Mayor appoints former Metropolitan Police Authority chair Lord Harris to examine how city would cope with multiple attacks

London’s ability to tackle a major terrorist attack is to be reviewed by the former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Sadiq Khan has announced.

The London mayor said the review of the city’s response – coming after the recent attacks on Paris and Brussels – would be led by Lord Harris, a former London Assembly member who oversaw the Met’s national counter-terror strategy for the Home Office.

“Nothing is more important to me than keeping Londoners safe,” the mayor said.

The review will look at how the city would cope if multiple attacks were launched, examining the arrangements in place across all the emergency services.

Khan said: “I want to be reassured that every single agency and individual involved in protecting our city has the resources and expertise they need to respond in the event that London is attacked.”

The emergency services along with Transport for London, the Port of London Authority and local government representatives will be contacted as part of the review, which is expected to release its findings in the summer.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said: “Although we are confident the Met can deal effectively if terrorists did strike our city, and we test ourselves regularly, we are never complacent about the city’s security and recognise that there will always be ways in which we can improve.”

theguardian.com

Robert Fico: ‘I’m sorry, Islam has no place in Slovakia. It is the duty of politicians to talk about these things very clearly and openly. I do not wish there were tens of thousands of Muslims’

independent.co.uk

Police found “traces” of a plot to launch a new attack in Belgium when they arrested four people suspected of recruiting jihadists for Syria and Libya, prosecutors said Wednesday, May 25, according to AFP.

The four were charged with “participating in the activities of a terrorist group” following their arrests in the northern port of Antwerp and other Flemish-speaking cities, the federal prosecutor’s office said.

“The four were more involved in the part of recruiting,” Eric Van der Sypt, a spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutors, told AFP. “And we found traces of plans for an attack in Belgium.”

He said the probe into an alleged plot continued while his office said that “for now there is no link” with the investigation into the deadly March 22 bombings in the capital Brussels, AFP says.

The prosecutor’s office said the four people arrested are “suspected of having wanted to recruit people to send them to conflict zones in Syria and Libya,” adding that some of them had intended to travel to those areas and join the Islamic State group.

Eight raids in Antwerp as well as in Ternat and Borgerhout turned up neither weapons nor explosives, the statement said without saying when the action was carried out.

The investigating judge ordered one of the four to be detained, but released the three others, according to AFP.

Belgium is still reeling from the Islamic State suicide bomber attacks at Brussels airport and on the metro on March 22 which killed 32 people and wounded hundreds more. They came five months after jihadists, many of them from Brussels, carried out gun and bombing attacks in Paris on November 13, killing 130 people and wounding hundreds more.

panarmenian.net

France is set to deploy a security force of about 90,000 to patrol the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Wednesday, according to Reuters. Tens of thousands of police soldiers and private security agents will be spread across the country, with the monthlong event scheduled to begin June 10.

The games will take place in the shadow of last November’s attacks, carried out by the Islamic State group, which killed 130 people across Paris. The country remains under a state of emergency. One attacker in November attempted to enter the 80,000-capacity Stade de France during a soccer match but was turned away by security after he was found to be wearing an explosive vest. The attacker then detonated the vest outside the stadium.

About 2.5 million fans are expected to attend the 51 tournament games, which will be played at 10 stadiums nationwide. Major cities will also have “fan zones” for crowds to watch matches on large television screens.

“Such a unique event in exceptional circumstances requires extra security measures,” Cazeneuve told reporters Wednesday.

The 90,000-strong force is expected to be composed of 77,000 police officers, armed officers and riot control forces, alongside 13,000 private security agents and 1,000 volunteers. Cazeneuve said a portion of 10,000 soldiers already handling counterterrorism across France will be given more responsibilities during Euro 2016.

A test of increased security measures at France’s domestic league cup final days ago was widely criticized. The system, featuring about 1,700 security personnel, left many fans scattered about the stadium and stuck in overcrowded spots between security checkpoints. Fireworks were ignited both inside and outside the stadium.

