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TERRORISTS are plotting to blow up five European passenger jets in a Christmas "spectacular", security experts say. The threat has been taken so seriously it came close to leading to an outright ban on all hand luggage, a senior insider has revealed. Mobile phones and electronic devices could still be banned from plane cabins, with the threat of a 9/11-style coordinated attack on London and other major cities feared imminent. The warning comes as Whitehall officials admit that a terror strike on the UK is now "almost inevitable" particularly with British jihadis returning from fighting alongside the Islamic State in...

Military control keeps Islamic militants at bayThe soft coup in Egypt over the past week shouldn’t have surprised anyone. The only reason it wasn’t harder and faster was because the secularist generals know the Muslim Brotherhood has a friend in the White House. Egypt’s armed forces are an elite class with special power, privileges and important economic interests it wants to retain. Despite everything that was at stake over the recent chaotic months, the generals couldn’t simply send in the tanks to do a Tiananmen Squaredance on the dissidents. The whole world was watching; the loyalty of the troops wasn’t...

(CNSNews.com) – At a congressional hearing on Muslim radicalization in U.S. prisons, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said that investigators needed to analyze Christian militants in America because they too might try to “bring down the country.”In an exchange with witness Patrick Dunleavy, the former deputy inspector of the criminal intelligence unit, New York Department of Correctional Services, Rep. Lee mentioned the case of a man who blew up an abortion clinic and proposed that this perhaps was an attempt to undermine U.S. law that allows a woman to procure an abortion. Rep. Lee then said, “As we look to...

Islamic militants shot and killed a Christian lawyer, his wife and their five children in northwestern Pakistan, just days after a pastor nearly died in a seperate attack linked to Muslim extremism... Police found the bodies of attorney and evangelist Edwin Paul and his family at their home ...Haripur Station House Officer Maqbool Khan... "We went and found seven bodies in a house." Paul’s Muslim neighbor, Mushtaq Khan, told reporters a group of armed men had threatened the lawyer the previous day. "On Monday a group of armed men stopped Paul and took him by the collar and said, ‘Leave...

The Yemeni government ordered an "unprecedented" number of troops into a region controlled by a branch of Al Qaeda, as the U.S. and Britain, concerned about the threat of terrorism, both closed their embassies in the capital of Sana. The Obama administration increased the pressure on Islamic militants in Yemen Sunday after the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for plotting the failed attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. The White House's top counterterrorism official didn't rule out U.S. military action. Yemen deployed troops into provinces east of the capital to combat a growing...

The sea lanes of the South Atlantic have become a favored route for drug traffickers carrying narcotics from Latin America to West and North Africa, where al Qaeda-related groups are increasingly involved in transporting the drugs to Europe, intelligence officials and counternarcotics specialists say. A Middle Eastern intelligence official said his agency has picked up "very worrisome reports" of rapidly growing cooperation between Islamic militants operating in North and West Africa and drug lords in Latin America. With U.S. attention focused on the Caribbean and Africans lacking the means to police their shores, the vast sea lanes of the South...

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (Reuters) - Lebanese troops battled al Qaeda-linked militants in northern Lebanon on Sunday and at least 11 people were killed, seven of them soldiers, security sources said. They said the fighting broke out between the Lebanese army and members of the Fatah al-Islam militant group after security forces raided homes in Tripoli to arrest suspects accused of robbing a bank in the city a day earlier. Three soldiers were killed in the clashes at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp. The militants also attacked an army patrol in the Koura region of northern Lebanon, killing four soldiers,...

FIVE people were shot dead and one policeman was wounded in a string of drive-by shootings by suspected Islamic militants in Thailand's restive Muslim-majority south, police said. A 60-year-old Buddhist cattle raiser was gunned down while walking, before suspected insurgents burned his body and left it on the roadside in Yala, one of three violence-torn southern provinces bordering Malaysia. A 52-year-old Buddhist street ice cream seller was also shot dead on Friday by two suspected insurgents on a motorcycle in Yala where another Muslim villager, 27, was killed late on the same day while riding a motorcycle, police said. In...

Islamic militants today shot dead four Buddhists in two separate attacks in Thailand's mainly Muslim south, where an insurgency has raged for more than two years... In one attack, two teenagers in Islamic students' dress and riding a motorcycle, shot and killed three Buddhists in Yala... “The militants exploited the fact that the men were shopping at a grocery store and could not defend themselves, even though they had a gun,” police Colonel Somsak Wannawak said. Earlier a militant shot dead a Buddhist man in Pattani province while he was riding a bus... More than 1400 people have died in...

