The judge said she hoped he spent some of his prison time thinking about "whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people" [sources: Associated Press , John ].
Thanks to undercover operatives, a terrorist plot to attack U. Six men were arrested before the violent plan could take place at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.
The FBI infiltrated the group after receiving a tip from a store clerk who got suspicious after the men dropped off a video to be copied to DVD. The video showed the men firing their weapons and calling for jihad [source: Fletcher]. A month investigation revealed they had gone on training missions in the nearby Poconos Mountains and had the weapons they needed to carry out an attack.
The men — including three Albanian brothers -- were arrested and in December , five were convicted on conspiracy charges, four were found guilty on weapons charges and one pled guilty to aiding and abetting the plot. All were sentenced to multiple years in jail; four of the men received life sentences [source: Carafano ].
It required the work of undercover agents and a few fake bombs, but by May , the New York Police Department had arrested four men for a failed terrorist attack. An informant infiltrated a mosque and befriended the men, three of whom were born in the U. Agents were able to sell the men fake explosives. The men were nabbed as they attempted to stow the faux bombs in a car and at various Jewish religious sites. Three of the men were later found guilty and convicted to 25 years in prison.
The fourth, Payen, was ordered to have psychiatric testing as his lawyer said he was schizophrenic. He was later sentenced to 25 years, too [sources: Carafano , Dolmetsch ]. The target of this terrorist plot in January wasn't on U. The terrorist's plan was a straightforward one: Al-Qaida operatives would load explosives into a small boat, navigate near the Navy ship and then blow up themselves, their boat and the Navy's carrier.
It seems like the plot could have used a few more layers. After launching from the beach, the boat immediately sank under the weight of the explosives.
The conspirators regrouped to plan another attack. In , the pair was among a group of six sentenced by a Yemeni court for the Cole attacks [sources: Department of Justice , Branigin. Al-Quso was later released but continued his al-Qaida activities, including meeting with the "underwear bomber. Al-Badawi was sentenced to death, but escaped during a prison transfer in He later turned himself in and was set free by Yemeni authorities. In , Hosam Smadi, a year-old man from Jordan on an expired student visa began posting on a Web site known for its radical Islamic leanings.
Smadi lived in Texas at the time and, according to FBI reports, seemed determined to act out his violent plans. Soon, he was at the center of a month FBI sting -- one that eventually supplied Smadi with a fake bomb made to his exact specifications.
Smadi then drove an SUV carrying the bomb into a parking garage under a story Dallas skyscraper known as Fountain Place. When he got inside an undercover agent's car and attempted to set off the bomb by dialing a cell phone number, Smadi was arrested.
In , Smadi pled guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison in a courtroom just a few blocks from the building he'd once threatened to blow up [sources: FBI , Trahan ]. What I was surprised to discover while researching this article, though, is a history of terrorism spanning centuries and ethnic groups.
Terrorism is nothing new. In 19th-century Russia, for example, terrorist sought to overthrow the ruling regime by killing Czar Alexander the Second -- after half-a-dozen failed attempts. In fact, the word "terrorism" was first used in 18th-century France to describe a government that used terror to rule its citizens. Although the modern definition of "terrorism" has flipped it's more likely to mean acts of aggression used to undermine a government , it's no less a threat than it ever was.
Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. The data are thus extensive in terms of time period covered and countries included. This report outlines some of the key findings, focusing on trends and case studies from the data collected.
First, the attacks against the U. Since the failed and foiled plots project also collected data on countries that are members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as Australia and New Zealand, the second section of the report provides some international comparison of the threats emerging in recent years.
This section takes the data from , when there was a steep increase in threats to the United States, through , the last complete year of data collection, to provide a general picture of the threat to the West and permit comparison between the United States and other western democracies. The analysis draws on work completed in the early years of the project with the development of a detailed coding framework and a test of the reliability of the coding scheme.
It is certainly the case that in the United States there are more jihadist plots that are successfully disrupted than terrorist attacks that can be said to have achieved some kinetic effect. How plots come to fail or to be foiled is therefore of great importance to the study of terrorism and to the development of counterterrorism policy. There can be no comprehensive picture of the threat without analyzing what violent jihadist adversaries planned to do as well as what they actually managed to accomplish.
Examining failed and foiled plots is essential to understanding their intentions as well as their capabilities. The statistics also reveal that one in five people behind bars for terrorism offences in Britain last year were rightwing extremists, the highest proportion since records began, while a rise in arrests was only recorded for the unders category.
Firstly, that despite facing unprecedented challenges brought about by the pandemic, counter-terrorism policing continued to keep the public safe by making arrests across more than live investigations — stopping three possible terror attacks in the process.
The number of arrests for terrorism-related activity fell from to in the year to December, the lowest since
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