CNN, 9 Dec 09: Five people arrested in Pakistan had been reported missing in the United States, and police are confident they were planning terrorist acts, a Pakistani police official told CNN. . . . The five were from Virginia and their families had contacted the FBI soon after they went missing, he said. They include two Pakistani-Americans, two Yemeni-Americans and an Egyptian-American. . . .
. . . .The Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement Wednesday it was assisting in the investigation of “five Muslim young men from Virginia who left the country recently under mysterious circumstances.”
The parents of the missing youths and local Muslim leaders approached the council about the disappearances and the organization “immediately informed the FBI,” the council said. Council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said one of the missing youths was a student at Howard University, and all five knew each other.
One of the youths left a video behind, Nihad Awad, the council’s executive director, told reporters. “I was disturbed by the content of it,” he said. One person appeared in it, and made references to “the ongoing conflict in the world, and that young Muslims have to do something,” Awad said. He said the video “juxtaposed certain verses of the Quran.” . . . . .
5 men missing from N.Va. are arrested in Pakistan
Washington Post, 9 Dec 09: Five missing Muslim men from Northern Virginia have been arrested in Pakistan and are being held by Pakistani authorities, the FBI and a Muslim group said Wednesday.
Pakistani media reports said the young men were taken into custody at the home of an activist linked to Jaish-i-Muhammad, a jihadist group that was implicated in the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi and has been branded a terrorist organization by the United States. . . . .
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Authorities Search for Five Missing Washington, DC-Area Muslim Men
Guardian, 9 Dec 09: A former MI5 officer cannot take his battle to publish his memoirs to a court of law, top judges ruled today.
In a move with potentially widespread implications for individuals complaining about the activities of the security and intelligence agencies, the supreme court unanimously dismissed the case brought by the former officer, known only as A.
Instead, the five judges ruled, he must take his case to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), a body that meets in secret, sometimes without the knowledge of a complainant. There is no right of appeal and the tribunal is under no obligation to give reasons for its decisions.
Though the former MI5 agent wants to publish his memoirs, he insists on remaining anonymous. He has threatened a high court injunction if the Guardian publishes his identity, though his name is available on websites.
His 300-page manuscript is provisionally entitled Siberia, after the codeword he was given to use when in danger during a decade-long undercover career, that began with other crimefighting organisations and progressed to infiltrating international terrorists. . . . .
Gothamist, 9 Dec 09: An Imam has turned an abandoned department store just two blocks away from ground zero into a place where hundreds Muslims gather for prayer every week — and he dreams of converting into a full-fledged Islamic cultural center.
After paying $4.85 million this summer to purchase a five-story Park Place building — which once housed a branch of Burlington Coat Factory but has been vacant since a plane’s landing gear crashed through its roof on Sept. 11, 2001 — a group of investors plan on building “an Islamic cultural, educational and recreational center near the city’s most hallowed piece of land,” the Times reports. . . . .
InformationWeek, 9 Dec 09: Employees at the Transportation Security Administration inadvertently exposed classified information about the agency’s security procedures because, apparently, they don’t know how PDF documents work.
What’s not clear is how many other government departments, legal agencies, healthcare providers, and other organizations that deal with sensitive information are unaware that a quirk in Adobe’s Portable Document Format can leave data open to prying eyes.
TSA officials posted what they thought was a redacted version of the TSA’s airport security operating manual on a Web site used by private contractors looking for government work. The problem: the officials didn’t actually delete sensitive parts of the document—they just blacked them out using a graphics tool.
That method left the underlying words intact, and they were exposed when readers cut and pasted pages from the document, “Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures,” into a new file. The vulnerability isn’t technically a bug in Adobe’s product, but its existence shows how those handling secure information should be fully trained in the software they’re using.
The end result of the foul-up was that highly sensitive information about TSA screening methods, interviewing procedures, X-ray machines and other terrorist prevention tools became easily available to millions of people on the Web.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Wednesday promised Senate Judiciary Committee members that her department would launch a full probe of the incident and take unspecified actions against those involved. . . . . .
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TSA Leaks Sensitive Airport Screening Manual
From left to right: Adam Khatib, Nabeel Hussain and Mohammed Shamin Uddin
Times of London, 9 Dec 09: Three friends of the leader of the airline bomb plot were convicted today of terrorist offences connected to the plan to commit mass murder in the skies.
Adam Khatib, 22, was found guilty of conspiring with Abdulla Ahmed Ali to detonate suicide bombs onboard transatlantic airliners flying from London to the United States and Canada.
A jury at Woolwich Crown Court also found Nabeel Hussain, 25, guilty of acts preparatory to terrorism and convicted Mohammed Shamin Uddin, 39, of possessing a document likely to be useful to terrorists.
The three men were convicted at the end of an eight-week trial which was told by the prosecution that they helped Ali and his terror cell as they prepared for their suicide mission.
The plot was thwarted in August 2006 after intensive surveillance by the police and intelligence services, as plans for the attacks were being finalised. After the capture in Pakistan of a key link man between al-Qaeda leaders and Ali’s group in east London, police moved swiftly to arrest the group.
The discovery of their plan to use bottle bombs to bring down aircraft led to a security clampdown which temporarily paralysed global air travel and continues to cause restrictions on carrying liquids on board airliners.
Khatib, a factory worker who was aged 19 at the time of the plot, was a potential suicide bomber who was willing to board one of the seven planes targeted in the plot. He had been with Ali in Pakistan, and police found a tourist map of Lahore bearing Khatib’s fingerprints alongside those of the plot leader and another of the cell ringleaders Assad Sarwar.
Scientific evidence also linked Khatib to the group’s “bomb factory”, a flat in Walthamstow, east London, where the plotters experimented with making liquid bombs and recorded martyrdom videos. . . . . .
. . . . . Hussain was accused of providing logistical and financial support to the bomb cell and police found a martyr’s will among his possessions. The will, written in September 2005, stated: “Why should I worry when I die a Muslim in the manner in which I am to die? I go to my death for the sake of my maker, who if wishes can bless limbs torn away.” . . . .
