Terrorist, Al Qaeda | featured news

The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the two brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups — and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged. The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri said a film made in the United States mocking the Prophet Mohammad showed Washington was waging a "crusader Zionist war" against Muslims and he called for more protests outside American embassies.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that an affiliate of Al Qaeda in North Africa was behind the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans.

U.S. President Barack Obama's "secret wars" against al-Qaida are steadily widening, most notably in Africa, with the U.S. military's Special Forces Operation Command doubling in size and the CIA's strike capabilities undergoing a radical expansion, international analysts said.

The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said.

Steps were being taken to guard against a new threat of "body bombs" planted inside passengers aboard flights heading to the United States from overseas, a government official with knowledge of the threat said Tuesday.

Al-Qaeda it would release hostage Stephen Malcolm if cleric Abu Qatada were freed.

Four admitted terrorists cooperated with prosecutors in the trial of Adis Medunjanin, and their testimony provided an unusually human look at what drew them to Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda's core organization is likely incapable of carrying out another mass-casualty attack on the scale of September 11, 2001, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials said on Friday.