Tag Archives: Terrorism

Maryland Man Charged With Receiving Funds from ISIS to Carry Out U.S. Attack

A 30-year-old Maryland man is accused of receiving close to $9,000 from the Islamic State to fund a terrorist attack in the United States, according to the Department of Justice.

FBI officials arrested Mohamed Yousef Elshinawy on Friday at his home in Edgewood, the Department of Justice said Monday in a news release. The charges against him include providing material support to the Islamic State, as well as lying to the FBI and hiding facts.

“According to the allegations in the complaint, Mohamed Elshinawy received money he believed was provided by ISIL in order to conduct an attack on U.S. soil,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin said in a statement, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

Prosecutors accused Elshinawy of receiving at least $8,700 from people he knew he had ties to the Islamic State between March and June of this year. Prosecutors said Elshinawy claimed that he wasn’t going to carry out an attack and that he was just trying to scam money from the group.

But the Department of Justice alleges that Elshinawy mentioned pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in two separate electronic communications with his childhood friend and brother. In one instance, Elshinawy is accused of telling his brother he wanted to die as a martyr for ISIS. He’s also accused of using social media and prepaid phones to speak directly to ISIS operatives.

“The affidavit alleges that Mr. Elshinawy initially told the FBI that he was defrauding the terrorists, but further investigation showed that Mr. Elshinawy was supporting the terrorists and misleading the FBI,” U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rothstein said in the news release.

Prosecutors said they first became aware of Elshinawy in June after noticing a suspicious money transfer from Egypt. The FBI interviewed Elshinawy about two weeks later, and said Elshinawy admitted he had received $4,000 from an Islamic State operative for “operational purposes.”

The investigation found additional money had been sent to Elshinawy, according to prosecutors.

Earlier this month, George Washington University’s Program on Extremism published a report that found that 56 individuals had been charged with Islamic State-related activities in the United States this year. That was the most terror-related arrests in any single year since 2001.

Capitol Hill Lawmakers Trying to Use Social Media Profiles in Visa Reviews

Lawmakers say they’re drafting new legislation that would tighten up the visa screening process and give officials the power to review an applicant’s social media profiles in background checks.

The House Judiciary Committee is currently working on the proposed bill, officials said Monday.

There has been widespread call for United States visa program reform in the wake of the Dec. 2 mass shooting that left 14 people dead and 21 more wounded in San Bernardino, California.

FBI officials have publicly said that the shooters, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, were discussing jihad and martyrdom over the Internet in 2013, yet Malik was still allowed to enter the United States on a fiancee visa after these conversations. Malik was living in Saudi Arabia when she met Farook, a United States citizen living in California, on an online dating website.

President Barack Obama has called the shooting an act of terrorism.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) specifically mentioned the San Bernardino shootings in a statement announcing the proposed legislation, saying that more could have been done to check Malik’s background — including checking her social media pages.

ABC News reported that U.S. officials had a policy not to review applicant’s social media profiles during visa background checks because there were concerns about civil liberties. The news agency reported that immigration officials pushed early last year for social media profiles to be included in background checks, particularly as foreign terrorist organizations used social media to spread their message, but Homeland Security officials ultimately decided against a policy change because they feared there might be a negative public perception if a switch was disclosed.

Homeland Security’s social media posting policy is now under review, ABC News reported. While some pilot programs to review postings are in place, it’s still not a widespread practice.

In his statement, Goodlate mentioned published reports saying that Malik “posted her radical views on social media prior to obtaining a visa, yet it seems that the Obama Administration’s policies may have prevented officials from reviewing her account.” The proposed bill would now require officials to review social media profiles in background checks, as well as other changes.

“As terrorists continue to adapt and evolve in order to carry out their heinous plots, we have a duty to strengthen the security of our immigration system so that we keep bad actors out of the United States,” Goodlatte said in the statement, adding the bill would be introduced soon.

Authorities Investigating Batches of Suspicious Cell Phone Purchases in Missouri

The FBI is investigating multiple reports of bulk purchases of prepaid cell phones in Missouri.

According to various local media reports, law enforcement officials in at least six Missouri towns reported that customers bought a large quantity of the prepaid phones at local Walmart stores.

Prepaid cell phones are popular for a number of reasons, including that they can be bought with cash and don’t require a contract or a credit check like many wireless plans. People can pay for the minutes as they use them, and buy more calling time whenever they need it. But the phones are also attractive in other circles because they’re difficult to trace and can be easily disposable.

