Qaeda Affiliate Is Blamed in Iraq Suicide Bombing

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but officials blamed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni insurgent group that has conducted dozens of attacks in the city in recent years, including several in which the police and security officials were targets.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since insurgents promised to increase violence in response to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Monday.

Coming after a bombing attack killed 10 people in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad on Tuesday, the violence underscored the continuing challenges for Iraqi security forces to secure the country as American forces withdraw by the end of the year.

Although there are far fewer attacks than at the height of the sectarian war in 2007, there are still bombings and assassinations virtually every day.

“This was a breach of our security by Al Qaeda,” said Haider Zanbor, the head of the security committee in Babil Province, which includes Hilla. “We were expecting that Babil would be the target of revenge for the killing of Bin Laden. We will increase the security procedure to prevent this from happening again.”

Around 7 a.m., the bomber drove a car packed with explosives to a checkpoint outside the training center in downtown Hilla, detonating the explosives as a bus drove by, a security official said. A shift change at the training center increased the number of officers in the area, the official said.

The explosion knocked over several blast walls and damaged the front rooms of the training center, as well as several homes. Of those killed, 24 were police officers, as were many of the wounded, the provincial police said.

Local officials also blamed the central government in Baghdad for failing to protect them.

“The central government is responsible for this explosion,” said Kathum Majed Toma, the head of the Babil provincial council. “We requested many times for them to provide us with sonar devices to detect explosives and for them to hire more security forces so we can secure our province, but they did not reply.”

At a news conference in Baghdad on Wednesday, one of the country’s top law enforcement officials, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said, “There are still some cells able to work in Iraq and able to implement a terrorist act.”

General Atta, the spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, which controls the police and army, stressed, however, that Iraqi forces were prepared to maintain security after American forces withdrew.

Yasir Ghazi and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an employee of The New York Times from Hilla, Iraq.

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Qaeda Affiliate Is Blamed in Iraq Suicide Bombing

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but officials blamed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni insurgent group that has conducted dozens of attacks in the city in recent years, including several in which the police and security officials were targets.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since insurgents promised to increase violence in response to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Monday.

Coming after a bombing attack killed 10 people in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad on Tuesday, the violence underscored the continuing challenges for Iraqi security forces to secure the country as American forces withdraw by the end of the year.

Although there are far fewer attacks than at the height of the sectarian war in 2007, there are still bombings and assassinations virtually every day.

“This was a breach of our security by Al Qaeda,” said Haider Zanbor, the head of the security committee in Babil Province, which includes Hilla. “We were expecting that Babil would be the target of revenge for the killing of Bin Laden. We will increase the security procedure to prevent this from happening again.”

Around 7 a.m., the bomber drove a car packed with explosives to a checkpoint outside the training center in downtown Hilla, detonating the explosives as a bus drove by, a security official said. A shift change at the training center increased the number of officers in the area, the official said.

The explosion knocked over several blast walls and damaged the front rooms of the training center, as well as several homes. Of those killed, 24 were police officers, as were many of the wounded, the provincial police said.

Local officials also blamed the central government in Baghdad for failing to protect them.

“The central government is responsible for this explosion,” said Kathum Majed Toma, the head of the Babil provincial council. “We requested many times for them to provide us with sonar devices to detect explosives and for them to hire more security forces so we can secure our province, but they did not reply.”

At a news conference in Baghdad on Wednesday, one of the country’s top law enforcement officials, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said, “There are still some cells able to work in Iraq and able to implement a terrorist act.”

General Atta, the spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, which controls the police and army, stressed, however, that Iraqi forces were prepared to maintain security after American forces withdrew.

Yasir Ghazi and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an employee of The New York Times from Hilla, Iraq.

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Local Iraqi Leaders Blame Al Qaeda for Attack

The attack underscored the continued struggles of Iraqi security forces to curb violence throughout the country. Although there are far fewer attacks than at the height of the sectarian war in 2007, there are still bombings and assassinations on a daily basis.

Around 7 a.m., the bomber drove a car packed with explosives up to a check point outside the training center in downtown Hilla, detonating the explosives while a bus drove by, according to the security official.

At the time, there was a shift change at the training center, which increased the number of officers in the area, the official said.

“The central government is responsible for this explosion,” said the local official, Kathum Majed Toma, who is the head of Babil’s provincial council. “We requested many times for them to provide us with sonar devices to detect explosives and for them to hire more security forces so we can secure our province but they did not reply.”

The explosion knocked over several blast walls and damaged the front rooms of the training center, as well as several homes.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since terrorists here promised to increase violence in response to Osama bin Laden’s death in the early hours Monday.

