Free Republic

A Philadelphia man has been charged after allegedly threatening the life of Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House. U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger said that 38-year-old Norman LaBoon has been charged with two counts of threatening an official of the United States and with transmitting in interstate commerce a threatening communication, according to the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The FBI arrested LaBoon in March after receiving a copy of a YouTube video in which LaBoon made threats about Cantor. Officials tracked the I.P. address to a computer in Philadelphia used by LaBoon, who had previously been arrested for...

OSLO (AFP) - The founder of radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam was questioned in Oslo by German police ahead of the arrests in Germany of three men suspected of plotting to attack visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allaiwi. German police interrogated Mullah Krekar in Oslo early last week and he is thought to be linked to at least one of the men arrested on Friday on suspicion of planning attacks during Allawi's visit, the Norwegian daily VG reported Sunday. All three have been ordered held over their alleged membership of Ansar al-Islam, described by German authorities as a foreign terrorist...

JEDDAH – Suicide bomber Abdullah Asiri had inserted around half a kilogram of explosives into his own body to carry out his failed assassination attempt of Prince Muhammad Bin Naif, Assistant Minister of Interior for Security Affairs, last week. As more details emerged of the events surrounding the attack that took place at the Prince’s home in Obhur, sources told Okaz newspaper Friday that Asiri’s mobile telephone was equipped with two SIM cards, one of which was used to speak to call members of the terrorist organization in Yemen, and the other to detonate the device located inside Asiri’s rectum...

Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri --- "believed to be the movement's resident bombmaking expert - skills he first put to chilling use in a suicide attack in which he recruited his own younger brother, Abdullah, 23, to act as the "martyr". The attack was an audacious attempt on the life of the Saudi Deputy Minister of the Interior, Prince Muhammad Abdul Aziz Al-Saud..."

MI6 hired Al Qaeda men to kill Gaddafi: ex-official By Martin Bright LONDON: The British government will this week go to unprecedented lengths to stop a renegade counter-intelligence officer, David Shayler, from making his most devastating claim yet : that the Libyan Islamic cell paid by British intelligence agents to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996 were members of Al Qaeda. The Libyan cell is believed to have included one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants, Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. Al-Liby lived in...

Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler's alleged 'fantasy'about Gadaffi plot Martin Bright, home affairs editor Sunday November 10, 2002 The Observer British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya's fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden's trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government, which described similar claims by renegade MI5 officer David Shayler as 'pure fantasy'. The...

Police in Hamburg shut down the notorious al-Quds mosque, renamed the Taiba mosque in 2008, led by German-Syrian national and voluntary imam Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli (a.k.a. Abu Ilyas al-Suri) has been a suspected al-Qaeda operative, primarily as a financier and logistician, in the European Union for close to two decades. Long active in al-Qaeda circles, Darkazanli first surfaced on the radar of Western intelligence agencies when he purportedly helped procure a cargo ship named “Jennifer” for Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 (Hamburger Abendblatt, October 16, 2004). Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA- Federal Criminal Police Office) admitted that it had been...

IT COULD have been a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s novella, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. But there was nothing magical about the realism of the video recorded by Rodrigo Rosenberg, a Guatemalan lawyer, four days before he was shot dead on Sunday May 10th while cycling on a busy avenue. “If you are hearing this message,” he intoned, “it is because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assassinated by the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala’s president and first lady]”. Political murders are sadly nothing...

SNIPPET: "This past Sunday, six terrorists were captured in Medan, North Sumatra province, by Indonesia's counter-terrorist unit, Special Detachment 88. All were thought to be linked to a paramilitary camp in Aceh that was raided in February and two of them, Pandu Wicaksono Widyan Putro and Bayu Sena, were said to be tied to the twin hotel bombings in Jakarta last July." SNIPPET: "Special Detachment 88 will likely continue its raids in and around Aceh to round up those camp members that have thus far evaded the police dragnet."