Criminals have been known to use prepaid phones, often called burners, to avoid police detection because they can be purchased anonymously and don’t require disclosing a lot of personal information. Terrorists have also been known to use cell phones to detonate explosives.

The first batch of bulk cell phone buys was on Dec. 5, when buyers reportedly went to a Walmart in Lebanon around 4 a.m. and bought 59 cell phones. Law enforcement officials in Macon, Ava, Jefferson City, Columbia and Cape Girardeau also reported similar phone buys on that weekend. Fox News reported that more than 200 prepaid cell phones were purchased in total at the stores.

The purchases came days after a husband and wife killed 14 people and injured 21 more in a Dec. 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in what has been called an act of terrorism.

The American public has been on high alert since that attack.

Searches for concealed carry permits, which allow people to carry hidden handguns in public, have surged to record levels, and a Public Religion Research Institute survey released last week found 47 percent of all Americans fear they or someone in their family will be a terrorism victim.

Americans have long been encouraged to report any kind of suspicious activity through the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. That’s exactly what the Walmart stores and local law enforcement authorities appear to be doing.

Speaking to the Kansas City Star, FBI spokesperson Bridget Patton said law enforcement officials were “acting out of an abundance of caution” in alerting the FBI about the phone buys.

“We have seen similar purchases of bulk cell phones in the past, and it has been concluded that these transactions were unrelated to terrorism,” Patton told the newspaper.

The Kansas City Star also spoke to law enforcement officials in Macon. Sheriff’s Sgt. Curt Glover noted that people have been known to purchase burner phones and resell them at higher prices.

“I do not feel there’s an immediate threat to the community,” Glover told the newspaper. “This has been going on for the last 15 years. They sell them and make a whole lot more money.”

There weren’t any arrests this month because buying a lot of cell phones at once isn’t illegal, and retired FBI Agent Jeff Lanza told the Kansas City Star that a link to terrorism appears unlikely.

“If you were planning to use those in a terrorist act, you wouldn’t be buying in bulk and attracting attention to yourself,” Lanza told the newspaper. “It would be a stupid way to start buying things to be used as bomb detonators because the first thing people do is call the police.”

The FBI has also been notified about a theft of propane canisters in Kansas City, Patton told the Kansas City Star, but the bureau is leaving the investigations of those thefts to local authorities.

The fact that propane can be used in improvised explosive devices raised some alarm bells, particularly because they reportedly occurred around the time of the prepaid phone purchases. But there’s currently no evidence suggesting the propane thefts and phone buys were related.

Americans are asked to remain vigilant and tell police if they notice suspicious activity.

U.S. Official: ISIS Has Acquired Some $1.5 Billion Through Oil Sales, Looting

The Islamic State has acquired about $1.5 billion dollars through black market oil sales and looting bank vaults, according to an official within the United States Treasury Department.

Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam Szubin spoke at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London on Thursday, providing insight into the Islamic State’s bankroll. In remarks prepared for delivery, Szubin said black market oil sales have netted the terrorist organization more than $500 million and militants have also looted between $500 million and $1 billion after seizing various bank vaults throughout Iraq and Syria.

The group has also extorted millions more from those living under its control, Szubin said. His prepared comments did not mention a specific window of time in which ISIS acquired the funds.

Reuters reported that Szubin said the Islamic State was “selling a great deal of oil” to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an astonishing revelation given that the Islamic State is currently entrenched in a war with Syrian government forces. Islamic State oil was also being shipped to Turkey and some Kurdish regions in the Middle East, though Reuters quoted Szubin as saying that a “far greater amount” winds up in the hands of al-Assad and his government.

Russian officials had previously accused Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan and his family members of personally benefiting from the Islamic State’s black market oil trade, though Erdogan has publicly denied that and said he would resign if the allegations were proven true.
The two countries have been at odds since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border last month, with each side believing a different set of the circumstances about the event.

United States officials have called for Turkey to seal its border with Syria to disrupt the flow of oil and manpower into Islamic State strongholds, one of several tactics designed to combat ISIS.

The United States is leading a 65-nation coalition, which Britain recently joined, that is carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State interests in Syria. Those airstrikes have been known to target Islamic State-controlled oil fields, with the ultimate goal of choking off the group’s fund supply.

In his remarks prepared for delivery, Szubin said United States officials are also taking steps to prevent the Islamic State from spreading its money internationally. The U.S. is working with a at least 30 countries to prevent the group from performing tasks like wire transfers. The U.S. has also sanctioned at least 30 leaders and financiers of the Islamic State in 2015 alone, Szubin said.

