12 Dead in Daytime Paris Attack at Satirical Magazine

[R.K. Locke]

Police state rollout underway I guess.

[Drew Phipps]

Maybe Bob P. could have a look at it and give us a firearms-guy POV. For me, it looks like the dust moving on the sidewalk might be the result of the "muzzle-blast" i.e. the hot gases that escape from the end of the barrel. The muzzle blast travels much slower than the bullet, and since the shooter is moving forward, might have caused the muzzle blast to pass over the officer's head, while the bullet itself might have struck him. Or the dust might not be dust at all but vaporized lead, or something.

To be sure, the absence of blood is puzzling.

[David Guyatt]

Belgium have now elevated their terror alert to the highest level. Meanwhile 12 people, 9 men and 3 women, have been arrested in Paris. It seems that the names of those arrested came from an American terrorist list -- the French weren't even aware of the names according to the French former Europe Minister, Pierre Lellouche, interviewed on BBC News this morning.

On this basis it is evident that the present crackdown is being led by the US. I assume that the Belgian events are likewise a result of US intelligence?

[David Guyatt]

Below is the Indy lead headline:

French websites hacked as Kalashnikovs, bomb kit and police uniforms found in terror raids across Europe

Meanwhile the article itself with its own headline. There is no mention in the story at all of a website being hacked. Is there an intention by the Indy to link to the Korean hack? I wonder what their thinking was and why?

Belgium terror raids: Killed suspects had police uniforms, Kalashnikovs and bomb-making kit



Authorities said the cell was planning an imminent attack on police

LIZZIE DEARDEN

Friday 16 January 2015

The suspected terrorists shot dead by special forces during a raid in Belgium last night may have been planning to dress as police to launch a deadly gun and bomb attack, it has emerged.

Special forces who raided a property in the town of Verviers, killing the two men as snipers patrolled the rooftops, found four Kalashnikovs and bomb-making equipment among police uniforms, La Libre reported.
The same type of gun was used by the Kouachi brothers in the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week.
Belgian authorities said Thursday night's raid on the former bakery and other locations was sparked by phone taps and intelligence suggesting an attack was "imminent".
The operation in Verviers targeted a group of three young men who had recently returned from Syria, where they were believed to have fought with an Islamist group.
Belgian police exit a building in Palais street, near Colline street in Verviers, eastern BelgiumTwo people were killed and another injured during a shoot-out shortly before 6pm (5pm GMT) and one suspect has been arrested.
READ MORE: TWO DEAD IN BELGIAN TERROR RAIDS

Alexandre Massaux, who witnessed the raid from his home nearby, said there was a shoot-out between suspects with automatic weapons and police punctuated by explosions.
"As soon as I opened the window, you could smell the gunpowder," he added.
"It sent shivers down my spine to think about [the fact they had come back from Syria]."
Footage posted online showed the building being rocked by blasts, gunshots and sirens as a fire sent smoke billowing into the air.
No police were wounded in the clash, which occurred at the height of rush hour in a busy part of the former industrial town of 56,000 about 80 miles south-east of the capital, Brussels.
Eric Van der Sypt, a federal magistrate, confirmed the suspects had opened fire, calling them "extremely well-armed men".
"They were on the verge of committing important terror attacks," he said.
In pictures: Counter-terrorism raid in Belgium
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Police continued searches in Verviers and the greater Brussels area into the night as part of an investigation that started well before the terrorism spree last week that led to 17 deaths in Paris.
The Belgian operations do not appear to be linked to the French atrocities but the national terror alert level has been raised from two to three the second-highest state of alert.
Prime Minister Charles Michel said the increase in the threat level was "a choice for prudence."
"There is no concrete or specific knowledge of new elements of threat," he added.
Up to 300 Belgian residents have gone to fight with extremist Islamic groups in Syria and it was unclear how many have returned.
Additional reporting by AP

[David Guyatt]

The latest Paris arrests

Paris 'bomb threat': Gare de l'Est evacuated after suspicious package found




A police official has said the station has been closed 'as a precaution'

ROSE TROUP BUCHANAN

Friday 16 January 2015

A Paris train station has been evacuated and closed following an alleged bomb threat after French police arrested several people overnight in anti-terrorism raids.

The Gare de l'Est has been totally evacuated after an alleged bomb threat. Le Monde is reporting that a bomb disposal unit is already on the ground at the station.
The security scare comes as overnight security police arrested at least 10 individuals in a series of coordinated raids aimed at disrupting suspected jihadist networks facilitating young people travelling to the middle east to fight.
Individuals in Paris, Le Havre and Toulouse were targeted, the Paris prosecutors office told Reuters. The investigation was launched over a year ago after a Turkish family alerted authorities following the suspicious behaviour of their son, BFM-TV reported.
Montrouge, Grigny, Chatenay-Malabry, Epinay-sur-Seine and Fleury-Merogis were also the focus of some of the raids, i-Tele claimed.

