| Europe |
| Danish Teenager Sentenced in Terror Plot |
| 2007-02-16 |
| Judges throw out jury convictions on 3 others A Danish court on Thursday convicted a 17-year-old defendant on terror charges and sentenced him to seven years in prison for involvement in a botched plot to blow up a target in Europe. Three other suspects in the case were cleared of offenses. The court found Abdul Basit Abu-Lifa guilty of involvement in a terror plot uncovered in Bosnia in October 2005 with the arrest of two men allegedly preparing to carry out a terror attack. The pair, Swedish national Mirsad Bektasevic and Abdulkadir Cesur, a Turk living in Denmark, were convicted by a Bosnian court last month of planning an attack aimed at forcing foreign troops to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The exact target of the plot remains unclear. In the Danish case, police arrested Abu-Lifa and the three others on Oct. 27, 2005, after a tip from Bosnian police. Investigators used mobile phone records and Internet chats to link the defendants in Denmark to the Bosnian plot. A jury in the Eastern High Court said Thursday there was enough evidence to prove that all four defendants were involved in the plot, but the three-judge panel disagreed and overturned the verdicts against all but Abu-Lifa. Under Danish law, judges have the right to overturn any decision made by the jury. "It is very, very rare that this happens," said Thorkild Hoeyer, the attorney for one of the freed defendants, Elias Ibn Hsain. Prosecutors had demanded at least eight years in prison for Abu-Lifa, a Danish citizen of Palestinian descent, but the judges gave him a seven-year sentence, citing his young age. Imad Ali Jaloud, who prosecutors said was the leader of the group, refused to speak to media as he left the courtroom. Another acquitted defendant, Adnan Avdic, |
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| Terror Networks |
| The online face of terror |
| 2006-06-13 |
| At 3.55 p.m. on October 19, 2005, a squad of anti-terrorist police rang the doorbell of a ground-floor apartment in the Bosnian capitol of Sarajevo. The door was opened by Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year old Bosnian native who had spent most of his life in Sweden, and who held a Swedish passport. According to an official English translation of a Bosnian indictment, the police showed Bekasevic a search warrant and their ID cards, but Bektasevic refused to move out of the doorway and allow them in. Then he started trying to push one of the officers back out the door, exclaiming: Who are you to search my house, you trash. Police subdued Bektasevic and barged into the apartment. Inside, they found Bektasevics room-mate, a Dane of Turkish extraction named Abdulkadir Cesur, sitting on a sofa with his hand under his coat. Police moved to wrestle the coat off Cesur, at which point they discovered he had in his hand a pistol with a silencer. Cesurs finger was on the trigger and a bullet was in the chamber. Police knocked the pistol out of Cesurs hands and wrestled him to the floor. Their search of the apartment proved productive: among items discovered were a home-made suicide belt, a quantity of factory-made explosives and a Hi-8 videotape with footage demonstrating how to make a home-made bomb. The tape included this bloodcurdling voiceover: Here, the brothers are preparing for attacks These brothers are ready to attack and inshallah, they will attack al-Qufar who our killing our brothers and Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries. These weapons are going to be used against Europe, against those whose forces are in Iraq and in Afghanistan Subsequent analysis by Britains Home Office determined that the voice on the tape was more than rather likely that of the suspect Mirsad Bektasevic. Within a day or two of the Bosnia arrests, police in Britain had staged their own, related, series of arrests. Two London men were arrested on terrorism related charges, which included allegations that they were in possession of computer images showing how to make car bombs and "martyrdom operations vests." One suspect, Younis Tsouli, was also charged with possessing computer images of "a number of places" in Washington, D.C. (A third suspect faced terror-funding charges.) Counterterrorism officials in the United States and Britain told NEWSWEEK at the time that the evidence suggested some of those connected with the U.K. suspects may have been targeting the White House and Capitol complex for attacks using homemade bombs. As we reported at the time, the British suspects were believed to have been in e-mail contact, via Hotmail accounts, with a suspected jihadist recruiter who used the Internet nom de guerre Maximus. According to the officials, Maximus was initially based in Sweden and moved to Sarajevo, where investigators believe he helped run a network recruiting European youth to go to Iraq. |
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| Europe | |
| Bosnian link to Canadian arrests | |
| 2006-06-08 | |
| The arrest of 17 suspected terrorists in Canada last weekend may be linked with the similar actions in Bosnia-Herzegovina last year, Bosnian media reported Wednesday. The Prosecutor's Office of the Sarajevo-based Bosnia-Herzegovina State Court, according to reports, handed over to their Canadian colleagues some information obtained in a couple of operations by Bosnian police against suspected terrorists last year. Bosnia's intelligence service (OSA) detained in October last year Mirsad Bektasevic, a Muslim with Swedish citizenship and of Serbia and Montenegro origin, Turkish citizen Abdulkadir Cesur and Bosnian citizen Bajro Ikanovic, all suspected of planning suicide attacks on Western diplomatic missions in Bosnia.
Bektasevic, Cesur and Ikanovic, who have been in custody since the arrest, last month pleaded not guilty before the State Court, where the trial against them has been ongoing. The court did not confirm or deny involvement in the arrests in Canada. A spokesman for Bosnia-Herzegovina Prosecutor's Office, Boris Grubesic, told media that during the investigation into suspected terrorist activities last year the office contacted many countries. However, he refused to give details of the contacts or reveal the names of the countries involved. The arrests of Bektasevic and Cesur in the Bosnian capital last year led to a number of arrests in Denmark where five men and one woman were detained last November over suspected terrorist activities, believed to be linked with the alleged terrorist group in Bosnia. | |
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