Police are also considering how best to handle rowdy fans, some of whom may come to France without tickets to take in Euro 2016. Authorities announced they would have a 24-hour ban on alcohol around games in the small French town of Lens, another cities might follow suit.

ibtimes.com

Kosovo has been ranked fifth on the list of world countries from where the highest number of persons have left to fight alongside the Islamic State terrorist organization.

The Independent has released statistical data regarding the participation of foreigners who fight alongside ISIL, putting Kosovo on the fifth place, with 83 militants in total. First comes Jordan with 315 people, followed by Tunisia – 280, then comes Saudi Arabia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina with 92 people who have left the country to fight alongside the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Kosovo media have reported.

Albania is seventh on the list with 46 of its citizens being deployed on ISIL’s battlefields, while the countries from where the lowest number of residents have decided to join the jihadist group are Kuwait (23) and France (18).

independent.mk

Head of Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre, Manuel Paniagua stated that more than 150 people were killed, over 360 were injured during terrorist attacks conducted in the EU countries in 2015.

During the meeting with members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, he said that terrorists were behind a total of 211 failed and committed attacks in the EU last year.

He also added that the bloodiest 17 terrorist attacks were carried out by so-called jihadists, and 667 suspects were arrested on related charges.

Paniagua noted that terrorist cells, ready to carry out attacks in the European Union, were homegrown but had connections to the ISIS terrorist group.

news.am

Tony Blair has said that Western nations will need to commit ground troops if they want to defeat the Islamic State militant group (ISIS).

“If you want to defeat these people,” Blair said, speaking at a Q+A event in London hosted by Prospect magazine and the Centre on Religion and Geopolitics, “you’re going to have to go and wage a proper ground war against them.”

Blair said he understood that there is “a very low threshold of acceptability” among Western populations for taking casualties in war, but insisted that the forces best placed to act were those of nations like the U.S., U.K. and France.

He said that unless successful action was taken now, ISIS posed a direct threat to the West: “If we don’t defeat them they are going to come and attack us here.”

He said using ground troops is “not a choice between huge-scale forces… and nothing,” but that other nations should follow America’s example in “using not just special forces but other capabilities as well in order to make a difference on the ground.”

Asked about his own intervention in Iraq, Blair said that he accepted he had “underestimated” the forces that would emerge following the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but did not accept that the war was a direct cause of the rise of ISIS.

He also rejected the argument that it is better for the West to leave unpalatable dictators in power to preserve stability. “What the Arab Spring shows you is that these countries with young populations and with these very radical forces acting within them, they’re not going to accept that,” he said.

Blair’s intervention in Iraq is set to come in for scrutiny with the publication of the final report of the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, scheduled for July 6. Blair said he was unable to answer any direct questions on the inquiry.

newsweek.com

Police say five people were severely injured in violent clashes between Iraqi Kurdish Yazidis and Chechen asylum-seekers in the central German city of Bielefeld.

Police said in a statement Sunday the religious minority group and the Chechens were living in the same refugee shelter and went after each other with truncheons and knives on Saturday night.

Reports indicate that the Chechens, who are Muslim, attacked the Yazidis. The Yazidis are a Kurdish religious group linked to Zoroastrianism and Sufism. The religious has roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by the hard-line Islamic State group. They currently live primarily in Iraq’s Kurdistan region and the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq.

Five people had to be treated in hospital for traumatic brain injury, a fractured hand, stabbing wounds and facial bone fractures.

Local media reported that about 15 Chechens and 15 Yazidis were involved in the brawl at the Oldentruper Hof refugee shelter where there had been a dispute between residents earlier in the week.

Two Chechen men, aged 24 and 42, were detained and all Yazidi and Chechen families were taken from the shelter and placed in other shelters in different cities overnight.

Later Saturday night, about 100 Yazidi Kurds tried to forcibly enter the shelter, some armed with clubs and knives, reportedly looking for Chechen families to take revenge, according to local media. The police, with the assistance of translators, contained the Yazidis behind a roadblock.

Police are still investigating the cause for the outbreak of violence.

Ezidi Press reported that Yezidis and Christians have faced repeated attacks at refugee centres in Germany.

Islamic State group has captured most parts of the Yazidi Sinjar (Shingal) district in northwest Iraq on August 3, 2014 which led thousands of Kurdish families to flee to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.

