Norway Attacks: The Worrying Rise of the Lone-Wolf Terrorist (Time.com)

As investigators dig deeper into Anders Behring Breivik's twisted world, they are coming to the conclusion that the Norwegian right-wing extremist most likely acted alone. To many, it may come as a relief that Breivik's claims of being just one of several killer cells in some wider conspiracy for global domination turns out to be nothing but a web of deception spun by a brutal killer. But investigators and counterterrorism officials are not relieved. They fear that Breivik represents a new, potentially deadly paradigm shift in the world of extremist violence.

Over the past year or so, counterterrorism officials have been warning of a new trend, the so-called solo terrorist, a fighter trained by organizations like al-Qaeda but then sent off to act on his own, with little or no further correspondence with the group. This tactic reduces the amount of "chatter" - discussions on cell phones and over the Internet - that counterterrorism officials routinely pick up when a terrorist plot is in the offing. But Breivik is no solo terrorist. He has taken the concept a step further and appears to have no real connection to any organized group, say investigators. "Breivik represents a new paradigm," says Janne Kristiansen, head of Norway's domestic intelligence, the Police Security Service. "He's not a solo terrorist. He's a lone wolf who has been very intent on staying under the radar of the security services by leading a lawful life." (See TIME's photos: "Explosion and Shooting Rock Norway.")

Kristiansen, whose organization operates about 26 field offices charged with the task of keeping tabs on extremist activities in Norway, is not willing yet to categorically rule out a possible conspiracy that resulted in the July 22 Oslo bomb blast and mass shootings on Utoya island. But evidence so far indicates that Breivik acted alone and is using claims of a wider network as a tool to manipulate the media and keep himself in the headlines. "At this moment in time we do not have any indication that he had any help from accomplices or other cells," she says. "He is manipulating us all in the sense that he is keeping us all uncertain."

Right now, Norwegian investigators are combing through Breivik's 1,500-word manifesto for leads, putting his claims to the test of rigorous investigation to separate fact from fantasy and deception. The Norwegians have requested the assistance of Europol, and senior Norwegian intelligence officials were in Brussels on July 27 to discuss the investigation with European Union officials. Norway is not a member of the E.U., but European officials are particularly concerned about Breivik's claims to have links with cells outside Norway and are investigating any potential contacts he may have had with right-wing extremists in other European countries. Breivik claims to have had extensive contact with the English Defence League (EDL), for example. Kristiansen declined to comment in detail on the EDL but confirmed that the U.K.-based organization does have a connection to its Norwegian counterpart, the Norwegian Defense League (NDL). The NDL, however, has been a nonstarter in Norway, unable to garner any broad support. It is also unclear if Breivik had any contact with the NDL. (See "Fighting Terrorism with Democracy: How Norway's Prime Minister Plans to Heal His Country.")

Norwegian officials attribute the weakness of Norway's extreme-right scene to a dearth of charismatic leaders and Norway's tradition of antifascism. Norway was occupied by the Nazis during World War II, sparking a massive resistance movement. In fact, even Breivik uses the Norwegian resistance to Hitler as an argument for why he is not a neo-Nazi.

Norway has also been proactive in keeping neo-Nazi groups in check. In 2004 the country's domestic intelligence moved in on a right-wing extremist group called Vigrid, whose leader, Tore Tvedt, had built up a network of about 200 people and drew them in with a mix of neo-Nazi teachings, Odinism and ideas borrowed from Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Okalahoma City bomber, according to an intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous. Fearing Vigrid could evolve into a terrorist network, the agency launched a campaign to disrupt the group by sending agents to visit everyone involved except its top leaders. One day in 2004, agents from all 26 field offices paid personal visits to each of Vigrid's members, many of whom were teenagers living with their parents. The investigators continued this tactic for several months, until about 60% of Vigrid quit the group voluntarily. (See TIME's photos: "Inside the World's Most Humane Prison.")

Despite Breivik's atrocities, Kristiansen still believes that Islamic terrorism poses a greater threat to security in Norway than the right wing. "The most dangerous groups are the Islamic extremists. That hasn't changed in the 10 years since 9/11," she says. And now adding to that threat is the rise of the lone wolf, the disconnected terrorist. "It is one of our biggest worries," she says. "You can't track down terrorists if they don't talk to each other on the Internet."

