EGYPT: Movie star facing death threats for criticizing Hamas

Egyptian movie star Adel Imam has sparked a fuss by criticizing Hamas and holding it partially responsible for the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. His criticism of the Palestinian militant group has spurred radical Islamist leaders to issue a fatwa calling for Imam's execution.

Earlier this month, Imam told the independent daily al-Masry al-Youm:

“The Egyptian leadership warned the Palestinian leaders against Israeli attacks; however, they did not pay attention and fought a disproportionate war. It is better that Hamas stops what it is doing because Israel will not respond with flowers.”

Imam also criticized pro-Hamas demonstrations that erupted around the Arab world blaming Egypt for the blockade suffered by Hamas.

SYRIA: Notorious Islamist leader 'captured or killed'

Lebanon’s most notorious Islamic militant might have been captured or killed in Syria, according to a statement posted Monday on a website used by violent extremists.

Shaker Abssi, the leader of the Al Qaeda-inspired Fatah al Islam, might have been detained by Syrian authorities, but was most likely killed, said the statement reported by the U.S. monitoring service, SITE Intelligence Group:

"We don't know his fate, but we believe he probably was martyred, but we don't have solid evidence."

Abssi, a onetime leftist Palestinian guerrilla turned Islamic militant, had been on the run since his group was defeated in September 2007 by the Lebanese army at a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. The battle, which lasted for more than three months, led to the deaths of more than 400 people, including dozens of Palestinian civilians, 168 soldiers and 220 militants, according to officials.

The statement earlier this week said Abssi and two other members of his group were ambushed in Jermana, a small town south of Damascus, while trying to link up with veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies.

EGYPT: Former militant condemns Zawahiri as 'bloodthirsty'

Al Qaeda second in command Ayman Zawahiri is a bloodthirsty militant who exerts all possible effort to justify the killing of innocent civilians, according to his former partner with whom Zawahiri co-founded a notorious Islamic militant organization in Egypt three decades ago.

“Zawahiri finds it legitimate to kill anybody whose country fights Muslims,” said Sayed Imam, an iconic ideologue of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, on Monday in his new jailhouse treatise quoted in the independent daily Al Masry al Youm. Imam added that Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri are “bloodthirsty and remain determined to commit mass killings.”

The scathing treatise, published in sequels in the local press, seeks primarily to renounce violence and bash Al Qaeda. In today’s installment, Imam, who is serving a 25-year sentence, tears apart the logic of the religious fatwas Al Qaeda uses to rationalize the killing of civilians. 

“The killing of civilians in blocks, trains, markets, mosques or elsewhere is a declaration of impotence to face armies of enemy states and cowardice. Their impotence drew them to kill civilians who Islamic Sharia said should not be killed,” said Imam.

LEBANON: How the head of an Al Qaeda-inspired group fled the country

He has become a local Osama bin Laden, planning bomb attacks from his secret hideout and hurling threats against the Lebanese army through voice recordings.

But the mystery of his disappearance might be close to an end. In the last few days, new clues about the whereabouts of Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of an Al Qaeda-inspired group were revealed across the Lebanese media.

The 53-year-old Palestinian guerrilla allegedly managed to cross the Lebanese border into Syria after staying incognito for months at a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, media reports and security officials said. 

Abssi, along with hundreds of Islamic fighters, engaged in fierce battles against the Lebanese army during the summer of 2007 before being crushed at the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon. Almost 400 people, including militants and soldiers, were killed.

Authorities first believed that Abssi died during the battles after his wife and other clerics who had known him identified one of the corpses found in the battlefield as his. But DNA tests showed that the body in question did not belong to Abssi.

SYRIA: After years on the outs, Damascus and Beirut now partners

For more than three years, Lebanese officials and political leaders accused Syria of fostering instability in Lebanon. According to the Lebanese, Syria was plotting bomb attacks. Syria was dispatching “terrorists."  Syria was manipulating Lebanese politics.

Er, never mind.

Lebanon’s attitude toward the Syrians has now changed. And dramatically.

On Monday, Lebanon’s Interior Minister Ziad Baroud made a landmark visit to Damascus to discuss common security challenges facing both countries, especially the danger coming from radical Islamist groups. 

Baroud and his Syrian counterpart, Bassam Abdul-Majid, agreed to set up a commission "to put into place the basis of coordination in the fight against terrorism and crime," the two said in a statement read out to reporters after their meeting. 

The commission will be also tasked with “finding a joint mechanism for controlling the borders,” according to Syria’s official news agency, SANA.

