Calgary man pleads guilty to terrorism charge after posts on TikTok, Snapchat
A man has pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge after admitting he shared recruitment videos for the Islamic State group on TikTok and posted on Snapchat that his mission would begin during Pride month.
Zakarya Rida Hussein, 20, was charged in June with two counts of facilitating terrorist activity and two counts of participating in or contributing to an activity of a terrorist group.
Hussein appeared Friday via video in the Alberta Court of Justice in Calgary. Some of his family members attended.
His lawyer, Alain Hepner, entered Hussein’s plea to one count of facilitating terrorist activity.
“The plea is guilty,” Hepner told Justice Harry Van Harten.
An agreed statement of facts, which was read into court by Crown prosecutor Kent Brown, said Hussein was arrested at his home by the RCMP Integrated National Security Enforcement Team with assistance from the Calgary Police Service on June 15.
It says a search warrant on his home and vehicle found a notebook with step-by-step instructions for making a bomb, an Islamic State group flag, several electronics, a black collapsible baton, knives and imitation brass knuckles.
During a post-arrest interview, the statement says Hussein admitted ownership of his social media accounts, including on TikTok and Snapchat. He also admitted to writing homemade explosive instructions found in his bedroom, the statement says.
The document adds that Hussein knowingly facilitated terrorist activity on May 14 by posting an Islamic State group recruitment video on TikTok, which received comments from other users that included “I$I$ and proud,” and “the video itself is very motivational.”
It says he then shared a longer version of the same video in a text message chat.
The statement says Hussein then posted a Snapchat message on June 1 that his mission would begin the next day.
“It’s Pride month,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”
Hussein then referred to two different types of explosive devices and one of those devices matched what was described in the handwritten instructions seized from his bedroom, says the statement.
It says he shared a video to a group chat containing “extremist ideological interpretations that encouraged the killing of gay men.”
The document says Hussein also replied to an automated text message from Alberta’s United Conservative Party asking for his support.
“No,” he wrote back. “I’m gonna do a terrorist attack on you guys.”
The statement says he received additional automated messages from the UCP, including one that asked if they could put a sign up at his house, and he replied: “I’ll blow you guys up with an explosive.”
Hepner ordered a risk assessment report for Hussein before he’s to be sentenced next year.
RCMP have charged two other young Calgarians for terrorism-related offences in an ongoing national security investigation.
The two teens, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, have been released with conditions, pending the outcome of Terrorism Peace Bond applications.
Accused of having prepared attacks in a
Brest butcher’s shop, six men in court
Translated from “Accusés d’avoir préparé dans une boucherie de Brest des attentats, six hommes renvoyés aux assises,” France Bleu, November 30, 2023 (thanks to Medforth):
Six men accused of having prepared violent actions inspired by those of the Islamic State group in a butcher’s shop in Brest (Finistère) are being referred to the special juvenile court at the end of 2024.
Six men are being referred to the special juvenile court, Agence France Presse (AFP) learned this Thursday. They are accused of having prepared violent actions inspired by those of the Islamic State group in a Brest butcher’s shop. The investigation began in September 2019 around the situation of Mohamad D., a Palestinian born in 1985 in Syria.
Arriving in France at the end of 2015 as a refugee – he has since lost this status – he regularly visited the “Chez Wahid” butcher’s shop on the outskirts of Brest in 2019. Behind the stall, Wahid B., convicted that year for advocating terrorism for having mimed shooting with an automatic weapon as a police patrol passed after the attacks of November 13, 2015.
His business was suspected of hosting meetings of the local “radical Islamist movement”, according to the indictment order of which AFP became aware this Thursday, with the advantage of “not attracting attention“. The establishment was sounded in November 2019, which allowed investigators to trigger a wave of arrests in January 2020 targeting seven men, ultimately indicted, including Mohamad D. and Wahid B.
