Free Republic

London’s proposed ‘mega-mosque’ has been allowed to complete its application for planning permission, despite calls from one councillor to remove the “illegal and irresponsible” mosque. At Newham Council meeting last Monday night, Cllr Alan Craig asked the Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, to enforce a compulsory purchase order (CPO) to reclaim the site from the Abbey Mills Mosque Trust, members of Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat. Cllr Craig said: “Tablighi Jamaat intend that the mega-mosque will be their new international headquarters, yet the current temporary mosque on the Abbey Mills site has now been operating illegally and irresponsibly without planning permission for...

Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan? It was malice in wonderland at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday as Bush Administration envoys insisted things are getting better in Afghanistan, while angry lawmakers from both parties cited facts and figures showing just the opposite. Even the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Richard Lugar, found the Administration's claims wanting. "I'm not sure that we have a plan for Afghanistan," he said. Long seen as the "forgotten war" eclipsed by Iraq in U.S. priorities, Afghanistan is in the Washington spotlight this week with the release of three independent reports concluding...

U.S. to Offer Turkey Help on PKK The U.S. is to offer Turkey a package of measures to dissuade Ankara from mounting a large-scale military incursion into Iraq to attack PKK Kurdish guerrillas, who have killed scores of Turkish soldiers in recent weeks. Ahead of a meeting in Washington on Monday between President George W. Bush and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, U.S. officials said Ankara would have to get concrete American help to combat the PKK, which has bases in northern Iraq from where it frequently launches attacks into Turkey. “Erdogan has to go back with the...

A global Islamic missionary group has emerged as a key influence on terrorists targeting Britain. Tablighi Jamaat, a powerful, grass-roots religious organisation based in South Asia, is a common link to a string of attacks and conspiracies. One of the four men convicted this week of attempting to carry out suicide bombings on the London transport system

IT SAYS its members brought about the conviction of radical Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, uncovered insurgent tactics in Iraq and are now working to provide intelligence from North Korea.The organisation is not the US Central Intelligence Agency or Britain's MI6 but Vigil, a shadowy network of retired spies, senior military personnel, anti-terrorism specialists and banking experts. The group's director Dominic Whiteman said he set up Vigil with two other businessmen last year to act as an conduit between retired spies who were still party to good, raw intelligence, and the police and security services. "This evidence was just getting...

A mosque in Walthamstow, east London, is emerging as the hub where a number of the terror suspects may have met each other and become friends, writes Abul Taher. At least eight suspects worshipped at the Masjid-E-Umer mosque regularly, three of whom were well known to those that run it. Waheed Zaman, 22, lived opposite the mosque on Queens Road, and is believed to have prayed five time a day. Zaman, a final-year biochemistry student at London Metropolitan University, is understood to have become friends there with Ibrahim Savant, 25, a white convert to Islam, and Muhammed Usman Saddeque, 24....

A mosque in Walthamstow, east London, is emerging as the hub where a number of the terror suspects may have met each other and become friends, writes Abul Taher. At least eight suspects worshipped at the Masjid-E-Umer mosque regularly, three of whom were well known to those that run it. Waheed Zaman, 22, lived opposite the mosque on Queens Road, and is believed to have prayed five time a day. Zaman, a final-year biochemistry student at London Metropolitan University, is understood to have become friends there with Ibrahim Savant, 25, a white convert to Islam, and Muhammed Usman Saddeque, 24....

Members of Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamist missionary group that the United States accuses of links to Al-Qaeda, are in Argentina with the possible aim of recruiting local Muslims for terrorist activities, a newspaper has said. Citing sources in the intelligence community and the foreign ministry, the La Nacion said the 26 Islamists arrived in Argentina in five groups over the past few months. The militants, from Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa, Qatar and Egypt, came into the country to possibly contact and recruit Argentine Muslims to train them abroad to conduct terrorism, the newspaper said on Friday. The Argentine government, which...

NEW YORK: A prominent Muslim missionary group, Tablighi Jamaat, has come under the scrutiny of US investigators who suspect that al-Qaeda used it for recruiting terrorists, a media report said here on Monday. Founded in India 75 years ago, Tablighi Jamaat is a conservative Islamic missionary group spread across the globe. "We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States, and we have found that al-Qaeda used them for recruiting, now and in the past," Michael J Heimbach, the deputy chief of the FBI's international terrorism section, was quoted as saying by the New York Times. The...

ne of Al Qaeda's first assignments for Iyman Faris, the Ohio truck driver named last month in a terrorist plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, was to visit a travel agency while he was in Pakistan in late 2001 to have some old airline tickets reissued, federal investigators say.Because the tickets were not in his name, Mr. Faris needed an explanation to validate his request. Investigators say he used one that other Qaeda recruits have relied on to disguise their intentions: he pretended to be a member of Tablighi Jamaat, a fraternity of traveling Muslim preachers that is well known...

Fifteen thousand feet high in Kashmir and armed with a Kalashnikov–that was not how friends thought Jibreel al-Amreekee would end up. All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. A soft-spoken youth with long dreadlocks, al-Amreekee had a passion for sky diving and reading books on the world's religions. One religion that drew his interest was Islam, and while he was at North Carolina Central University, that interest grew into a calling. By 1997, he had converted and was spending his...

'Jihad Johnny' Linked to Flt. 63 Shoe Bomber America's Tailban traitor "Jihad Johnny" Walker and Flight 63 shoe bomber Richard Reid were recruited to do Osama bin Laden's dirty work by the same extremist Muslim group currently operating all over the globe to build an anti-Western army to fight jihad, one Mideast expert contended Friday. "The French newspaper La Provence reported Tuesday that Reid had been an acolyte of Tabligh-i-Jamaat," reports Islamic scholar Steven Schwartz in the New York Post. "U.S. media disclosed last week that Walker had been recruited by a San Francisco cell of the same group." Schwartz ...