Alerte à la bombe à gare de l'Est. Tout le monde est évacué. #Garedelest #AlerteAttentatpic.twitter.com/4wSsbQFo0V
Pedro Soares (@PedroSoaresTv) January 16, 2015

They are being questioned over "possible logistical support", a judicial source told AFP, that they could have given to the gunmen - such as vehicles or weapons.
Latest reports emerging from the station suggest that security forces are working to return the situation to normal by 9am.
A police official told the AP the station was closed "as a precaution." The official, who was not authorized to be publicly named, also said the alert was prompted by the presence of abandoned luggage.
Charlie Hebdo: Mourning in Paris
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The station is one of several major transport hubs in Paris.
The possible threat comes following the deaths of 17 people in the worst terror attacks seen by France in years.

[David Guyatt]

And now the Berlin arrests:

Two men arrested in Berlin on suspicion of recruiting fighters for Isis in Syria



More than 200 police searched 11 properties in a German anti-terror sweep

LIZZIE DEARDEN

Friday 16 January 2015

Two Turkish men accused of recruiting and radicalising fighters to join Isis in Syria have been arrested in Berlin.

About 250 police officers and special forces commandos searched 11 properties and a mosque association in the German capital in the early hours of this morning in co-ordinated anti-terror raids.
There was no indication that the group was planning attacks in Germany, officials said.
A spokesperson for Berlin's police force said the raids were planned after months of investigation and had not been sparked by last week's attacks in France.
"The accused have been on the violent Salafist spectrum for years and follow an ideology close to that recognised by terrorist organisations like Isis and Chechen groups fighting in Syria," he added.
Members of a special German anti-terror police outside an apartment block in Perleberger Strasse, Berlin, 16 January 2015.Two Turkish nationals named as Ismet D, 41, and Emin F, 43, were arrested on suspicion of supporting anti-government violence in Syria and money laundering.
Ismet D is accused of leading a group of Islamic extremists as their self-appointed "Emir". The group, which meets in the famous Berlin Tiergarten, is made up mainly of Turkish origin men and Russian nationals of Chechen and Dagestani origin, police said.
READ MORE: TWO SHOT DEAD IN BELGIAN TERROR RAIDS
BELGIUM SUSPECTS HAD POLICE UNIFORMS, GUNS AND BOMBS
FRENCH POLICE ARREST 12 IN ANTI-TERROR RAIDS

Ismet D is suspected of radicalising members with his teachings and preparing them to wage war against "infidels" in the Syrian conflict. Emin F was named by police as the group's finance director and the pair are accused of giving members of their group practical and financial support to travel to Syria.
"Considerable amounts of money" were being used, police said, including for the purchase of high quality military equipment including night vision goggles.
Among those allegedly recruited was Murat S, a 40-year-old Turkish man who was arrested after his return from Syria to Germany in September.
In pictures: The rise of Isis
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Four other nationals aged between 31 and 44 were investigated as part of the sweep but police said they could not be arrested because of insufficient evidence.
In an unrelated raid, police in Wolfsburg, about 120 miles west of Berlin, took a 26-year-old German-Tunisian dual national into custody on Thursday on suspicion he had fought in Syria for Isis in 2014.
Federal prosecutors said there was no evidence the suspect Ayub B, who was due to appear in court on Friday, was planning terror attacks in Germany.
The raids came hours after two men were shot dead in Belgiumafter police received intelligence about jihadists returning from Syria preparing to launch an "imminent" terror attack.

[David Guyatt]

It's all rather suspicious isn't it.

[David Guyatt]

Is Madrid next to get a crackdown?

Paris attackers may have links with Spanish terrorist cell

French and Spanish police investigate possibility of Islamist group in Madrid after reports of Coulibaly visit over new year

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• Kim Willsher in Paris and Ashifa Kassam in Madrid
  
  
• The Guardian, Thursday 15 January 2015 14.53 GMT
  

A French officer guards the kosher supermarket where Amedy Coulibaly killed four people. Photograph: Zuma/Rex

