..
Italian ambassador killed in attack on UN peacekeepers in DR Congo
22 Feb, 2021 11:49
Soldiers from a UN peacekeeping mission patrol the road in Djungu, Democratic Republic of Congo, March 2020.
© Samir Tounsi / AFP
An Italian diplomat and a police officer were killed while traveling as part of a UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday.
The Italian Foreign Ministry confirmed that Ambassador Luca Attanasio and a member of the country’s Carabinieri police were killed during an attack on a UN convoy in the city of Goma in eastern Congo, near the border with Rwanda.
According to Rai News, the head of the EU delegation in Congo’s capital Kinshasa was also traveling with the convoy that was part of a UN peacekeeping mission.
A spokesperson for the Virunga National Park told Reuters the ambush on the convoy was carried out as part of a kidnapping attempt.
Several armed groups are known to operate in the area where the attack occurred.
‘Preacher without a face’: ISIS’ ‘chief recruiter’ in Germany sentenced to over 10yrs in prison following years-long trial
24 Feb, 2021 16:27
FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Fabian Bimmer
An Iraqi man identified as Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah A., also known as Abu Walaa, has been sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison by a regional court in the German town of Celle. He was found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization, lending support to terrorist activities and financing terrorism.
Walaa stood trial together with three other suspects, who were also sentenced to between four and eight years in prison. According to the court, the Salafist preacher led a network in Germany that radicalized young people and sent them to join IS terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
At least 20 people travelled to IS-held areas and joined the extremists after being recruited by Walaa’s network, German media reported, adding that two of his recruits carried out suicide bombings in Iraq that led to massive casualties.
One of the jihadists believed to be radicalized by Walaa and his accomplices also sought to commit a terrorist attack in Germany. Known as Safia S., this young woman attacked a German police officer with a knife in 2016 in Hannover and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Walaa arrived in Germany from Iraq as a refugee in the early 2000s, but soon gained prominence as a preacher and became one of the most influential figures in the German Salafist scene. He also led the ‘Deutsche Islamkreis Hildesheim’ – one of the most active Salafist groups – which ran a mosque in the town of Hildesheim near Hanover. The group’s members, however, operated in other cities as well.
The man is also reported to have some links to Berlin terrorist attacker Anis Amri, who deliberately rammed a heavy truck into an overcrowded Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz public square in 2016, killing 12. Amri reportedly visited Walaa’s mosque in Hildesheim, but it is unclear whether the Salafist preacher influenced his attack plans in any way.
Walaa has been in the crosshairs of the German security services for quite some time, particularly in the wake of Amri’s attack. His mosque was closed and the organization he led was banned in 2017. Before that, he was also active online. The preacher had his own YouTube channel where some of his videos received over 40,000 views. He also boasted around 25,000 followers on Facebook, where he called himself ‘Sheikh Abu Walaa’, while offering “admonitions, hadiths, recitations and information on lessons.”
He was even known as the ‘preacher without a face’ throughout the internet, as he never showed his face in his YouTube videos. He was arrested in 2017, but his trial took more than three years – partly due to the numerous testimonies the court had to hear, including those from the former jihadists he recruited, who later decided to cooperate with the authorities.
One of the witnesses was Yusuf T., who received a seven-year sentence over an attack on a Sikh temple in the German city of Essen in 2016, and who confessed to being recruited by the ‘preacher without a face’.
Walaa himself repeatedly denied any links to Islamic State, while his defense lawyers insisted the witnesses’ testimonies were untrustworthy and demanded his acquittal. The prosecutors demanded he be sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison.
Despite the sentencing of IS’ “chief recruiter” in Germany, the “danger from Islamist terrorism remains unchanged,” the head of the domestic security service (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, told the German media.
“We still witness significant manpower resources and intensive internet propaganda,” he said. The German police still classify around 600 radicals in Germany and beyond as acute threats, adding that they might carry out attacks. The list includes those who returned from Syria and Iraq, as well as those who have already served sentences in Germany and have since been set free, but still pose “a particularly high risk.”
In October 2020, one such radical attacked two tourists in Dresden and fatally injured one of them. The attacker was released from prison just few days earlier. Two weeks ago, 14 suspects were also arrested in Germany and Denmark, who are believed to have sought to procure chemicals to make explosives. It is unclear, however, if they had any specific plans for an attack.
Major police raids carried out around German capital after Islamist group,
which called for death of Jews, outlawed by authorities
25 Feb, 2021 13:33
(FILE PHOTO) © REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
More than 800 officers were on duty as police in Berlin and Brandenburg carried out 26 raids across the region to enforce a ban on a Salafist group which was advocating terrorist attacks and the killing of Jews.
Berlin Interior Senator Andreas Geisel told a news conference on Thursday that 19 members of the Jama’atu Berlin were targeted during the raids and that the group had been under surveillance for two years.
Geisel could not confirm whether any arrests had been made but said 850 officers were involved in the raids and that half of those targeted in the operation were German citizens.
In a tweet in the early hours of Thursday morning, Berlin’s interior ministry said it had outlawed Jama’atu Berlin, “a young and very radical jihad Salafist” association, also known as Tauhid Berlin.
“Today’s ban is another building block in the resolute fight against violent extremism,” Geisel added during his press conference.
The group saw themselves as the successor to the banned Fussilet 33 association and reportedly glorified the fight of the terrorist militia “Islamic State,” especially on the internet, and called for the killing of Jews, according to the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. The organization also welcomed the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty in October by a radicalized student.
“(In the group), there are severe anti-Semites who are calling for the death of Jews,” Berlin Interior Secretary Torsten Akmann said in a statement.
Members of the group reportedly met regularly to pray and plot, also distributing flyers in public spaces and spreading their dangerous ideology online. Several members had been linked to an outlawed Islamist group in 2017 which had been in contact with Anis Amri, a failed Tunisian asylum seeker who drove a truck into the Berlin Christmas market, killing 12.
In its annual report, the German intelligence agency said that there were three times as many Salafists in the country in 2019 as there were in 2011, numbering 12,150 in 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment