Police in Quebec have arrested a terrorist suspect on charges of conspiracy to set off bombs in Austria and Germany. He is accused of helping to run a jihadist Web site in Canada and of having links with a cell of al-Qaida propagandists in Vienna.
While Austrian police arrested three suspected operators of a jihadist Web site on Wednesday in Vienna, Royal Canadian Mounted Police closed in on one of their colleagues, Said Namouh, in a town in the Canadian province of Quebec.
He was accused of conspiracy to bomb targets outside Canada. The 35-year-old man, reportedly Moroccan by descent, lived near Maskinongé, Quebec, and was allegedly involved in procuring explosives and making online threats against the governments of Austria and Germany last spring. Canada was reportedly not a target.
The Vienna group (more...) consisted of a married couple and a friend who are all accused of producing a video which threatened attacks on Germany and Austria last March. The six-minute film warned of violence if the governments of both countries failed to pull troops out of Afghanistan.
In March, Austria had a total of five officers in Afghanistan.
The video appeared on the German-language home page of the Global Islamic Media Front, a propaganda Web site for al-Qaida. Its producers seem to have taken inspiration from a cell in Canada, possibly from Namouh himself. The English-language edition of GIMF has been based in Canada since 2002, and authorities say the alleged head of the Vienna cell, Mohammed M., approached the Canadians by e-mail to volunteer help on a German-language site. "He more or less asked how you set something like that up," said a German security official.
The German-language site went online in 2005.
GIMF is an organizational tool for al-Qaida sympathizers, who communicate in discussion forums, trade information and radicalize new recruits. But German security official say the cell arrested in Vienna was not actively planning an attack. "They were more like armchair jihadists," said one official.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,505801,00.html
JPTF 2007/09/17
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