Posted on 01/31/2007 5:53:52 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A foiled plot to kidnap, torture and behead a British Muslim soldier was orchestrated by Al Qaeda, police sources have said.
Officers suspect the mastermind behind the appalling attempt to bring the horrors of Baghdad to the streets of Britain is a senior Al Qaeda terrorist with close links to Osama Bin Laden.
More here:
• Hostility and fear on the quiet streets
• 'Did this soldier trigger the plot?'
The alleged plan was to abduct a Muslim soldier, mirroring the murders of British hostages Ken Bigley and Margaret Hassan.
The victim would have been made to plead for his life to Tony Blair, denounce the war and ultimately be executed - all on film.
In a move which would have caused unprecedented terror and revulsion, images of his death would have been posted on the Internet, security sources said.
The alleged plot follows an appeal by extreme Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed last summer for fanatics to kidnap a British soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan - branding all Muslims who serve with the coalition troops as "non-believers".
A senior security source said: "The plot involved a ruthless gang who regard British Muslim soldiers who serve in Iraq or Afghanistan as traitors for killing fellow Muslims.
If they had not found a suitable Muslim soldier to kill, it is quite possible they would have plucked an innocent member of the public off the streets and beheaded him.
"They wanted to scare British Muslims into leaving the military and also send a message of revenge to Downing Street for sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan."
Other targets could have been civil servants or anyone seen to be collaborating with the Government.
It has emerged that the Ministry of Defence has identified one individual soldier as the most likely potential victim.
The man, understood to be a regular soldier rather than a reservist, was said to be in a safe location.
Security sources said that at least one other British Muslim - on a hit-list of 25 potential targets - had also been identified as being in "imminent danger". He, too, was being kept safe.
It is understood that a tip-off from a trusted informant last summer sparked the dramatic events in Birmingham when nine men suspected of being members of the terror cell were arrested in a series of raids across the city.
During a six-month, £10million surveillance operation involving 250 police officers and MI5, cameras, telephone taps and surveillance teams had been used to monitor the group's movements.
Officers had hoped to keep the men under surveillance for a further two months to gather further intelligence but sources said the operation was brought forward following "clear indications" that the gang were making final preparations to enact their murderous plan.
One said: "Police had no choice but to carry out the arrests."
Eight men were arrested in raids at 4am while a ninth was held on a motorway in the afternoon.
Those arrested included businessmen, a teacher and a father-of-four on benefits. All are British of Pakistani descent.
The nine men were arrested on suspicion of the 'commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism' under the Terrorism Act.
The scale of the operation, which involved hundreds of officers, prompted a protest from some local Muslims, who accused police of over-the-top tactics.
West Midlands Police said 12 addresses had been sealed off in the Sparkhill, Washwood Heath, Kingstanding and Edgbaston areas of Birmingham.
They included an Islamic bookshop which was co-founded almost a decade ago by Moazzam Begg, who was captured and imprisoned in the Guatanamo Bay camp in Cuba before his controversial return in 2005.
Police also searched a grocery store run by a respected Asian businessman.
One arrested man was named locally as 29-year-old Amjad Mahmood.
His brother Zair said: "The police won't let me know where he is. His wife and kids are very distressed. My mother and father are very distressed."
Local councillor Ansar Ali Khan said he had spoken to the father of the arrested man who, he said, was "in shock to know that his son had been arrested".
He described him as "a very hard-working businessman", adding: "He has served the community for 30 years and he is proud to be British. He cannot imagine his son having any link to this sort of activity."
The brother of Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, 24, the first British Muslim soldier to be killed on active duty in Afghanistan, spoke of his fears that his hero brother may have unwittingly inspired the plot.
Corporal Hashmi was labelled a "traitor to Islam and professional terrorist" in a vicious internet hate campaign following his death.
His brother Zeeshan Hashmi, 27, himself a former soldier who is now studying Arabic at Cambridge University, said: "It would have been a horrendous crime had it taken place. My brother would have felt exactly the same."
The plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier is further evidence that fanatics in Pakistan are actively planning atrocities in Britain, sources said.
The London bombings on July 7 2005 and last summer's alleged airline terror plot were both masterminded in Pakistan, investigators believe.
It is believed anti-terrorist officers are liaising with their counterparts in Pakistan in the hunt for the mastermind of the Birmingham plot.
There have been claims that the raids had been exploited by the Government following days of damaging stories about fundraiser Lord Levy, casinos and turmoil in the Home Office.
A source at West Midlands Police said: "There is widespread fury that Whitehall officials have been briefing sensitive details of this operation.
"This terror raid has come at a very convenient time for the Government as it has taken a number of embarrassing stories off the news agenda.
"But it must be stressed that the timing of the operation was an independent police decision."
Bump.
And we are supposedly the torturers when we put women's underwear on their heads. Please, Congress, let our guys fight this war the way it needs to be fought so we can win! Stop tying our Soldiers/Marines hands behind their backs!
A new kind of terror comes to these shores
******************EXCERPT *********************
JAMES KIRKUP (jkirkup@scotsman.com)
Key quote
"What we have witnessed today is a change in terrorist tactics. This is something that happens more and more as splinter cells constantly try to slip under counter-terrorist surveillance." - PROF DAVID CAPITANCHIK
Story in full EYES wide open to the camera and a knife at his throat, his death would have burned a terrible new image into Britain's collective nightmare of Islamic terrorism. That is the bloody outcome intelligence officers believe was averted yesterday with a string of arrests in Birmingham.
The men arrested had been planning to abduct a British soldier and behead him in an internet broadcast, security sources said yesterday. Intelligence analysts said the plot was disturbing proof that Britain's domestic terrorist threat is still evolving.
Moving on from bomb attacks intended to kill and maim as many as possible, extremists are instead trying to spark political panic and social tension with individual acts of murder live on camera.
The new tactics of terror have been drawn directly from Iraq, where several hundred British Muslims have taken part in the bloody insurgency against Western troops and the country's post-war government.
In 2004, Britain was traumatised by the abduction and beheading in Iraq of Ken Bigley, a British engineer who was killed after being taken hostage. Still, the worst atrocities of the Iraqi turmoil have been committed by Muslims against Muslims, and so it could have been in the UK.
The soldier targeted in yesterday's alleged plot was, like them, a British-born Muslim, the plan to kill him apparently calculated to inflame the tensions within British Islam still further.
The nine men being questioned in a Coventry police station last night were said to have fallen under the sway of extremist interpretations of Islam as they grew up in Britain's second-biggest city.
Yet their victim, who was raised in the same area in the same wider community, made an entirely different choice: joining the British Army and serving Queen and country. Last year, he was deployed to Afghanistan, trying to break the grip of the Taleban militia.
Last night, the targeted soldier, an unmarried man in his twenties, was under police protection, and the Ministry of Defence was reviewing security precautions around the 330 or so declared Muslims serving in the British armed forces.
Police and MI5 officers involved in the six-month operation that led to yesterday's arrests believe the plan was to abduct the soldier then issue a series of films of his captivity via the internet, before eventually beheading him.
Pre-dawn raids were launched after intelligence officers at MI5 declared a "threat- to-life" situation, assessing that there was an "intolerable risk" that the plotters were about to act on their plan. Despite that conclusion, the official government assessment of the terror threat to Britain remained last night unchanged at "severe".
Combining broadcasts of a kidnapped soldier with demands for British withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as warnings to other British Muslims, the plotters were said to have been hoping to put enormous pressure on government ministers and traumatise the nation as a whole.
Professor David Capitanchik, an expert on terrorism at Aberdeen University, said: "What we have witnessed today is a change in terrorist tactics. This is something that happens more and more as splinter cells constantly try to slip under counter-terrorist surveillance."
