Friday, April 01, 2016

9/11 still stings

The 9/11 attacks were such a large scale assault on the USA that you'd think anyone with the remotest connection to the attacks has been rounded up or at least thoroughly accounted for.

You'd be wrong.

Among the details of the continued Franco-Belgian dragnet after the Paris and Brussels attacks (New York Times) --

Mr. [Abderahmane] Ameroud had been convicted of providing logistical support to two Tunisian suicide bombers who assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan opposition leader, two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. In 2005, Mr. Ameroud was found guilty of complicity in the murder. Mr. Ameroud was also linked to an Afghan and Pakistani network suspected of training would-be jihadists in a forest near Paris and in the French Alps. He was convicted of participation in a terrorist enterprise in 2007 and was thought to have been deported to Algeria after serving his sentence.

It's considered highly likely that the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001 was a pre-emptive strike by Al Qaeda to weaken opposition to the Taliban given the challenges they would be under 2 days later. Indeed that assassination might itself have been a missed warning sign that something big was imminent.

But one of the dudes directly connected to the assassination was out of jail and at large for several years before his name came on the radar screen again.

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