Homeland Security News

Attorneys for a Chicago terrorism suspect are urging a federal appeals court to uphold a trial judge's decision to grant defense lawyers unprecedented access to secret intelligence-court records.  In their March appeal to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, prosecutors said letting the defense see the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documentation would be a "sea change" in how such sensitive documents are handled and could end up jeopardizing national security.

But attorneys for 20-year-old Adel Daoud argued in a Friday filing that the trial judge acted appropriately and didn't abuse discretion when ordering that the defense could see the documents. Daoud is a U.S. citizen from a Chicago-area suburb. Prosecutors say he took a phony car bomb from an undercover FBI agent in 2012, parked it by a downtown Chicago bar and pressed a trigger, but Daoud has denied those allegations.

Read more: ABC News

The Islamist militant group Boko Haram claimed responsibility on Monday for the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls during a raid in the village of Chibok in northeast Nigeria last month, the French news agency AFP reported, citing a video it had obtained.

"I abducted your girls," Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in the video, according to AFP. It did not immediately give further details.

Source:  Reuters

Just a few weeks after he was released from federal prison in March 2012 on fraud convictions, Dearborn, Mich., cleric Ahmad Jibril told his followers in a fiery sermon posted online:  When your brothers in Syria speak, everyone today needs to shut their mouth and listen, because they're proving themselves to be real men.

Jibril's talk was the beginning of a number of videos and online comments that have made him an internationally known inspirational figure for militants in Syria. Over the last two years, Jibril has become the most popular religious leader online for Westerners who've joined the battle against the Syrian government, according to a new report by a security center in England.

Jibril has a history of making what prosecutors said were extremist comments, dating to at least 1995, according to a 2005 sentencing memo from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit.  On a radical website he operated, "Ahmad Jebril encouraged his students to spread Islam by the sword, to wage a holy war, to hate and kill non-Muslims," prosecutors said in the memo.

Read More:  USA Today