SAS joined police for terror raids
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 31/07/2005)

Sunday Telegraph

London under attack

The dramatic scenes that played out live on television on Friday morning
were the result of intelligence gathered during a dawn raid by police two
days earlier in the Hay Mills area of Birmingham.





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In that operation, Anti-Terrorist Squad officers and members of the
Metropolitan Police's firearms unit, SO19, stormed two houses and arrested
four men.

It was the first big breakthrough in the hunt for a team of bombers who had
tried to replicate the devastating Tube and bus attacks of three weeks
earlier which had killed 52 people and injured 700.

Yassin Hassan Omar, 24, who was believed to have attempted a suicide attack
at Warren Street station six days earlier, was in police custody and was
beginning to talk.

It is believed that information obtained from Omar's interrogation led
police to two addresses in west London, which were being used as safe
houses. By this stage the police knew the identities of all five suspects,
to whom they referred as Bravo 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, while the addresses they
were occupying were known as Alpha 1 and Alpha 2.

Almost 10 days earlier at a Cobra meeting - which consisted of the Prime
Minister, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Eliza
Manningham-Buller, MI5 director-general, and other government ministers -
approval was given to use the Special Air Service's counter-terrorist (CT)
team in any hostage or siege situation.

The CT team, which is made up of about 30 SAS troopers, had been moved to a
"holding area" just outside London on at least two occasions since the
attacks of July 7 in anticipation that they might be needed.

At around lunchtime on Thursday an SAS liaison officer working with S013,
the Anti-Terrorist Squad, contacted the operations officer at the SAS
headquarters in Hereford and requested that two four-man teams trained in
"explosive entry" techniques should be dispatched to London.

Their use, they were told, would be limited to forcing an entry into two
buildings and, because it was still a police and not a military operation,
they would not be used in any assault and would be armed only with pistols
for personal protection.

Any further use of the SAS would have required a "transfer of authority"
signed by the police officer in charge of the operation to put the SAS in
control. The last time this happened was during the Iranian Embassy siege in
1980.

Later on Thursday, Sir Ian Blair said on television that it would be only a
matter of time before the terrorists were caught. At the same time, SO13 was
briefing officers on the forthcoming operation, which would prove to be the
turning point in the investigation. Police had already inserted microphones
in two properties and they were certain that they had located terrorist safe
houses.

By 8am on Friday, the SAS teams had conducted a "walk by" reconnaissance of
the front door of flat number 14 in the Peabody Trust complex in Dalgarno
Gardens, where they believed that Ramzi Mohammed and Ibrahim Muktar Said
were hiding. A similar reconnaissance was conducted on a flat in Tavistock
Crescent where Whabi Mohammed, the so-called 5th bomber, was thought to be
hiding.

By this stage specialist firearms officers from SO19, were receiving their
final briefings for the assault.

The SFOs are taught the same tactics and close-quarter battle skills as the
SAS and train in the black rubber-clad "killing house" at the regiment's
headquarters. They are not, however, trained in explosive entry techniques,
which is why they are sometimes accompanied by SAS troopers during
operations.

In March last year the terrorists who bombed trains in Madrid blew
themselves up and several members of the Spanish police rather than face
capture. The SAS and SFO teams waiting outside the target addresses in West
London knew they, too, faced the same danger.

The tactics that they had decided on were relatively simple. The SAS would
make entry into both of the flats through the front door, either by using a
small explosive charge or by using a pump-action shotgun. SFOs would then
fire CS gas through windows and doors, after which police negotiators would
try to talk to the suspects.

Although the police wanted to capture the men alive, no chances were to be
taken and anyone who represented a threat or failed to follow commands would
be shot dead.

By 9.30am the SFO teams and their SAS entry men were ready to go. Snipers
moved into position and neighbouring houses were evacuated. The assault
teams were given a three-minute warning and at 11am began the raids on the
two suspect addresses.

After CS gas was fired into both houses, police knew that the suspects would
eventually emerge - the only question was whether they would try to detonate
explosives.

Within minutes of the start of the assault, police negotiators began a
dialogue with the occupants of flat 14 in the Peabody Trust complex. The men
were ordered to come to the door, and were warned that they were surrounded
but told that they would not be harmed if they did as they were told. One
suspect began crying, declaring that he was "scared" and that he "had
rights".

With tension mounting and the suspects still inside, one officer was heard
shouting: "What is the problem?"

After a 30-minute stand-off, the police fired another volley of CS gas into
the flat. Choking and wiping away tears, the suspects emerged with their
hands in the air and stripped to their underwear.

After their surrender, all three suspects were dressed in white boiler suits
and taken to Paddington Green Police station.

While the SFOs and the SAS troopers celebrated their successful operation,
the five suspects were about to face the first of many hours of questioning.
One security official said: "We have just won round two in the first battle
of what will be a very long war."





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I confess, I have never had a Muslim to dinner
By Max Hastings
(Filed: 31/07/2005)

Sunday Telegraph

Home-grown terrorism has prompted an intense debate about the rights and
obligations of everyone who lives in our society. We have been brought face
to face with the fact that some people who hold British passports
nonetheless dislike this country so much that they are eager to immolate
innocent people as well as themselves, to demonstrate their alienation.

This has done enormous harm to race relations. Many white people are
instinctively looking askance at young Muslims. They wonder which side they
are on. This assertion is neither flippant nor hyperbolic. More than a few
representatives of old Britain ask a brutal question of new Britain: "If you
don't like it here, why don't you simply go somewhere else?"

Emigration was the historic recourse of the disaffected. A host followed
where the Pilgrim Fathers led, to America and the colonies. If some Muslims
perceive Western societies as deplorably decadent - which last week's Daily
Telegraph poll convincingly suggested - then why should they not transfer
themselves and their resentment to an Islamic society?

In truth, of course, few dissidents are likely to do this, because they
cherish the economic advantages available in the West. Migrants are
struggling to reach Europe and the US, because these offer standards of life
and liberty unattainable in Pakistan or Iran.

Yet why should we welcome anyone who comes here only for the money? If a
newcomer is unwilling to defer to our values, flawed as these may seem, then
surely no Western society has a moral obligation to admit him? I suspect
this view will be increasingly and energetically expressed by "old"
residents, in Britain's harsher post-July 7 social climate.

The most generous interpretation of multiculturalism has become
unacceptable: that people can pitch camp here as migrants or asylum-seekers
on their own terms, heedless of our custom and practice. For instance, no
one should expect to live in Britain unless willing to treat women with the
respect accorded to them by the majority of British people. Those culturally
committed to women's subjection should choose somewhere else.

A vital factor in sustaining a racially mixed society is a sense of shared
purpose, such as the United States has historically achieved. It is not only
the number of uncontrolled migrants which makes British citizens today feel
vulnerable. It is also the failure of government to impose any plausible
social contract for newcomers' domicile.

The majority have human rights, too. Many of us find it relatively easy to
agree on that, even if Tony Blair does not.

Now we come to the hard part, the other side of the deal: what can new
Britain reasonably demand from old Britain? Do we try nearly hard enough, to
make welcome those newcomers who, in the fullest sense, want to belong ?

Last week, a letter appeared in the Financial Times, from a Malcolm Subhan.
He wrote: "As a good 'brown Englishman' I took my assimilation into Western
society for granted - until it suddenly occurred to me, a few months ago,
that to the white-skinned 'natives' I am a dark-skinned foreigner, an
outsider, ultimately a good imitation of an Englishman. What should I do to
let people know that I am one of them? Hand out cards setting out my
credentials - that I attended the primary school attached to the Anglican
cathedral in Lahore, that I was brought up on Sexton Blake and Sherlock
Holmes, that I read politics at Oxford, that I think in English, probably
dream in it as well? Is integration - never mind assimilation - possible for
those of us who are dark-skinned?"

This is an extraordinarily moving declaration - no, interrogative - from
someone who seems to fulfil every criterion to be considered a "true Brit"
by even the most reactionary of his fellow-countrymen. It evokes the tragic
predicament of Harry Kumar, the public-school Indian in Paul Scott's Jewel
In the Crown.

Those of us who pin our hopes for British society upon assimilation are
brought up short when reminded how hard it is to make this real. I was
shocked recently at a business dinner in a northern city where there was not
one black or brown face among 600 guests. As a society, we must do much
better than that.

The challenge is to advance integration, without imposing unreasonable
demands on the traditional community. The Countryside Agency, a Government
quango, recently made itself ridiculous by urging that rural Britain should
become more user-friendly towards minorities.

This prompted many perfectly decent white rural-dwellers to demand: what in
God's name do they want? Chapattis in Cornish tearooms? Rice paddies in
Wiltshire?

If some readers find such remarks tasteless as well as facetious, they were
understandable. Nothing is more certain to damage race relations than clumsy
demands for old Britain to change its character to suit new. Why should it?

By contrast, positive discrimination in employment seems vital. As a
newspaper editor, for some years I resisted this, then grew so discouraged
by the tiny number of job applicants from minorities that I acknowledged its
indispensability. John Birt, as director-general of the BBC, deserves credit
for having pursued an energetic policy of minority recruitment, the fruits
of which are visible on every television channel.

Shopping in a small English country town last week, I felt a stab of
optimism, amid the relaxed friendliness of the Asian shopkeepers who now
play so significant a part even in rural communities. I think also of my
grown-up children, infinitely less race-conscious than our generation,
embarrassed by anything resembling a racist joke.

It is among the middle-aged, I fancy, more than the young, that an effort is
needed to reach out to good citizens like Mr Subhan. While searching my own
soul about our cultural predicament, I acknowledged an embarrassing truth.
In the course of my life I have entertained only perhaps a dozen black
guests at parties, and have never had a Muslim to dinner in my house. The
same must be true for many British middle-class people.

Until interracial experience finds a path into our own lives, it remains
hard to boast that we are contributing much to the assimilation we deem
vital to our future. This is a two-way street.



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Suspect Held in Italy Said to Admit Carrying Bomb in Train


By
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=IAN%20FISHER&fdq=1996010
1&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=IAN%20FISHER&inline=nyt-per> IAN FISHER and
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ALAN%20COWELL&fdq=199601
01&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ALAN%20COWELL&inline=nyt-per> ALAN COWELL

New York Times

July 31, 2005

ROME, July 30 - A suspect in the failed July 21 bombings arrested in Rome on
Friday confessed to investigators to carrying a bomb through London's
subway, but claimed it was meant as a "demonstration" rather than as a means
of killing, a person with firsthand knowledge of the interrogation said on
Saturday.

The investigation appeared to move quickly on Saturday, with this first
reported confession from one of five suspected plotters in custody. Britain
pressed for the suspect in Rome to be returned for interrogation, and the
police in Italy continued to carry out raids.

The person who talked about the interrogation, who declined to speak for
attribution because the law bars such disclosures, said the suspect
maintained that his group was not connected to the bombers who died with 52
other people in a July 7 wave of attacks in London or to Al Qaeda. The
suspect also said that he had come to Italy not to carry out attacks but to
visit his brother.

The man, a 27-year-old Ethiopian who fled Britain four days ago, was
identified here as Osman Hussain and in Britain as Hussain Osman.

His claims did little to quell a deepening sense of alarm here that, with a
terror suspect from Britain seeking refuge among the low-profile population
of Ethiopian immigrants here, Italy could be the next target.

"We are facing a grave threat that must be dealt with using all means of
prevention and crackdown that we have," Giuseppe Pisanu, the Italian
interior minister, told a special session of Parliament on Saturday in which
new antiterrorism measures were passed.

Briefing lawmakers, Mr. Pisanu said the police were carrying out raids in
some 15 locations linked to the suspect through cellphone calls. The
authorities did not say where the raids were, but Mr. Pisanu noted that
"important investigations" were under way in Venice, Salerno and other parts
of the country.

Raids also continued in Britain. Scotland Yard said Saturday that two men
had been arrested under counterterrorism laws in two raids in the midlands
city of Leicester about 4 a.m. But a police statement said, "There is no
reason to currently suspect that these arrests are in any way connected to
recent terrorist activity in London."

The capture of the five suspects brought only the most cautious sense of
relief to Britons, and the police warned that the country still faced what
Peter Clarke, London's top counterterrorism official, called a "very real"
threat.

The rapid-fire events since the four bombs failed to explode July 21 on
three subway cars and a bus have left Britons unsettled at the notion of an
enemy within.

Some of the five suspects had family links to the Horn of Africa but had
lived in Britain for many years. Two have been reported to be naturalized
British citizens. In the July 7 bombings, the police identified three of the
assailants as British-born sons of Pakistani immigrants and the fourth as a
Jamaican-born man who had spent most of his life in Britain.

"All the perpetrators of the failed attacks of July 21 have been
apprehended," The Times of London said in an editorial on Saturday. "Yet the
notion that Britain has suddenly been rendered entirely 'safe' or 'secure'
is illusory."

"The character of life will have to change" to maximize the chances of
forestalling attacks, the newspaper said. "The abnormal will become normal."


Heavily armed police officers moved in on Friday morning to detain three men
at apartments in west London, heralding the arrests with explosions from
stun grenades and tear gas. Two newspapers reported on Saturday that a
military special forces unit backed up police officers in the raids.

The police had identified two of the suspected bombers arrested Friday as
Muktar Said Ibrahim and Ramzi Mohamed. A Scotland Yard official, speaking
without attribution under police rules, said a man arrested Friday in west
London was called Wahbi Mohamed, 23, and may have been a fifth bomber. The
official said he was possibly a brother of Ramzi Mohamed.

Mr. Osman was arrested Friday at an apartment in southeast Rome.

An Italian investigator said that as Mr. Osman traveled from Britain to
Italy, his cellphone calls were monitored by the same police antiterrorist
unit in Milan that tracked 13 people linked to the C.I.A. who were ordered
arrested in June by an Italian judge. They were accused of illegally seizing
an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street two years ago and flying him to Egypt
for questioning.

