Britain Finds Link Between Muslim Terrorists and KIDDY PORN

According to the Times of London, Scotland Yard has Discovered a Strong link between Muslim Terrorists and internet Pedphiles.

The source explained that both types of criminal also share a need for great secrecy and indeed it is the paedophiles' status as outcasts as well as their expertise in encryption techniques that may have first attracted the terrorists. Hardline Muslim recruits are often given passwords and keycodes to terrorism sites via internet chatrooms, although sometimes they come from sympathisers in local mosques. But recently British police have managed to crack some of the codes that prohibit outsiders from accessing the more hardcore jihadi sites. Using child porn sites might be one way round this.

Not much surprise her folks, Muslim Terrorists who Kill babies, uniting with Pedophiles. But its not just sharing encryption methods. The terrorists are becoming very interested in the kiddy porn:

Dangerous and depraved: paedophiles unite with terrorists online Richard Kerbaj, Dominic Kennedy, Richard Owen and Graham Keeley

For some, the internet is merely a hiding place — a web of secret corridors where all manner of shameful deeds unfold. But the police never expected that it might become a strategic platform where two groups of society's outcasts, terrorists and child sex abusers, could meet to exchange operational secrets.

The realisation that there might be something in common between violent Muslim fanatics known for their supposed piety and sexual deviants who prey on children has only slowly dawned on officers. Cracking the mystery of how these worlds overlap is expected to improve understanding of the mindsets of both types of criminals and has been hailed as a potentially vital intelligence tool to undermine future terrorist plots. “A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are”, an anti-terror source said, “is to go through the child-porn sites.”

The link might have remained unknown but for the case of a Muslim preacher from the East End of London who in 2006 was being investigated by police over his suspected links to a jihadi terrorist gunrunner.

To Scotland Yard's surprise, the 26-year-old Abdul Makim Khalisadar, a former primary school assistant, was discovered to be downloading considerable quantities of child pornography. A DNA test showed he was the wanted “Whitechapel Rapist” who had violently attacked a woman in the street a year earlier. He was jailed for ten years for rape and perverting justice. Khalisadar, who has never been convicted of terrorist offences, and some friends concocted a false alibi that he was preaching at the East London Mosque when the attack happened. He was accused of possessing photographs of child sex abuse but these 11 charges were allowed to lie on file.

Khalisadar's case came hot on the heels of the unexpected discovery of a few dozen images of hard-core child pornography during a raid on a suspected Muslim terrorist's home during a separate investigation. It was enough to convince some officers that they had discovered a potentially important link.

But an investigation by The Times has discovered that the first evidence actually came on the Continent within a few weeks of the 9/11 massacres. The unlikely setting was the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan. This place of worship was, according to the book Al-Qaeda in Europe, by the terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino, expressly “built to create a new gathering place for militants in the southern part of the city”. It was run by the al-Qaeda recruiter Abdelkadar Mahmoud Ed Sayed.

During a crackdown on the mosque, police were astonished to discover pornography on computer hard drives. But what was not reported then was that the haul included images of children being sexually abused that were encoded with messages as a clandestine method of communication. Ed Sayed was sentenced to eight years in absentia in 2004 for terrorism-related offences.

Stefano Dambruoso, Italy's anti-terror magistrate, said: “In our experience in investigating Islamic cells linked to al-Qaeda, they use pornographic images simply to camouflage the content of their messages. They use the images — of men, women and children — as an instrument to hide messages of quite a different content.

“I would exclude the idea that they have paedophile tendencies. The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which — as in many parts of the Arab world — wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture.”

The Times has also found a case in Spain where an Islamic terror suspect is accused of downloading child pornography, a case in Yorkshire where child protection officers stumbled on a nail-bomb terror plotter, and a case in Salford where officers discovered a chemistry student visiting explosives websites and also downloading child abuse images. The Spanish case, still before the courts, resulted from raids by the Guardia Civil directed at breaking up a terrorist cell in October 2007. Thousands of hardcore pornographic images of young children were found on home computers.