Interest in Concealed Carry Permits Hits New High after California Shootings

More Americans have performed Google searches for concealed carry permits this month than at any other point in the past 11 years, according to data published on the company’s website.

The spike in concealed carry permit searches comes in the wake of the Dec. 2 mass shooting that left 14 people dead and 21 more injured in San Bernardino, California. The husband-and-wife team of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire during a holiday party for Farook’s coworkers in what President Barack Obama has declared an act of terrorism.

People who possess valid concealed carry permits can carry hidden handguns in public areas.

The previous all-time high for concealed carry searches came in December 2012, the month in which Adam Lanza killed 20 schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The total concealed carry searches in that month were about 60 percent of what they were in the first 11 days of this month, according to Google Trends data.

There’s also been a documented rise in the number of people who actually obtain the permits.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says that about 12.8 million Americans held concealed carry permits in July, nearly tripling the 4.6 million million who held such permits in 2007. The CPRC says that 1.7 million new concealed carry permits were issued in the past year alone, and the 15.4 percent year-over-year increase was the largest ever recorded in history.

Near the site of the shooting, some people wasted little time to get new concealed carry permits.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the San Bernardino County sheriff’s department received 75 applications for concealed carry permits the weekend following the shooting, which was seven times higher than usual. In neighboring Orange County, sheriff’s deputies told the newspaper that they received about 100 additional applications the weekend after the attack.

The news comes amid a new survey released Thursday by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that found that 47 percent of Americans fear they or someone in their family will be the victim of a terrorist attack. That’s a 14 percent increase from one year ago. The PRRI survey also indicated 3 in 4 Americans said terrorism was a “critical issue” in the nation.

As permit interest surged, some were trying to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands.

Connecticut’s governor, Dannel P. Malloy, said Thursday he would sign an executive order that prohibits selling firearms to anyone on a government watchlist. It still needs federal approval.

U.S. Officials Fear ISIS Has Passport Printing Machine

United States officials fear people with ties to the Islamic State might have traveled to the United States using fraudulent Syrian passports, including some the terrorist organization printed itself, according to a recent Homeland Security Intelligence report obtained by ABC News.

The intelligence report, ABC News reported, says that ISIS has theoretically had the ability to print fake passports for more than 17 months, following their capture of the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. The group could have theoretically gained access to the city’s passport office, the report indicated, and its “boxes of blank passports” and at least one passport printing machine. The Islamic State’s longstanding capital is the Syrian city of Raqqa, home to another passport office.

“Since more than 17 months [have] passed since Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour fell to ISIS, it is possible that individuals from Syria with passports ‘issued’ in these ISIS controlled cities or who had passport blanks, may have traveled to the U.S.,” ABC News quoted the report as saying.

While not specifically mentioning the report, FBI Director James Comey testified before Capitol Hill lawmakers on Wednesday and mentioned concerns about ISIS forging travel documents.

“The intelligence community is concerned that they have the ability, the capability, to manufacture fraudulent passports, which is a concern in any setting,” Comey told lawmakers.

It’s been widely reported that at least one of the men who carried out last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris had a fake Syrian passport. ISIS has claimed responsibility for those attacks.

San Bernardino Suspects Spoke of ‘Jihad and Martyrdom’ Two Years Ago

The husband and wife responsible for last week’s mass shooting in California were discussing ‘jihad and martyrdom’ together as early as 2013, FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday.

Comey unveiled the information while he was speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Investigators have been working to determine the circumstances that led the husband-and-wife team of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik to open fire during a holiday party for Farook’s coworkers, killing 14 people and injuring 21 others exactly one week ago.

President Barack Obama has called the shooting an act of terrorism, and investigators had said the suspects were radicalized for “quite some time,” though Comey’s revelation to the lawmakers provided the most specific account yet of how and when the suspects became radicalized.

Comey said the FBI’s investigation “indicates that they were actually radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online,” dispelling notions that one suspect radicalized the other. By the end of 2013, Comey said the two “were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom” online before their engagement, marriage and Malik’s move to the United States.

Yet none of these conversations apparently triggered any red flags, as Comey had previously told reporters that neither Farook nor Malik was on the FBI’s radar screen at the time of the attack.

Farook, a United States citizen, was born to Pakistani parents in Illinois. He met Malik, a Pakistan native who was living in Saudi Arabia, on an online dating website. Malik originally came to the United States under a “fiancee visa” waiver program that has been highly scrutinized since the attack, with federal lawmakers and Obama calling for reviews to the program. The fact that Malik was apparently radicalized before she came to America could spur further scrutiny.