The Italian unit tracked Mr. Osman with a cellphone number from the British
police, possibly discovered in a raid on Mr. Osman's London home last
Wednesday. Italian surveillance specialists also tracked about 25 numbers
from calls made to and from his phone, the investigators said. But when Mr.
Osman was arrested it was because the wireless signal from a cellphone he
was using at the time had betrayed his physical whereabouts, the
investigator said.

On Saturday, Mr. Osman faced a closed extradition hearing in jail - the
first legal proceeding against any of the five suspects.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said Britain had asked for his extradition under a
fast-track extradition law approved by Italy Thursday.

His court-appointed lawyer, Antonietta Sonnessa, said Mr. Osman had not
agreed to be sent back to Britain, but she would not discuss the hearing
further. "It's a very delicate moment," she said.

Other details emerged from both Italian officials and news media accounts.

Minister Pisanu, who on Friday had described the man as a naturalized
British citizen of Somali descent, described him on Saturday as a Briton
with Ethiopian citizenship. Italian media reported that Hamdi Issac was his
legal name.

News reports said that before moving to Britain, he had lived in Italy for
some time, with a relative in the northern city of Brescia and with a
brother, who has also been arrested, in Rome. His lawyer said he speaks
Italian well enough not to need an interpreter.

Italian newspapers carried detailed accounts of his interrogation on Friday,
in which he was described as giving a broad account of his involvement on
July 21.

Corriere della Sera, Italy's biggest newspaper, reported that he told
investigators that, at a gym in Notting Hill, he met a man named Muktar
Ibrahim, who gave him instructions for the bombing. He said the motive was
anger over the war in Iraq.

There are about 10,000 Ethiopians living in Italy, according to Tarekegne
Taka, head of the Association of the Ethiopian Community in Italy. He said
most were women paid low wages to baby-sit and clean houses, and he said
"very few" of the Ethiopians here were Muslim, even though nearly half of
Ethiopia is Muslim.

Ian Fisher reported from Rome for this article, and Alan Cowell from London.
Reporting was contributed by Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Marc Lacey from
Nairobi, Kenya, and Jonathan Allen and Souad Mekhennet from London.





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British Inquiry Shifts Away From Foreign Aid for Plots


By RAYMOND BONNER, STEPHEN GREY
and DON VAN NATTA JR.

New York Times

July 31, 2005

This article was reported by Raymond Bonner, Stephen Grey and Don Van Natta
Jr., and written by Mr. Bonner and Mr. Van Natta.

LONDON, July 30 - As police officers investigating the two London bombing
attacks questioned suspects rounded up in London and Rome, they have begun
to explore the possibility that both were largely homegrown efforts with
minimal outside support, senior British investigators said Saturday.

They also said they had not established any solid evidence linking the
attack on July 7, which killed 52 along with the four bombers, and the
failed bombings on July 21.

The British officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of
the continuing criminal investigation, emphasized that their investigation
was still in its early stages and that their analyses might change.

"The point is simply that so far there is not a foreign connection that is
the major focus of our inquiry," a senior police official said.

Three arrests on Friday, two in London and one in Rome, meant that all four
suspects in the attempted attacks on July 21 are now in custody, along with
a fifth man who might have also been involved. Scotland Yard is now trying
to determine whether either team was helped by a support network. In
particular, they are focusing on the question of whether a Britain-based
mastermind or bomb-maker helped with the July 7 and July 21 plots.

Questioning of the suspects may take time, and their comments may have to be
carefully weighed, the police said. Meanwhile, the investigators are looking
closely at the July 21 bombs, which failed to detonate. Forensic evidence
shows that the bombs used in both attacks were crude, homemade devices that
were not highly sophisticated. So far, the police have little evidence
pointing to a foreigner entering the country and helping either group build
the bombs.

"Everything that we have suggests that these could have been made with
knowledge in this country," a police official said. "These are the type of
devices you can make yourself with information you could acquire from the
Internet, or other extremist training manuals."

Photographs of several homemade bombs, including a milk bottle with nails
attached, have appeared on television and in newspapers. The devices are
strikingly similar to bombs found in Indonesia recently, a security official
based there said. "They are very common, very easy to make," the official
said.

The explosive material is triacetone triperoxide, or TATP.

Making bombs with that material requires little more than millimeter
measuring glasses, a well-calibrated thermometer and a stove - and patience.
Because of the high volatility of the chemicals, it must be done with care,
but it does not require lengthy training or a degree in chemistry, experts
say.

"It is very unsophisticated, and that is one of the scary bits," said Paul
Beaver, a defense analyst in London.

British officials also minimized the importance of two men they initially
believed might have played roles in the July 7 attacks. One is a suspected
terrorist arrested in Zambia last week, Haroon Rashid Aswat; the other is
the Egyptian chemist, Magdy el-Nashar.

Mr. Aswat fell under suspicion early in the investigation because he had
trained at camps for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and had been a senior aide to
Abu Hamza al-Masri, the blind militant cleric who preached vitriolic
anti-Western sermons at the Finsbury Mosque in northern London.
Investigators also found that calls had been made from his cellphone to West
Yorkshire, where three of the July 7 bombers lived. But investigators said
they now had determined that none of the calls were to the bombers
themselves.

"For now, this man or any role he may have does not figure, to any degree of
importance, in our inquiry," said a British security official. "Of course,
this could change."

Investigators also initially suspected that Mr. Aswat had entered Britain
two weeks before the July 7 attacks, on a ferry from Belgium, and left the
day of the attacks or the day before. But officials said they were now
almost certain that the man who entered the country was not Mr. Aswat, and
that Mr. Aswat was in South Africa at the time.

Several weeks before the July 7 bombings, the South African government
alerted the Americans that Mr. Aswat was in their country. Mr. Aswat is also
wanted in the United States on allegations that he had tried to set up an Al
Qaeda camp in Oregon in late 1999.

The Americans asked South Africa to arrest Mr. Aswat and turn him over to
the United States without going through formal extradition proceedings.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has taken at least 100 men
into custody under the policy of rendition, and many have been sent to
foreign countries, like Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Uzbekistan, countries
known to use torture.

The South Africans contacted the British government, because Mr. Aswat is a
British citizen. The British balked at the United States' request for his
arrest and deportation to the United States.

A British Foreign Office official said the government was strongly opposed
to extralegal renditions.

"The U.K. would not stand in the way of any legitimate request to arrest
anyone suspected of involvement in terrorism or any crime, but we would
expect that arrest to be conducted through a proper legal process," he said.
"That is by way of a proper extradition warrant."

The British government will send a consular official to see Mr. Aswat, but
will not send any police officials to question him, British officials said.
They did not exclude the possibility that British intelligence officials
might question him, and a European intelligence official said it was his
government's understanding that they would.

The chemist, Mr. Nashar, was originally suspected as a possible bomb-maker.
But a Scotland Yard official said he was "no longer an active part" of the
police investigation. The police might still want to talk to him as a
witness, the official added.

Mr. Nashar, a graduate student in chemistry at Leeds University, had come
under suspicion because he had lent the keys to his apartment to one of the
men who carried out the July 7 bombings, and he left for Egypt 10 days
before the blast. He was arrested in Cairo, but he insisted that he had gone
to Egypt on vacation. Egyptian officials have said repeatedly that Mr.
Nashar has denied any involvement. He is still believed to be in custody in
Cairo.

Souad Mekhennet and Heather Timmons contributed reporting from London for
this article.






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'A Long-Term Threat'
A counterterrorism expert discusses how the London bomb attacks were carried
out-and whether they could have been prevented.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Susanna Schrobsdorff
Newsweek
Updated: 4:06 p.m. ET July 7, 2005


July 7 - The first bomb went off at 8.51 a.m., in the midst of the London
rush hour. By 9.47 a.m.-56 minutes later-at least four blasts had rocked the
heart of the British capital. Three were on crowded underground trains; the
fourth on one of the city's signature red double-decker buses. Hours after
the attacks, the number of dead remained unclear. Hundreds, however, were
injured-many severely-and tens of thousands of commuters were stranded after
the city shut down its subway and bus systems.

Who was behind the coordinated attacks? While British authorities initially
said they were keeping an open mind, a group calling itself the Secret
Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe quickly claimed responsibility.  The
group also threatened future assaults on Italy and Denmark, two other U.S.
allies that have supported  the war in Iraq.  The London incident, following
15 months after the devastating Al Qaeda-linked rail bombing in Madrid, has
security officials around the world on high alert and investigators
scrambling for clues as to exactly how the attack was carried out and by
whom.

Jack Riley, associate director of RAND Infrastructure, Safety and
Environment and a founding codirector of RAND's Center for Terrorism Risk
Management Policy, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Susanna Schrobsdorff about how
terrorist cells operate and what counterterrorism experts could learn from
the attack on London. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Is this attack similar to other Al Qaeda attacks?
Jack Riley: It is evident from [their] nature that this has the hallmark of
an Al Qaeda-inspired or actual Al Qaeda attack. There are very clear
parallels to what happened in Madrid [in March 2004] and how the U.S. was
attacked in September of 2001, which was also multiple simultaneous attacks.


What was the logic behind the timing of the attack?  Is it relevant that it
was announced yesterday that London had won the 2012 Olympics, or did it
have more to do with the G8 summit of the world's economic leaders in
Scotland?
The timing [with respect to] Olympic announcement was just coincidence. The
timing of the attack was probably organized around the G8 summit, [but] that
might also be just a coincidence. When you look at the list of cities
worldwide that are at risk, London has been on that list for virtually as
long as New York and Washington, D.C.


How prepared was Britain for this kind of attack?
There are very few places, in my opinion, that are as well prepared as the
United Kingdom in terms of rail security. There's no question that the Brits
have been very serious about terrorism preparedness for a long time. They've
intercepted major recent threats, including the ricin poisoning plot a few
summers ago. They have long, long experience with this kind of issue from
the IRA [Irish Republican Army] campaign. They had excellent intelligence
capabilities, particularly with respect to the radical Islamic threat. They
watched what happened in Madrid very carefully. And to me, that just
demonstrates how difficult it is to prevent these kinds of incidents from
happening.

What kind of logistical planning would it take to execute an attack like
this?
The demands on an organization to carry out [multiple] attacks like that
probably increase exponentially.  In other words, to carry out four
simultaneous bombings is more difficult than simply just four times the
difficulty of carrying out one bombing. You need to have people in position
at the right place and time. It increases the risk of being observed by law
enforcement and compromising the operation. There are all sorts of ways that
these kinds of attacks raise the risk of the operation being compromised by
someone on the inside who might be a turncoat.  Or there could be
law-enforcement penetration [of the organization].


How many people might be involved?
You're looking at a minimum of six to eight people and it may get as large
as 20. It depends on how sophisticated the cell is. You need the
bombmakers-one or two people, and that's their specialized skill and
contribution. You need the people to simultaneously place the bombs. We're
still getting conflicting reports on how many there were.  You probably had
separate people involved  in reconnaissance activities so that there was
minimal risk that the people placing the bombs would be recognized.  Then
you need a team of one or two people to organize finances and provide
logistics and support.  So you pretty quickly get up to a fair sized number
of individuals.

How long would it take to plan?
It would probably not take years, because you're talking about attacking a
pretty open system, as opposed to the attacks of 9/11 which probably had a
much longer planning time.  [They'd]  probably want to do a couple of dry
runs. [They]  might send operatives on the train, have them leave packages
that are unattended and observe how long it takes before someone notices and
they're moved. That might influence the timing and scope of the operation.
Depending on how sophisticated they are about this kind of thing, [they]
might even want to practice this kind of dry run during another major
political event in London.


The group claiming responsibility for the attack has also threatened similar
attacks in Italy and Denmark. How likely is it that they could organize
another attack in Europe or the United States sometime soon?
It'd be harder to organize it immediately after [this one], but the reality
is that these kind of rail systems thrive and function on being open and
easily accessible. It's going to take determined vigilance and some luck to
be able to completely prevent these kinds of events in the future.


You're a specialist on security in the United States. What do you think the
reaction will be in that community?
There will be the obvious demands for the Department of Homeland Security to
pony up an integrated transportation security plan-which they have not done.
We don't have a good sense of how much we ought to be allocating to the air
security versus rail security versus any other transportation-mode security
in this country. It's a very difficult question to address, and it needs to
be done in a very careful and integrated fashion.

What effect will this attack have in terms of security planning globally?
In a perverse and odd way, these attacks are helpful to policymakers in the
U.S., England, Italy and other places because this is a stark reminder to
the public that this is a very long-term threat, and the threat is not going
to go away. In the same way that the Madrid attacks really catalyzed
attention on security issues and brought the radical Islamic threat home to
. Europe, these attacks are going to have very similar effect in England. It
will contribute to increased resolve for multinational collaboration [to
combat them].


Why didn't they attack the United States?
That is the million-dollar question.  I suspect that the answer is that they
just don't have the people inside this country. England and a few other
places in Europe have long been home to much larger radical Islamic
populations [than the United States]. And, we've done a pretty good job
since 9/11 of keeping them out. I suspect that if they had the people inside
this country to carry out these attacks that they would have done it at some
point before this. There's ample evidence that we've impaired their
capabilities ... which is why you're seeing a return to carrying out attacks
against U.S. targets and U.S. interests overseas. And of course London is an
important ally in the war in Iraq.


C 2005 Newsweek, Inc.


C 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8500211/site/newsweek/

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Rome Suspect Says Had Role in UK Bombs - Law Source

By REUTERS

Filed at 2:43 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-britain-
italy.html

ROME (Reuters) - One of the prime suspects in the second series of this
month's London bombings has told Italian investigators he took part in July
21 attacks on London's transport network, a judicial source in Italy said.

The source, who has had direct contact with the suspect but asked not to be
named, confirmed Italian media reports that Osman Hussain had said shortly
after his arrest that he participated in the attacks.

``Yes, yes. I can confirm that,'' the source told Reuters. He gave no
further details.

Hussain, who police said on Sunday was also known as Hamdi Adus Issac, was
arrested on Friday in Rome. His court-appointed lawyer Antonietta Sonnessa
has suggested that he may try to resist extradition requested by British
authorities.

Sonnessa told Britain's ITV news that Hussain had no links to the July 7
bombers and had no idea where his explosives came from.

