Tag: suspect
FBI Asks For Tips On IS Group Volunteers

FBI Asks For Tips On IS Group Volunteers

Washington (AFP) — The FBI on Tuesday appealed for help tracking people planning to join the Islamic State group in combat, including an English-speaking militant with a “North American accent.”

“We need the public’s assistance in identifying U.S. persons going to fight overseas with terrorist groups or who are returning home from fighting overseas,” Michael Steinbach, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said in a statement on the agency’s website.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation posted forms online for the public to submit potential tips, at www.fbi.gov/ISILtips, and released a segment from a 55-minute propaganda video in hopes someone might recognize the English-speaking IS militant.

“No piece of information is too small,” Steinbach said.

In the video, the masked man — dressed in desert camouflage and waving a pistol — stands in front of purported prisoners as they dig their own graves and then later presides over their executions.

In the clip released by the FBI, the faces of the alleged prisoners are obscured and their killing is not shown.

The individual in the video has what appears to be “a North American accent,” it said.

About a dozen Americans are fighting with the IS group, according to the FBI.

U.S. authorities on Saturday arrested a 19-year-old man at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago who they alleged was heading to the Middle East to fight with the IS group.

Mohammed Hamzah Khan was charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, the Justice Department said.

AFP Photo

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American Beheading Suspect’s Mother Apologizes In Video

American Beheading Suspect’s Mother Apologizes In Video

Washington (AFP) — The mother of an American worker suspected of beheading one of several colleagues he had tried to convert to Islam has broken her silence, apologizing in a video posted online.

Alton Nolen, 30, is due to be charged Monday with first-degree murder, as well as assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He may also face federal charges.

It was after being fired from his job at the Vaughan Foods in an Oklahoma City suburb that Nolen went on a frenzied knife rampage Thursday, severing the head of a colleague and wounding another before being shot by his former boss.

“My heart is just so heavy right now,” his mother Joyce Nolen said in the video posted Saturday on Facebook. “That’s not my son.”

The incident came in the wake of a series of beheadings of Western captives by militant fighters in the Middle East and Algeria, but U.S. officials have not confirmed any link to the Oklahoma case. Nolen had recently converted to Islam.

“His family, our hearts bleed right now because what they saying Alton has done,” Nolen’s mother said in the short video statement, sitting next to her daughter Megan.

“I want to apologize to both families — because this is not Alton.”

She said she was hoping that justice will prevail and “the whole story will come out.”

In a separate Facebook entry, Megan Nolen said her brother “has been a great influence to me and has always been a loving and caring person.”

“He has never been a violent person and has never done any physical harm to anyone. Only God knows why what happened took place,” she added.

“I am praying for the families as well as for my brother.”

– Troubling online postings –

On Facebook, Nolen went by the moniker Jah’Keem Yisrael. He posted photographs of the World Trade Center towers going up in smoke during the September 11, 2001 attacks and of graves.

“SHALOM ALHAKEIUM O YE MUSLIMS AND NON-MUSLIMS ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT THE ONES WHO DIED IN FAITH (SERVANTS OF ALLAH SWT) WILL RISE FROM THE DEAD TO BE JUDGED WITH EVERYBODY ON EARTH WHOS STILL LIVING…THE ONES WHO DIED IN SIN WILL REMAIN IN THEIR GRAVES CAUSE THEIR ALREADY IN HELL!!!” he wrote on September 17 in a posting that got five “likes”.

In another post in May disparaging Americans who eat pork, women who don’t cover their hair and gays getting married, he warned that “SHARIA LAW IS COMING!!!!!!”

His account shows he has 1,470 “friends,” many of them women wearing the Muslim veil.

The Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City has stressed that “this unwarranted act does not represent Islam in any shape or form.”

“We condemn, and are 100% against, the heartless & unnecessary act committed by the suspect. We stand for justice.”

Local media quoted the group’s Saad Mohammed as saying other Muslims who attended the same mosque as Nolen considered him “a little odd” and “a little weird”.

