History > 2015 > UK > Terrorism (I)

Tunisia attack perpetrators

will be tracked down,

vows Michael Fallon

Defence secretary makes pledge in Commons
as foreign secretary confirms final death toll of Britons
killed in attack as 30 and more bodies are repatriated

Thursday 2 July 2015

17.33 BST

Last modified on Thursday 2 July 2015

23.22 BST

The Guardian

Mark Tran

The UK defence secretary has said perpetrators of the massacre of British tourists in Tunisia would be “tracked down” wherever they were, as the bodies of nine more victims were repatriated.

“We are working with the Tunisian authorities to find out exactly how this outrage last Friday was carried out, how it was planned, who was involved in it,” Michael Fallon told the House of Commons on Thursday.

“Let the house be in absolutely no doubt, the people who perpetrated the murders of our constituents are going to be tracked down, whether they are in Libya, in Syria or anywhere else,” he said.

Earlier, Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, confirmed the final death toll of British tourists killed in the attack as 30.

“We now have all 30 British victims positively identified and we can say with a high degree of confidence that is now the final death toll of British nationals killed in this incident,” said Hammond. Thirty-eight people were killed by gunman Seifeddine Rezgui on the beach in Sousse last Friday.

Thomson and First Choice, the holiday firm, confirmed that the 30 Britons were its customers.

An RAF C17 transport plane carrying the bodies of Lisa and William Graham, Ann and James McQuire, Philip Heathcote, Trudy Jones, Janet and John Stocker, and David Thompson touched down at Brize Norton air base in Oxfordshire.

The Grahams came from Perthshire in Scotland. William Graham reportedly booked the holiday as a birthday present for his wife, who turned 50 earlier this year.

Jim and Ann McQuire, 66 and 63 respectively, from Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, were described as a “kind and gentle couple” by vicar Joyce Keys. McQuire was a captain in the Boys’ Brigade, a Christian youth organisation, which said it was “shocked and deeply saddened” by his death.

Heathcote, 52, from Felixstowe, Suffolk, was celebrating his 30th wedding anniversary with wife Allison, 48, who was seriously injured in the attack and has been flown back to Britain by the RAF for treatment.

Jones, 51, of Blackwood in Gwent, south Wales, was described by her family as “our beautiful mother”. The 51-year-old divorced mother-of-four had been on holiday with her friends.

Retired printer John Stocker, 74, and his wife Janet, 63, were described by their family as “the happiest, most loving couple”.

Wounded Britons - including four with severe injuries - have already been brought back to the UK for treatment at hospitals in Birmingham, Oxford, Plymouth and London.

A minute’s silence in memory of the victims will be observed at noon on Friday – a week after the attack – and flags will be flown at half-mast over Whitehall departments and Buckingham Palace.

Eight Britons killed in the attack in Sousse, a popular Tunisian resort, were brought back on Wednesday. They included the youngest known victim, Joel Richards, 19, who was killed alongside his uncle Adrian Evans and his grandfather Patrick Evans at the beach last Friday. Joel’s brother Owen, 16, survived the attack.

The others were fashion blogger Carly Lovett, 24, from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire; Stephen Mellor, 59, from Bodmin in Cornwall; John Stollery, 58, a social worker from Nottinghamshire; former Birmingham City football player Denis Thwaites, 70, and his wife Elaine, 69.

The other British victims include: John Welch, 74, and his partner Eileen Swannack, from Wiltshire; Christopher and Sharon Bell, from Leeds; Chris Dyer, from Watford; Lisa Burbidge, from Gateshead; Sue Davey from Staffordshire; Scott Chalkley from Derby; Claire Windass from Hull; Bruce Wilkinson, 72, from Goole, East Yorkshire; and Stuart Cullen, 52, from Suffolk.

The Irish victims were Lorna Carty, from Robinstown, Co Meath, and Laurence and Martina Hayes, both in their 50s, from Athlone in Co Westmeath.

Tunisian investigators have arrested 12 people in connection with the attack but are still hunting for accomplices believed to have helped Rezgui. According to Tunisian officials, he trained at a Libyan jihadi camp at the same time as the two gunmen who attacked the Bardo museum in Tunis in March, killing 22 people.

Tunisia attack perpetrators will be tracked down, vows Michael Fallon,
G,
2 JULY 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/
tunisia-attack-death-toll-britons-confirmed-30

Tunisia attack:

Foreign Office say

15 Britons killed

and death toll may rise

Prime minister earlier denounced ‘savage’ killings
by Islamic State terrorist of at least 39 tourists

Saturday 27 June 2015

14.40 BST

Last modified on Saturday 27 June 2015

19.55 BST

The Guardian

Jessica Elgot, Chris Johnston and agencies
 

More details of the Tunisian beach shooting have emerged as it becomes clear that British tourists bore the brunt of the attack by an Islamic State extremist.

