DUBAI: Al-Qaeda’s military chief in Yemen warned Americans in an audio message posted online yesterday that the Boston bombings revealed a fragile security as he urged Muslims to defend their religion.
Qassim Al-Rimi, the military chief of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, said making bombs such as the ones used in the twin blasts in Boston in April, is within “everyone’s reach.” “The Boston events... and the poisoned letters (sent to the White House), regardless of who is behind them, show that your security is no longer under control, and that attacks on you have taken off and cannot be stopped,” he said, in the message entitled: “A letter to the American people.” “Every day you will be hit by the unexpected and your leaders will not be able to defend you,” warned the man whose organization is considered by Washington the world’s most dangerous Al-Qaeda branch.
Rimi said the killing of Al-Qaeda’s founder Osama Bin Laden in May 2011 and top Yemeni-American cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki in Sept. 2011, had not ended the struggle.
“Have you eliminated the jihadist groups that have spread everywhere after they had only been in Afghanistan? Today, they are in your land or close to it,” he warned.
To the Muslims in the United States, he said: “We encourage you to carry on with this way, be steadfast in your religion.
“Carry out your obligations, defend your religion and follow in the footsteps of those who supported their religion and Ummah (Muslim nation) while they are in their enemy’s den,” he said.
Two brothers, 19-year-old Dzhokhar and 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are accused of being behind the April 15 attack near the finish line of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and wounded more than 260.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police, and Dzhokhar was captured and taken into custody after an extensive manhunt.
At about the same time, three letters laced with ricin were discovered, one addressed to US President Barack Obama, one to Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and a third to a justice of the peace in the same US state, Sadie Holland.
Charges were later dropped against a man initially suspected to be behind the letters, Paul Curtis.
An Al-Qaeda suspect who was held at the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan was returned to Mauritania last week and not two prisoners from Guantanamo, a local security official said yesterday.
The head of a prisoners’ rights group had said that two Mauritanians who had been held for several years at the US prison camp in Cuba had been flown to Nouakchott on Friday after being cleared of suspected terror-related activities.
But the Pentagon denied the claim, saying “there was no release” and that the number of detainees in Guantanamo still stood at 166.
“It was a Mauritanian prisoner who had been held at the Bagram base in Afghanistan who was returned to Nouakchott by the Americans, and not prisoners from Guantanamo,” a Mauritanian security source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
He said the detainee was El-Haj Ould El-Houssein, or Abou Youness, who was “very close to (late Al-Qaeda leader Osama) Bin Laden.”
He was sought by the authorities in Mauritania after fleeing in 2008 following his alleged role in operations against the army and the police, the source added.
In particular, he was accused of an attack on a military barracks in 2005 in which 15 Mauritanian soldiers were killed.
Police have taken the suspect to an unknown location where he was being interrogated yesterday, the source said.
The US army in March handed over full control of Bagram prison, where a number of suspected Taleban and Al-Qaeda militants are held, to the Afghan security forces.