He continued: "The security forces have yet again done a good job in foiling this plot, but if the scale of the threat is as large as we believe it to be, we will yet again need to bulk up the numbers of personnel working in counter-terrorism."
John Reid, the Home Secretary, said yesterday's arrests demonstrated again the "real and serious nature of the terrorist threat we face". He declined to discuss details of the case and later issued a statement warning the media not to prejudice any eventual trial that the arrested men might face.
None of the nine was charged with any crime yesterday and police have 28 days to question them. Assistant Chief Constable David Shaw of West Midlands police, who oversaw yesterday's operation, appeared to signal a lengthy process of questioning and investigation, saying that officers were "at the foothills of what is a very, very major investigation".
About 150,000 of Birmingham's one million population are Muslims. Mr Shaw praised Muslim community leaders in the city for their co-operation and understanding over yesterday's arrests.
But Islamic leaders in the districts where the arrests took place warned that the operation had harmed community cohesion.
"I just wish the police could have been more discreet because, at the moment, it's just suspicion. At the moment, the whole of the community are labelled as terror suspects," said Allah Ditta, of the Alum Rock Islamic Centre.
And Adam Yosef, of the interfaith Saltley Gate Peace Group, said the raids had "affected our relationships between local community and police and between the community itself".
The city's Islamic community also produced the only British Muslim soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, 24, a member of the Intelligence Corps, was killed in Afghanistan last July. His death attracted nationwide political and media attention.
It also led al-Ghurabaa, a radical Muslim group, to post images on the internet of the dead man wreathed in flames, accusing him of "terrorism" against his fellow Muslims. Al-Ghurabaa has since been banned, but several figures behind the group remain at large and are said to use internet sites to spread extremist interpretations of Islam.
IN BIRMINGHAM yesterday, the pre-dawn peace was shattered as more than 100 police officers forced their way into properties around the city.
Twelve raids took place in Alum Rock, Sparkhill, Kingstanding and Washwood Heath, and there were nine arrests.
Police targeted a terraced home in Jackson Road in the Alum Rock area and another on nearby Foxton Road.
The man arrested at Jackson Road was named as Amjad Mamood, 29, a father-of-two. Abid Hussain, a neighbour said: "There was a big bang at about 4:30am and then glass smashing. I went outside and there were police everywhere. They went in through the front door to get Amjad and about eight of them went around the back and the side of the house. All I could hear was screaming - the little boys were shouting 'please don't take our father', over and over again.
"They were sobbing. They are only three and seven - they must have been petrified."
One person was believed to have been removed from a house in Ward End Park Road and three men were thought to have been taken from a house on Asquith Road. In the neighbouring district of Sparkhill, a house was raided in Poplar Road as well as the Maktabah Islamic book store and Blade Communications cyber cafe, both on Stratford Road.
Police removed computer equipment from the cafe and an Islamic book warehouse was also being searched on Golden Hillock Road.
*************************
Military Matters: Variables in Iraq
By WILLIAM S. LIND
*********************EXCERPTED************************************
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- One way to look at the situation in Iraq is to try to identify variables, elements that could change. Without change, the war is likely to end with U.S. troops having to fight their way out, if they can.
The military situation in Iraq is not a variable. All that can change is the speed of the U.S. defeat. Some actions might slow it, although the time for such actions, such as adopting an "ink blot" strategy instead of "capture or kill," passed long ago.
Other actions could speed the U.S. defeat in Iraq, an attack on Iran chief among them. It now looks as if the Bush administration may have realized that an out-of-the-blue, Pearl Harbor-style air and missile attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is politically infeasible. Instead, the White House will order a series of small "border incidents," U.S. pinpricks similar to the raid on an Iranian mission in Kurdistan, intended to provoke Iranian retaliation. That retaliation will then be presented as an Iranian attack on U.S. forces, with the air raids on Iranian nuclear targets called "retaliation." Fabricated border incidents have a long history as causes of war. Adolf Hitler used one as an excuse for his Sept. 1, 1939 attack on Poland.