"This was a breach of our security by Al Qaeda," said Haider Zanbor, the head of the province’s security committee. "We were expecting that Babil would be the target of revenge for the killing of bin Laden. We will increase the security procedure to prevent this from happening again."

Members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, have conducted dozens of attacks in the city in recent years, including several targeted at police and security officials. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

At a press conference in Baghdad on Wednesday, one of the country’s top law enforcement officials, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said that “there are still some cells able to work in Iraq and able to implement a terrorist act.”

However, Mr. Atta, who is the spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, which controls the police and army, stressed that Iraqi security forces are prepared to maintain security after American forces withdraw all by the end of the year.

Yasir Ghazi and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad. An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Hilla.

 

German Terrorism Arrests Disrupt Qaeda Inquiry

 

The moment came after they overheard a conversation in which the men exulted about the bombing in Morocco on Thursday that killed 16 people. The suspects had begun building a bomb; one of them complained about the smell as they mixed chemicals in a kitchen. They also mused about where they might kill the most people, officials said. A crowded bus stop, perhaps?

At that point, the investigators reluctantly decided that the danger of an attack outweighed the risk that arresting the men would alert other suspects and hamper the broader investigation. Shortly after sunrise on Friday, they seized two suspects in Düsseldorf, catching one as he walked to his car and another in his apartment, where the suspect briefly brandished a knife before surrendering.

A third man was arrested in Bochum, where he offered no resistance, German officials said on Saturday.

“It was completely clear to me we had to act,” said J?rg Ziercke, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office.

Mr. Ziercke and other officials laid out details of the investigation on Saturday, in a news conference near the federal court where the three men were brought before a judge.

The officials described a vast operation involving an intensive surveillance effort by more than 100 people and including assistance from American intelligence sources and the Moroccan authorities.

The German officials said they believed that the aborted attack was part of a strategy that Al Qaeda had been following to encourage homegrown terrorist attacks, now that the group had lost much of its ability to direct attacks from abroad.

Mr. Ziercke described the plot as a kind of hybrid terrorism that had elements of central control but left would-be attackers largely to their own devices.

One of the suspects, a citizen of Morocco who had lived for a decade in Germany, was recruited to attend a Qaeda training camp last year near the Afghan-Pakistani border, officials said. The suspect, identified only as Abdeladim El-K., 29, received weapons and explosives training and orders from a high-ranking Qaeda official, whom the authorities did not identify, to carry out an attack in Germany.

After re-entering Germany illegally in May 2010, Mr. Ziercke and other officials said, the suspect recruited two longtime acquaintances: men identified as Jamil S., 31, who has joint German and Moroccan citizenship; and Amid C., 19, who is a citizen of Germany and Iran.

While two of the suspects had Moroccan roots, the authorities said they had not found any evidence of a direct connection between the German plot and the bombing in Marrakesh. However, the men did appear to have been inspired by the attack, the police said.

The authorities said all three of the suspects worked full time on preparing for an attack, trying to conceal their activities by communicating in code and acquiring chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide and acetone that can be used in bomb production. They downloaded bomb-making recipes from the Internet and tried to extract chemicals for a detonator from a charcoal lighter.

The suspects also investigated security measures at possible targets like public buildings, airports and train stations, the authorities said. They stayed away from mosques and other places where they might attract attention.

The German officials who spoke on Saturday did not confirm news reports that the suspects planned to stage an attack during the Eurovision Song Contest, an international music competition that will draw large crowds to Düsseldorf from May 10 to 14.

While taking note of the event, officials said the suspects had not yet settled on a target.

“They wanted to create an explosion in a place with big crowds of people,” said Rainer Griesbaum, head of the antiterrorism unit at the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe.

Mr. Griesbaum and Mr. Ziercke said there was at least one other suspect tied to the plot who had not been arrested, and that there might be dozens of others in Germany providing financial and logistical support to terrorist groups. The officials said they knew of about 200 Germans who had received training at Qaeda camps.

Mr. Griesbaum said Al Qaeda remained determined to retaliate against Germany for sending troops to Afghanistan.

“We have prevented this danger, but only this danger,” Mr. Griesbaum said.

 

Al Qaeda Attack Was Thwarted By Three Arrests, Germany Says

BERLIN — The German police arrested three men suspected of being members of Al Qaeda on Friday, saying they represented “a concrete and imminent danger” to the nation and had been planning an attack using explosives.

The German authorities presented the bare outlines of a terrorism plot that they said involved at least one person trained at a militant camp in Afghanistan or Pakistan and a cache of material for producing explosives. The men had been under surveillance for seven months, but the authorities said they decided to move fast when the three began preparations for testing an explosive device.

