A gunman barricaded the back door blocks NY center's door, kills 13

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – A gunman barricaded the back door of a community center with his car and then opened fire on a room full of immigrants taking a citizenship class Friday, killing 13 people before apparently committing suicide, officials said.

Investigators said they had yet to establish a motive for the massacre, which was at least the fifth deadly mass shooting in the U.S. in the past month alone.

The attack came just after 10 a.m. at the American Civic Association, an organization that helps immigrants settle in this country. Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said the gunman parked his car against the back door, "making sure nobody could escape," then stormed through the front, shooting two receptionists, apparently without a word.

The killer, believed to be a Vietnamese immigrant, then entered a room just off the reception area and fired on a citizenship class.

"The people were trying to better themselves, trying to become citizens," the police chief said.

One receptionist was killed, while the other, shot in the abdomen, pretended to be dead and then crawled under a desk and called 911, he said.

Police said they arrived within two minutes.

The rest of those killed were shot in the classroom. Four people were critically wounded.

The man believed to have carried out the attack was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in an office, a satchel containing ammunition slung around his neck, authorities said. Police found two handguns — a 9 mm and a .45-caliber — and a hunting knife.

Thirty-seven people in all made it out of the building, including 26 who hid in the boiler room in the basement, cowering there for three hours while police methodically searched the building and tried to determine whether the gunman was still alive and whether he was holding any hostages, Zikuski said.

Those in the basement stayed in contact with police by cell phone, switching from one phone to another when their batteries ran out, Zikuski said. Others hid in closets and under desks.

Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers. They then spent two hours searching the building.

They led a number of men out of the building in plastic handcuffs while they tried to sort out the victims from the killer or killers.

Most of the people brought out couldn't speak English, the chief said.

Alex Galkin, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, said he was taking English classes when he heard a shot and quickly went to the basement with about 20 other people.

"It was just panic," Galkin said.

Zhanar Tokhtabayeva, a 30-year-old from Kazakhstan, said she was in an English class when she heard a shot and her teacher screamed for everyone to go to the storage room.

"I heard the shots, every shot. I heard no screams, just silence, shooting," she said. "I heard shooting, very long time, and I was thinking, when will this stop? I was thinking that my life was finished."

Dr. Jeffrey King, speaking at a Catholic Charities office where counseling was being offered Friday night, said he was certain his mother, 72-year-old Roberta King, who taught English at the community center, was among the dead.

Authorities read a list of survivors and his mother's name wasn't on it, he said.

King, one of 10 children, described his mother as a woman brimming with interests ranging from the opera to the preservation society to collecting thousands of dolls. He recollected a recent conversation in which he told her to enjoy her retirement.

"I said, 'Mom you're in your 70s,'" King said. "She said, 'What? You don't think I enjoy working?'"

President Barack Obama, who was traveling in Europe, said he was shocked and saddened by the shooting, which he called an "act of senseless violence." He said he and his wife, Michelle Obama, were praying for the victims, their families and the people of Binghamton, about 140 miles northwest of New York City.

Gov. David Paterson said the massacre was probably "the worst tragedy and senseless crime in the history of this city." Noting mass killings in Alabama and Oakland, Calif., last month, he said: "When are we going to be able to curb the kind of violence that is so fraught and so rapid that we can't even keep track of the incidents?"

The community center was holding class "for those who want to become citizens of the United States of America, who wanted to be part of the American Dream, and so tragically may have had that hope thwarted today," the governor said. "But there still is an American dream, and all of us who are Americans will try to heal this very, very deep wound in the city of Binghamton."

Center officials issued a statement Friday night saying they were "stricken with grief about today's horrific assault and share this grief with the victims' families, our community and the entire nation."

The suspected gunman carried ID with the name of 42-year-old Jiverly Voong, of nearby Johnson City, N.Y., but that was believed to be an alias, said a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A second law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two handguns were registered to Jiverly Wong, another name the man used. Both officials were not authorized to speak publicly.

Initial reports suggested Voong had recently been let go from IBM. But a person at IBM said there was no record of a Jiverly Voong ever working there.

The police chief would not confirm the name of the dead man with the ammunition satchel, saying authorities were still trying to establish with certainty that he was the gunman.

"We have no idea what the motive is," Zikuski said.

He said the suspected gunman "was no stranger" to the community center and may have gone there to take a class.

A woman who answered the phone at a listing for Henry D. Voong said she was Jiverly Voong's sister but would not give her name. She said her brother had been in the country for 28 years and had citizenship.

"I think there's a misunderstanding over here because I want to know, too," she said.

Friday evening, police searched Voong's house and carried out three computer hard drives, a brown canvas rifle case, a briefcase, a small suitcase and several paper bags.

Police left the Voong home shortly before 8 p.m., soon after four people arrived by car and went into the house. It wasn't clear who they were, but they promptly turned out the lights.

Crime scene tape was stretched across the street about 20 yards from the house, and a steady rain fell as two state troopers stood guard to keep anyone but neighborhood residents from entering the dead-end street.