Brest naval base considered as target
At the end of three and a half years of investigation, two anti-terrorism judges ordered on July 28 the dismissal of six of them for criminal terrorist association and a dismissal of the case for the seventh. The trial, confirmed by a decision of the Paris Court of Appeal on Monday, could be held at the end of 2024 before the specially composed juvenile court, because one of the accused was 16 years old at the time of the facts.
The six accused, five of whom are still detained, were born between 1983 and 2003 and suspected of having considered several targets for violent actions: the Brest naval base, Chinese New Year celebrations in France, a synagogue, football matches …
“You kill the whole village in one night, it’s easy”
In a sound recording from December 9, 2019, Mohamad D. said to Wahid B.: “We need a little training, we need weapons, and we need to learn certain things (…) We can’t go there. too far away, for example, we go to see the countryside. There are four or five of us, armed, you kill the whole village in a single night, it’s easy (…) You have to have the audacity, and you have everything planned,” adds this man, now 38 years old.
“Out of context” sound recordings, denounces his lawyer, Me Sami Khankan, who tells AFP that he “will plead innocent” as he “contests the procedure in form and substance.” Among the other projects attributed to the six men by investigators, the infiltration of the French army, “you light them all,” suggests the one who was then a minor, or the rallying of fighters in Syria or Mali.
Mohamad D.’s journey seemed to interest his co-defendants. “He fought there and everything,” says one of them. “How did he come back?” asks another. But Mohamad D. contested the numerous elements put forward by the investigators to assert that he had fought in the ranks of the Islamic State group in Syria in 2014. His defense presents him as distanced from the rest of the cell and believes that the investigators used its geographical origin, a Syrian area under the yoke of the Islamic State group, to consolidate a file that it considers artificial.
Collective fascination with the abuses perpetrated by jihadists
For the judges, on the contrary, the plans for violent actions are very real. They mention paintball sessions related to shooting training, plans to purchase weapons by certain protagonists, in Brest and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and above all a form of collective fascination with the abuses perpetrated by jihadists.
The other five accused defended themselves from “blah-bla,” “empty words” or the group effect. Contacted by AFP, their lawyers did not respond or did not wish to comment this Thursday morning.
UK: Hindu families living in perpetual fear of
persecution by Islamists, netizens reveal
chilling details of harassment and police inaction
OpIndia, November 28, 2023:
Reports are doing rounds about attacks on a Hindu family in the UK’s West Midlands county by Islamists. The incident was first reported early in November. The family has been attacked several times by Islamists since July this year but the local police refused to take action demanded by the complainants.
The incident was again reported this time by GB News and shared by British journalist Martin Daubney on X, formerly Twitter. Daubney’s post was reshared by another X user prompting several UK citizens to share the horrifying experiences of several Hindu families they knew living in the UK.
One such user named Bo shared an experience of their Hindu friend. The user wrote that their Hindu friend stopped wearing bindi (a Hindu symbol worn by Hindu women on the forehead between the eyebrows) owing to the hatred that she had been subjected to.
“She’d had dog poo put through her letter box, she and her husband’s cars had been keyed, they’d been spat at, and a whole host of other things,” Bo wrote on X.
Bo added, “Thinking it was locals, I was just pushing up my proverbial sleeves to start having words with people before she told me who it was and begged me not to do anything as the police didn’t seem to care. In the end, they just moved away. Beautiful family, with great kids. I think this is more common than we realise.”
Replying to this post, another user named Boudicca and Viriato wrote that their son had a Hindu friend in school and they all got on well with each other. However, the school had a majority Pakistani students and the Hindu girl “experienced abuse from some of the mums”.
“It was stuff like telling her to ‘go home’ and this was ‘their’ school. They moved away also,” Boudicca and Viriato wrote.
A user named klownShowz wrote that their friends don’t wear bindi and have been advised by the police not to draw attention by putting rangoli or flowers on the doorway in Hindu festival style.
When a user replied to Bo’s post pointing at a possible lack of support from non-Muslims, Bo replied by saying that the aggrieved couple was a quiet couple and “it was only after they left and people asked where they went, and I said, that people were furious and wished they’d known.”…
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