Not-So-Friendly Skies
James Carafano /
On Monday evening, Dutch authorities detained Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi (of Detroit) and Hezem al Murisi when their United Airlines flight from Chicago landed in Amsterdam. It’s always a big mistake to jump to “instant analysis” based on preliminary press reports. But it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise if these two men turn out to have had bad intent.
Al Soofi and al Murisi are suspected of making a dry run for a future terrorist attack. Dry runs are common in the terrorism trade. Terrorists are a relatively scarce asset. They like predictability. They like to know the security they’ll be facing and the likelihood they can pull off a successful operation.
Nor is it surprising to find terrorists departing from the United States rather than heading to it. It has been all the fashion lately. David Coleman Headley, a Chicago-based Pakistani-American, was dispatched from the U.S. to scout out terrorist targets in Mumbai. In June, two New Jersey men — Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almont — were arrested at JFK as they were allegedly heading to join al Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia. (more…)