Tag Archives: Terrorism

Fugitive from Paris attacks arrested in Brussels shootout

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The most-wanted fugitive from November’s Paris attacks was arrested after a shootout with police in Brussels on Friday, Belgium’s prime minister said.

Charles Michel described the capture of 26-year-old French suspect Salah Abdeslam and two others as “a very important result in the battle for democracy”. French President Francois Hollande said he was confident they had links to Syria and to Islamic State which claimed the attacks that killed 130 people.

“The threat level is very high,” said Hollande, who was in Brussels for an EU summit. He added that it was now clear many more people had been involved in the Paris attacks on a sports stadium, bars and cafes and concert hall than had been realized.

Michel said Abdeslam was wounded — local media said he was shot in the leg — in the operation launched as EU leaders met on the other side of the city to discuss Europe’s migration crisis. U.S. President Barack Obama sent his congratulations.

Television footage showed armed security forces dragging a man with a sack on his head out of a building and into a car.

“We got him,” Belgian government minister Theo Francken said on Twitter.

Hollande said France wanted to extradite Abdeslam, who was born and raised in Brussels to a Moroccan immigrant family, and hoped he would yield more clarity about an operation mounted by Syria-based Islamic State in which all the known attackers died.

Several bursts of gunfire rang out earlier in the capital’s Molenbeek area – Abdeslam’s home neighborhood and the scene of past investigations into the Paris attacks – and police officers surrounded an apartment block there from around 4 p.m. (1500 GMT).

Two explosions were heard after the arrest, though it was unclear whether they were part of a new operation or the clear-up. Some four hours later, the main police presence had stood down but crime scene investigators were still at work.

There had long been speculation about whether Abdeslam had stayed in Belgium or managed to flee to Syria. Security services will be seeking information from Abdeslam on Islamic State plans and structures, his contacts in Europe and Syria and support networks and finance.

Hollande said he was sure Abdeslam, whose elder brother blew himself up at a Parisian cafe on Nov. 13, had also been in the city that night and had helped plan the attack.

FINGERPRINTS

Belgian police had found fingerprints belonging to Abdeslam at the scene of an apartment raided on Tuesday, prosecutors said.

The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office also said an Algerian killed during that earlier operation was probably one of the people French and Belgian investigators were seeking in relation to the attacks in Paris.

Public broadcaster RTBF said it had information that Abdeslam, whose elder brother blew himself up in Paris, was “more than likely” one of two men who police had said evaded capture at the scene before a sniper shot dead 35-year-old Belkaid as he aimed a Kalashnikov.

It said Belkaid was the man known to police as Samir Bouzid who has been sought since December when police issued CCTV pictures of him wiring cash from Brussels two days after the Paris attacks to a woman who was then killed in a shootout with police in the Paris suburb of St. Denis.

She was a cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who had fought in Syria and is suspected of being a prime organizer of the attacks in which 130 people were killed. Both died in the apartment in St. Denis on Nov. 18.

France’s BFM television said the fingerprints were found on a glass in the apartment, where four police officers, including a Frenchwoman, were wounded when a hail of automatic gunfire hit them through the front door as they arrived for what officials said they had expected to be a relatively routine search.

Abdeslam’s elder brother was among the suicide bombers who killed themselves in Paris. The younger Abdeslam was driven back to Brussels from Paris hours later.

Belgian authorities are holding 10 people suspected of involvement with him, but there had been no report of the fugitive himself being sighted.

Investigators believe much of the planning and preparation for the November bombing and shooting rampage in Paris was conducted in Brussels by young French and Belgian nationals, some of whom fought in Syria for Islamic State.

The attack strained relations between Brussels and Paris, with French officials suggesting Belgium was lax in monitoring the activities of hundreds of militants returned from Syria.

Hollande and Michel took pains to exchange mutual compliments to their security services and cross-border cooperation.

Brussels, headquarters of the European Union as well as Western military alliance NATO, was entirely locked down for days after the Paris attacks for fear of a major incident there. Brussels has maintained a high state of security alert since then, with military patrols a regular sight.

(Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio and Jan Strupczewski; Writing by Alastair Macdonald and Andrew Heavens; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Alastair Macdonald)

Record number of children arrested for terrorism offenses in UK

LONDON (Reuters) – British police arrested a record number of children for terrorism offenses last year and the number of women detained also soared, official figures showed on Thursday.

While the total number of terrorism-related arrests fell, 16 children aged under 18 were held in 2015, up from 10 the year before and the highest number ever recorded, according to figures from the Home Office (interior ministry).

Meanwhile 45 women were detained on suspicion of terrorism crimes – a 15 percent increase on the previous year – and a continuation of a recent upward trend.

In total, there were 280 terrorism-related arrests, a decrease of 3 percent from 2015 when there were 289.

“The overall fall in terrorism-related arrests was driven by a fall in the number of arrests for domestic terrorism, which decreased to 15 in the year ending December 2015 compared with 28 in the previous year,” the Home Office said.

Arrests for international-related terrorism increased by three percent.

Britain is on its second-highest threat level, meaning an attack is considered highly likely.

Earlier this month, Britain’s most senior anti-terrorism officer said Islamic State fighters wanted to carry out “enormous and spectacular” attacks against Britain and the Western lifestyle in general in repeats of last November’s Paris attacks which left 130 people dead.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Stephen Addison)

Germany searches home of two Syrians suspected of planning attack

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police have raided the home of two Syrian brothers with links to the militant group Islamic State (IS), suspecting that they were preparing an attack, prosecutors in Frankfurt said on Thursday.

Police confiscated an air pistol, electronic storage devices, mobile phones and $16,000 in cash but did not arrest the brothers, 21 and 30 years old.

Prosecutors did not give more information on the exact nature of the suspected crime, which they called a “serious act of violent subversion”.

The older brother had entered Germany in February 2015 with a forged passport obtained by IS, a crime for which he was sentenced and fined last year.

Prosecutors said that in social media postings he had promoted the militant group, threatened German authorities and justified last November’s attacks in Paris.

The younger brother published a picture of himself on social media that showed him sitting in a “luxury car belonging to his brother” sporting a pistol, the prosecutor’s office said.

Germany has been on alert since militants with links to Islamic State killed 130 people in Paris in November.

The anxieties have been fueled by the arrival of over 1 million migrants in Germany last year, many of them fleeing war and conflict in the Middle East and beyond.

Last month, the government said that the whereabouts of more than 140,000 people registered in 2015 were unknown.

(Reporting by Tina Bellon)

Security fears haunt Turkey’s biggest cities after Ankara blast

ANKARA (Reuters) – Ibrahim Ozcan has worked at the fish market in Ankara’s usually bustling Sakarya street for more than 30 years, and even he struggles to remember a time when the heart of the Turkish capital has been this quiet.

A suicide car bomb tore through a transport hub just a few hundred meters away on Sunday, killing 37 people and wounding dozens more. It was the third such attack in five months in the city, leaving many residents reluctant to venture out.

“Nobody has come for the last few days. Our sales are 60 percent down … Especially young people aren’t coming to Sakarya any more,” said Ozcan, 57, his stall still packed with fish after what should have been a busy day’s trade.

Tables spilling onto the pavements of Sakarya street would usually be packed with students and office workers at lunchtime and in the evenings. But two days after the blast, hardly a customer was being served in its cafes and bars.

“I’ve been here 10 years. I’ve never seen days this quiet. Normally you can’t see an empty table at this time of day,” Menderes Korkmaz, 42, who owns a kebab restaurant on the street, said in the early evening.

The government has said two members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has waged a three-decade insurgency for greater Kurdish autonomy in the southeast, were responsible for Sunday’s suicide car bombing.

There has been no claim of responsibility, but if confirmed, the targeting of civilians in Ankara would mark a dangerous shift in strategy for a group that has in the past focused its attacks on the security forces in the southeast.