``He is not a violent person. He did everything possible to ensure his
actions did not provoke any injuries, damage or death.''

Sonnessa added Hussain was not a suicide bomber.

``He was not a kamikaze, he did not want to blow anything up at all. He
cannot give any help to police for the simple fact that he is not associated
with any terrorist organization.''

British police suspect Hussain attempted to bomb a train at Shepherd's Bush
underground station in west London on July 21 as part of a series of botched
bombing attempts on three underground trains and a bus.

Those attacks were two weeks after suicide bombers killed 52 people and
themselves in similar attacks in London.

Italian authorities said Hussain is an Ethiopian-born British citizen who
speaks Italian and lived in Italy during the 1990s. Police said he has
relatives in Italy -- including two brothers who have also been arrested.

Italian police said Hussain traveled by train from London to Paris to Milan,
and then to Rome where he was arrested on Friday at a relative's apartment
outside the historic center.

BROTHERS ARRESTED

Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu announced over the weekend that police
staged at least 15 raids in Italy related to Hussain's contacts.

The latest high-profile arrest stemming from the raids was a man named as
Fati Issac, who police said was Hussain's brother. A police source told
Reuters he is accused of ``hiding or destroying'' documents. Another brother
was arrested in Rome on Friday for possession of false documents.

Unconfirmed Italian media reports have quoted Hussain as saying that his
group did not intend to kill anyone and that the blasts were planned as a
show of force. In the reported comments, Hussain also denied any connection
to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda militant network.

``We wanted revenge, to make them pay for what they were doing to Muslims
after July 7, for the treatment the English dished out to our people,''
Sunday's edition of La Stampa newspaper quoted Hussain as saying. ``We did
not want to kill. It was only a demonstrative action.''




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Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain
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for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies
as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four
criteria to qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" is
determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not
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Suspect 'tracked by phone calls'

BBC

July 30, 2005

Police surround a flat on the outskirts of Rome

Police had the flat under surveillance for two days

Italian investigators say police used cell phone records to track down one
of the suspects in the failed suicide bombings in London on 21 July.

Osman Hussain was arrested on Friday in his brother's flat on the outskirts
of the Italian capital, Rome.

He was traced using call records from two cell phone numbers, supplied to
the Italians by UK police.

Police believe he travelled by train across Europe from London via Paris,
Milan and Bologna.

Osman Hussain is wanted in the UK over the attack on Shepherd's Bush
underground station.

  <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4730265.stm#map#map> Click to see
a map of the suspect's alleged journey

Investigators quoted by Corriere della Sera newspaper said that his real
name is Hamdi Isaac and that he may have been born in Ethiopia or Eritrea,
rather than Somalia as previously thought.

No panic

The suspect's constant use of cell phones betrayed his attempt to find
refuge. As well as calling his brother in Rome, he talked to his father who
lives in Brescia, in northern Italy.

The suspect, who speaks good Italian, told investigators that he was brought
up in Italy after his family sought asylum from Somalia when he was a child.


An unnamed Italian security officer told La Stampa newspaper that police
discovered the suspect's whereabouts two days ago.




Police show pictures of suspect Osman Hussein

The man obeyed: first he got down on his knees, then he placed his hands on
his head... finally he was handcuffed


Italian security officer
La Stampa

"We went to the area, to take a look around the neighbourhood, to work out
what kind of traps or pitfalls there might be," he said.

Italian Central Security Operations (NOCS) officers then approached the
brother, who gave them a description of his flat and the door keys.

On the day of the raid, the building was surrounded with snipers and a
number of ambulances were on site.

A team of four armed security agents climbed the stairs to the flat,
followed by more police.

When officers entered the flat, they found the suspect on a sofa in the
living room and told him in English to get down on his knees.

"The man obeyed: first he got down on his knees, then he placed his hands on
his head, he allowed himself to be searched, and finally he was handcuffed,"
the officer told the paper.

"He did not allow himself to panic."

The flat was then searched for traps. Computers and hard-drives were taken
away to be analysed.

The suspect has been co-operating with investigators, who he apparently told
that he had no intention of carrying out any terrorist activities in Italy.

A phone centre and internet cafe run by his brother near Rome's Termini
railway station is also being searched by Italian police.







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

*


	 Osman caught a Eurostar train to Paris from Waterloo.  French
security sources think Osman arrived in Paris's Gare du Nord early on
Tuesday. He then travelled to Gare de Lyon, catching a train to Milan before
taking sleeper services to Brescia and Bologna, finally arriving at Rome's
Termini station at about 8am on Thursday.  He then spent a brief period at
the Sheriffcom.site internet cafe near the station run by his brother Ramzi.
Police have removed all the computers from the cafe

*


	 Osman was arrested at Ramzi's three-bedroom flat in the
working-class Casilino district.



Bombing suspects watched Iraq war videos

By GLEN OWEN and NICK PISA in Rome and DOMINIC TURNBULL in London, Mail on
Sunday 08:46am 31st July 2005


<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id
=357670&in_page_id=1770>
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=
357670&in_page_id=1770


One of the men arrested over the failed London bomb attacks has told police
he watched videos of the Iraq war with fellow suspects, it was reported.

Hussain Osman, who is accused of trying to detonate a bomb at Shepherd's
Bush, claimed he was shown footage of the conflict by Muktar Said Ibrahim,
the man arrested in connection with the abortive attack on the Hackney bus.


Osman, who was arrested in Rome on Friday night after a joint operation by
British and Italian anti-terrorist officers, was quoted in the respected
Italian Corriere della Sera newspaper as telling police: "Ibrahim showed us
films and videos of the war in Iraq."


According to the report, Osman indicated that he and his friends were
interested in politics rather than religion. The claims will be regarded as
a serious blow to Tony Blair, who has sought desperately to keep the issue
of Iraq separate from the London bombing campaign.


Earlier this month Mr Blair argued: "If it is Iraq that motivates [the
bombers], why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of
an elected Iraqi government? What was September 11 the reprisal for?"


According to the report, Osman told police he met Ibrahim in West London,
near the flats where he was dramatically arrested on Friday. He told police:
"I used a gym in Notting Hill. That's where I met Ibrahim."


The newspaper also reported a possible link between Osman and Saudi Arabia,
claiming he called a Saudi number shortly before his arrest. Osman, 27, was
tracked throughout his 1,000-mile journey from London to Rome via Paris and
Milan, Brescia and Bologna, using mobile phone technology.


Osman vanished immediately after the bomb he is alleged to have been
carrying failed to detonate on July 21. A few minutes later he was captured
on CCTV boarding the 220 bus towards Wandsworth, South-West London.


Detectives piecing together his movements


Where he went afterwards is not known. But the day after the failed
explosion bid, police raided a flat in Stockwell, South London, where the
mother of his Ethiopian girlfriend, Yeshiemebet Girma, lived.


Italy's interior minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, said Osman caught a Eurostar
train to Paris from Waterloo last Tuesday. Detectives are now thought to be
scanning hours of footage from the station.


French security sources think Osman arrived in Paris's Gare du Nord early on
Tuesday. He then travelled to Gare de Lyon, catching a train to Milan before
taking sleeper services to Brescia and Bologna, finally arriving at Rome's
Termini station at about 8am on Thursday.


He then spent a brief period at the Sheriffcom.site internet cafe near the
station run by his brother Ramzi. On Friday, shortly after Osman's arrest at
Ramzi's three-bedroom flat in the working-class Casilino district, police
removed all the computers from the cafe.


Before the brothers were arrested they had both prayed together at the
nearby Al Houda "mosque" - in reality a garage used by Muslims who live in
the area.


Neighbours told how police had been lying in wait for Osman. Italian police
sources said Ramzi had handed over the keys to his flat and told them they
would find his brother there. One said: "We convinced Ramzi it would be
better for him to co-operate.


"Four officers were sent in and they found Hussain sitting on the sofa. He
did not resist and he obeyed instructions to kneel down on the floor. He
spoke in Italian."


'This is a very delicate phase'


Osman was yesterday being held in a cell on the seventh floor of Rome's
high-security Regina Coeli prison, where guards said he had pasta and
meatballs for lunch.


Yesterday a preliminary extradition hearing took place there. Sources say
Osman intended to fight to stay in Italy. A British police source said: "If
he opposes extradition it will draw out the process and it could be six to
eight weeks before he is brought back to London."


Osman's court-appointed lawyer, Antonietta Sonnessa, said after the hearing:
"This is a very delicate phase." Asked about the newspaper report, she said:
"To say anything else would be counterproductive. He is not collaborating
but has made declarations to investigators."


Osman's brother Ramzi was also being questioned for allegedly possessing
false identity papers.


Meanwhile, a friend of Osman's girlfriend has revealed how he had ordered
her not to mix with Westerners. Jammell Burrell, 25, who met Girma at a
women's refuge when she was pregnant with Osman's first child six years ago,
said: "She lived for him. It was as if he controlled her."


Last night the four other men held over the alleged attacks - Ibrahim, 27,
Yasin Hassan Omar, 24, and brothers Ramzi and Wahbi Mohammed, 23, were being
held at Paddington Green police station, West London.All rights reserved.
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

* Hussain claims he wasn't carrying enough explosives in his bag to
harm anyone - an empirically verifiable assertion

Aswat's father blames race for UK authorities' failing to assist his
estranged son: "We wonder whether the government's attitude would have been
any different if it was a white, non-Muslim citizen detained in a foreign
country."


* The use of two ethnic groups ensured that when the police focus was
on the Pakistani community after the July 7 attacks, the East African group
could still move freely.



Bomber's trail raises network fears
By DAVID RISING
Associated Press
7/31/2005  <http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050731/1066529.asp>
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050731/1066529.asp
   <http://www.buffalonews.com/images/space.gif>
   <http://www.buffalonews.com/images/space.gif>  LONDON - When the
bomb he tried to detonate aboard a London subway train failed to explode,
police say Osman Hussain jumped out a window, ran along the track, then tore
through back yards before melting into the city's bustle.


After going underground for five days, Hussain boarded a train at Waterloo
station, possibly walking past his picture and those of three other
suspected July 21 attackers on posters that blanketed the city.


Then he slipped away, traveling from London through France to Rome where he
was arrested Friday.


His ability to escape a massive British dragnet, coupled with the arrest of
another suspect in Zambia with al-Qaida ties, raised fears about the global
reach of today's terrorists and the depth of their networks.


"The way people fanned out after the bombings, it's brought it home to
people ... that it is part of a kind of a network, interconnected - all the
fingerprints are there," said Michael Cox of London's Royal Institute of
International Affairs. "They'd have to have a much wider support base than
just those who are active suicide bombers."


Hussain, 27, an Ethiopian-born Briton, was captured at his brother Remzi
Isaac's house in Rome, where police traced him through his use of a
relative's cell phone.


He admitted playing a role in the July 21 attack but said it was only
intended to be an attention-grabbing strike, not a deadly one, a legal
expert familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press in Rome.


Hussain told interrogators he wasn't carrying enough explosives even to
"harm people nearby," the expert said, speaking on condition of anonymity,
citing the ongoing investigation, which under Italian law must remain
secret.


He also told investigators the bombers were motivated by anger over the
U.S.-led war in Iraq, but he said his cell was not linked to either al-Qaida
or the cell that carried out the deadly July 7 suicide bombings on the
London transit system that killed 52 people and the four attackers, Italian
media reported.


Hussain's arrest sparked more than a dozen follow-up raids across Italy as
authorities tried to determine if any attacks were being plotted in their
country.


In addition to Hussain, at least two of the other July 21 suspects were of
East African origin, and Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the
country was watching the area closely.


"We are following the evolution of the overall situation in the Horn of
Africa where, in stateless lands, al-Qaida has arrived, has settled, and
from where it tends, in various ways, to dispatch its followers into Europe
and the rest of the world," he said.


Though British officials have not yet found links between the July 7 attacks
and the failed attacks two weeks later, police chief Sir Ian Blair said
there was a "resonance" between the two.


If it turns out both events had a single mastermind and a common bombmaker,
they probably would have fled Britain before the attacks, said Alex
Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest. A likely hiding place would
be in Western Europe, where they could flee without facing tough border
security checks.


"They'll go to ground in areas that they will not be conspicuous," Standish
said. "Most European Union countries have a significant Muslim population
where these guys can just sit there and fade into the background."


Britain is seeking Hussain's extradition and the return of one of its
citizens detained in Zambia.


Though the Foreign Office has not released the name of the person in Zambia,
it is widely reported to be Haroon Rashid Aswat, who Zambian officials have
said was being questioned about 20 phone calls he allegedly made to some of
the July 7 attackers.


Aswat has been implicated in a 1999 plot to establish a terrorist training
camp in the United States and has told Zambian investigators he once was a
bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.


Aswat's family in a statement issued Saturday said they were "concerned,
distressed and disappointed" by Britain's handling of the case.


"It is very worrying that after more than 10 days the British government is
still unable to verify that the British citizen detained is actually
Haroon," said the relatives, who live in northern England. "Our son, albeit
estranged for many years, is surely entitled to the presumption of innocence
as any other British citizen.


"We wonder whether the government's attitude would have been any different
if it was a white, non-Muslim citizen detained in a foreign country."


Before he was detained in Zambia, Aswat had been hiding in Johannesburg,
South Africa, and was followed after entering the country from Botswana,
Zambian officials said.


"Every single terrorist event we've had, and the failed ones we've had,
there usually are foreign connections, even though the cannon fodder may be
homegrown," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of
Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in
Scotland.


British authorities had closed-circuit television pictures of the July 21
suspects. That could have spooked them, with three failing to immediately
flee the country and Hussain using a cellular phone that could be traced
easily, Ranstorp said.


If the two sets of transit attacks are linked, they show a worrying degree
of preparation by a person or people making use of homegrown radicals from
two distinct ethnic groups, with three of the four July 7 bombers of
Pakistani origin and at least three of the July 21 suspects with East
African roots, Standish said.


The use of two ethnic groups ensured that when the police focus was on the
Pakistani community after the July 7 attacks, the East African group could
still move freely.


