Tuesday, June 26, 2012

A trained Islamic terrorist from Norway is awaiting orders to carry out an attack on the West, officials from three European security agencies have revealed

The Muslim is believed to have received terrorist training from Al Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen and is ready to strike. Western intelligence officials have long feared such a scenario - a convert to Islam who is trained in terrorist methods and can blend in easily in Europe and the United States, traveling without visa restrictions. European security services, including in Norway, have warned in recent years of homegrown, radicalized Muslims traveling to terror training camps in conflict zones. Many of the known cases involve young men with family roots in Muslim countries. But the latest case involves a man in his 30s with no immigrant background, the officials said. After converting to Islam in 2008, he quickly became radicalized and traveled to Yemen to receive terror training, one of the officials said. The man spent some months in Yemen and is still believed to be there. There are several examples in Europe and the United States of converts to Islam linked to terror plots, from failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid, a British convert, to a Pennsylvania woman dubbed Jihad Jane, who pleaded guilty in 2011 to charges that she plotted to kill a Swedish cartoonist who caricatured the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. In March 2012, Mullah Krekar, a radical Iraqi-born cleric who came to Norway as a refugee, was sentenced to five years in prison for making death threats against Norwegian officials and three Kurdish men he claimed had insulted Islam.

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