Homeland Security News

France is increasing security at religious sites as the interior minister said Tuesday that the country faces a “very high” risk of terrorist threats, amid growing geopolitical tensions following the beheading of a teacher who showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

French diplomats are trying to quell anger in Turkey and Arab nations amid anti-France protests and calls for boycotts of French goods in response to President Emmanuel Macron’s firm stance against Islamism in the wake of the Oct. 16 beheading. European allies have supported Macron, while Muslim-majority countries are angered by his defense of prophet cartoons they consider sacrilegious.

France’s national police have called for increased security at religious sites around the All Saint’s holiday this coming weekend, particularly noting online threats from extremists against Christians and moderate French Muslims.

Read more: France 24

At least seven top Qaeda operatives were killed in the latest of a recent spate of U.S. Special Operations drone strikes in northwest Syria.

Afghan commandos killed a senior Qaeda propagandist in a raid in a Taliban-controlled district. And the United States continues to pressure the Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, the Shabab, which may be undergoing a leadership shake-up.

Yet nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks and with many of its top leaders dead, Al Qaeda remains resilient and has “ingrained itself in local communities and conflicts” spanning the globe, from West Africa to Yemen to Afghanistan, a U.N. counterterrorism report issued in July concluded.

Read more: New York Times

A Turkish court sentenced an employee of the U.S. consulate in Istanbul to prison on charges of aiding a terrorist organization, a ruling that might prompt a protest from Washington.

Nazmi Mete Canturk, a security guard, was convicted for providing assistance to the outlawed movement of Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric accused by Turkish authorities of masterminding a failed coup in 2016, state news agency Anadolu said on Tuesday.

He becomes the second staff worker at the American mission in Istanbul to be convicted this year. In June, Metin Topuz was sentenced to more than eight years in prison on similar charges, drawing criticism from American officials who said there was no credible evidence to support the ruling.

Read more: Bloomberg

Four individuals have been charged for their respective roles in a conspiracy to sell phony Coast Guard merchant mariner credentials in Norfolk.

According to allegations in the unsealed indictment, Lamont Godfrey, 42, of Portsmouth, Eugene Johnson, 45, of Norfolk, Shunmanique Willis, 43, of Texas, and Alonzo Williams, 45, of Louisiana, acted in concert to create counterfeit certificates from the Mid-Atlantic Maritime Academy (MAMA) and sell them to merchant mariners for a profit. The MAMA is a private state-of-the-art maritime training center, offering mariners over 100 U.S. Coast Guard approved deck and engineering courses needed for merchant mariners to hold various positions on merchant vessels. Godfrey worked for the MAMA as the school’s Chief Administrator.

According to the indictment, Godfrey used this position to create fake MAMA course certificates for mariners who had never taken the MAMA courses, in exchange for thousands of dollars in payments. The mariners would receive the fake certificates along with instructions on how to load them in the Coast Guard systems and be credited with a fraudulent Coast Guard qualification. Johnson, Willis, and Williams worked with Godfrey as brokers to find additional mariners willing to buy the fake certificates. In exchange for their efforts, Johnson, Willis, and Williams all received a cut of the illicit proceeds from the scheme. In total, the conspiracy netted over $200,000 in profits from the production of these counterfeit MAMA certificates and involved over 150 mariners purchasing fraudulent qualifications.

Read more: Department of Justice