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Authorities Conclude Switzerland Likely Used as Base for Financing, Logistical Support for 9/11 Attacks by Al-Qaida By Daniela Sigrist Associated Press Writer Published: Jun 24, 2004 BERN, Switzerland (AP) - Investigators have concluded that Switzerland was likely used as a base for financing and logistical support for the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida, the country's attorney general said Thursday. Federal Prosecutor Valentin Roschacher said authorities plan to begin court proceedings in the coming weeks in three terror cases, capping investigations started four days after the 2001 suicide hijackings in New York and Washington. A special task force initially was charged...

In recent days, pro-al Qaeda jihadists claimed to confirm a recent news report saying that several senior al Qaeda leaders have been released from Iranian custody. Sky News reported earlier this week that five veteran jihadists were released in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been kidnapped in Yemen. Several jihadists on Twitter who are connected to al Qaeda have said the report is accurate. One of them is known as “Al Siyasi al Mutaqa’id,” who has relayed accurate information on al Qaeda in the past. The five jihadists who were reportedly freed are: Saif al Adel, Abu Mohammed...

… the remarkable reach of the global-terror network A little-noticed investigation by Swiss federal police has uncovered the existence of an apparent terror-support network with ties to the upper levels of Al Qaeda — including an operative believed to have played a role in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the May 2003 bombing of a housing complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The discovery of a largely invisible Al Qaeda network in the peaceful alpine nation has gotten virtually no public attention outside of Switzerland. But criminal charges outlined in a July 30 Swiss prosecutor’s report —...

Plans, tapes diaries seized at Pearson airport Zaynab Khadr denies they belong to her OTTAWA—The RCMP and Canadian military believe they've discovered a vital cache of information on Al Qaeda that includes the whereabouts of wanted members and details of attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. The information is allegedly contained in a laptop, dozens of DVDs, audiocassettes and the pages of diaries, seized by the RCMP officers who met Zaynab Khadr at Pearson airport with a search warrant as she arrived back in Canada in February, court documents state. Khadr is the eldest daughter of a family that has...

A Falls Church man accused of conspiring to assassinate President Bush met several times with an al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia who once was the target of a global manhunt and a key suspect in an attack that killed nine Americans in Riyadh, law-enforcement authorities said. Ahmed Omar Abul Ali, scheduled for a detention hearing tomorrow in federal court on charges of providing material support to al Qaeda, met with Zubayr al-Rimi in Saudi Arabia between September 2002 and June 2003...

CAIRO (AP)--Saudi police reportedly arrested the kingdom's most wanted terrorist on Thursday, according to pan-Arab satellite TV station Al-Arabiya. The Saudi-owned station reported late Thursday that police captured Faris Ahmed Jamaan Al Showeel al-Zahrani in Abha, a town 800 kilometers southwest of the capital, Riyadh. According to the Cable News Network, the Saudi Interior Ministry said an operation targeting the man was still going on. Saudi authorities released a list of 26 most wanted terrorists following a series of bombings in Riyadh on May 12, 2003, that killed 26 people. On Nov. 8, another suicide attack on a Riyadh...

RIYADH, 23 April 2004 — Anger and astonishment continues to grow in the community after the terrorist attack on the security forces building in Riyadh with a call for quicker and firmer action to eradicate terrorism from the Kingdom. “Our country was always known as the country of Islam and peace,” said the sister of Col. Mutlak Al Hammash. Her brother remains in the ICU suffering from various head injuries due to the force of the blast. The colonel’s son, Khaled Al-Hammash, said, “I couldn’t believe what had happened. I immediately rushed to the hospital and discovered that my father...

RIYADH, 23 April 2004 — The Kingdom’s grand mufti said yesterday the perpetrators of Wednesday’s deadly blast would “burn in hell” for killing innocent Muslims in the attack. “God has promised wrath, damnation, painful torture and an eternity burning in hell for those who deliberately kill a Muslim... Unjustly killing a Muslim is the gravest crime and cannot be atoned for,” Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh said after visiting blast victims at Central Hospital here. At least five people were killed and 148 injured in the suicide bombing of buildings of special security forces and the Traffic Department. Some 83 out of...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Those responsible for Saudi Arabia's latest suicide attack will be "burned in hell," the kingdom's top cleric said Thursday, as investigators searched for clues to the deadly bombing. Five people, including two senior police officers and an 11-year-old girl, were killed along with the suicide bomber in Wednesday's attack on the administrative building of the General Security, the Interior Ministry said. It said 148 people were injured. A shadowy Islamic extremist group, the purportedly al-Qaida inspired al-Haramin Brigades, released a statement on at least two Islamic Web sites claiming responsibility for the attack. The authenticity of...

Nothing follows. Searching for wire reports.

