What & Who discovers terrorist plots?

[davidbfpo]

Nearly missed this report on Anglo-Australian academic research on 'community reporting'; the Australia research came first and was built upon here:

It expands and develops the approach of the Australian study through a sample of 75 community members and professional practitioners, with a particular focus on young adults, matching the demographic profile of many plotters and those who travelled to Syria. The UK study’s preliminary findings suggest we need to re-examine policy and practice approaches around two key issues.

Two points emerged:

First, sharing concerns with authorities about an ‘intimate’ is likely to be the last resort, with respondents much more likely to seek help from figures of authority within communities first....Second, reporting processes around terrorism are not clearly understood by community members or professional practitioners and need to be both strengthened and clarified. As in Australia, respondents in our current study express a strong preference for face to face reporting – they largely do not trust on-line or telephone based methods.

Link to summary article:https://crestresearch.ac.uk/comment/...ity-reporting/ and the full report (not yet read) is:https://crestresearch.ac.uk/resource...ds-full-report

(Added) A statement in November 2017 by a senior police officer, responsible for CT; which in sum says:

funding cuts for local policing will harm intelligence efforts

Link:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...head-neil-basu

[davidbfpo]

Rather unusual as the discovery was made by a non-UK national:

Hussain's activities came to the attention of counter terrorism police after a man reported receiving an email from him. The court heard how the witness, who lives outside the UK, emailed the Home Office in March 2017 after receiving a private message on Facebook, from someone he did not know, inciting him to join Daesh.
Commander Dean Haydon, head of the Met Police Counter Terrorism Command, said: "This investigation started with one conscientious individual trusting his instincts and reporting something suspicious. He could have ignored the message Hussain sent him but instead he took a screenshot of the message and contacted the UK authorities immediately. It is in great part thanks to him that police were able to bring Hussain to justice."

Link:http://news.met.police.uk/news/man-j...ffences-296161

[davidbfpo]

Came across this via a pointer in a journal article and it refers to the unsuccessful London bombings:

Said is wanted in connection with a blast on a No 26 bus in Hackney Road. In a statement, the family of the 27-year-old said that as soon as they saw his picture on news reports they contacted police....Said's family said they moved from Eritrea to the UK in 1990. They said he left home in 1994, lives alone and is "not a close family member."

Link (background): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_Jul...ondon_bombings and story:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4718797.stm

[davidbfpo]

Earlier in this thread I have cited UK court cases where families have regretted calling the police after incidents etc.

Now we may see a high profile case in Florida, where the wife of the Pulse night club attack is due to reach trial and on March 30th 2018 she was found not guilty. From:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43599130

From the New Yorker:

Salman’s trial is expected to raise questions about what level of responsibility family members have to report suspicious behavior. It is also expected to draw more attention to the relationship between domestic violence and mass shootings. The link is well known among researchers, and increasingly part of the public conversation, but the domestic-violence laws that do exist—such as banning convicted abusers from owning guns, or a strangulation statute that could have put Mateen behind bars—are not always enforced. In recent years, domestic-violence incidents have foreshadowed shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Northern California; and Harvey County, Kansas.
Salman’s relatives say that she did not know Mateen planned to carry out the attack. Her lawyers will likely argue that if the F.B.I. failed to detect Mateen’s radicalization, his wife would not have been able to do so either.

Link:https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...goes-on-trial?

[davidbfpo]

A new national CT campaign:

It’s more important than ever that everyone plays their part in tackling terrorism. Your actions could help the police prevent terrorism and save lives.

Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Sj...ature=youtu.be

The BBC report citing the police:

The campaign - encouraging people to report suspicious behaviour - comes as figures reveal 30,984 reports were made to counter-terror officers in 2017. More than 6,000 of those reports helped inform live investigations, police say.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43465966

[davidbfpo]

Last week an Iraqi teenage asylum seeker Ahmed Hassan, who had been in foster care for two years, was convicted for a bomb attack on the London Underground, the bomb was faulty and only partly worked, injuring fifty-one. The foster parents knew nothing about his intentions, nor that for a year he had been subject of a counter-radicalisation action. Hassan awaits sentencing.

The carers were interviewed by ITV and this link is a detailed account. It ends with:

We've asked ourselves time and time again 'what did we miss?

Link:http://www.itv.com/news/2018-03-19/s...suspected-him/
The BBC News report is shorter:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43463856

[davidbfpo]

A fascinating blog article from Belgium by:

a journalist working for the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws

The explanation:

Families of terror suspects often suffer from all kind of prejudice. It is thought that they are covering for their relatives, that they have contributed to the radicalization themselves, or that they quietly are proud. Sometimes that is true — but it seems rather rare, according to research published in the Belgian newspaper ‘Het Laatste Nieuws’. We examined how people landed on the Belgian list of foreign fighters and recruiters — and found that on a total number of 450 cases where authorities acted on external tip-offs, family members who raised the alarm were the most important factor.

(More on the research process): We based our research on a list of 811 suspected foreign terrorist fighters, people willing to leave for jihad, and recruiters — compiled by the Belgian federal government’s Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (CUTA, also known as OCAD in Dutch and OCAM in French). Since the allegations often haven’t been proven in court, we don’t mention full identities unless an individual was publicly named and/or convicted already for a terrorist offense. It is crucial to add that a single allegation like the ones we mention, never was enough to be put on the list. That happened only after further investigations resulted in additional evidence. Finally, it has to be stressed that the percentages do not refer to the total number of suspects, but only to the 450 cases for which the list explicitly mentions an external tip-off as first indication or decisive confirmation of the suspected radicalism.

In a possibly unique way they explain the 'external sources' who provided tip-offs:

1. 26% denounced by relatives
2. 25% were flagged by foreign partners (notably Turkey)
3. 13% gave too much away on social media
4. 5% were exposed by public sources
5. 4% spilled the beans themselves (one wrote to the Belgian King)
6. 2% detected at schools / universities
7. 1% reported by employers / co-workers
8. 24% could not be classified (amendment after author update)

The individuals merely detected by police and intelligence work (or without any mention of external sources, at least) were not included in the 450 cases I've studied, so they are the remainder of the total number of 811.
Link:https://emmejihad.wordpress.com/2018...amily-members/