Sheikh Nazem Abu Salim AKA Abu Osama al-Nasseri has been arrested in Nazaret, Israel, along with an associate. He is the Imam of the Shihab Al-Din Mosque in Nazareth, and heads the "Jama'at Ansar Allah - Bayt Al-Maqdis - Al-Nasira" organization.
Yefim Weinstein was 54 years old and working as a cab driver in northern Israel when he was murdered by three of the Sheikh's followers in 2009. Two of the killers subsequently fled to Africa, where they were captured crossing the Kenya/Somalia border in an attempt to join up with al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabaab.
Numerous other followers of the Sheikh are already in custody, and the cases feature a mix of real-world and online radicalization, social network building, psychological conditioning, and training. Plots tracing back to Nazareth include a plan to assassinate President Bush (II) in Jerusalem, and a plan to kidnap a Christian man in Nazareth and videotape his murder by decapitation (for subsequent release on jihadi websites). In addition, the Sheikh's followers perpetrated a series of arsons and robberies in and around Nazareth.
The "Jama'at Ansar Allah" has maintained a web presence of its own on-and-off since at least 2004, with sites and documents which they publicize in the leading jihadi forums of the day. The activities of Sheikh Abu Salim were well known within Israel no later than October 2005.
In memory of Yefim Weinstein I would like to offer up three archives from the early days of the "Jama'at Ansar Allah" in the hope that perhaps something can be learned from them in light of subsequent events.
In some cases you may need to manually instruct your browser to use Arabic-Windows encoding in order to view archived web pages.
Moving forwards, the Jama'at Ansar Allah continue to operate a website, now called muslim48.com and hosted on a server in Israel.
See also:
Shin Bet arrests two Israeli Arabs for plotting terror
3 Nazareth men with links to global jihad charged with cabbie's murder
A Salafi-Jihadi Hub in Nazareth: Imam Abu Osama Al-Nasiri and the Shihab Al-Din Mosque in Nazareth
The Focal Point of Activity of the Concept of Global Jihad in Nazareth
Posted on 06 October 2010 @ 22:44© 2003-2011 society for internet research