Federal authorities in New York announced that a Swede of Lebanese descent, wanted in connection with establishing a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon, in 1999, was extradited to the US on Tuesday.
Officials said the defendant, Oussama Abdullah Kassir, was taken into custody in the Czech Republic by FBI agents and returned to the US to face charges of providing material support to terrorists. He was arrested on Dec. 11, 2005, during a layover in Prague while traveling from Stockholm to Beirut, officials said.
The extradition of Kassir, 41, is another chapter in the sprawling investigations related to the camp in Bly that have touched three continents and have led to the 2003 guilty plea of James Ujaama, a convert to Islam who owned a computer business in Seattle, where he also worked as a motivational speaker. Two other suspects, Abu Hamza al-Masri, a blind, one-armed Islamic cleric, and Haroon Rashid Aswat, one of Masri's chief aides, are in custody in Britain awaiting extradition.
Federal officials said the nearly two years it took for the extradition of Kassir was part of the normal process and was not a result of undue delay.
In November 1999, the authorities said, Kassir and Aswat traveled on an Air India flight from London to Kennedy Airport in New York and embarked on a bus trip to Seattle. Working on behalf of Masri, they then went on to Bly, officials said, to establish a "jihadi" training camp.
In the two months before they left Bly, the two men produced a series of CDs that were to be used to teach recruits how to make poisons and construct bombs, said Michael Garcia, the US attorney in Manhattan. In a fax sent between Kassir and Aswat, the property was described as being in "a pro-militia and firearms state" that "looks just like Afghanistan," officials said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
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
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion