The uncertainty mounting around whether or not President Barack Obama will attend the 2010 World Cup championship in Cape Town, South Africa, is causing quite a stir for that nation’s security officials.
The country’s police commissioner Bheki Cele has already publicly expressed his reluctance to having the immense responsibility of protecting the U.S. President at the event.
“One challenge is the American president, who is coming, not coming, coming, not coming,” Cele told a parliamentary committee during a briefing on the police agency’s World Cup security plans in Cape Town, the SAPA news agency reported. “It is 50-50 (whether Obama comes or not), our prayer is that the Americans don’t make the second round. We are told that if it goes to the second or third stage, the U.S. president may come,” Cele said.
Although South Africa is deploying 44,000 police officers to secure the event, issues of protecting the first African American president of the United States is an unparalleled effort for the officials of a country which formerly enforced a policy of apartheid. In an equally — if not more so — historic election of it’s first black president when the beloved civil rights leader Nelson Mandela was elected to the office in 1994.
Osama Bin Laden’s first assistant, Ayman al- Zawahiri, was arrested on Monday May 17, in relation to a suspected terrorist plot to attack the World Cup soccer tournament.
The World Cup is scheduled for June 11-July 11 in South Africa, and is expected to attract between 200,000 and 300,000 foreign visitors. -christian johnson
