som bl a stod bakom mordet på Theo van Gogh
(artikeln är inte färsk, men läsvärd)
Mohammed Bouyeri var mannen som sköt
och skar av halsen på van Gogh:
**
Bouyeri was the child of Moroccan immigrant
workers. He grew up in a proletarian area of
Amsterdam sometimes known as Satellite City
because of the many reception dishes that sit
on its balconies, tuned to al Jazeera and
Moroccan television. Bouyeri's parents arrived
in a wave of immigration in the 1970s and never
learned Dutch. But Bouyeri graduated from
the area's best high school. His transformation
from promising student to jihadist follows a
pattern in which groups of thriving, young
European Muslims enlist in jihad to slaughter
Westerners.
**
After graduating from a local college and then
After graduating from a local college and then
taking advanced courses in accounting and
information technology, Bouyeri, who had
an unruly temper, was jailed for seven months
on a violence-related crime. He emerged from
jail an Islamist, angry over Palestine and
sympathetic to Hamas. He studied social work
and became a community organizer. He wrote
in a community newsletter that "the Netherlands
is now our enemy because they participate in
the occupation of Iraq." After he failed to get
funding for a youth center in Satellite City and
was unable to ban the sale of beer or the presence
of women at the events he organized, he moved
to downtown Amsterdam. There, he was recruited
into the Hofstad Group, a cell of second-generation
Islamic militants.
**
The cell started meeting every two weeks in
The cell started meeting every two weeks in
Bouyeri's apartment to hear the sermons of a
Syrian preacher known as Abu Khatib.
Hofstad was connected to networks in Spain,
Morocco, Italy, and Belgium, and it was planning
a string of assassinations of Dutch politicians,
an attack on the Netherlands' sole nuclear reactor,
and other actions around Europe.
European intelligence services have linked the cell
to the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which is
associated with the Madrid bombings and a series
of attacks in Casablanca in 2003.
Its Syrian imam was involved with mujahideen in
Iraq and with an operational chief of al Qaeda.
"Judging by Bouyeri's and the Hofstad network's
international contacts," an analyst for the
Norwegian government says, "it seems safe to
conclude that they were part of the numerous
terrorist plots that have been unraveled over t
he past years in western Europe."
**
****
