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August 17, 2006

Denmark: Muslim On Terror Charges

News from Copenhagen Post and the BBC states that a Danish Muslim and al Qaeda supporter will be the first person to be tried under Denmark's anti-terror laws, which were introduced in 2002 following the events of 9/11.

Yesterday, the public prosecutor's office announced that Said Mansour (pictured) will be charged for inciting terrorism, following approval from Lebe Espersen, the Danish justice minister. He will be tried for making and distributing material glorifying jihad against the West. If he is found guilty, he could face six years in prison.

45-year old Mansour has said that he is not guilty.

He has been under investigation since 2004, and was arrested on Thursday September 8 last year. His home in the Copenhagen suburb of Brønshøj was searched, and inside were found videos, CDs and other material promoting jihad. Since then, other evidence has emerged that Moroccan-born Mansour was distributing bomb-making manuals. He would sell his CDs at a flea market in Copenhagen.

In an August 2005 interviews, Mansour was unapologetic about downloading videos from the internet of beheadings and speeches by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and burning them onto CDs for distribution. He claimed Muslims had a right to kill Americans in Iraq because: "This is war, it's not a picnic."

Mansour had arrived in Denmark in 1983 to be with his sister, who had married a Danish national. In 1984 Mansour married a Danish national, a teacher, and now he and his wife have four children who attend public schools. At the time of his arrest, Mansour was unemployed, and claiming $1,800 a month from the Danish taxpayers.

Mansour made no secret of his associations with terrorists. He said he had been a close friend of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of plotting the attack upon the World Trade Center on 26 February, 1993. According to Mansour, and backed up by police, the blind sheikh stayed at his home in December 1990 and May 1991.

Mansour also claimed to be an associate of Abu Qatada, the cleric who is detention in Britain fighting extradition to his native Jordan, where he has been convicted of several bomb attacks. Abu Qatada has been described as "Al Qaeda's ambassador in Europe". He was also a friend of Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas who is currently on a 12 year sentence in Spain for belonging to a terrorist organisation (Al Qaeda).

At his interview prior to his arrest, he claimed that the Danish authorities were intending to bring charges against him to appease the Americans, to show they too were against terrorism.

After the arrest, his lawyer,Claus Bergsoe, said Mansour's freedom of speech had been violated.

In an earlier interview with a Danish newspaper, from March 2003, Mansour had described the 9/11 attacks as "a benign kind of terrorism (as) opposed to the malign kind that the United States for so long had carried out against the Muslim world."

Material on his CDs had included Chechens decapitating and shooting Russian soldiers, the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, which were shown to Copenhagen City Court at a bail hearing. The CD-ROMs bore the logo of his publishing company, Al Nur (light) Islamic Information. He also distributed a radical magzine called Al Ansar.

The hearing was told that Danish intelligence personnel claimed he had contacts with Ayman al-Zawahri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda.

In 2003, Mansour was sentenced to three months' prison for possessing stolen goods and having an illegal weapon.

Mansour lost his September bail hearing, and has been remanded in custody ever since. There was an unsuccessful attempt to charge him under terror laws in 2004, after he had been on a ferry from Copenhagen to Oslo, where he took pictures of certain facilities.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at August 17, 2006 3:09 PM

Comments

Posted by: Holger Dansker at August 17, 2006 5:39 PM

Posted by: Holger Dansker at August 17, 2006 5:41 PM

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