See More on Anders Breivik.

See "A Killer in Paradise: Inside the Norway Attacks."

View this article on Time.com

Most Popular on Time.com:

View the original article here

Mumbai attacks won't stop Clinton trip to India (AP)

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says it is more important now than ever to show solidarity with India in its fight against terrorism and she will not cancel her planned trip to the country next week following bomb attacks in Mumbai.

Speaking to reporters at the State Department shortly after coordinated blasts struck India's commercial capital on Wednesday killing at least 21 people and wounding 113, Clinton offered condolences to the Indian people and government. She said India has been hit by terrorism before and has responded "with courage and resilience."

Clinton said she will go ahead with her trip as planned and believes "it is more important than ever that we stand with India." Clinton is scheduled to visit New Delhi and Chennai starting next Tuesday.

View the original article here

Wheelchair bomber attacks Iraqi police station (AP)

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Qassim Abdul-zahra, Associated Press – Sun Jun 26, 11:35 am ET

BAGHDAD – A suicide bomber in a wheelchair blew himself up at the entrance to a police station north of the capital Baghdad on Sunday, killing three people and wounding 18, officials said.

Two police officers were killed and 10 injured in Tarmiyah, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Baghdad, two police officers and one medical official said.

The head of the Tarmiyah city council, Qassim Khalifa, told The Associated Press that it was not clear whether the bomber was really handicapped or using the wheelchair as a way to deflect attention from security personnel.

The bomber went to the police station claiming to need a letter from the police certifying he'd been maimed in a terror attack, Khalifa said. Iraqis who have been disabled from a bombing or shooting can receive compensation from the government if their injuries are documented.

"Police inspected him but not very carefully as he was handicapped or pretending to be handicapped, so they let him go inside the police reception area where the blast occurred," Khalifa said.

In Baghdad, security authorities were out in force to protect Shiite pilgrims converging from around the country to commemorate the death of Imam Moussa al-Kadhim, a revered Shiite figure. Pilgrims traditionally walk to the twin-domed shrine in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kazimiyah, where al-Kadhim is buried.

Predominantly Sunni militants often target the pilgrims as they are walking to and from the shrine from cities and towns across Iraq. Sunday morning a sniper shot and wounded two Iraqi soldiers near the village of Wahda, a mixed Shiite-Sunni village 20 miles (30 kilometers) south of the capital, said a police and hospital official. The soldiers were manning one of the checkpoints set up to protect pilgrims as they walk to the shrine.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi court has sentenced the wife of a slain al-Qaida leader to 20 years in prison on terrorism-related charges, an Iraqi judicial spokesman said.

Hasna Ali Yahya, the Yemeni wife of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was convicted last Thursday, according to Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council spokesman Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar.

Bayrkdar didn't give details on the charges, but a government official said she was convicted of facilitating correspondence between insurgents and preparing explosive-laden belts. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to release information.

Al-Masri's wife, a mother of three has been in custody since the April 2010 joint U.S.-Iraqi raid north of Baghdad that killed al-Masri along with another prominent al-Qaida in Iraq militant.

Six months later, Iraq's al-Qaida umbrella group, the Islamic State of Iraq threatened to kidnap family members of Iraqi politicians and ministers if al-Masri's wife and children were not released.

Last month, the two daughters and son were handed over to their uncle in Yemen, according to a Yemeni diplomat in Baghdad. The youngest child is 18 months old, while the others are 9 and 7, the diplomat said. He spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to release information.

Al-Masri, an Egyptian, joined al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and trained as a car bomb expert before traveling to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, U.S. officials have said.

He led the terror organization after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed in June 2006. The group launched a bombing campaign shortly afterward to show that al-Qaida was far from eliminated.

___

Associated Press Writer Saad Abdul-Kadir contributed to this report.

