Category: Terrorism

In response to a Swiss vote banning the construction of new mosque minarets, a group of Muslims this month went into a church building in eastern Turkey and threatened to kill a priest unless he tore down its bell tower, according to an advocacy group.

The threats may reflect a larger and well-established pattern of anti-Christian attitudes in Turkey.

In nearly a dozen recent terrorism cases in the United States, Britain and Canada, investigators discovered the suspects had something in common: a devotion to the message of Anwar al-Awlaki, an eloquent Muslim cleric who has turned the Web into a tool for extremist indoctrination.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5, is only the latest suspect accused of perpetrating or plotting violence to be linked to the cleric.

After the recent arrests of numerous Hindu terrorists for exploding bombs, authorities increasingly view Hindu rightwing extremists as a threat not only to Muslim and Christian minorities but also to national security.

Historically Hindu terrorist groups have traded blows with India’s Muslim extremists, but because of a perceived threat from Christianity many analysts believe Hindu terrorists increasingly pose dangers to Christians as well.

Two Chicago men have been charged in what officials said was a plot to attack employees of a Danish newspaper that in 2005 published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that offended many Muslims, according to criminal complaints unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Chicago.

One of the men had initially targeted a building occupied by the Danish newspaper, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. terrorism experts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have reached a stark conclusion about the war on terrorism: the United States is losing. Despite an early victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the two former Clinton administration officials say President George W. Bush’s policies have created a new haven for terrorism in Iraq that escalates the potential for Islamic violence against Europe and the United States. America’s badly damaged image in the Muslim world could take more than a generation to set right. And Bush’s mounting political woes at home have undermined the chance

AMMAN, Jordan – After the warehouse raid in northern Jordan, the word from authorities horrified the people of Amman. Terrorists linked to al-Qaida had assembled a fearsome array of chemicals and planned a bombing that would send a 2-mile-wide “poison cloud” over this Middle East capital, killing as many as 80,000 people, military prosecutors said. Osama bin Laden’s foot soldiers had finally concocted a weapon of mass destruction. A year later, in the hard light of scientific scrutiny, that sinister scenario looks more fictional than factual. “Eighty thousand! That would have been like Hiroshima. And that was an atomic bomb,”

WASHINGTON – As the shock waves from Thursday’s terrorist attacks in London reverberate across the Atlantic, a grim truth should become increasingly clear: One of the greatest terrorist threats emanates not from the graduates of Middle Eastern madrasas, but from some of the citizens of Britain. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who tried to blow up a jet flying between Paris and Miami in 2001, is British. So is Saajid Badat, who pleaded guilty in London four months ago to plotting to use a shoe bomb to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight in late 2001. And Ahmed Omar Sheik, who