Waiting outside a Catholic Charities office where counselors were tending to relatives of victims, Omri Yigal said his wife, Delores, was taking English lessons when the gunman attacked. He had no word on what happened to her.

He finally left the center feeling sullen shortly before 8 p.m.

"They told me they don't have much hope for me," the Filipino immigrant said before going home to wait for a telephone call.

The American Civic Association helps immigrants in the Binghamton area with citizenship, resettlement and family reunification. The shootings took place in a neighborhood of homes and small businesses in downtown Binghamton, a city of about 47,000 residents.

The Binghamton area was the home to Endicott-Johnson shoe company and the birthplace of IBM, which between them employed tens of thousands of workers before the shoe company closed a decade ago and IBM downsized in recent years.

A string of attacks in the U.S. in the last month left 44 people dead in all.

A gunman killed 10 people and himself in Samson, Ala.; shootings that began with a traffic stop in Oakland, Calif., left four police officers and the gunman dead; an apparent murder-suicide in Santa Clara, Calif., left six dead; and a gunman went on a rampage at a nursing home Sunday, killing seven elderly residents and a nurse who cared for them.

A gunman barricaded the back door blocks NY center's door, kills 13

New Zealand family watches Khmer Rouge trial very closely with personal interest

ELEANOR HALL: One person watching the trial in Phnom Penh very closely is New Zealand Olympic rowing great Rob Hamill, whose brother was among those killed by the Khmer Rouge at Tuol Sleng prison.

Rob Hamill told our New Zealand correspondent Kerri Ritchie that his brother Kerry was captured when he sailed close to Cambodia in the late 1970s.

ROB HAMILL: My brother was sailing his yacht, taking a charter from Singapore up to Bangkok and got blown off course and ended up in Cambodian waters, got captured by a Khmer Rouge gunboat.

One of the guys on the boat, there were three of them, one was killed at that time and my brother and another charter, a guy from England were taken back to Tuol Sleng.

KERRI RITCHIE: And what happened then. I mean, what do you know happened to your brother?

ROB HAMILL: Well, we didn't know for a long time what had happened. He was a regular letter writer to us when he was in his travels and his adventures and enjoying life and living it to its fullest and they just stopped.

We didn't know what happened for a long time. It was a good year wondering, hoping, wondering you know, before we found out what happened.

KERRI RITCHIE: How do you know that your brother was in that Khmer Rouge torture prison?

ROB HAMILL: We were contacted, we weren't contacted by anyone actually. We found out through the media - reading an article in a paper and it was on a radio station that particular day and information had been sourced through Interpol and that a confession; all the prisoners, there were about a dozen or so Westerners that were captured during that three-year period, and all were made to sign confessions that they were CIA agents and Interpol had some documents that were confirmed as my brother's handwriting.

KERRI RITCHIE: The trial is underway of the prison boss and he has asked for people to forgive him. When you heard that, how did that make you feel?

ROB HAMILL: It rings a little hollow. I mean I think Duch was a person who, I mean he must have been an ambitious man. He didn't get to be commandant of that prison by accident and from what I, my understanding in the research I have conducted suggests that he was ruthless and clinical and cruel.

I am going through a process where our family haven't grieved properly. Personally I want to be able to forgive but I can't do that.

KERRI RITCHIE: Is it hard being here in New Zealand and watching it from here? Do you wish that you were there in Cambodia to see this first-hand?

ROB HAMILL: I feel I should be there. Right at this minute I almost, just circumstances don't allow.

KERRI RITCHIE: But you are going to go to Cambodia to give a statement in coming months?

ROB HAMILL: I don't know when. It depends on the court process but certainly I hope to face Duch and make a statement on behalf of our family and the effect he had on our family in the hope that it aids in some way the sentencing process.

KERRI RITCHIE: How will you convey how much it ripped apart a Kiwi family?

ROB HAMILL: Mmm, well I am just going to tell the story and will describe the pain, the anxiety, the hope, the desperate hope. I think that was really, really hard on my parents in particular and they paid for it too with their health.

KERRI RITCHIE: What punishment is fit for this man? What would you like to see? What would bring you and your family comfort?

ROB HAMILL: I don't know. Look, I don't know what to expect from this. If I could bring myself to believing Duch's words, you know, that he can somehow see the error in his ways and I can believe him, there may spring a strange comfort, I don't know. I don't know ultimately but it is going to be, it needs to be done.

ELEANOR HALL: That was Rob Hamill whose brother was killed by the Khmer Rouge. He was speaking to our New Zealand correspondent Kerri Ritchie.

News Source: abc.net.au

New Zealand family watches Khmer Rouge trial very closely with personal interest

April Fools' may be no joke for world's computer users

(CNN) -- Computer experts waited early Wednesday to see what impact -- if any -- the worm known as Conficker.c will have on the world's computers.


"As long as you've patched or at least brought your antivirus software up to speed, you should be fine," said Chris Pirillo, a tech expert for CNN.com.

And there are plenty of anti-virus software packages available.

"I believe just about everybody out there," Pirillo said, "has a removal tool."