View the original article here

Death count in Sept. 11 attacks increases by 1 (AP)

By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press David B. Caruso, Associated Press – Fri Jun 17, 8:16 pm ET

NEW YORK – A man who died last year of lung disease was added Friday to the official list of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

New York City's medical examiner ruled that 63-year-old Jerry Borg, of Manhattan, who died in December, was killed by complications caused by a lung condition he got from inhaling dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Borg suffered from pulmonary sarcoidosis, a disease in which inflamed cells can make someone's lungs stiff and interfere with normal breathing.

The death brings the official count of World Trade Center attack victims to 2,753.

The ruling is a rarity. Thousands of people have blamed health problems on trade center dust, but Borg is only the third victim to be added to the medical examiner's list of victims of Sept. 11, 2001.

Borg was working downtown on the day of the attacks and became caught in the dense cloud of pulverized concrete and glass that billowed over lower Manhattan when the twin towers fell.

Borg's nephew, Joseph Borg, of New York City, said Friday that his uncle worked as an accountant and was doing an audit at a building at ground zero on Sept. 11. He said his uncle witnessed "the whole thing." He recalled that his uncle had some health problems before his death.

"He said something about having a lung problem before he passed away. And that he was waiting for a lung transplant," Joseph Borg said. "It might have been due to the fumes from the 9/11 accident."

He said his uncle was not married and had no children. "He lived an ordinary life. He went to work and came home. That's it," Joseph Borg said.

The other two people who were added to the medical examiner's list also were working downtown on Sept. 11.

Felicia Dunn Jones, a 42-year-old civil rights lawyer, fell ill immediately after the attacks, was diagnosed with sarcoidosis and was dead within five months. Her death wasn't ruled as officially caused by the terrorist attacks until 2007.

Leon Heyward, 45, died in 2008 of lymphoma, an illness that hasn't been conclusively linked to trade center dust, but Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch ruled in early 2009 that his cancer was complicated by sarcoidosis.

All victims of the terrorist attacks have been classified as homicide victims.

A spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office, Ellen Borakove, declined to release additional information about the circumstances of Borg's illness or personal biography, citing privacy rules.

Congress late last year created a $2.78 billion fund to compensate people who might have been sickened by exposure to trade center dust and ash, and set aside $1.5 billion to fund health programs for rescue and cleanup workers.

Medical studies have found elevated asthma rates among people who were caught in the dust cloud or spent extended periods in the trade center ruins. Fire Department medical experts have documented diminished lung power among an unusual number of firefighters who were at the site.

Hard evidence linking other ailments like cancer to the dust, however, has been elusive or inconclusive, leading Hirsch to resist immense political pressure add more people to the death count.

He famously declined to add a retired police detective, James Zadroga, to the list after concluding that the lawman's fatal lung condition was caused by prescription drug abuse, not by trade center particles trapped in his lungs.

That decision remains controversial, and the sponsors of the health bill that passed in December named it after Zadroga.

__

Associated Press Writer Cristian Salazar contributed to this report.

View the original article here

Man behind failed Moscow terror attacks killed in Russia (AFP)

MOSCOW (AFP) – Russian forces have killed three men including an organiser of failed New Year terror attacks in Moscow when they put up resistance during a routine security check in the unrest-infested Caucasus, police said on Saturday.

Late Friday police and the FSB security service officers killed three men in Dagestan after their attempts to stop a suspicious-looking car met with resistance, regional police said.

The attackers began shooting at the security forces and were killed by return fire.

Police identified one of the assailants killed near the village of Manas as Kamil Magomedov, who it said was behind the failed bombings that were supposed to rock Moscow on the New Year's Eve.

"He looked after those who sought to organise the attacks in Moscow on December 31 when Zavzhat Daudova blew herself up," a spokeswoman for Dagestani police told AFP.

Russian investigators said at the time the Russian capital had escaped twin suicide bombings on the last day of 2010 by a sheer stroke of luck as Daudova had accidentally set off her suicide belt before heading into the city centre.

The second potential suicide bomber fled after the explosion but was later arrested.

Russia is fighting an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, where it fought two wars with Chechen separatists in the 1990s, and the Caspian region of Dagestan has experienced some of the deadliest violence.

