FBI files tell how addicted agent was able to get the drugs - WP
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FBI agent Matthew Lowry checked out Item 1B4 from the evidence room at the bureau’s Washington field office on an August morning in 2013. He wrote “to lab” on a log sheet to explain why he was taking drugs that had been seized in an undercover operation dubbed Midnight Hustle.
But it was nearly a year later when he delivered the drug package to the lab. For 10 months, court records show, the heroin had gone unaccounted for and unmissed. When the package made it back to the FBI office in September, it weighed 1.1 grams more than when it had been seized.
Someone had tampered with the contents, prosecutors said later.
The package is one piece of a tale that has unfolded in recent months — the case of an FBI agent who, by his own admission, repeatedly stole heroin from evidence bags for his personal use. In the process, he sabotaged drug cases that he and his colleagues had labored on for months. Prosecutors have dismissed charges against 28 defendants in three cases, many of whom had already been convicted, and they say it could affect 150 other defendants.
The revelations have exposed a system of weak checks and balances that allowed Lowry’s thefts and drug use to go undetected for at least 14 months as he worked on a task force focusing on heroin traffickers along the borders of the District, Maryland and Virginia. The problems were discovered only after the agent disappeared after work Sept. 29 and was found by colleaguesincoherent, standing next to his disabled bureau car in a construction lot near the Washington Navy Yard.
A look at how Agent Lowry affected the case of Earl Owens, who was eventually dismissed.
FBI documents say the agency vehicle, which had run out of gas, was littered with bags of heroin “sliced open and drugs removed,” along with a shotgun and a derringer pistol seized during a drug raid but never logged into evidence.
An examination of court records and more than 600 pages of internal FBI documents obtained by The Washington Post — including statements Lowry made to investigators describing his actions — provides a detailed look at his elaborate deception and downfall. The case has prompted an exhaustive review of how drug evidence is handled in one the largest and most prestigious of the bureau’s 56 field offices.
“It’s shocking that there was such little oversight,” said Steven H. Levin, a private lawyer in Baltimore with 10 years’ experience as a federal prosecutor, much of it overseeing the violent-crimes section in Maryland. “It’s something you would expect to see on a made-for-TV movie. . . . You’re thinking, there is no way that could ever happen. And that’s what happened.”
Lowry, 33, remains the target of a criminal investigation that is being led by federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania to avoid any conflict of interest. He has not been charged with a crime, but he was suspended from his job and entered into drug counseling immediately after he was found in September. His attorney, Robert C. Bonsib, declined to comment for this article, but he has said his client is cooperating with authorities. In the documents, which were provided to defense attorneys in the drug cases under review, Lowry said that he turned to heroin after becoming addicted to prescription painkillers because of an illness and that he started taking heroin from evidence in the summer of 2013.
A spokesman for the FBI’s Washington field office, Andrew Ames, issued a statement saying protocols for handling evidence are being tightened. “The incident has brought to light certain vulnerabilities the office is addressing to reduce the likelihood of this type of misconduct happening again.”
Levin said Lowry’s conduct “should have raised questions right way.” He added, “How many people share blame for allowing this to be perpetrated, and for it to continue for as long as it did?”
The system
Lowry’s system was basically quite simple, according to the FBI documents and a summary of his statements to investigators, in which he told them how he took drug evidence from cases with code names including Broken Cord, Family Matters, Tequila Shot and Smellin Like a Rose.
Photographs from FBI evidence files of heroin found in the car assigned to FBI agent Matthew Lowry. Prosecutors dropped drug cases against 28 defendants in four cases based on evidence now deemed tainted. (U.S. District Court)
He checked out drugs from cases he had worked on the pretense of taking them to a lab to be tested for trial. He kept the drugs — sometimes for days or weeks, other times for months — and used a little bit nearly every day, he told investigators. He eventually submitted the drugs to the lab and took them back to the FBI office when testing was done.
Lowry described for investigators a painstaking process used to circumvent rules and procedures and avoid detection, court documents state. He said he forged signatures of supervisors to authorize withdrawals and of colleagues to reseal evidence bags he had cut open, taking time to practice the signatures. He often targeted cases that were already resolved, making it less likely another agent would need the drugs and notice that evidence was missing.
Lowry told investigators he routinely used a filler to repackage bags of heroin. He said he often added an over-the-counter laxative but also used creatine, a chemical commonly mixed with heroin before it hits the street. An FBI memo said Lowry used a digital scale — taken from a drug house — to ensure that he repackaged the drugs at close to their initial weight.
