"This car was used only my 100 year old mullah four times. It has only ten miles. I swear it by allah (peace be upon him)!"
Posted on 05/26/2004 8:57:29 PM PDT by pwatson
May 26, 2004
Japan makes first al-Qaeda arrests in dawn raids FROM RICHARD LLOYD PARRY IN TOKYO
Japan made its first move against radical Islamic suspects today, when police raided ten sites and arrested five foreigners suspected of plotting to set up an al-Qaeda cell.
The five men - three Bangladeshis, one Indian and one citizen of Mali - were arrested for alleged forgery and breaking immigration laws.
But in briefings to Japanese journalists, detectives made it clear that they will be questioned as the country's first suspected Islamic terrorists.
Apart from the Red Army Faction, a defunct group of ultra-left wingers active in the 1970s, and Aum Shinri Kyo, the religious cult which released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, Japan has no experience of domestic terrorism.
Today's arrests mark a threshold in the dawning realisation of the risks associated with the Government's support for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They also underline Japan's vulnerability to potential terrorist attack. With one of the lowest crime rates in the industrialised world, Japanese have none of the security consciousness bred into Europeans and Americans.
Despite a heightened alert since the Madrid bombings in March, searches and ID checks at government buildings in Tokyo are remarkably lax.
In a co-ordinated operation this morning, announced in advance to the Japanese media, the police raided about ten homes and offices in Tokyo and the four prefectures surrounding it.
Four of the men were arrested for overstaying their visas, and the fifth, a Bangladeshi businessman named as Islam Mohamed Himu, for allegedly falsifying documents relating to his chain of mobile phone dealerships.
They were singled out because of their alleged association with Lionel Dumont, a French Muslim fugitive convicted for robbery and murder in Bosnia in 1997 and sentence to 20 years imprisonment.
M Dumont escaped from prison in Sarajevo two years later and was recaptured last December in Germany. A false passport in his possession revealed that he had based himself in Japan for more than a year, entering and leaving the country repeatedly and living with his German wife in the northern port city of Niigata.
Between July 2002 and September 2003, he worked as a dealer in second hand cars, an occupation pursued by a large number of the relatively small number of foreign Muslims who live in Japan.
Embarrassingly for the Japanese authorities, his entry into the country post-dated an improvement of immigration controls supposed to have been put in place after September 11, 2001.
According to police leaks to the Japanese media, 33-year old M Dumont deposited and withdrew sums amounting to several hundred thousand yen (thousands of pounds) on 45 separate occasions in a post office savings account.
The speculation, unsupported so far by any publicly presented evidence, is that the Frenchman was being supplied with money for the purchase of supplies, possibly connected with planned terrorist attacks.
The five men arrested are believed to have been the recipients of phone calls made by M Dumont after his departure from Japan, and traced through telephone records.
The most prominent among them, Mr Islam, 33, is married to a Japanese woman and runs a mobile phone business, Ryo International, which reportedly had sales of 800 million yen (£4 million) last year.
Among the offices raided today was a Ryo International branch in the port of Yokosuka, south-west of Tokyo, which faces the vast US naval base, home to thousands of US servicemen and women, where the Seventh Fleet is based.
The elderly owner of the building told the Yomiuri newspaper: "The man who signed the contract was always out and there are about three Filipina women in the office. I had absolutely no idea this company is related to al-Qaeda."
The other men were named by the Japanese media as Ahmed Faishal, 26, and Mohamed Muktar Hossain, 29, both from Bangladesh, Syed Naseer Syed Gaffar, 32, from India, and Kane Yaya, 41, from Mali. Under Japanese law a suspect can be held for 23 days without charge.
The only other suspected case of terrorism with religious motives came in 1991 when the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death on his university campus north of Tokyo. The case has never been solved.
Kakkate koi!
That means the ranks of terrorists have swelled again from 18,000 to 17,995. This can't keep happening.
They must not have convenience stores in Japan.
"This car was used only my 100 year old mullah four times. It has only ten miles. I swear it by allah (peace be upon him)!"