Al Qaeda wants to build a political operation in Iraq to broaden its campaign against the U.S.-backed government, a top U.S. general said on Wednesday. Citing intelligence mostly gathered since the death of al Qaeda's former leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June, Major General William Caldwell said the militant group appeared to be refining its approach beyond bombings and beheadings. "Al Qaeda in Iraq wants to present itself as a legitimate organization and is striving to increase its operational power by building a political base with a military wing," Caldwell told a news briefing. He did not give specific examples....

Algiers, 26 June (AKI) - Algerian police killed 19 Islamic militants who rejected a government amnesty aimed at ending years of conflict following a civil war in the 1990s, reports said on Monday. Police reportedly raided on Sunday bases of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda, in the eastern province of Annaba. The operation followed an upsurge in attacks by Islamic fundamentalists this month which killed 31 people. Unlike some other Islamic militant groups, the GSPC has refused to give up the armed struggle in exchange for an amnesty offered by president...

KARACHI - Protests against the administration of President General Pervez Musharraf and against the US took off in Pakistan about a month ago in the guise of rallies denouncing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.These protests have now reached the stronghold of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan: the self-proclaimed "Islamic State of North Waziristan", a volatile tribal area on the border with Afghanistan.For the past few days this region has been the scene of fierce battles between the Pakistani armed forces and the Taliban and their supporters. This, analysts believe, is the starting point of taking the nascent Tehrik-i-Nizam-i-Mustafa movement...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- The terrorism trial of 14 Muslim men accused of plotting the murder of Dutch politicians began in confusion Monday, when the first witness refused to testify -- or even give her name. The defendants, mostly Dutch-born children of North African immigrants, include Mohammed Bouyeri, already sentenced to life in prison for the November 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Lawyers for the men say they are religious youths, innocent of any wrongdoing.

Thousands of Indonesians with experience as Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Southern Philippines, Sri Lanka and Libya are believed to be residing in big cities in Java and West Sumatra although it is not known whether they were also part of the terrorist network led by the Malaysian terrorist duo Dr Azahari and Noordin M. Top. The statement was made by two Indonesian intelligence agents in Singapore and Jakarta on Friday following a statement by Din Syamsuddin, chairman of Indonesia's second biggest Moslem mass organization, Muhammadiyah, that some 3,000 former militant fighters from Afghanistan had been recruited since 1980 to wage...

SRINAGAR, India -- The massive earthquake that rocked Kashmir appears to have dealt a blow to the disputed region's Islamic militants, ripping through their heartland along the mountainous frontier and wrecking their network of camps, safe houses and weapons caches. One former militant said Tuesday that a temporary rebel cease-fire called after the quake was a "clear sign they are in trouble." But he and other one-time rebels, Western diplomats and Indian officials cautioned that any setback to the insurgents — who work in small, flexible cells — is likely to be merely temporary. And even if they can't launch...

ROME (Reuters) - Italy has arrested 141 people in a security swoop following the bombings in London and Egypt last month and remains at high risk from an attack by Islamic militants, the Interior Ministry said on Monday. Italy, the subject of several Internet threats from purported Islamic militant groups, said it had begun expulsion procedures against 701 people. "The latest evaluations ... confirm an ongoing high risk of a terrorist attack on our country," the ministry said in a statement after a parliamentary meeting on the findings from a series of nation-wide raids in recent days. Italy has not...

PARIS (AP) - A Paris court sentenced five Islamic militants Tuesday to jail terms for associating with "a terrorist enterprise," with some of the five convicted of helping the assassins of an anti-Taliban commander in Afghanistan. The five were sentenced to terms ranging from two to seven years. Those defendants included some convicted of providing logistical support to the killers of Ahmed Shah Massood, who was assassinated in 2001.

Gunfire has broken out in Uzbekistan in the eastern city of Andijan. Local residents say a group of armed men have stormed the prison and released possibly thousands of inmates. Residents living close to Andijan prison say the attack began at midnight (2100 GMT) when 15 cars pulled up at the prison. Men armed with automatic rifles and sawn-off shotguns got out and opened fire on the guards, apparently killing some of them. They then pulled open the gates and a stream of prisoners poured out. One local eyewitness said it took 20 minutes for the crowd to pass.

MADRID (Reuters) - Armed Islamist militants that operate in Europe are also helping support the armed insurgency in Iraq, one of Europe's foremost experts on such groups told Reuters. Spanish High Court Judge Baltasar Garzon, who has been investigating Islamist militants in Spain since 1991, warned that groups such as the Algerian Salafist movement and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group were particularly dangerous for Europe. "They are groups that have membership inside and outside Europe and in any case we have to keep close watch on the relationship these groups have with others like Ansar al-Islam," Garzon told Reuters in...