An agent told investigators that Lowry had “stated that the ‘system was messed up’ and that ‘anybody can check out anything,’ according to the court papers..
The 21.3 grams of heroin Lowry took from the Midnight Hustle evidence had been bought for $1,800 by an undercover FBI agent in a June 2013 street deal on Rhode Island Avenue NE in the District, according to the court papers. Lowry checked out the drugs two months later. The FBI documents say he broke the evidence seal on the bag and kept the drugs in the trunk of his Chevrolet Impala, where he stored it “between uses.”
On June 30, Lowry took the drugs to the lab, according to the documents. He added Purelax, a powdered laxative, “to offset the weight of the drugs he used,” the documents state. He obtained a new evidence bag and an evidence seal. He forged the signatures of the two agents who had seized the heroin the previous year, and he tried “to mimic the hand-writing on the original sealing sticker,” the documents state.
Lowry peeled a bar code off the original evidence bag, put it on the new bag and then sealed the bag with heat. He told investigators that he didn’t sign the same drugs out twice because he recognized the forged signatures as his handwriting. A few times, he took guns, drugs or other items from crime scenes and did not log them into evidence.
One agent interviewed by investigators said that “drug evidence is controlled very tightly, as you guys know. There’s very stringent rules on how you handle it. They’re pretty robust.” But, the agent said, “if somebody is actively trying to subvert the process, then they can defeat the rules. And that’s apparently what happened in this case.”
A high error rate
An internal audit by the FBI, completed last month, found that every one of the nation’s field offices had problems tracking gun and drug evidence and that in some cases, drugs disappeared for months without notice. The Washington field office was among those with the highest error rates; 90 percent of drug evidence examined had been mishandled or had record-keeping problems.
In the Washington field office, a single agent could check drugs out of the lab, even from cases the agent had not worked. All that was needed was a supervisor’s signature. When an agent is taking drugs to a lab, protocol dictates that the trip is made immediately, with no stops. But two senior law enforcement officials interviewed said no one checks to ensure that the packages are dropped off. It can take months or even a year for evidence to be tested, so it’s not unusual for packets of cocaine or heroin to be gone for long periods of time. Also, the Washington field office is one of the few in the country whose agents take drugs to the lab in their cars.
One FBI official said small variations in the weight of drug evidence after testing are often a result of repackaging. Supervisors are supposed to review agents’ quarterly log sheets, documenting progress on investigations and listing drugs signed out from labs. It is unclear whether Lowry’s log sheets were thoroughly reviewed.
As a result of the case, the Washington field office “is re-examining certain policies and processes for how drugs are checked out, transported, tracked and checked into the lab,” according to a senior law enforcement official who discussed the case on the condition that he not be identified because of rules that forbid publicly discussing pending criminal cases.
In one significant change, two agents will be required to check out evidence, the official said, describing what is considered a best practice. That exceeds requirements in place across the entire bureau.
Michael Bromwich, a retired inspector general with the Justice Department, said even when strict controls are in place, compliance can weaken over time. Requiring two agents to sign out drugs, for example, “is an administrative burden.” He said, “I think that over time the controls begin to loosen. It never occurs to them that somebody would make off with the drugs and steal the money.”
Cases upended
The Lowry investigation has stunned police and prosecutors, upended their cases and returned men who had admitted or been convicted of felony drug crimes to the streets of the District and Maryland.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Darlene Soltys told a federal judge how hard she worked to “salvage” a drug case Lowry had worked. “My agents invested their hearts and souls in investigating this case,” she said during a closed-door hearing in a judge’s chambers. The transcript was recently unsealed.
In that hearing, Soltys meticulously explained Lowry’s role in the search of an apartment from which 2.2 pounds of heroin was seized. It was a stash and packaging house for drugs, with “powder everywhere,” authorities said.
Lowry and another agent moved together through the apartment, with Lowry hanging evidence signs and the other agent taking photographs. The procedure is intended to ensure that no one is alone with evidence. “They moved from room to room to room,” Soltys said. But she said agents could not conclusively testify that Lowry was never alone.
It appears that nothing was taken or tampered with during that search, the prosecutor told the judge. But FBI agents also searched the same defendant’s house in Accokeek, in Southern Maryland, where they reported finding expensive watches and jewelry, two guns, and $780,000 in cash split into bags. Soltys said the bags were brought to Washington, and Lowry was among the agents who helped recount the money. The prosecutor said authorities initially thought that one bag was missing and that the final count was $130,000 short.