Islamic militants are seeking to establish an independent state across the North Caucasus and vowed to make 2011 a year of "blood and tears" for Russia.

In January, a suicide bomber from the Caucasus blew himself up at Russia's biggest Domodedovo airport, killing 36 and injuring more than 100.

View the original article here

Jury may have doubted key Mumbai attacks witness (AP)

CHICAGO – Five days of testimony from the government's star witness in the trial of a Chicago businessman accused in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a Pakistani militant group and its suspected ties to the country's main intelligence agency.

But jurors' split verdict in the case suggests they didn't always take David Coleman Headley — an admitted terrorist with a troubled past — at his word, underlining the difficulties federal prosecutors face winning complex terrorism cases that involve questionable cooperating witnesses and a complicated web of terror networks.

"Jurors are always looking for corroborating evidence," said former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton. "Mr. Headley avoided the death penalty and it's understandable that jurors would want evidence that his testimony was independently confirmed, but didn't find it."

After two days of deliberations, jurors cleared Tahawwur Rana, a Pakistani-born Canadian, of any involvement in the three-day siege that has often been called India's 9/11. He was convicted of two lesser charges: providing material support to the terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed in the attacks, and in a plot that never was carried out against a Danish newspaper that in 2005 printed cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. He faces up to 30 years in prison on the two charges.

Though defense attorneys called it a "conflicting decision" and planned to challenge the verdict, experts say the jury's split ruling isn't wholly surprising, especially because so much of the trial focused on Headley's testimony.

The 50-year-old American Pakistani pleaded guilty to laying the groundwork in the attacks on Mumbai and conducting surveillance in Copenhagen. He agreed to testify against his school friend Rana to avoid the death penalty and extradition.

Those facts probably weren't lost on jurors, who heard defense attorneys chip away at Headley's credibility for days, portraying him as a manipulator, who lied to FBI agents and the judge and worked as a Drug Enforcement Administration informant to get lighter sentences after two heroin smuggling convictions.

Experts said the evidence in the Denmark plot seemed easier to verify independently of Headley, who spent days on the stand detailing in emails, recorded conversations and testimony how he worked for both the Pakistani intelligence agency known as the ISI and Lashkar. His testimony took up more than half the trial, and had been highly anticipated worldwide after Osama bin Laden was found hiding out in a military garrison town outside of Islamabad. The trial fueled fears that could put pressure on the already frayed U.S.-Pakistani relations and inflame tensions between Pakistan and India.

Prosecutors presented Rana's videotaped arrest statement to the FBI where he said he knew Headley had trained with Lashkar. They also played a September 2009 recorded phone conversation between the men where "targets," including the Danish newspaper, were discussed.

But when it came to the Mumbai accusation, evidence either originated from Headley or one of the other six Pakistani men charged in absentia in the plot.

Seth Jones, a RAND Corp. political scientist, said it is generally easier for the government to prove that somebody is supporting a group than helping in a plot.

"Headley did not appear as crucial as the government had hoped in prosecuting Rana," Jones said. "There just was insufficient evidence to support his direct involvement in the Mumbai attacks."

Rana was accused of allowing Headley to open a branch of his Chicago-based immigration law business in Mumbai as a cover story and travel as a representative of the company in Denmark. In court, a travel agent showed how Rana booked travel for Headley and prosecutors showed emails from the Danish newspaper.

The Indian government expressed disappointment with the jury's ruling and said it would examine the verdict and evidence to decide whether to formally charge Headley, Rana and others in its own investigation into the Mumbai rampage, which left more than 160 people dead.

"When Rana has been held guilty of assisting the Lashkar -e-Taiba and guilty of supporting terrorist acts in Denmark how have they separated him from the Mumbai attacks?" said Ujjawal Nikam, the special public prosecutor in the Mumbai attack trial in India. "It appears that there are some apparent contradictions in this verdict."

Still, the split verdict was considered at least a partial win for the Justice Department, with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald calling it a clear message to "all those who help terrorists."

Headley's testimony may not have been enough to convict Rana in the Mumbai attacks, but it might have been the only shot prosecutors had, said Pat Rowan, the former head of the Justice Department's national security division.