"It seems a very sophisticated level of planning went into it," Standish
said. "What will the next one be - from Kashmir? From Nigeria? From
Southeast Asia? From Saudi? We just don't know."



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be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this
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as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four
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determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not
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British Opinion Surveys from an Islamist Hell
http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/i/310720051

By Daniel Pipes

IHC Abstract
As Daniel Pipes reports, public opinion surveys of British Muslims show that
"about 16,000 [British Muslims would] declare themselves willing, possibly
even eager, to embrace violence" in the effort to bring an end to "decadent
and immoral" Western society. The estimated 16,000 British Muslims willing
and eager to do violence to British society is only about one percent of all
British Muslims.

By comparison, about two percent of all USSR Russians were 'hard core'
communists responsible for the millions of brutalities of the Lenin, Stalin
and Khrushchev eras.

For those who say 'only' 1% of British Muslims favor violence similar to
that of London's 7/7, Mr. Pipes reports other statistics that could make
that one percent a very low estimate:


* Six percent of British Muslims see the 7/7 bombing in London as
justified;


* 24 percent feel sympathy for those who carried out the attacks;


* 56 percent understand "why some people behave that way;"


* 26 percent disagree with Tony Blair's description of the ideology of
the London bombers as "perverted and poisonous."

The statistics describe, as Pipes puts it, "an Islamist hell."



   _____


Estimating how many potential terrorists reside in one's country is a highly
inexact business, but there is a striking correlation between a British
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1688261,00.html> government
report recently leaked to London's Times and a new opinion
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/23/npoll23.xml
&sSheet=/news/2005/07/23/ixnewstop.html> survey commissioned by the Daily
Telegraph.

Drawing on unidentified "intelligence," the government report (analyzed by
me at "The Next London Bombing <http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2754> ")
finds as many as 16,000 "British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist
activity."

Then, using standard survey research methods, the reputable YouGov polling
firm <http://www.yougov.com/>  interviewed 526 Muslim adults across Great
Britain online during 15-22 July, weighing the data to reflect the British
Muslim population's age, gender and countries of origin. The survey found
that one percent of them, or "about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves
willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence" in the effort to bring an
end to "decadent and immoral" Western society.

Should their ranks really be so thick, such a huge number of potential
terrorists could cause an unprecedented security crisis for Britain, with
all the attendant economic, social, political and cultural ramifications one
can imagine.

The YouGov survey contains
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2005/07/23/npoll23big.gif> many
other statistics that should interest, if not shock, Britons and other
Westerners.


* Muslims who see the 7/7 bombing attacks in London as justified on
balance: six percent.



* Who feel sympathy for the "feelings and motives" of those who
carried out the 7/7 attacks: 24 percent.



* Understand "why some people behave in that way": 56 percent.



* Disagree with Tony Blair's description of the ideology of the London
bombers as "perverted and poisonous": 26 percent.



* Feel not loyal towards Britain: 16 percent.



* Agree that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims
should seek to bring it to an end": 32 percent willing to use non-violent
means and (as noted above) one percent willing to use violence "if
necessary." Just 56 percent of Muslims agree with the statement that
"Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live with it and not
seek to bring it to an end."



* Agree that "British political leaders don't mean it when they talk
about equality. They regard the lives of white British people as more
valuable than the lives of British Muslims": 52 percent.



* Dismiss political party leaders as insincere when saying "they
respect Islam and want to co-operate with Britain's Muslim communities": 50
percent.



* Doubt that anyone charged with and tried for the 7/7 attacks would
receive a fair trial: 44 percent.



* Would not inform on a Muslim religious leader "trying to
'radicalize' young Muslims by preaching hatred against the West": 10
percent.



* Do not think people have a duty to go to the police if they "see
something in the community that makes them feel suspicious": 14 percent.



* Believe other Muslims would be reluctant to go to the police "about
anything they see that makes them suspicious": 41 percent.



* Would inform the police if they believed that knew about the
possible planning of a terrorist attack: 73 percent. (In this case, the
Daily Telegraph did not make available the negative percentage.)

Another  <http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13391671,00.html>
opinion poll, this one commissioned by Sky News and carried out by
Communicate Research (which interviewed 462 UK-based Muslims by telephone)
found similar results:



* Muslims who agree with what the London suicide bombers did: two
percent.



* Who believe there is Koranic justification for the bombings: five
percent.



* Disagree with the statement that "Muslim clerics who preach violence
against the West are out of touch with mainstream Muslim opinion": 46
percent.



* Think of themselves as Muslim first and British second: 46 percent.
Another 42 percent do not differentiate between the identities. A mere 12
percent see themselves as British first and Muslim second.

Comments:

1. It is hard to say which is the most alarming of these many worrisome
statistics, but two stand out. That less than three-quarters of Muslims in
Britain indicate they would tell the police about an impending terrorist
attack raises grave doubts about the Blair government's tactic of getting
Muslims to police their own community. That one-third of Muslims do not
accept British society and want to end it, presumably to pave the way for an
Islamic order, casts comparable doubts on Britain's much-vaunted
<http://www.britischebotschaft.de/en/news/items/041225.htm> multicultural
ideal.

2. Even the Telegraph's interpreter of its survey, Professor Anthony King of
Essex University, feels compelled to sugar the results, calling them "at
once reassuring and disturbing, in some ways even alarming," whatever that
means. In several specific instances, he turns hair-raising statistics into
cheerful ones (that 73 percent would warn of an impending terrorist attack
he deems "impressive"). The newspaper's and the professor's panglossian
attitude makes one wonder what might wake the British to the Islamist hell
growing in their midst.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten or redistributed.


FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this
message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to
these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed
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"Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The
Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain
permission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materials
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for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies
as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four
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determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not
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copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to:
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Guess where the terrorists can come in?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------

Mexican accused of leading document-fraud ring By Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON
TIMES Published July 26, 2005

----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
The Mexican national indicted by a federal grand jury in a
multimillion-dollar scheme to distribute millions of phony identification
documents to illegal aliens in the United States is, according to
authorities, a leader of a crime syndicate that specializes in document
fraud.
     Pedro Castorena-Ibarra, 42, is accused of heading a franchise operation
that sold bogus but "high quality" Social Security documents, resident alien
and Mexican matricula consular ID cards, driver's licenses, birth
certificates, marriage licenses, work authorization documents, proof of
vehicle insurance cards, temporary vehicle registration documents, and
utility bills from both Mexico and the United States.
     U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who sought the
indictment after a lengthy investigation, said millions of phony documents
were sent to illegal aliens in the United States in the past five years,
including 3 million that were shipped to the Los Angeles area alone. The
documents were available on the street for $80 to $300, authorities said.
     The indictment was handed up Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver,
although an investigation by ICE agents into the conspiracy is continuing.
The Justice Department will seek the extradition of Castorena-Ibarra, listed
as a federal fugitive.
     All 19 of the September 11 terrorists had phony Social Security numbers,
state driver's licenses or state identification cards.
     Marcy Forman, director of investigations for ICE, called the Castorena
family "one of the largest and most sophisticated document fraud rings ever
uncovered," adding that fraudulent documents "can be provided to terrorists
and other criminals, posing a major homeland security vulnerability."
     According to court records, the Castorena family oversees from its base
in Guadalajara, Mexico, a large-scale criminal organization with more than
100 members who direct cells of 10 to 20 people located in cities across the
United States.
     ICE spokesman Dean Boyd said that in the past decade, the family has
been managed by six brothers and sisters: Pedro, Alfonso, Jose, Maria,
Francisco Javier and Raquel, who have maintained direct involvement in the
counterfeiting scheme.
     The ICE probe targeted operations in Los Angeles; New York; Chicago;
Atlanta; Miami; Dallas; San Antonio; Las Vegas; Albuquerque; Denver;
Lincoln, Neb.; and Des Moines, Iowa.
     Mr. Boyd said Castorena family leaders charged a "rent"
or "franchise" fee of as much as $15,000 per month for cell leaders to
operate in the United States -- making millions in return. He said the
organization moved its illicit profits through three primary
methods: wire transfers, bulk shipments of cash and checks, and couriers who
transported U.S. currency across the border and between U.S. cities.
     Phony documents supplied by the family, authorities said, have been
linked to more than 400 federal investigations and to document seizures in
more than 50 cities in 33 states. The American Express Corp. has attributed
$2 million in losses to counterfeit documents in Los Angeles alone that
authorities have tied to the Castorena family.
     More than 50 people have been prosecuted in the probe, Mr. Boyd said,
adding that dozens of family members and associates have been deported to
Mexico, Colombia and El Salvador. He said ICE agents in Denver also seized
20 computerized laboratories that were used to produce the counterfeit
identity documents.




Copyright C 2005 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Italy bans Islamic burqas
Natasha Bita, Florence
01aug05

ITALY has banned Islamic burqas under tough terrorism laws that provide
two-year jail terms and E2000 ($3200) fines for anyone caught covering their
face in a public place.

The counter-terrorism package, passed by Italy's parliament yesterday,
doubles the existing penalty for wearing a burqa or chador -- traditional
robes worn by Muslim women to cover their faces -- or full-faced helmets or
balaclavas in public.

Police can extract DNA samples without a suspect's consent, detain them for
24 hours without a lawyer present, and deport foreigners suspected of
terrorism under the new legislation. Soldiers involved in counter-terrorism
have been given the same stop-and-search powers.


The changes, approved in a rare show of bipartisanship, came as Italian
police arrested a fugitive hunted by British police over the bungled bombing
attempt in London on July 21.


"In the course of the investigation, it has been possible to identify a
dense network of individuals from the Eritrean and Ethiopian communities in
Italy, believed to have helped the fugitive cover his tracks," Italian
Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu told the Senate. "We have before us a
grave threat that has to be confronted with all the means of prevention and
contrast that we have." Italian media yesterday reported that the suspected
terrorist, named by British police as Somali-born Hussain Osman, was Hamdi
Adus Issac, 27, born in Ethiopia and allegedly granted British citizenship
using false Somali documents.


Osman, who reportedly lived in Rome for several years and speaks fluent
Italian, is fighting Britain's extradition request via a European arrest
warrant. He slipped through Britain's security dragnet last week by catching
a train from London's Waterloo station to Paris. He then moved to Milan and
Rome, where Italian police arrested him during a raid on a relative's
apartment. They had been tracking him by monitoring his mobile phone.


Italy's biggest newspapers reported that Osman had admitted to his Italian
police interrogator that he had carried a bomb on to a train in his
backpack.


Italy's opposition leader, former European Commission president Romano
Prodi, yesterday pledged to withdraw Italy's 3000 troops from Iraq if his
centre-left coalition wins elections due by June next year.


"We will withdraw them as a occupying force because our job will be to aid
in the reconstruction of Iraq," he said.


Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi -- who has said Italy will progressively
withdraw its troops starting in September -- accused his rival of putting
Italian soldiers' lives at risk by defining them as "occupying".


"He's breaking Western solidarity, justifying and enticing attacks against
our troops," Mr Berlusconi said.


Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini accused Mr Prodi of exposing Italy to a
terrorist attack.






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

While they hae not yet discovered what the intial cause was, it is clearly
something exploded on a truck that was at the loading dock.  I personally
know the owner (bill davis brother of the infamous cullen davis).  The thing
that we find a bit suspicious is that there was a fire in Houston, one in
St. Louis and others that have been unexplained as to cause.  I am not
suggesting a terror incident in this case or for that matter in any of the
otheres.  It is just suspicious.  Noted that LEO incluiding the FBI are
quick to say there is no connection to terrorists.

e



Jul 28, 2005


Explosion and Fire Rock Texas Industrial Plant

The Associated Press


FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - A series of explosions rocked a chemical plant
Thursday and set off a raging fire, injuring three people and sending up a
pillar of black smoke that could be seen 30 miles away.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known. Workers at the Valley
Solvents & Chemicals plant told authorities they heard an explosion and then
noticed a fire near a tractor-trailer that had just pulled in to deliver
chemicals, said fire Lt. Kent Worley.


The driver suffered a burned leg, one employee had arm burns and another
hurt his back trying to flee, Worley said.


Firefighters battled the blaze for about three hours after the blast, and
the fire had diminished by late afternoon.


It raged in and around more than a dozen large metal and plastic tanks
containing 2,000 to 4,000 gallons of methanol, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric
acid, ethanol and other chemicals.


The Environmental Protection Agency has sent an official to the scene with
air-monitoring equipment to provide information to local officials, said
Cynthia Fanning, a spokeswoman for the EPA in Dallas.


Valley Solvents officials didn't immediately return phone calls seeking
comment.


The blaze was in a large industrial area not close to any residential
neighborhoods.


"It shook all the buildings here," said Angela McCollum, who works at a
cement plant about 100 yards away. "All I can see is just tons of fire and
tons of smoke, and it's really kind of scary."


AP-ES-07-28-05 1930EDT

This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB3LR1NPBE.html



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://www.ndtv.com/template/template.asp?template=Londonblasts
<http://www.ndtv.com/template/template.asp?template=Londonblasts&slug=UK+pol
ice+find+'terror+kit'&id=76771&callid=1>
&slug=UK+police+find+'terror+kit'&id=76771&callid=1



Police find 'terror kit' at Heathrow airport

---

NDTV Correspondent

Sunday, July 31, 2005 (London):

British anti-terrorist police are examining an abandoned bag at Heathrow
airport, which could be a "potential terrorist goldmine".

The bag - with a Qatar Airways luggage tag - was spotted on a grass verge of
a busy airport route by a passing taxi driver who found 19 passports inside
- for Pakistani, Indian, British, Nepalese and South African nationals.

The bag was stuffed with visas, forged Home Office documents, bank cards and
work permits.

Security sources say the bombers behind both terror attacks might be only a
small part of a sinister al-Qaida network operating in Britain - with more
attacks to come.

The fear is that the hold-all is a "terror kit" meant to assist bombers get
in and out of the country.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

High-tech tracked London suspects


Using closed-circuit cameras and tracing cellphone calls, British and
Italian police capture 7/21 bombing suspects.

