Denmark is taking threats from the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda very seriously, Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard said on Tuesday, according to broadcaster DR.

On Monday, reports had emerged that al-Qaeda was calling on Muslims to launch retaliation attacks for recent desecrations of the Koran in Sweden and Denmark.

The Danish domestic intelligence service PET had earlier confirmed a new threat against Sweden and Denmark, in response to Koran burnings in the two countries.

Several anti-Islamic protests involving the damaging and burning of the Koran in Sweden and Denmark have triggered protests in Muslim-majority countries in recent months.

The reactions in Iraq were particularly strong. In July, the Iraqi government expelled the Swedish ambassador, while demonstrators stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad and set fire to it.

The Koran burnings have been carried out by small groups seeking to provoke Muslims. The protests fall under freedom of speech in both countries and are legal.

Al-Qaeda is said to have posted an online statement calling for severe punishment against everyone involved in such acts, including blowing up Swedish and Danish embassies around the world.

But Hummelgaard reassured Danes that they should not be nervous. Police and secret services were keeping a very close eye on the situation, he said.

He reiterated that the government intended to ban the provocative Koran burnings, however it was initially unclear what steps would be taken.

The terror alert level in Denmark has not been raised, despite the multiple threats. It is currently on the fourth of five levels.

Read more: Denmark ponders law to ban burning of the Koran in front of embassies

There is “no doubt” that events in Afghanistan will have “heartened and emboldened” extremists, the boss of MI5 said as he warned of the potential return of “al Qaida-style” terrorist plots.

Director-general Ken McCallum said that, although the Government has pledged to judge the Taliban by their actions, the UK security service and its partners will plan for the chance that “more risk, progressively, may flow our way”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There is no doubt that events in Afghanistan will have heartened and emboldened some of those extremists and so being vigilant to precisely those kinds of risks (is what) my organisation is focused on along with a range of other threats.”

While “inspired” acts of terrorism are “by volume” the largest number of threats that MI5 and their partners face in the UK, Mr McCallum also warned of the “potential regrowth of al Qaida-style directed plots”.

He said that although more directed plots from terrorist organisations take time to organise and carry out, psychological boosts for their causes can happen “overnight”.

“Terrorist threats tend not to change overnight in the sense of directed plotting or training camps or infrastructure – the sorts of things that al Qaida enjoyed in Afghanistan at the time of 9/11.

“These things do inherently take time to build, and the 20-year effort to reduce the terrorist threat from Afghanistan has been largely successful.

“But what does happen overnight, even though those directed plots and centrally organised bits of terrorism take a bit longer to rebuild… overnight, you can have a psychological boost, a morale boost to extremists already here, or in other countries.

“So we need to be vigilant both for the increase in inspired terrorism which has become a real trend for us to deal with over the last five to 10 years, alongside the potential regrowth of al Qaida-style directed plots,” Mr McCallum said.

His comments follow warnings he made during his annual address in July that terrorists will “seek to take advantage” of chances to “rebuild” as troops withdraw from Afghanistan, suggesting it could be “challenging” to disrupt potential threats without “having our own forces on the ground”.

Almost 20 years on from the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, Mr McCallum said it was “difficult to give a simplistic answer” as to whether the UK was safer, or less safe now from the threat of terrorism since 2001.

He said a consequence of the success of reducing large-scale terror events had been the growth of “inspired terrorism”. The so-called Islamic State had “managed to do something that al Qaida did not” in inspiring lots of people to attempt smaller scale acts of terrorism through online grooming.

“The number of plots that we disrupt nowadays are actually higher than the number of plots that were coming at us after 9/11, but on average they are smaller plots of lower sophistication,” Mr McCallum added.

He warned the threat of terrorism in the UK remains “a real and enduring thing”, describing how security services and police had disrupted 31 late-stage attack plots in Britain in the last four years.

Over the past two years during the coronavirus pandemic, six late-stage attack plots have been disrupted, he added, as he warned it would be “reckless” of him to claim that a terror attack would not happen on UK soil “on his watch”.

But he insisted those at MI5 “spend our lives” working to mitigate such threats.

One of the hardest things about being the boss of MI5 is the “prioritisation” of threats, Mr McCallum said, adding: “While we have, I can confidently say, saved thousands of lives across the last 20 years, we cannot always succeed.”

A senior al Qaida operative was killed in Iran earlier this year by Israeli agents supported by US intelligence.

