The station was infested with feral cats in 1992, prompting the then environment minister Pat Comben to send in army sharpshooters to reduce the population.

The stomping crowd hooted hoarsely, then formed gyrating conga lines that snaked to and fro across the plaza where 11 years before army sharpshooters gunned down pro-rebel demonstrators.

In El Salvador, his relatives and Government officials have said Mr. Cruz Leon was not the army sharpshooter and explosives expert the Cuban authorities depict him to be, but rather a military academy dropout who was working as a private security guard.

They were eventually overcome by a deployment of army sharpshooters and commandos.

Specially trained army sharpshooters are included among the new, special teams, he said, "so they can be more accurate in shooting them below the knees."

By now Tyler had returned upriver in an attempt to help the crippled Carondelet- Lieutenant Commander Gwin, captain of Tyler, gave the order to a detachment of army sharpshooters that had been assigned to his boat.

And a couple of years ago, the Minister of the Environment called in army sharpshooters when wild cats chased 2,000 rare letter-winged kites from their nests, ruining a field experiment by John Pettigrew, a neuroethologist at the University of Queensland.

No longer, Israeli officials said, will the military "initiate" attacks on Palestinians, either planned assassinations carried out from helicopters or reprisals by army sharpshooters against neighborhoods believed to have been harboring Palestinian gunmen.

They landed a party of sailors and army sharpshooters to reconnoiter Confederate strength in the area.

Some witnesses claimed it was government security forces that threw bombs into the crowd, and army sharpshooters, dressed as civilians, that fired into the chaos from the balcony or roof of the National Palace.