"There's a lot of individuals out there who are cooperators, and they have a lot of baggage, and you're not really sure how they'll come across when they testify," Rowan said.

Roy Black, a high-profile Miami defense attorney, said the benefit to using a cooperating witness, such as Headley, is that the prosecution has someone who can tell the entire story, and then the jury can parse out what they believe.

Jurors weren't available to explain their verdict. The names weren't released due to the sensitivity of the case, and they declined to speak publicly. The only hint of what was being discussed during deliberations is the one question they had about the affiliations of two other men charged in absentia in the case. The judge directed them to look at the evidence.

"It's not uncommon for juries who think it was a close case to want to show how close they thought it was by dividing up the counts and finding people guilty of one and not the other," said Stuart Baker, a former senior Homeland Security official and former general counsel of the National Security Agency.

___

Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan in Washington and Muneeza Naqvi and Ashok Sharma in New Delhi contributed to this report.

___

Sophia Tareen can be reached at http://twitter.com/sophiatareen

View the original article here

New Jersey tries to prevent terror attacks with texting (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New Jersey Transit Corporation, the nation's third largest transit system, ramped up its efforts to guard against terrorism on Wednesday by asking passengers to text about suspicious behaviors or unattended packages.

The initiative, dubbed Text Against Terror, was being promoted with radio and television ads, posters, and panel cards on trains.

It compliments NJ Transit's security hotline (888-TIPS-NJT). Passengers are encouraged to text tips to NJTPD (65837).

"As the eyes and ears of the NJ Transit system, our customers and employees are the first line of defense in the war against terror," NJ Transit Police Chief Christopher Trucillo said in a statement.

NJ Transit has 165 rail stations, 60 light rail stations and over 18,000 bus stops in New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia. It provides over 895,000 trips every weekday.

(Reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr.; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune)

View the original article here

Oil tanker terror hijacks easy, attacks complex (AP)

NAIROBI, Kenya – Supertankers — the hulking, slow-moving ships that transport half the world's oil — have few defenses against terrorist hijackers like those envisioned by Osama bin Laden, security experts said Saturday.

Al-Qaida operatives with enough training could easily manage to capture ships carrying millions of gallons of oil or liquefied natural gas. All they would have to do is imitate the tactics of Somali pirates who already use small boats to overpower tanker crews in mostly remote locations, the experts said. Few supertankers have armed guards, due to gun import laws and the risk of accidental gunfire igniting explosive cargos.

But once terrorists captured a supertanker, it wouldn't be so easy to sow the economic chaos and costly environmental destruction bin Laden desired and outlined in secret files captured from his Pakistan hideout. It's actually extremely complex to blow up a supertanker or even sink it near heavily guarded oil shipping lanes like the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal or the Strait of Hormuz at the end of the Persian Gulf.

"It would only be a risk if they could sail it undetected and had worked out how to blow it up, which is pretty complicated," said Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, the head of Dryad Maritime Intelligence.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a confidential warning to authorities and the energy industry Friday that al-Qaida was seeking information on the size and construction of tankers.

The newly revealed plot showed that while bin Laden was scheming about the next strike to kill thousands of Americans, he also believed an attack on the oil industry in "non-Muslim waters" could create a worldwide economic panic that would send oil prices soaring and hurt Westerners at the gas pump.

Other bin Laden documents revealed that the terror group identified New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago as important cities that should be attacked. Al-Qaida also identified key dates for those attacks, including the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Christmas, July 4th and during Obama's State of the Union address in January.

Oil already is a known target. On Saturday, a truck tanker carrying oil for NATO forces in Afghanistan exploded in northwestern Pakistan as people tried to siphon off fuel, killing 15. Fourteen other NATO oil trucks were damaged in a bombing at a nearby border town, but no one was hurt.

The hundreds of seafaring oil tankers that travel across the planet daily are theoretically capable of igniting massive fires with the capability for extensive destruction.

Intelligence gathered from bin Laden's hideout revealed that al-Qaida realized the tankers would have to be boarded so explosives could be planted inside them. Security experts say, however, blowing them up would be difficult because the tankers have double hulls and compartmentalized holds that prevent oil spills in groundings and can withstand direct hits from rocket propelled grenades.

