Khaleej Times Online – Six terrorism suspects arrested in the Netherlands

Posted on November 7th, 2006 by .
Categories: International Terrorism, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

Khaleej Times Online – Six terrorism suspects arrested in the Netherlands
Six terrorism suspects arrested in the Netherlands
(AFP)

7 November 2006

THE HAGUE – Six people have been arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of recruiting volunteers for jihad, or Islamic holy war, prosecutors said on Tuesday after a year-long investigation.

The suspects, five men and a woman, were arrested in The Hague and Amsterdam late Monday and early Tuesday as part of a probe into an international Islamic terror network launched in November 2005, the prosecutor’s office said.

Among the suspects, who were not identified by name, are two Dutch nationals of Moroccan origin, a Turkish man, a Tunisian national, a Moroccan and a sixth with dual Dutch-Moroccan nationality, prosecution spokesman Wim de Bruin said.

The six were suspected of ‘recruiting radical Muslims for the international jihad’, a crime under recently amended Dutch laws.

Police were still investigating whether the suspects could also be charged with forming a terrorist organisation, the prosecutor’s office said.

De Bruin added that the Turkish suspect in this case had been acquitted in 2003 after going on trial on suspicion of recruiting for jihad.

At the time, recruiting for jihad was not a crime and the 12 suspects in the 2003 case were charged with the rarely used ‘aiding of the enemy’.

That charge was thrown out by the judges who said the Netherlands were not at war with Afghanistan’s Taleban regime as prosecutors argued.

In 2004 the laws changed in the Netherlands making recruitment for jihad a crime in itself, punishable by a maximum sentence of four years in prison.

The office of the national prosecutor said the current investigation began in November 2005 after police received information about three men from The Hague who had travelled to Azerbaijan to take part in jihad. They were arrested by Azerbaijani authorities in Baku and sent back to the Netherlands.

‘The three youths were suspected of being in contact with a network of extremist Muslims that was recruiting young men for the jihad,’ prosecutors said.

Investigators discovered that potential jihadists were being recruited with inflammatory speeches, pamphlets and videos focusing on the supposed duty of all Muslims to take part in holy war.

Several suspects have also tried to get fake travel documents to travel to Iraq.

The suspects were expected to appear before a judge later this week, who will then rule if they can be remanded in custody.

Prosecution spokesman De Bruin said that the six suspects were not linked to the Hofstad group, a terrorist network led by Mohammed Bouyeri who was convicted for the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, or the six other terrorism suspects on trial in Amsterdam who also have links to Bouyeri.

In recent years there have been several high profile acquittals in Dutch terrorism trials because judges are reluctant to convict suspects for plotting attacks without evidence that they were making clear steps towards carrying them out.

A round up of Dutch and English sources I have (in particular about the Turkish suspect Murat Ö aka Abu Jarrah aka Abu Zer aka Ibrahim the Turk and the so called Eik (Oak) case of 2002/2003):
(more…)

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