With a new threat of terrorism coursing through Europe, intelligence and police authorities say they are acting more aggressively, with greater emphasis on pre-emptive action to roll up networks of Islamic militants whose members may not have committed crimes, but who have the skills or ideological resolve for violence. .... Huge antiterror sweeps and arrests have followed in Britain, Belgium and France, and related arrests have been made in Canada and Saudi Arabia. Intelligence monitoring of international communications has intensified, but investigators say connections to the "terrorist central" that Al Qaeda once represented no longer seem so important for some groups that identify with the cause but have their own skills and resources. ....
European intelligence officials say that some recent raids represent less a new threat than a shifting in tactics to deal more aggressively with an existing one. .... The French had kept a group of Moroccan-born militants under surveillance for some time, but had no specific cause to arrest them when the police struck in dawn raids on Monday, seizing 13 men with suspected links to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. .... The crucial factor was that they had traveled to Afghanistan, where they learned to use weapons and make explosives.... The new French counterterrorism motto ... is "Every time we discover a cell, we eliminate it as a pre-emptive measure." In Britain, the shock of the Madrid attacks made a developing threat seem more imminent. Scotland Yard suspected that a group of young Britons of Pakistani origin had become radicalized by lunatic fiery imams in local mosques and might have reached out to international terror networks, perhaps even Al Qaeda. They, too, had fallen under surveillance by security services before the Madrid bombings. Soon after the attack, 700 British police officers conducted the largest antiterrorism operation in years, arresting nine men of Pakistani origin in and around London. .... British counterterrorism officials said they took pre-emptive action based mainly on suspicion — another shift in tactics after Madrid. ....
In the post-Madrid mobilization in Europe, Germany has been quiet, but German intelligence officials say they are not lulled by the calm. "Most of the Al Qaeda cells in Germany have been prosecuted and destroyed," said Carl Heinrich von Bauer, deputy head of the North Rhine-Westphalia state police. With German forces now in in Afghanistan, the government assumes that Germany is on the target list. Belgium was one of the first governments to act after the Madrid blasts, where the police arrested four members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group in the week after the attacks. The preponderance of ethnic Moroccans under surveillance in the Spanish, French and Belgium antiterror operations reflects not only the size and dispersal of Moroccan immigrants across Europe, but also the intense disaffection of a growing fraction of young, mostly unemployed Moroccans who are vulnerable to the call to radicalism. "After Madrid, European police and intelligence services are increasingly focusing on the North African community" in Europe, one senior intelligence officer said. But since many North Africans now have citizenship in Europe, it is difficult for security services to act on intelligence about potential threats without violating their rights.
| Seems like there should be some mechanism to strip them of their citizenship when their actions are treasonous to their new homeland... |
Swedish and Danish newspapers suggested this week that Sweden’s intelligence services were so determined to expel a Moroccan-born Swede suspected of having Qaeda ties that they lured him to Denmark, where he would have less legal protection against extradition. According to those reports, they then tipped the Danish security service to arrest him so he could be turned over to Moroccan authorities. ..... The police and intelligence services are under pressure to effectively engage in racial profiling to weed suspected terrorist cells out of law-abiding communities where mainstream frustration is rising. But the public demands results, as one intelligence chief pointed out. "Although there is uncertainty about where the likely targets are," he said, "there is a growing certainty in Europe that there are targets."
| That racial profiling angle keeps coming up. Nobody seems to dwell on the fact that the Bad Guys are engaging in some "racial profiling" themselves as they indiscriminately bump off as many infidels as they can. |
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