“We succeeded in preventing a concrete and imminent danger,” the interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, said in a statement that acknowledged assistance from foreign investigators. “This proves that Germany continues to be in the cross hairs of international terrorists, and we need to remain vigilant.”

The authorities said more information would be released at the federal prosecutor’s headquarters in Karlsruhe on Saturday, when the men would be brought before a judge. But some details emerged from law enforcement officials and the German news media, which said at least two of the men were Moroccan, one with German citizenship and the other living in Germany illegally. The third was said to be a German of Iranian descent, though some reports said he was of Moroccan descent.

It was not at clear if there was any connection between the arrests and the terrorist attack in Morocco on Thursday, when at least 16 people were killed after a bomb was detonated in a packed cafe in the popular tourist city of Marrakesh. But experts said it was likely that Moroccan and German intelligence services had recently cooperated.

The German news media reported that the three suspects had been taken into custody in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and that the authorities had confiscated materials for making explosives, including acetone, a volatile substance that terrorists often use. Officials identified the suspects only as Abdeladim K., Jamil S. and Ahmed Sh. German authorities do not typically release the names of criminal suspects.

According to the newspaper Bild, one of the men was from Düsseldorf and the other two were from nearby cities, Essen and Bochum. All three were arrested at 6:30 a.m. in raids in Düsseldorf and Bochum.

The target was uncertain. Bild, Germany’s most widely read and generally reliable newspaper, reported that the terrorist cell might have planned to hit the popular Eurovision Song Contest on May 14, though that event’s organizers said they had not been alerted to any such threat.

The newspaper Die Welt anonymously quoted an investigator as saying that the suspects were planning to attack public transportation in a large German city. An American official who was briefed on the operation said the plot was aimed at buses or depots.

The arrests and accusations, which combined elements of homegrown terrorism with concerns about the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, shook Germany’s sense of calm. The country was put on edge last year as well after a terrorism alert involving what the authorities said was concrete information of a planned attack.

The increased security measures established at public areas like transportation hubs had eased in recent months, but law enforcement had quietly continued to pursue leads on the threats aggressively, including a suggestion that terrorists planned to strike the Reichstag, home to the lower house of Parliament.

Wolfgang Bosbach, a member of the lower house and chairman of the Committee on Internal Affairs, said investigators had closely monitored travel to the Afghan border area and noted “a significant number of returnees.”

“The recent arrests must not surprise anyone who deals seriously with the matter,” Mr. Bosbach said.

The Rhine-Main region has a large population with ties to North Africa and is one of Germany’s centers of the Salafist movement, a radical fundamentalist school of Islamic thinking, along with Hamburg, Berlin and the region around Frankfurt, according to Guido Steinberg, an expert on terrorism with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“We do not know yet exactly how big this is,” Mr. Steinberg said. “But that something could happen this year is anything but absurd. The Salafist scene has grown significantly in Germany in recent years. The number of converts has increased substantially as well.”

According to the official Germany News agency, the three men had planned to test an explosive on Thursday night, but delayed for some reason. The authorities said the men were arrested without previously issued warrants, perhaps indicating a decision to move quickly.

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Marrakesh, Morocco; Jack Ewing from Frankfurt; and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

 

Fatal Bomb in Morocco Shows Signs of Al Qaeda

The bomb appeared to have all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Interior Minister Taieb Cherkaoui said, briefing the government in Rabat. “The manner reminds us of the style used generally by Al Qaeda,” he said. “And this leads us to think that there is a possibility of more dangers to come.”

But there was no claim of responsibility on Friday by Al Qaeda or any other group.

“This was not a suicide attack,” Mr. Cherkaoui said, adding that “it appears the bomb was set off remotely,” in remarks carried by the official news agency, MAP. He said the bomb contained ammonium nitrate. A Moroccan security official, asking for anonymity, said the bomb also contained triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, an explosive easily made and popular among bombers in the Middle East, including those from Al Qaeda.

The bombing is a serious blow to Morocco’s tourism industry, already hurt by the economic crisis and anxieties about popular protests that are stirring much of the Arab world. The site — a popular cafe facing the historic Djemma el Fna square — is a regular tourist stop, and the bombing appeared aimed at foreigners.

Fourteen of the 16 dead were foreigners, mostly French citizens, as well as two Canadians, a Briton and a Dutch tourist, officials said. There were 25 people wounded, 14 of whom remained in hospitals, Mr. Cherkaoui said.

