Homeland Security News

The now ubiquitous surveillance image of the Brussels suicide bombers strolling through the airport corridor is enough to instill fear in anyone with plans to fly.  In the U.S., security officials are partly depending on bomb-sniffing dogs to thwart similar terror plots.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the number of canines deployed to protect the nation’s busiest airports, train stations and other transit centers has surged 400 percent.  A similar strategy is employed across the world. But the global war on terror’s ever-increasing reliance on man’s best friend is presenting a new problem — a deficit of high-quality bomb dogs.

“More developing countries are incorporating detection dog teams into their national security plan,” Cynthia Otto, executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told Congress earlier this month at a hearing on canines used for homeland security. “The demand for detection dogs has increased to the point that the quality of dogs has suffered and the price has increased dramatically.”

Read more: Yahoo News

Kuwait has cancelled the residencies of more than sixty Lebanese nationals, who were proven to have links to Hezbollah, a report said Monday.  The Interior Ministry’s Assistant Undersecretary of Citizenship and Passports Affairs Maj. Gen. Mazen Al-Jarrah told the Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas that more 60 Lebanese citizens have up to two months to settle their financial situations before being deported from the country. He said those labeled “dangerous” have been given just 48 hours to leave Kuwait.

The report comes amid a heightened campaign by Gulf countries against Hezbollah, which the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council designated as a “terror” group earlier this month.  “The security of Kuwait is a red line and it cannot be bypassed by individuals belonging to parties and those ideologies prohibited in Kuwaiti society,” Jarrah said.  He revealed that deportation is not only limited to Arab nationals, but that a “U.S. citizen” was also told to leave.

Read more: Al-Bawaba

A suspected suicide bomber, who was intercepted in Cameroon Friday before she could blow herself, reportedly told authorities that she was one of the Chibok schoolgirls who were captured by Boko Haram in 2014.

Two girls were carrying explosives in the village of Limani in northern Cameroon before being stopped by local defense forces, according to the UK Daily Telegraph. The village had been the target of suicide bombings in recent months.

The girls were handed over to Cameron soldiers who are part of a multi-national African force that was created to take on the Islamist terrorist group.

Read more: Fox News

Stephane Medot knows a thing or two about Belgian prisons.  He spent 10 years in them.  Arrested for carrying out more than a dozen armed bank robberies, the stocky, bald-headed Medot moved from prison to prison, from one cell of his own to another, until he served out his time.  Along the way, he got a front-row seat in a prison system that has become a breeding ground for violent Muslim extremists.  Many of those involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks first did short stints behind bars for relatively petty crimes.  And there these wayward young people met proselytizers and appear to have acquired a new, lethal sense of purpose.

A Belgian prison is where Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who helped plan the Paris attacks and who was killed in a police raid in November, met Salah Abdeslam, an alleged Paris attacker who was captured in Brussels this month.  Salah’s brother Brahim, who blew himself up in Paris, also served time.  Two of the suicide bombers in the Brussels attacks last week, brothers Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, had spent time in Belgian prisons for violent offenses that included armed robbery and carjacking. More than a dozen people were killed, and several others were injured, after explosions at an airport and metro station in the Belgian capital.

Medot, now 37, said that from prison to prison, the routine he witnessed was similar.  Proselytizing prisoners used exercise hours and small windows in their cells to swap news, copies of the Koran and small favors such as illicit cellphones.  Gradually, they won over impressionable youths and taught them to stop drinking and start thinking about perceived injustices such as the invasion of Iraq, the plight of Palestinians or the treatment of their own immigrant families.  The prison guards, who could not understand Arabic, had a “laissez-faire attitude,” he said, and did nothing to stop the pulsating music or political discussions.

Read more: Washington Post

Brussels prosecutors on Monday said they had charged three more people with participating in a terrorist group after a series of raids following bomb attacks on Brussels airport and a metro train last week.

In a statement on Monday, the federal prosecutors named the three charged as Yassine A., Mohamed B. and Aboubaker O., adding they could not give further information about them at this stage.

They also said they had released without charge a fourth man they had been questioning. On Sunday, they had announced they were holding four people following 13 new raids in and around Brussels and Antwerp.

Source:  Reuters