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‘The guy on TV looks like you.’ ‘lol’: How three friends got snarled in one of U.S.’s biggest terrorism investigations
Dias Kadyrbayev was driving back to his apartment when he got a call from a college buddy. A clearly anxious Robel Phillipos told him authorities had released photos of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers — and one of them looked very familiar.
When he got home, Kadrybayev turned on the television to see a shaggy-haired Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his friend, classmate and, by then, one of the most wanted men in the world.
That call set in motion a series of events that on Wednesday turned three college pals into key figures in one of the largest terrorist investigations ever on U.S. soil. According to an FBI affidavit based on interviews with all three men, this is how it played out. (AP)
‘He just took Tamerlan’s brain’: Boston bombing suspect transformed after meeting mysterious Muslim convert
In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.
Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.
“Somehow, he just took his brain,” said Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan’s worried father about Misha’s influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.
Tamerlan’s relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself. Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups. (Glenn DePriest/Getty Images)
Two charged over al-Qaeda-supported terror plot to attack VIA passenger train: RCMP
The RCMP arrested two men Monday in connection with an “Al Qaeda-inspired” plan to attack a Via Rail train, part of an international investigation that disrupted the intended assault before there was an “imminent threat,” the force announced.
Had the plan succeeded, it could have led to innocent people being killed or injured, James Malidza, an RCMP officer chief superintendent, told a news conference.
The two accused, Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, were charged with conspiring to carry out an attack and commit murder at the direction of or in association with a terrorist group. (Andrew Vaughan /The Canadian Press)
Sand sculpture against terrorism — A cyclist pedals past a sculpture with a message against terrorism, created after attacks in Boston and Bangalore, at the golden sea beach in Puri, India, Wednesday, April 17, 2013. (AP Photo)
Graphic: The Extraordinary Renditions – 54 Guilty Nations
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA has been accused of rendering 136 suspected terrorists to states such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Uzbekistan. The National Post takes a look into the allegations around the murky world of extraordinary rendition.
Death of a master terrorist: How the ‘Iranian Jackal’ was killed
On the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, a.k.a. “The Iranian Jackal,” much new information about the hunt for the terrorist most wanted by Mossad and the FBI has emerged. It’s a story of high-tech surveillance and old-fashioned espionage, and it’s just starting to be truly told now.
Imad Mughniyah was 20 years old when he made his debut on the international terrorist scene in 1983, with a series of spectacular and deadly bombings aimed at Western forces in Lebanon. The 1983 Beirut suicide bombings included those on April 18 at the U.S. Embassy (63 killed); on Oct. 23 at the U.S. Marine barracks (241 killed); and on Oct. 23 at the French paratrooper barracks (58 killed). A litany of bombings, hijackings, kidnappings and assassinations followed, with an ever-increasing body count. A list of the attacks he is believed to have been involved in, directly or in a leadership capacity, reads like an index of late-20th-century terrorism: Car bombings of the Israeli embassy and the Jewish cultural center in Argentina (124 killed) in the early 1990s; the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (6 killed); the Khobar Towers suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (19 killed); the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 (223 killed); the 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen (17 killed).
And perhaps even the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The 9/11 Commission Report references “a senior Hezbollah operative” shepherding the future hijackers in and out of Iran. Some terrorism experts believe this was almost certainly Mughniyah. Indeed, according to Peter Lance’s book Triple Cross, Osama bin Laden spoke admiringly of Mughniyah’s lethal handiwork and in 1993 met with him in Khartoum, Sudan, to form a working alliance. That historic meeting, according to Lance, was brokered by Ali Mohamed, bin Laden’s master spy and double agent inside the FBI. Kenneth R. Timmerman, in Countdown to Crisis, quotes Major General Amos Malka, a senior Israeli military intelligence official, saying that before Sept. 11, the Israelis had picked up on numerous signs that bin Laden and Mughniyah were planning new operations against Israel and the U.S. “within the next few weeks.”
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(Photo: Lyle G. Becker / Getty Images)
Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden describes moment he killed the al-Qaeda leader — and his life now without a pension or health care
A U.S. Navy SEAL who claims to have fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden has described for the first time the moment he shot the al-Qaeda leader twice in the head.
However, the anonymous shooter also told how his wife and family now lived in constant fear of their lives, and had taught their children to hide in the bathtub at the first sign of a revenge attack.
In a 15,000-word account, the unnamed member of SEAL Team 6 describes the huge elation — but also the deep personal cost — that came with being the man who killed bin Laden during the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. (Getty Images)
Obama’s licence to kill worries friends and foes alike
Kelly McParland: The debate rages over the president’s right to order people killed, who can be placed on his ‘kill list’ and who he needs to listen to in making that decision.
U.S. has been operating secret drone base in Saudi Arabia for two years
The United States has been operating a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia for the past two years as a launch pad for attacks on terrorist targets in Yemen, it emerged Wednesday.
The first pilotless CIA mission flown from the base killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric and senior figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and a deputy in September 2011, reports said. (HO/AFP/Getty Images)
Michael Den Tandt: The Khadr case pits extreme against extreme, with no room in the middle
Depending on which news sites you favour, Omar Khadr is either an innocent pawn, who if paroled would re-integrate seamlessly into civil society just like any other wrongfully imprisoned, harmless former child conscript soldier; or a cold-blooded terrorist and unrepentant murderer champing at the bit to get back to bomb-making and mayhem.
But what if the truth were more nuanced? What if the facts called on us to both condemn Khadr for his past actions on the enemy side in the war in Afghanistan, yet still acknowledge that he has been treated unjustly by Washington and by Ottawa? Ah, but that would be complicated. It’s so much easier, in Canada today, to stick with simple. (Sketch: Janet Hamlin/Reuters)
For Rudy Giuliani, 9/11 ‘isn’t over’
On the eve of the eleventh anniversary of Sept. 11, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani warned “it isn’t over” for enemies preying on America and said Republican Mitt Romney is the better choice to lead the country through precarious times.
“Every December we remember Pearl Harbor because Pearl Harbor is over,” Mr. Giuliani told the National Post on Monday evening. “September 11 is different. No peace treaty has been signed… Their desire to come to the United States and kill us still exists.” (Photo: Darren Calabrese/National Post)
After latest key figure slain, what’s left of al-Qaeda?
Osama bin Laden lies at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. Anwar al-Awlaki was taken out by a Hellfire missile in Yemen. And now al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Abu Yahya al-Libi, has been confirmed killed in Pakistan.
Since last year, U.S. counterterrorism operations have systematically stripped al-Qaeda of its leaders. Except for Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who has been reduced to the role of video propagandist, little remains of al-Qaeda’s central core.
Jonathan Kay: Time to call Pakistan what it is — a state supporter of terrorism
Here in the West, the killing of Osama Bin Laden was considered a triumph. In Pakistan, where the al-Qaeda leader lived out his final years, attitudes are very different: On Wednesday, a Pakistani court brought down a guilty verdict against the Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA locate bin Laden in May, 2011. Having been convicted of treason, Shakil Afridi now faces a 33-year prison sentence.
Each story like this brings fresh evidence that Pakistan, a nominal Western ally in the war on terrorism, actually is doing more to enable the jihadis than fight them. We don’t yet have definitive evidence to suggest that the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment was actively housing and protecting bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. But that certainly would have been in keeping with long-standing Pakistani policies.
Christopher Hitchens: Assassination is the best option
Probably because it mainly provides the kind of short-term cinematic satisfaction that characterizes the Hellfire terminus, the flashy ending of al-Qaeda’s main media star has only led to the reopening of some pressing questions about the nature of the jihadi menace. It has also forced us to confront the idea of words as weapons, and the relationship between ideas and actions, in a world of conscienceless criminal violence that operates without employing any code or precedent of its own.
So now we have the phenomenon of an American citizen, able to whisper directly into the ears of people living here, but until recently being able to do so from a geographical location where our laws cannot reach him. There is no precedent, however remote, for a legal and moral challenge of this kind, let alone for a political or military one.