According to the United Nations Islamic State enslaved an estimated 7,000 women and girls in 2014, mainly the Kurdish Yazidi women and children, and is still holding 3,500 as slaves.

The EU, US and UK parliament recognize Islamic State killing of Yazidi Kurds as ‘Genocide’.

ekurd.net

Jan Jambon wants to hire 20 more staff to monitor radical islamic posts

The Belgian police force wants to hire 20 extra staff to monitor radical islamist propaganda on the internet, local media reported Monday.

The federal police division — the Internet Referral Unit — monitoring such online traffic currently has 10 officers, but Interior Minister Jan Jambon said he wants to increase that figure to 30, Belgian daily Het Nieuwsblad reported.

The unit was set up by Jambon in January to monitor online radicalization. When officers discover a message containing radical points of view, the author is contacted and asked to remove the offending post. “If that person does not delete the message, a magistrate can order the police to have it deleted,” Jambon’s spokesperson told the newspaper.

In 2014, more than 46,000 Twitter profiles were linked to Islamic State, according to a study by the Brookings Institute, a think tank.

However, several members of the Belgian parliament have expressed concern about the legality of the police operation, because its staff use pseudonyms. According to its opponents that makes it an undercover operation, which would need the backing of a magistrate. But Jambon’s office said the unit is completely legal.

politico.eu

A report from Libya claims there are at least 800,000 migrants on the coast waiting for the right moment to cross the sea to Italy, and the European Union (EU) plans a new summit to prepare for the next potential great wave of migrants.

Austrian paper Kronen Zeitung reports that French Interior minister Jean-Yves Le Drian claimed the number of migrants in North Africa waiting to cross the Mediterranean sea numbered in the “hundreds of thousands.” European Union foreign policy chief Federica Moghoerini confirmed the fears of the French official saying that the EU estimated at least 500,000 displaced people were waiting to flee to Italy. Ms. Mogherini was slammed by critics last week after she cried during a press conference following the Brussels attacks, with Members of the European Parliament calling for her resignation over the incident.

Libya has been a more or less failed state since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and has seen rebel fighters and Islamic State militants battle for control of the country. For months Libyan government forces have struggled to combat the two groups who use the migrant crisis to extort money from African migrants who want to come to Europe.

Mr. Le Drian said their is an urgent need for sides to come together and form a national unity government to control the borders or Europe risks hundreds of thousands of African migrants arriving when the weather on the sea improves.

He noted that the European mission to combat people smuggling from North Africa, code named Operation Sophia, has only a limited effectiveness.

The ships that track migrant vessels only have the ability to do so in international waters and not in Libyan territory. Mr. Le Drian says that a working government would benefit greatly by allowing EU ships to cooperate with Libyan officials to stop smuggling at the source rather than hope to find them miles out at sea.

In the past year around 200,000 people have crossed the sea from Libya into Italy. Around 3,700 of them were killed in accidents where makeshift rafts capsized, resulting in drownings. Some migrants, later identified as Christians, did not survive the trip for different reasons, as they were thrown off boats by Muslims before they could make it to shore. At least 15 Muslim migrants were arrested in one particular incident according to Italian police.

European leaders have convened a new summit for April 18th to discuss the situation in Libya. The topic of the summit will be how to potentially handle the 800,000 migrants who may attempt to cross into Europe this summer.

An unnamed spokesperson for the EU Foreign Affairs Council told Belgian site EurActiv: “…the discussion will focus on the EU support of an inclusive agreement in all sectors, from humanitarian to migratory… including security related aspects. the discussion will take place on April 18th following the regular Foreign Affairs Council meeting and ahead of Foreign Affairs Council Defence on April 19th, in Luxembourg.” The spokesman also said, “the objective will be to bring together foreign affairs ministers with their counterparts in defence in order to effectively address the new challenging situation.”

Breitbart London previously reported that the EU border agency Frontex has said that stated Africa will be the next great challenge for illegal migration into Europe. Millions of Africans face poverty, war, and disease, and due to a weak regime in Libya, combined with a growing cottage industry of people smuggling, the threat of 800,000 migrants may only be the beginning.

breitbart.com