Cyprus-Forum.com

[Get Real!]

Al-Qaeda kingpin: I trained 9/11 hijackers

I've got another one... Al-Qaeda kingpin:"George Bush is a GOOD man... everything he says is right!"

[samarkeolog]

Yet, just before the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on Milošević's regime during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army bought arms from Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias through Greek Cypriot front companies....

After the UN imposed financial sanctions upon Milošević's regime, the Greek Cypriot government allowed Serbian front companies to bypass them and fund the regime and its wars and, facilitated by various state and private actors to buy weapons to fight them with; billions of dollars - possibly $4b - were spent enabling the regime and enriching its élite.

Armenian Cypriot Benon Sevan broke sanctions against Iraq, which then bought arms from Cypriot companies and grey arms brokers.

The Russian mafia both sold arms to Iraq and laundered the profits from that trade through Cyprus...

Is Cyprus going to be attacked too?

[Paphitis]

Al-Qaeda kingpin: I trained 9/11 hijackers

I've got another one... Al-Qaeda kingpin:"George Bush is a GOOD man... everything he says is right!"

Spot on fella!

Due to that I promise I will be nice to you for the next 5 minutes...

Opportunities like this don't happen often so make the most of it....

Your time starts NOW...

[Get Real!]

Your time starts NOW...

You're getting confused with Sale of the Century...

[Oracle]

Your time starts NOW...

You're getting confused with Sale of the Century...

I thought that was the "Mastermind" cue ...

[Paphitis]

TURKISH CITIZEN ARRESTED IN DAGESTAN IS A MEMBER OF TERRORIST GROUP

28-year-old citizen of Turkey Ali Soitekin Ollu arrested during a joint operation of the Russian Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, is an active member of an international terrorist group.

As it became known to a REGNUM correspondent, during the operation, Soitekin Ollu confessed that from 2001 to 2005 he was an active member of the terrorist group led by Abu Khavs (representative of Al-Qaeda).

Representatives of the FSS also stated that in 1996-1997 Ali Soitekin served in the Turkish army, and in 2001 he was enlisted by Islamic extremists to fight in Chechnya. He departed to Baku, from there to Tbilisi, and then took taxi to Pankiss canyon, where Abu Khavs resided at that time. There, he was trained as commando among 35 of his compatriots, under the command of Turkish citizen Abu Zar.

On August 2002, Ali Soitekin as a member of a terrorist group led by warlord Gelayev arrived in Chechnya, where in 2002-2004 he actively participated in attacks through all Chechnya, including the attack on the village of Avtury (Shali district) where the terrorists took 12 peaceful citizens as hostages.

In 2004, Ali Soitekin was wounded and was taken to Dagestan, where he received treatment for a year. He was arrested on December 29 and is currently under investigation.

http://www.armtown.com/news/en/yer/20060111/21138/

[samarkeolog]

TURKISH CITIZEN ARRESTED IN DAGESTAN IS A MEMBER OF TERRORIST GROUP

So you want this to just be a general cut-and-paste dump for anything ever about terrorism committed by anyone Turkish?

[Paphitis]

Europeans Get Terror Training Inside Pakistan

September 10, 2007

Europeans Get Terror Training Inside Pakistan
By SOUAD MEKHENNET and MICHAEL MOSS
FRANKFURT, Sept. 9 — The accused conspirators in a bombing plot disrupted last week in Germany were part of what the authorities say is a small, but growing, flow of militants from Germany and other Western countries who are receiving terrorism training at camps in Pakistan.

Beginning early last year, at least five of the suspects traveled to the tribal regions of Waziristan, where they learned to prepare chemical explosives and military-grade detonators that they intended to use to build three car bombs, according to German officials and a confidential German intelligence document that details the allegations.

The authorities said the man they had identified as the leader of the plot, Fritz Martin Gelowicz, 28, apparently found his way to the camp in Waziristan through contacts he made at an Islamic center he attended in Neu-Ulm, Germany. Other suspects in the suspected conspiracy then followed Mr. Gelowicz to the camp, where their instructors included militant Islamists from Uzbekistan who are aligned with Al Qaeda, according to the confidential document.

As further evidence of traffic between Germany and the tribal areas of Pakistan, intelligence officials said six other men from Germany who had received similar training had been detained in Pakistan, and they suspect that numerous other Germans have attended the camps without being identified by the authorities.

