Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

French Prosecutor: 7 Hour Siege 5000 Rounds, Paris

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A dead dog too, sadly that was instrumental to the investigation and raid.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Top Suspect in Paris Attacks, Not Arrested in Morning Raid

  • NYT: The police stormed the Paris suburb of St.-Denis and arrested eight. At least two people died, including one who blew herself up.
  • The prosecutor said that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected of organizing Friday’s attacks, and another fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, were not among those arrested.
  • Everything we know about the attackers is here.
  • Here are profiles of some of the victims.

Details for Bataclan Attack Found on Cellphone in Paris Trash Can

A cellphone that could belong to one of the attackers was found in a trash can near the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, according to the French publications Le Monde and Mediapart.

Investigators found a detailed plan of the Bataclan assault and a text message sent at 9:42 p.m. on Friday that read, “On est parti on commence.” This can be translated as “Here we go, we’re starting,” or, more literally, “We have left, we’re starting.”

The identities of the sender and the recipient of the text message remained unclear.

Investigators told Le Monde that geolocation services on the phone led them to one of the places the attackers were last seen, in the Paris suburb of Alfortville.

French authorities kill 2, detain 7 terror suspects in violent raid

Here are the latest details related to the French police raid on suspected terrorists in a Paris suburb, as well as the larger fight involving ISIS and the West:

Latest developments:

• Officials have not yet identified the two dead in Wednesday’s raids in Saint-Denis, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said. Belgian state broadcaster RTBF reported that the woman who blew herself up during that operation is a cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader in Friday’s attacks in Paris.

Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam, who also was allegedly involved in last week’s bloodshed, are not among the seven detained in connection with that Saint-Denis operation, the prosecutor said.

• The Saint-Denis shootout began at 4:20 a.m. local time (10:20 p.m. ET Tuesday) and lasted nearly an hour, according to Molins.

• Three coordinated teams of commandos committed Friday’s Paris attacks, arriving nearly simultaneously at three locations, Molins said. Authorities have been able to identify five of the seven terrorists killed in that bloodshed.

Full story:

For the second time in a week, gunfire and explosions ripped through France on Wednesday — this time in an hours-long ordeal that ended with two terror suspects dead, seven detained, new attacks potentially thwarted and further proof, according to French President Francois Hollande, that his country is “at war” with ISIS.

Authorities zeroed in on a building in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis after picking up phone conversations indicating that a relative of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of last week’s bloody attacks, might be there, a Belgian counterterrorism official said. French police also believed Abaaoud himself was then still in the country, though they didn’t know exactly where.

By late Wednesday, the new question was whether or not he is even alive. Investigators are using DNA to analyze the body parts found in the Saint-Denis building where a female suspect first blew herself up and then French forces used powerful munitions to combat others, which led to one floor of the building collapsing.

Hollande was among those who offered congratulations to French police on the raid. Yet he also stressed that his country’s fight against terrorists, specifically those linked to ISIS, is anything but over. In fact, the violent nature of Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis is further proof that “we are at war,” Hollande said.

“What the terrorists were targeting was what France represents. This is what was attacked on the night of November 13th,” he said. “These barbarians targeted France’s diversity. It was the youth of France who were targeted simply because they represent life.”

Given this threat, Hollande said that Wednesday evening he would present legislation to extend France’s state of emergency for three more months — a measure that, among other things, gives authorities greater powers in conducting searches, holding people and dissolving certain groups.

The French President also said he’d appeal to world leaders — including meetings next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have been at odds on what to do in the ISIS stronghold of Syria — to form a wider coalition to go after the savage Islamist extremist group.

“There is no more … divide. There are only men and women of duty,” he said. “… We must destroy this army that menaces the entire world, not just some countries.”

‘We could see the bullets’

As France learned Friday — when a series of coordinated attacks left a trail of horror, sorrow and questions, with 129 dead and hundreds more wounded — terrorists act with savagery on their own schedule.