Plus, getting enough explosives aboard the tankers would mean using more speedboats than Somali hijackers normally do to take over the ships and hold crews hostage, Gibbon-Brooks said.

Somali pirates have already captured five supertankers, proving that men with little training and basic weapons can easily seize the giant ships. Supertankers move slowly when fully loaded, can be longer than three football fields and generally only have around 20 unarmed crew onboard.

Although the size of the ships makes them vulnerable, their slow speed also makes it harder for terrorists to sneak one into a port or a narrow shipping passage. Ships are closely tracked via satellite and any unexplained deviations from their travel plans would immediately raise alarms.

While al-Qaida's most brazen sea attack was on the USS Cole in Yemen, the explosives that knocked a hole in the destroyer and killed 17 sailors in 2000 would not sink a double-hulled oil tanker.

Other marine attacks have been botched. An attempt to blow up the USS The Sullivans warship failed in 2000 when the plotters overloaded their speedboat with explosives and it sank en route to the mission.

The 2002 suicide bombing of a tanker off the coast of Yemen damaged the ship but didn't sink it. And last year a suicide bomber only slightly damaged the Japanese tanker M. Star in the Straits of Hormuz, which handles 40 percent of the world's tanker traffic. An obscure al-Qaida-linked group claimed responsibility.

After those attempts, al-Qaida decided attackers have to board a ship and blow it up from the inside, according to documents seized by U.S. special forces from the compound where bin Laden was killed nearly three weeks ago.

Despite the difficulties, warnings abound that several groups have the capability to pull off a terror attack on a supertanker, especially in Asian waters.

The al-Qaida-affiliated Abu Sayyaf militia remotely detonated a bomb on a ferry in Manila Bay in the Philippines in 2004, igniting an inferno that killed 116 people.

Small cargo barges and fishing boats have been attacked by militants, some of whom have taken diving lessons that Filipino authorities suspect were preludes to maritime attacks. In March 2010, Singapore's navy raised its security alert, warning that an unspecified terrorist group was planning attacks on oil tankers and other vessels in the Malacca Strait, which separates Malaysia from the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

While authorities fear that al-Qaida may link up with the Somali pirates who have become so adept at hijacking cargo ships, experts say the chance of any such alliance is remote because the pirates are in the hijacking business for the multimillion-dollar ransoms they get from holding ship crews hostage.

If the pirates started working with terrorists, that could seriously hurt their business, said Roger Middleton, a piracy expert with London's Chatham House think tank.

"They're multimillionaires running a very important business and don't want to see that jeopardized by too much politics," he said.

To counter attacks, tanker owners have begun putting barbed wire around ship guardrails and installing firehoses that can launch high pressure jets of water at attackers. They are also installing bulletproof glass around ship bridges and accommodation quarters, a vessel's two most vulnerable areas, said Chris Austen, the head of Maritime and Underwater Security Consultants.

Some shipping companies also insist their tankers travel through pirate-infested waters only in convoys, added Crispian Cuss, program director at Olive Group, one of the biggest security companies working in the Middle East.

If hijackers decide they can't get onboard and steer a ship toward a target without detection, they might try to seize a vessel in port — but that would be much risker given the global port security measures in effect in the last decade.

The al-Qaida plot found in bin Laden's hideout also mentioned attacking oil facilities, but most oil terminals are considered strategic installations — meaning they are protected by roving coast guard boats, radar, divers who conduct inspections and heavy security. Brazil, for example, is justifying the cost of developing a nuclear submarine to protect its vast offshore oil fields.

Security levels vary, but the ports that terrorists value the most generally have the heaviest protection, Cuss said.

"A port in Sudan is not going to have the same level of security as Houston," he said.

The latest plots show that bin Laden was clearly thinking about the economic consequences of his attacks and might even have been planning a devastating oil spill, said Tim Hart, a maritime security analyst at Maritime and Underwater Security Consultants.

That means Western security forces might have to take strong action sometime at sea.

