Influential Connections
So much for home-grown and self-motivated terrorists. Home grown they very well may have been, and motivated as well, but the connections are there, despite original speculations and denials to the contrary. The tentacles of international jihad are everywhere entwined, ruthlessly seeking out converts to their cause. Recruits don't seem all that hard to come by for assiduous jihadists who know where to look and how to impress those romance-seeking, impressionable young psychopaths-in-waiting.Now new information has been divulged through Ontario Superior Court Justice Douglas Rutherford, sitting on the Khawaja trial. Originally suppressed at the behest of British justice officials, it's now been revealed that there was a connection between the leader of the London "7/7" suicide bombers and Canada's very own jihadist, Momin Khawaja. Moreover, that the terror gang in London with which Momin Khawaja was involved, also had connections with al-Qaeda operatives.
It would seem from the evidence and through witness reports that Mohammed Sidique Khan, who led the suicide bombers of July 7, 2005, who were successful in killing 52 London commuters, had associated and trained with the same British terror cell that Momin Khawaja belonged to. Big surprise, actually. The world of international jihad is not that vast and uncontrived that it doesn't represent a small world of intriguers.
Mohammed Khan, who successfully detonated a device that killed him and 7 passengers at London's underground attended the same terrorist training camp in Pakistan's Malakand region that Mr. Khawaja and his associates trained at, mere days earlier - two years before the July 7, 2005 terror event. They also, it seems, stayed at the same Lahore safehouse - as testified by Crown witness Mohammed Babar, responsible for setting up the camp and safehouse.
British security services have incriminating photographs and recordings of Mohammed Khan meeting with Momin Khawaja's jihad-mates. A definite connection is made between the two jihadist cells and senior al-Quaeda representatives who directed their negotiations from a distance. A far cry from the original post "7/7" claims that the groups were independent of al-Qaeda influence, but rather represented self-propelled jihadists.
Even Prime Minister Tony Blair was involved in assuring the public that the terror strikes had no precedent, that investigating authorities had no prior knowledge of the cells and the individual participants had been unknown to them. Whereas the truth was otherwise; both the associates of Momin Khawaja and the "7/7" perpetrators had been identified and profiled, and were deemed to be radicals, but of no immediate concern as potential jihadists.
Sheer ineptitude, a stark failure of intelligence. The government and its intelligence authorities both claiming that "if more resources had been in place sooner, the chances of preventing the July attacks could have increased". Truth was, there were distinctly "missed opportunities" to intervene and prevent the disaster.
But the terrorists were dismissed as being peripheral figures, not worthy of continued surveillance. An investigation wrongly concluded in part that Britain's spy community had no way of anticipating that British citizens would undertake suicide martyrdom attacks on their very homeland. Arriving at that life-altering and -ending decision on their own recognizance.
Now Canada looks to the Momin Khawaja trial for some answers to a very troubling series of events involving a home-grown Canadian man of Pakistani extraction who experienced a middle-class upbringing in the country, and was exposed to the very same education system as any other young man. And who chose to pursue the path of hatred and violence against a culture and a society well known to him.
In the process fancying himself an instrument of Islamic justice. Finding honour and pride in the deliberate plans to destroy the lives of as many innocent people as their incendiary device could demolish.
Labels: Canada, Justice, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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