And those in Saint-Denis were “about to move on some kind of operation” again, police sources told CNN, adding that the Wednesday raid happened “just in time.”

Some 110 police swarmed on the diverse, working-class area that is home to the Stade de France sports stadium — where three suicide bombings took place days earlier. They first went into one apartment that had been under surveillance since Tuesday, a Paris police source said. That raid led them to another apartment on the same street.

The French police met fierce resistance when they entered the building, including the female suicide bomber — who Belgian state broadcaster RTBF claimed was Abaaoud’s cousin. They answered with powerful munitions of their own, a fact that produced piles of rubble interspersed with body parts, according to the Belgian counterterrorism official.

“We could see the bullets,” a woman, who identified herself only as Sabrine, told CNN affiliate France 2 of the drama. “We could feel the building shaking.”

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said there could end up being more than the two suspected terrorist deaths. As of Wednesday afternoon, seven suspects — including three in one apartment, the person who loaned the apartment to the suspected terrorists and his friend — ended up in custody from this operation alone. Two of them are hospitalized, Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told France Info radio.

Five French officers, meanwhile, were slightly wounded, while a police dog died in the operation, according to police.

Saadana Aymen, a 29-year-old who lives one street down, couldn’t believe what was happening in his neighborhood.

“When you think of Saint-Denis, you don’t think of terrorists,” he told CNN. “I’m shocked! Why would the terrorists pick this neighborhood?”

Phones offer clues

Yet Saint-Denis wasn’t the only place where French authorities fanned out Tuesday night into Wednesday, as part of their security clampdown.

The Interior Ministry announced in a statement that 118 searches led to the detention of at least 25 people, the confiscation of 34 weapons and the discovery of illicit drugs in 16 instances. This is on top of hundreds of similar operations conducted in recent days, which have resulted in 64 people being held and 118 put under house arrest.

Authorities have not yet laid out what connection any of these arrests have to Friday’s attacks. Yet counterterrorism and intelligence officials say that investigators have uncovered what could be a big break: cell phones believed to belong to the attackers.

According to the officials, one of the phones contained a message, sent sometime before the Friday attacks began, to the effect of: OK, we’re ready.

But cracking into their communication won’t be easy.

Investigators have found encrypted apps on the phones, which appear to have left no trace of messages or any indication of who would have been receiving them, according to officials briefed on the French investigation.

‘These are not regular people’

Seven attackers died during Friday night’s wave of violence, and an international arrest warrant is out for one suspect, Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman. The identity of the possible ninth suspect, seen in a video that shows two gunmen inside a black car and perhaps a third person driving the vehicle, is unknown.

Mohamed Abdeslam has urged his younger brother Salah, who was stopped but then let go en route to the Belgian border hours after the attacks, to turn himself into authorities. He acknowledged noticing Salah and another brother — 31-year-old Ibrahim, who is among the seven terrorists killed — had been adopting more radical views, though that didn’t mean the family isn’t shocked.

“My brother who participated in this terrorist act must have been psychologically ready to commit such an act. These are not regular people,” he told CNN.

“You cannot have the slightest doubt that they have been prepared, that they must not leave any trace which would cause suspicion that they might do such things. And even if you saw them every day, their behavior was quite normal.”

Official: Belgian authorities lost track of 2 suspects

Both Salah Abdeslam and Ibrahim were known to authorities: Belgian prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told CNN’s Ivan Watson police questioned the Abdeslam brothers in February. The brothers were released, the federal prosecutor said, after they denied wanting to go to Syria.

And Salah Abdeslam and Abaaoud served time together in a Belgian prison in 2011, when the former spent a month for an alleged theft, a Belgian federal prosecutor said.

Belgian authorities believe Abaaoud has spent previous months in Raqqa, the Syrian city that’s now the de facto capital of the Islamic State, or ISIS, a counterrrorism official in that European nation said. There, in Syria, Abaaoud is thought to have worked with several senior French figures in ISIS — members of the so-called Artigat network including Sabri Essid and Fabien Clain, whose voice can be heard on the claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks — to plot a series of attacks in France.