SYRIA: Islamist radicals admit to Damascus bombing

The captured daughter of the head of an Al Qaeda-inspired group said her father received financial support from Saudi Arabian nationals as well as the main U.S.-backed Sunni Arab faction in Lebanon.

Wafa Abssi, daughter of the fugitive leader of Fatah al Islam, Shaker Abssi, was shown with other members of the radical Islamist group on Syrian state television Thursday confessing that they helped carry out a recent deadly attack in Damascus.

The Sept. 27 blast killed 17 people in a Shiite neighborhood of the Syrian capital and was the first such attack in decades to hit Syria.

Wafa Abssi, who wore a black headscarf, accused the Future Movement, the main Western-backed Lebanese Sunni political faction, of channeling funds to her father's militant group via a private bank.

In the summer of 2007, Fatah al Islam fought a fierce battle with the Lebanese military in a Palestinian refugee camp north of Lebanon. The clash claimed the lives of about 400 people, including Islamist fighters and soldiers. The group was blamed recently in Lebanon for recent bomb attacks against the Lebanese army.

LEBANON: Key 'terrorist cell' figure still at large

Lebanese security forces are hard pressed these days to track down a key member of an alleged Al Qaeda-inspired group.

Authorities arrested members of the “terrorist cell” in the northern coastal city Tripoli late last week, accusing them of carrying out two recent deadly bomb attacks against the Lebanese army.

According to local media reports, Abdel Ghani Ali Jawhar is a 25-year-old Lebanese whose brother was killed in fierce fighting between the military and Fatah al Islam, an Al Qaeda-linked Islamist group last year in northern Lebanon.

Officials and analysts believe Jawhar and his partners are seeking revenge from the army for its defeating of Fatah al Islam in the three-month battle that claimed the lives of around 400 people in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al Bared.

Jawhar's  whereabouts remain unknown, but some media reports quoted security sources as saying that he was hiding in the area of Baddawi, the location of another Palestinian refugee camp in the country's north. The reports said that Jawhar was trying to get to Ain al Helwe, a refugee camp in the south notorious for hosting extremist Islamist groups out of the reach of the country’s security apparatus.

SYRIA: Al Qaeda mastermind said to be captured

An intriguing morsel about the mysterious leader of a ferocious militant group has been floating around the Lebanese and Syrian media this weekend.

According to a report in the Arab-language Syrian newspaper Al Liwaa, Syrian officials captured the leader of the Al Qaeda-linked militant group Fatah al Islam two months ago in Syria.

The report, summarized in English here, says that Shaker Abssi, a former Libyan air force pilot turned radical Islamist, was captured in the poor Meliha district of southern Damascus and hauled off to prison.

Of Palestinian descent, Abssi, now about 53 years old, has led a storied life.

LEBANON: Will Syria invade or stay put?

Leaders of Lebanon's American-backed March 14 coalition have publicly voiced fears that Syria is planning to launch an invasion of their country on the pretext of clamping down on Islamic extremists based in the northern seaside city of Tripoli.

Security officials in Lebanon and Syria have accused such militant groups of responsibility for a pair of attacks in Tripoli and Damascus that have killed at least 24 people over the last week. Syrian President Bashar Assad has complained that northern Lebanon has become a hotbed for extreme Islamic groups.

The attacks followed Syria's decision to amass what some describe as thousands of troops along the Lebanese frontier. Damascus says it was to interdict smuggling. But former President Amin Gemayel, leader of the Christian Ketayeb movement said the troop deployment was “not innocent." 

Meanwhile, Saad Hariri, leader of the Sunni Future movement, accused Damascus of being responsible for the violence. He accused Syria of “infiltrating extremists to north Lebanon to carry out terrorist attacks targeting the Lebanese army and civilians."

Samir Geagea, leader of the Christian Lebanese Forces movement, went even further, saying that Assad was laying the groundwork for a return to Lebanon, which his military was forced to leave after a prolonged occupation ended in 2005.

In a television interview, he said Assad's charge that north Lebanon poses a threat to Syria's security is aimed at "setting the atmosphere for Syrian intervention in Lebanon."

LEBANON: Bomb design repeat of previous blast

The bomb that killed five people Monday morning in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli employed the same design as an August 13 attack on a bus in the same city that killed at least 12, most of them soldiers.

That's according to a ranking security official in northern Lebanon. He spoke to the Los Angeles Times on condition of anonymity.

He said the weapon was a small explosive charge surrounded by nails and ball bearings, meant to inflict maximum casualties. The official said the explosive charge was concealed under a civilian vehicle and likely activated by remote control, just like the August blast.

“The perpetrator is one,” he said. "The same exact method and technique was used in the previous attack."