But Mohammed also noted that Nolen’s behavior did not raise any red flags, and that he had attended services during which sermons were delivered condemning beheadings such as those committed by Islamic State militants based in Iraq and Syria.

AFP Photo

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Libya Demands Return Of Benghazi Suspect Seized By U.S. Forces

Libya Demands Return Of Benghazi Suspect Seized By U.S. Forces

By Laura King and Amro Hassan, Los Angeles Times

CAIRO—Libya’s weak interim government on Wednesday verbally assailed the U.S. capture of a suspected mastermind of the 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans and set off a political firestorm in the United States.

At a news conference nearly 24 hours after the Pentagon publicly disclosed the special-operations raid that netted Ahmed Abu Khattala, Justice Minister Saleh Marghani denounced the U.S. military action as a violation of Libyan sovereignty and demanded that Abu Khattala be returned to Libya for trial.

“We had no prior notification,” the minister told reporters. “We did not expect the U.S. to upset our political order.”

Libya said it had had an arrest warrant out for Abu Khattala but that turmoil in Benghazi, the hub of Libya’s east, had prevented it from being executed.

After being grabbed Sunday on a street outside Benghazi, Abu Khattala was swiftly bundled onto an American warship and President Barack Obama declared that he would face the “full weight” of U.S. justice.

U.S. officials in Washington characterized the capture of Abu Khatalla, who had lived openly in Benghazi even after being accused of plotting the storming of the U.S. Consulate in the city, as a long-planned response to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Central authority in Libya has weakened dramatically in recent months as fighting among rival militias — one-time allies in the uprising that toppled and killed strongman Moammar Gadhafi — has engulfed the country. The situation is particularly dire in Benghazi, which is plagued by near-daily bombings, abductions and assassinations, many of them blamed on Islamist groups such as Ansar al Sharia, with which Abu Khattala was affiliated.

Deepening the turmoil, a rogue ex-general, Khalifa Hifter, has in recent weeks launched a self-declared war against the Islamists. He has urged regular Libyan military units to join forces with him and has marshaled weapons including artillery and attack aircraft to bombard Islamist militias’ positions in Benghazi.

The Islamists and Hifter’s troops routinely exchange fire with heavy weapons while civilians cower in their homes.

AFP Photo/Abdullah Doma

Chinese Police ID Uighur Man As Suspect In Urumqi Bombing

Chinese Police ID Uighur Man As Suspect In Urumqi Bombing

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Chinese police have identified a 39-year-old Uighur man they suspect to be one of the first Chinese suicide bombers and have put out a nationwide alert to identify a second man killed in an attack last week at a train station in Urumqi.

The attack took place on Wednesday night, the eve of the busy May Day holiday, and killed three people — including the two assailants — and left 79 injured.

It happened hours after Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up a tour of the far northwestern Xinjiang region during which he called for a crackdown on terrorism.

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday named one of the bombers as Sedirdin Sawut and said he was from the Aksu, which is south of the regional capital of Urumqi. Local police took the unusual step of releasing photographs showing the faces of the two dead assailants, offering $15,500 for information about the suspected second bomber, who remains unidentified.

Chinese police also put out an alert for the arrest of 10 of Sawut’s family members, including his wife, father, father-in-law, brothers and cousins. The Global Times quoted an unnamed source saying officials believe that the attack was the work of a “crime family deeply influenced by extremist ideology.”

Although the death toll in the Urumqi bombing was small, the attack nevertheless sent tremors through China because it was one of the first cases involving suicide bombers of the type that have terrorized other parts of the world. Surveillance photos released over the weekend showed the two men strolling through the crowd of passengers carrying briefcases. They also attacked bystanders with knives.

“This is the first suicide bombing of this type in Urumqi,” said Yang Shu, head of the Central Asia Studies Institute in Lanzhou. Most other attacks have not involved explosives, only knives and gasoline, such as the car that plowed into pedestrians at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in October.

“The number of attacks is increasing and the attackers are getting more professional in what they do,” Yang said.

In the largest such attack this year, 33 people were knifed to death at a train station in Kunming in March.

©afp.com / Mark Ralston