Police are investigating whether the gunmen who killed 17 people in Paris last week had links with a terrorist cell in Spain.
One of the three Islamic fundamentalists involved in the bloody rampage, Amedy Coulibaly, was reported to have spent three days in Madrid over the new year. He was accompanied by an unidentified person, according to detectives in Spain.
Last week Coulibaly, 32, shot dead a trainee police officer in southern Paris before storming a kosher supermarket in the east of the French capital the following day and killing four hostages.
Coulibaly's partner, Hayat Boumeddiene the couple were married under Islamic law travelled to Syria via Madrid and Istanbul before the attacks. Turkish authorities have said Boumeddiene crossed from Turkey into Syria on 8 January.
Police photos of Hayat Boumeddiene and her husband Amedy Coulibaly. Photograph: ReutersSpanish and French police were now trying to establish if there was a fundamentalist Islamic group in Madrid that gave logistical support to Coulibaly and the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who killed 12 people in the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. The Spanish high court said that it has opened a preliminary investigation into Coulibaly's time in Spain. A judge will look into the activities of Coulibaly and Boumeddiene while they were in Madrid, as well as that of the third person who remains unidentified, said the court.
Spanish media claimed the country's security forces had established that Coulibaly was in Madrid from 30 December until 2 January and returned to France "accompanied by an individual who has yet to be identified".
"Spanish anti-terrorist officers are investigating, in cooperation with their French counterparts, the activities of Coulibaly during his stay in Madrid and trying to determine who he could have been in contact with," said a report from the Spanish daily La Vanguardia. "His presence in the city suggests there is, at least, a support cell in the capital of Spain."
The Spanish interior minister, Jorge Fernandez Diaz, said recently that around a dozen of the 70 Spanish citizens who have joined the jihad in Syria and Iraq, had returned home since the beginning of 2015.
In Belgium, police were reportedly questioning a well-known arms dealer who is alleged to have supplied the weapons used in the Paris attacks.
Belgian media reported that the unnamed man handed himself in to police in the southern city of Charleroi. He told detectives he had been in touch with Coulibaly, and a search of his home allegedly found evidence connecting him with the gunman who died when police stormed the supermarket.
The dealer is said to have sold Coulibaly the Skorpion sub-machine gun used in the attack as well as a rocket-propelled grenade and the Kalashnikov assault rifles used by the Kouachi brothers, for less than €5,000.
According to the reports, the man said he swindled Coulibaly in a car sale, but police later found evidence that the two were negotiating about the sale of ammunition for a 7.62mm calibre firearm.
Bullets of this calibre are needed for the Tokarev pistol used by Coulibaly in the supermarket attack, and possibly in the shooting and injuring of a jogger two days earlier.
"The man is being held by the judge in Charleroi on suspicion of arms dealing," a spokesman for Belgium's federal prosecution said. "Further investigations will have to show whether there is a link with the events in Paris."
On Thursday, the French president, François Hollande, sought to calm tensions after the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo was published featuring a drawing of the prophet Muhammad.
During a visit to the Institute du Monde Arabe (Institute of the Arab World) in Paris, which is holding a forum entitled Renewing the Arab World, Hollande told those present: "Muslims are the first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism and intolerance.
"We must refuse to confuse the issues. French people of Muslim faith have the same rights, the same duties as all citizens. They must be protected. This is what secularism is about, it respects all religions. In the face of terrorism, we are all united."
Hollande added: "Anti-Muslim acts, like antisemitic acts must be severely punished … the Middle East conflict is not to be played out here."
On Thursday, the cartoonists Georges Wolinski, 80, and Bernard Verlhac, 57, who signed himself Tignous, were buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Economist Bernard Maris, known as "Uncle Bernard", 68, and Elsa Cayat, a psychiatrist and regular writer for Charlie Hebdo, the only woman to die in the attack on the magazine, were also buried.
The coffin of cartoonist Bernard Tignous' Verlhac is carried out of the town hall of Montreuil, near Paris, during his funeral. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty ImagesThe cartoonist Jean "Cabu" Cabut, 76, was buried on Wednesday at Châlons-en-Champagne, where he was born.
Cartoonist Philippe Honoré and the magazine's editor in chief, Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, will be interred on Friday. Charb's police protection officer Franck Brinsolaro was buried in a private ceremony on Thursday.
François Hollande ® with the president of the Institut du Monde Arabe, Jack Lang, in front of the institute building bearing the message We are all Charlie'. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/AFP/Getty Images

[David Guyatt]

