Free Republic

Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Islamist gunman who hunted down three Jewish children and a rabbi after murdering three French paratroopers in Toulouse last month, didn't act alone. In his journey from the slums of Toulouse, to the local mosques, to the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan that he described to French police, to filming his murder of the terrified children in order to post video clips on the web, Mr. Merah was following a path marked out years earlier by the coldblooded jihadist theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri. What is perhaps more disturbing, Mr. al-Suri was recently set free...

A SUSPECTED al Qaeda leader, accused of being involved in September 11 and planning the 2004 Madrid train bombings, has been imprisoned in a secret US jail for the past year, Spain's El Pais newspaper reported today. Mustafa Setmarian, 48, a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistani and European security service officials told El Pais. A spokesman for the US embassy in Spain declined to comment on the report. Setmarian's 2005 capture was reported in May of this year after the...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani security agencies have arrested two al-Qaida suspects and are investigating whether one is a Syrian believed to be a key figure in Osama bin Laden's terror network in Europe, two intelligence officials and a senior government official said Thursday. The two suspects were captured this week during a raid on a house in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province, said one of the intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to address the media. A senior government official confirmed the arrests and said authorities were investigating whether...

THE mastermind of the Madrid train bombings remains at large and security sources believe that he may be planning an attack in Britain during the general election. Documents found in a Madrid flat used by some of the bombers show how their leader, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, ordered them to strike in the final days of the Spanish election campaign last March. The coded command was sent three months earlier; Nasar left it to his lieutenants in Spain to decide what the target should be. Fernando Reinares, Spain’s counter-terrorism director, said the documents showed that the bombing on the eve of...