Free Republic

The FBI has released the first photos of the AR-15 rifle that Thomas Matthew Crooks used in his attempt to kill former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last month. The images show that Crooks — a 20-year-old gun nut — broke down the semi-automatic DPMS DR-15 rifle into two pieces and stowed it in a black SwissGear backpack as he made his way through the Butler, Pa. rally crowd. A closer look at the weapon reveals an approximately three-inch chunk missing from the gun’s buttstock, which could be where the police sniper’s bullet struck before the Secret Service sniper...

Security service officials had would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks on their radar for almost an hour before he shot Donald Trump, a new image reveals. A photograph showing the 20-year-old sniper appearing to crawl on the ground while scouring the area was circulated to law enforcement as a suspicious sighting at 5:30pm the Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 14. Around 6.10pm, Crooks took up a position on the slanted roof and shot at Trump from a distance of around 165 yards, wounding him in the ear and killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore. Two more newly-released images also show a...

The Muslim terrorist group Qa’adat el-Jihad claimed responsibility Saturday for a terrorist bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria. The bombing in Bulgaria last week killed five Israelis, one a pregnant woman. The Lebanese paper El-Nashra reported that the group, which has ties to Al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility in an email to the Arab press.

(CNSNews.com) – Although no group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s deadly bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, a leading al-Qaeda ideologue last year recommended that jihadists in America include sporting events in their list of prospective terror targets.

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: NEW YORK - A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said. The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt...

MARRAKESH – A bomb killed 14 people including foreigners in Morocco's bustling tourist destination of Marrakesh, officials said on Thursday, in an attack that bore the hallmark of Islamist militants. The blast ripped through a cafe overlooking Marrakesh's Jamaa el-Fnaa square, a spot that is often packed with foreign tourists. A Reuters photographer said he saw rescuers pulling dismembered bodies from the wreckage. If the bombing is the work of Islamist militants, it will be the first time they have carried out a major attack in Morocco since 2003, when a series of suicide bombings in the commercial capital, Casablanca,...