Anwar Al-Awlaki may be the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, but he was also a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Fox News has learned.

Añadir leyenda

Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News, including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

...According to the documents, obtained as part of an ongoing investigation by the specials unit "Fox News Reporting," there was a push within the Defense Department to reach out to the Muslim community.

"At that period in time, the secretary of the Army (redacted) was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim."

In addition, Awlaki "was considered to be an 'up and coming' member of the Islamic community. After her vetting, Aulaqi (Awlaki) was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel."

Awlaki, a Yemeni-American who was born in Las Cruces, N.M., was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first week after the attacks because of his ties to the three hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour. The three hijackers were all onboard Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon.

Nidal Hassan

Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups ... are hailing Hasan, an American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, as a hero worthy of emulation. Though the Nov. 5 shooting was not on the scale of a 9/11-style attack, it served the same purpose: to terrify "the Crusader West" and shake America off kilter, according to an Al Qaeda spokesman.

"Hasan has become almost everything they've been hoping … he's legendary now within their movement," says Jarret Brachman, an expert on international terrorist groups and author of "Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice."

Nidal Hassan - Al-Awlaki

Hasan's ties to US-born Muslim cleric and terrorist recruiter Anwar Al-Awlaki have given rise to the theory that Hasan carried out the first international terrorist attack against America since 9/11.

In the months after the shooting, Al Qaeda doubted that line of reasoning, because a minor online essay about martyrdom was all that could be linked to Hasan. More recently, however, the international jihadist group has sought to portray Hasan as a terrorist "trailblazer" who conducted a "historic and trend-setting" operation, though some say Al Qaeda's embrace of the Fort Hood incident indicates that it is now willing to settle for inflicting damage that, while deadly, is much less spectacular than a 9/11-style attack.

A self-confessed militant admitted on Saturday carrying out deadly attacks on military targets and oil facilities in Yemen, as four other suspected Al-Qaeda members went on trial for planning attacks.

Saleh al-Shaoush was arrested on January 30 as he prepared to carry out a suicide bombing in the southeastern port of Mukalla. He had been stopped on his motorbike and found to be wearing an explosives belt and carrying two bombs.

Shaoush admitted in court taking part in seven deadly attacks in Hadramawt and Marib provinces.

"The acts attributed to me are correct," he said. "I prepared and carried out these operations voluntarily and without duress."

The court in Sanaa set Monday as a date for final deliberations in the case of Shaoush, who faces the death penalty if convicted.

In a separate hearing, the same court opened proceedings against four Al-Qaeda suspects for allegedly planning attacks on national and foreign targets in Yemen.

A married father who planned a "violent jihad" in Afghanistan or Pakistan wrote a farewell letter to his family saying Allah came first, a court has heard.

London Underground driver Amir Ali, of Ilford, Essex, bought a plane ticket to Islamabad, jurors were told.

Mr Ali's letter talked of his love for his children, but added he had to go for Allah's sake, prosecutor Duncan Penny told Snaresbrook Crown Court.

The 28-year-old denies one count of preparing for acts of terrorism.

Police found pictures of Mr Ali posing with weapons - including two AK47 rifles and a self-loading pistol - when they searched his home, Mr Penny said.

The ringleader of the alleged illegal Bulgarian branch of the extremist Al Waqf al Islami Foundaton is the Imam from the village of Sarnitsa, Saud Muutlu, according to the Prosecutor's Office in the southern city of Pazardzhik.

The Imam and people believed to be his accomplices have been closely followed and monitored in the last two years, including with special surveillance devices.

According to the Prosecutor, the Bulgarian radical Islam branch has been founded in Istanbul. The pre-trial proceedings against an unknown perpetrator date from the beginning of 2009.

The organization has a plan to convert Bulgaria to Islam and is financed from Saudi Arabia via Turkey while the funds are transferred through illegal channels.

Saud Muutlu has a circle of lecturers, each paid EUR 300 a month. The organization also has a program for girls' education and its lecturers are paid EUR 200 a month. The Foundation has cells in the southern city of Blagoevgrad, the second largest city of Plovdiv and the capital Sofia. Special people monitor the upbringing and education of Bulgarian Muslim children round-the-clock.

The name of the Foundation means Foundation for Assisting the Good Understanding of Islam.

According to its teaching every child is born a Muslim and then parents make if an infidel, a practice that must be halted.

The probe of the seized literature is ongoing, but the investigation says they have serious reasons to believe the organization is a threat to Bulgaria's national security.

The Al Waqf al Islami Foundation was established in the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands and it is believed to be financed by extremist Muslim circles from Saudi Arabia.

Its headquarters were closed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US, when the Dutch authorities discovered ties between the Foundation and the perpetrators of the attacks.

"The process started months ago with the arrival of former Islamist prisoners of Guantanamo Bay. But we must add to that, the continued rise of Salafism as a doctrine which is gaining in significance throughout the Spanish geography. Moreover, the threat is seriously affected by the release of jihadist prisoners, not just those who have served time in Spain, but of those who are acquitted following their arrest for acts related to jihadist activity, "says a report by the responsible for fighting terrorism.