By John Thorne | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

August 01, 2005

LONDON - "That's definitely him. I'm really scared now," Ana Christina
Fernandes told a British policeman Thursday as he showed her a picture. A
grainy CCTV (closed circuit television) photo showed a young man in
tracksuit pants and a white tank top boarding the No. 220 bus. She
identified Osman Hussain as her London neighbor.

A day later, the same man, who police say tried to set off one of four bombs
on July 21, was captured by Italian police in Rome. He was betrayed by his
mobile phone. Mr. Hussain was using a relative's cellphone as he traveled
from Britain to France and Italy. By tracing the phone, Italian police
pinpointed Hussain's location. This weekend, police say, they captured all
four of the 7/21 London attackers, and technology proved a crucial tool in
cracking the cases.

"There are a lot of lessons for other European capitals about using CCTV for
both prevention and tracking of terrorism," says Magnus Ranstorp, a
terrorism expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "I doubt very much
that the 7/21 bombers would have been caught so quickly had there not been
CCTV cameras that allowed police to work with the public."

Britain's investigation into the bombings which have twice struck London in
three weeks has been sped along by the use of new and evolving technologies
like CCTV and mobile phones, which have allowed police to identify suspects
quickly and trace their movements around the world.

The string of contacts - and arrests - continued over the weekend. Police
arrested six people Sunday they say were involved in the failed July 21
London transit bombings and were reportedly investigating the attackers'
ties to Saudi Arabia and Italy, hurrying to track down any accomplices to
prevent more attacks.

Police sources told the Sunday Telegraph that Mr. Hussain, an Ethiopian-born
British citizen, called Saudi Arabia hours before his arrest. A legal expert
familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press in Rome that
Hussain admitted to a role in the attacks but said it was only intended to
be an attention-grabbing strike.

Hussain told Italian police that the bombers had been led by a man called
"Muktar," the Rome daily La Repubblica reported.

Suspect Muktar Said Ibrahim was arrested Friday in London. The Sunday Times
said the Ethiopian-born Briton went to Saudi Arabia in 2003 on a month-long
visit, telling friends he went for training.

In Pakistan, police are painstakingly analyzing the mobile phone records of
the two 7/7 suspects who visited the country. While officials stress that it
is a tedious process, it has already yielded the name of at least one
significant suspect: Masoud Azhar, leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of
Mohammed).

But the clever use of technology is not the exclusive domain of law
enforcement. It is equally a tool of terrorists. "The instruments of
globalization have afforded [terrorists] a great degree of anonymity and
mobility," notes Mr. Ranstorp, citing terrorist organizations' fondness for
pre-paid phone cards, one-time use satellite phones, and coded e-mails as
means of coordinating their activities.

Terrorist organizations have also made use of technology to distribute both
their ideology and training. Islamist websites show slickly produced
instructional videos on such things as building bombs and pulling off a
successful kidnapping. And in the event the hostage is executed, the videos
can be shown online to a world audience to simultaneously recruit new
terrorists and sow fear.

When the police make swift progress, Ranstorp says, it's often because the
terrorists may have made mistakes in their use of communication technology.
"It's a double-edged sword," he says. "It depends on how well-versed
[terrorists] are at covering their tracks. If they are careless, all the
police need is one break."

Suicide bombers in particular, he says, are less likely to care about
concealing their support network so long as they are able to carry out their
attack. "In Madrid, there were a lot of people on the periphery of the [May
2004] bombings who were expendable," says Ranstorp.

In Britain, as CCTV cameras have sprouted across the land during the last
decade, more Britons have joked - and civil libertarians have complained -
that they have become the most watched people on earth. It's estimated that
there is one camera for every 14 people here; in big cities like London, it
can mean that nearly all a person's movements from the moment he or she
leaves the house are caught on tape.

But it is a boon to police investigators working frantically to avert
expected further attacks. In the course of the London bombings'
investigation, they have scrutinized some 15,000 CCTV tapes. After the 7/7
bombings, the release of images of the four suspects triggered hundreds of
calls and e-mails; a subsequent series of raids netted an abandoned car,
with leftover explosives, which helped police identify the bombers.

Last Thursday, 6,000 police fanned across London in the largest security
exercise since World War II. The blunt, boots-on-the-ground show of force
had been prompted, police officials announced Sunday, by intelligence
suggesting that a third Islamist terror cell is planning a wave of suicide
attacks on "soft targets" in central London such as the Tube.

Science and technology are critical tools. But Metropolitan Police
Commissioner Sir Ian Blair stressed to the BBC this weekend the importance
of tried-and-true police assets: firepower, forensic experts to analyze
bombs and bomb traces, and "good old-fashioned detective legwork."

. Wire services were used in this report.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Bombers Next Door
Four dead and four others safely in custody, but British police worry this
is only the beginning.

By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek


Aug. 8, 2005 issue - The weird thing was how ordinary they all looked. Each
new glimpse of the eight suspected foot soldiers of Al Qaeda last week only
underscored the British tabloids' description of them as "the suicide
bombers next door." A video recording surfaced showing two of the four July
7 terrorists on a Welsh white-water-rafting holiday, laughing and paddling,
hardly a month before they killed themselves and 52 mass-transit riders in
Lon-don. The same commonplace quality came through in TV coverage of a
police raid in London last week as two of the four suspects in the failed
July 21 bombings emerged meekly onto the balcony of their North Kensington
apartment, unclothed, eyes and noses running from tear gas. A pair of small
children toddled out onto another balcony below, visibly thrilled to find a
K-9 officer on their doorstep. Nothing about any of the eight men's faces
would have drawn a second look on most city streets.

No one doubted there could be more like them. Four of the men blew
themselves up, and the other four were run to ground from England to Italy,
only eight days after they had fled their dud bombs. The quick arrests,
thanks to closed-circuit-TV images and fast police work, were reassuring.
But Scotland Yard said it would be foolhardy to suppose that the
conspirators behind the attacks intend to stop there. Someone must have
recruited, organized and equipped the two terror cells. The bombing suspects
mirrored Britain's large immigrant population: East Africans, Pakistanis, a
Jamaican, they included a school aide, a business student, a transit worker,
a counterman from a family fish-and-chips shop. How many other malcontents
might Al Qaeda have already groomed into other sleeper cells? "This is not
the B team," said London's top police officer, Sir Ian Blair, of the July 21
bombers before their capture. "These -were not amateurs... They only made
one mistake," he added. "We were very, very lucky." London cops were on high
alert last Thursday after getting word that more bombings were imminent.
When the day passed with many arrests but no attacks, they speculated that
their increased visibility might have deterred an attack, said a source
close to Scotland Yard.

Investigators have found no hard evidence so far that the members of the
July 7 and July 21 cells even knew one another. Presumably the plotters
didn't want an investigation of one leading to the other. Three of the July
7 bombers were British natives of Pakistani descent, and all four had spent
much of their lives in and around the northern city of Leeds. The July 21
suspects appear to have been children of refugees from the Horn of
Africa-Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian-who had lived in England for several
years; one had only recently become a British citizen. There were hints last
week that London police were chasing a third cell, this one of
French-speaking Muslims.

Police have yet to figure out who directed the attacks, though they've
publicly blamed Al Qaeda. The inquiry keeps coming back to the gritty London
neighborhood of Finsbury Park, home of the North London Central Mosque,
where a fiery Egyptian preacher known as Abu Hamza al-Masri was a principal
prayer leader from 1996. He had two prosthetic hands and one sightless
eye-war wounds from Afghanistan, he told people. Until his removal two years
ago, he preached venomously anti-Western sermons to jihad recruits like
shoebomber Richard Reid and the convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias
Moussaoui. Abu Hamza was finally arrested in May 2004 and charged with
incitement to murder, along with other offenses.

British and American counterterrorism officials, who declined to be
identified because of the sensitive nature of the inves-tigation, tell
NEWSWEEK they're actively pursuing possible ties between Abu Hamza's
followers and the bombings. One name that has resurfaced is that of Richard
Reid: he's said to have been acquainted with at least one of the July 21
suspects, an Eritrean named Muktar Said Ibrahim. Another is that of Abu
Hamza's top lieutenant, Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British-born ethnic Indian
who is wanted in the United States for allegedly trying to set up a
terrorist training camp in Oregon for his boss. In the days before the July
7 attacks, calls were logged between a phone used by one of the bombers and
one that was registered to Aswat. Counterterrorism officials say Aswat's
phone was found in Britain, but two weeks ago Aswat was arrested in Zambia,
where he is awaiting extradition-whether to Britain or the United States has
yet to be decided.

Despite the apparent Finsbury Park links, some of the bombers had nothing in
common with thugs like Ibrahim, a convicted mugger, and losers like Reid.
Teaching assistant Mohammed Sidique Khan, a decade older than the other July
7 bombers, was a natural leader, according to those who knew him in the
ethnically mixed neighborhoods in Leeds, an old mill town in northern
England. Muslims and non-Muslims admired his community spirit. He set up two
gyms to help get local youngsters off the streets, mentored problem students
at primary school and was rewarded with a tour of Parliament by his M.P. "If
Khan could be turned, it means anybody could be turned," says Khurshid
Drabu, an adviser provided to the Khan family by the Muslim Council of
Britain. "That's what's terrifying."

One old friend thinks the dramatic change may have begun back in 1999, when
a Jamaican-born jihadist cleric known as Abdullah el-Faisal, an Abu Hamza
associate, went to Leeds. (In 2003 a Brit-ish court convicted him of
incitement to murder and sentenced him to nine years in prison.) Around the
time of the Iraq invasion, Khan began distancing himself from old friends
and hanging out more and more with two of the teenagers he had been
mentoring at his gym, Hasib Hussain and Shahzad Tanweer. In November 2004,
Tanweer and Khan flew to Pakistan for three months. When they came back,
Khan quit his teaching job, moved his family to another town-Aswat's old
hometown of Dewsbury, as it happens-and left his wife, an ethnic Indian
Muslim, and their infant daughter. Five months later, Khan and friends blew
themselves up.

Such drastic withdrawal is actually a common feature of Al Qaeda's
re-cruitment process. Former Saudi intelligence chief (and current
ambassador-designate to the United States) Prince Turki al-Faisal, a veteran
of the secret war against Al Qaeda, described the routine to NEWSWEEK. By
the time the group's enlistment spe-cialists approach a candidate, they have
studied him care-fully. "Then they approach him," Prince Turki says. "They
express admiration for him, and they invite him for tea or coffee." They
talk about jihad and praise the ideas of some sheik. "After a few more
meetings they will offer to intro-duce him to the sheik. That's when they
start putting into his head the idea of being careful and not telling
anybody, especially his family." Then comes the turning point: they ask the
recruit to prove himself by doing something to incriminate himself.

British police may find their jailed suspects surprisingly eager to talk.
People say Qaeda operatives are trained to withstand interrogation. That may
be true of the commanders, but Prince Turki says captured foot soldiers tend
to open up with little or no coaxing. They want to escape their cultish
isolation. "If you show them a little sympathy, they want to come back to
the way they were before," he says. "It's as if they were given the chance
to come back again as human beings, and many of them jump at that chance."
If only they could have made the jump before people were killed.

With Rana Foroohar and Emily Flynn in Leeds and Christopher Dickey in Paris

C 2005 Newsweek, Inc.


C 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8770544/site/newsweek/

All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten or redistributed.

FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this
message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to
these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed
within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with
"Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The
Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain
permission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materials
if the purposes of display include "criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching, scholarship, and research." Section 107 establishes four criteria
for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies
as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four
criteria to qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" is
determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not
substantially satisfy the criteria in their totality. If you wish to use
copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. COPYING AND DISSEMINATION IS
PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

MUI issues 11 fatwa

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailweekly.asp?fileid=20050729.@02

July 29, 2005

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

In what was widely seen as an apparent campaign against freedom of thought
and religion, the state-sanctioned Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issued on
Thursday a fatwa outlawing liberal Islamic thoughts.

Apart from liberalism, the council also declared secularism and pluralism
forbidden under Islam, through one of the 11 decrees it issued during its
four-day national congress that will officially end on Friday.
With such an unpopular fatwa, the MUI could be headed for a showdown with
progressive Islamic movements that have been growing in the predominantly
Muslim nation.
Fatwa Commission chairman Ma'ruf Amin said that although the edict did not
specify any organization by name, it was issued apparently in reaction to
the activities of two progressive groups -- the Liberal Islam Network (JIL)
and the Muhammadiyah Youth Intellectuals Network (JIMM).
"All of their teachings are deviant ... No one should adhere to their
beliefs," Ma'ruf told The Jakarta Post. "Their principles are dangerous and
misleading, because they believe in only what they think is right and use
pure rationale as justification."
Proponents of liberal Islam use rational interpretations of Islamic texts as
opposed to literal meanings, view religious truth as a relative concept and
believe in the separation of religion and state.
MUI deputy chairman Umar Shihab said that in the council's view, both the
Western-influenced JIL and JIMM have strayed from the Indonesian brand of
Islam.
"The views that are developing in Europe and America are heretical and not
allowed here," he said. "However, we must not counter them with violence,
but with logical arguments."
The fatwa, which was read out on the third day of the congress without any
resistance from over 300 participants, stated that Islamic interpretations
based on liberalism, secularism and pluralism "contradict Islamic
teachings".
The fatwa defines liberal Islam as interpreting Islamic texts using pure
rationale to selectively accept only certain religious doctrines.
"For example, they (liberals) say that a man cannot have more than one wife
because it is gender bias, when in fact polygamy is allowed by Islam, as
long as the husband can be fair," said Ma'ruf.
Secularism by definition, according to the edict, is the belief that the
role of religion should be limited to an individual's relationship with God
and that society should be guided by social conventions.
The fatwa outlaws pluralism that views all religions as being equally valid
and having relative truths.
"Pluralism in that sense is haram (forbidden under Islamic law), because it
justifies other religions," Maruf said, adding that people should be allowed
to claim that their religion is the true one and that other faiths are
wrong.
However, he stressed that the council accepted the fact that Indonesia was
home to different religions and that their followers could live side by
side.
"Plurality in the sense that people believe in different religions is
allowed," Ma'ruf explained. "As such, we have to respect each other and
coexist peacefully."
The MUI also renewed its 1980 fatwa against Ahmadiyah, an Islamic group that
does not share the mainstream Muslim belief that Muhammad was the last
prophet.
The new fatwa contained stronger language than the previous one, calling for
the government to ban and dismantle the organization as well as freeze all
of its activities.
The council also issued a fatwa, reaffirming its 1980 ban on marriages
between people of different faiths.
The MUI also banned interfaith prayers, unless they are led by a Muslim.
Other edicts issued included those forbidding women from leading prayers
when men are in attendance.
Commenting on the fatwas, particularly the one against liberal Islam,
prominent Muslim scholar Azyumardi Azra dismissed it as "ineffective and
even counterproductive".
"I don't agree with such a fatwa. The state cannot enforce it for Muslims as
it's not legally binding. Muslims can or will ignore it."
He said the ban on liberal thoughts reflected the intolerance being promoted
by the MUI and indicated that it was trying to curb freedom of thought.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

London Police Make Seven More Arrests

By  <http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ALAN
COWELL&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ALAN COWELL&inline=nyt-per>
ALAN COWELL
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e/31cnd-london.html&tntemail0=&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print>
&tntemail0=&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print

LONDON, July 31 - The British police today widened their hunt for people
involved in attempted terrorist bombings in London on July 21, seizing six
men and a woman at an apartment house in Brighton on the south coast.

