JOIN USUS counter-terrorism officials have authenticated a video by an al-Qaeda recruiter threatening to do so, the Washington Times reported on Wednesday describing it as “the latest sign of the terrorist group’s determination to stage” such an attack.
The video aired earlier this year as a recruitment tool makes clear that al-Qaeda is looking to exploit weaknesses in US border security and also is willing to ally itself with white militia groups or other anti-government entities interested in carrying out an attack inside the US, the daily said citing unnamed counter-terrorism officials interviewed by it.
The officials, it said, stressed that there is no credible information that al-Qaeda has acquired the capabilities to carry out a mass biological attack although its members have clearly sought the expertise.
The video first aired by the Arabic news network Al Jazeera in February and later posted to several websites shows Kuwaiti dissident Abdullah al-Nafisi telling a room full of supporters in Bahrain that al-Qaeda is casing the US border with Mexico to assess how to send terrorists and weapons into the US. The Times cited a US counter-terrorism official as saying al-Nafisi is a “person of interest” and a veteran recruiter for al-Qaeda.
Misidentified on some blog sites as a professor, he is a Qaeda associate who is thought to have communicated with senior Qaeda leaders in recent years, the official said.
The recruiter is said to have close ties to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the senior Afghan Taliban leader now thought to be in Pakistan. Al-Nafisi “is a significant ideological player in terrorist circles, and that makes him dangerous because he can inspire his followers to do extremely bad things,” the official said.
Agencies
British hostage in Mali killed
Al-Qaeda’s North African wing said it had carried out its threat to kill a British hostage it was holding in the Sahara, Reuters reports from London. Britain said it had reason to believe the hostage, Edwin Dyer, had been killed.
The AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) had said it would kill the Briton if Britain did not release Abu Qatada, a Jordanian Islamist in UK prison.
Dyer was killed on May 31 after a second deadline expired. “The British captive was killed so that he, and with him the British state, may taste a tiny portion of what innocent Muslims taste every day at the hands of the Crusader and Jewish coalition to the east and to the west,” the group said in a statement.