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Swedish Police Arrest Terror Suspect
Swedish police have arrested a man investigated in an alleged conspiracy to open a terrorist training camp in the United States in 1999. Oussama Kassir, a 37-year-old Swedish citizen, was charged with planning a terrorist crime, prosecutor Agneta Hilding Qvarnstroem told Swedish media. Kassir was the first person arrested under a new Swedish terrorism law enacted in June which calls for harsher punishments if it can be proven that a crime was an act of terrorism. Kassir, a native of Lebanon, was referenced, but not named or charged, in a U.S. federal indictment issued by a grand jury in Seattle in September 2002. That indictment accused James Ujaama of trying to set up an al-Qaida-linked terrorist training camp in Oregon in the northwestern United States. Ujaama showed the ranch to two emissaries of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical London cleric. One of those was Kassir, who identified himself as being employed by Osama bin Laden as a hit man.
| "Yeah. Just t'ink of me as Luca Brasi wit' a turban..." |
But in an interview with The Seattle Times newspaper last year, Kassir denied being a gunman for the group. "I am not the hit man of Osama bin Laden," the U.S. newspaper quoted him as saying. "I am a supporter. ... I love al-Qaida. I love Osama bin Laden." Kassir moved to Sweden in 1984 and became a citizen in 1989. He spent several months in prison in 1998 for assaulting an officer and drug possession.
| A real asset to his adopted homeland... |
Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said it is likely that the arrest is connected to Ujaama case. "I think we're dealing with mercenary activities, rather than some hard-core extremist," Ranstorp said. "But the only ones who know for sure are the police."
Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-10-23 |