The resort 60 miles south of London is more usually known for holiday trips,
excursions to the seaside and the restorative breezes of the English
Channel.

But, just two days after armed police in London and Rome detained men
suspected of being the July 21 attackers, police shifted their search for
accomplices to two locations in Brighton. Police did not identify the new
suspects by name. The arrests, which witnesses said took place at an
apartment house called Fairways about one mile from the sea, brought to 19
the number of people being detained in relations to the July 21 bombings.

They include five men - four held in Britain and one in Rome - suspected of
planting bombs on July 21 in an attack that mimicked a far bloodier assault
on July 7, when 56 people, including four bombers, were killed.

The police that the arrests in Brighton, all made under counter-terrorism
laws, were part of a hunt for a so-called third cell of bombers alluded to
in a British newspaper report.

But a police spokesman in London, speaking in return for anonymity under
police rules, said: "There may well be further suspects out there with
similar intentions" to the earlier bombers.

"And there may be others who assisted them. We would expect that they would
have had other persons involved," he said.

The spokesman said the police had never specifically referred to the
existence of a "third cell," even though senior officers have warned
repeatedly that Britons still face a serious threat, despite Friday's
arrests.

British authorities are seeking the extradition of the suspect held in Rome,
identified variously as Hussain Osman and Osman Hussain, a 27-year-old
naturalized Briton of Ethiopian or Somali background who fled London last
Tuesday aboard a Eurostar train to Paris.

He has also been identified as Hamdi Isaac. He is suspected of attempting to
bomb a subway train near Shepherd's Bush station in west London on July.
Witnesses at the time said that, when a bomb in a backpack failed to
detonate properly, he jumped from a subway train onto the tracks - above
ground at that point - and fled.

Mr. Osman told Italian investigators that the July 21 bombers intended their
action only as a "demonstration" and did not mean to kill anybody, a person
with firsthand knowledge of the interrogation said on Saturday. But Sir Ian
Blair, the head of London's police, had said earlier on several occasions
that the bombers made a single mistake - which he has not explained in
detail - that prevented carnage on the same scale as on July 7.

British officials today questioned how Mr. Osman - identified after the July
21 bombings in closed-circuit television images released by the police -
could have slipped out of the country so easily at a time when immigration
officers were supposed to be on high alert.

A spokesman for the Home Office said Britain had ordered its immigration
services to introduce passport checks at all ports after the first bombing
on July 7. That order had been relaxed on July 17 but reimposed after the
failed attacks on July 21, when explosives failed to detonate properly, the
spokesman said, requesting customary anonymity.

According to Italian officials, the fugitive had told investigators in Rome
after his arrest that he fled Britain five days after the July 21 attacks.

David Davies, a spokesman for the opposition Conservatives, said the ease
with which Mr. Osman left the country showed "the vital and immediate
necessity for the government to get a grip on our porous borders, both in
terms of people coming into the country and in terms of people leaving."

Under Britain's anti-terrorism laws, police have 14 days to question
suspects - from the time of their arrests - before they are obliged to
charge or release them.

The first arrest of a July 21 suspect was last Wednesday when a man
described as a Somali, Yasin Hassan Omar, was arrested in Birmingham,
central England, accused of trying to bomb a subway train at Warren Street
station.

In London on Friday, three more men were arrested - Muktar Said Ibrahim,
suspected of trying to bomb a doubledecker bus; Ramzi Mohamed, suspected of
attacking a subway train at Oval station, and Wahbi Mohamed, wanted in
connection with suspicions that an attempt to bomb a fifth target on the
same day was abandoned.

In the hunt for suspects, a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles
de Menezes, was shot dead by accident by police on July 22, and since then
some Muslims have said they fear being singled out by police because of
their appearance.

"Every Muslim in the community is living in fear of harassment, arrest and
possible execution," said Imran Waheed, a spokesman for the radical Hizb
ut-Tahrir organization, which held a meeting of several hundred supporters
in London today. The organization is outlawed in some countries.

But the police insist they will continue to stop and search people from
groups seen as most likely to be a threat. "We should not waste time
searching old white ladies," Ian Johnston, the head of the British Transport
Police, told the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

"What it means is, if your intelligence in a particular area tells you that
you're looking for somebody of a particular description, perhaps with
particular clothing on, then clearly you're going to exercise that power in
that way," he said, referring to police powers to stop suspects on the
street.

In Italy - among more than a dozen searches carried out in the last few days
- the police today announced the arrest of a man identified as Fati Issac,
though he was not charged with an terror-related crimes. Several accounts in
the Italian press said he was a brother of Osman Hussain, arrested as one of
the bombers in the July 21 attempt.

A police official in the northern city of Brescia, where the suspect was
arrested, would only confirm the arrest and say that he was charged with
crimes connected to documents.

ANSA, an Italian news agency, cited unidentified police sources as saying
that he was charged with destroying documents after being taken into custody
on Saturday. The agency said the suspect's girlfriend, identified as a
Bosnian, was also questioned but later released.

A lawyer representing the July 21 suspect captured in Rome has said the
extradition could take up to two months, even under an expedited extradition
process approved by Italy only last week.

cowell

Ian Fisher contributed reporting from Rome for this article.


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Authorities look to tighten borders


From correspondents in London

August 01, 2005

From: Agence France-Presse



AUTHORITIES are mulling how to tighten border controls after a suspect in
London's July 21 botched bombings took a Eurostar train to leave the country
and travel to Italy, officials said overnight.

Hamdi Issac, also known as Osman Hussain, was arrested in Rome after fleeing
London aboard a Eurostar train to Paris on July 26, five days after the
attack on the British capital's transport system.

He is wanted in connection with the abortive bomb attack on a London
Underground station at Shepherd's Bush in West London, one of four
unsuccessful attacks on London's transport network.

A Home Office spokesman confirmed that checks at the Eurostar terminal at
Waterloo were increased following the initial July 7 suicide bombings, which
left 56 people dead, including the four attackers.

The bolstered checks were lifted on July 17, but then re-introduced
immediately after the July 21 attempted attacks.

"There are currently passport checks at Waterloo. All these decisions are
taken in close consultation with the police, and the situation is kept under
review, in liaison with the Special branch," said the spokesman.

He declined to speculate on the specifics of how Issac got through the
Waterloo checks. "It's the subject of a police investigation and I cannot
comment," he said.

House of Commons leader Geoff Hoon echoed the Home Office comments, implying
that extra passport checks could be introduced.

Hoon told the BBC that British ministers will be looking into claims that
passport checks at Waterloo are inadequate.

"I'm aware that the Home Office will be looking at that. Certainly in recent
times there has been enhanced security for those leaving the country as well
as for those coming into the United Kingdom," he said.

A spokesman for Eurostar underlined that the company is not responsible for
passport checks. "We can't confirm he travelled with Eurostar, we are
working with the British authorities and going through lists of our
passengers."

"If he did travel ... that was before they issued a proper picture of him
and before they knew his name: to give to some credit to the police they
didn't know the person they were looking for anyway," he said.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Australian team developing the science of surveillance


By Holly Nott
August 1, 2005

Sydney Morning Herald

Australian researchers have begun developing advanced surveillance systems
capable of recognising suspicious behaviour to combat crime and potential
terrorist activity on public transport.

Curtin University of Technology and DTI Group, both located in Perth, have
joined forces in a $1 million, three-year project aimed at creating
next-generation surveillance for public transport services in Australia and
overseas.

Face-recognition technology and techniques to detect unattended objects and
recognise behaviour not typical of public transport users are all being
examined.

Curtin's pro vice-chancellor of research and development, Barney Glover,
said there was a pressing need for more sophisticated public security
technology.

"We all know what is happening right around the world at the moment and
closed-circuit television and surveillance is becoming an absolutely
critical issue," Professor Glover said.

"It is one thing to use CCTV technology after an event. What is important
about the future is to be able to use that technology more pre-emptively .
and to be able to stop an event occurring."

Professor Glover said Curtin researchers had developed ways to check all
cameras were operational and correctly focused throughout a surveillance
network - a previously time-consuming and difficult process.

They were also hoping to incorporate sophisticated face-recognition
technology into the surveillance systems, and build in a trigger that is
activated when objects are left unattended.

Cameras using so-called terahertz technology, which can see through clothes
the same way X-rays do, are being developed in Britain for routine checks on
passengers at airports and rail stations. Such cameras detect the extremely
short radio waves naturally emitted by objects, revealing the presence of
concealed weapons and explosives.

A company called ThruVision has begun trials of a terahertz imaging system
at an undisclosed British airport.

British scientists are also about to reveal a breakthrough in the detection
of explosives. Until now, security services at key targets have relied on
chemical analysis of air samples or sniffer dogs.

Scientists at Insentinel, in Hertfordshire, have developed a far faster
system using trained honey bees. The bees are exposed to tiny samples of
explosives and rewarded if they respond correctly. According to the team,
the bees have proved capable of detecting concentrations down to one part
per million million - equivalent to a single grain of salt in a swimming
pool.

Australian Associated Press; Telegraph, London



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All terrorist organizations have larger support cells than attack cells.

Bruce




Net widens with more arrests


From correspondents in London

August 01, 2005

From: AAP



BRITISH police arrested seven more people overnight over the botched July 21
terror attacks in London, a spokeswoman said, as the investigation widened
following the capture of the four alleged bombers.

In a bid to thwart other plots, police are hunting for bankrollers,
bombmakers and others who could be behind the July 21 attacks and the deadly
July 7 bombings, while trying to determine if they are linked.

Police investigating the July 21 bid to bomb three Underground trains and a
bus now hold 18 people in custody in Britain, including three of the alleged
assailants. The fourth, Hamdi Issac, is in Italy facing extradition.

Issac's escape from Britain, despite a massive police manhunt and the wide
distribution of his photograph, has prompted the British authorities into
mulling how to tighten border controls.

Issac, also known as Osman Hussain, was arrested in Rome Friday after
fleeing London aboard a Eurostar train to Paris on July 26.

House of Commons leader Geoff Hoon told the BBC that British ministers will
be looking into claims that passport checks at London's Waterloo station are
inadequate.

A spokeswoman for London's Metropolitan police said that seven people were
arrested, six men and one woman, at an address in Sussex, reported by the
domestic Press Association to be in or near the south coast resort of
Brighton.

No further details were released about their alleged roles in the attacks,
which were a bungled attempt to repeat the July 7 devastation when four
suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 others on London's transport
system.

Police have warned that despite the arrest of all four suspected July 21
bombers, the threat of further attacks remained "very real".

With the alleged bombers behind bars, police have turned their sights on the
ringleaders -- the chemists who made the explosive mixture used in the
bombs, the technicians who put them together and the ideologues who inspired
them.

"There were quite a few other people involved in the incidents of the 7th
and the 21st. It's extremely likely there will be other people involved in
harbouring, financing and making the devices," the police spokeswoman said.

In central London's high-security Paddington Green police station, police
were continuing Sunday to interrogate three of the alleged July 21 bombers
-- Eritrean-born Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, Somali-born Yassin Hassan Omar,
24, and Ramzi Mohammed, whose age and ethnic background have not been
released.

Ibrahim and Mohammed were arrested in a west London flat during a raid by
heavily armed elite police on Friday. Hassan Omar was arrested last
Wednesday in a pre-dawn raid on a house in Birmingham.

The man held in Italy reportedly confessed to magistrates and claimed the
gang's intention was to terrorise but not to kill.

Issac, 27, an Ethiopian-born Briton, said the group was motivated by
watching videos of US and British forces in Iraq, and has vowed to fight his
extradition to Britain.

"The bombs of July 7 in London? That happens every day in Iraq," he was
quoted as saying by the daily La Repubblica newspaper, adding that he had no
link with the Al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.

Italian police on Sunday reportedly arrested Hussain's brother, Fati Issac,
for allegedly hiding or destroying documents. Police have traced phone calls
from Hussain to Fati Issac after Hussain fled London by train on July 26.

Another brother, Remzi Issac, was arrested in Rome on Friday for having
allegedly sheltered Hussain and for holding fake documents in his shop in
the Italian capital.

British authorities have also said they are seeking access to a man --
described by US and British media as a senior Al-Qaeda figure and the
ringleader of the July 7 attacks -- who is being held in Zambia.

Zambian police said Sunday that British national Haroon Aswat, 31, who was
arrested on July 20 in Lusaka, would be handed over to British authorities.

Aswat was also wanted by US authorities over alleged attempts to set up a
terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon, but a Zambian police official said
that as he was a British citizen he would be handed over to Britain.