President Tayyip Erdogan has said the attack will not weaken Turkey’s resolve in fighting terrorism. Warplanes hit PKK camps in northern Iraq hours after the blast, and clashes between the militants and the security forces have spread in the southeast.

There have been several security scares in Ankara and Istanbul amid fears of repeat bombings.

The German embassy sent an email to its citizens in Ankara on Tuesday warning of possible attacks on shopping malls, while police in Istanbul briefly closed one of the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait to search a suspicious vehicle.

“My primary request to our citizens is that we be careful, cautious and alert, but do not allow ourselves to be panicked,” Anadolu Agency quoted Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin as saying on Wednesday.

Every possible measure was being taken “at the highest level” to ensure security, he said.

MORE VIOLENCE FEARED

Authorities in cities including Istanbul and Diyarbakir, the largest in the mainly Kurdish southeast, have banned Kurdish New Year (Newroz) celebrations on March 21. At the height of the PKK insurgency in the 1990s, the day was often marked by violent Kurdish protests, something many fear will be repeated next week because of the upsurge in fighting in the southeast.

“The government’s efforts to block Newroz celebrations are neither legal nor legitimate. What is legitimate and right is celebrating Newroz, as it has been for thousands of years,” the pro-Kurdish opposition HDP said in a statement on Wednesday.

“We will carry out our Newroz celebrations as we planned and announced. Our people will be in the streets and squares.”

Newroz coincides with the spring thaw, a time in years past when PKK fighters re-entered Turkey from mountain hideouts in northern Iraq and violence escalated.

The HDP’s co-leader Selahattin Demirtas warned earlier this month that clashes could pick up in the spring and spread to new urban centres, noting that both the PKK and the government had vowed to step up their campaigns.

It is a fear being felt beyond the southeast.

“The Kurdish issue has been there for a very long time … the PKK has always been a danger. But it’s the first time attacks like this are happening,” said a retired bank employee in central Ankara, declining to give her name because of the sensitivities around discussing the Kurdish conflict.

“I’ve lived in this city for 30 years and I’ve never lived through a harder five months … I’m looking at each passing car and wondering if it is loaded with bombs. I’ve told my kids to stay indoors.”

(Additional reporting by Ece Toksabay and Mert Ozkan in Ankara, Ayla Jean Yackley and Daren Butler in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Pravin Char)

Turkey plans to make praise of violent acts a ‘terror crime’

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday called on parliament to act swiftly to broaden an anti-terrorism law, saying those who support killers of innocent people were no different from terrorists themselves.

His comments, drawing criticism from rights groups, followed the deaths of 37 people in a suicide bombing in Ankara on Sunday that security officials blamed on Kurdish militants. It was the second such attack in the capital in a month.

Rights groups fear that anti-terrorism laws, already used to detain academics and opposition journalists, will be used in courts to stifle discussion of issues such as a Kurdish conflict in the media and on other public platforms.

“Those who support directly or indirectly people who destroy innocent lives are not in the slightest different from terrorists,” Erdogan said in a speech.

“We must immediately revise the definition of terror and terrorist. In line with this new definition, we must immediately change the penal code.”

Western states are concerned about a wave of bombings in Turkey, blamed on Islamic State or Kurdish militants, valuing Ankara as a key ally in containing warfare in neighboring Syria and Iraq; but at the same time, they have criticized the NATO ally and EU aspirant’s human rights record, raising questions about the independence of its judiciary.

Police detained 20 suspects, including lawyers, in an Istanbul operation targeting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is accused of carrying out the Ankara bombing, state-run Anadolu Agency said.

On Tuesday an Istanbul court detained three academics pending trial on charges of “terrorist propaganda” after they publicly read a declaration urging an to end military operations in the mainly Kurdish southeast.

‘SCARY AND WRONG’

A Briton, who has lived in Turkey for decades and had gone to the court to show support for the academics, was detained overnight for terrorism offences.

