Operations Mazhar And Northern Exposure
Via Allah at HotAir:
The six-month RCMP investigation, called Project OSage, is one of several overlapping probes that include an FBI case called Operation Northern Exposure and a British probe known as Operation Mazhar
Operation Northern Exposure was also the name given to FBI operations at Ruby Ridge. But it seems to have also been used for a recent disaster drill involving terrorists releasing a bird flu virus into the United States.
By the time this article is published the disaster drill named “Operation Northern Exposure” involving five counties in North Central Montana will be well underway. The scenario as presently understood by this writer involves the terrorist introduction of “Bird Flu” at a big concert in Great Falls. Within 48 hours a large number of very sick people will be descending on all the local hospitals, and the problem will be how will we go about managing the situation.
Operation Mazhar is a Scotland Yard Operation per this Newsweek report from November 2005. It did involve the potential for attacks on Washington, DC - but that was never fully confirmed. It was also linked to Sweden and Sarajevo. It looks as though it might be on going leading to arrests as recently as April. That portion of the operation fits into the Canadian scenario as it involves homegrown terrorists and Internet communications.
Nov. 14, 2005 issue - Having been burned by false alarms in Baltimore and New York, federal and local authorities last week played down intel that a jihadist network with connections in London and Bosnia might have been plotting to attack D.C. landmarks.
Scotland Yard announced late last week that two London-area suspects had been charged with terror-related counts, including possession of computer images showing how to make car bombs and "martyrdom operations vests."
One suspect, Younis Tsouli, was also charged with possessing computer pics showing "a number of places" in Washington, D.C. (A third suspect faces terror-funding charges.) Counterterrorism officials in the United States and Britain, who asked for anonymity because the investigation is continuing, told NEWSWEEK that evidence suggests the plotters may have been targeting the White House and Capitol complex using homemade bombs.
According to the officials, the British suspects are believed to have been in e-mail contact, via Hotmail accounts, with a suspected jihadist recruiter who used the Internet nom de guerre Maximus. According to the officials, Maximus was initially based in Sweden and moved to Sarajevo, where investigators believe he helped run a network recruiting European youth to go to Iraq. Investigators believe the network engaged in credit-card fraud to raise funds.
Officials in Britain were treating the investigation, code-named Operation Mazhar by Scotland Yard, as a major development. But U.S. officials said they were unsure about the seriousness of the threat to Washington. U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said that, while "fully informed," his department was "not concerned about any direct threat or attack." One U.S. counterterror official said that the talk of attacking D.C. symbols might have been overheated "jihadist chatter"; another official said the D.C. photographs found in the suspect's computer could be innocent vacation snapshots. Lawyers for the suspects could not be located for comment.
April 11, 2006 (Reuters) BERLIN -- Investigations into the Madrid and London bombings highlight two worrying trends for European security services -- the emergence of autonomous, homegrown radical cells and their skilled exploitation of the Internet.
A Spanish judge investigating the train bombs that killed 191 people in Madrid in March 2004 reported today that the attacks were carried out by a local group of Islamic militants who were inspired -- but not directed -- by al-Qaeda, taking their cue from an Islamist Web site.
On Sunday, Britain's Observer newspaper quoted a draft government report on last July's London attacks as saying the four young suicide bombers were not part of an international terrorist network but had devised their own "simple and inexpensive" plot, again using information from the Net.
Still unexplained are the significance of trips to Pakistan by two of the bombers and of a video released nearly two months after the blasts in which ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan and al-Qaeda No. 2 man Ayman al-Zawahri appeared in separate segments. The bombers killed 52 people.
In the wake of Madrid, London and other cases, police and security services across Europe have had to revise their previous perception that militant threats were more likely to come from outside their countries.
'Made in Europe'
The chief worry now is "made in Europe" radicals, and the possibility that the same kind of cells that struck Spain and Britain could pop up elsewhere using a similar modus operandi, said Claude Moniquet, head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels.
He said the local nature of the threat made it harder to spot, because those involved may not have forged the kind of contacts with militant circles that could bring them to the attention of police and intelligence services.
Whereas an earlier generation of radicals was trained in al-Qaeda's Afghan camps in the 1980s and 1990s, their equivalents today are frequently schooled on the World Wide Web.
"It is quite clear that the Internet is playing an ever greater role in radicalization and recruitment, and indeed also in facilitating the practical planning [of attacks]," European Union counterterrorism chief Gijs de Vries told a conference in Berlin last week.
Britain's top antiterrorist police officer, Peter Clarke, told the same audience that investigators had last year come across the first known example of a conspiracy hatched entirely over the Internet.
"I think it's the first time we've found a 'virtual network.' The people concerned in it have been charged with conspiring to cause an explosion, but we don't actually have any evidence they have ever met," he said.
An investigation code-named Operation Mazhar led to charges against three men, two of them with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion, and the third with terrorist fund raising.
Asked if it was conceivable that total strangers could put together a successful attack via the Internet, Clarke said: "I think that's entirely feasible. I can't see anything to stop it."
Update: Also see here:
The recent discovery of a transnational terrorist network anchored in Sarajevo—and with branches in Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom—is further evidence of the extent to which the jihad in Bosnia still influences Western European mujahideen networks. Last fall, Bosnian authorities announced a series of arrests in connection with a security sweep known as Operation Mazhar. The men taken into custody had purchased explosives and allegedly planned to carry out suicide attacks against Western targets across Europe. The leader of the cell, Swedish national Mirsad Bektasevic (a.k.a. “Maximus”) was initially based in Sweden and then traveled on to Bosnia “to plan an attack aimed at forcing Bosnia or another government to withdraw forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.”120
In a videotape recovered by Bosnian police, masked militants were shown building explosives while another individual—allegedly Bektasevic himself—explained to the camera, “This weapon will be used against Europe, against those whose forces are in Iraq and Afghanistan… These two brothers ... have given their lives to God to help their brothers and sisters. We are here and we are planning and we have got everything ready.” Mobile phone records also showed that Bektasevic was communicating with other known extremists based in Denmark and the United Kingdom.121 He was also believed to be running a recruitment operation sending young European jihadi recruits on to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.122 Moreover, at least one of the suspects arrested in Bosnia-Herzegovina in connection with the Bektasevic network was the former accountant of a financial front company run by veterans of the El-Mudzahedin Unit in Sarajevo and Zenica.
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