Fifteen Britons died in the shooting at the coastal city of Sousse but the toll could rise further, the Foreign Office said on Saturday, in what it called “the most significant terrorist attack on the British people” since 7 July 2005.

The Foreign Office minister, Tobias Ellwood, said: “At least 15 British nationals were killed in yesterday’s atrocity, but I should stress that the number may well rise as several more have been seriously injured in this horrific attack.”

He said the act of “evil and brutality” demonstrated why this kind of extremism had to be confronted, whether it happened in the UK or abroad.

The number of British holidaymakers confirmed to have been killed by the lone gunman on Friday rose steadily on Saturday.

The prime minister, David Cameron, warned earlier that the UK public needed to be prepared for the total to rise.

A total of 39 people were killed, including one Irishwoman, with one Belgian and a German also among the victims. The Irish government said there were grave concerns about another two Irish citizens.

At least 1,000 holidaymakers arrived back in the UK on Saturday. Cameron said a full deployment team of consular staff, police and experts from the Red Cross would arrive in Tunisia on Saturday to help the victims and added that the government was doing all it could to assist them.

The PM said: “These savage terrorist attacks in Tunisia, Kuwait and France are a brutal and tragic reminder of the threat faced around the world from these evil terrorists.”

In the wake of the attacks, Cameron said there would be heightened security as events are held across the UK to mark Armed Forces Day.

The UK’s terror threat level remains at “severe”, the second-highest level, meaning an attack is highly likely.

Mark Rowley, Metropolitan police assistant commissioner and national policing lead for counter-terrorism, said it was “fairly clear” that the location of the Tunisian attack was chosen because of the number of westerners present.

A large number of officers had been sent to the resort, to gather evidence and help the Tunisian authorities, he said.

The Tunisian prime minister called for all citizens to work together to defeat terrorism as thousands of tourists prepared to leave the north African country in the wake of its worst terrorist attack.

Tourists crowded into the airport at Hammamet near the coastal city of Sousse where a young man dressed in shorts on Friday pulled an assault rifle out of his beach umbrella and killed 39 people, mostly tourists.

“The fight against terrorism is a national responsibility,” Essid said on Saturday. “We are at war against terrorism which represents a serious danger to national unity during this delicate period that the nation is going through.”

He announced a range of tough measures to fight extremism, including examining the funding of organisations suspected of promoting radicalism, closing about 80 mosques outside government control and declaring certain mountainous zones military areas.

Essid identified the gunman, who was killed by police after the attack, as Seifeddine Rezgui, a young student at Kairouan University from the town of Gaafour in the governorate of Siliana.

The Site Intelligence Group reported that Isis had claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack on its Twitter account, referring to the gunman by his jihadi pseudonym Abu Yahya al-Qayrawani. Isis Twitter accounts have published a photograph purporting to be Rezgui posing between two Kalashnikovs and smiling.

Meanwhile, more survivors’ stories and details of the victims began to emerge. The British tourist Tom Richards, who faced the gunman in a hotel corridor, described him as being in his early 20s with long black hair and a beard. Richards, who was there with his mother, escaped when the gunman inexplicably stopped firing.

Matthew James survived being shot three times when he used his body to shield his fiancée, Saera Wilson, during the shooting.

Ross Thompson and Rebecca Smith, from Coventry, were recovering after receiving shrapnel injuries. “We managed to get the room barricaded, got down low and just hid,” Thompson said.

Smith said she became separated from Thompson and hid in toilets with another woman and her son: “We locked ourselves in and hoped for the best.”

Dave Beardsmore, from Manchester, told Sky News: “We ran for our lives. I heard bullets going over the top of my head; I just kept on running and we went to our room.”

Tony Callaghan, who works for Norfolk police at North Walsham, and his wife were injured in the attacks. They both needed hospital treatment but their injuries were not life-threatening.

One of those killed has been named as Lorna Carty, a nurse and mother of two from County Meath in Ireland. She had been in the resort with her husband, Declan, who had recently undergone heart surgery. It is understood the couple were given the holiday as a present from a family member to help with his recuperation.

The killings took place on the beach between the Soviva and Imperial Marhaba hotels in the town of Sousse, a popular destination for tourists from the UK and Ireland.

They came on the same day that a suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Kuwait killed 27 worshippers and wounded a further 220 in an attack that was later claimed by Isis.