German officials say they are troubled by evidence that Al Qaeda and other groups are training Western-born recruits whose passports allow them easy access to other Western countries.

“They started to look especially for people from Europe, because they wanted to train them and later to use them here in Germany for operations,” said a high-ranking German intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

The accusations in Germany contain similarities to two high-profile cases in Britain.

The leader of the suicide bombers who killed 52 people in the 2005 London subway and bus attacks trained at a camp in northwestern Pakistan, according to court papers. Four British men convicted in April of planning fertilizer-bomb attacks around London also trained in Pakistan camps, according to court papers in the case, known as Operation Crevice.

This summer militants released a 46-minute videotape depicting some 250 graduates of a Taliban training camp near the Afghan-Pakistan border, which included speeches in English by recruits who were grouped by the countries they had been trained to attack, including Germany and the United States.

“We are not only fighting in Afghanistan,” the Taliban leader, Mullah Mansoor, said at the end of the ceremony. “Those American, British, German, French, Canadian and others who have come to finish us, if God wills, we will destroy them with the power of strong faith in God. We will commit suicidal attacks and we will destroy their national assets.”

German officials said they were relying largely on American and Pakistani intelligence to identify men who traveled to Waziristan, and while they declined to specify the nature of that intelligence, they said it was strong.

The amount of training under way in the tribal areas of Pakistan is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate, but intelligence officials are concerned about what they see as a trend toward terrorist groups recruiting Westerners.

In a speech in New York on Friday, the C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said, “We do see them working to train people whom you and I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow about if they were getting off the plane with us at Kennedy, people whose identity makes it easier — whose persona makes it easier for them to come into America and to blend into American society.”

The Pakistani government has recently acknowledged that Al Qaeda and other militants are operating in the tribal-controlled areas on its border with Afghanistan. Pakistan had struck an agreement with leaders in the South Waziristan tribal area, giving groups there amnesty as long as they refrained from attacking government installations and vehicles. But it broke down last month when the military began a new operation against the militants, which led to the capture of close to 300 Pakistani troops by the militants.

Even as Western governments and Pakistan try to crack down on terrorist training, their efforts are clashing with human rights groups in Pakistan that are pressing for the release of terrorism suspects who have been detained without being charged.

Pakistani courts recently released two Germans, who officials say they believe received explosives training in Waziristan, including a 45-year-old gem dealer who was designated a “potentially dangerous person” by the German police for threatening statements he made three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He is back home in Germany, where officials say he has contacts with violent Islamic cells and has made several trips to the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He was arrested on June 18 by the Pakistani military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, as he was boarding a plane in Lahore to fly back to Germany, and remained in detention for two months until the Supreme Court ruled there was insufficient evidence to continue holding him.

“There was no basis for the ISI to hold this man for two months,” said Amina Masood, an official with the Pakistani group Defense of Human Rights, which is pressing for the release of more than 400 people it has identified as being held by the ISI as terrorism suspects.

Ms. Masood said that the suspects included a handful of foreigners from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and that several of the European detainees had been released in recent days, including men from Britain and Belgium.

The German intelligence document on the car-bombing plot, which was prepared by the authorities last week , details trips made by the German suspects to militant camps in Pakistan starting in early 2006.

The men trained in Waziristan with Uzbek militants belonging to a group known as the Islamic Jihad Union, which was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in 2005.

Its predecessor, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, financed by Osama bin Laden, had been Central Asia’s largest militant group until it went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban and was decimated by the American-led campaign after the Sept. 11 attacks. The successor group still had fighters in Afghanistan and had “also been working on our common targets together with Caucasian mujahedeens,” the group’s commander, Ebu Yahya Muhammad Fatih, said in a statement posted on the Internet in May 2007.

The involvement of members of the Uzbek group in militant training is particularly troubling, intelligence officials say, because of their expertise in explosives, and their use of women in suicide missions and of men who unwittingly drove car bombs.

In Pakistan, Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the spokesman of the Pakistani military, acknowledged that Uzbeks were present in Waziristan, yet said the traffic of German nationals to Pakistan for terrorism training had not been confirmed.

But according to German intelligence officials, Mr. Gelowicz, who converted to Islam in his teens, most likely connected with the Uzbek group through the Multi-Kultur-Haus, the Islamic center in Neu-Ulm.

