Al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar sparks new jihadi terror threat

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Now another Muslim terrorist felt that he had to join in with some threats.

Al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar sparks new jihadi terror threat

The terror mastermind behind the massacre of Westerners at a gas plant in Algeria is recruiting foreign jihadi fighters to launch new attacks

By Robert Verkaik, and Robert Mendick
7:30AM BST 13 Jul 2014

The al-Qaeda terrorist behind the massacre of six British gas workers is recruiting foreign Jihadi fighters returning from Syria to launch attacks on Western targets, defence and security sources have claimed.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the terrorist who masterminded the Algerian gas plant terror attack where 40 hostages, six of them British, were killed last year, has fled to Libya after surviving a counter-terrorist operation in which he was reported to have died.

Now it has emerged that he is recruiting foreign fighters from Syria, raising fears of new terror plots against Britain and France.

Continue reading at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/10964077/Al-Qaeda-leader-Mokh

 

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Dis cat hath 9 lives...

Mokhtar Belmokhtar: Veteran jihadist whose Al Murabitoon group claimed responsibility for the Mali hotel attack
20 Nov.`15 | The 43-year-old has been nicknamed 'the uncatchable one' after being reported dead several times in recent years

The man thought to have been behind the assault on a luxury Bamako hotel is a veteran Saharan jihadist known, among other sobriquets, as “the uncatchable one”. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, 43, has been reported dead several times in recent years, yet attempts on his life appear to have been unsuccessful. Earlier this year, Belmokhtar was named the leader of Al Murabitoon, an al-Qaeda affiliate operating in West Africa, which claimed responsibility for the attack, saying in a statement to Al Jazeera that it had carried out the operation in collaboration with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), its north African “branch”.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar speaking at an undisclosed location​

Belmokhtar, who fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1990s, has sworn loyalty to the current chief of al-Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, and has criticised Isis. In January 2013, he instigated a deadly assault on an Algerian gas facility, and several months later a double suicide bomb attack on a military barracks and a nearby uranium mine in Niger. “The attacks in Bamako would be entirely within Belmokhtar’s style,” said Paul Melly, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Africa programme. “While there have been several small scale attacks in Mali so far this year, Belmokhtar has tended to favour larger scale attacks.”

Born in northern Algeria in 1972, Belmokhtar first took up arms as a teenager, fighting with the mujahedin against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan. It was there that he is believed to have lost his left eye while mishandling explosives. He now wears a distinctive false eye in its place, earning him another of his nicknames: “One Eye”. He returned home to spend the 1990s fighting and smuggling on behalf of extremist Islamist groups to overthrow the Algerian government. The country’s courts have twice sentenced him to death in absentia for terrorist activities. Formerly a commander within AQIM, in 2012 Belmokhtar left the group after an argument with the leadership.

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