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A French physicist with the European atomic research centre near Geneva was charged with terrorism offences by a Paris judge last night after investigators said that he offered to work with the North African branch of al-Qaeda. Adlène Hicheur, 32, who is of Algerian origin, was arrested last week with his younger brother after intelligence agents intercepted his alleged internet contacts with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The physicist, who works at the giant atomic collider at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), which straddles Swiss and French territory, told the Islamic group that he was interested in committing an...

SNIPPET: “WASHINGTON: The family of an Algerian national held at the US prison camp in Guantanamo for seven years is delighted he is due to arrive in France next week to start a new life. Lakhdar Boumediene, 42, would be the first non-French citizen from Guantanamo to be taken in by France since President Barack Obama pledged to shut down the prison camp when he took office in January. “I cannot hide the fact I am really happy. Soon, he is going to be freed,” his wife Abassia Bouadjimi told AFP Wednesday from Algeria. “He really is keen to be...

Algeria, The north African nation already has more than 10, 000 women police officers and is swelling the ranks even more. Another 177 women officers have just graduated to a force where they make up almost eight per cent, the largest female police contingent in the Arab world. Category: Pets & Animals

Al Qaeda terrorists have been left fearing the Black Death plague after it wiped out at least 40 insurgents at an Algerian training camp, it was reported today. The horror disease, which killed 25 million people in medieval Europe, is understood to have been found in a militant’s body dumped at a roadside. Terror group AQLIM (al Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb) was forced to turn its shelter in the Yakouren forests into mass graves and flee, it has been claimed. Now al Qaeda chiefs are said to fear the plague has been passed into other cells...

In Sarcelles, a northern suburb, I walked through a crowd of black children yesterday who were arguing about which of them was "le plus Obama" -- the most like Obama. As it has done all over Europe, the election of a US president called Barack Hussein has given a lift to minorities who feel marooned outside the mainstream. This weekend, the imminent arrival in the White House of someone with an African Muslim name has prompted a new campaign for racial integration, supported by Carla Bruni, President Sarkozy's wife. Yazid Zabeg, an Algerian-born millionaire and the JDD Sunday newspaper have...

A man accused of killing his neighbour carried the dead man's head on a bus before dumping it in a canal... The court heard Mohammed Boudjenane, 46, from Kilburn, north London, hit Lakhdar Ouyahia, 43, on the head with an object believed to be a claw hammer. Earlier he allegedly raped a woman at his flat and beat her after abducting her as she made her way to church. Mr Boudjenane told police he had been planning to kill the woman but released her when she agreed to marry him. "She was very fortunate to escape with her life," ......

ALGIERS, (Reuters) - The Algerian army, stepping up a counter-offensive after attacks by al Qaeda's north Africa wing, has killed around 16 of the group's fighters in the past three days, newspapers reported on Saturday. At least 13 members of the al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb were killed near borders with Tunisia in Tebessa province, some 634 km (396 miles) east of the capital Algiers, independent dailies Liberte and El Khabar said. The army was acting on information provided by a captured rebel, the papers cited security sources as saying. In a separate operation, the military killed three...

ALGIERS (AFP) - A week-long offensive by Algerian special forces in a mountainous area east of Algiers has killed between eight and 11 Islamist militants, security sources said on Saturday. The soldiers, who include paratroopers, are tracking a group of around 100 militants in the Akfadou mountains, 160 kilometres (100 miles) east of Algiers in the Kabylie region, the sources said. The inhospitable area has also been bombarded heavily by artillery and by aircraft, residents told AFP. The operation follows a raid last week on an army barracks in the Yakouren forest in the same region and a suicide bomb...

NHS doctors accused of bomb plots, Al Qaeda fanatics working for the police, and now the Terrorist traffic warden A terrorist jailed for his involvement in a bomb attack on the Paris Metro - which killed eight people and wounded 80 - has been working as a traffic warden in England. Mustapha Boutarfa, 32, was arrested by Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad in 1996 and extradited from Britain to France two years later. He stood trial for his auxiliary role in the 1995 attack on the St Michel station by a notorious Islamic militant group and was given a two-year...

Terrorist ten are set free Danger ... Abu Qatada         By GEORGE PASCOE-WATSON Deputy Political EditorTHE Human Rights Act was blamed last night for the release of ten “highly dangerous” terror suspects. Abu Qatada — Osama Bin Laden’s top European lieutenant — will be freed with the others by tonight. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair warned that the men’s release was “a grave threat” to national security. But Home Secretary Charles Clarke is powerless to keep them caged — thanks to the Human Rights Act. Law Lords ruled last year that Britain’s detention of terror...