As President George W. Bush made clear in his Jan. 10 speech on Iraq, his policies are not a variable. He will pursue the neo-conservatives' dreams all the way.
That leaves the U.S. Congress, and it may well be the key variable in the equation. 2008 is not that far away, and electoral panic continues to spread among Hill Republicans. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is the first conservative Republican senator to break with the administration, opposing the "surge." Conservatives have a central role to play here, because if they turn openly against the war, Bush will lose his base.
But the Democrats hold both houses of Congress, so the main burden of ending a failed enterprise will fall on them. At present, they seem unwilling to go beyond symbolic but ineffectual measures, such as passing "non-binding resolutions." Why? It may be that they are paralyzed by a false understanding of the war, one stated by Vice President Dick Cheney on "Fox New Sunday" when he said, "We have these meetings with members of Congress, and they agree we can't fail... "
In fact, we have already failed. The war in Iraq was lost long ago. In terms of the administration's objective of a "democratic Iraq," which Bush re-stated in his Jan. 10 speech, it was lost before the first bomb fell, because it was unattainable no matter what we did. Now, not even the minimal objective of restoring an Iraqi state is attainable, at least until Iraq's many-sided, Fourth Generation civil war sorts itself out, and probably not then. Events in Iraq are simply beyond our control; the forces our invasion and destruction of the Iraqi state unleashed far overpower any army we can deploy to Iraq, surge or no surge.
Once Democrats accept and announce that Congress cannot lose a war that is already lost, they will have the freedom of action they need to get us out. Polls suggest the public will go along; most Americans now realize the war is lost, regardless of what President Bush may say or do.
It is probably true, as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., constantly reminds us, that chaos will follow an American withdrawal. But that chaos became inevitable, not with America's withdrawal (it is already happening, even with U.S. troops present), but with its destruction of the Iraqi state. Again, the Democrats need to make this point to the American people, and make it often.
********************************************************
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)
So Al Qaeda is scared to death of Muslims who won't play they're stupid game?
UK terrorism kidnap plot - high shock for low cost
***********************Reuters ***Excerpt*****************************
By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent
LONDON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - An alleged militant plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier would have had the appeal of massive media impact and shock value while requiring minimal resources, security analysts say.
A defence source confirmed to Reuters that a major police operation in which nine men were arrested in central England on Wednesday involved a plot to kidnap a soldier.
Police refused to give details of their investigation but British media widely reported that the hostage would have been tortured, forced to plead for his life and eventually beheaded, with video of his death posted on the Internet.
Editors Choice: Best pictures
from the last 24 hours.
Security analysts said such a plan -- modelled on tactics previously used by al Qaeda in Iraq -- would have been much easier to carry out than multiple bombings of the kind seen in Madrid in 2004 or suicide attacks staged by four British Muslims in London in 2005.
"This is the type of operation you need no resources for, you need no great skills for, you don't really need to link into any particular network," said Peter Neumann, terrorism expert at King's College Centre for Defence Studies in London.
"You really need just two or three men who are very determined, and a car, and you can kidnap someone and you're creating two weeks of media impact, possible even longer, for very little effort."
Robert Ayers, a former U.S. intelligence officer, told Sky News that such an operation would have dominated headlines and sent a powerful message that "British soldiers returning home are not safe in their own country".
media is the key leverage for such events
otherwise they would have little impact and therefore not worth the bother
yes, the media is the direct reason why terrorism happens
"They included an Islamic bookshop which was co-founded almost a decade ago by Moazzam Begg, who was captured and imprisoned in the Guatanamo Bay camp in Cuba before his controversial return in 2005."
But....but...but.....people being held at Guatanamo are being held there unjustly.......
"His brother Zair said: "The police won't let me know where he is. His wife and kids are very distressed. My mother and father are very distressed."
I wonder if they are as distressed as the family of the man that was going to be beheaded?
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