Spain – Spanish police arrested nine people in the Catalonia region on the 8 Apr 15 suspected of links to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, authorities said, the latest such raids as European nations seek to stop jihadist recruitment. The operation included raids in the Barcelona and Tarragona areas and those arrested are suspected of crimes “linked to jihadist terrorism, particularly to the Islamic State group,” police said in a statement, using another term for ISIS. Authorities in Europe have sought to stop young people seeking to travel to Iraq and Syria to fight with ISIS. A number of alleged recruitment cells have been targeted by authorities in Spain, including in the country’s North African territories of Ceuta and Melilla. On the 1 Apr 15 a Moroccan living in Catalonia was remanded in custody after allegedly seeking to send her 16-year-old twins to fight with militants in Syria, a year after another son died in the country. Last month, Spanish authorities arrested eight suspected members of a jihadist network who allegedly called for attacks in Spain and tried to recruit for the Islamic State. About 60 people charged in Islamist terrorist cases were being held in Spain at the start of 2015, a law enforcement source has said. Spanish authorities say about 100 people from Spain are suspected of having joined radical militant groups in Iraq and Syria, and fear they may return to launch attacks.
United Kingdom – A Syrian preacher at a fundamentalist mosque who was shot dead on a London street was asked to resign as an imam over the institution's links to extremism, it was claimed on the 7 Apr 15. Abdul Hadi Arwani, 48, a fierce critic of president Bashar al-Assad, was found slumped in a Volkswagen Passat with wounds to his chest in the suburban street. Mr Arwani was 'obliged' to resign as an imam at the An-Noor Mosque in Acton, West London after the mosque became linked to jihadi preachers and terror suspects. A police source said that the killing had all the hallmarks of a 'state-sponsored assassination'. Detectives are trying to establish whether his strong opposition to Assad was the motive. In a lecture he gave in 2012, Mr Arwani described how the Assad regime had sentenced him to death, forcing him to flee his homeland, and then harassed his elderly relatives for three decades. He grew up in Hama, the site of a notorious 1982 massacre where up to 40,000 civilians were killed by the Syrian Army under the orders of Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father. The Assad regime has been known to assassinate its political opponents in the past, most prominently the Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, whose killing in 2005 was blamed on the Syrian government. Arwani was born in Syria but had been based in the UK for the past three years, where worked as an Islamic teacher.
United Kingdom – A Syrian preacher at a fundamentalist mosque who was shot dead on a London street was asked to resign as an imam over the institution's links to extremism, it was claimed on the 7 Apr 15. Abdul Hadi Arwani, 48, a fierce critic of president Bashar al-Assad, was found slumped in a Volkswagen Passat with wounds to his chest in the suburban street. Mr Arwani was 'obliged' to resign as an imam at the An-Noor Mosque in Acton, West London after the mosque became linked to jihadi preachers and terror suspects. A police source said that the killing had all the hallmarks of a 'state-sponsored assassination'. Detectives are trying to establish whether his strong opposition to Assad was the motive. In a lecture he gave in 2012, Mr Arwani described how the Assad regime had sentenced him to death, forcing him to flee his homeland, and then harassed his elderly relatives for three decades. He grew up in Hama, the site of a notorious 1982 massacre where up to 40,000 civilians were killed by the Syrian Army under the orders of Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father. The Assad regime has been known to assassinate its political opponents in the past, most prominently the Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, whose killing in 2005 was blamed on the Syrian government. Arwani was born in Syria but had been based in the UK for the past three years, where worked as an Islamic teacher.
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