Homeland Security News

Eight people from a little-known urban guerrilla group have been arrested in connection with a bombing last week at an upscale mall in the Colombian capital Bogota, the police said on Saturday.

Three people were killed and eight wounded when an explosive detonated in a women's restroom at the Andino shopping center on June 17.

Four men and four women, members of The People's Revolutionary Movement (MRP) rebel group, were captured — half in Bogota and half in El Espinal in Tolima province, national police director Jorge Nieto told journalists.

Read more: NBC News

The ISIS suspect who pleaded guilty to attempted terrorism in Burke County was handed a life sentence in federal court Tuesday.

Justin Sullivan pleaded guilty last year. He was arrested on June 19, 2015, and charged with attempting to provide material support to ISIL, transporting and receiving a silencer in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony and receipt and possession of an unregistered silencer, identified by serial number.

"Those who committed terrorism are not martyrs, they are criminals," the judge said in Tuesday's sentence hearing in Asheville.

Sullivan, who called himself The Mujahid in his contacts with the Islamic State, is accused of plotting a mass killing in support of ISIL.

Read more: WBTV (Charlotte)

A man charged with stabbing an airport police officer in an attack federal investigators are probing as an act of terrorism is expected to appear in a Michigan federal court on Wednesday.

Amor Ftouhi, 49, of Quebec, Canada, was charged in federal court with violence at an international airport for stabbing officer Jeff Neville at the Bishop International Airport in Flint on June 21. Neville underwent surgery and has left the hospital, local media reported.

Ftouhi, originally from Tunisia and who holds dual Tunisian-Canadian citizenship, is expected to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie Dawkins Davis at the federal courthouse in Flint on Wednesday morning.

Ftouhi legally entered the United States from Lake Champlain, New York, on June 16 before making his way to Flint, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said. Officials said Ftouhi targeted a city with an international airport, but declined to say why Flint was chosen.

Ftouhi, who was not on the radar of U.S. or Canadian authorities before the attack, was in Michigan as early as June 18, the FBI said. U.S. and Canadian investigators are probing his travel before the attack.

According to the criminal complaint, Ftouhi yelled in Arabic "Allahu akbar" (God is greatest) before stabbing Neville.

He also said something to the effect of "You have killed people in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are all going to die," the complaint said.

Read more:  Reuters

Four men have been arrested on Majorca and two more in the UK and Germany as part of a Spanish investigation into support for so-called Islamic State, police say.

The suspects are said to have produced and spread violent videos to recruit would-be jihadist fighters online.

One was a 44-year-old man from Birmingham, described by Spanish officials as a Salafist imam.

He was held in the city's Sparkhill area under a European Arrest Warrant.

West Midlands police said he was arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences and would appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court later.

Police in western Germany said they had detained a 28-year-old Spanish national in Dortmund, emphasising there was no indication of any planned attack in Germany itself.

The Spanish investigation dates back to 2015 when a series of videos were posted online showing how a young Muslim in Spain was indoctrinated, recruited and eventually sent to fight in Syria.

Read more:  BBC News

A new, highly virulent strain of malicious software that is crippling computers globally appears to have been sown in Ukraine, where it badly hobbled much of the government and private sector on the eve of a holiday celebrating a post-Soviet constitution.

The fresh cyber-assault Tuesday leveraged the same intrusion tool as a similar attack in May and proved again just how disruptive to daily life sophisticated cyber-assaults can be in this age of heavy reliance on computers.

Hospitals, government offices and major multinationals were among the casualties of the ransomware payload, which locks up computer files with all-but-unbreakable encryption and then demands a ransom for its release.

Ukraine and Russia appeared hardest hit. In the United States, it affected companies such as the drugmaker Merck and Mondelez International, the conglomerate of food brands such as Oreo and Nabisco. Multinationals, including the global law firm DLA Piper and Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, were also affected.

The virus’ pace appeared to slow by Wednesday, in part because the malware appeared to require direct contact between computer networks, a factor that may have limited its spread in regions with fewer connections to Ukraine.

Its origins and the motive for its release remained unclear, and financial gain may not have been a big reason. The time and place of release could have been a clue.

It was loosed on the eve of a national holiday marking Ukraine’s 1996 constitution — its first after independence from Soviet rule.

Read more:  AP