The center had close ties to the jihadist fighting in Chechnya, where three of its members died in combat. While German officials shut down the center in 2005, one of its imams, who fled to Saudi Arabia, continued to encourage jihadist activities by young men who had attended the center, German authorities say.

In Waziristan, Mr. Gelowicz formed a close relationship with the leaders of the Uzbek group, the German report says. A second man who joined him on that trip in March 2006, Adem Yilmaz, 28, who was born in Turkey, focused on bringing more men from Germany to be trained, the investigative report said.

They were followed in June by Atilla Selek, a 22-year-old man born in Ulm who the authorities say joined Mr. Gelowicz in December 2006 in scouting American military facilities in Hanau, Germany, the investigative report says. Mr. Selek, who goes by the name Muaz, is now in Turkey.

A fourth German man, Zafer Sari, 22, from Neunkirchen, went to the camps last summer, after attending a language school in Syria. Mr. Sari, who also has a Turkish passport, was in Turkey on June 21, when he left for Jordan and then Cairo. He is considered a suspect but is not in custody, according to the report and German officials.

The fifth suspect to train in the camps was Daniel Martin Schneider, 22, also from Neunkirchen. He went to Pakistan in August 2006 and also helped send other people to train there. Mr. Schneider was arrested last week as well.

The report says the Islamic Jihad Union has close ties to Al Qaeda, and evolved from a group with regional targets to sharing Al Qaeda’s goal of a worldwide jihadist movement. The Uzbeks have also been joined by militants from elsewhere in Central Asia, changing the ethnic complexion of the training camps.

Souad Mekhennet reported from Frankfurt, and Michael Moss from New York. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti and Margot Williams in New York, Salman Masood in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/world ... nted=print

[samarkeolog]

Are there any NYT articles mentioning suicide bombers whose last meal was Adana kebab?

[Paphitis]

A NATION CHALLENGED: THE SUSPECT; Sept. 11 Shadow Lingers As Egyptian's Trial Begins

By KATHERINE E. FINKELSTEIN
Published: Monday, January 14, 2002

When the young Egyptian landed on Sept. 19 at Kennedy International Airport, officials were alarmed by what they found when they searched his luggage: a fake Egyptian pilot's uniform, phony documents identifying him as a pilot and a forged certificate from a Florida flight school, according to court records.

The man, Wael Abdel Rahman Kishk, 21, insisted that he had falsified the documents to impress friends. When asked, he said he had come to the United States to study business administration, not aviation. Officials feared Mr. Kishk might have been part of a second wave of terror attacks. Their suspicions were heightened when they discovered that he had indeed applied for flight training at a community college in Washington State.

Mr. Kishk was among hundreds of people taken into custody after the Sept. 11 attacks because of initial fears that they might be linked to terrorism. The suspicions about most of those people have evaporated, but this case is different.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin today in Mr. Kishk's trial on charges of falsifying documents and making a false statement. Though prosecutors have no evidence connecting him to the Sept. 11 attacks or any other terrorist acts, those original suspicions are still a driving force behind the government's case.

Mr. Kishk has been charged with a crime that could land him in prison for up to five years, and that, while not linked to terrorism, is not easily dismissed as irrelevant: falsely denying his plan to study aviation.

In a December letter to Judge Charles P. Sifton of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, the assistant United States attorney in the case, Dwight C. Holton, said that at the trial the government ''will stipulate that there is no allegation or evidence offered that the defendant was in fact a part of any such second wave, or that he was in any way responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks or connected to those who were.''

Even so, the letter says, Mr. Kishk's actions are crimes because of the atmosphere at the time. The government was on high alert for a second wave of hijackings, possibly to be carried out by someone like him: young, Middle Eastern, with a legitimate visa, who might have trained at a Florida flight school.

''The discovery of the pilot's uniform and fake documents suggested that Kishk might have been hoping to wrongfully gain access to the cockpit of a jetliner,'' Mr. Holton wrote. ''With this backdrop, the question of whether Mr. Kishk intended to learn to fly went directly to the question of whether Kishk intended to gain access to the cockpit and then assume control of that jetliner.''

Mr. Kishk's court-appointed lawyer, Michael K. Schneider, says that his client was simply trying to pursue his studies when he was arrested on Sept. 19. Since then, Mr. Schneider said, Mr. Kishk has been held alone in a cell and denied access to television, reading materials and even, for weeks, shoes and a shaving razor. ''The terms of his detention are harsh given what he's charged with,'' Mr. Schneider said.