While authorities have not linked Farook or Malik to being part of a larger terrorist group, investigators are trying to uncover what initially led the suspects to become radicalized and whether they were inspired by the work any foreign terrorist groups.

Police have said they recovered at least 4,500 rounds of ammunition and 19 pipes that could have been used to produce bombs from the couple’s home in Redlands, California.

Farook and Malik died in a shootout with police, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter.

House Overwhelmingly Votes to Tighten Restrictions on Visa-Free Travel

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to impose new restrictions on travel to the United States, which bill proponents said is designed to prevent terrorists from lawfully entering the country.

The bill, approved by a 407-19 margin, is geared to reform the United States’ Visa Waiver Program, which allows eligible citizens from 38 participating countries to travel to the country for 90 or fewer days without first getting a visa from a United States embassy or consulate.

The list of countries includes Belgium and France, according to the State Department. Those countries were the home of many of the terrorists who executed the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. The legislation is designed to close a loophole that, theoretically, could have allowed any one of those Belgian or French terrorists from entering the United States through the Visa Waiver Program.

The Associated Press reported about 20 million travelers visit America through the program every year. There are some security measures in place, but this bill aims to improve them.

The changes would now require the 38 participating countries to “continually share terrorism and foreign traveler data with the United States,” according to a news release from lawmakers.

“It will also disqualify anyone who has traveled to Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and Iran within the past five years from participating in the program,” Rep. Candice Miller (R-Michigan), the lawmaker who introduced the bill, said on the House floor. “In an abundance of caution, we will now require those individuals to apply for a visa and go through the formal visa screening process.”

In the week before the vote, the House’s Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Michael McCaul (R-Texas), said about 5,000 of the 30,000 foreign fighters currently in Iraq and Syria have Western passports that could have been used to exploit the Visa Waiver Program loophole.

Other proposed changes to the program are geared toward reducing passport fraud.

They include requiring the participating countries to report lost or stolen passports within 24 hours, and screen travelers against INTERPOL records. The changes would also require U.S.-bound travelers to hold chip-enabled “e-passports” like those issued by the United States.

The bill would allow Homeland Security officials to suspend a country’s visa waiver privileges if they don’t comply with the proposed rules, like not sharing information about potential threats. They could also block any country from the program if the country is later determined to be a “high-risk” area in security reviews that would be conducted annually.

“We need to be certain that participating countries are giving us all the information we need from either their own terror watch lists or travel manifests and that the information protocols are being shared,” Miller said on the House floor. “As we know, sometimes it’s not until after the fact that some of the participating countries actually provide us names of individuals who they knew were a terror threat. That is unacceptable.”

Though it was approved by the House, the bill still needs Senate approval and must be signed by the president before it becomes a law. Lawmakers have introduced a similar bill in the Senate.

Miller also called for a “complete, comprehensive review of all our visa programs,” including the fiancee-visa that allowed one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, California, mass shootings to lawfully enter the country. Tashfeen Malik was a Pakistani native living in Saudi Arabia when she met Syed Rizwan Farook, a United States citizen, reportedly on an online dating website.

Last week, the couple killed 14 people and injured 21 more during a party for Farook’s coworkers. The mass shooting has been called an act of terrorism by President Barack Obama, and authorities say they have evidence that the couple had been radicalized for a period of time.

The investigation into the shootings continued on Wednesday.

Islamic State Militants Reportedly Using U.S. Weapons

Islamic State militants are using some weapons that originally came from the United States, according to a new report from the human rights group Amnesty International.

The report, released Tuesday, provides a glimpse into how the Islamic State has stockpiled the weapons it is using to fight battles in Iraq and Syria and commit deadly terrorist acts worldwide.

Amnesty International found the Islamic State has amassed more than 100 kinds of weapons and ammunition from at least 25 countries, and most of its weapons were stolen from the Iraqi military. Amnesty reported a large number of these arms were obtained when the Islamic State captured Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in June 2014 and looted military stockpiles there.

The Mosul haul, which Amnesty described as a “windfall,” included American-made weapons and military vehicles. The organization said both were subsequently used in Islamic State activities elsewhere in the country as the group successfully took control of additional territory.

The report comes days after President Barack Obama gave an address from the Oval Office and said one of America’s strategies to defeat the Islamic State terrorists was to continue providing training and support to local groups who were fighting the insurgents in the Middle East, rather than deploy large numbers of American soldiers there. But Amnesty’s report provides evidence that strategy seems to have, somewhat inadvertently, aided the Islamic State’s terror campaign.

