Tag: Islamic State

Tunisian security forces have arrested the nephew of the Berlin market attacker Anis Amri and two other suspects, officials said.

The Tunisian interior ministry said the three, aged between 18 and 27, were members of a “terrorist cell,” and that they were detained overnight.

Tunisian-born Amri, 24, was shot dead by police near the Italian city of Milan in the early hours of Friday, the BBC reports.

Monday’s lorry attack on the market left 12 people dead and 49 injured.

The interior ministry statement said Amri’s nephew – the son of his sister – had confessed that he had communicated with his uncle via the encrypted chat application Telegram to evade security surveillance.

It said the three-member cell had been active in the towns of Fouchana, outside Tunis, and Oueslatia near Amri’s hometown of Kairouan, about 150km (95 miles) south of the capital.

The statement added that Amri had sent money to his nephew to travel to Germany and join a jihadist group, and encouraged him to pledge allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (IS) group.

Meanwhile, intelligence services in Spain are investigating a possible internet communication between Amri and a Spanish resident on December 19, Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido told radio station COPE.

On Friday, IS released a video showing Amri pledging allegiance to its leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.

An Australian militant thought dead is still alive and under arrest in the Middle East, according to reports.

The Australian government in May said Neil Prakash, a senior recruiter for the so-called Islamic State group, had been killed in a United States air strike.

He died in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Attorney-General George Brandis said at the time.

But the New York Times on Friday reported Prakash was still alive, citing senior U.S sources.

Prakash handed himself to Turkish authorities several weeks ago, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said.

Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Counter-Terrorism, Michael Keenan, said the government could not comment on intelligence matters.

“The government reported Prakash’s death in May on the basis of advice from the U.S government that he had been killed in an air strike,” the BBC quoted Keenan as saying in a statement on Friday.

“But as we have said previously, the government’s capacity to confirm reports of deaths in either Syria or Iraq is limited. These places are war zones, with many ungoverned spaces.”

Prakash, also known as Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, has been linked to attack plots in Australia and appeared in propaganda videos and magazines.

Five people believed to be linked to the man who killed 84 people in Nice are in police custody, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Three arrests were made on Saturday and two on Friday, including the man’s estranged wife, Le Monde reported.

The BBC reported that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a lorry into crowds marking Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday before he was shot dead by police.

So-called Islamic State claimed one of its followers carried out the attack.

A news agency linked to the group, Amaq Agency, said: “He did the attack in response to calls to target the citizens of the coalition that is fighting the Islamic State.”

French President Francois Hollande met with his defence and security chiefs and cabinet ministers on Saturday.

Mr. Hollande, who said the attack was a terrorist act, has already moved to extend a state of emergency by three months.

Two senior military leaders of so-called Islamic State (IS) were killed by a United States-led coalition air strike near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the Pentagon says.

They were the group’s deputy minister of war, who oversaw Mosul’s capture in 2014, and a senior military commander, spokesman Peter Cook said.

US-led air strikes have helped Iraqi forces and its allies to push IS back, the BBC reports.

An offensive to retake Mosul is seen as the next battle for Iraqi forces.

Basim Muhammad Ahmad Sultan al-Bajari was a former al-Qaeda member who also led an IS battalion known for using homemade explosives, suicide bombers and mustard gas in its attacks, Mr. Cook said in a statement.

Hatim Talib al-Hamduni was a military commander in Mosul and the head of military police in the region, he added.

“Their deaths, along with strikes against other ISIL leaders in the past month, have critically degraded ISIL’s leadership experience in Mosul and removed two of their most senior military members in northern Iraq,” Mr. Cook said, using another acronym for IS.

They were both killed as a result of a “precision strike” on June 25, he said.

The Islamic State extremist group on Monday claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide attack that killed six Jordanians at an army base just across the border from Syria.

Islamic State’s Aamaq news agency said that an Islamic State fighter carried out the attack on what it described as the “American-Jordanian” base at al-Rukban.

The claim, via Aamaq and couched in neutral terms, is typical of how Islamic State has claimed major attacks in recent months.

The Jordanian army had said that the Tuesday’s attack killed six people, mainly troops, and injured 14 others.

It said that the attack was launched from a Syrian refugee camp across the border.

Jordan declared its northern and north-eastern border regions near Syria a closed military zone after the attack.

Some 72,000 Syrians became stranded in remote desert areas near the border after Jordanian authorities implemented new entry restrictions last year, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Conditions for those refugees are now “tragic” due to shortages of food and water, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict via a network of informants inside Syria, said.

The Observatory said that residents were accusing Jordanian authorities of blocking deliveries of food and water.

The nearest well is 50 km from the refugee camp at al-Rukban, and when water is brought there it is sold at prices beyond the reach of residents, the monitoring group said.

Some 4.8 million Syrians have fled the country since 2011, with another 6.6 million displaced inside its borders, according to the latest UN estimates.

The conflict, which began with peaceful protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, has turned into a four-way war between the government, mainly Islamist rebels, the Islamic State extremist group, and leftist Kurdish forces.