Morocco’s king, Mohammed VI, has tried to respond to popular demands for more democracy by beginning constitutional reforms and releasing or commuting the sentences of 190 radical Islamic prisoners arrested after the last big terrorist bombing, in Casablanca in 2003, when 45 people died, including 12 suicide bombers.

On May 1, protesters plan another rally in Moroccan cities to demand a faster transition to a constitutional monarchy, the third such protest since Feb. 20.

Mohamed Darif, a political scientist at King Hassan University in Casablanca, said, “The finger is pointed at Al Qaeda,” and suggested that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb had singled out a cafe popular with French tourists. The same group holds four French hostages and demands that for their return, France pull its troops out of Afghanistan.

“They would find no better spot than Marrakesh, which has become a French village, with a strong French presence,” Mr. Darif said.

But he suggested other possible culprits, including radical Islamists who want all their colleagues released from prison — nearly 2,000 or so are detained — and those who do not favor the king’s recent movement toward democratic reform.

Jean-Yves Moisseron, editor in chief of the France-based magazine Maghreb-Machrek, said the way the bombing was carried out pointed to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, “since Marrakesh is a very touristy place with a bad reputation, a spot for prostitution and sexual tourism, with international jet-setters” who own houses in the old city.

“There is a very clear will to target tourists; otherwise they would have bombed 50 meters away,” he said, adding that the bombers had to get through significant police controls to hit the square, which is well protected. “They were surely well organized and significantly trained.”

Two of the dead were Michal Zekry, 29, an Israeli-Canadian who was pregnant, and her husband, Messod Wizman, 30, a Moroccan-Canadian. They had come from Shanghai to visit Mr. Wizman’s parents, who live in Casablanca, for Passover, and then took a trip to see Marrakesh.

“They were lovely together, married for three years and have a boy, 2,” said Mr. Wizman’s aunt. “She was pregnant. What happened was that they went to the hotel in Marrakesh, but their room was not ready, so they thought, ‘Why not have a coffee?’ and went to the Argana.” She paused, then said: “There are no words for that.” The couple had left their son with his grandparents.

Mr. Wizman, she said, grew up in Casablanca, studied in Paris and then went to Montreal, where he met his wife.

On Friday evening, the square was packed with people, but the coffee shops and restaurants normally filled with tourists were nearly empty.

Around the corner, the Mabrouka cinema was open, showing “Femmes en Miroirs,” about a young Moroccan photographer living in Paris who returns home to see her sick mother. Rashiq Moulay Alarbi, a literature student, said: “We are not afraid, we are going out. I want these people who did this to us to know that they have not succeeded.”

His friend Abdellah al-Khalaoui, a driver, expressed sorrow for the deaths and concern for the city. “We fear that the tourism will drop; it has already started,” he said. “Already the coffee shops in which people used to sit are empty.”

Nearby, a Spanish couple ate with friends at a small restaurant, undeterred. They were near the square on Thursday but did not hear the explosion. “We’re very sad for the people, but something like this could have happened in Barcelona or Paris as well,” said Manuel Sanroma, a mathematics professor at the University of Barcelona who was making his second visit to Marrakesh.

“We love the Arab world,” he said. “Terrorists can attack you anywhere.”

Souad Mekhennet reported from Marrakesh, and Steven Erlanger from Washington. Ma?a de la Baume contributed reporting from Paris.

 

Airstrike Killed Qaeda Figure, NATO Reports

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A NATO airstrike this month killed a senior operative of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan who was a regional commander in charge of suicide bombings and cash flow, the international military coalition said Tuesday.

NATO identified the man killed in the air attack on April 13 in the Dangam District of eastern Kunar Province as Abu Hafs al-Najdi, also known as Abdul Ghani. The military alliance said the strike also killed a number of other insurgents, including a Qaeda leader known as Waqas.

Mr. Najdi, a Saudi, directed Al Qaeda’s operations in Kunar Province and traveled regularly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, NATO said. He coordinated suicide bombing attacks and kidnappings, and oversaw the transfer of money.

An American official in Washington described Mr. Najdi as a “significant commander” and said that he had been one of fewer than a dozen such Qaeda commanders in Afghanistan.

NATO said it had been chasing Mr. Najdi since 2007 and finally found him while he was meeting with Mr. Waqas, who like many Afghans used only one name.

In Paktia Province, the provincial governor narrowly escaped what appeared to be an assassination attempt. A roadside bomb exploded behind a vehicle that was taking the governor, Juma Khan Hamdard, to his office, said Rohallah Samon, a spokesman for the governor.

Mr. Hamdard was not hurt, but three police officers in another vehicle were slightly wounded, Mr. Samon said.