It was determined later, after the case had been dropped, that an honest miscount of the money had occurred, but as investigators sorted through the stolen drug evidence, the count became suspect. Just the suspicion of misconduct tainted the case.
“So now, I can no longer demonstrate the integrity of the money that was seized,” Soltys said in the hearing. Pressed by the judge, she said that evidence in the case gathered at three locations ended up spread out in an office where Lowry and others worked.
Soltys told the judge that because Lowry “is going to be portrayed as a heroin junkie” and as “drawn to that heroin like moth on a flame,” she could not at the time vouch for the money they thought was missing. “Can anybody say that they had their eyeballs on the evidence that we brought back from the safe house?” she said.
She added, “The integrity of my prosecution is undermined by the presence of this bad agent.”
The prosecutor told the judge that “it is not a question about saving the FBI the embarrassment. They’re already embarrassed by this. The question is, can I, on behalf of the United States of America, stand up and argue to a jury that my evidence is pristine, that there is any doubt that my agents are credible?”
Charges against four drug defendants in the case were dismissed.
Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.
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President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron are meeting this week in Washington to discuss the two nations’ response to the growing threat of cyberattacks.
The two leaders are expected to discuss, in particular, the problem of adversaries hijacking computers in Britain to unleash cyber assaults on America, and vice versa, according to a security firm involved in the talks.
In a realm without physical boundaries, it’s all too easy for hackers to hop around and fake out authorities.
A recent case in point: Computers engaged in the Sony hack allegedly operated out of New York, Thailand, Poland, Italy, Bolivia, Singapore and Cyprus, according toThe Associated Press. The attackers — who the FBI claims are North Korean — also published some company files using an anonymous email service in France.
“These attacks cross country borders,” said Nicole Eagan, head of U.K.-based firm Darktrace, who will brief Cameron in Washington, D.C., before he heads into the Oval Office on Friday. The defense tactic “really has to be more governments and companies working together because of the nature of these truly global threats.”
Darktrace, with a staff roster comprising former National Security Agency, GCHQ and MI5 analysts, uses technology that combines probability and artificial intelligence to predict the next moves of attackers. The system, borne out the University of Cambridge, basically detects hacks before they’ve happened.
This capability can be helpful in pinpointing the assailant’s potential attack route and end target.
“Let’s say you have an adversary that is coming out of the Middle East. They are probably going to utilize infrastructure that partly is based in an Amazon cloud in Europe, maybe then utilize some hop points for command and control that are in the U.S.,” said Jasper Graham, a veteran NSA technical director and now a senior vice president at Darktrace, giving an example of a possible threat vector. “The victim might be the U.S., but they are going to utilize a whole bunch of international infrastructure in order to execute their attacks.”
Obama and Cameron are scheduled to discuss a variety other topics over dinner Thursday, followed by a White House meeting Friday, administration officials said in a statement. They declined to comment further.
Another reason the two countries want to align cyber policies is so they can close regulatory loopholes. Lax security rules in one nation can aid an adversary mired by tougher rules in a target country, Jasper explained.
The men likely will discuss ways of cooperating in situations where “you have one attack but you have multiple countries involved with the hosting” of the malicious activity, he said.
“How do we quickly exchange the [threat] indicators amongst the government agencies so that they can track down those responsible in a timely manner?” Jasper said.
A common hacker practice is to breach a small mom-and-pop shop in one portion of the world and use that store’s compromised system “as a staging point to attack something much bigger in another part of the world,” Jasper said. “It becomes really hard for them to trace back who is responsible.”
The conversation between the two Western leaders will cap a week of White House activity related to cyberspace. Obama proposed legislation that would, among other things, require companies to notify data breach victims within 30 days and to share metadata from customer and business communications that could signal a cyber threat. The legislative agenda is the administration’s response to a year of high-profile intrusions at Target, JPMorgan, Sony and other companies. And the strategy is expected to be a focus of next week’s State of the Union address.
But there is tension between civil liberties advocates and the two countries with a “special relationship” over the matter of allowing government eyes into people’s private correspondence. To guard against what critics see as surveillance overreach, some citizens now are “encrypting” their communications with secret codes that render them interception-proof.
In response, the FBI and now Cameron are urging technology companies to build “backdoors” in apps and mobile devices through which law enforcement officials can enter to retrieve data.
The prime minister reportedly pledged to ban the likes of Facebook’s WhatsApp, Apple’s iPhone and other encryption tools, as a means of collecting more intelligence on suspected terrorists following the Paris shootings.
