UK authorities foiled 31 terrorist plots in the past four years, the head of MI5 has said. He warned that the Taliban victory in Afghanistan likely served as a morale boost to domestic extremists.
“Even during the pandemic period we have all been enduring for most of the last two years, we have had to disrupt six late-stage attack plots,” Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security service, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today show.
An ISIS suicide bomber who survived the 2015 Paris terror attacks had his microphone switched off in court today after multiple outbursts.
A judge told Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of a group of assailants who killed 130 people: ‘You’ve had five years to comment,’ after the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State soldier’ disrupted proceedings with rants about Syria and claims some of the co-accused were innocent.
Abdeslam, 31, went on trial with 19 others on Wednesday over the November 13, 2015 suicide bombing and gun assaults on bars, restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and the national stadium.
A decade and a half back, the late Christopher Hitchens was talking to the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and brought up my demographic-death-spiral thesis from America Alone. Hitch wanted to know whether, when the PM got together with the Continental bigwigs, it was part of “the European conversation”.
Tone replied that it was part of “the subterranean conversation”.
By which he meant that nice house-trained EU prime ministers hadn’t figured out a way to raise such subjects in public without being damned as racists and becoming electorally unviable, at least anywhere west of the Landstraße, to modify Metternich. They still haven’t. Fifteen years on, almost every subject worth talking about remains part of “the subterranean conversation”.
The former U.S. Army major and self-described “soldier of Allah” behind the deadly 2009 massacre at Fort Hood cheered the resurgent Taliban ’s takeover of Afghanistan in a letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner.
Writing from death row at Fort Leavenworth , Nidal Hasan boasted “We Have Won” and congratulated the Taliban. Hasan, who gunned down 14 people and wounded 43 more, urged the nascent terrorist government to implement its brand of brutal oppression under the guise of religion.
Saturday marks twenty years since Islamic jihadis attacked New York City and Washington, and the establishment media is doing all it can to ensure that Americans grasp the true significance of those attacks: not that America was hit by a global jihad that has only gained in strength since then and could hit us again, but that Muslims were and are the true victims of that fateful day. In the last few days, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press have published lengthy pieces to that effect, and more in this vein is certain to come this week.
France declared a state of emergency on the evening of the November 13, 2015 after the deadliest terror attacks on French soil in modern history left 130 people dead in the Paris region. The government pushed through fresh anti-terror laws, granting police and intelligence agencies extended powers, as the country faced a wave of further attacks in French cities and towns, such as Nice, St-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Villejuif and Rambouillet.
The state of emergency expired in November 2017, when President Emmanuel Macron replaced it with a tough anti-terror law. The new law permanently legalised several aspects of the state of emergency – such as extended police powers to search homes, restrict movement or close radical religious sites.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – Swedish police said Monday they had arrested two women linked to Islamic State after they flew back from Syria, as media reported that one was being investigated for war crimes.
Stockholm police spokesman Ola Osterling said the prosecutor leading the investigation into the two women had ordered their arrest.
A key question arising from the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan is their relationship with their long-time ally, al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda is bound to the Taliban by a pledge of allegiance – or “bay’ah” – which was first offered in the 1990s by Osama Bin Laden to his Taliban counterpart Mullah Omar.
The pledge has been renewed several times since, although it has not always been publicly acknowledged by the Taliban.
Under the 2020 peace deal with the US, the Taliban agreed not to allow al-Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate in areas under their control. They reiterated this vow days after the takeover of Kabul on 15 August.
But they do not appear to have publicly rejected al-Qaeda either.
A 29-year-old Afghan man in Germany repeatedly stabbed a 58-year-old landscape gardener who was working in a park in Berlin, allegedly because he didn’t like the fact that as a woman she was working, police said Sunday.
The man stabbed the woman in the neck several times in the city’s Wilmersdorf district on Saturday afternoon.
A 66-year-old man who saw the attack unfold rushed to help the woman but was also stabbed in the neck by the suspect.
Back to gender studies class you go!
Sven Kurenbach still remembers the images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing and the spontaneous minute of silence at the Berlin police department that followed. When Islamist terrorists weaponized passenger planes on September 11, 2001 — killing nearly 3,000 people — Kurenbach was still head of inspection for the Berlin police’s special units. Today he is Germany’s top investigator into jihadist activities.
Twenty years ago, Islamist terror was still largely an unknown for German security authorities, Kurenbach recalled recently at an event organized by “Mediendienst Integration” in Berlin. Just a dozen officers at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) had been dealing with it.
Supermarket Chain in New Zealand Reportedly Takes Knives Off Shelves After Stabbing Attack
Following Friday’s terrorist attack in New Zealand’s city of Auckland, supermarket giant Countdown has temporarily removed all knives and scissors from sale, the New Zealand Herald reported.
“We want all of our team to feel safe when they come to work, especially considering the events of yesterday,” Countdown’s General Manager of Corporate Affairs Kiri Hannifin told the newspaper.
The newspaper further reported that Countdown is even considering stopping the sale of all knives and scissors permanently. Foodstuffs NZ also retrieved their knives from sale.
A known extremist was responsible for a terror attack in Auckland which has seen six people injured, three of whom are in critical condition, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday evening.
The man was shot and killed by members of a police Special Tactics Group within 60 seconds of the attack beginning, Ardern said. He was a Sri Lankan national who came to New Zealand in October 2011 and has been considered a “person of national security interest” from 2016.
Ardern said she was limited in what more she could share about the man as a result of suppression orders made by the court, although a spokesman for the Prime Minister later confirmed the Crown was “seeking the court’s urgent lifting of the suppression orders, which will be filed this [Friday] evening”.
Seems he was a known unknown – ‘Violent extremist’ responsible for mall terrorist attack was ‘known threat to New Zealand’
WASHINGTON, Sept 2 (Reuters) – A British-born man who was a member of a team of Islamic State militants in Syria nicknamed “The Beatles” accused of beheading American hostages was due to plead guilty on Thursday to U.S. criminal charges, according to a federal court record.
A docket entry for the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, showed a change of plea hearing was scheduled on Thursday for Alexanda Kotey, one of two Islamic State members who had been held in Iraq by the U.S. military before being flown to the United States to face trial on terrorism charges.
Advocates of multi-culturalism demand not only that we should accept sweeping changes to our cultural landscape, but also that we should be far more welcoming of some of the medieval customs, traditions, and religious laws it has taken much of the world — often at great cost in the irrevocable currency of life as well as treasure — centuries to get rid of.
German federal prosecutors arrested a woman on Monday suspected of collecting money for the extremist “Islamic State” (IS) group and helping with bank transfers to the Middle East.
The suspect, identified only as Denise S., is thought to have been in contact with female IS members to keep them informed on money being sent to the group.
She is also accused of collecting donations for a woman member to enable her to return to the group after her detention in a Kurdish refugee camp.
