Free Republic

Investigators used a ruse to question a man later charged with aiding terrorists, an FBI agent testified Tuesday at a hearing over admissibility of the conversation and a search of the defendant's luggage. FBI agent Michael Scherck said he and another law enforcement officer approached Ehsanul Sadequee as he got off a flight from Atlanta to New York on Aug. 18, 2005, and told him they wanted to talk to him about passenger complaints that he had acted suspiciously on the plane. Scherck said that in fact there were no complaints, but investigators wanted biographical information from Sadequee as part...

Cheney warns of new attacks Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed. In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects. And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than...

A chance arrest in the city of Rotterdam and tapped telephone conversations were both key factors behind the move to the heightened terrorist alert that has been in place in the Netherlands since 9 July. On Wednesday, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that a 17-year-old Dutch Muslim youth had been arrested on 30 June on suspicion of involvement in a raid on a supermarket. A subsequent search of his home allegedly led to the discovery of a number of items which, while they had nothing to do with "ordinary" crime, could be connected with...

A MAN linked to Al-Qaeda and believed to have helped to mastermind the Madrid train bombings was overheard last month describing a plot for a woman to carry out a chemical or germ attack in America that he said would “wipe out an entire neighbourhood”. The Italian warrant for the arrest of Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, 32, an Egyptian seized in a suburb of Milan last week, details transcripts of bugged conversations and telephone calls in which he not only boasted of his involvement in the Spanish attack of March 11 but also spoke of future plans. The Spanish government...