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| Terror Networks |
| The online face of terror |
| 2006-06-13 |
| At 3.55 p.m. on October 19, 2005, a squad of anti-terrorist police rang the doorbell of a ground-floor apartment in the Bosnian capitol of Sarajevo. The door was opened by Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year old Bosnian native who had spent most of his life in Sweden, and who held a Swedish passport. According to an official English translation of a Bosnian indictment, the police showed Bekasevic a search warrant and their ID cards, but Bektasevic refused to move out of the doorway and allow them in. Then he started trying to push one of the officers back out the door, exclaiming: “Who are you to search my house, you trash.” Police subdued Bektasevic and barged into the apartment. Inside, they found Bektasevic’s room-mate, a Dane of Turkish extraction named Abdulkadir Cesur, sitting on a sofa with his hand under his coat. Police moved to wrestle the coat off Cesur, at which point they discovered he had in his hand a pistol with a silencer. Cesur’s finger was on the trigger and a bullet was in the chamber. Police knocked the pistol out of Cesur’s hands and wrestled him to the floor. Their search of the apartment proved productive: among items discovered were a home-made “suicide belt,” a quantity of factory-made explosives and a Hi-8 videotape with footage demonstrating how to make a home-made bomb. The tape included this bloodcurdling voiceover: “Here, the brothers are preparing for attacks…These brothers are ready to attack and inshallah, they will attack al-Qufar who our killing our brothers and Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan…and many other countries. These weapons are going to be used against Europe, against those whose forces are in Iraq and in Afghanistan…” Subsequent analysis by Britain’s Home Office determined that the voice on the tape was “more than rather likely” that of the suspect Mirsad Bektasevic. Within a day or two of the Bosnia arrests, police in Britain had staged their own, related, series of arrests. Two London men were arrested on terrorism related charges, which included allegations that they were in possession of computer images showing how to make car bombs and "martyrdom operations vests." One suspect, Younis Tsouli, was also charged with possessing computer images of "a number of places" in Washington, D.C. (A third suspect faced terror-funding charges.) Counterterrorism officials in the United States and Britain told NEWSWEEK at the time that the evidence suggested some of those connected with the U.K. suspects may have been targeting the White House and Capitol complex for attacks using homemade bombs. As we reported at the time, the British suspects were believed to have been in e-mail contact, via Hotmail accounts, with a suspected jihadist recruiter who used the Internet nom de guerre Maximus. According to the officials, Maximus was initially based in Sweden and moved to Sarajevo, where investigators believe he helped run a network recruiting European youth to go to Iraq. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |