Update: 7:00 pm EST-Atlanta …bomber believed by some to be Ted Nugent (witnesses said to note whiff of bowel…a Nugent trademark)
…by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor
OK Folks, As I had said earlier we expected this to be a moving story and it is. Above is all we have now, a photo on a phony Michigan license with a fake address of a Louisiana casino. We now have a white dude of no visible Mid Eastern origin.
“The bomber was said to be 36 years old and had been in the country for between four and seven days before the attack, Reuters reported…Officials are still trying to determine how the alleged bomber triggered the explosion. “
“He either had turned with his backpack toward the bus when he exploded it or pretended he was one of the group putting his backpack in the baggage compartment under the bus,” according to a Bulgarian official with knowledge of the investigation who spoke with the New York Times. “Video footage clearly shows him in the airport earlier wandering back and forth, following the group, looking nervous.” …Haaretz
Earlier reports had stated that the U.S. Passport was fake. I have found no U.S. official statement from law enforcement yet other than a second party quote that nothing in the ID recovered was in U.S. databases.
One question that no one seems to be asking today, is where is Mr. Gezhali? One would think that his parents or he might want to have contacted authorities with the massive media on this to donate their rather important information to the investigation.
But whoever did this, alone or with a group, these killings will lead to more killings, with almost a 100% assurance that those that really need to be killed won’t be. Maybe the cowardly killers will figure out one day that the elitists of all varieties could not care less over the deaths of we random victims.
On the contrary, they take advantage of these situations to lock down on us even harder. Violence is always a win win for them, and a lose lose for us.
There is no need for me to get in front of this story…but I have a whiff of MK Ultra in my nostrils. This looks like a double bomb, back and front. Suspicious me, the way he has it hanging in front of him like a laptop bag, and his hands in his pockets on a detonator, or two.
There is almost an OK Corral gunslinger demeanor here. “C’mon. You want a piece of me… C’mon.” The adrenalin pumping through this guy is something the rest of us will fortunately never know. For all those who have hunted…and been hunted…you know, that Twilight Zone moment where even gravity takes a break.
Official reports of the video footage said he looked nervous. Ah…yeah. He was about to kill a bunch of people and die. In Israel, at their airport…they would have spotted this guy. Guaranteed.
Guys like the crotch bomber that Israeli security let through the Amsterdam airport?….that of course was an ops. And we know, that they know, that we know. And the American authorities know that we know they know. So we have a big game of chicken going on here. “Wha-da-ya gonna do about it?”
I will post all new breaking news at the top of the article.
ATTN: Mehdi Ghezali. If you are still alive and see this please contact us by email. We would like to set up a radio interview. Thanks.
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[First Release Story Below with Videos]
Mehdi Ghezali – Ex-Gitmo detainee, Fake American Passport and Driver’s License, but Real Swedish One.
Dear Folks, I am going to keep editing this as new information flows in today so check back for updates.
But a quick read here is we have a young guy traveling around a lot with no visible means of support, obviously on somebody’s string, but whose…and why?
Yesterday the Netanyahoo quick draw blame on Iran (and of course tying in Hezbollah) seemed to ready, too canned…and sloppy.
Tying the bombing to the 18th anniversary of a previous Argentina attack, for example, also seemed a stretch…and a hurried one.
We were also surprised that a bomb could get on an Israeli bus with kids as they usually travel with security.
From the video of this guy and his backpack it appears that he walked onto the bus, a huge breach of security to have someone not with the group to be able to get on with them.
A security guy would be right at the door checking off names on a list to make sure all the kids were accounted for…standard procedure, no exceptions, period.
I can assure you that heads will role on whoever was in charge of their security. They would have known every kid by sight. A stranger getting on carrying a huge backpack??? No way folks.
Expect a lot more on this as there will be huge pressure back in Israel to find out how a bomber with a Gitmo track record just walked onto the bus…or…was walked on.
The suspect’s ID appears to be coming from the bomber remains (fingerprints) and what he was carrying and allow quick database connections to his past. This guy had an extensive wrap sheet. See below his Wiki bio.
The no fly list never appears to have been a problem for this guy…strange when you see how extensive his profile is. And yet we have people at VT on the no fly list just as a punishment for speaking out on terrorism. Go figure.
He could have been a suicide bomber, or… sucked into a plan to plant the bomb and then having it remotely detonated with him in the bus to eliminate any later interrogations when he was caught.
It would not be the first time that trick has been pulled on some disposable schmuck.
While we have tons of info pouring out on Mehdi Ghezali today there is still a complete media lock down on Hillary Clinton’s convoy in Israel getting shot up.
We are still waiting for the first call from mass media, as we do on so many stories they seem to miss.But back here on the VT farm it became our number one story in a day, and in just the last hour got a 1000 reads. Welcome to that world.