“The vast and varied weaponry being used by the armed group calling itself Islamic State is a textbook case of how reckless arms trading fuels atrocities on a massive scale,” Patrick Wilcken, a researcher on arms control, security trade and human rights at Amnesty, said in a statement. “Poor regulation and lack of oversight of the immense arms flows into Iraq going back decades have given (ISIS) and other armed groups a bonanza of unprecedented access to firepower.”

Amnesty’s report said “a large proportion” of the Islamic State’s weapons were originally given to the Iraqi military by the United States, Russia and the former Soviet Union. They range from handguns and assault rifles to anti-tank weapons and shoulder-mounted missile launchers, most of which were manufactured between the 1970s and 1990s. But the Islamic State has also been crafting its own weapons, such as hand grenades, car bombs and other explosive devices.

Amnesty said the diverse nature of the Islamic State’s weapons “reflects decades of irresponsible arms transfers to Iraq,” a country that saw its military stockpile swell when at least 34 countries began sending it weapons around the time of the Iran-Iraq war. Amnesty said the country began bringing in fewer weapons after it invaded Kuwait in 1990, largely due to a United Nations embargo, but its weapons imports spiked again after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

Amnesty reported that 30 countries have sent weapons to Iraq in the past 12 years, but many were not properly tracked by the Iraqi military or the U.S. military forces occupying the nation.

“Hundreds of thousands of those weapons went missing and are still unaccounted for,” the report states. It goes on to note that “mass desertion” from the Iraqi military during the rise of the Islamic State in 2013-14 “left huge quantities of military equipment exposed to looting.”

While the Amnesty report says the majority of the Islamic State’s weapons were looted from those military stockpiles, the document notes the group also added arms by seizing them from Syrian soldiers on battlefields and from defectors who have brought firepower with them.

Speaking to CNN, a Pentagon spokesman said the United States monitors the technology that it gives to its partners to prevent any American weapons from ending up in the wrong hands, but conceded those monitoring programs don’t include any weapons lost on battlefields.

Amnesty’s report calls for countries to stop providing military equipment and arms to forces in Syria and stronger protocols for sending weapons to Iraqi authorities. It also calls for national laws and procedures to prevent arms from ending up in the hands of groups who will use them nefariously, and for more strict rules regarding stockpile management and record-keeping.

“The legacy of arms proliferation and abuse in Iraq and the surrounding region has already destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions of people and poses an ongoing threat,” Wicken said in a statement. “The consequences of reckless arms transfers to Iraq and Syria and their subsequent capture by (ISIS) must be a wake-up call to arms exporters around the world.”

Investigation into California Shootings Continues

The investigation into the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and 21 more injured last week continued on Tuesday, though authorities had yet to hold a news conference on any updates.

Authorities have said the husband-and-wife team of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire in San Bernardino, California, during a holiday party for Farook’s coworkers last Wednesday. President Barack Obama and FBI officials have declared the shooting an act of terrorism and said the suspects were radicalized, but officials have yet to publicly say they’ve found any evidence that the two were part of a foreign terrorist group or a broader conspiracy.

While police continued their investigation, news agencies reported some new information.

Citing unnamed informed sources, Fox News, Reuters and the Los Angeles Times reported that $28,500 was deposited into Farook’s bank account in the weeks before the shooting. Authorities have said they were trying to see if anyone helped the couple plan the attack, but three unnamed sources told Reuters the money trail doesn’t appear to link Farook or Malik to a terrorist group.

Reuters and the Los Angeles Times reported the money was a loan, with the Los Angeles Times reporting that a pair of unnamed federal officials said that could explain how the couple was able to acquire the materials they used in the attack. Authorities have said they recovered at least 4,500 rounds of ammunition at the pair’s home, as well as parts that could make 19 pipe bombs.

Authorities were investigating how the suspects became radicalized and whether they were inspired by the work of other terrorists. The FBI has said Farook and Malik both engaged in target practice ahead of the attacks, in one instance within days of the deadly rampage.

Farook and Malik died in a shootout with police, leaving behind a six-month-old daughter.

Farook was a U.S. citizen who was born to Pakistani parents in Illinois, while Malik was a Pakistan native who was living in Saudi Arabia. It’s been widely reported that the two met on an online dating website. During his speech from the Oval Office on Sunday, Obama called for federal officials to review the “fiancee visa” waiver program that Malik used to enter the country.