As Mr. Kishk remains solitary and silent, with neither friends nor family coming to his aid, it has been difficult to determine his intentions when, according to the government, he applied to a community college in Washington to take flight lessons. A spokesman for the United States attorney in Brooklyn would not comment on the case, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service referred calls about Mr. Kishk to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau did not comment.

When Mr. Kishk arrived at Kennedy Airport last September on a flight from Egypt, he was returning to the United States. Public records and interviews with school officials and landlords show that he lived in Daytona Beach, Fla., in 2000, staying with two other Arab men in a cheap, messy apartment on a cul-de-sac. But neighbors on Arnold Drive do not remember him, and a manager at the building, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Kishk's name was not on the lease.

The apartment is not far from the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where Mr. Kishk enrolled in a free English-language course that the school offered to community residents, said Lisa L. Ledewitz, a university spokeswoman. Mr. Schneider, his lawyer, said Mr. Kishk's goal had been to learn enough English to take flight lessons there.

He never did. Yet on his driver's license, Mr. Kishk and both his roommates listed the university's address as their own. Ms. Ledewitz said she was not familiar with the roommates' names but declined to search the enrollment records for them.

One of the men publicly listed as living in the apartment with Mr. Kishk was Hany A. Barakat, 25, who is registered with the Federal Aviation Administration as a licensed airplane mechanic from the United Arab Emirates. Neither roommate could be reached for comment.

In August 2000, Mr. Kishk applied to Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, Wash., an institution with about 2,300 students where Embry-Riddle offers aeronautics courses. According to the indictment against him, Mr. Kishk intended to take flight lessons there. Kenneth W. Turner, vice president of administrative services at Big Bend, said Mr. Kishk had sent his application with $210 in processing fees, but never contacted the school again and was not admitted.

It is not clear when Mr. Kishk left the United States, but he arrived in New York on Sept. 19 on an Iberian Airlines flight that originated in Cairo and passed through Barcelona, Spain. At customs, he presented an Egyptian passport and visa, acquired in late 1999. But when immigration agents dug through his suitcase, they found two documents that appeared to be from the F.A.A. -- forms known as 8500-9's, which American pilots use to show they have met medical requirements. Mr. Kishk used a different name on each form: Kishk Wael Abd Elrhman on one, Kasheal Wael Abdelrhaman on the other.

One of the forms had misspellings and appeared to be the wrong size, Detective Kevin Frazer, of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, reported in an affidavit, while the other was a much better forgery, because it was an authentic document signed by an F.A.A. examiner. But the form was dated 1998, and that examiner told Detective Frazer that he had stopped doing examinations in 1997.

Inspectors say they also found a photocopy of a fake Turkish passport, the Egyptian pilot's shirt with Mr. Kishk's name and the word ''pilot'' on it, and a falsified certificate from Embry-Riddle, identifying Mr. Kishk as a private pilot.

Detective Frazer reported that he found Mr. Kishk's answers ''inconsistent and evasive.'' First, he said, Mr. Kishk insisted he had come to the United States to study business administration; then he admitted after extensive questioning that he had taken an English class on the Embry-Riddle campus and had intended to take flight training.

He asserted that he had created the fake documents and the pilot's shirt solely to impress his friends, Detective Frazer said, and ''further claimed that while he had himself made the shirt, he had never worn the shirt, even in the privacy of his home, and never intended to do so.''

At a court appearance on Sept. 21, the government argued successfully that, given his evasive answers and lack of ties to the community, Mr. Kishk might flee and should be held without bail.

His lawyer, Mr. Schneider, in interviews with reporters, predicted that Mr. Kishk would become a ''minor figure'' in the government's terrorism inquiry. The allegedly forged documents, some of them already expired and buried in his suitcase, were not intended for use, he said.

On Oct. 12, Mr. Kishk was brought to court shoeless and unkempt, having been denied a razor and nail clippers, provoking complaints from his lawyer.

Judge Sifton angrily told the prosecutor that if security concerns had led to restricted grooming, the restrictions ''shouldn't be particularly focused on Mr. Kishk unless there's some good sufficient reason for doing it.'' But some of the restrictions persisted.

The government has never publicly explained what lingering suspicions it has of Mr. Kishk. Mr. Schneider sees the case in simple terms.

''In my view, he's just a guy from Egypt who'd come to study in the United States and got charged with these documents,'' he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/14/us/na ... wanted=all