Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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 Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:47 am Post subject: Europol Terrorism Report |
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In today's Sunday Telegraph there is a short article titled:
UK is Europe's top terror centre, arrests show
Here it is:
| Sunday Telegraph wrote: | Britain has become the main focus of Islamist terror in Europe, according to official figures.
More Muslim extremists were detained in Britain last year on terror-related charges than in the rest of Europe added together.
The number of arrests rose steeply and involved "young, radicalised British citizens", sparking fears that the threat of an attack is growing.
The report by Europol, the European police force, said that terrorist plots linked to groups in Pakistan had been "almost exclusively focused on the UK".
It comes following the disclosure last week that 15 plots to attack British targets have been foiled in the three years since the London bombings.
British authorities said that 203 people had been arrested on suspicion of terror offences in 2007, representing a 30 per cent increase on the previous year. The majority were said to be motivated by Muslim extremism.
In contrast, only 201 people were detained in the rest of Europe. French police made 91 arrests. The number of suspects under investigation in Britain has risen from 500 in 2004 to 2,000 last year.
"People shouldn't be sceptical about the threat that is posed," the report adds. |
Timely reporting of facts?
Or a timely reminder that we really do need 42 days pre-charge detention of "terrorism suspects", just as the eminently qualified Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith is facing possible defeat over the latest pogrom expansion.
Here's another view of the same Europol report, expressed by The Register, published 19 days ago, titled:
Is Europe's war on Islamist terror running out of terrorists?
Here it is: You decide.
| The Register wrote: | The terror threat to Europe - Islamist or otherwise - may not be all it's cracked up to be, statistics published by Europol this week indicate. Europol, a criminal intelligence support service for European law enforcement agencies, maintains that the Islamist terror threat remains high despite a 22 per cent drop in arrest numbers, but as was the case with last year's report, very few actual incidents of, or attempts at, Islamist terror attacks were reported.
Overall in 2007 there were 48 per cent more terrorism arrests - a total of 1,044 - than in 2006. The 'Europe-wide' terror threat however seems - if it's measured by police activity - to be largely illusory, because there are really only three countries playing. France, Spain and the UK led in arrest numbers, with 409, 261 and 203 respectively. These three account for most of arrest total, and the numbers submitted by other states are at a level where it's difficult to draw any valid conclusions from them. For example, Portugal had the fourth largest arrest number at 32, but 31 of these were associated with a single right wing group and the sole example of a right wing terror attack in Europe in 2007. This is reported as being the vandalisation of a Jewish cemetery in September 2007.
Actual and attempted attacks were also largely confined to a small number of countries. Spain and France led with 264 and 253 separatist-related attacks respectively, while Germany came third with 15. Germany? Yes, but the separatists in question were Kurdish extremists mounting attacks on Turkish interests in Germany. The majority of the attacks in France and Spain were arson attacks, i.e. fairly low level and causing few casualties. There were four Islamist attacks in total, and two of these were in the UK. These however were the flaming muppet attacks in London and Glasgow, which you could reasonably class as the same incident.
We can draw several conclusions. First, as far as the numbers are concerned, Europe's war on terror is largely a French and Spanish matter, related to crackdowns on Basque and Corsican groups. Here, the number of arrests appears to reflect the number of incidents - evidence that there's a struggle, if not a full-scale war, going on. France, incidentally, was the major influence on the overall drop in Islamist terrorism arrests, with its numbers down 35 per cent from 2006.
The figures for the UK, the third of the major drivers of the Europol stats, don't match the French and Spanish pattern. The UK doesn't break down the figures it submits to Europol into categories (which is odd, given that such figures are submitted to Lord Carlile for his reviews of terrorism legislation), but the "vast majority" of its 203 arrests related to Islamist terrorism. There were two (or possibly just the one, see above) Islamist attempts, while numbers weren't submitted for any other categories. The UK's 203 (mainly) Islamist arrests were double those in France, four times those in Spain, and almost ten times those in Italy. No other country made it into double figures, and the other two Islamist terror attempts took place in Denmark and Germany (nine and three arrests respectively).
The UK is therefore arresting an awful lot of people while experiencing a very small number of incidents, and the large number of arrests (half of the European total for Islamist terror) causes massive distortion in the European statistics.
There's a chicken and egg discussion associated with these lopsided (compared with the French and Spanish figures) numbers. Is it the case, as UK law enforcement would have us believe, that the small number of incidents is accounted for by the success of the security services in nipping plots in the bud at an early stage (hence resulting in large numbers of arrests)? Is the UK more alert to the threat than anybody else? Is the UK massively more threatened than anybody else? Or is it the case that the large numbers of arrests are a consequence of wildly overestimating the size of the threat?