I am not so sure terrorists would have such an easy time getting away with this "stuff" in Japan. For one thing, Japanese don't really like to have a lot of foreigners living in their country (they are afraid too many Koreans and Chinese would want to immigrate there). So Japan is fairly UN-diverse. As a result, any foreigner would have a difficult time blending in as they went about their business.
So if Al Qaida is going to run an operation in Japan, they better be able to find Japanese people who are willing to carry out the operation. Any foreigner that did anything like that would surely be seen and remembered in the police dragnet/investigation that would follow any major terrorist operation. If you don't look like the other 99% of the population, you are going to stand out no matter where you try to hide. From what I have heard, Japanese police are pretty good, and Japanese prisons are NOT very pleasant at all.
I think Japan might be a difficult place for foreigners to mount a major terorist operation, the chances they would be caught afterwards are pretty high (so it better be suicide attack), and the punishment they would suffer afterwards would not be fun. I think Japan has less to worry about than the U.S. and Europe.
the religious cult which released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995
They released SARIN, Which was the same stuff found in the shells in IRAQ. Why does the article say nerve gas?
I guess the same reason Shepherd Smith called Sarin a "banned substance"... like it was DDT or something. They refuse to acknowledge facts these days.
This Islamic cancer is going on all over the world and John Kerry, Al Gore and other Dem politicians are trying to politicize it and blame President Bush!!
I wonder how many useful idiots will believe the Dems and vote stupidly?
Sarin is a nerve gas.
Weak editorializing passing for news. Just add "I hope" at the end of sentences like this.
One more victory for Civilization! Give Em Hell!
I am in shock. Since when are groups like RAF defined as terrorists much less ultra-left wing terrorists?
Don't you know that they are always classified as heroic activists drawing attention to the plight of the common man?
Send this reporter to the re-education camps!
" They must not have convenience stores in Japan. "
Hehehe...Got the joke ...Actually , Japan has more convenience stores per capita than the USA ...
" From what I have heard, Japanese police are pretty good, "
You heard wrong . They are bloody useless . Best thing they are good at is helping old ladies across the street , and giving directions .
" and Japanese prisons are NOT very pleasant at all. "
You heard right .
First US troops sent to Bosnia - 1995
Dumont attemps attack on the Lyon G7 summit - 1996
Dumont arrested, convicted and imprisoned for murdering police officer in Bosnia - 1997
US airstrikes against Yugoslavia - March 24 1999
Dumont escapes from Bosnian prison - 1999
Dumont sentanced to life in absentia by French court - 2001
Dumont enters Japan - Before July 2002
Dumont arrested in Germany but allowed to re-enter Japan - December 2003
Arrested in Japan - May 2004
Sources:
Japan troubled by entry of terror suspect
From above article: "French authorities have long associated Dumont, a Muslim, with the violent Roubaix gang in northern France, which they suspect of ties with Islamic radicals. He escaped a raid on the gang in 1996 that left some members dead, though French authorities say don't have enough evidence to charge the group with links to terrorists.
He headed to Bosnia to fight in the army alongside fellow Muslims and was arrested and convicted of killing a Bosnian police officer during a robbery and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He escaped in 1999 and vanished. Dumont was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison by a French court in 2001." Japan makes first al-Qaeda arrests in dawn raids
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We can learn two things from Dumont:
1. Interpol is not anything close to an effective crime fighting tool (not to mention a guard against terrorism) if it does not even recognize that a twice convicted, double international fugative is sitting in one of their member-country's holding cells.
2. Bill Clinton attended the Lyon G7 summit and would have been on the receiving end of Dumont's scheme, yet there was no known effort by the US to bring to justice those responsible for those who plotted this attempt on the President's life. Remember how much fun this same group made of GWB for going after Saddam for the assasination attempt on his father? Bill apparently has been oblivious to the effects of terrorism even at the risk of his own life and the lives of leaders of the other G7 nations.
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks for the information!
Please keep me informed.:)
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