In a sign of the shockwaves triggered by the London bombings, France has
started cracking down on radical imams accused of inciting young Muslims to
violence.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Police query value of terrorism patrols


By Stephen Gibbs
August 1, 2005

Sydney Morning Herald

Some police commanders believe a counter-terrorism measure that is putting
detectives on street patrol for an hour a day is taking resources away from
other important commitments.

One senior investigator said the disruption, including changing into and out
of uniform, stripped up to 2½ hours' productive work from a detective's day.

Police commanders said the new patrols had been described as a public
relations operation at a meeting of managers last week.

"It is purely an arse-covering exercise and the troops recognise it as
such," one said.

"It's still productive to one extent - it gives a perception of safety to
the community, which is good."

Commanders are required to submit a written account of the daily patrols.

Those records could be used to counter public criticism following a major
terrorist incident in Sydney. "The community will then be saying, 'this
failed', 'this failed', 'this failed'," a senior officer said. "I'm working
on the when, not if."

His detectives understood the value of the exercise and were using the hour
as productively as possible, he said.

They did not have to change into uniform or wear fluorescent vests, but he
expected them to patrol in pairs and identify themselves as police. "The
response has been very positive," he said.

Bob Waites, Assistant Police Commissioner and commander of the inner
metropolitan region, said individual local area commands would decide how to
deploy criminal investigators to gather intelligence and increase protection
around critical infrastructure.

"It's about making sure that we are alert and aware and confident that when
[an incident] happens here we have some operations in place," Mr Waites
said.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/bin-laden-funded-australian-embassy-bombing
-in-jakarta/2005/08/01/1122748533388.html?oneclick=true#
Bin Laden 'funded' Australian embassy bombing
August 1, 2005 - 1:51AM

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Osama bin Laden bankrolled the 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy in
Jakarta, the terrorist who led the attack has told Indonesian police.

Rois, also known as Iwan Dharmawan, told police a courier delivered a bundle
of Australian dollars from bin Laden to Malaysian master bomber Azahari bin
Husin, according to a newspaper report.

The information came from a transcript of an official police interview with
Rois on November 10, the report said.

Rois told police: "According to Dr Azahari's explanation to me at the time,
the funds came from Osama bin Laden, and they were sent by a courier, but he
didn't say the name, or when he received it."

Rois said Australia was targeted because its government supported the US in
Iraq, the paper reported.

"The intention to bomb the Australian embassy was because the Australian
government is the American lackey most active in supporting American
policies to slaughter Muslims in Iraq," Rois told police.

"It had the aim of preventing Australia again leaning on Muslims, especially
in Iraq."

  Eleven people - including the suicide bomber - were killed, and dozens more
wounded, when a car bomb exploded outside the gates of the Australian
embassy on September 9.

Rois, who denies being a member of the Islamic extremist group Jemaah
Islamiah (JI), is standing trial on terrorism charges.

He told police a co-conspirator, Noordin Mohammed Top, hatched the plan to
attack the Australian embassy, the report said.

Noordin and Azahari - who are wanted in connection with the 2002 Bali
bombings that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians - planned further
attacks in Jakarta, Rois told police.

Rois's claim about bin Laden indicates that he kept up direct contact with
Indonesian operatives after Hambali, the link between al-Qaeda and JI, was
arrested in 2003, the newspaper said.

FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this
message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to
these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed
within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with
"Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The
Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain
permission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materials
if the purposes of display include "criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching, scholarship, and research." Section 107 establishes four criteria
for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies
as a "fair use".

A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four criteria to
qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" is determined by
the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not substantially
satisfy the criteria in their totality. If you wish to use copyrighted
material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain
permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. COPYING AND DISSEMINATION IS
PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.





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http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1312&id=1703432005

Police force denies use of stun gun was 'incredibly risky'

SHAN ROSS

WEST Midlands Police last night defended using a 50,000-volt Taser
stun gun on a suspected suicide bomber after being accused by the
Metropolitan Police Commissioner of running "an incredible risk" of
detonating any explosive device he might have had on him.

In a highly unusual move, Sir Ian Blair had openly questioned the
actions of another force's officers and reiterated his view that the
only way to deal with a suicide bomber is to shoot him dead.

In response, West Midlands Police said Sir Ian did not know the full
circumstances surrounding Wednesday's arrest in Birmingham of Yasin
Hassan Omar, the prime suspect for the failed bomb attack on a
London Tube train near Warren Street on 21July.

Sir Ian, speaking about the arrest of Omar, 24, told a BBC News
special programme Questions of Security on Thursday night: "I can't
imagine how that was used. We use Tasers in London regularly, but a
Taser sends electric currents into the body of somebody.

"If there is a bomb on that body, then the bomb is going to go off.

"I can't imagine... it may be that they [the officers in Birmingham]
were clear there wasn't a bomb, I don't know what the situation was."

Sir Ian added: "There is only one way to stop a suicide bomber,
which is to kill that person, because anything else that happens,
unless you can persuade them in some open space to undress, allows
the shot to go home but the bomb to go off. It was an incredible
risk to use a Taser on a suicide bomber."

A week ago, Sir Ian's force was caught up in a row following the
fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, a Brazilian
electrician, at Stockwell Tube station in London on 22 July because
police officers believed he was a suicide bomber.

Following Sir Ian's comments, West Midlands Police denied they had
taken unnecessary risks and suggested that Omar's case may have
required a different approach to that of Mr de Menezes.

A statement issued by the force said: "Every situation in which
firearms are deployed is unique. The shooting of Mr de Menezes in
London and the arrest of Yasin Hassan Omar in Birmingham may appear
similar but they were separate incidents.

"The information and intelligence would have been different, the
threat level to officers and the public was different."

The statement even denied that Sir Ian had criticised West Midlands
Police officers at all.

"The Commissioner... did not criticise West Midlands Police
officers," it said. "During a television debate last night he talked
generally about tactics relating to suicide bombers. However, he
stressed 'I do not know what the situation was'."

West Midlands Police have voluntarily referred the use of the Taser
to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which will
investigate the incident.

"It's impossible to draw conclusions until these inquiries have been
concluded," the statement added.

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1703452005


Sat 30 Jul 2005

Extremists rip off tsunami charity cash

IAN JOHNSTON

CHARITABLE donations to help people affected by the Asian tsunami
disaster are falling into the hands of radical Islamic groups linked
to terrorists in Indonesia, a leading expert on the global al-Qaeda
network warned yesterday.

Relief money had become the "primary source" of income for two
militant groups, including one founded by a Muslim cleric serving a
prison sentence in connection with the Bali bombing in 2002 in which
more than 200 people were killed.

Dr Rohan Gunaratna, head of the international centre for political
violence and terrorism research at Singapore's Institute of Defence
and Strategic Studies, told the Asia-Pacific Financial Crime
Conference that the Boxing Day disaster had given "unprecedented
opportunities for these groups to expand their areas of influence".

The UK Department For International Development (Dfid) said it
was "concerned" about his comments and urged him to provide more
information so it could take action if necessary. However, the Red
Cross, Oxfam and Cafod aid agencies insisted that strict accounting
procedures saw to it that no money given to them had fallen into the
wrong hands.

Dr Gunaratna, author of the book Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of
Terror, said the radical Islamic groups Mujahideen Kompak and
Majelis Mujahideen Indonesia, or MMI, were moving into the Aceh
region, where 130,000 people were killed and entire villages
demolished by the devastating tsunami.

He told the conference, organised by banks in Singapore, that steps
had to be taken to ensure that charitable donations did not go
astray.

"Charities are a primary source of income for these groups," he
said. "That's why there has to be more accountability in where
donations go."

MMI, which has been called the Indonesian equivalent of Sinn Fein,
was founded by militant cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who is serving a 30-
month jail sentence for conspiracy in the Bali bombings. Its name
means the Council of Mujahideen For Islamic Law Enforcement.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group has said Mujahideen
Kompak plans to wage holy war in Indonesia.

And, according to the US-based analysts Global Security, Mujahideen
Kompak has been responsible for attacks on Christians, including the
nail-bombing of a church in North Jakarta during evening prayers in
November 2001. Its leaders are also sometimes drawn from the
infamous Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.

Indonesian authorities have arrested scores of al-Qaeda-linked
militants suspected of being involved in the Bali bombings, last
year's attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, or in the 2003
attack on the city's Marriott Hotel. But some critics still accuse
the government of being soft on terrorists for fear of escalating
conflicts in a land which is home to more Muslims than any other.

Dr Gunaratna said: "Indonesia must suffer more from terrorism for
the people and their leaders to realise that terror is serious
business and you can't flirt with terrorists."

Terrorism expert Professor David Capitanchik, formerly of Robert
Gordon University, told The Scotsman that terrorist groups were
known to have set up charities to act as money-laundering operations.

"Around mosques, there are lots of people standing outside with
boxes asking people to give to charity," he said. "It is rare that
people who donate money know exactly where it is going.
Organisations banned in this country - like Hamas - raise funds like
that here."

Patrick Nicholson, of Catholic aid agency Cafod, who was in Aceh in
early this year and again in June, said that while radical Islamic
groups had first tried to exploit the situation to whip up anti-
Western feeling, they appeared to have given up.

"I would challenge him [Dr Gunaratna]. There aren't the same sort of
groups [in Aceh] as you see in other parts of Indonesia," he
said. "They [Islamic extremists] turned up after the tsunami and
tried to get Western aid agencies kicked out.

"But they got no support from local people, and they all left."

When he returned in June, there was no sign of Islamic radicals. He
added that Cafod's accounting allowed a £10 donation in Britain to
be traced to the building of a house or buying of a boat.

A spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross said
simply: "If the question is, 'Is Red Cross funding falling into the
hands of terrorists?', in our view, it isn't."

However, the UK government appeared to be taking the claim
seriously. A Dfid spokesman said: "We are concerned to hear these
allegations. We encourage Dr Gunaratna to approach Dfid with more
information."

Imam crackdown widens


August 01, 2005

From: Agence France-Presse



LESS than a month after suicide attacks in London, French authorities have
started cracking down on radical imams accused of inciting young Muslims to
violence.

France's Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has launched a series of
measures he says will show "zero tolerance" for Muslim clerics who preach
violence and recruit young men for jihad, or holy war.

In just a week, two imams out of about a dozen threatened with either
expulsion or losing their French nationality were sent back to Algeria.

Reda Ameuroud, 35, an imam expelled on Friday, was arrested more than two
weeks ago in what authorities called "a preventive anti-terror operation" in
a Paris neighbourhood that is home to a mosque known for attracting
radicals.

Another Algerian, Abdelhamid Aissaoui, 41, was banished from France on July
23.

He was an "occasional imam", who had been sentenced to four years in prison
for participating in an attempted attack in 1995 on a high-speed train near
Lyon, organised by Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA).

French authorities have zeroed in on a dozen imams, most of them from North
Africa but also some from Turkey, who are preaching in and around cities
with large immigrant populations such as Paris, Lyon and Marseille.

They are also monitoring about a dozen other people deemed potentially
dangerous due to the content of their speeches.

France has less than 1,000 imams and officials point out that the vast
majority of them do not pose any problem.

About half of the imams preach regularly, while 320 only lead Friday
prayers, and 150 are occasional preachers. Thirty per cent of French imams
are Moroccans, 20 per cent Algerians and another 20 per cent are French,
with Turks accounting for about 15 per cent.

Of the 1,500 or so Muslim places of worship in France, less than 40 are
under the influence of hardline radicals, with their preaching extending
from "'classic fundamentalism' to more violent ideas", police officials
said.

The self-proclaimed, or "occasional", imams often do not have any training
and only a cursory knowledge of the Koran, Islam's holy book.

Despite a lack of scholarship, these preachers can exercise influence over
youths from disadvantaged neighbourhoods looking for some sort of identity.

"The title of imam has been tarnished, it is often usurped," said Dalil
Boubakeur, the moderate president of the French Council of the Muslim
Religion, the first recognised national organisation for France's estimated
5 million Muslims.

"Sometimes all that's needed is a djellaba (kaftan) and a turban to pass for
an Islamic sheikh."

The French crackdown on imams is cause for concern in immigrant communities,
which were rattled 18 months ago by the adoption of a French law that barred
religious insignia -- notably the Muslim headscarf -- from state schools.

"We are not killers -- immigrants are human beings, not cockroaches," said
one Frenchman of Egyptian origin near the Paris mosque where Ameuroud
preached.





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Tube bomb suspect fled Britain by Eurostar
By George Jones and John Steele
(Filed: 01/08/2005)

Daily Telegraph

The Government was under pressure last night to reintroduce permanent
passport checks at all British border points after it emerged that one
suspect in the botched July 21 suicide bombings was able to flee to the
Continent unchallenged by stepping on to a Eurostar train at Waterloo
station.

Geoff Hoon, the Leader of the Commons, admitted that there was "concern" in
the Government that Hussain Osman, accused of being the Shepherd's Bush Tube
bomber, was believed to have slipped away by train last Tuesday when border
security was supposed to have been at its tightest.




Hussain Osman


Hussain Osman: tracked by mobile phone calls

He indicated that the Government was urgently considering reintroducing
permanent checks by immigration officers on the passports of those leaving
and entering at the Eurostar terminus and other embarkation points.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said Osman's escape showed the
"vital and immediate necessity" of getting a grip on the country's "porous"
borders.

Osman, 27, who was born in Ethiopia but who has a British passport, fled to
Paris then to Rome, where he was held on Friday after being tracked by
mobile telephone calls.








<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/exclusions/ufflondon_t
error.xml>

Mr Hoon promised that the circumstances would be investigated urgently but
the Home Office refused to comment on reports that Osman's passport was
checked only by French immigration officials based at Waterloo.

Osman, also known as Hamdi Isaac, apparently got through despite CCTV
pictures of the bombing suspects being displayed prominently at Waterloo.

But police sources said the image of Osman was the least distinct and
helpful of the four suspects. If he left the country on Tuesday, it could
have been nearly 24 hours before the police had positively identified him by
name.

His escape and the prospect of a lengthy extradition process to secure his
return to stand trial in Britain is a serious embarrassment for the
Government.