FBI Director James Comey last fall said: “If the challenges of real-time data interception threaten to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead us all to a very, very dark place. I am a huge believer in the rule of law, but I also believe that no one in this country should be beyond the law. There should be no law-free zones in this country.”
The American Civil Liberties Union maintains that encryption does not have to interfere with catching terrorists or cyber crooks.
The nation should concentrate on “encouraging companies to adopt basic security best practices, like two-factor authentication and encryption, to prevent hacks. This would be more effective, and less invasive, than expanding surveillance authorities or creating exemptions to existing privacy law,”ACLU legislative counsel Gabe Rottman said Tuesday in a blog post.
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Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
What causes young inner-city men to kill each other?
Where do we start? At the root causes of poverty, discrimination, family breakdown, childhood toxic stress? With concrete societal failings such as bad schools, unsafe housing, lack of health care and few jobs? With a gang culture that accords respect to those who commit brutal crimes and serve long prison terms? With the easy availability of guns?
All contribute. But we can’t wait until we solve these enormous problems to keep young men alive. “Maybe you don’t have to solve poverty,” said Sara Heller, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Maybe you can attack more proximal causes. So much violence comes out of arguments. If you can get a kid to look away instead of throwing the first punch, you can avoid violence.”
On its face, this seems absurd. But consider the Chicago police’s analysis of murders. In 2011, of the murders for which researchers could identify a motive, only 10 percent were the stuff outsiders imagine: ruthless drug dealers vying for territory. The vast majority of homicides — 70 percent — were the result of altercations.
“A couple of young guys plus a stupid beef plus the presence of a gun equals dead bodies,” said Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago and co-director of its Crime Lab, an organization founded in 2008 that conducts gold-standard randomized controlled trials of promising interventions to prevent crime. Jens Ludwig, Crime Lab’s director, calls these arguments “Seinfeldian” — about nothing.
Can anything be done to save these lives? Maybe. During the 2009-10 school year, two organizations carried out versions of a program called Becoming a Man in Chicago schools in low-income neighborhoods. They chose as participants male students who were doing poorly (a D+ average) and considered at risk for violence; a third of them had been arrested before the program started.
The organizations used counseling, mentoring and unfamiliar sports such as archery and wrestling to deliver a form of cognitive behavior therapy. C.B.T. helps people to be more realistic and effective thinkers. In this case, the program was designed to encourage the students to question their automatic thoughts and biases, most of which were driving them to lash out. They worked on regulating impulses, understanding the point of view of others, and thinking about the consequences of their actions.
Crime Lab found that violent crimes committed by this group were 44 percent lower than in the control group. The youth also improved their school attendance and achievement; if the gains continue, the graduation rate would rise by 10 to 23 percent — which is an anti-crime intervention in itself.
The results were not entirely satisfying: the gains in crime lasted only as long as the program did.
This fall in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice opened a branch of Crime Lab, directed by Ludwig and Katy Brodsky Falco, formerly a city department of correction official. The city isn’t paying — the Laura and John Arnold Foundation put up all the money. Crime Lab New York is so new that the city hasn’t announced it yet.
Why does New York City need a Crime Lab? Because crime is different here than in Chicago; New York’s success in reducing homicide — 328 last year, down from 2,245 in 1990 — means the city has the luxury to explore other things.
“Police will always play an important role, but there are other ways in,” said Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “If the way we think about crime is really about changing behavior and controlling risk, there are a lot of ways to do that. If you light up housing developments, are you less likely to have crime? Figuring out smart interventions way, way, before arrest, or using behavioral economics as a way to nudge people’s behavior — these are incredibly important and promising areas we need to explore in a rigorous way.”
The United States has a lot of data on crime. But rarely is data used in randomized controlled trials to identify what works. It is relatively recently that any field uses data systematically this way. One exception is the work of MDRC, born in 1974, which develops and tests programs that fight poverty. Its studies, for example, convinced New York City to greatly expand its use of small high schools. In 2003, economists at M.I.T. founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab to look at what works in international development (it was named for the father of the M.I.T. alumnus who donated the money). In 2013, the lab opened a North America office and is starting to touch on crime; it worked with Crime Lab in the Becoming a Man study.
The randomistas, as these social scientists are sometimes called, lead an important new march toward the use of evidence in public policy. A randomista revolution is desperately needed in the field of crime. No issue is more governed by prejudice, fear and political exploitation. We need to know what works. And we need to be able to prove it with gold-standard evidence, because otherwise a lot of people aren’t going to listen.