Those acquitted by the High Court the report refers to are Spanish national Gonzalo López Royo (aka "salaam1420", above) and Morocccan Fath Allah Sadaqa, arrested by the Guardia Civil after finding that these two men ennobled Islamic jihad over the Internet. The Third Division of the High Court, presided by Judge Alfonso Guevara and speaker Gregorio Ruiz Polanco, recognized as a fact that "the statements made by the two defendants were intended as a tribute to a Chechen guerrilla militant, devoting their website to all Muslims who die and suffer at the hands of the infidels, the desire to transform Spain again in Caliphate (and) their call for jihad and martyrdom (...) The accused Fath Allah Sadaqa uploaded to Youtube two videos, one with reference to three leaders of Al Qaeda, and another image of an attack against a U.S. vehicle in Iraq. "
The resolution of last June 21st, resolved to acquit both accused of "the crime of praising terrorism and contempt for the victims of terrorism with all the inherent favorable pronouncements such absolution has" . 

A U.S. missile killed five German militants taking shelter in a house in northwest Pakistan on Monday, intelligence officials said.

The attack hit a house in North Waziristan. That region has been named as the source of a European terror plot that has prompted American authorities to issue a travel advisory. One or more German citizens are reported to be linked to the plot.

The missile strike took place in the town of Mir Ali, a known hub for foreign militants with links to al-Qaida.

Two officers said the five victims were believed to be German citizens in the region for terrorist training.

Japan issued a travel alert for Europe on Monday, joining the United States and Britain in warning of a possible terrorist attack by al-Qaida or other groups, but tourists appeared to be taking the mounting warnings in stride.
The Foreign Ministry in Tokyo urged Japanese citizens to be cautious when using public transport or visiting popular tourist sites — issuing another blow to Europe's tourism industry, which is just starting to recover from the global financial crisis.
European authorities — especially in Britain, France and Germany — tightened efforts to keep the public safe in the wake of warnings by officials that the terrorism threat is high and extra vigilance is warranted.

"According to the figures of our intelligence agency we have some 3,000 Wahhabi followers in Bosnia, but that does not mean they are all terrorists," Bosnian Security Minister Sadik Ahmetovic said.

"However we cannot exclude that there are individuals among them ... who could at a certain point commit terrorist acts," he added, insisting that Bosnia's police have the capacity to deal with the menace.

Bosnian Muslims, some 40 percent of a population estimated at 3.8 million, are generally a moderate Sunni community.

During the bloody 1992-95 inter-ethnic war a number of foreign Islamic fighters joined forces with the Bosnian Muslim army. They introduced Wahhabism, also referred to as Salafism, to Bosnia and built a small following.

Currently there are some twenty radical Islamic groups in Bosnia, estimates Ahmet Alibasic, a professor of the faculty of Islamic sciences at the University of Sarajevo.

Seven suspected Islamic radicals were detained in February in Gornja Maoca, a remote northeastern hamlet seen as a key location for Bosnian followers of Wahhabism.

The men were accused of "endangering the territorial integrity" of Bosnia and confined to house arrest but have not been formally charged. 

Contacted through an intermediary, the leader of Gornja Maoca's Salafist community refused to talk to AFP. The imam who reads the important Friday prayers at Sarajevo's Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque, known to attract Salafists, also refused to comment for this article.

Sweden raised its terrorism threat level on Friday based on a classified intelligence assessment, but authorities said an attack was not imminent and the threat was still low compared to other European countries.

The Swedish Security Service said it had raised the estimated threat level for terrorism targeting the country to "elevated" from "low", based on a review of security by the National Centre of Terrorist Threat Assessment.

Political violence is rare in Sweden, which has roughly 500 troops stationed in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led force.

Russia's counterterrorist forces killed the head of a rebel group in the North Caucasus province of Dagestan on Saturday, after a suicide bomber wounded at least 26 people, Russian news agencies reported.

"Alibek Abunazarov was on the federal wanted list for a long time. According to our information, he was involved in several terrorist acts, (as well as) attacks on, and killings of policemen," the state-run RIA Novosti agency quoted a local law enforcement official as saying.

Three other rebels were killed in the same operation, local agencies reported.

The suicide bomber had earlier set off explosives after approaching police guarding a site where security forces had fought suspected militants late on Friday, Interfax reported, citing the Russian National Anti-Terrorism Committee.

The blast wounded 13 police officers and 13 civilians, Interfax said. Other reports said as many as 30 people had been hurt.

An insurgency is raging across the mainly Muslim region, where rebels angry about poverty and fueled by the ideology of global jihad want to carve out an independent state governed by Islamic law.

The US government placed Anwar al-Awlaki, a key leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, on its list of terrorism supporters, froze his financial assets and banned any transactions with him.

The measures were outlined in Executive Order 13224 issued Friday by the US Treasury Department.

"Anwar al-Awlaki has proven that he is extraordinarily dangerous, committed to carrying out deadly attacks on Americans and others worldwide," said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey.