The attack in Tunisia was the country’s worst and follows a massacre on 18 March at the national Bardo museum in Tunis that resulyed in the deaths of 22 people, again mostly tourists, and has called into question the newly elected government’s ability to protect the country.

The carnage in Tunisia began on the beach, where tourists described hearing what sounded like fireworks and then ran for cover when they realised it was gunfire. Video of the aftermath showed medics using beach chairs as stretchers to carry away people in swimsuits.

The Tunisian interior minister, Rafik Chelli, said of the gunman: “He had a parasol in his hand. He went down to put it in the sand and then he took out his Kalashnikov and began shooting wildly.” He then entered the pool area of the Imperial Marhaba hotel before moving inside, killing people as he went.

A British tourist, Gary Pine, told AP he was on the beach with his wife around midday when heard the shooting. They shouted for their son to get out of the water, grabbed their bag and ran for the hotel. Their son told them he saw someone who had been shot on the beach.

There was sheer panic at the hotel, Pine said. “There were a lot of concerned people, a few people in tears with panic and a few people – older guests – they’d turned their ankles or there was a few little minor injuries and nicks and scrapes.”
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Elizabeth O’Brien, an Irish tourist who was with her two sons, told Irish radio she was on the beach when the shooting began. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. It sounds like gunfire,’ so I just ran to the sea, to my children and grabbed our things” before fleeing to their hotel room, she said.

Since overthrowing its secular dictator in 2011, Tunisia has been plagued by terrorist attacks, although only recently have they targeted the tourism sector, which makes up nearly 15% of GDP.

Simon Calder, a London-based travel commentator, said: “The Foreign Office will declare the summer effectively over for Tunisia, and it will destroy – besides the lives taken – the tens of thousands of livelihoods who depend on tourism for a living.” Nearly half a million Britons visited Tunisia in 2014.

Jonathan Hill, professor of defence studies at King’s College London, said the attacks were a blow to Tunisia’s image as a stable, democratic nation emerging from its revolution in 2011. “The terrorists are attacking Tunisia’s reputation,” he said. “Not just as a safe and welcoming destination for western holidaymakers, but as the one real success story to emerge out of the Arab Spring.”

Tunisia attack: Foreign Office says 15 Britons killed and death toll may rise,
G, JUNE 27, 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/27/
tunisia-prime-minister-to-shut-mosques-inciting-terrorism-as-isis-claims-attack

Teenage Girl Leaves for ISIS,

and Others Follow

 

FEB. 24, 2015

The New York Times

By KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA

LONDON — Aqsa Mahmood’s family saw her as an intelligent and popular teenager who helped care for her three younger siblings and her grandparents at her home in Scotland. She listened to Coldplay, read Harry Potter novels and drank Irn Bru, a Scottish soft drink.

She aspired to be a pharmacist or a doctor, and they did not expect her to leave her home in Glasgow in November 2013 to go to Syria, where the authorities now say she is one of the most active recruiters of young British women to join the Islamic State.

The authorities are investigating possible links between Ms. Mahmood, who goes by the name Umm Layth (meaning Mother of the Lion), and the disappearance last week of three teenagers from London. They, too, are believed to have traveled to Syria to join the terrorist group also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The apparent trend of studious, seemingly driven young women leaving home to join violent jihadists has become disturbingly familiar.

A Metropolitan Police official said on Monday that one of the girls, Shamima Begum, had sent a Twitter message to a woman on Feb. 15, a couple of days before they left Britain, but declined to disclose her name.

Experts who track jihadist activity online, including Audrey Alexander at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, in London, have identified that woman as Ms. Mahmood, 20.

She is now thought to live in Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital of the Islamic State, where she married a jihadist and acts as a virtual den mother offering sometimes stern advice to peers who would follow in her footsteps.

As the families of the three missing girls made tearful appeals for their daughters to return home, Ms. Mahmood’s family issued a statement last weekend addressed to their own daughter, whom they called a “disgrace.” They said they were “full of horror and anger” that she “may have had a role to play” in recruiting the girls for the Islamic State.

“Your actions are a perverted and evil distortion of Islam,” the family said in their statement, released through their lawyer, Aamer Anwar. “You are killing your family every day with your actions. They are begging you to stop if you ever loved them.”

The young women — Kadiza Sultana, 16; Ms. Begum, 15; and Amira Abase, 15 — were described by a classmate as studious, argumentative and driven, not unlike Ms. Mahmood. Ms. Sultana’s Twitter feed showed that she followed many accounts of jihadist fighters. Ms. Begum, who sent a Twitter message to Ms. Mahmood, asked her own followers before she left to “keep me in your duas,” or prayers. (Their accounts were recently disabled.)

