Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

September 12, 2012

US ambassador killed in consulate attack in Libya

The attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty since 1979.

The Associated Press

CAIRO — A mob armed with guns and grenades launched a fiery attack on the U.S. Consulate, killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. President Barack Obama strongly condemned the violence, vowed Wednesday to bring the killers to justice and tightened security at diplomatic posts around the world.

The attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens — the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty since 1979 — came on Tuesday's 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist strike and presented a new foreign policy crisis for the United States in a region trying to recover from months of upheaval.

While the deadly assault was initially blamed on an anti-Islamic YouTube video, U.S. officials say the Obama administration is also investigating whether it was a planned terrorist strike to mark the anniversary of 9/11. Intelligence officials said the attack on the Benghazi consulate was too coordinated or professional to be spontaneous, according to a U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the incident publicly.

Libya's interim president, Mohammed el-Megarif, apologized for what he called the "cowardly" assault on the consulate, which also killed several Libyan security guards in the eastern city. Just before the Benghazi violence, protests also flared in Egypt, where crowds angry over the film climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and tore down an American flag, which they replaced briefly with a black, Islamist flag.

The demonstrators in Cairo cited an obscure movie made in the United States by a filmmaker who calls Islam a "cancer." Video excerpts posted on YouTube depict the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, a womanizer and a madman in an overtly ridiculing way, showing him having sex and calling for massacres.

The brazen embassy assaults — the first on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya and Egypt — were signs of the lawlessness that has taken hold in the two countries after revolutions ousted their autocratic secular regimes and upended the tightly controlled police state. Islamists have emerged as powerful forces, and security forces have largely broken down.

In Libya, the volatility is further compounded by the wide availability of heavy weapons and the numerous armed militia factions that remain more powerful than security forces. Notably, an Islamic militant group known as the Omar Abdel-Rahman Brigades claimed responsibility in June for a bomb that went off outside the same U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, causing no injuries. The group at the time said the bombing was in retaliation for the killing of al-Qaida's then-number two, Abu Yahya al-Libi in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan.

Stevens, 52, died as he and a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff during the attack late Tuesday by a mob of protesters, including gunmen armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade, attacked.

The crowd, which numbered several thousand strong, moved on the consulate, firing in the air outside the compound. The consulate is a one-story villa located in a fenced garden in downtown Benghazi. A small contingent of Libyan security forces protecting the facility also fired in the air, trying to intimidate them, said Wanis el-Sharef, the deputy interior minister of Libya's eastern region.

But faced with the mob's superior size and firepower, the Libyan security withdrew, el-Sharef said. Gunmen stormed the building, looted its contents and torch it, he said.

(Continued on page 2)

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