Already, Essid and Clain have been traced to an April plot to attack a Paris church and the August armed assault on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train that was thwarted by three Americans.

As to those behind the latest violence, Belgian authorities didn’t even know Abaaoud was back in Europe, according to the counterterrorism official. They’d also lost track of Salah Abdeslam.

And, the senior Belgian official said, the bombmaker who made the suicide vests used in Paris is also thought to still be at large.

What’s next for ISIS?

ISIS was born in Iraq and blossomed in Syria, taking advantage of the power vacuum from that country’s chaotic, years-long civil war. In the process, the militant group employed bold, ruthless and sometimes sadistic tactics — as evidenced by the taking of women and girls as sex slaves, broadcasting the beheading of journalists and aid workers, destroying centuries-old historic artifacts and massacring those who don’t subscribe to its twisted, extreme interpretation of Islam.

The group has managed to take over vast swaths of Iraq and Syria in this campaign. But it’s not content to stop there.

Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon and other nations have all been sites of ISIS-claimed attacks in recent months. The militant group has also boasted about bloodshed inside Europe, including January’s massacre on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

While some have faulted world leaders for not stepping up sooner, there has been a more concerted effort of late. The United States conducted airstrikes for months, which U.S. Army Col. Steven Warren estimated have killed at least one mid- to high-level ISIS figure every day since May. More recently, Russia has stepped into the fray, in part, to support its longtime ally Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s embattled President.

Then there’s Turkey, whose involvement has been complicated by the fact that its longtime adversaries, the Kurds, have been fighting against ISIS. On Wednesday, the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported that Turkish police had detained eight ISIS-linked suspects who’d arrived at an Istanbul airport from Casablanca. The eight Moroccans said they had booked a hotel in Turkey and were preparing to head to Germany — via Greece, Serbia and Hungary — the report added, pointing to a document — seized by police — that detailed the travel route.

France has been part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS for months. But it has enhanced its role — symbolically and in practice — in the wake of the latest Paris attacks. And Hollande says that the arrival of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle within striking distance of Syria will triple France’s capacity to conduct airstrikes.

And, despite their differing stances on Syria’s future and other matters, Russia’s armed forces are ready to organize joint military operations with the French navy “to combat terrorists in Syria,” Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, citing army official Andrey Kartapolov.

ISIS Has 24 Hour Tech Savvy Jihad Help Desk

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Using the Darkweb is not a new weapon for jihad cells, DARPA has been working the ISIS hidden internet world for quite some time, to what success is undetermined.

ISIS Has Help Desk for Terrorists Staffed Around the Clock

NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint — a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development — which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year — is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.

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Authorities are now homing in on the terror group’s growing cyber capabilities after attacks in Paris, Egypt and elsewhere for which ISIS has claimed credit.

“They’ve developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning,” said Aaron F. Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research organization at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Brantly was the lead author of a CTC report on the Islamic State’s use of secure communications, based on hundreds of hours of observation of how the Jihadi Help Desk operates.

“They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror,” Brantly said in an interview Monday. “Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner. They are now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications.”

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The existence of the Jihadi Help Desk has raised alarm bells in Washington and within the global counterterrorism community because it appears to be allowing a far wider web of militants to network with each other and plot attacks. A senior European counterterrorism official said that concerns about the recent development are especially serious in Europe, where ISIS operatives are believed to be plotting major attacks, some of them with direct assistance from ISIS headquarters in Syria.

At a congressional hearing in October, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI is extremely concerned about ISIS’ increasing ability to “go dark.” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee that the U.S. is ” confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet.”

“While some of the contacts between groups like ISIL and potential recruits occur in publicly accessible social networking sites,” said Comey, “others take place via encrypted private messaging platforms. As a result, the FBI and all law enforcement organizations must understand the latest communication tools and position ourselves to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland.”