British police arrested a man before Christmas who was suspected of preparing himself for a suicide bombing and who had links to Al Qaeda, British newspaper The Sunday Times said. The paper, which did not give a source, said the man in his late twenties was arrested after leaving notes to his family saying he planned to "martyr" himself. The paper said he was an Algerian asylum seeker. The man had also shaved off all his body hair, a religious act often observed by would-be suicide bombers so that they are "clean" before entering heaven, the newspaper said. "I hope...

Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn't tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It's safer that way. It's only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group"), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden's videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims. He's a...

Sarkozy embarrassed as Algerian thief is arrested By Colin Randall in Paris (Filed: 31/08/2006) An Algerian thief saved from deportation by France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, made a spectacular return to crime. Police opened fire after a stolen BMW driven by Cherif Bouchelaleg sped towards a checkpoint protecting the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, at Sallanches, near the borders with Switzerland and Italy. The incident — in which Bouchelaleg, 36, was arrested after jumping from the car and trying to escape on foot — embarrassed Mr Sarkozy, a presidential hopeful who has made much of exerting control over France's borders....

TORONTO - Canadian counter- terrorism investigators have dismantled a suspected terrorist cell in Toronto whose members included an al-Qaeda-trained explosives expert, the National Post has learned. The cell consisted of four Algerian refugee claimants who had lived in Canada for as long as six years and were alleged members of a radical Islamic terror faction called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. The central figure of the Toronto-area cell was a former al-Qaeda training camp instructor who studied bomb-making at Osama bin Laden's Al Farooq and Khaldun training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The group was watched by intelligence officers...

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) - Al-Qaida-linked Algerian insurgents are becoming more active in Africa's remote, ungoverned deserts, and increased cooperation among African nations will be key to averting future terror attacks, a top U.S. general said Saturday. U.S. Maj. Gen. Thomas Csrnko said the No. 1 threat to the region was Algeria's Salafist Group for Call and Combat, an al-Qaida affiliated movement that loaded fighters onto a dozen trucks earlier this month and attacked an isolated Mauritanian army outpost near the Algerian and Mali borders. The surprise assault left 15 Mauritanian soldiers and nine Salafists dead. The attack was a clear...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - An Algerian man who pretended he had information about a supposed al-Qaida plot to bomb five U.S. cities was sentenced Friday to a year in prison. Ahmed Allali, 37, was convicted on three counts of making false statements. He had pleaded guilty earlier this year. Allali was convicted for telling federal investigators he knew members of the al-Qaida terrorist network and had lived overseas with them in the late 1990s. He also told them an al-Qaida cell was planning to detonate bombs in five major U.S. cities in early 2005. Late last year, Allali acknowledged he knew...

A KEY al-Qaeda operative responsible for recruiting the shoe bomber Richard Reid and one of the September 11 hijackers helped to kidnap five British children from their Norwich home and take them to Libya, a court was told yesterday. Djamel Beghal, 39, is serving ten years in a French prison for plotting a suicide attack on the US Embassy in Paris and was described as so dangerous that even other al-Qaeda members thought him beyond the pale. While he was living in Leicester in the late 1990s Beghal, an Algerian, met Azzedin Journazi, from Libya, at a city mosque and...

Last Updated: Thursday, 14 April, 2005, 11:30 GMT 12:30 UK Guantanamo Bosnians cry 'torture' Six Guantanamo Bay detainees are challenging US federal authorities to reveal evidence of abuse at the camp. The six - all of Algerian origin and extradited from Bosnia - are suing the Bush administration as part of their effort to contest their detention. They want the government to release documents which they say would prove that prisoners were tortured. In their legal action, they say one of the six was beaten so badly by jailers that he suffered facial paralysis. The detainee, Mustafa Ait Idir, alleges...

Alleged Canadian al-Qaeda 'sleeper' agent set to testify October 25, 2004 OTTAWA - A man accused of being a member of al-Qaeda appeared in an Ottawa federal court Monday to fight deportation to Algeria, where he fears he may be killed. Canadian authorities arrested Mohammed Harkat nearly two years ago on a national security certificate, which allows Ottawa to deport non-Canadian citizens considered a security risk. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service says Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda member now in custody, told American authorities he helped train Harkat in Afghanistan. CSIS thinks Harkat was sent to Canada as a "sleeper"...

Fernando Huarte Santamaría, a leader of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) in the northern city of Gijón, Asturias, contacted Algerian terrorist Benesmail Abdelkrim in the Villabona prison in 2001. Huarte even got Abdelkrim a furlough to go to the dentist and paid his bill; the two last met in October 2004. A few days later, the police arrested Abdelkrim and found the address of a well-known ETA terrorist in his pocket. Abdelkrim served time with two other notorious prisoners, Spaniard Antonio Toro Castro and Moroccan Rafá Zouhier, two police informants accused in the March 11, 2004 bombings. In April 1997...