New York has numerous academics who study crime, and has an entire college, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, devoted to it. And it has the Vera Institute of Justice, which started in 1961. Just one example of Vera’s impact: Its demonstration projects with the New York City police and subsequent evaluations were early and important factors in the national movement toward community policing.
But far more research is needed. Crime Lab New York, like the Chicago original, will work with various academics. And Glazer feels there is an important gap in the research, and so is working withIdeas42, an organization that applies behavioral economics to social problems, to test these kinds of solutions.
Crime Lab was born after a University of Chicago doctoral student was killed during a mugging just outside campus in September, 2007. Amadou Cisse was one month from finishing his doctorate in chemistry. His death started a discussion about how to make the university’s often-slow and arcane research on crime more relevant and less, well, academic. The idea was to test real-life ideas in a shorter time frame, so that policy makers might use them.
Crime Lab doesn’t want to study everything. It focuses on how a few highly promising interventions can be made even more useful — larger, cheaper, more effective. At the moment, Crime Lab is continuing to study cognitive behavioral therapy, this time a program in Chicago’s juvenile detention center. Boys, most of whom were 14 to 16 years old, were randomly assigned to either units with C.B.T. therapy programs or those without. The preliminary findings show that the boys who got C.B.T. were less likely to offend again.
In contrast to the Becoming a Man results, which disappeared after a year, the impact of C.B.T. didn’t even kick in until the boys had been out of the program for a year. The gap in the number of youths returning to the juvenile facility was small — only five percentage points in the preliminary results. But the program was cheap, as the boys were already there (they would have spent their time hanging out and watching television if not for C.B.T.), and correction officers delivered the training. So it was likely to be cost-effective even with small gains.
Crime Lab also studied a program in one Chicago school that combined C.B.T. with an intensive tutoring initiative called Match Tutoring. Researchers couldn’t cross-reference the students who participated with crime data, so they don’t know the effect on crime. But the program had a profound affect on academic achievement. The impacts, the authors wrote, “are large enough to raise the question of whether the field has given up prematurely on the possibility of improving academic outcomes for disadvantaged youth.”
In other words: we’ve assumed that helping kids as teenagers is too late — but it might not be.
Ideas42 is working with Crime Lab to tweak the C.B.T. curriculum so it is easy for lots of people to learn quickly. In part because of Crime Lab’s studies, the Becoming a Man program is part of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative. The White House recently gave Chicago $10 million to expand and study the Becoming a Man and Match Tutoring programs.
Crime Lab New York has other goals as well. One is getting better at predicting where domestic violence will occur. Another is mitigating some of the harm people suffer from just being involved in the justice system. “Nobody is well served when the police have to arrest someone who didn’t go to court over what was originally a traffic ticket,” Ludwig said.
Glazer is interested in whether changes in the physical environment can lower crime. Also, can CompStat, the famous strategy to map crime and direct resources accordingly, work for other problems? Crime Lab New York is starting to study whether a form of CompStat can help neighborhoods identify problems. “Strong neighborhoods, where people contribute together to the health of the neighborhood — those are the ones that resist crime.
“There are a lot of fields in which as a matter of course we use science to evaluate everything we do,” she said. Health is an example; crime is not. “Our effort with Crime Lab and other partners is to start to move the study of crime from the realm of astrology to the realm of science.”
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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.” She is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.
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WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, sharply criticized The New York Times on Thursday for anonymously quoting a member of a terrorist group in an article about the deadly attacks last week in France.
The article, which ran on the front page on Thursday, quoted a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who addressed the timing of the attacks. The Qaeda member said that although the operations were executed by one man who had ties to the Qaeda group and another who had ties to the Islamic State, the coordination was a result of their friendship — not of common planning between the groups.
“Your decision to grant anonymity to a spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula so he could clarify the role of his group in assassinating innocents, including a wounded police officer, and distinguish it from the assassination of other innocents in Paris in the name of another group of terrorists, is both mystifying and disgusting,” Mr. Comey said in a letter to The Times.
He added: “I fear you have lost your way and urge you to reconsider allowing your newspaper to be used by those who have murdered so many and work every day to murder more.”
The article did not say why The Times did not name the individual, who communicates with news organizations through a mobile messaging application.
Michael Slackman, the international managing editor for The New York Times, defended the decision to use anonymity.