Nick Rasmussen, director of the U.S. government’s multiagency National Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview with the Combating Terrorism Center’s in-house publication that the “agile use of new means of communicating, including ways which they understand are beyond our ability to collect,” is one of his greatest concerns when it comes to ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Brantly described the Jihadi Help Desk as “a fairly large, robust community” that is anchored by at least five or six core members who are technical experts with at least collegiate or masters level training in information technology. There are layers of other associates, living all around the world, who allow the service to operate — and respond to questions — at any time of the day or night. CTC researchers have spent a year or so monitoring the help desk — and its senior operatives — via online forums, social media and other means.

“You can kind of get a sense of where they are by when they say they are signing off to participate in the [Muslim] call to prayer,” which traditionally occurs at five specific times a day, Brantly said. “They are very decentralized. They are operating in virtually every region of the world.”

The help desk workers closely track all of the many new kinds of security software and encryption as they come online, and produce materials to train others in how to use them. The CTC has obtained more than 300 pages of documents showing the help desk is training everyone from novice militants to the most experienced jihadists in digital operational security.

ISIS also distributes the tutorials through Twitter and other social media, taking pains to link to versions of it that can be downloaded even after their social media sites are shut down.

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And once the help desk operatives develop personal connections with people, ISIS then contacts them to engage them in actual operational planning — including recruiting, fundraising and potentially attacks.

“They will engage in encrypted person-to-person communications, and these are extremely hard to break into from a cryptographic perspective,” Brantly said.

“They also post YouTube Videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies,” Brantly said. “Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube; they have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism].”

 

 

Gotta Love Those Clintons and Hired Criminals

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Clinton Foundation Donor to Pay $95.5 Million Settlement to Justice Department

For-profit education company with ties to Goldman Sachs
FreeBeacon:

A for-profit educational corporation that has donated to the Clinton Foundation agreed to pay $95.5 million to the Obama administration as a settlement for a government lawsuit alleging that it was using illegal tactics to lure in prospective students.

The Education Management Corporation was sued by the Department of Justice in 2011 for multiple recruitment violations, including paying its recruiters based on the number of students it enrolled, and exaggerating the career opportunities that were available to graduates. The lawsuit argued that the violations made the corporation ineligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it has received since 2003.

On top of the $95.5 million settlement, the group also agreed to forgive more than $100 million in loans it made to former students, according to the Associated Press.

The Education Management Corporation contributed between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation through Brown Mackie College, one of the largest of the group’s four divisions. Goldman Sachs, which owned a 43 percent stake until it sold off much of the company to creditors last summer, has also donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.

The lawsuit was filed based on information brought forth by whistle-blowers. It claimed that the corporation operated a “boiler-room style” sales team that was taught to “exploit applicants’ psychological vulnerabilities to convince them to enroll.

Among the applicants targeted by recruiters were individuals “who were unable to write coherently, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs, or who sought to enroll in an online program but had no computer,” according to the suit.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised whistle-blowers for revealing the group’s “deceptive practices.”

“This case not only highlights the abuses in the [Education Management Corporation’s] EDMC’s recruitment system; it also highlights the brave actions of EDMC employees who refused to go along with the institution’s deceptive practices,”said Lynch at a Monday news conference.

The lawsuit alleged that the group’s aggressive recruitment practices were geared toward raking in as much government aid as possible.

Although the group agreed to the settlement, it admitted no wrongdoing and said it agreed to pay the penalty based on a desire to put “these matters behind us” and focus on educating its students.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement, but its ties to the for-profit education industry go beyond the Education Management Corporation.

The Laureate International Universities, a group of for-profit schools partially owned by the liberal billionaire George Soros, has also contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton is paid an undisclosed salary to be “honorary chancellor” of the schools, and has been described as the “face” of the massive university group.

Also contributing to the Clinton Foundation is the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, and has been criticized for aggressively targeting veterans with G.I. Bill money to spend on education. The University of Phoenix received more than $1 billion through the G.I. Bill between 2009 and 2014, but only 16 percent of its students graduate within six years.

