Security and Counterterrorism
U.K. Prosecutors to Retry 7 Men for Airline Bomb Plot (Update2)
U.K. prosecutors will retry seven British Muslims who they claim conspired to blow up several passenger planes bound for North America from London after a jury days ago failed to reach a verdict. The men will be retried for conspiring to kill passengers by detonating homemade liquid-based bombs on trans-Atlantic flights, Ken Macdonald, the U.K.’s…
Spain acquits 14 accused Islamists
The Spanish Supreme Court overturned convictions against 15 of the 20 men accused of forming an Islamist group plotting to blow up Madrid’s High Court. The ruling found “non-existent the crime of conspiracy to commit a deadly terrorist attack.” Convictions for five of the men were upheld. Thirty suspects were originally arrested four years ago,…
Court Case Rescheduled Because of Ramadan
Defense lawyers of a Muslim man accused of a hold-up claimed that their client was put into a “weak position” because he was fasting during the time of his trial and requested it be rescheduled. One of the man’s lawyers, Mr. Yann Choucq, said that his trial would fall 14 days into the fast which…
Probe into Maher Arar Torture Case Closed
Canadian federal police (the RCMP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police), has closed its investigation into the source of the damaging leaks to the media about Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen deported to Syria by U.S. officials because of false allegations of terrorism. This statement marks the end of a five-year criminal investigation to examine how inaccurate…
Muslim inmates living in fear for their safety at high-security prison
Muslim prisoners, including some convicted terrorists, inside one of Britain’s biggest high security prisons feel so unsafe that they have sought sanctuary in the jail’s segregation unit for their own protection, the chief inspector of prisons discloses today. Anne Owers says that there have been serious incidents of “prisoner-on-prisoner” violence inside Frankland prison, near Durham,…