terrorism

Why are they always more worried about the potential ‘backlash’ to atrocities than the atrocities themselves?

Four toddlers are fighting for their lives right now. Two adults, a mother and an elderly man, are also in hospital in a critical condition, following a brutal stabbing spree in Annecy in the French Alps. On Thursday morning, the suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian refugee named as ‘Abdelmasih H’, rampaged around a park playground, knife in hand, charging at terrified children and parents, even slashing at a baby in a pram, until he was apprehended by police just four minutes later.

Four years before he vanished on a ferry in the Mediterranean, Bruno Breguet walked into a US embassy offering information on his paymaster, a Venezuelan called Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, but known the world over as Carlos the Jackal.

By the spring of 1991, the Swiss-born Breguet had risen to become a deputy leader for Sánchez in western Europe, with the Jackal in hiding in Damascus. Breguet, who was legally a resident of Ticino, Switzerland, often spent weeks at a time in the Syrian capital and was trusted by the world’s most wanted terrorist to run his operations.

During the lull between Christmas and the new year, something alarming flashed up on Heathrow Airport’s specialist scanning technology.

From the depths of a shipment of scrap metal, a radioactive signal.

While false alerts can sometimes be triggered, this one was not one of them.

Metal bars embedded with uranium had made the 3,700-mile journey to London from Pakistan, via Muscat in Oman.

America remains vulnerable to pathogens.

American counterterrorism experts’ biggest fear remains a biological w    eapons attack in the United States. A conventional bomb can kill hundreds or even thousands, but a biological weapon can surreptitiously invade, spread, mutate, and kill millions. Biological weapons have been used throughout history, from poisoning wells to “gifting” smallpox-infected blankets. Whether you believe that Covid-19 came from bats sold in a wet market or escaped from a Chinese lab, terrorists are observing the pandemic’s toll on America and taking notes for a future biological attack. What lessons might they have learned from America’s reaction to Covid?