Kaplan, which paid a $1.3 million settlement to the Justice Department in 2014 for using unqualified instructors, also contributes to the Clinton Foundation. It was specifically targeting “African-American women who were raising two children by themselves” in the hope that they would drop out after the federal funding based on their enrollment had already been received.

Despite the Clintons’ extensive ties, Hillary Clinton has spoken out against the for-profit industry on the campaign trail for targeting “service members, veterans, and their families with false promises and deceptive marketing.”

The Clinton campaign also did not return a request for comment. *** Don’t go away yet, there is more….more criminals.

FreeBeacon is still on the case….

Numerous former board members and trustees of a charity group cofounded by Bill Clinton have been accused of or convicted of insider trading, campaign finance violations, and other illegal schemes.

The American India Foundation is one of several nonprofit groups in Bill Clinton’s charitable orbit, although it has received less attention than the Clinton Foundation and its spin-offs.

The group was founded in 2001 “at the initiative of President Bill Clinton following a request from Prime Minister Vajpayee” in order to help with the recovery efforts after the Gujarat earthquake. It is currently run by CEO Ravi Kumar.

AIF was co-founded by Clinton and former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta in 2001. Clinton continues to serve as honorary chairman of the council of trustees, according to the website.

Gupta, a Clinton donor, was convicted of passing illegal trading tips to another former AIF trustee—Raj Rajarantam—in the highly-publicized 2011 case that took down the Galleon hedge fund. Gupta is currently serving out a two-year prison term and was last listed as co-chairman of the AIF board in 2010.

Gupta’s legal team highlighted his work with AIF and Bill Clinton during his sentencing.

“Rajat worked with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Victor Menezes, former Senior Vice Chair of Citigroup, to found the American India Foundation (AIF),” said his attorneys in a sentencing memo. “Under their leadership, within its first year AIF raised millions of dollars to support earthquake relief efforts.”

However, Gupta is just one of many current or former members of AIF leadership who have been embroiled in headline-grabbing legal controversies over the years.

Rajarantam, the former head of Galleon and also an early member of AIF leadership, was sentenced to 11 years in prison—the longest sentence ever handed down in an insider trading case—in 2011 for allegedly using illegal stock tips to amass a $63 million fortune.

Former AIF trustee and hotelier Sant Chatwal, pled guilty in 2014 to a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. He was accused of illegally funneling $180,000 through straw donors to political candidates, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Federal investigators reportedly recorded Chatwal talking to an informant about using contributions to influence politicians.

“Without that nobody will even talk to you. When they are in need of money…the money you give then they are always for you,” he said. “That’s the only way to buy them, get into the system. … What, what else is there? That’s the only thing.”

The Hampshire Hotels president was sentenced to three years probation and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine, according to his attorney. He is still listed as a New York trustee on the AIF website.

Chatwal’s son, Manhattan socialite Vikram Chatwal, has also been an AIF trustee. He was charged with felony drug trafficking in 2013 after police say he tried to board a plane carrying heroin, cocaine and illegal prescription pills. The charges were dismissed after he completed a yearlong rehab program.

Natel Engineering, a company owned by former AIF trustee Sudesh Arora, pleaded guilty to contract fraud in 1993. The company was ordered to pay a $1 million fine for neglecting to test computer parts in military equipment it sold to the U.S. military.

InfoUSA founder Vinod Gupta, a former early AIF board member, was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with misappropriating company funds in 2010. According to a lawsuit filed by InfoUSA shareholders in 2006, Gupta spent company money on private flights for the Clintons. Bill Clinton also reportedly earned over $2 million working as a consultant for Gupta’s company.

Gupta stepped down from InfoUSA and agreed to pay a $7.4 million settlement in 2010.

Tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, a former AIF trustee, was found to have violated insider trading laws in a civil suit in 2003 and ousted as CEO of InfoSpace.

