Homeland Security News

A Quincy cabdriver who was a friend of the late Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been charged with obstructing the investigation of the bombing.  Khairullozhon Matanov, 23, was arrested this morning by federal authorities, the US attorney’s office in Boston said. He made a brief initial appearance in US District Court in Boston this afternoon. He was held without bail until a detention hearing at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

He has been indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of destroying, altering, and falsifying records, documents, and tangible objects in a federal investigation. He is also charged with three counts of making a false statement in a federal terrorism investigation.  Matanov, a citizen of Kyrgyzstan who entered the United States lawfully in 2010, also knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brother, Dzhokhar.

Read more: Boston Globe

Police have dismantled a ring in the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla that recruited and sent jihadist terrorists to Mali and Libya, arresting six people thus far in the ongoing operation.  The detainees include the "first Spanish jihadist" to have returned from the conflict in Mali, according to Spain's Interior Ministry, which said the suspect passed through training camps run by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa in that country.

The six detainees were taken to the airport in Melilla for transfer to Madrid, where they will be turned over to judicial authorities.  Spanish National Police and Civil Guard agents carried out the operation early Friday in Melilla, a Spanish city bordering Morocco.  Sources close to the investigation told Efe that police conducted eight raids in Muslim-majority neighborhoods on the city's outskirts.  Spanish and Moroccan police dealt a severe blow in March to Spain's most active jihadist cell, which was tasked with recruiting volunteers for terrorist groups linked to Al Qaeda, especially those based in conflict-ridden countries such as Mali and Syria.

Read more: Fox News

Two years ago, a young man who now calls himself Abu Muhajir slipped into Syria with a few friends and $80,000, forsaking what he said was a job as a high school science teacher in North America to wage jihad.  In a conversation conducted by text message in recent weeks, he said he was raised in a religious family, studied at a madrasa on Sundays and had no non-Muslim friends growing up. And he suggested that Western governments could indeed have cause to be worried that the foreign jihadis in Syria might someday return home to carry out attacks.  “Attacks occurring on the soil of Middle Eastern countries,” he said.  “We can only expect a response. Americans are still in Afghanistan.”

More than 70 Americans are thought by intelligence and counterterrorism officials to have traveled to Syria to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad.  One of them, still publicly unidentified, carried out a suicide bombing there on Sunday, making him the first United States citizen believed to have been involved in such an attack.

As many as 3,000 Westerners are believed to have gone to Syria to fight, prompting increasingly aggressive efforts by their home governments to keep them from leaving and to detain them on their return.  In Britain, the Home Office has stripped at least 20 jihadis of their citizenship, and the police said that the number of “Syria-related arrests” totaled 40 from January to March of this year, compared with 25 for the whole of last year.

Read more: NY Times