“I was released by the court but they’re going to deport me now,” Chris Stephenson, a teacher at Bilgi University told local media after his release. “This is very scary and wrong.”

Stephenson was one of more than 1,000 academics who signed a petition this year criticizing military action in the largely Kurdish southeast.

A legal expert in the ruling AK Party told Reuters the government aimed to “broaden the extent” of the anti-terror law.

“A man may not have participated directly in terrorist acts but may have supported them ideologically. This may not be a full terror crime, but a degree of terror crime,” he said.

Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch, said she was appalled at the prospect of a widening of the definition of terrorism. “It completely violates Turkey’s international obligations and law,” she said.

Over 40,000 people have been killed since 1984 in an insurgency by Kurdish militants for autonomy. A ceasefire broke down in July, unleashing some of the worst violence in the history of the conflict.

The PKK is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

(Writing by Daren Butler and David Dolan; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton)

Algerian named as dead Brussels gunman, manhunt goes on

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgian prosecutors on Wednesday named a 35-year-old Algerian as the man shot dead by police on Tuesday during a police raid on a Brussels apartment in the hunt for clues to bloody attacks in Paris last November.

Police found an Islamic State flag in the apartment used by Mohamed Belkaid and two others suspected of being with him after officers were met with a barrage of automatic weapons fire as they arrived to search the flat.

Belkaid, who was living in Belgium illegally and had a police record for theft but was not on security watchlists, was killed by a special forces sniper after a three-hour siege. A manhunt for the two other suspects continued on Wednesday.

The government held its alert status steady at Level Three, one step below the maximum.

The prosecutors said a radical Islamic text was found next to Belkaid’s body and a cache of ammunition was also discovered. It was not clear if he had any links to the Paris suspects.

Two people detained overnight on suspicion of links to the shootout in the suburb of Forest were released without charge.

Investigators believe much of the planning and preparation for the Nov. 13 shooting and bombing rampage in Paris that killed 130 people was conducted in Brussels by young French and Belgian nationals, some of whom fought as militants in Syria.

Ten people are being held in Belgian custody on a variety of charges relating to the four-month investigation, though prime suspects, including Salah Abdeslam, a brother of one of the Paris suicide bombers, are suspected of having fled the country.

SHOOTOUT

On Tuesday, six Belgian and French police officers arrived to search the flat and came under automatic fire through a door from at least two people barricaded inside. Four officers, one of them a Frenchwoman, were wounded, none very seriously.

Ministers said the police visit to the apartment had not been expected to provide much new evidence and that the presence of French officers did not imply a major break in the case.

Prime Minister Charles Michel said he was holding the state of alert steady after a meeting of security and intelligence chiefs in Belgium’s national security council .

Brussels, headquarters of the European Union as well as Western military alliance NATO, was entirely locked down for days shortly after the Paris attacks because of fears of a major incident there. The city has maintained a high state of security alert since then, with military patrols a regular occurrence.

Belgium, with a Muslim population of about 5 percent among its 11 million people, has Europe’s highest rate of citizens joining Islamist militants in Syria.

People living in the quiet neighborhood of Forest suffered hours of lockdown on Tuesday and voiced shock at the events.

Schoolboy Maxime, 11, was at home sick when he heard gunfire and helicopters and saw masked commandoes on a rooftop. “They had a huge weapon,” he said, adding he was “very, very scared”.

(Additional reporting by Miranda Alexander-Webber; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Tom Heneghan)

Al Qaeda says Ivory Coast attack was revenge against France

ABIDJAN (Reuters) – Al Qaeda’s North African branch said its attack on a beach resort in Ivory Coast on Sunday that killed 18 people was revenge for a French offensive against Islamist militants in the Sahel region and called for its forces to withdraw.

The raid in Grand Bassam claimed by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was the first of its kind in Ivory Coast but the third in the region since November.

It was also a setback for France, who lost four of its nationals when gunmen opened fire on people eating lunch at restaurants and sunning themselves on the sand.