A current AIF trustee, CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings Prem Watsa, is reportedly under a civil investigation in Canada for insider trading, along with others at the company. Fairfax said it is cooperating with the probe and denied any wrongdoing.

The foundation has also honored Ramalinga Raju, the head of the now-defunct Satyam Computer Services, a company that has been dubbed “India’s Enron.” Raju was sentenced to seven years in prison in April after he was convicted of carrying out one of the largest corporate frauds in India’s history. His sentence was suspended in May pending appeal.

AIF did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A spokesperson for Bill Clinton was reached and did not comment.

Attorneys for Vikram Chatwal, Arora, and Rajaratnam could not be reached. Sant Chatwal’s attorney confirmed the details of his sentencing; the others did not return requests for comment.

AIF brought in $6.9 million in 2013, and spent just over $7 million, according to tax records. It currently has a two out of four star rating from Charity Navigator.

The charity supports education initiatives, anti-poverty programs, and disaster relief efforts in India and says it has “chang[ed] the lives of more than 2.3 million of India’s less fortunate.”

Through its high-profile fundraising events, AIF has provided a networking platform for business leaders, Hollywood stars, and political figures.

Earlier this month, the group honored Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a former Clinton aide, at a fundraising gala in Washington, D.C.

Paris Had Their 9/11, who is Next? Interpol

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Sorry, but some unvarnished truth is required now and beginning to understand the threat is the first step to safety and self preservation but more, it is both an offensive and defensive measure. This post will be data rich.

July 2015: Interpol has issued a warning to countries operating in the Mediterranean to be on the alert for an attempt by ISIS militants to carry out some sort of operation at sea over the next few days, Italian military sources have told Migrant Report.

Three U.S. governors have taken proactive measures to stop refugees from coming into their respective states but White House senior staffer on the National Security Council, Ben Rhodes stated that the refugee program will continue regardless of matters in Europe and Paris.

Michigan, Alabama, Louisiana are the governors asserting their 10th Amendment authority. The question then becomes if this program continues what other states will be forced to take the refugees?

PARIS (Reuters) – Fingerprints from one of the suicide bombers behind the attacks at the Stade de France in Paris matched the prints of a man registered in Greece in October, a French prosecutor said on Monday.

“At this stage, while the authenticity of a passport in the name of Ahmad al Mohammad, born Sept. 10 1990 in Idlib, Syria needs to be verified, there are similarities between the fingerprints of the suicide bomber and those taken during a control in Greece in October,” the Paris prosecutor said in a statement.

The prosecutor also said a second bomber at the Bataclan concert hall had now been identified. The prosecutor named him as 28-year old Samy Ammour from Drancy, north of Paris and said he was known to counter-terrorism units after being placed under investigation and judicial control for attempting to go to Yemen.

He disappeared in the autumn of 2013 and an international arrest warrant was issued for him.

“Five of the terrorists killed have now been identified,” prosecutor added.

The mastermind of the Paris attack has been identified:

A French official has named the suspected mastermind behind the Paris attacks as a Belgian man called Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He recently traveled to Syria and returned to Belgium.

June 2015: Juergen Stock cited this shift as an emerging trend at a UN Security Council meeting along with changing travel methods being used by foreign fighters seeking to join groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

Stock was a keynote speaker at a meeting attended by half a dozen ministers including US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to assess progress in implementing a US-sponsored resolution adopted last September requiring all countries to prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters preparing to join extremist groups.

On Friday, the Security Council adopted a presidential statement calling for a significant increase in border controls, improved cooperation at all levels “including preventing terrorists from exploiting technology, communications and resources.”

Johnson said the United States will be developing a new passenger data-screening and analysis system within the next 12 months which will be made available to the international community at no cost for both commercial and government organizations to use.

In a report obtained by The Associated Press on April 1, the panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaeda said the number of fighters leaving home to join al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group in Iraq, Syria and other countries has spiked to more than 25,000 from over 100 nations. The panel said its analysis indicated the number of “foreign terrorist fighters” worldwide increased by 71 percent between mid-2014 and March 2015.

