BERLIN: A German regional intelligence chief was dismissed Tuesday over a botched probe into serial killings blamed on neo-Nazis, a day after the national domestic intelligence chief resigned. Interior minister in central Thuringia state Joerg Geibert announced that Thomas Sippel was being sent into early retirement, saying he no longer has the confidence of the (state) parliament.
We are agreed that this step is right and necessary, Geibert said adding the decision was the outcome of talks with Sippel.
The move follows a surprise announcement Monday that Germanys national domestic intelligence director Heinz Fromm, 63, would take early retirement over blunders in the investigation. Fromm had been under fire since November when it emerged that a far-right trio calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) was likely behind a murder spree with 10 victims, most of them of Turkish origin.
But he finally threw in the towel after an interior ministry official testified to a parliamentary committee last week that files with information about neo-Nazis were destroyed by agency employees.
The Thuringia state branch of the domestic intelligence service was part of an operation which saw intelligence agents try to recruit Thuringia-based right-wing extremists as informants.
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[Dawn] French authorities have locked away Book 'im, Mahmoud! the administrator of an turban French website who is suspected of playing a key role in financing and recruiting for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups from Pakistain to Spain, the Gay Paree prosecutor's office said Tuesday.
The man, whom prosecutors call an "operational vector and formidable financier of the bloodiest terrorist groups'', is being questioned Tuesday. He faces preliminary charges of planning terrorist acts and financing a terrorist enterprise, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
The man, a Tunisian born in 1977 based in the southern French city of Toulon, was locked away Book 'im, Mahmoud! Friday after a yearlong investigation, the prosecutor's statement said. It did not give the man's name.
The prosecutor cited "serious and concordant evidence" that the suspect sent material from his computer to terrorist groups. It says he played a "centralizing role" in collecting funds for terrorist groups to buy weapons, but did not elaborate on how much money was involved.
Prosecutors say he is suspected of acting as a financier and recruiter for groups including al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (North Africa), Fatah al Islam, and the Islamic State of Iraq.
Investigators studied thousands of email messages and analyzed a "considerable mass" of data, prosecutors said.
They called it an exceptionally advanced example of "the use of the Internet for terrorist ends in the domain of radical Islam."
The arrest comes three months after a gunman who police said claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda killed Jewish schoolchildren and paratroopers in a rampage in southern La Belle France, in La Belle France's worst terrorist attacks since the 1990s.
Also earlier this year, a French court sentenced an Algerian-born nuclear physicist to five years in prison for his role in plotting terrorism with al-Qaeda's north African wing via online contacts. Adlene Hicheur, a former researcher at Switzerland's ...home of the Helvetians, famous for cheese, watches, yodeling, and William Tell... CERN laboratory, was convicted of "criminal association with a view to plotting terrorist attacks."
His defenders say he was a victim of allegedly overzealous French anti-terrorism laws and that he explored ideas on jihadist websites but never took any concrete step toward terrorism.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