“We repeat our call to all countries involved in the French invasion of Mali to withdraw,” the group said in a statement.

It named the attackers but gave no further details of their identities.

France is a key player in security in West Africa with about 3,500 troops in the region. It has also joined a campaign against Islamic State, which is based in Iraq and Syria.

Paris is to station a force of armed gendarmes in the capital of Burkina Faso to react swiftly in the event of another attack in the region and to provide training, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Tuesday.

“The desire to position this (gendarmerie) team in Ouagadougou is to enable us to immediately dispense advice and coordinate other actions in the event of a terrorist crisis,” Cazeneuve said.

He was speaking during a visit with Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault to Ivory Coast that aims to reassure the large French community and boost the investigation into the attack in Grand Bassam.

France launched Operation Serval to oust militants from northern Mali and replaced it in 2014 with Operation Barkhane which targets militants across the Sahel region.

Ayrault and Cazeneuve met President Alassane Ouattara and were due to visit the site of the attack and meet representatives of the French community.

Islamic State has also singled out France as a target and claimed responsibility for the attack in Paris in November in which 130 people were killed.

Twenty people were killed at a hotel in Mali in November and 30 died in an attack on a cafe and hotel in Burkina Faso in January.

Ivory Coast has French-speaking West Africa’s largest economy and has recovered from a decade of political crisis to boast one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

(Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)

Apple fight could escalate with demand for ‘source code’

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The latest filing in the legal war between the planet’s most powerful government and its most valuable company gave one indication of how the high-stakes confrontation could escalate even further.

In what observers of the case called a carefully calibrated threat, the U.S. Justice Department last week suggested that it would be willing to demand that Apple turn over the “source code” that underlies its products as well as the so-called “signing key” that validates software as coming from Apple.

Together, those two things would give the government the power to develop its own spying software and trick any iPhone into installing it. Eventually, anyone using an Apple device would be unable to tell whether they were using the real thing or a version that had been altered by officials to be used as a spy tool.

Technology and security experts said that if the U.S. government was able to obtain Apple’s source code with a conventional court order, other governments would demand equal rights to do the same thing.

“We think that would be pretty terrible,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology.

The battle between Apple and the U.S Justice Department has been raging since the government in February obtained a court order demanding that Apple write new software to help law enforcement officials unlock an iPhone associated with one of the shooters in the December attack in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people.

Apple is fighting the order, arguing that complying with the request would weaken the security of all iPhones and create an open-ended precedent for judges to make demands of private companies.

The Justice Department’s comments about source code and signing keys came in a footnote to a filing last week in which it rejected Apple’s arguments. Apple’s response to the DOJ brief is expected on Tuesday.

Justice Department lawyers said in the brief that they had refrained from pursuing the iOS source code and signing key because they thought “such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple.”

The footnote evoked what some lawyers familiar with the case call a “nuclear option,” seeking the power to demand and use the most prized assets of lucrative technology companies.

A person close to the government’s side told Reuters that the Justice Department does not intend to press the argument that it could seize the company’s code, and someone on Apple’s side said the company isn’t worried enough to counter the veiled threat in its brief due Tuesday.

But many people expect the iPhone matter to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and thus even fallback legal strategies are drawing close scrutiny.

ODDS OF SUCCESS UNCLEAR

There is little clarity on whether a government demand for source code would succeed.

Perhaps the closest parallel was in a case filed by federal prosecutors against Lavabit LLC, a privacy-oriented email service used by Edward Snowden. In trying to recover Snowden’s unencrypted mail from the company, which did not keep Snowden’s cryptographic key, the Justice Department got a court order forcing the company to turn over another key instead, one that would allow officials to impersonate the company’s website and intercept all interactions with its users.

“Lavabit must provide any and all information necessary to decrypt the content, including, but not limited to public and private keys and algorithms,” the lower court ruled.

Lavabit shut down rather than comply. But company lawyer Jesse Binnall said the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower ruling, did so on procedural grounds, so that the Justice Department’s win would not influence much elsewhere.