Abu Mohammed al-Masri was killed by assassins in Tehran during a period in which the Trump administration was ramping up pressure on Iran.

He was killed on August 7, the anniversary of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Al-Masri was widely believed to have participated in the planning of those attacks and was wanted on terrorism charges by the FBI.

The US provided intelligence to the Israelis on where they could find al-Masri and the alias he was using at the time, while Israeli agents carried out the killing, according to two officials.

Another two other officials confirmed al-Masri’s killing but could not provide specific details.

His death is a blow to al Qaida, the terror network that orchestrated the September 11 attacks in the US and comes amid rumours in the Middle East about the fate of the group’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The officials could not confirm those reports but said the US intelligence community was trying to determine their credibility.

Two of the officials – one within the intelligence community and with direct knowledge of the operation and another former CIA officer briefed on the matter – said al-Masri was killed by Kidon, a unit within the secretive Israeli spy organization Mossad allegedly responsible for the assassination of high-value targets.

The official in the intelligence community said al-Masri’s daughter, Maryam, was also a target of the operation.

The US believed she was being groomed for a leadership role in al Qaida and intelligence suggested she was involved in operational planning, according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Al-Masri’s daughter was the widow of Hamza bin Laden, the son of al Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Both the CIA and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which oversees the Mossad intelligence agency, declined to comment.

Read more: Iran continues to stockpile and enrich uranium, says UN

A terror suspect has appeared in court charged with travelling to Syria and joining al Qaida.

Mohammed Yamin, 25, from east London, was arrested on Wednesday and subsequently charged with three offences – engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts, membership of a proscribed organisation, and possession of a gun for a purpose connected with terrorism.

The Metropolitan Police said the charges relate to offences allegedly carried out between April 25 2013 and June 1 2014.

The particulars of the alleged offences include engaging in conduct in preparation for giving effect to his intention, namely the purchase of equipment and clothing; obtaining information about the routes to Syria from the UK, the purchase of a one-way flight ticket to facilitate the journey to Syria and his subsequent travel to Syria.

Yamin appeared before Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Friday morning following his arrest as part of a pre-planned operation.

He was remanded in custody ahead of his next court appearance, at the Old Bailey, on February 15, Scotland Yard said.

A knife-obsessed teenager who talked about carrying out a terror attack with a blade or acid has been jailed for three years and four months. The individual concerned, Sudesh Amman, 18, was sentenced today in the Old Bailey after he pled guilty for being in the possession of terrorist material.

Some of the material that he admitted to included manuals on bomb-making, knife-fighting and close combat. This also included the infamous, ‘How to Make a Bomb in Your Kitchen’.

Amman also pled guilty to the distribution of Al-Qaida propaganda on a family Whatsapp group, where young siblings, as young as 11 were exposed to the extremist material. Further bomb-making material was also shared through Skype chat and it emerged that Amman was looking to become a martyr, something that he had written in his notebook.

Amman was identified through a Telegram chat when a photo of a knife and two firearms on a Shahada flag were identified to him with the words, “armed and ready”.

On searching his premises, police officers seized an air gun, a black flag and a combat knife

In a search of his family home, officers seized an air gun, a black flag and a combat knife.

The science and Maths student had previous convictions for possession of an offensive weapon and cannabis.

He was aged just 17 when he began collecting terrorist material in 2017.

Acting Commander Alexis Boon, head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, said Amman had a “fierce interest in violence and martyrdom”.

He said: “His fascination with dying in the name of terrorism was clear in a notepad we recovered from his home. Amman had scrawled his ‘life goals’ in the notepad and top of the list, above family activities, was dying a martyr and going to ‘Jannah’ – the afterlife.

“It’s not clear how Amman became radicalised but it is apparent from his messages that it had been at least a year in development. Whatever the circumstances, this case is a reminder of the need to be vigilant to signs of radicalisation and report it.”

The U.S. ambassador joined a ceremony in Nairobi on Tuesday to commemorate 20 years since truck bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 258 people and marking the start of al Qaeda’s global campaign of violence.

Some 200 Kenyans and Americans, many of them survivors of the attack, gathered at Nairobi’s August 7th Memorial Park to pray and remember the victims.

“We forgive those who hurt us, but we may not forget. Let’s pray for them to change their mind so that we can live happily together,” said Thaddeus Mutiiria Nyaga, whose son, Emmanuel, was killed on Aug. 7. His name was read out along with those of the other victims, as candles were lit during the ceremony.