The teenagers told their families on Feb. 17 that they would be out for the day, but security camera video at Gatwick Airport, near London, showed that the girls had boarded a Turkish Airways flight to Istanbul, and the Metropolitan Police in London said Tuesday that they had arrived in Syria.

Another classmate from the girls’ school, Bethnal Green Academy in east London, took a Turkish Airlines flight in December and is thought to be in Syria. Police officers at the time questioned the three teenagers over their classmate’s disappearance, a Metropolitan Police officer said.

Like them, “Aqsa was very intelligent, very liked, very bubbly, kind, caring,” said Mr. Anwar, the lawyer. But the Islamic State has turned Ms. Mahmood into “a poster girl in Britain for recruitment,” he said, “and she herself is a high-value recruit.”

Members of Ms. Mahmood’s family said they had “absolutely no inkling” of her radicalization, according to Mr. Anwar. The oldest of two sisters and a brother, she lived with her parents and grandparents in a middle-class area of Glasgow. None of the women in her family wore a head scarf, Mr. Anwar said, but one day Ms. Mahmood began wearing a hijab and became “increasingly vocal and angry” about events in Syria.

“But you can go to any Muslim household,” he added, “and you would hear similar arguments being made.”

“It is those young people who are liked, who are smart, who think, who are caring, who are ripe for radicalization,” he said, not the outcasts.

When they do not receive adequate answers from their families, schools or the local mosque, they often turn to the Internet, Mr. Anwar said. Last year, a pair of 17-year-old twins from Manchester who traveled to Syria attracted widespread attention because they had been straight-A students who wanted careers in medicine.

The precise role Ms. Mahmood might have played in the flight of the three London teenagers is unclear, since Ms. Begum, not Ms. Mahmood, initiated their exchange on Twitter. Their conversation quickly moved to an encrypted social media channel, which is standard practice among would-be jihadists seeking practical information on how to reach Syria.

There are about 100 British women among the 550 Western women who are thought to have joined Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq, according to the Soufan Group, a security consultancy based in New York. Female recruits are generally younger than their male counterparts, said Ross Frenett of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London research organization that studies extremism. As the radicals see it, “a 15-year-old makes a good wife,” he said. “A 14-year-old male is less useful as a combatant.”

Women who join the Islamic State try to entice other women to marry militants and help them build a new, retrograde Islamic society. Ms. Mahmood had emerged as one of the most vocal supporters of the Islamic State and one of its most established online recruiters, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadists’ online activity.

She has tried to incite terrorist attacks on Western countries through her Tumblr blog and multiple Twitter accounts, calling on British Muslims to follow the example of “brothers from Woolwich, Texas and Boston.” But she has also occasionally alluded to boredom doing housewifely duties.

She tweeted that, compared with Scotland, the winters in Syria “are too much,” and advised, “Sisters please don’t forget to pack thermal clothing or you’ll regret it later on.”

She also admonished them: “Sisters, please for the sake of Allah contact the sisters whom are online rather than approaching the brothers. Also know the fact many brothers whom you contact and chat to are married. Have some self-respect and don’t be a homewrecker :)”

The families of the three missing London teenagers have criticized the security services in Britain for failing to intervene to stop their daughters from going to Syria, even though they were monitoring Ms. Mahmood’s online activity.

After she left home more than a year ago, Ms. Mahmood called her parents from the Turkish border, telling them she would next see them on “Judgment Day” and take them to heaven, holding their hands. But the British security services advised her parents to keep their daughter’s disappearance “under the radar,” Mr. Anwar said.

“Had the security services really been concerned about Aqsa Mahmood’s welfare, they would have moved heaven and earth to get her back in November 2013,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on February 25, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Teenage Girl Leaves for ISIS, and Others Follow.

Teenage Girl Leaves for ISIS, and Others Follow,
FEB. 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/world/from-studious-teenager-to-isis-recruiter.html

British jihadi

who faked his own death

to return to UK

is jailed for 12 years

Imran Khawaja, who fled home from Syrian training camp,
is a risk to public after he appeared in videos
promoting Islamic State cause, judge rules


Friday 6 February 2015

12.33 GM

The Guardian

Caroline Davies



A British jihadi, who appeared in “horrific and deeply disturbing” propaganda videos and faked his own death so he could return to the UK from a Syrian training camp, has been jailed for 12 years.