"He has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism -- fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents."

Awlaki, now based in Yemen, rose to prominence last year after it emerged he had communicated by email with Major Nidal Hasan, a US army psychiatrist accused of opening fire on colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13.

The imam has also been linked to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian student accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound flight with explosives in his underwear on December 25.

The sudden increase in the number of pages on the Internet extremist recruitment facilitates the work of Al Qaeda, said the president of Interpol, Ronald Noble. "The threat is global, is virtual and is here, at our doors," he warned.

In a speech to police chiefs on Tuesday in Paris, Noble explained that in 1998 there were only 12 pages of this type, while in 2006 there were about 4,500.

Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, from the Center for the Study of Radicalization, told the BBC that this number is now much higher. "Only in English there are many thousands," said the expert, who believes that governments take the proliferation of these pages as an unstoppable process.

In August, the head of the British internal security service (MI5), Jonathan Evans, expressed concern about the influence of Yemeni Muslim cleric Anwar al Awlaki, who has uploaded more than 5,000 recordings of his sermons to the YouTube video portal. Al Awlaki is related to the attempted attack on Christmas Day 2009 against a flight between Netherlands and the United States.

In addition, Noble said that the Internet is an obstacle to the fight against radical thought because many of these propaganda activities do not constitute a crime. Increasingly, Noble went on, the recruits are younger, more vulnerable and belong to the middle class.

El Mundo (Translation T&P):

His many fans consider him almost like a prophet for having predicted 9/11and his resounding discourse on the subject led many of his lectures on the subject of "Islam, terrorism and the West." But he has many enemies too: they call him "Islamophobic.

The American analyst and director of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, is more than that. His talks are followed by hundreds of people in the auditorium and thousands of others over the Internet. You can praise or criticizehim but what it's certain is that he speaks without fear. A feature alien to many leaders of the XXI century.

"The key is not what the Islamists want to do but to be aware about what they want to do in the West. I am satisfied that there is more and more people who understand what is Islam and Jihad. You can not defeat the enemy without first defining him. If you are afraid even to the extent of being fearful of defining him, how can you stop it?" asks Pipes in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, after participating in a Forum on terrorism.

Although some call him a neocon, he has also attacked the foreign policy of former President George W. Bush. Of course his opinion on Barack Obama is worse. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero? The U.S. national recognizes that he has no in-depth knowledge of Spanish reality but believes, to sum it up, that "the Islamists are happy with the Spanish president".

Question. Do you believe people are fearful of Islam?

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Friday that President Barack Obama should denounce the fatwa issued by a Muslim-American cleric that has sent an American cartoonist into hiding. He also said that there is a double standard at work; that insults to Islam are treated differently than insults to Christianity.

Image via Wikipedia. Flowers outside Australian embassy in Jakarta, days after the 2004 bombings.

Six years after the Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta, the two militants on death row for the attack say they have no remorse and they are ready to die as “mujahideens.”

Iwan “Rois” Dharmawan Muntho and Achmad Hasan were among six people jailed for helping to plan the Sept. 9, 2004, bombing that killed nine people and wounded 150.

In an exclusive interview with the Jakarta Globe at their prison on Nusakambangan Island in Central Java, Rois and Hasan said that the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad legitimized the attack.

“Why should we apologize if we believe that we did right in waging jihad [holy war] against the infidels?” Rois said. “Why must we show any remorse?”

He said it was “legitimate to attack Australian interests worldwide” because of Canberra’s close ties to Washington and its “targeting of Muslims.”

Image by olaf.kellerhoff via Flickr

A few days ago, a new video emerged showing the fighters taking part in target practice at a training camp in Afghanistan. In the 31-minute-long video, the five German-speaking jihadists claimed responsibility for two attacks on American military installations in Afghanistan.

They call themselves the German Taliban Mujahideen and are a relatively new group, according to Yassin Musharbash, an editor at German news portal Spiegel Online and an expert on Islamic terrorism.

“There seems to be between six and 10 German-speaking fighters who are in Afghanistan, apparently acting under the command of the Afghan Taliban,” he said. They appear to have made their first online appearance in the fall.

According to Musharbash's assessment, the German Taliban Mujahideen (DTM) formed from the scattered remnants of the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), a relatively small group that had been active in Afghanistan for years. The four young men of the so-called "Sauerland" group in Germany also belonged to the IJU. They were sentenced to long prison terms in March for preparing planned terrorist attacks in Germany.

“It's my impression that the IJU has been mostly destroyed,” said Musharbash. Only a few sporadic traces remain of the group on the Internet. The marauding foreign fighters of the IJU apparently slipped under the wing of the Afghan Taliban. There, the German jihadists were able to form their own brigade, the DTM.

Musharbash speculated that their involvement in the attacks on the American and Afghan bases, referenced in the video, could have been a sort of internship for the men.

“The Afghan Taliban seem to have taken them along on two attacks - that's what it looks like to me,” he said. “And for their part, the German jihadists made a big propaganda video for the German-speaking public, to show that they're not just sitting around but actually taking part."