The blasts killed 12 Americans, and wounded several thousand people in what was al Qaeda’s first big attack in a campaign by the Islamist militants.

Three years later, the group would conduct its most notorious attack, flying passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people.

“The terrorists really sought to divide us. They sought to divide Kenyans and Americans. They sought to attack civilization. And they failed,” U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec said at the ceremony.

Kenya’s director of counter-terrorism, Martin Kimani, said terrorism remained a threat, “but our country has taken giant strides to prepare better to be more ready, and part of that readiness is our cooperation with our friends”.

In 2013, gunmen from the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda affiliate, killed at least 67 people inside a shopping mall and held out for four days as security forces laid siege to the complex.

Kenyan troops are fighting in neighbouring Somalia against al-Shabaab as part of an African Union peacekeeping force that has been deployed there for more than a decade.

Mourner Ali Mwadama said militants who say they kill in the name of religion do not represent Islam or any faith.

“We can’t call them Muslims,” he said. “If you are a Muslim you must follow the rules of Allah.”

Convoys of buses arrived on Monday to transfer thousands of Syrian militants and refugees from Lebanon’s border region into rebel territory in Syria in exchange for Hezbollah prisoners. Under a local ceasefire between the Sunni Muslim militants and the Shi’ite Hezbollah, about 9,000 fighters and their relatives were to leave. With no sign of any buses leaving, the departure was delayed to Tuesday from Monday for “logistical” reasons including having to wait for the rest of a total of 98 coaches to arrive from the Syrian side, a Hezbollah media unit said.

The deal includes the departure of all Nusra Front militants from Lebanon’s border region around the town of Arsal, along with any civilians in nearby refugee camps who wish to go. The truce echoes deals struck within Syria in which Damascus has shuttled rebels and civilians to Idlib province and other opposition areas. Such evacuations have helped President Bashar al-Assad recapture several rebel bastions over the past year. Lebanon’s Hezbollah has played a major role in fighting militants along the frontier during Syria’s six-year war, sending thousands of combatants to support Assad’s government. Last week, Hezbollah took most of the mountainous zone of Jroud Arsal in a joint offensive with the Syrian army to drive Nusra militants from their last frontier foothold. The Nusra Front was al Qaeda’s Syria branch until it severed ties and rebranded last year. It now spearheads the Tahrir al-Sham Islamist alliance in the Syrian war.

The Lebanese army, which receives considerable U.S. and British military support, did not take an active part in the operation, setting up defensive positions around Arsal. The next phase is expected to target a nearby enclave currently in the hands of Islamic State jihadists.

BODIES OF FIGHTERS EXCHANGED

“Buses that will transport Nusra Front militants and their families have started arriving in Jroud Arsal,” the military media unit run by the Iran-backed Hezbollah said via social media on Monday. The convoys rolled in from Syria and headed towards Lebanese army positions. Syrian Red Crescent ambulances arrived on the opposite side of the frontier, the media unit said. Footage from the border zone showed dozens of white buses driving through the barren hills. The Lebanese Red Cross has taken part in logistics. The first step of the ceasefire, brokered by Lebanon’s internal security agency, unfolded on Sunday as the two sides exchanged the bodies of dead fighters. A Lebanese security source said 200 militants with hundreds of their family members, as well as more than 5,000 refugees, were due to leave, mostly towards insurgent-held Idlib. Nusra Front will release eight Hezbollah fighters under the deal, three captured in recent days and five held in Syria, a Lebanese security source said. Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV said the two sides would swap Nusra militants for the Hezbollah hostages near the city of Aleppo, which the Syrian government controls.

The U.N. refugee agency, not involved in the deal, was trying to reach refugees in the Arsal region to evaluate whether returns were voluntary, spokeswoman Lisa Abou Khaled said. “UNHCR believes that conditions for refugees to return in safety and dignity are not yet in place in Syria,” she said, with war continuing across large swathes of the country. The multi-sided Syrian conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven at least 11 million from their homes – about half Syria’s pre-war population. Nearly 1.5 million refugees have poured into Lebanon – around a quarter of its population – where most languish in severe poverty. Several thousand live in makeshift camps east of Arsal. 

Syrian rebel officials said on Thursday that a ceasefire deal agreed with the government included Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as the al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front, although the army said that was not the case.

