Tuesday night at two a.m. the police arrested nine young men in the ghetto Vollsmose in Odense, Demnark's third largest city. The men, aged from 17 to 33 are all muslims (one is a Danish convert) are suspected of planning a terrorist action and the police believed an attack was eminent. After a 12 hour long preliminary hearing the low court judge imprisoned two of the defendants for four weeks (that was appealled by the defence) and opheld the arrest of five others for three days, while two where released..
So far so good. Now here's the strange part: Police say they informed the leading imam in Vollsmose just prior to the operation and that he was present at some of the arrests.
(I suppose the next time the cops crack down on organized crime, say the Hells Angels, they'll wake up the Bishop of Copenhagen in the middle of the the night and have him present at the arrests. Then again, probably not. But I digress.)
Now, this cleric is not just anybody. His name is Mohamad Al-Khaled Samha, also known as Abu Bashar. He works as a prison imam in the maximum security prison Nyborg Statsfængsel, and is known for his radical views on Islam. (Rumor has it that the prison is in effect taken over by the muslim inmates, but I don't have the contacts to confirm that.) Bashar was born in Syria and has spent the last 12 years in Denmark and have gained Danish citizenship.
He is a leading member of The Islamic Faith Community and was one of the Travelling Imams who through their lies and desceptions sparked the Mohammed cartoon-crisis earlier this year. He showed the infamous "Pig Picture" as "proof" of the apartheitnesque enviroment in Denmark.
There is some sort of link between him and the German would-be train bombers: Abu Bashar's phone number was stored on one of the German suspects cellphone and he had a train ticket to Odense, when he was apprehended in Kiel, a few miles from the Danish border. Danish Intelligence Service (PET) dismisses any connection between the Germans and the arrests in Denmark. Abu Bashar says he have not been questioned by PET on the issue, and that his "number is in the book and anyone can look it up"!
The day before the Odense arrests he stated that Denmark is a natural target for terror because of the Motoons and the Danish presence in Iraq. (Link in Danish)
I worry that a terror-atack might be targeted at Denmark because there are Danish soldiers in Iraq and I worry what Al-Qaida might do if Denmark does not pull the troops home.I may be paranoid, but that sounds a lot like a go-ahead order to me.
So, summing up, what we have here is a man who has commited high treason by travelling through the Mid-east showing off false cartoons in order to stir up trouble against his new homeland (he should have tried doing that to his old homeland, Syria; Assad would have him in front of a firing squad within 24 hours. But then of course Bashir knows that.) He's somehow linked to a terrorist plot in Germany, if nothing else one of the terrorists knew him. He knows some of the arrested suspects in Odense, he was even present at their arrest, he is rumoured to de facto run the prison in Nyborg which is holding some of the most hard-core criminals in Denmark, and he is a well-known islamist.
And yet he is the very man PET chooses to cooperate with when he really should be locked up somewhere in a lightened cell, being forced to listening to Whigfield until he cracks! (personally I would would spill the beans within five minutes if I had to listen to Whigfield. I'm more of a Stones-man myself.)
So why is PET in bed with this scumbag? Perhaps it's part of some kind of divide-and-conquor strategy. One can only hope so.