<p>HAMMOND, Ind. - A former Purdue University graduate student convicted of threatening to kill President George W. Bush and others in Internet postings has been sentenced to more than four years in prison.</p> <p>Thirty-eight-year-old Vikram S. Buddhi, an Indian national who was living in West Lafayette, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Hammond to 57 months in prison and 3 years of probation.</p>

HAMMOND, Ind. -- A Federal judge refused to throw out a Purdue University student's indictment on charges alleging he urged the assassination of President George Bush and made threats against other administration officials. Friday's ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James Moody clears the way for Vikram Buddhi's trial to begin June 25 in Moody's Hammond courtroom. Buddhi, an Indian national who was attending advanced engineering classes at Purdue's West Lafayette campus, faces an 11-count complaint for alleged comments he made in an Internet chat room in 2005 and 2006. The indictment alleges that he made threats against the president,...

BOSTON - A pharmacy college graduate conspired with two other men on a terror plot to kill two prominent U.S. politicians and carry out a holy war by attacking shoppers in U.S. malls and American troops in Iraq, prosecutors said Wednesday. But their plans — in which the men used code words like "peanut butter and jelly" for fighting in Somalia and "culinary school" for terrorist camps — were thwarted in part when they could not find training and were unable to buy automatic weapons, authorities said. Tarek Mehanna worked with the men from 2001 to May 2008 on the...

SNIPPET: "Steven Cucuzzella, of North Charleston, pleaded guilty in federal court to sending a threat by mail to destroy the Naval Brig near Charleston. Another charge of threatening to kill former President George W. Bush was dismissed."

In its pages, Omar (and his mother) reveal that the Clinton administration failed in a major assassination attempt of Osama bin Laden, just days after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. This is something that has often been speculated but never confirmed. Former insiders like Richard Clarke say Omar bin Laden’s account of the assassination failure appears to be credible. And if this is the case, it might explain a little more about what documents Sandy Berger really had stashed away.

There has been suprisingly little reportage of the actual details of would-be shopping mall terrorist, Mr. Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef's mindset and intentions. So as a public service, here the FBI agent's affidavit (pdf file) in easy to read format. Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef STATE OF ILLINOIS)) COUNTY OF COOK)AFFIDAVIT1. I, Jared Ruddy, Federal Bureau of Investigation, being duly sworn, state as follows: I am a Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and have been so employed for more than two years. I am currently assigned to an FBI Counterterrorism squad as well as the...

John William Yettaw thought he was on a mission from God to save Aung San Suu Kyi. But the American ended up inadvertently extending her house arrest. It started with his now infamous swim in May. Overweight, asthmatic and suffering from borderline diabetes, he arrived at the back door of the Nobel Peace laureate's home and lay down exhausted, with cramps in both legs. Suu Kyi's two companions heard him moaning but let him in only after dawn. Then Suu Kyi herself told him to get out, allowing him to stay two nights when he complained of ill health instead...

The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is serving a 30-year sentence at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., for joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate then-President George W. Bush. Last year, Abu Ali requested two books written by Obama: "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." But prison officials, citing guidance from the FBI, determined that passages in both books contain information that could damage national security.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House. Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom as he disclosed details he had never revealed before. It was in stark contrast to Moussaoui's previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned on earlier terrorist convictions. Moussaoui testified Monday he lied to investigators when arrested...

A schoolboy who joined a cell of Islamic fanatics targeting the Royal Family has become Britain's youngest convicted terrorist. Hammaad Munshi, now 18, became obsessed with terrorism while aged 15 and studying for his GCSEs. Instead of revising he spent hours secretly surfing jihadist websites and distributing material as part of a 'conspiracy to wipe-out' non-Muslims. A computer expert, the teenager set up a website giving advice on how to make bombs, detonators, Napalm and using machine guns. He was arrested at the age of 16 as he walked home from school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, following a GCSE exam....

(New York-WABC, September 20, 2004) — Breaking news concerning President Bush's visit to New York. Eyewitness News is told that there has been a credible threat against the president Monday. From the AP: The News in Photographs The Day's Top 25 Stories- NY, NJ, CT, US, Entertainment Your Hourly Forecast Eyewitness News' political reporter Dave Evans says the first sign of something going on came when security around the president's visit got even tighter than usual. He says authorities are looking for a 55-year-old man named Lawrence J. Ward in connection with the reported attempt on the president's life. Ward...