[youtube pg3KZdCpAH8]
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…from The Times of Israel
Bulgarian media on Thursday named the suicide bomber who blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists, killing five Israelis and a local bus driver, in the Black Sea resort of Burgas on Wednesday as Mehdi Ghezali.
There was no independent confirmation of the veracity of the information. The reports surfaced soon after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly accused Hezbollah, directed by Iran, of responsibility for the bombing. The Prime Minister’s Office made no comment on the reports.
The Bulgarian reports, rapidly picked up by Hebrew media, posited various versions of how the bomber had detonated the bomb, including the suggestion that the bomber had not intended to die in the blast, but may have wanted to place the bomb on the bus and flee.
Ghezali was reportedly a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.
Earlier on Thursday the Bulgarian police released a brief video clip that claimed to show the suicide bomber, responsible for Wednesday’s terror attack on a tour bus full of Israeli citizens, walking around shortly before the blast at Burgas International Airport.
The Bulgarian news agency Sofia reported that the bomber was carrying an American passport and Michigan driver’s license, both believed to be forgeries.
Sofia also reported that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry managed to recover the fingerprints of the bomber, which they submitted to the FBI in the United States and the international police organization Interpol. The FBI and CIA joined Israeli and Bulgarian officials in investigating the attack.
Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told Sofia that DNA tests were being run to determine the identity of the Caucasian man, who the minister described as casually dressed with nothing suspicious about his appearance to set him apart from the crowd of people at the airport.
The ministry did not indicate how the police came to the conclusion that the man was the suicide bomber.
…from Wikipedia
Mehdi Mohammad Ghezali (Arabic: مهدي محمد غزالي) (born 5 July 1979),
Mehdi Ghezali was born in Botkyrka, Stockholm, and grew up in Örebro, the son of an Algerian immigrant and a Finnish woman.[7] He finished secondary studies in 1999 and trained as a welder. He was suspected of theft the same year, but left the country and could not be questioned by the Swedish police.
When police officers visited Ghezali’s father he stated that Ghezali had left for Algeria in order to complete his military service, however Ghezali had traveled to Portugal, supposedly to pursue a career as a football player.
Ghezali was apprehended by the Portuguese police in the Algarve region of Portugal on 31 July 1999 for a suspected bank robbery and a jewelry theft together with his partner Stavros Christos Toilos. The bank robbery in Albufeira netted 600,000 euros while the jewelry theft in Playe de la Galé netted 5,000 euros.[8] Ghezali and his partner were released from prison on 12 June 2000 after having spent 10 months in a Portuguese prison without being charged, and returned to Sweden.
Ghezali then traveled to Medina in Saudi Arabia to study at the university.[citation needed] However, he was not accepted and returned to Sweden in March or April 2001 for a brief period before travelling to London where he studied at the madrasah of the Muslim cleric Omar Bakri.[citation needed]
He then traveled to Pakistan in the summer of 2001 in order to study at one of the madrasahs situated there.[citation needed] After failing to gain acceptance into any of the madrasahs he then travelled to Afghanistan, where he according to his own statements stayed with a family in Jalalabad. Ghezali stated that:[9] “I lived a simple life, playing with the children and seeing how Afghans lived.”
According to media reports Ghezali stayed at “Algerian House“, supposedly a known hideout for al-Qaeda in Jalalabad.[7] Information gleaned from interrogations with the captured terrorist Ahmed Ressam described “Algerian House” as a part of a training camp known as “biot al-ansar“, or the house of sympathisers.[citation needed]
At the first level sympathisers are given ideological indoctrination and basic weapons training before al-Qaeda leaders determine which sympathisers are to advance to the next level within the organization.
After the Armed Forces of the United States together with the Afghan Northern Alliance initiated a bombing campaign on the Tora Bora mountains a large number of al-Qaeda sympathisers and others in the affected areas fled southward to Pakistan. Mehdi Ghezali was captured by local warlords in Pakistan in the Tora Bora mountains which are close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then handed over to the U.S. Armed Forces which transported him to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on Cuba where Ghezali was held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.
During his stay at Guantanamo Bay Ghezali was visited by representatives of the Swedish government (February 2002, January and July 2003 and January 2004) and was informed that he had been assigned an attorney in Sweden (Peter Althin) and that his case had been brought up in inter-governmental contacts and had been featured on several occasions in the Swedish media. Ghezali supposedly refused to discuss what he was doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the agents of the Swedish government.[10]
On 15 May 2006 the United States Department of Defense released a list of all the individuals who had been held in military custody in their Guantanamo Bay detainment camps. That list gives Ghezali’s Guantanamo detainee ID as 166.[11] The DoD lists his place of birth as Stockholm.
After being held as an enemy combatant for 930 days Ghezali was released into the custody of the Swedish government on 8 July 2004 since he was no longer considered a threat to the United States, since he had no information that was of interest to the American Intelligence Service and since he had not committed a crime which could be proven in a military court.[12] Ghezali was transported home by the Swedish Air Force on a Gulfstream IV jet, at the expense of the Swedish government (estimated at 500 000 – 600 000 Swedish kronor).
