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French counter-terrorism chief says TWO Islamist plots were thwarted in 2020,
though FIVE attacks weren’t prevented
4 Jan 2021 11:23
A makeshift memorial to Samuel Paty in Nice, France, October 21, 2020. © Eric Gaillard / Reuters
Authorities foiled two Islamist plots last year, France's top counter-terrorism official has said. The country suffered five high-profile terrorist attacks in 2020, including the murder of Samuel Paty and the stabbing in Nice.
“Two Sunni Islamist terrorist attacks were thwarted in 2020,” National Coordinator for Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Laurent Nunez told Europe 1 radio station, adding that 33 Islamist terrorist plots had been foiled in France since 2017.
This suggests the number of prevented attacks in 2020 was smaller than the number of terrorist attacks that had occurred.
On April 4, a knifeman killed two people and wounded five in Romans-sur-Isere in the southeastern part of the country. A few weeks later, a terrorist rammed his vehicle into police officers outside Paris, injuring three. Both incidents took place in the middle of a nationwide lockdown against Covid-19.
In September, a man stabbed two people outside the former Paris office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. On October 16, a terrorist of Chechen origin beheaded teacher Samuel Paty for having shown his class a cartoon of Mohammed during a lesson on freedom of speech. Several weeks later, three people were killed in a stabbing attack inside a Catholic church in Nice.
These attacks prompted the government to crack down on mosques and Muslim NGOs suspected of promoting radical views. Nunez said Islamist terrorism remains a “priority threat” that is growing “increasingly difficult to detect.” He explained that the attacks coming from abroad are “less likely” because Islamic State has become “very weak” in the Middle East.
“But we stay extremely vigilant. Islamic State is reorganizing itself to act in a clandestine manner.”
Nunez said five attacks by far-right groups were thwarted since 2017, and he is concerned about the “rise of [white] supremacists and survivalists.”
Last month, France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin thanked police for busting a cell of “violent ultra-left activists” who were suspected of planning terrorist actions.
Anti-Muslim Polish duo plotted to ‘BOMB MOSQUE’ and ‘POISON’ people after writing Breivik-like manifesto against Islam
4 Jan 2021 17:03
FILE PHOTO © Reuters / Kacper Pempel
State prosecutors in Poland charged two men with conspiring to attack a mosque with explosives. The suspects are also accused of planning poisonings, while one wrote a manifesto on the need to “exterminate religious groups.”
The two men were arrested in November 2019, the day before a large nationalist march in Warsaw. Police seized guns, drugs, explosives and chemicals, and an investigation began. At the time of their arrest, the men were already under investigation for alleged involvement in a 2012 plot by a Polish academic – dubbed “Poland’s Breivik” after Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik – to blow up parliament buildings.
State prosecutors charged the men on Monday with preparing explosives that they say “threatened the life and health of many people.” A government spokesman told Onet that the men targeted “a specific religious object of the Islamic community,” believed to be a mosque.
The spokesman added that the conspirators also planned to “spread poisonous substances to certain people,” in a campaign aimed at preventing the “Islamization” of Poland. A third man is also charged with possessing chemical precursors to explosives.
Like Breivik in Norway and mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand, one of the would-be attackers prepared a manifesto that prosecutors say “incited hatred on the basis of ethnic and religious differences.”
The two bomb plotters face up to 10 years in prison if convicted, while the third man faces two years behind bars for possessing illegal chemicals.
Poland is a staunchly Catholic country, where Muslims make up around 0.1 percent of the population. Warsaw’s two mosques have both been targeted by vandals in recent years, with windows smashed in one mosque and cultural center in 2017.
A Pew Research poll last year found that two-thirds of Poles have an unfavorable view of Muslims in their country, and the country’s ruling Law and Justice party has refused to take in significant numbers of Muslim migrants, with then-interior minister Mariusz Blaszcak comparing his party’s position in 2017 to that of “Charles the Hammer who stopped the Muslim invasion of Europe in the 8th century.”
UAE nabs Iranian terror squad plotting to attack Israelis
January 4, 2021
Israelis have been warned about visiting Dubai. The discovery of Iranian terror squad underscores the danger.
By David Isaac, World Israel News
An Iranian terror squad was broken up by UAE intelligence in the capital of Abu Dhabi and its most populous city, Dubai, media reports.
Israelis have visited the UAE in the thousands since the signing of the Abraham Accords on the White House Lawn on Sept. 15, 2020. From Iran’s point-of-view, they make a soft target and one easily reached.
Tensions have been particularly high in recent weeks as Israel went on high alert due to the approaching anniversary of the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike on Jan. 3, 2020. Iran has repeatedly vowed revenge against both the U.S. and Israel, although the latter has not taken credit for being involved in the attack.
Israel’s National Security Council had also warned in late November of security threats to Israeli tourists in Dubai. But Israelis have largely ignored the warnings.
Dubai has been a prime location for carrying out kidnappings.
In 2000, a reserve colonel in the IDF, Elhanan Tannenbaum, was kidnapped in Dubai and held for more than three years by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Although Tannenbaum was a shady character who had gone to Dubai to complete a drug deal, the IDF decided to do what it could to get him back given that he was privy to IDF information as part of his reserve service. He was returned as part of a prisoner swap in Jan. 2004.
In July 2020, Iran kidnapped a California man for being part of an Iranian dissident group. Jamshid Sharmahd was staying in Dubai.
“We’re seeking support from any democratic country, any free country,” his son Shayan Sharmahd told the AP. “It is a violation of human rights. You can’t just pick someone up in a third country and drag them into your country.”
Even the man portrayed in the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda,” Paul Rusesabagina, was seized in Dubai in Sept. 2020. It appears he was nabbed on an arrest warrant by the Rwandan government. His daughter described it as a kidnapping.
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