Sunnis — continue fighting on the regime's side."

In their campaign against the opposition, the Syrians have been using helicopters, MiG jets and trainer aircraft to hit targets daily in the north, the east, the south and in rebel strongholds on the edges of the capital of Damascus.

"The aim of the airstrikes appears to be to terrorize civilians from the air, particularly in the opposition-controlled areas where they would otherwise be fairly safe from any effects of fighting," Ole Solvang of Human Rights Watch told The Associated Press.

More than 4,300 people have been killed since summer in such attacks that amount to "serious violations of international humanitarian law," and people who commit such breaches are "responsible for war crimes," the New York-based group said in the report, the most comprehensive study ofSyrian air force operations in rebel-held areas since the beginning of the conflict. The U.N. estimates that more than 70,000 people have been killed in the civil war.

The Assad regime has significantly increased its use of air power since July, when the rebels captured territory in the north after an offensive, as well as last month after they seized their first provincial capital, Raqqa. The city is bombed almost daily.

Human Rights Watch said it inspected 52 sites in northern Syria and documented what it labeled 59 unlawful attacks by the Syrian air force in rebel-held areas.

Based on inspections and more than 140 interviews with witnesses, HRW said warplanes "deliberately targeted four bakeries (in the north) where civilians were waiting in bread lines a total of eight times."

Repeated aerial attacks on two hospitals that the group visited in the northern areas under opposition control "strongly suggest that the government also deliberately targeted these facilities," HRW said.

Assad's jets have dropped incendiary weapons on residential areas in the north that are designed to set fire to objects and people, the group said.

The planes have also hit civilian areas with makeshift bombs, made from hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of explosives stuffed into barrels. HRW even found unexploded naval mines on sites hit by airstrikes in northern Syria, Solvang said.

"They seem to be using pretty much everything they have to bomb places," he said.

Officials in Damascus could not immediately be reached for comment on the Human Rights Watch report. The Syrian government describes the rebels as foreign-backed terrorists set on destroying the country.

HRW also criticized the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups for not taking measures to avoid deploying forces and headquarters in or near densely populated areas.