Still, the worm can wreak havoc, he said.

Unlike viruses, worms self propagate, spreading by networks. "Once it's out there, it's very difficult to stop," Pirillo said.

He predicted that "the worst possible outcome" would be that some computers would run "suboptimally," as network traffic becomes clogged.

And its ability to do that is cleverly designed: Conficker.c has a feature that disables the Windows update program in the Microsoft product, keeping Windows from becoming patched, Pirillo said. It also disables the auto-update capabilities of many anti-virus software programs.

Pirillo said it may be a week or more before the true impact of the worm is known, but he predicted it will have one.

"It's going to be very annoying to say the least," he said. "It's going to impact network traffic in a big way."
Lawrence Baldwin, the chief forensics officer with mynetwatchman.com, an Internet security site based in Atlanta, said the motivations of Conficker.c designers appear to be different from the motivations of those who designed previous worms, which infected millions of computers but had little impact.

"Three or four or five years ago, they were plainly trying to prove how smart they were," he said. Now, he said, the designers' motivation appears to be financial. "They can make serious amounts of cash with a variety of means."

Still, he predicted, any damage will be limited. "I don't suspect that we're going to have any kind of global meltdown as a result of this thing. I think what we'll see is that the purpose and intent of Conflicker is to deploy a whole plethora of secondary malware -- spam, Trojans, key loggers, distributed denial-of-service attacks, adware, etcetera, etcetera. Basically, all the things that the criminal can make money with."

Widespread media coverage of the threat may have motivated many individuals and corporations to act, possibly minimizing the potential impact.

The FBI said only that it was "aware of the potential threat posed by the Conficker worm" and was working with a range of partners "to fully identify and mitigate the threat."

But just what is that threat? Computer experts acknowledged they don't know for sure. "The biggest question is what is actually going to happen?" said Simit Shah, director of Web operations for CNN.com.

So far, the worm "kind of calls home and says, 'What should I do?'" he said. And so far, the response has been to do nothing, he said.

But on Wednesday, the worm is expected to expand its daily call list from a set list of 250 sites to 500 Web sites chosen at random from 50,000, "so it becomes harder to continue using some of the countermeasures that have worked so far," he said.

The worm "could end up connecting to one of these sites and say, 'Go do something,'" he said. That "something" could wind up being any of a number of different kinds of attacks on any of a number of Web sites, including government ones, he said.

He said the worm already controls more than 10 million computers by some estimates and is very sophisticated. "If someone says, 'I want to try to hack some system and try millions of combinations of Social Security numbers,' they could purchase this computing power to do that," Shah said.

Or, on the other side of the spectrum, "it could be all about ego," he said, noting that the worm authors have played a cat-and-mouse game with security experts since last November, when the first version of the Conficker worm was discovered.

Since then, as countermeasures have been devised and deployed, the worm has morphed into two other versions, each more sophisticated than the previous one.

In February, security experts' efforts to fight back got a boost when Microsoft offered a $250,000 reward to anyone who could catch the worm authors.

That resulted in the formation of Conficker Cabal, a group of security experts trying to combat the worm.

Despite the worm's potential for causing damage, its still-unknown authors have earned "a lot of respect" from the security experts, Shah said.

"These guys are doing stuff you don't normally see done," he said.

One of the first things it does is to disable a computer's automatic updates, he said. In October, Microsoft released a patch to fix this vulnerability, but many computer users have not updated yet. And, "once you get the worm, it disables your ability to update," Shah said.

IBM security expert Holly Stewart said in a telephone interview with CNN that the latest version of Conficker -- Conficker.c, which was discovered less than a month ago -- is different from prior versions in that it is not focused on propagating. Instead, it "is more focused on holding the fort and keeping the communication lines open to its peers."

She said an IBM computer specialist last week reverse-engineered the worm's communications mechanisms and found a way to detect it on the network.

"It's very well constructed," she said about the worm. "Conficker authors spent a lot of time making this chatty network very difficult for intrusion prevention and intrusion detection systems to detect."

The company's security update, deployed late last week to its customers, shows 45 percent of infections occurring in Asia, followed by Europe, with 31 percent, she said.

Still unclear is the impact. "That's the million-dollar question," she said. "To be honest, no one can give an accurate prediction."

But the motivation appears more clear. Someone has spent "a lot of money and resources" creating the worm, she said. "It would surprise me if they did not want to cash in on it in some way."

Shah said he too did not know what would happen, but that the worst-case scenario would be "you could get your computer wiped out and your computer could be part of some kind of criminal enterprise."

For the moment, the worm remains at rest, but, "at some point, it is going to get an instruction to do something."

Steve Santorelli, a former Scotland Yard detective who is now director of global outreach for the Chicago, Illinois-based security research company Team Cymru said the worm authors "have amassed what is the equivalent of a major weapon that could possibly be turned against the Internet. There is lots of speculation, and that speculation leads to fear of the unknown. The only people who really know what Confiker will be used for, if anything, are the criminals behind it. The rest of us are guessing."

News Source : cnn.com

April Fools' may be no joke for world's computer users