Tag Archives: Jihadist Group

Uzbekistan says told West that Stockholm attack suspect was IS recruit

People lay flowers near the crime scene at Ahlens department store at the pedestrian street Drottninggatan in central Stockholm, Sweden, April 12, 2017. TT NEWS AGENCY/ Fredrik Sandberg via REUTERS

TASHKENT (Reuters) – Uzbekistan’s security services warned a western ally before last week’s deadly truck attack in Stockholm that the suspected perpetrator was an Islamic State recruit, Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov said on Friday.

Kamilov told reporters that Rakhmat Akilov had been recruited by the jihadist group after he left the Central Asian nation in 2014 and settled in Sweden.

“According to the information that we have, he actively urged his compatriots to travel to Syria in order to fight at Islamic State’s side,” Kamilov said, adding that Akilov had used online messaging services.

“Earlier (before the attack), information on Akilov’s criminal actions had been passed by security services to one of our Western partners so that the Swedish side could be informed.”

Kamilov did not identify the intermediary country or organization.

A spokesman for Sweden’s security police declined to comment on Kamilov’s statement. The police said last week they had intelligence on Akilov in 2016 that they could not verify.

An Uzbek security source said on Wednesday that Akilov had tried to travel to Syria in 2015 to join IS but was detained at the Turkish-Syrian border and deported back to Sweden.

The source added that Uzbekistan authorities had in February put him on a wanted list of people suspected of religious extremism.

(Reporting by Mukhammadsharif Mamatkulov; Additional reporting by Bjorn Rundstrom in Stockholm; Writing by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Katya Golubkova and John Stonestreet)

Man claiming to be Boko Haram leader denies 5,000 hostages freed

By Ardo Abdullahi

BAUCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) – A man purporting to be the leader of Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram denied in a video posted on Friday that 5,000 people held by the group had been freed by West African forces earlier in the week.

On Wednesday, Cameroon said regional forces had rescued the hostages, who were held in villages by the jihadist group, in an operation along the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

“You are telling lies that you killed 60 of our men and rescued 20 children, and that you rescued 5,000 of your people, Paul Biya,” said the man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, referring to Cameroon’s president.

He also claimed responsibility for attacks earlier this week which included suicide bombings in the city of Maiduguri and a raid on the town of Magumeri, both of which are in the northeast Nigerian state of Borno.

Nigeria’s military has said on multiple occasions in the last few years that it has killed or wounded Shekau.

Such statements have often been followed by video denials by someone who says he is Shekau, but poor footage makes it difficult to confirm if the person is the same man as in previous footage.

Boko Haram has killed around 15,000 people and forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes since 2009 in an insurgency aimed at creating a state adhering to strict Islamic laws in the northeast of Africa’s most populous nation.

The jihadist group, whose attacks have increased since the end of the rainy season in late 2016, also carries out cross-border attacks in neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Kingimi; writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)