Homeland Security News

A Syrian migrant suspected of planning a bomb attack on a Berlin airport has committed suicide in a detention center in Leipzig, the Justice Ministry for the state of Saxony said on Wednesday.

Investigators believe Jaber Albakr, 22, who arrived in Germany last year, was close to staging an attack comparable to those that killed 130 people in Paris last November and 32 in Belgium in March.

"On the evening of October 12, 2016, Jaber Albakr, who was suspected of planning a serious attack, took his life in the detention center at Leipzig correctional hospital," the ministry said in a statement on its website.

Read more: Reuters

Three men suspected of laundering cocaine money for the Colombian cartel have been busted after agents say they illegally moved $500,000 into Miami banks through a series of complicated financial transactions stretching from Australia to Europe.  That’s not uncommon in Miami, but the trio’s background is: They are suspected associates of the Middle Eastern terror group Hezbollah.

The main player is Mohammad Ahmad Ammar, 31, who was living in Medellín, Colombia. He was quietly booked into a Miami-Dade jail last week to face state felony money laundering charges in a case that underscores increased law-enforcement scrutiny on the role of Middle Eastern terror groups who use financial networks in Latin America to earn untold millions off drug profits.

Read more: Miami Herald

The world faces cold-war-era threat levels, Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, has said, due to the west vacating the stage in Syria and failing to recognise that the growth of Russian military power over the past 15 years required the development of a new strategic relationship with Moscow.

“We are moving into an era that is as dangerous, if not more dangerous, as the cold war because we do not have that focus on a strategic relationship between Moscow and Washington,” Sawers told the BBC on Wednesday.

He said the west needed to recognise that the balance of power had changed in the world because of an increase in Russian military power, and its willingness to use that power.

Read more: The Guardian

France plans to invest 42 million euros ($47 million) to help countries of Africa’s Sahel region prepare to face extremists attacks similar to those that killed dozens in Paris in 2015, an interior ministry official said on Friday.

The Sahel, a politically fragile region whose remote desert spaces host a medley of extremists groups, is seen as vulnerable to further attacks after strikes on soft targets in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast earlier this year.

Nearby Senegal, a Western security partner with a long history of stability, has so far been spared.

“In future we will train all the countries of the G5 Sahel and Senegal with 42 million Euros in financing, including 24 million Euros for equipment,” said a spokeswoman for Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve during his visit to Dakar on Friday.

Read more: Al-Arabiya

A gunman opened fire in a Shiite shrine in Kabul on Tuesday morning, killing 14 people before Afghan security forces killed him, reported Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs.

The attack happened about 7:50 a.m. at the Karte Sakhi shrine. A police officer and a child were killed and 36 people were wounded, including 19 women, Sediqqi said.
After a two-hour gunbattle, security forces killed the gunman. No group has claimed responsibility yet.

Another mass killing occurred in Kabul on August 24, when attackers killed 13 people at Kabul University. Police killed two attackers and a third attacker died when he detonated an explosive-laden vehicle, authorities said.  In July, at least 80 people died in an attack on a minority group's peaceful demonstration in Kabul. ISIS claimed responsibility.

News source: CNN