There is no intelligence problem from or by an any government intelligence apparatus, but rather the voids are in the laps of the political wings where they themselves remain in a fetal position due to political correctness. Barack Obama is in that mix.

One of the Paris attacks terrorist was previosly charged, the French prosecutor François Molins said.

Fingerprints from one of the suicide bombers behind the attacks at the Stade de France in Paris matched the prints of a man registered in Greece in October, the prosecutor said on Monday.

It is known that International terrorism warrant was issued for one of the attackers by Interpol.

 

This post will be rich in links, so some real study is required here.

  1. BRUSSELS (AFP) – One of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks had links to a Belgian Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militant believed to be the mastermind of an extremist cell dismantled in January, a report said on Monday (Nov 16).The name of Paris attacker Brahim Abdeslam appears in several police files alongside leading militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud relating to criminal cases in 2010 and 2011, Flemish-language newspaper De Standaard reported.

  2. Let’s be clear: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Sunni Salafism across the globe.

    Most Sunni Muslims around the world, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim population, are not Salafis. Salafism is seen as too rigid, too literalist, too detached from mainstream Islam. While Shiite and other denominations account for 10 percent of the total, Salafi adherents and other fundamentalists represent 3 percent of the world’s Muslims.

    Unlike a majority of Sunnis, Salafis are evangelicals who wish to convert Muslims and others to their “purer” form of Islam — unpolluted, as they see it, by modernity. In this effort, they have been lavishly supported by the Saudi government, which has appointed emissaries to its embassies in Muslim countries who proselytize for Salafism. The kingdom also grants compliant imams V.I.P. access for the annual hajj, and bankrolls ultraconservative Islamic organizations like the Muslim World League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

  3. Seven terrorist attacks have been thwarted in the last six months, David Cameron has revealed as he oversees the biggest increase in security in the UK since the 7/7 bombings, including the recruitment of nearly 2,000 new spies.  He warned that the deadly terrorist attacks that hit Paris on Friday night, killing 129 people, “could happen here” and Britain faced a continued threat by Isis.
  4. The French Prime Minister has warned that more terror attacks are being prepared against France and other European nations as police raids continue across the continent.

  5. The fifth named attacker is Ahmad al Mohammad, a Syrian. He is the man who entered the EU through Greece in October as an asylum seeker. The authenticity of his passport, which said he was born in Idlib in 1990, has not been confirmed.

    He blew himself up at the Stade de France.
  6. Samy Amimour was one of the attackers at the Bataclan, French media reports. 
  7. Prosecutors have confirmed the identity of the fourth named suicide bomber. He is  Samy Amimour, born in 1987 in Paris, living in Drancy. He was reportedly known to security services following a terror case in 2012.

Tell Bloomberg About Darknet Arms Trafficking

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Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York went off after the Paris attacks stating once again an issue with people having the ability to get their hands on guns. Ah …Michael you trying to do gun control in Europe also? Sheesh. Get a clue Bloomberg, here is a memo on the Darknet.

There is also a State Department visa waiver program that allows foreigners to travel freely in countless countries globally much less, Europe is borderless due to the Schengen Agreement. Borders and documents MATTER! Oh and hey Michael, payment methods often include the bitcoins, track that sir.

The Middle East is full of weapons, all kinds of weapons and to resell them is nothing more than a yard sale. An AK-47 in good condition sells for $50.00 (U.S.) or less.

 

How Dark Net Arms Dealers Could Easily Smuggle Assault Weapons To Paris

Europe’s open-border policy has made it harder for government officials to track illegal weapons that come from as far away as the U.S.

Vocativ: When terrorists in Western Europe want guns, they usually tap into a 20-year-old market that took root and flourished at the end of the Balkan wars. Now with the rise of the dark net, that market has been digitized and deals on illegal guns are only a few minutes away.