Outgoing British passport checks were abandoned at the Eurostar terminus
last year. The Home Office said that checks by British immigration officials
at embarkation points were reintroduced at the request of the police after
the July 7 bombings but lifted on July 17. They were introduced again after
the July 21 attacks and were still in force.

Asked on BBC News 24 whether the passports of passengers leaving Waterloo
were not checked, Mr Hoon said: "I understand that concern and I am aware
that the Home Office will be looking at that."

He said it was important that Britain was able to identify those coming into
the country as well as leaving it. That was one of the arguments the
Government had used to support the proposal for identity cards "because it
is vitally important that we are able to say who is in the UK at any given
time".

The
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/30/nbomb30.xml
> arrest of the July 21 suspects was a welcome development, Mr Hoon said.
But the public should not drop its guard.

Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, defended police plans to pick out
young Muslims for stop-and-search as part of the security response to the
bombings.

Miss Blears, who is in charge of the department while Charles Clarke, the
Home Secretary, is on holiday, told the BBC that she believed the Muslim
community would accept such searches as a necessary response.

Ian Johnston, the chief constable of British Transport Police, made clear in
a newspaper interview that his officers would not shy away from
concentrating on those groups most likely to present the greatest danger.

He told the Mail on Sunday: "We should not bottle out over this. We should
not waste time searching old white ladies."

Mr Johnston said he was confident there was every sign that the Muslim
community understood the predicament that officers faced and that it would
continue to support the police even if young Asians became the focus of most
searches.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil rights group Liberty, said that
"racial profiling" was a disaster and could play into the hands of those who
wanted to recruit terrorists.

She said: "If you search people of a particular race or description while
letting others through, it does not take long for a terrorist group to learn
ways of placing their lethal cargo with those who do not meet the profile."

The Home Office said it was launching a series of meetings with Muslim
community leaders across the country to try to foster good relations after
the bomb attacks.

MPs are also being asked to consult local Muslim communities over the summer
holiday and to provide information on their views to the Home Office.

A further seven suspects were arrested in the early hours in Brighton
yesterday as part of the investigation into the attempted bombings on July
21.

Six men and one woman were held after unarmed officers from Scotland Yard
and Sussex police raided two homes in the resort.





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A month that changed the face of Britain
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=W3Y2MECOZY0IVQFIQMFCNA
GAVCBQYJVC?xml=/news/2005/08/01/nbomb401.xml
(Filed: 01/08/2005)

What kind of explosives were used?

Experts believe that the July 7 blasts were caused by the kind of home-made,
chemical-based explosives similar to material found in a "bomb factory" in
Leeds, where three of the suicides lived, and in a car in Luton. They may
have been nail or shrapnel bombs.


  The bus bombed in Tavistock Square
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2005/08/01/nbomb401.jpg>

The No 30 bus destroyed by a suicide bomber in Tavistock Square on July 7

The mix is believed to be a form of peroxide-based compound. There are
"initial chemical similarities" between the material found after July 7 and
that discovered after July 21.

Were 16 bombs left in a car in Luton after the July 7 suicide bombs?

Police sources have said there were 16 items, not 16 bombs. The items ranged
from packs of suspected chemical explosive material to "things with wires
sticking out" and were in the boot of a hire car left at Luton rail station
after July 7.

There was however one "viable" nail bomb, images of which were published
last week in America. The vehicle was understood to be linked to Shehzad
Tanweer, one of the suicides.

Was there a fifth would-be bomber on July 21?

A bomb similar to the four left on July 21 - chemical-based explosive
material in a plastic food container, with a detonator and shrapnel in a
rucksack - was found dumped in bushes at Little Wormwood Scrubs in west
London on July 23.

Police now suspect that it was for use by a potential fifth bomber, who for
some reason did not attempt to detonate it. It is also now suspected that
the bomb left in the Luton car was for a fifth bomber who did not collect
it.

Were the July 7 and July 21 attacks linked?

This is a critical question. Sources have suggested that, so far, they have
not established clear "evidential or forensic links" which could go before a
court.

There are, at least, apparent similarities between the type of explosives in
the two sets of events and it has been suggested that some of the July 21
suspects visited a white water rafting centre in Wales at around the same
time as some of the July 7 suicides.

Security sources believe that the two groups may not have been directly
linked, in terms of plotting together, but are likely to have shared
connections in the Islamic fundamentalist "Jihadist" network, which was
established largely in the Taliban and al-Qa'eda training camps in
Afghanistan.

The "mastermind"?

Given the enormous speculation over the past three weeks, "masterminds" is
more appropriate.

Senior police sources have stressed throughout that, if their suspicion is
correct and they are dealing with al-Qa'eda-inspired terror, they would
expect to find evidence of at least one organiser or co-ordinator.

To term such a player as a mastermind may be to underestimate the abilities,
for example, of the July 7 suicides, where the 30-year-old Mohammed Siddique
Khan was clearly an influence on the younger participants.

It has been reported that a suspected senior al-Qa'eda figure entered
Britain just before July 7 and left shortly before those attacks but it is
believed this turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

Spiritual influences?

An important, long-term aim is to establish where those involved in the two
bombing episodes were radicalised to the extent of being willing to blow
themselves up. Sources suspect a combination of spiritual "guidance" and the
influence of the jihadist network will become apparent. Radicalisation in
prison, as previously seen in the case of the "shoe bomber", Richard Reid,
is thought to be a growing problem.

A single bomb maker?

In the days of IRA campaigns, the "signature" of bombs often helped the
security services to track down the bomb maker. However, such simple
principles may not hold in the case of the London attacks, which may involve
the same basic compound.

If suspicions are correct and the explosive is a home-made, peroxide-based
compound, then similar mixes have been used around the work. Acetone
peroxide, a common variant, is a favourite of terrorists because it is easy
to make and difficult to detect.

Finding evidence of the detonators in the hundreds of dustbins of debris
from July 7 will take months. Eventually, though, they may be compared to
the bombs left on July 21.

This may reveal a single source of manufacture but, equally, it may be both
sets of attacks involved a variant of the peroxide mix put together from the
same recipe, but either "cooked" differently, or handled differently, by the
two sets of attackers.

Security sources have no doubt there are "experts" in the jihadist network,
possibly communicating through the internet, who could have passed on such
knowledge. Inquiries will focus on whether any of the suspects or suicides
had visited jihadist camps where they could have learned about making
chemical bombs.

International connections?

It is thought that three of the July 7 bombers had visited Pakistan, two of
them at the same time, and may have been to Afghanistan. Some of the
suspects in the July 21 case have links to east Africa.

Hussain Osman, who has been detained in Italy, is suggested to have made a
call to Saudi Arabia, the importance of which is unknown at present.
However, some of the September 2001 jet hijackers had Saudi links, as does
Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qa'eda.

The "Zambian" connection?

It has been reported repeatedly that Haroon Rashid Aswat, who grew up in
West Yorkshire and has been detained in Zambia, is wanted in connection with
the July 7 bombs. It is understood that his telephone number cropped up
once, in the past, in the records of one of the July 7 suicides, believed to
be Khan. Such background connections are common, sources say.

However, Scotland Yard sources are emphatic that he has not been detained in
Zambia at their request, that they have not sent officers to Africa, and
have no plans to do so.

Aswat has, in fact, been detained principally for the American authorities,
in connection with his suspected role in setting up a terrorist camp in the
state of Oregon, US reports say.

The Egyptian chemist?

An Egyptian biochemist, Magdy Elnashar, emerged in the days after July 7 as
allegedly linked, as a previous keyholder, to a flat in Leeds used as a
"bomb factory", and was said to have met one of the suicides.

He had returned to Egypt before July 7 and has been arrested since in Cairo.
However, Scotland Yard sources have insisted he was not arrested at their
instigation, he has denied any wrong-doing and the Cairo authorities have
been reported as saying they do not believe he has al-Qa'eda connections. At
present, Elnashar appears to have the potential status of a witness who will
be interviewed to piece together the history of the Leeds flat.

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August 01, 2005

London  faces lockdown to thwart third terror strike By Daniel McGrory and
Sean O’Neill

THOUSANDS of police marksmen will be on London’s  streets and rooftops again
today after warnings that another team of suicide  bombers is plotting a
third attack on the capital.

The new group is  believed to be made up of British Muslims who were
understood to be close to  staging an attack on the Underground network last
week. According to security  sources the men are thought to be of Pakistani
origin but born and brought up  in this country. They have links with the
Leeds-based terrorist cell that  staged the July 7 attacks, in which 52
innocent people died.

Even  with the transport system so heavily guarded, police and intelligence
sources  believe that the bombers are intent on once more attacking London’s
bus and  Underground network. Another multiple suicide strike is also
intended to  demonstrate how the network can call on more recruits. The men
are said to  have access to explosives.

US security sources said yesterday that this  third group of would-be
bombers met at Finsbury Park mosque in North London,  where some of the July
7 terrorists are also known to have stayed. There are  reports that this
team originally planned to strike last Thursday, which is  why more than
6,000 police, half of them armed, were present at Underground  stations.
Scotland Yard said at the time that this exercise, the biggest  since the
Second World War, was to test their resources and reassure a  nervous
public.


As commuters return to work today police chiefs say  that the arrest of five
suspected bombers in house raids in Birmingham,  London and Rome has not
ended this threat. Deputy Assistant Commissioner  Peter Clarke, head of the
anti-terrorist branch, said: “The threat remains  and is very real.”

There is concern among ministers and police at how  long officers can
continue such an intensive operation to “lock down” London  while a threat
remains. Although reinforcements have been brought in and  leave has been
cancelled, resources are stretched to keep up the guard on the  capital,
which is costing £500,000 a day. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan  Police
Commissioner, admitted that his officers were “very, very tired”.

While the priority is to thwart another strike, police are  still
investigating links between the attacks on July 7 and the botched  operation
a fortnight later. They are also hunting for what officers describe  as “key
logistical players” behind the attacks.

Seven more people —  six men and a woman — were arrested in raids in
Brighton yesterday, bringing  the number of people under arrest in Britain
to 18. A Scotland Yard spokesman  said: “This is a further indication of the
fact this is a fast-moving  investigation and we continue to progress. We
are searching for other people  in connection with this ongoing inquiry.

“There were quite a few other  people involved in the incidents of the 7th
and the 21st. It’s extremely  likely there will be other people involved in
harbouring, financing and  making the devices.”

The major link between the two sets of bombers is  that the alleged leaders
of both groups attended Finsbury Park mosque.  Experts are studying
similarities between the bombs used on July 7 and 21.

Anti-terrorism officers are still questioning four of the failed bombers  at
Paddington Green police station while a fifth member of the team is  being
interrogated in Rome.

Hussain Osman, who tried to blow up a  Tube train at Shepherds Bush, told
Italian police that the devices were only  meant to scare passengers, not
injure them. Scotland Yard dismissed that  claim as “nonsense”.

The devices, hidden in rucksacks, were studded with  razor sharp nails and
only failed to explode because of a clumsy mistake by  the bombmaker. Sir
Ian Blair said that the bombs were designed to kill and  that London had a
lucky escape.

Ethiopian-born Hussain, 27, who has a  British passport, claimed that the
plot was orchestrated by another of those  arrested on Friday, Muktar
Said-Ibrahim. Hussain said that he had been  recruited in an underground gym
in Notting Hill.

Immigration  officials are trying to find out how he managed to slip out of
Waterloo  station on a Eurostar train to Paris and make way to Italy where
he met his  brother, who lives in Rome. Officials want to know why Hussain,
who says his  real name is Hamdi Isaac and who has Italian citizenship, came
to Britain  posing as a Somali asylum-seeker in 1996.

There were reports last night  that Muktar Said-Ibrahim, the suspected
ringleader of the July 21 plot, was  seen in Rome several weeks before the
failed attacks. A mother and daughter  living downstairs from the suburban
flat where Hussain Osman was arrested on  Friday, said that they had
recognised Said-Ibrahim from footage of his arrest  in London.

Two of Hussain’s brothers who live in Italy are also being  held. One is
accused of sheltering him; the second was picked up yesterday in  the
northern town of Brescia.

Italian police say they are using  Hussain’s phone records to unpick the
international network that has been  helping him. Alfredo Mantovano, an
Interior Ministry official, said that the  network “confirms the presence in
our country of autonomous Islamic cells . .  . which could represent a
concrete threat.” Italy is worried that it is the  next target for Islamic
terrorists.

4 wounded in twin explosions in Southern RP
By Al Jacinto

Sun-Star, Zamboana

July 31, 2005

FOUR persons were wounded in two separate explosions Saturday in the
southern Philippines, police and military said.

A homemade bomb exploded Saturday in Cotabato City in the southern
Philippines, wounding a 14-year old girl, police said.

Police said the bomb, planted near a light pole, went off around 11.05 a.m.
inside the compound of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). "We
are still investigating the blast. One 14-year old student was slightly
wounded in the explosion that occurred inside the ARMM compound," local
police chief Inspector Joey Ampong said.

Four hours later, a second bomb rift through a section of Koronadal City,
which left three persons wounded. The bomb, placed in a cardboard box,
exploded on a motorcab parked infront of the city's main market, the
military said.

No group claimed responsibility for the two attacks, and authorities would
not say if the explosions were connected or not.

Police in Cotabato said they recovered parts of a shattered cellular phone,
raising suspicion that it was used to trigger the explosion. "They're using
cell phones as initiators to set off explosive devices. This could be part
of a bigger plot to sow terror. We are in heightened alert now," Ampong said
yesterday, July 30.

The police could not say who were behind the blasts or the motive in the
attacks. "It could be a rehearsal to test whether cell phones are effective
tools to trigger explosion," Ampong said.

Abu Sayyaf terrorists tied to al-Qaeda network had also previously used cell
phones to detonate bombs in Zamboanga City. Instead of the phone ringing, it
sends the power to an explosive charge and detonated it.

In the Bali bombings in October 2002 that killed 202 people, Jemaah
Islamiyah terrorists triggered a bomb in a mini-bus outside the Sari Club
with a cell-phone detonator. A car bomb detonated by mobile phone killed 12
people at Jakarta's Marriott hotel in August 2003.



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