Free Republic

BERLIN (AP) — Two suspected al-Qaida members were arrested by German authorities Sunday, federal prosecutors said. Police arrested the pair on Sunday in Mainz and Bonn for allegedly breaking German laws forbidding membership in a foreign terrorist organization, federal prosecutor Kay Nehm said.

CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- When the Organization of American States asked its press freedom expert, Santiago Canton, to report on the state of the independent press in Venezuela, they must have known it was a sensitive mission. President Hugo Chavez's radical populist government does not take kindly to criticism nor does it appreciate outside scrutiny of its internal affairs. It's doubtful, though, that anyone at the OAS expected Canton to fall victim himself to the kind of tactics the Venezuelan press faces every day. Just moments after beginning the final press conference of his four-day visit to ...

2 NAILED IN HERALD SQ. SUBWAY BLAST PLOT August 28, 2004 -- The convention will be held at Madison Square Garden, located over Penn Station and a block west of the Herald Square subway station. The busy station serves hundreds of thousands of daily riders on the B, D, F, V, N, Q, R and W lines. Sources said the threat was taken so seriously by officials that it was mentioned this week in a Department of Homeland Security memo. The plot unraveled when the NYPD's Intelligence Division began conducting surveillance earlier this year on a group of Muslim...

Men wanted to blow up bomb in 34th Street/Herald Square station. Men of Middle-Eastern descent. No ties to convention. More to follow...

Six out of seven men suspected of plotting an Al Qaeda terrorist attack in Bahrain were re-arrested yesterday. New evidence reportedly revealed that they were on the verge of launching an attack when they were first arrested on June 22. An investigation of belongings seized from their homes indicated that they had planned and were ready to execute an attack, said a statement from the Interior Ministry. Chemicals taken from their homes and files seized from their computers indicated that they had completed the planning stages of their operation and were awaiting a convenient time to strike, said the statement....

A British-born Muslim convert convicted in Australia's first terrorism trial of plotting to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Canberra was sentenced to nine years in prison. Perth District Court judge Paul Healy said 50-year-old Jack Roche, originally from Hull, should serve four and a half years before becoming eligible for parole, although he backdated the term to start when Roche was taken into custody - meaning that Roche could be free in about three years. Prosecutor Ron Davies earlier described Roche's plot as an affront to Australian values, and called for a sentence approaching the 25-year maximum to serve as...

Texas Terror Plot Foiled? Jan 8, 2004 10:20 am US/Eastern DALLAS (CBS) In the East Texas hamlet of Noonday -- known for onions, not anarchy -- federal agents arrested a common-law couple last April. They were hiding a weapons cache, including, as CBS News Correspondent Bob McNamara reports, the makings of a sophisticated sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands. William Krar, 62, with ties to white supremacist groups, pleaded guilty to possessing a chemical weapon and faces life in prison, while 54-year-old Judith Bruey could get five years. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons. "They certainly...

HOUSTON — One evening two winters ago, a man in Staten Island, N.Y., absent-mindedly flipped through his mail. Inside one envelope was a stack of fake documents, including United Nations (news - web sites) and Defense Department identification cards, and a note: "We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands."

Saturday, Apr. 17, 2004 11:23 AM EDT Foiled Al Qaeda Attackers Caught Red-Handed with WMDs Two members of an al Qaeda cell connected to top terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have been caught in Jordan with chemical weapons and poisonous gas for a planned attack that Jordanian officials say would have killed up to 20,000 people. The officials told the London-based newspaper al-Hayat on Friday that the al Qaeda plotters planned to launch a WMD attack against a Jordanian Military Intelligence installation, the US embassy in Amman and a government building in the country. According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv,...

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al Qaeda bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks. Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives...

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission Thursday morning that it was an alert Customs agent - and not the Clinton adminsitration "shaking the trees" for intelligence on al Qaeda - who deserves credit for foiling the December 1999 al Qaeda plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. "It's questionable to me . . . that somehow shaking the trees was what broke up the Millennium [Plot]," Rice told the 9/11 probers, referring to claims by Clinton terrorism czar Richard Clarke that White House alerts had the nation's security apparatus on the lookout for trouble. In fact, said...

A college student charged with plotting to bomb Coast Guard and Army National Guard stations has pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of trying to obtain explosives. Under a plea agreement disclosed Tuesday, Paul Douglas Revak, 20, hopes to be home by Christmas, said his attorney Thomas W. Hillier II. 'Expressing His Frustration' With Bush "I don't think Paul has a mean bone in his body. I think he was expressing his frustration with how the administration was dealing with the Iraq situation and got a little carried away," Hillier said. Revak was arrested in June after investigators said...

<p>Authorities revealed Wednesday that they have been investigating a now-imprisoned man who allegedly collected semiautomatic assault weapons, ammunition, pipe bombs and barrels of jet fuel and appeared to be planning to attack an unknown building.</p> <p>There have been no charges filed involving the materials but the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is investigating, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials told a headquarters press conference. Calls seeking comment from the ATF and FBI were not immediately returned.</p>

BREAKING NEWS (also in Filipino press this a.m. ) Text: "The Philippines military has arrested a Filipino man they suspect of supplying a ton of explosives for use in an alleged plot to bomb Western targets in Singapore. Security forces arrested the man, Hussain Ramos, also known as Ali Ramos or Abu Ali, in the southern Philippine city of Marawi on Monday night." Jailed militant Al-Ghozi implicated Ramos Officials says he was identified by an Indonesian man convicted in April of buying explosives for the alleged operations, Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi. Police say al-Ghozi is a member of the regional militant...