Abdelkader Ayachine, an Algerian in his forties working in Burgos, is in custody awaiting trial for terrorism. He is accused of incitement to jihad via the internet by recruiting volunteers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of sending money to prisoners belonging to an Islamic terrorist movement. But he had a dual use for the internet, if another charge is proven. Prosecutors say “he regularly downloads and transfers” from the internet to the computer installed in his home “numerous video and photographic files of child pornography, in which the main characters are minors having sex among themselves or with adults”.

In police raids on him and five other suspects, investigators discovered bomb manuals and text, audio and video in which he and the other suspects were said to praise jihad. He is linked to the Islamist terrorist group that killed 45 people in a suicide bomb attack in Casablanca in 2003.

One area that British anti-terror investigators are now keen to look at is the startling similarity in the way that jihadis and paedophiles target vulnerable young people, first befriending them and then slowly introducing them to warped behaviour that comes to be seen as normal. “What we were starting to see was a similarity in grooming that goes on in paedophilia and grooming that goes on in extremism,” said the anti-terror source.

The source explained that both types of criminal also share a need for great secrecy and indeed it is the paedophiles' status as outcasts as well as their expertise in encryption techniques that may have first attracted the terrorists. Hardline Muslim recruits are often given passwords and keycodes to terrorism sites via internet chatrooms, although sometimes they come from sympathisers in local mosques. But recently British police have managed to crack some of the codes that prohibit outsiders from accessing the more hardcore jihadi sites. Using child porn sites might be one way round this.

Some paedophiles have become adept at encrypting information and burying it so deeply in the internet that no outsider can easily find it. Paedophiles then meet in cyberspace and swap notes on how to reach the images. None is likely to rush to police saying they suspect that they have spotted a terrorist loitering on their child porn website.

Another area investigators will want to explore is the similarity between the personalities of paedophiles and terrorists. “If they are going out, a lot of time is spent by going to the mosque or going off to internet cafés,” the source said.

Shahien Taj, the director of the Henna Foundation, which deals with domestic violence against women and children, said that both terrorists and paedophiles were obsessed with control and domination. She attacked the hypocrisy of terrorists who claim to espouse religious motives on one hand while degrading children on the other.

Not every terrorist downloading child pornography is a Muslim, though. The British Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre was investigating the case of paedophile Philip Thompson, known as the Librarian because he lent out his 241,000 images of child abuse. They sent an intelligence file to police about a suspected associate, Martyn Gilleard, 31, a forklift truck driver and Hitler enthusiast from Goole on Humberside.

When officers turned up looking for child abuse images, they found 39,000 of them. But they also stumbled across Gilleard's stash of machetes, swords, bullets, gunpowder and nail bombs. He wanted to start a race war.

There is another case involving a white man that may be telling. Edward Mattison, a 21-year-old chemistry student from Salford, was jailed in 2006 after he admitted explosives offences. He created homemade bombs using chemicals including a deadly substance known as “Mother of Satan”, used in the London bombings and by Palestinian suicide bombers. He admitted offences relating to seven images of child pornography, though his lawyer said this happened just once through curiosity. He was never accused of terrorism.

Through glimpses of these characters, a pattern can be seen: the same kind of obsessive, sometimes paranoid, individual who becomes skilled in locating the rotten fruit of the internet, from bombmaking instructions to child pornography.

Just as the paedophiles have been getting cleverer at hiding their abuse images, the authorities have been raising their technological game. But it is feared that clues to terror plots may have escaped police attention because of a lack of communication between Scotland Yard's child protection and anti-terrorism specialists.

“It's worth researching this [link between terrorism and child pornography] further because we will get an operational strategy with the paedophile unit when they are infiltrating a paedophile site,” the source said.