Imran Khawaja, 27, nicknamed “Barbie”, posed with severed heads, dead fighters and child soldiers during a six-month stint with Rayat al-Tawheed (RAT) insurgents in Syria last year.

But he told friends he had “had enough” of the conditions, and had complained about the lack of toiletries, cocoa butter, and condoms for the “war booty”.

The former immigration centre worker, from Southall, west London, was stopped by port officials at Dover trying to gain re-entry to the UK after telling friends he needed to raise further funds to support the RAT cause.

The bodybuilder pleaded guilty to preparation of acts of terror, for which he was sentenced to a 17-year extended term, comprising a 12-year custodial term before being released on licence. He will serve a minimum of eight years. He was also given seven-year terms for attending a terrorist training camp and for weapons training, and an 11-year term for possession of an article for terrorist purposes, which will all run concurrently.

Sentencing him at Woolwich crown court, judge Jeremy Baker described him as a “willing and enthusiastic” participant in the videos posted online for Islamic State’s propagandist arm.

Dismissing Khawaja’s claims that he had come home to see his family and that he had regretted his actions, the judge said he presented a risk to the public. “It is clear in the last few years you have been showing an increasing interest in Islamic jihadist material. You took part in the production of films designed to promote the Islamic State cause and encouraging UK Muslims to join you in jihad. Your interest was sufficiently profound for you to travel to Syria to train for jihad. I’m also satisfied, by the time you decided to return to the UK, you had completed your terrorist training,” he said.
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Khawaja showed no emotion as he was led from the dock. His counsel, Henry Blaxland QC, said Khawaja had a very low IQ and had been “indoctrinated” in the months before he travelled to Syria in January 2014.

Khawaja had resisted his family’s pleas for him to return to the UK. In messages to friends and relatives, he repeatedly lied about when he was coming home before confiding he was there to die a martyr, the court heard.

In one text exchange with his sister Azmeena, he told her to tell his family that he was doing charity work – “driving an ambulance der [Syria] or sumtin” (sic).

In reality, he was whipping up domestic support for his cause by appearing in harrowing footage and speaking publicly about his desire for actions. In one section of footage played to the court, prosecutor Brian Altman said, Khawaja could be seen picking up severed heads from the back of a flatbed truck and saying: “Heads. Kuffar (non-Muslims). Disgusting”.

His family tried to tempt him home by texting pictures of English food. At one stage Azmeena threatened to travel to Syria herself to fetch him.

At the time of his return, a series of newspaper articles published from 3 June reported Khawaja’s death based on RAT posts on Titter and Instagram, which announced he “was killed in battle a few nights ago.” Those postings provided cover for his return to the UK on 3 June, said Altman.

When he was stopped at Dover he was with an older cousin, Tahir Bhatti, who had gone to rescue him, the court heard. The two were arrested when Bhatti, 43, a taxi company owner from Watford, Hertfordshire, admitted to border staff that the “road trip” the two purported to be returning from, was actually a rescue mission.

During his time in Syria, Khawaja told friend Asil Ali he needed toiletries and loo roll, and Ali sent a message to a friend saying Khawaja “needs cocoa butter, toothpaste, soap and condoms for the war booty”.

The prosecution said the messages between Khawaja and Ali hinted that he was returning to the UK to help with fundraising as his friends back home had failed to do so. Ali, 33, of Ealing, west London, pleaded guilty to entering into a funding arrangement for the purposes of terrorism after handing Khawaja £300, and was sentenced to a 21-month custodial term. Bhatti was also given 21-months for assisting an offender, reduced to 95 days for time spent in custody awaiting trial.

In a note to the judge, Khawaja said he had “nightmares” about his time in Syria and urged “the young men of Britain” not to “make the same mistake” he had.

Outside court, Commander Richard Walton of the Metropolitan police described the images and video footage of Khawaja in Syria as “horrific and deeply disturbing”.

“Khawaja chose to become a terrorist, engaged in weapons training in a terrorist training camp and faked his own death in order to conceal his entry back into the UK,” said Walton.

“This sentence sends a powerful message to those who plan or prepare acts of terrorism overseas or here in the UK.”

Deborah Walsh, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Imran Khawaja’s actions are one of the most appalling examples of violent extremism that I have seen committed by British jihadis returning from Syria.

“Photos and videos of Khawaja posing with child soldiers and severed heads defy the understanding of civilised people and paint a picture of a man who would stop at nothing to spread terror and hatred.”

British jihadi who faked his own deathto return to UK is jailed for 12 years,
G,
FEB 6, 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/06/
british-jihadi-fled-syria-training-camp-jailed-12-years-imran-khawaja