Free Republic

The chemicals were stored in vats in the basement of an Egyptian restaurant in downtown Brussels. The suicide bomber, a former soccer player who had fallen into drug use and petty crime, had been selected. The target, the American Embassy in Paris, had been scouted. All that remained was the signal from Osama bin Laden's operatives in Afghanistan to strike. The nod was to come from a Frenchman of Algerian origin who was on his way back from training in Afghanistan. But he was arrested in transit, and he talked, spilling to French interrogators details of what could have been ...

The 27-year-old man photographed in 2009 seemed to represent hope springing from Paris’s desperate suburbs. Part of a work-insertion program, he was about to meet then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was trying to combat high youth unemployment.... The man was Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed Friday after seizing hostages in a Jewish supermarket in Paris, an attack he claimed was in support of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham. A close associate of Said and Chérif Kouachi, the two brothers who attacked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday, Coulibaly is a symbol of the huge challenges lying ahead...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lifted a U.S. ban on a planned visit by a leading European Muslim critic of the Iraq war, in a move rights groups hailed as a victory for civil liberties. Clinton signed orders which ended the ban on Professor Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University, who was barred due to alleged terrorism ties which he denies, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said on Wednesday.

Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest; foreword by Denis MacShane (Encounter Books, 262 pp., $23.95) In the 1990s, Western liberals, alarmed at the presence of Islamic fundamentalists in their midst, turned in desperation to Muslims whom they dubbed “reformers” or “modernizers.” They hoped that these figures would have a moderating influence on disaffected Muslim youths who refused to integrate into Western society. One such “reformer” is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born academic. Ramadan has won the confidence of many in the West, including the British government, which asked him to serve on its task force for...

W A S H I N G T O N, Sept. 26 — An ambitious terrorist plot to attack a host of American interests overseas was foiled by the capture of a key Osama bin Laden operative, sources tell ABCNEWS. Intelligence sources in Europe and the United States say the intended targets included the American embassy in Paris, the U.S. consulate in Marseilles, France, buildings at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium and the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France. The outlines of the plan were known to French and American authorities before Sept. 11, but the attacks were not ...

Six jailed over Paris bomb plot A Paris court has sentenced a French-Algerian, Djamel Beghal, to 10 years in jail for plotting to bomb the US embassy in France in 2001. Beghal, 39, was on trial with five other alleged militant Islamists. They got jail terms of one to nine years. Beghal, arrested in Dubai in July 2001, retracted a confession he had made there, alleging it was extracted by torture during weeks of questioning. He had said the bomb plot idea had come from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Beghal was found guilty of "criminal association in relation with a terrorist...

PARIS Six men suspected of a role in a foiled 2001 plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris will stand trial on terrorism-related charges, judicial officials said Monday. The men are charged with ‘‘criminal association with a terrorist enterprise,’’ which carries up to 10 years in prison, the officials said on customary condition of anonymity. Two are also accused of violating French immigration laws. France’s top anti-terrorist judges Jean-Louis Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Ricard have investigated the suspects for nearly three years. The trial could begin in early 2005, the officials said. Among the suspects is French-Algerian Djamel Beghal, an...