The Syrian army has announced a nationwide halt to military operations to begin at midnight on Thursday, excluding Islamic State as well as the former Nusra Front and all groups linked to them.

But several rebel officials told Reuters the deal included the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham group.

A spokesman for the Jaish al-Nasr rebel faction present at the ceasefire talks told Reuters that only Islamic State was excluded. The deal is to be monitored by Russia and Turkey and includes establishing humanitarian corridors, he said.

Zakaria Malahifji, head of the political office of rebel group Fastaqim, also said the truce only excludes areas under the control of Islamic State.

The Jaish al-Nasr spokesman said the other side had wanted to exclude the ex-Nusra Front, and to exclude the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta from the agreement. But he said the rebel groups at the meeting refused.

Fastaqim’s Malahifji said: “Rebel groups said it is not about covering for (the ex-Nusra Front), but because we can’t separate them out, because the territory is overlapping.”

Malahifji, who was not present at the talks, said rebels had agreed to three main points: one about the truce, one about how it would be monitored by Russia and Turkey and one about a political process to begin after one month of ceasefire.

Several other rebel officials also said if the ceasefire holds for a month, political negotiations will begin.

Mamoun al-Haj-Mousa, a member of the rebel Free Syrian Army’s political council and spokesman for the Suqur al-Sham rebel group, told al-Arabiya al-Hadath television channel that rebels had asked that no group be excluded.

“We saw recently how Aleppo was annihilated because of 200 fighters from Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. This is a fundamental condition for us that no group is excluded be it Fatah al-Sham or not,” he said.

The ceasefire deal was first announced by Russia, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, after Moscow, Iran and Turkey said they were ready to broker a peace deal in the nearly six-year-old Syrian war.

Russia’s defence ministry said the insurgent groups which signed the agreement were: Failaq al-Sham, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam, Thuwwar al-Sham, Jaish al-Muhajidin, Jaish Idlib and al-Jabha al-Shamia.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told a visiting group of European parliamentarians on Sunday that western governments’ support for opposition groups in Syria caused terrorism in Europe.

“The problems Europe faces today of terrorism, extremism and waves of refugees are caused by some western leaders’ adoption of policies which do not serve their people,” Assad told a delegation of members of the European Parliament headed by Javier Couso, vice chairman of its foreign affairs committee.

“Especially when those leaders give support and political cover to terrorist groups inside Syria,” Syrian state news agency SANA said in a summary of Assad’s comments.

The Syrian government, supported by Iran and Russia, refers to all groups fighting it in the five-year-old conflict as terrorists. Of such groups, the U.N. classifies only Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front as terrorist.

A range of countries provide financial, logistical and training support to the many armed opposition groups in Syria, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Western and Gulf Arab countries which want Assad out of power blame him for the displacement of tens of thousands of Syrians, through air strikes on rebel-held areas that have killed thousands.

Opposition groups accuse the government of deliberately targeting civilians and breaching ceasefires. United Nations-brokered peace talks broke down in late April as violence escalated, without a set date to resume.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, in an online audio message, pledged allegiance to the new head of the Afghan Taliban, who was appointed last month after his predecessor was killed in a US drone strike.

The veteran Islamist militant became al Qaeda’s leader after U.S. Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, and he is thought to be hiding in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, having been based there since the late 1990s.

“As leader of the al Qaeda organisation for jihad, I extend my pledge of allegiance once again, the approach of Osama to invite the Muslim nation to support the Islamic Emirate,” al-Zawahri said in a 14 minute recording.

During its years in power, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and it has been fighting an insurgency since to regain control of the country.

The authenticity of the recording could not be immediately verified.

Haibatullah Akhundzada, Islamic legal scholar who was one of former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour’s deputies, was appointed a few days after Mansour was killed by a U.S. drone attack in a remote border area just inside Pakistan.

Since al-Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor-turned-militant, succeeded bin Laden, al Qaeda has lost ground to Islamic State in the leadership of the global jihadist movement.

Some Afghan insurgent commanders have broken away from the Taliban to pledge support for Islamic State, though it operates largely in Iraq and Syria, and is active in parts of North Africa.

Al Qaeda was set up by Arab guerrillas who flocked to Afghanistan to fight Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s. It had thrived under the Taliban’s rule before both groups were driven underground following the U.S. invasion that followed Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.