More from Wayne Madsen

Hebdo attack rife with false flag' clues


By Wayne Madsen
Posted on January 12, 2015
by Wayne Madsen
The reliance of governments and non-state actors on carrying out "false flag" terrorist attacks, which, in the modern-era, began in Europe with the 1980 time-bombing of the Bologna train station that killed 85 and injured over 200, is beginning to yield predictable clues. This is certainly the case with the three-man professional military assault carried out in a precision manner by three alleged Islamist terrorists on the Paris editorial offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo.
The 1980 attack on the Bologna train station began the age of modern false flag attacks. Although the Italian government and media originally blamed the bombing on leftist radical Italian guerrillas, it was, in fact, carried out by an underground fascist cell that obtained the bomb materials from hidden caches belonging to the secret NATO "stay behind" paramilitary network known as "Gladio."
Gladio was intended to mobilize guerrilla forces to fight the Soviets in the event of a ground war in Europe. Weapons and materials were hidden underground and in caves throughout Western Europe for future guerrilla assaults on occupying Soviet troops. However, Italian rightists and Zionists attempted to use the discredited Mitrokhin Dossier, obtained from KGB files, to pin the blame for the Bologna attack on the Soviets acting in concert with radical Arabs, including Palestinian groups. It was later discovered that it was the CIA that funded such news stories in a psychological warfare operation against the Soviets and the Arab countries. From his Paris jail cell in 2005, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the famed terrorist known as "Carlos," revealed that it was the CIA and Mossad that carried out the Bologna bombing and that the Mitrokhin File was being used to "falsify history."
Ever since Bologna, the tell-tale signs of Western intelligence false flag operations are extremely evident in attack after attack. By sticking to the same doctrine for over 40 years, Western intelligence fingerprints, including those of Mossad, are becoming as clear as day.
One such tell-tale sign of a false flag operation is the convenient discovery by police of evidence linking attacks to the perpetrators, be they unknowing double agents or patsies who believe in whatever cause has been dangled before them.
One sign of a false flag operation is that "evidence" linking the intended perpetrators to the crime scene is always discovered. French police claim they were able to pin the attack on two Franco-Algerian brothers, Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, because Said, the eldest brother, left his French identification card in a black Citroen used as a getaway car. Police would not say whose identification card they found. Some French security experts warned that the ID card may have been purposely planted in the car to confuse the police. Police also conveniently found Molotov cocktails and Islamist jihadist flags inside the getaway car.
Alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta's passport was supposedly found in pristine condition in the rubble of the World Trade Center. A third suspect identified by French police, Hamyd Mourad, the 18-year old brother-in-law of the Kouachis, was said to be the third gunman but he has an alibi. Mourad was in school at the time of the attack. That means that the third gunman has not been captured, let alone identified. Mourad surrendered to authorities after his name appeared in the media as a supposed suspect.
Often, the true perpetrators of false flag attacks are masked. This was the case with the three gunmen, who killed 12 people at the Charlie Hedbo offices, who were wearing balaclavas during their assault on the newspaper's offices.
There are always other attacks in the region to confuse police. For example, while French police were concentrating their search for the gunmen from northern Paris to the Belgian border, a French police woman was shot and killed in Montrouge, south of Paris. French authorities were quick to say the events south of Paris and at Charlie Hebdo were not linked. A gas station in Villers-Cotteret in Picardy, northern France, was robbed by two men said to be the terrorists.
Another false flag clue is that the alleged perpetrators are almost always known to the police in advance. In 2008, Cherif Kouachi was convicted by French authorities for trying to recruit fighters for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. However, he never served a day of his sentence because half of his three-year sentence was suspended and the rest if his pre-trial prison time was recognized as time served.
Pre-attack knowledge by the authorities of an alleged perpetrator was certainly the case in the Merah affair in March 2012 when Mohammed Merah, a French national, was killed by French police. Merah was accused of killing three French paratroopers in Montauban and three students and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. It was later discovered that not only did the French Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI) have a dossier on Merah but that it tried to recruit him as an agent. Merah traveled with ease to Afghanistan and Pakistan with the foreknowledge of French intelligence. The then-governing conservatives of President Nicolas Sarkozy and the opposition, now ruling, Socialist Party conspired to cover up Merah's links to French intelligence.
The Kouachi brothers are said to have returned from Syria this past summer, where the CIA and French intelligence have been backing Islamist guerrilla groups battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Where government stories about terrorist perpetrators start to break apart is when descriptions of the alleged terrorists fail to meet popular conceptions. Although Cherif Kouachi was said to be a follower of Islamic cleric Farid Benyettou at the Addawa mosque in Paris, he was also reported by associates to be a drinker, smoker, carouser around women, and beardless. Similarly, the alleged 9/11 hijackers, far from being hard core Islamists, preferred to drink alcohol, spend time in topless bars, and use drugs.
Another common denominator in false flag operations is the release of information by authorities that the alleged perpetrators were bent on attacking Jewish targets. Cherif Kouachi was said to have planned attacks on Jewish targets in France just as Merah was identified as the attacker of the Jewish school in Toulouse.
The attack in Paris was the deadliest in Europe since the July 11, 2011, attack on a Norwegian Labor Party youth camp and government buildings in Oslo. Although the attack was originally believed by the corporate media to be an Islamist attack, it was later pinned on Norwegian fascist right-winger Anders Breivik. Breivik attacked the socialist party youth camp because it had just rallied in support of Palestine. Breivik, a neo-Nazi, maintained close links with European rightists, some of whom had traveled to Israel and even lived for a while on kibbutzim. Breivik's links to Zionists were quickly erased by the media from the public discourse.

[David Guyatt]

I saw this clip on Aangirfan. Interesting comments and denial in view of later events.