Car bomb kills at least 10 in Saudi Wed 21 April, 2004 14:44 By Dominic Evans and Fahd al-Frayyan RIYADH (Reuters) - At least 10 people have been killed and dozens wounded by a car bomb that destroyed a Saudi security service building in the capital, witnesses say. Officials in Riyadh described it as a "terrorist attack" and Arab television said the body of suicide bomber had been found. One Saudi source said five car bomb attempts had been foiled in the past week but this, the sixth, got past tight security. "The front of a building is blown off...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI made a series of arrests in three states Friday of men suspected of ties to an anti-U.S. terrorist organization whose main goal is driving India out of the disputed Kashmir territory in South Asia. The arrests of at least seven suspects were made in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, said federal law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity. Federal charges against the men, and several others who are overseas, were to be announced later in the day. The men are alleged to be part of an extremist Muslim organization called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is on the...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Federal prosecutors who accuse nine U.S. citizens and two other men of conspiring to join a Muslim terror group presented an address list and other evidence Friday to try to link the suspects to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida group. But the evidence wasn't enough to persuade U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema to keep one defendant, Sabri Benkhala, in jail. Brinkema ordered Benkhala released to home detention at his father's house in Falls Church, upholding a previous release order issued by a magistrate. "There's no question the government has raised some significant issues here," the judge said....

Shortly before midnight on May 12, 2003, Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was jolted awake by a series of synchronized car bombs that ripped through three residential compounds across the city. Twenty-five people from several nations, including Saudis, were killed. The jolt was psychological as well as physical. Al Qaeda, it seemed, had come home to roost, and not long after the terror attack, Saudis began referring to May 12 as ''our Sept. 11.'' Until the bombing, denial was officially sanctioned as a collective response to accusations that Saudi Arabia had a bit of a terrorism problem. Fifteen Saudis were among...

Aljazeera television has aired footage purporting to show the suicide bombers of a Riyadh residential compound minutes before they carried out their deadly attack last November. The Qatar-based Arab satellite news channel did not mention how it acquired the tape which was broadcast on Friday night.  Seventeen people, most of them Arab expatriates, were killed in the attack. The tape showed grainy and shaky images of what appeared to be a car making its way towards the housing compound with men inside chanting repeatedly: "Allahu Akbar (God is great)." This was suddenly interrupted by a dark screen and what...

A Saudi Islamist group affiliated with, or at least heavily inspired by, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for blowing up a car last month in Riyadh belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim al-Dhaleh, a senior Saudi security officer. He escaped by the skin of his teeth. The group, the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques, also said it was behind an attempt to kill Major General Abdel-Aziz al-Huweirini, the No. 3 official in the Saudi interior ministry, who was shot in the capital at the beginning of December. The latest statement from the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques warned Dhaleh “and those...

Swiss police have arrested eight foreigners in connection with a series of suicide bombings that killed 35 people in the Saudi capital Riyadh last May. The Swiss Attorney-General's office says the eight people, arrested in a swoop across five Swiss cantons, are suspected of having provided logistical support to a criminal organisation. A spokeswoman for the Attorney-General's office declined to comment further on the arrests, the nature of the police's suspicions or the nationality of the detainees. Police say the arrests follow investigations into the triple suicide bombings in Riyadh that Saudi officials have blamed on Osama bin Laden's Al...

Saudi Arabia Says Top Al Qaeda Suspect Surrenders Tue December 30, 2003 02:56 PM ET RIYADH (Reuters) - One of Saudi Arabia's top wanted Islamic militants, sought in connection with deadly suicide bombings, surrendered to police on Tuesday, Saudi state media reported. An Interior Ministry statement carried by state media said Mansour bin Mohammad Ahmad Faqih, who was on a list of 26 wanted militants with suspected al Qaeda links, surrendered to authorities and was later visited by his family. Saudi Arabia has promised to strike with an "iron fist" against those behind bombings that killed more than 50 people,...

KARACHI - The suicide bomb attack at the Muhaya residential compound in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh on November 9 in which at least 17 people were killed - most of them foreign Arabs - was neither an episode of global jihadi terrorism nor part of a conspiracy to destabilize the House of Saud. A Pakistani undercover intelligence operator who recently returned from Riyadh told Asia Times Online that the attack was in fact the result of a deep divide within Saudi society between strict religious conservatives with little exposure to the outside world, and a more "liberal" element...

A SEBEGALESE Muslim cleric deported from Italy as a danger to state security was quoted today as telling a pan-Arab newspaper that he had met three times with Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. The cleric, Abdel Qadir Mamour, told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat in an interview by telephone from Dakar, Senegal, that he had the meetings with bin Laden in Sudan from 1993 to 1996. Mamour said bin Laden had provided money to finance his trading in diamonds between Africa and Belgium, but did not say how much money was involved or if bin Laden was...