Moroccan police have dismantled a terrorist network, arresting 17 people, including two former prisoners at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the official MAP news agency reported. At least some of the suspects were linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Brahim Benchekroun and Mohammed Mazouz -- among five Moroccans freed from Guantanamo Bay in August last year -- were among the suspects, the news agency said on Sunday.
They were arrested on Nov. 11 at their homes in connection with a probe into al-Qaeda, a Moroccan security official said.
Information about the network, dismantled before it was fully structured, remained sketchy, and it was unclear when the 15 other arrests were made.
The top two suspects, Khaled Azig and Mohamed Rha, were recruiting extremists for their cause, MAP quoted police as saying. Members of the network had links with small groups on the Iraqi border and close ties to leading members of the al-Qaeda terror network, MAP reported.
No details were provided, including the exact nature of the link to al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is reportedly holding two Moroccan Embassy employees, Abdelkrim el-Mouhafidi and his driver, Abderrahim Boualam. They disappeared on Oct. 20 while driving to Baghdad from Jordan.
Morocco's intelligence services have been tracking Azig, one of the two lead suspects in the network, since March. A Moroccan, he once studied theology in Syria and made frequent trips to Turkey, but returned to Morocco in June, MAP quoted police as saying.
Azig was joined on Sept. 29 by Rha, a Belgian of Moroccan origin known to have close ties with North Africans in Europe. He also had made trips to Syria, MAP reported.
The two men were in the process of recruiting Islamic extremists when their efforts were cut short by the arrests, the agency said.
Benchekroun and Mazouz, the former Guantanamo prisoners, were among those being recruited, police told the news agency.
Arrested in Pakistan and Afghanistan in late 2001, they were among five Moroccans accused of taking training courses in how to handle firearms and make explosives.
A suspected former bodyguard of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Abdellah Tabarak, was one of the five released. Turned over to Moroccan authorities in August last year, after two years and eight months in the US detention camp, the five were given provisional freedom. The five all face trial.
Morocco has been tracking Islamic extremists since bombing attacks in Casablanca in 2003 killed 45 people -- 13 of them suicide bombers. The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group is suspected in the bombings that authorities have said were linked to al-Qaeda. The arrests were announced hours after French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy concluded a meeting with his Moroccan counterpart, Mustapha Sahel, devoted mainly to the fight against terrorism.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.