Police1.com Report / Critical Alert
Police1 urges officers to exercise continued vigilance after an overseas al-Qaeda website posted a vague warning to Muslims to leave three large U.S. metropolitan areas because of implied imminent terrorist attacks, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“Our Muslim brothers in America, we ask you to immediately leave the following cities: Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles,” reads the communique, which also quoted the Quran.
“We are serious in our warning,” the message states. “The next few days will prove to you the truth of this warning ... To the oppressive rulers of America we say: Expect our terms following the first strike of Allah’s believing soldiers [Quran, Chapter 59, Verse 2-3].”
In conjunction with the memo, al Qaeda’s Al Faroq website posted a photo of the Chinook helicopter shot down on Sunday with a caption in Arabic that reads: “We shall bring down and destroy the values of the Hubal of this generation.” Hubal was a pre-Islamic-era Meccan idol used by Muslims to symbolize the U.S., according to MEMRI.
Titled “A Warning to Muslims in America,” the directive was issued by the previously unknown “Islamic Bayan Movement” and first ran on the Global Islamic Media Web site on Monday, according to MEMRI, which translated the communique on the website.
The communique refers to the “sufferings” of Muslims, saying they are victims of oppression, imprisonment and murder. It ends with another verse from the Quran [Chapter 9, Verse 14]: “Fight them: Allah will punish them at your hands, and will humiliate them, and will help you to overcome them, and will relieve the minds of the believers.”
Our Muslim expert identifies the name of the signatory as belonging to a Yemeni from Hadhrameuth, the Bin Laden family’s place of origin where Osama enjoys substantial tribal support. Counter-terror sources stress that warnings appearing on these forums are taken both very seriously and with caution by the intelligence services keeping track of the terrorist network’s electronic traffic.
In November 2002, Jeddah-based fundamentalist forums addressed a message to an al Qaeda member, saying: "... we are marching towards an operation that will take us to Paradise.” Three days later, the Mombasa Paradise hotel was blown up killing 12 Kenyans and three Israelis, and a failed shoulder-launched Strela anti-air missile missed an Israeli airliner at Mombasa airport.
Source: Informed Source; Middle East Media Research Institute