In any case, full source code would be even more valuable than the traffic key in the Lavabit case, and the industry would go to extreme lengths to fight for it, Binnall said.

“That really is the keys to the kingdom,” Binnall said.

Source code is sometimes inspected during lawsuits over intellectual property, and the Justice Department noted that Apple won permission to review some of rival Samsung’s <005930.KS> code in one such case. In that case and similar battles, the code is produced with strict rules to prevent copying.

No cases brought by the government have led to that sort of code production, or at least none that have come to light.

But intelligence agencies operate under different rules and have wide latitude overseas. Some advanced espionage programs attributed to the United States used digital certificates that were stolen from Taiwanese companies, though not full programs.

U.S. software code may have been sought in other cases, such as investigations relying on the Patriot Act or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which applies within American borders.

Several people who have argued before the special FISA court or are familiar with some of its cases say they know of no time that the government has sought source code.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Cynthia Osterman)

Bangladesh arrests Islamist militants over bomb plot, seizes explosives

DHAKA (Reuters) – Officials of Bangladesh’s anti-terrorism unit on Monday detained five suspected members of a banned Islamist militant group for planning attacks during celebrations of the Bengali New Year next month, a spokesman said.

Muslim-majority Bangladesh has experienced a surge in Islamist violence, targeting liberal activists, members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups.

The five members of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh were arrested in an overnight raid on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka, said Mizanur Rahman Bhuiya, spokesman of the country’s Rapid Action Battalion, drawn from its police and military.

“Acting on a tip-off, the Rapid Action Battalion arrested them from an apartment,” he said, adding that a large quantity of gel explosives and other bomb-making materials were seized.

He said the group had been planning to target celebrations of Bengali New Year, the biggest event in the moderate Muslim nation of 160 million.

At least five militants of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen have been killed in shootouts since November, as security forces have stepped up the crackdown on Islamist militants looking to establish a sharia-based Islamic state.

The group has designated no representatives to provide comment.

Celebrations of Bengali New Year in April 2001 were marred by bomb blasts in Dhaka set off by another militant group, Harkat-ul Jihad Islami, which killed at least 10 people.

In 2005, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen set off nearly 500 bombs almost simultaneously on a single day, including in Dhaka. Subsequent suicide attacks on courthouses by its militants killed 25 people and injured hundreds.

The group, thought to have been lying low since six of its top leaders were hanged in 2007, is blamed for a spate of recent attacks, including the shooting of three foreigners, two of whom died.

Militant group Islamic State has claimed responsibility for some recent attacks, including the killing of a Hindu priest last month, but the government denies it has a presence in Bangladesh.

(Reporting by Ruma Paul; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Saudi Arabia says it will punish anyone linked to Hezbollah

DUBAI (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it would punish anyone who belongs to Lebanon’s Iran-backed Shi’ite Islamist group Hezbollah, sympathizes with it, supports it financially or harbors any of its members.

An Interior Ministry statement carried by the state news agency SPA said that Saudis and expatriates would be subjected to “severe penalties” under the kingdom’s regulations and anti-terrorism laws. Foreigners would be deported, it said.

The move comes after Gulf Arab countries declared Hezbollah a terrorist organisation, raising the possibility of further sanctions against the group, which wields influence in Lebanon and fights alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.

“Any citizen or resident who supports, shows membership in the so-called Hezbollah, sympathises with it or promotes it, makes donations to it or communicates with it or harbours anyone belonging to it will be subject to the stiff punishments provided by the rules and orders, including the terrorism crimes and its financing,” the statement said.

Foreigners working and living in the oil-exporting kingdom would also face expulsion, it said.

Hezbollah has close ties to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitter rival for power in the region. Saudi Arabia supports Syrian opposition groups to topple Assad and blames Iran and Hezbollah for helping him cling to power after five years of civil war.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has stepped up criticism of Saudi Arabia, accusing it of directing car bombings in Lebanon.

(Reporting by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Larry King)