“If we are now seeing that they are using these kind of sites as a smokescreen, as a safe haven, they will never think we are cops.”

A link between terrorism plots and hardcore child pornography is becoming clear after a string of police raids in Britain and across the Continent, an investigation by The Times has discovered. Images of child abuse have been found during Scotland Yard antiterrorism swoops and in big inquiries in Italy and Spain.

Secret coded messages are being embedded into child pornographic images, and paedophile websites are being exploited as a secure way of passing information between terrorists.

British security services are also aware of the trend and believe that it requires further investigation to improve understanding of terrorists’ methods and mindsets. Concerns within the Metropolitan Police led to a plan to run a pilot research project exploring the nature of the link. One source familiar with the proposal said that this could eventually lead to the training of child welfare experts to identify signs of terrorist involvement as they monitor pornographic sites.

Concerns have already been expressed at Cabinet minister level about the risk of vulnerable Muslim youths being exploited by older men.

Officers have noted that child sex abuse images have been found during investigations into some of the most advanced suspected plots. However, it is understood that the proposed research project was never implemented because the AntiTerrorism Branch was overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases it was having to deal with.

It is not clear whether the terrorists were more interested in the material for personal gratification or were drawn to child porn networks as a secure means of sending messages. In one case fewer than a dozen images were found; in another, 40,000.

British security sources confirmed that such a link had been discovered in several cases. They noted the contradiction between people supposedly devoted to theocracy and Islamic fundamentalism and their use of child pornography. “It shows that these people are very confused,” a source said. “Here they are hating Western decadence but actually making use of it and finding that they enjoy this stuff.”

Baroness Neville-Jones, Conservative security spokeswoman and former chairwoman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said: “The information about a possible link between extremism and child pornography potentially provides useful insight into three things: the methods that extremists use to communicate; the methods they use to target vulnerable people in society; and the techniques they seek to use to conceal their online activities.” She added: “There is no doubt that these possible linkages should merit further research.”

Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP and chairman of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, said: “This is an important development. We have to do more than just the police work. It needs child protection, criminological and psychological work. It could become a very important weapon in the fight against terrorism.” He urged researchers to review cases where terrorists had been convicted to look for this link.

The first British suspicions of a link between child sex abuse and jihadis emerged in London in 2006 when antiterrorism police in two unrelated investigations were shocked to find computerised images of hardcore child pornography. The key case that tipped off the security services to a plausible link involved the “White-chapel Rapist”, Abdul Makim Khalisadar. A former Mujahidin and a preacher at the East London Mosque, he was being examined for his links to a hardcore Islamic militant who was later convicted of terrorism. Khalisadar was never convicted of terrorist offences. The other investigation involved a young religiously observant Muslim.

The Times has learnt that a criminal investigation also found child pornography on computers after a raid in 2001 at a mosque run by an al-Qaeda recruiter in Milan. Italian police believe that the images were encoded with messages. At a forthcoming terrorism trial in Spain, the alleged mastermind of a Muslim cell has also been accused of downloading hundreds of child sex abuse pictures and videos.

Meanwhile, police uncovered a right-wing terrorist plot when they raided a home after being tipped off about pornographic images. This June, the Nazi sympathiser Martyn Gilleard was jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of terrorism. Police found 39,000 indecent images of children at his flat in Yorkshire.

Invisible ink for the internet age

— Messages may be concealed within digital images and audio, video or other files. The method is called steganography, derived from the Greek for “covered writing”

— Although the average person will not be able to detect the hidden messages by either listening to or viewing a file, the intended recipients can use applications to reverse the steganography process and gain access to the information

— Experts say that the advancement in encryption technology is outpacing the authorities’ abilities to monitor suspected terrorists and paedophiles

— Italian authorities uncovered files of child abuse images that had been manipulated by a terrorist cell after a raid on the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan in November 2001. Investigators claimed that the terrorist cell encoded the images before sending them to each other