In 2007, a Japanese tanker was hijacked carrying 40,000 tons of benzene, a highly explosive chemical. Intelligence officials feared at first that terrorists might try to crash the tanker into an offshore oil platform or use it as a gigantic bomb. In the end, it proved to be just another attack by pirates seeking ransom.

Naval forces were, however, ready attack the ship and blow it up at sea if it approached populated areas, a Western diplomat confirmed, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

___

Contributing to this story: Cassandra Vinograd, Raphael Satter and Meera Selva in London; Adam Schreck in Dubai; and Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines.

View the original article here

Mumbai attacks plotter fingers Pakistan at Chicago trial (AFP)

CHICAGO (AFP) – The Pakistani-American who spent months casing out Mumbai ahead of the 2008 attacks told a Chicago jury Monday that Pakistan's spy service supports terrorist group he worked with on the deadly siege.

David Coleman Headley testified that Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) provided financial, military and moral support to banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

"I assumed these groups operated under the same umbrella -- they coordinated with each other," Headley told the jury as he described his path to terrorism and the bloody 60-hour siege of India's largest city that left 166 people dead.

Headley described his relationship with an ISI handler identified as "Major Iqbal" who gave him $25,000 to help cover the cost of his surveillance work.

"I told him what kind of (terrorist) training I did and he mentioned he was part of Lashkar" Headley said.

Headley testified that after he told Iqbal of a plot he was working on in 2003, Iqbal asked him "to do something that was more important, which was intelligence work for the ISI."

Headley formally admitted to 12 terrorism charges in March 2010 after prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty or to allow him to be extradited to either India, Pakistan or Denmark to face related charges.

He was testifying at the trial of an old friend from military school in Pakistan -- Chicago businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana -- who stands accused of providing Headley with a cover and acting as a messenger.

The proceedings are likely to add fuel to a diplomatic crisis over suspicions of official Pakistani complicity with terrorism after US commandos killed ex-Al-QOsama bin Laden on May 2 in a garrison city just 55 kilometers (35 miles) from Islamabad.

However, while US prosecutors named ISI officers as co-conspirators in the Mumbai attacks, it is not yet clear whether they were acting independently or with the approval and aid of senior officials.

The Washington-born son of a former Pakistani diplomat and an American woman, Headley admitted to spending months scoping out sites for the Mumbai siege and plotting to kill a Danish cartoonist.

In a plot that reads like a movie thriller, Headley spent two years scouting Mumbai, even taking boat tours around the city's harbor to identify landing sites for the attackers and befriending Bollywood stars as part of his cover.

The attacks stalled a fragile four-year peace process between the two South Asian neighbors and nuclear-armed rivals which was only resumed in February.

Rana -- who holds Canadian citizenship -- insisted after his 2009 arrest that he was a pacifist "duped" into letting his old friend use his immigration services company as a cover.

In opening statements Monday, his lawyers tried to undermine Headley's credibility and insisted that Rana thought he was helping the ISI, not terrorists.

"Headley is a master manipulator who made a fool of Dr. Rana," defense attorney Charlie Swift told jurors.

"The question is that at the end of this case will David Headley make a fool out of all us. I'm confident he won't."

But prosecutors said Rana knew exactly what he was doing, and told jurors they would hear secret recordings in which Rana praised the Mumbai attackers.

"The defendant knew what Headley was doing and he helped him," said US Attorney Sarah Streicker.

"In a complicated and sophisticated attack, not everyone carries a weapon. But support people are just as important."

None of the other co-conspirators are in US custody and a spokesman for the US Attorney's Office declined to say whether the US government would be seeking their extradition or even knows their whereabouts.

Headley -- who changed his name from Daood Gilani so he could hide his Pakistani heritage -- joined LeT in 2002, attending training camps five times over the next three years.

He began working with an Al-Qaeda-linked group in Pakistan called Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami on the Danish plot after LeT became preoccupied with the final planning for the Mumbai attack.

Headley was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport on his way to deliver 13 surveillance videos he obtained after pretending to be interested in buying ads in Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's highest circulation daily.

The newspaper triggered a furor in the Muslim world by publishing 12 cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in 2005.

Rana's trial is expected to last about four weeks.

View the original article here