Vocativ used our technology to scan several current and active dark net marketplaces and found several postings selling AK-47s, the types of guns eight ISIS terrorists were said to have used during the deadly attacks in Paris on November 13. Across a dozen sites, we found 281 listings of guns and ammunition, including 16 submachine and machine guns, 12 sniper rifles and 40 assault rifles. The majority of the vendors ship from the U.S., as well as Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.

Terrorists likely acquired weapons through the black market or dark net, as France has especially strict gun laws. The French government estimates there are about 7.5 million legally owned guns in the country. Some estimates claim there are as many as 10 to 20 million illegal weapons in France. A European Commission study estimates some 67 million unregistered firearms exist in the EU.

When the illegal firearm market initially grew from weapons originating in the Balkans, criminals and terrorists wanting weapons had to connect with the right crime organization. Now, they just have to connect to the Internet. If a terrorist (or anyone) wants to buy an illegal assault rifle today they just have to download the Tor browser, which allows them to search the web anonymously, then find eBay-like marketplaces, which can be found on the regular Internet.

In January, Philippe Capon, the head of UNSA police union told Bloomberg that AK-47s sell for about 1,000 euros ($1,181 USD) to 1,500 euros ($1,650 USD) on the French black market. Our Vocativ analysis shows that the current going rate for AK-47s on the dark net ranges from 547 eros ($590 USD) to 6,300 euros ($6,785 USD).

“The guns moved from the Balkans to Western Europe and other parts of Europe in small and medium shipments, so that makes it very difficult to monitor and investigate and protect against,” said Cédric Poitevin, head of the  Arms Transfers and Small Arms project at GRIP (Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security), which is based in Brussels. “They can move across criminal networks within Europe. First to Belgium and other parts and then to someone who is linked to criminal or terrorist networks.”

An open-border policy has likely made matters worse. The United Kingdom does not participate in Europe’s open-border program and the country has had very little gun crime, but other European nations have not been so fortunate. “We face the same challenge in all countries with the almost absence of border controls,” Poitevin told Vocativ. “The fact that we are close to the Balkans and, generally speaking, two countries in Eastern Europe with huge stockpiles of guns that have been made available.”

Poitevin say, most of what he and European government officials know about firearm trafficking and smuggling comes from assumptions, arrests and limited studies. “Only recently there has been political priority,” he said. “Until recently there was very little funds to study the issue and build stats and to gather quantitative information.”

One of the most recent efforts to study gun trafficking began in 2013, when Interpol created the Illicit Arms Records and Tracing Management System (iARMS), which allows member countries to report and track weapon trafficking. In 2014, Europol announced they would make gun smuggling a priority. That initiative focused largely on the rise in Internet trafficking. They had some success in October that year. French law enforcement agents raided several homes across the country and found hundreds of weapon stashes, which included assault rifles and machine guns.

*** Meanwhile, the Paris attackers communicated with each other using PlayStation 4 and they in turned communicated with Islamic State using an app called ‘WhatsApp’.

Belgium’s home affairs minister says ISIL communicates using Playstation 4

Quartz: The day after terror attacks in Paris left at least 127 dead and some 300 wounded, attention has turned to Belgium. Several arrests were made in Belgium today (Nov. 14), and a black Volkswagen Polo with a Belgian license plate had been spotted on the night of the attacks near the Bataclan theater. Police have raided a Brussels neighborhood where three of the eight attackers are believed to have lived.

More fighters have joined ISIL from Belgium, per capita, than any Western nation.

Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has previously described Brussels as a weak link in the fight against terror. Speaking at a debate last week, he said: “The thing that keeps me awake at night is the guy behind his computer, looking for messages from IS and other hate preachers.”

Jambon also reportedly warned of the growing use by terror networks of the PlayStation 4 gaming console, which allows terrorists to communicate with each other and is difficult for the authorities to monitor. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,” he said.

The gaming console also was implicated in ISIL’s plans back in June, when an Austrian teen was arrested for downloading bomb plans to his PS4.