What would an al Qaeda Mumbai like plot look like in Europe? Thanks to great investigative reporting by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and one of its fine reporters, Yassin Musharbash, we have now a plausible scenario. A team trained in Pakistan by al Qaeda and LeT specialists and made up of al Qaeda fanatics recruited from disaffected Muslims in Europe would split up and attack two or three soft targets in several European cities at the same time. These could be hotels, restaurants, and Jewish sites, like the ones LeT targeted in Mumbai. In addition to killing innocents, the al Qaeda teams would take hostages, barricade themselves in with small arms, and prepare for hostage negotiations. Let’s assume they strike in Hamburg, Strasbourg, and Antwerp, with four or five terrorists at each site—big cities with lots of easy soft targets where the world press would be on the scene in minutes.
What might al Qaeda demand in exchange for hostages? According to Der Spiegel, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind of 9/11, and the other detainees still in Guantanamo, Cuba. Al Qaeda has long had its eyes on the Guantanamo detainees and often promised to avenge their imprisonment. Just this last June, Osama bin Laden, issued a message promising that if KSM is ever sentenced to death, al Qaeda would make American captives pay. Was this an indirect warning that al Qaeda is prepared to take captives to trade for his release?
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