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| Europe |
| European holy men coming under greater scrutiny |
| 2005-01-26 |
| In nightly sermons broadcast on the Internet, Sheik Omar al-Bakri, a 46-year-old Syrian-born cleric, has urged young Muslim men all over the world to support the Iraq insurgency on the front line of "the global jihad," investigators say. He struck a similarly defiant tone this month at a rally attended by 500 people at a central London meeting hall, where a giant screen behind him showed images of the World Trade Center falling. "Allahu akbar!" - "God is great!" - some audience members shouted at the images. After eavesdropping for months on his nightly praise of the Sept.-11 hijackers and of suicide bombings, Scotland Yard said last week that it was investigating Bakri, the leader of Al Muhajiroun, Britain's largest Muslim group, and officials are exploring whether they can deport him. The more aggressive approach toward the sheik is part of stepped-up surveillance of militant mosques in several countries, including Germany and France. French officials deported an imam this month after officials said he was inspiring men to jihad. One major concern, officials say, is that more heated religious rhetoric is encouraging young men to leave home to fight in Iraq. Although the dimensions of the recruitment effort from Europe to Iraq are not clear, there are indications that it is intensifying. On Sunday, the German police arrested a man suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda and charged him with recruiting men to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq. These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation in cooperation with the United States of recruitment and other terrorist activities in Europe. A senior German official said he was certain there would be additional arrests of militants inside the country who have set up sophisticated recruitment and smuggling networks that lead to Iraq. Italian investigators say several recruits from Italy carried out bombing attacks in Baghdad. Swiss officials say they are concerned that several militant clerics have openly urged men to become terrorists. And in Jordan, a gateway to Iraq for some foreign fighters, senior officials say they have arrested several dozen men in recent weeks who intended to cross the Iraqi border to serve as foreign fighters. Bohre Eddine Benvahia, the 33-year-old imam recently deported by France to Algeria, had urged young men in a working-class neighborhood of L'Ariane, outside Nice, to join jihad, French intelligence officials said. Bakri did not return repeated phone calls over the past several days. Last week, he denied in several interviews that he had urged people to become foreign fighters in Iraq, saying his comments had been taken out of context. "I believe Muslims are obliged to support their Muslim brothers abroad - verbally, financially, politically," Bakri said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I never said, 'Go abroad.' But if people want to go abroad, it's a very good thing to do. But we never recruit people to go abroad." News of the central London rally, which was first reported by United Press International, and portions of the sheik's nightly Internet sermons, have alarmed senior British officials. In one sermon last week, Bakri called Al Qaeda "the victorious group" that he said Muslims were "obliged" to join. Home Secretary Charles Clarke has asked officials to investigate relocating him to Syria or Lebanon. Like their counterparts in Britain, counterterrorism officials in Germany said they had seen indications of an increase in attempts by groups there to recruit fighters to travel to Iraq to fight. Some men in recent weeks have planned to go to Iraq to carry out suicide bombing missions, the officials said. In the arrest on Sunday, prosecutors said a man they identified as Ibrahim Mohamed K. , a 29-year-old Iraqi from Mainz, Germany, had persuaded a 31-year-old man, named Yasser Abu S., to go to Iraq on a suicide bombing mission. Prosecutors said Yasser Abu S. intended to fake his death in a car accident in Egypt and use the life insurance proceeds to pay for Qaeda activities in Germany as well as his travel expenses to Iraq, where he planned to carry out a suicide bombing attack. The surnames of suspects in criminal cases are not disclosed in Germany. "Stopping recruitment for Iraq where they may do harm to U.S. troops is our highest priority, and the Germans and other European governments are cooperating," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official based in Europe said in an interview with The New York Times and the PBS program "Frontline." He said that a would-be suicide bomber intending to travel to Baghdad was arrested early last fall in Germany. German officials said they were worried that recruitment had intensified there in recent months. Last October, the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that 1,000 "foreign fighters" had entered Iraq to join the insurgency, although U.S. military officials in Iraq have acknowledged that they are unsure of the numbers of outside fighters. In raids in several German cities on Jan. 12, the German police arrested 22 people suspected of being militant Muslims while recovering dozens of forged passports and boxes of militant propaganda. A senior German law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that many of the arrested men are members of Ansar al-Islam, who were recruiting young men to go to Iraq. Counterterrorism officials view some militant European mosques as a link in the Iraq recruiting chain, just as they came to see the importance of Al Quds Mosque in Hamburg in the formation of the Qaeda cell led by Mohamed Atta, the leading hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Officials say that in some countries, their efforts to control activities at mosques are hampered by laws that protect religious expression and restrict what they can do to stop hateful speech. British officials say that if they want to deport an imam who they fear is inciting violence, the proceedings can often take months or even years to wind through the court system. In Britain, where 1.8 million Muslims live, elected officials are demanding that the police move quickly. In the months after Sept. 11, pressure built for Britain to move against outspoken imams. But it was not until last May that British officials arrested the most high-profile militant cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri of the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. He was charged with encouraging others to murder people who did not believe in the Islamic faith. Now leading the mosque is another militant Muslim, Abu Abdullah, who said in an interview, "People see us as extremists because we don't compromise the religion of Allah." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 I saw these guys interviewed last night. They are rabid dogs that need to be put down asap. |
| Posted by: HV 2005-01-26 2:44:14 PM |