The fact that most of the plots uncovered so far have been incompetently planned and substantially incomplete at time of arrest suggests the latter. One or two glaring exceptions however provide some justification for the security services' readiness to mount pre-emptive strikes. The Europol data, meanwhile, isn't yet adequate to cover recent changes to UK law, and a likely higher arrest rate for possession of material likely to be of use to terrorists. If that's the case, it should show up in next year's Europol report. The data in Lord Carlile's reports, however, does tend to indicate that sympathy, propaganda and possession loom large in UK Islamist terror arrest numbers. |
The second EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report, TE-SAT 2008, produced by Europol was presented on April 7th in the European Parliament in Brussels by Director Max-Peter Ratzel and is available here [PDF]
Extract from Page 5:
Number of failed, foiled and successfully executed attacks in 2007 per member state and affiliation: 583
Of that total, 4 are attributed to Islamist category. 2 of which occurred in the UK.
I make that 0.68%
_________________
The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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| Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 10:04 am Post subject: |
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Today's Independent on Sunday is the latest, "quality broadsheet" to recycle the Europol report which was published on April 7th.
Today is 18th May
The commons "vote" on 42 days detention draws ever closer . . .
| IoS wrote: | Britain is focal point for terrorism, warns Europe's police force
Bleak report portrays EU under siege, with terror plots soaring and the UK fertile ground for jihadist recruiters
By Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Britain is the focal point for Islamic terrorism across Europe, and its controversial military campaigns overseas are putting the entire continent at risk, a disturbing new report has warned.
An analysis of the terrorist threat by Europol, the European Police Office, has concluded that the dangers posed by militant groups rose to unprecedented proportions in 2007, with steep increases in the number of arrests, plots and attacks.
But Islamic terrorism, particularly through a rejuvenated al-Qa'ida, was highlighted as the most significant security threat to the authorities in the UK. At least one person is arrested every day across Europe under suspicion of involvement in Islamic terror conspiracies or attacks. Europol warned that the UK was recognised as fertile ground for radical Islamists seeking recruits to their jihadist campaigns, with "young, radicalised British citizens" often used to mount attacks.
The bleak warning came as the Government prepared for a battle over its plans to allow the police to detain terror suspects for up to six weeks without charge.
The EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report revealed there were 203 terror-related arrests in the UK last year, when the danger was demonstrated by abortive attempts to detonate bombs in London and at Glasgow airport in June. Europol said the British figure was 30 per cent up on 2006, with the "vast majority" relating to Islamism; 201 Islamist-related terror arrests were made across the 26 other EU member states.
Europol experts identified the lawless tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan as troublesome, as they hosted training camps for some of the most committed jihadists. But the report also warned of other areas emerging as threats: in Somalia, "dozens" of British passport holders were fighting alongside the Islamists. There are also indications that terrorist training and attack planning, with a focus on the UK, is taking place in Somalia.
British sources said that further attacks on the UK were "highly likely", with the number of terror suspects being monitored rising from 500 to 2,000 since the start of the Iraq War.
The report also warned that British foreign policy presented critical dangers for all Europe: "The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have a large impact on the security environment of the EU."
Professor David Capitanchik, a terrorism expert at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, said: "We certainly face a greater threat, partly because we have such a large immigrant population which is more vulnerable to radical Islamic thinking... We are paying the price of giving political asylum for so long to individuals who were wanted for terrorist-related offences in their own countries."
Europol, which co-ordinates law enforcement information across the EU, warned that al-Qa'ida was stepping up its campaign against Britain and its European allies, after "rebuilding its capabilities". Europol's investigation portrays Europe as a continent under siege, with conspiracies cropping up in a wide range of member states.
A Home Office spokesman confirmed that most of the Europol findings tallied with official figures, and underlined the Government's consistent warnings about the scale of the terror threat facing the nation. But he insisted that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had no bearing on the level of the security threat in the UK or in the rest of Europe.
To have your say on this or any other issue visit www.independent.co.uk/IoSblogs |
You can read all about the terrorism expert David Capitanchik and his deeply insightful threat warnings here.
and here
| Quote: | David has also made many other media appearances. He is often decribed as "of Aberdeen University".
Some examples:
David Capitanchik, of the University of Aberdeen
David Capitanchik, a terrorism expert at Aberdeen University
Professor David Capitanchik of Aberdeen University
In my previous post, I claimed that David had left the University of Aberdeen in 1993. I said he'd most recently worked for Robert Gordons University, but had retired. The references above caused me to doubt if I'd been right. I emailed the University of Aberdeen to ask if they could clarify David's position.
I received this reply:
Dear Mr Hamster,
Professor Capitanchik was employed by the University of Aberdeen some 12 years ago, and recently retired from The Robert Gordon University. I have had a look at their website and found a biography which you will find below [I've linked it instead].
I hope this helps
Regards...
This is, I believe, called fact checking. I'd always thought it was an important part of journalism. I'm not a professional though, and I've had no training in journalism so I might just have misunderstood the concept. |
Enjoy !
_________________
The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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