• French police commander, partner killed by ISIS follower

    Larossi Abballa, a 25-year old French man who had served time for taking part in a jihadi recruitment network and claiming allegiance to IS, stabbed a Paris police commander and his partner at their home, in front of the 3-year old child, before being killed by a SWAT team which stormed their home. ISIS claimed the killing was part of a new campaign targeting French law enforcement personnel.

  • Orlando shooter may have struggled with his sexual orientation

    U.S. law enforcement is looking into a new angle to the Orlando massacre: Mateen’s sexual orientation. The former wife and acquaintances of Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed forty-nine people in an Orlando club, have said he may have struggled with his sexual orientation. Mateeen had been a regular at the Pulse, and tried to pick up men on gay chats and gay dating apps. “We are working to understand what role anti-gay bigotry may have played in motivating this attack,” FBI director James Comey said, adding: “But we are highly confident that this killer was radicalized and at least in some part through the Internet.”

  • 9/11 Report’s 28-page classified section will clear Saudi Arabia: CIA director

    CIA director John O. Brennan said that if the still-classified twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission Report are published, they will clear Saudi Arabia of any involvement in the terrorist attack. Brennan told Saudi-owned Arabiya TV: “I think the 28 pages will be published, and I support their publication. Everyone will see the evidence that the Saudi government had nothing to do with it.”

  • More than 8,000 arrested in Bangladesh in anti-Islamist crackdown

    Security forces in Bangladesh have arrested 3,245 people in the last twenty-four hours as part of broad campaign to put an end to a wave of Islamist violence against minorities, human rights activists, and pro-democracy bloggers. The total number of Islamists, and those suspected of Islamist sympathies, arrested since the campaign began last Friday no stands at 8,192, according the Bangladesh government sources.

  • More mass killings, violent repression in Africa as Islamist groups expand operations

    Africa dominates the list of states that have risen most prominently in the Peoples Under Threat index this year as conflicts involving Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and ISIS-affiliated forces affect more states, while numerous old conflicts are reactivated. While a significant rise in the Peoples under Threat index provides early indication of risk in the future, the mass killing of civilians is already under way in the African states at the top of the index.

  • Gunman kills 49, injures 53 in an Orlando, Florida club (updated)

    Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, a 29-year American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan, entered a night club in Orlando, Florida, at about 2:00 a.m., armed with an AR-15 assault-rifle and a hand gun, and opened fire. He killed 49 people and injured 53 – the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States – before being killed by police officers who stormed the club. Until the shooting early Sunday, the most lethal mass shooting in the United States was the 2007 Virginia Tech rampage, in which 32 people were killed and 30 injured.

  • What we know about Omar Mateen

    Omar Mateen, 29, was born in New York to Afghan parents. Since September 2007 he had worked as a security guard for G4 Security in Florida. The large security contractor provides security personnel to guard building, among them federal buildings. He underwent background checks in both 2007 and 2013. In March, British born Islamic preacher Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar gave a speech outside Orlando in which he called for the death of all homosexuals. “Death is the sentence. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence,” he said.

  • AR-15: The most popular assault-style rifle in the United States

    The gunman who killed dozens of people in Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and, yesterday, Orlando all used an AR-15 rifle. According to the National Rifle Association (NRA), the gun, which was designed by ArmaLite for the U.S. Army and originally produced by Colt in the 1960s, is the most popular rifle in the United States. Between 5 and 8.2 million assault-style rifles are privately owned by U.S. citizens, and 3.3 million of those were AR-15.

  • Major mass-shooting attacks in the U.S. since January 2009

    Between 2008 and 2013, the FBI used a narrow definition of mass shootings – limiting the designation “mass shootings” to incidents in which an individual “kills four or more people in a single incident… typically in a single location.” In 2013 the FBI changed its definition, moving away from “mass shootings” to identifying an “active shooter” as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” The FBI designated the incidents listed below as mass-shooting incidents.

  • Six things Americans should know about mass shootings

    The United States had 78 mass shootings during that 30-year period. The highest number of mass shootings experienced outside the United States was in Germany – where seven shootings occurred. In the other twenty-four industrialized countries taken together, 41 mass shootings took place. In other words, the United States had nearly double the number of mass shootings than all other twenty-four industrialized countries combined in the same 30-year period.

  • Terrorists gaining cyber capability to bring major cities to a standstill: U.K. intelligence chief

    Robert Hannigan, the director of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the U.S. NSA, has warned that terrorists and rogue states are gaining the technical capability to bring a major city to a standstill with the click of a button. He said that the risk to cities like London would significantly increase as more physical objects – cars, household appliances — are connected online in what is called the Internet of Things.

  • Euro 2016’s fan zones focus of security concerns

    Ten large fan zones in the center of ten French cities, set up to allow more fans to watch the Euro 2016 soccer games on giant outdoor screens, are the focus of security concerns. The tournament, which starts in France on Friday, is expected to draw more than ten million spectators from all over the world. “It as if we have created ten open-air Bataclans and invited the jihadists to do their worst,” one French security source said, referring to the Paris concert hall where ninety people were killed by jihadists on 13 November.

  • Turkey suspends sale of fertilizers containing nitrate in wake of car bombings

    In the wake of two car bombings which killed seventeen people, Turkey announced it was temporarily suspending the sale of fertilizers containing nitrate. The terrorists in the two bombings used fertilizers to make the explosives – as did Timothy McVeigh twenty years ago.

  • 4 killed, 6 injured in Tel Aviv terror attack (updated)

    Four people were killed and six injured yesterday in an attack by two armed terrorists near a shopping mall in the center of Tel Aviv. Of the six injured, one is in critical condition and four are in serious condition. The Sharona Mall is located within walking distance of the Kyria compound, the location of Israel’s Ministry of Defense and headquarters of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). The Israel government announced that 83,000 permits to West Bank residents to visit their relatives in Israel during the month of Ramadan have been suspended, and that permissions to residents of the Gaza Strip to pray in Al Aqsa have been revoked.

  • Infrared thermal imaging system spots menacing drones at a distance

    With the start of the UEFA Euro 2016 soccer tournament kicking off on10 June, expecting to draw a large international crowd at ten different stadiums in cities across France, security measures have been carefully considered by the organizers in light of a turbulent past couple of years in Europe and abroad. The growing popularity of the use of drones has necessitated consideration of counter-UAV technologies to thwart a terrorist attack using this method.