2 American Airmen Killed, 2 Wounded in Germany Airport Terrorist Shooting.

A gunman shot at U.S. Air Force personnel on a bus outside Frankfurt airport Wednesday, killing two airmen and wounding two others before being taken into custody, authorities said.

Kosovo's interior minister told The Associated Press that German police have identified the shooter as a man from Kosovo.

The attack came as the bus sat outside Terminal 2 at the airport, according to Frankfurt police spokesman Manfred Fuellhardt. The bus driver and a passenger were killed, and one person suffered serious wounds and another light injuries, he said.

A source tells Fox News that the shooter yelled "Allah Akbar" when opening fire on the U.S. military personnel. He then dropped his gun at the scene, ran into the terminal and was subdued.

U.S. Air Force Europe spokeswoman Maj. Beverly Mock said all four victims were airmen. The were all based at the Lakenheath military base in Britain.

A military official in Europe says the airmen were going to be deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan.

President Obama said he was "saddened and outraged" by the shooting. 

The president says the U.S. will spare no effort in finding out how the "outrageous" act took place and will ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice. He called it a tragedy.

In Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her sympathies were with the victims and their families, and pledged that Germany would do everything in its power to investigate the crime.

"It is a terrible event," she said.

The U.S. has drastically reduced its forces in Germany over the last decade, but still has some 50,000 troops stationed here. It operates several major facilities in the Frankfurt region, including the Ramstein Air Base often used as a logistical hub for operations in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The German news agency DAPD quoted Hesse's state interior minister, who had rushed to the scene of the shooting, as saying there were no indications of a terrorist attack.

Still, a member of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Patrick Meehan, said in Washington that it looked like a terrorist attack. The chairman of the subcommittee that focuses on terrorism and intelligence added he did not have all the facts about the shooting yet and was still being briefed.

At the airport, taxi cab driver Salimi Seraidon said he was sitting at a stand about 200 yards away when the attack took place and said it was over quickly as police rushed onto the scene.

"We just heard the shots," he said.

Kosovo Interior Minister Bajram Rexhepi told AP that German police have identified the suspect as Arif Uka, a Kosovo citizen from the northern town of Mitrovica.

"This is a devastating and a tragic event," Rexhepi said. "We are trying to find out was this something that was organized or what was the nature of the attack."

Kosovo remained part of Serbia amid the collapse of former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but a struggle for independence by ethnic Albanians there eventually led to the Kosovo war in 1998. The bloodshed was halted only in 1999 when NATO stepped in and bombed Serbia, followed by the deployment of peacekeepers.

Kosovo was initially run by a U.N. administration, but it unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in 2008 and it is now recognized by many states, among them the U.S. and most EU nations.

The NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) still has some 8,700 troops there provided by 32 nations, NATO says. The U.S. currently provides some 800 soldiers, the third-largest contingent behind Germany and Italy, according to KFOR's website.

The American forces in Germany have been targeted in attacks in the past, including a 1986 bombing at a disco in then-West Berlin that was known to be frequented by U.S. servicemen. Two soldiers and one civilian were killed, and 230 others injured in that attack, which a Berlin court in 2001 ruled was organized by the Libyan secret service and aided by the Libyan Embassy in then-communist East Berlin.

The leftist terrorist Red Army Faction was also responsible for a string of attacks on Americans in the 1970s and 1980s before the group was disbanded in 1998.

More recently, German police thwarted a plot in 2007 to attack U.S. facilities by members of the extremist Islamic Jihad Union. Four men had planning to attack American soldiers and citizens at facilities including the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base in Germany but were caught before they could carry out the plot.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

We ask all pray for our fallen, their families, loved ones and friends. 

Holiday reading

A boy and his donkey. Anjuman valley, Afghanistan. Photo: Bob McKerrow

I just got back from a holiday in Thailand where I had a chance to read all those books that have been piling up during the past year. The one that startled me the most was Greg Mortenson’s, “Three Cups of Tea. “ What a ripper. I criss-crossed Greg's footsteps in northern Pakistan and in Badakhshan, Afghanistan in the 90s and early this decade, but unfortunately we never met.

What Mortensin’s book did for me, was to reinforce, what I have written about a number of times before, that the US, EU countries and others of the so called ‘west’, abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out in 1989.

The political vacuum and the scarcity of international aid, gave scores of disorganised Mujaheddin factions a chance to squabble for the spoils of Kabul between 1991 and 1996, and spawned the birth of the Taliban’s, refined modern terrorism, and gave Wahabiism the opportunity to establish Madrases and spread a warped brand of fundamentalism.

During the ten year war against the Soviet Union, the US and the west poured in billions of dollars to support the so called freedom fighters (the Mujaheddin), and even supported Osama bin Laden to fight against the Soviets. Almost to the very day the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the US stopped providing AID to Afghanistan.

Head of the Chamar Valley, Panjcher valley, Afghanistan. Photo: Bob McKerrow

I was in Kabul from 1993 to late 1996 and witnessed first hand the anarchy, poverty, starvation and death caused by lack of foreign aid. Fortunately the Red Cross, OXFAM, CARE, ECHO, MSF, MDM and other national NGOs were able to provide a basic level of life saving aid, but there was little money for the crucial development of schools and universities. Sadly, it took events of 9/11 for the US and west to finally engage again with Afghanistan.

But at what cost ? Today the US are spending US$ 57,077.60 a minute on the current war in Afghanistan

Contrast the hard-won US20,000 Greg Mortenson scrapped together for his first school in Pakistan in 1995.

The potter and his wife. Photo: Bob McKerrow


Another book I read during the holidaywas Don De Lillo’s, Mao II and I was struck by this comment:

"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."

On the question: how do artists and terrorists relate to history?

He writes "There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence.... Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

I think I will read comic books on my next holiday. This stuff is too heavy.