“The individual quoted anonymously has for several weeks provided accurate insight and information into the thinking and actions of AQAP,” Mr. Slackman said. “The material was generally central to the news, in one case noting that Al Qaeda and the Islamic State had not jointly planned the attacks in Paris.”
Al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), took responsibilityfor last week’s deadly attack by Said and Cherif Kouachi on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in an 11-minute video released Wednesday. “We in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claim responsibility for this operation as revenge for the prophet,” Nasir bin Ali al-Ansi, an AQAP official, said.
AQAP did not take responsibility for the actions of Amedy Coulibaly, who took hostages at a Jewish grocery two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Coulibaly recorded a video prior to the attack saying he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has frequently encouraged supporters to carry out similar attacks in the West.
AQAP and ISIS are currently at odds, with members of AQAP publicly criticizing ISIS, and each struggling for supremacy of the jihadi movement.
Despite today’s video there are still a number of questions about the attack and AQAP’s role in it. Here are the top five:
1. Is the video authentic?
It appears so. The video carries AQAP’s official media logo in the upper-right-hand corner and was released online in a fashion similar to how al-Qaeda typically releases videos and statements. The AQAP official in the video — Nasir bin Ali al-Ansi — has previously appeared in several AQAP videos. The White House and State Department said they believed the video was authentic.
2. Are the claims accurate?
Just because the video is authentic doesn’t necessarily mean the claims of responsibility are accurate. AQAP is a sophisticated and opportunistic terrorist organization. At this point, there is little downside to the organization claiming the Paris attacks. Even if it did not directly order the attack, taking responsibility shows its target audience of potential recruits that al-Qaeda is still capable of striking in the West.
This is AQAP’s second statement on the Paris attacks. On Friday, AQAP released a five-minute audio message praising the attacks, but stopped short of claiming responsibility. In that audio message, the AQAP spokesman referred to the Kouachi brothers as jund allah, or soldiers of God, instead of asmujahidin, fighters in the way of jihad, the Arabic term AQAP typically uses to describe its fighters.
The message released Wednesday also follows widespread media reports that both attackers mentioned they were from “al-Qaeda in Yemen.” Wednesday’s message — unlike the earlier one — describes the Kouachi brothers as mujahidin.
3. How did AQAP order an attack in Paris from Yemen?
AQAP’s top leadership is extremely careful about how it communicates. Much like Osama bin Laden toward the end of his life, they stay offline and rely on couriers to transport letters back and forth.
The National Security Agency scoops up much of the electronic traffic in and out of Yemen, and the Kouachi brothers were known to French intelligence and under at least some surveillance. All of this suggests at least three possibilities.
One is that AQAP communicated in code. On Friday an AQAP source told The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill that the latest issue of Inspire, AQAP’s English-language journal, foreshadowed the attack through a picture of a French passport on one of the pages. The Kouachi brothers were last in Yemen in 2011, which makes this option unlikely although not impossible.
Another possibility is that AQAP dispatched a courier from Yemen to Paris. In November, Yemen expelled several hundred foreign students some of whom were said to have links to al-Qaeda.
Finally, it is possible that the brothers acted on their own, only receiving loose inspiration from al-Qaeda and now that they are dead AQAP is claiming post facto responsibility.
4. What was the relationship between the attackers and Anwar al-Awlaki?
In a telephone call with a French media outlet on Friday, Cherif Kouachi claimed the Charlie Hebdoattack had been financed by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Subsequent reports have cited anonymous Yemeni security officials as saying that at least one of the Kouachi brothers met al-Awlaki shortly before the cleric was killed. Al-Ansi suggests something similar in the video AQAP released on Wednesday.
But the brothers were in Yemen for a relatively short time, Awlaki was killed more than three years ago, and AQAP has been threatening Charlie Hebdo since early 2010, all of which begs one simple question: Why now?
Why did the brothers wait until early 2015 to carry out an attack, which AQAP now claims has been in the works since 2011? That question remains unanswered.
5. Are there more attacks to come?
This is perhaps the most pressing and least answerable question about the attacks. Several Western passport holders have spent time at AQAP camps in Yemen in recent years. How many of these have returned to their home countries with training and orders is impossible to know. But as last week’s attacks in Paris show it only takes a couple of determined terrorists to cause great disruption and tear at the fabric of a society.
As much as al-Qaeda prefers large-scale attacks focusing on aviation, it is also extremely adaptable. Paris was a success for al-Qaeda — whether or not it directly ordered the attacks — and terrorist organizations like to replicate their successes.
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