Initially Swedish prosecutors stated that they would press charges against him for crimes committed prior to Ghezali’s departure from Sweden, but they were subsequently dropped. There were also threats made against Ghezali, it was perceived that the Swedish government had given Ghezali too much help.[9]
Ghezali was the subject of the English-language documentary Gitmo – The New Rules of War. A film about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp by film director Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh[13]
An article in the Boston Globe, on detainees who had returned to battlefield following their release, mentioned Ghezali. The article said Ghezali was being “monitored by Swedish intelligence agents“.[14] Ghezali has also stated in his book that he feels he is being intensely monitored by the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO), both in his home and when he moves around. He claims that the surveillance has caused him to feel depressed.[15]
After his release Ghezali criticized the Swedish government for not helping him sufficiently and denied having been told that he was assigned an attorney or being informed of actions taken on his behalf by the Swedish government, however this was refuted by the Swedish foreign ministry which had documented their meetings with Ghezali.[16] It has been suggested by a psychologist that Ghezali’s recollection of events might have been affected by the stress of capture and detention.[17]
Ghezali has also made statements describing his stay at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. He claims to have been subject to torture such as sleep deprivation and made to sit in an interrogation room for thirteen hours in a row. He is planning a class-action lawsuit against the USA.[9] He has together with Gösta Hultén published a book, Fånge på Guantánamo : Mehdi Ghezali berättar (Prisoner on Guantanamo: Mehdi Ghezali tells) ISBN 91-7343-086-2, in which he chronicles his experiences.
Ghezali has not answered any questions regarding his activities in Afghanistan, possible connections to al-Qaeda and previous criminal activities. At a press conference following his return to Sweden Ghezali said the following about the al-Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden:[18]
Ghezali’s refusal to reveal what he was doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been highlighted in Swedish media and was brought up in the context of his stay at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.[19]
Ghezali was also suspected of having participated in a prison uprising in Pakistan, where 17 people (including seven prison guards) were killed. Ghezali and 47 other prisoners were being transported in a bus when the guards were overpowered and the prisoners fled into the wilderness. The majority of the prisoners were captured again, and were facing execution for their participation in the uprising.
After an intervention from the United States the threat of execution was withdrawn and Ghezali was taken into U.S. custody. When questioned about the prison uprising at the press conference following his release Ghezali denied having any knowledge of or participation in the prison uprising.[20]
On 4 July 2006, Ghezali made his first public appearance since his release at a demonstration held outside the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden. Ghezali and approximately 60 others called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay facility. Ghezali, who declined to answer any questions from reporters, and the other demonstrators also appeared in support of Oussama Kassir, the Swedish citizen at the time being held in the Czech Republic for alleged involvement with al-Qaeda.[21]
Ghezali is reported to have dropped his suit against the US government.[22] According to The Muslim News: “The Swede eventually found a [U.S.] firm willing to take the case on, but it dropped out shortly before the deadline for bringing a case expired.”
2009 arrest and release in Pakistan
On 10 September 2009, the Swedish television programme Rapport reported that Ghezali was among a group of twelve foreign citizens who had been arrested one week earlier in the Dera Ghazi Khan District in Punjab, Pakistan, on suspicions of having ties to al-Qaeda.[2][3][23][24][25][26][27] Pakistani security officials reported the 12 men were captured on 28 August 2009.
Among the twelve arrested men, three (including Ghezali) were Swedish, seven were Turkish, one was Russian and another one was an Iranian citizen.[24] According to the Pakistani police chief Mohammad Rizwan, the individuals were arrested when they were trying to sneak into the Punjab province through a checkpoint.[24] A
ccording to Rizwan, the police had found CDs, exchange money and literature which all indicated links to terrorist activity.[24] Following their arrest, Ghezali and the two other Swedish citizens were moved to Islamabad.[23] Rizwan described Ghezali as “a very dangerous man”.
Ghezali’s attorney, Anton Strand response to the news that Ghezali was reported to have been captured was: “Yes, I’m surprised by it. One should remember that Ghezali has traveled in that region previously and he has an interest in the region. He is religious and has friends and contacts.”[27]
Swedish newspaper, The Local quoted Gösta Hultén, the author of a book on Ghezali, who said that Ghezali’s father believed he was on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.[27] He reported that Ghezali had called from Saudi Arabia “a few days ago” — which would be about a week after Pakistani authorities reported the ten men were captured.
According to Hultén: “The father is very upset about the allegations that Mehdi has ties to Al-Qaeda. He has already been cleared from those suspicions once.”
On 13 September 2009 Swedish officials confirmed that Pakistan had apprehended three Swedish citizens.[28][29] But they declined to comment further on their identity.
On 16 September 2009 two of Ghezali’s traveling companions were identified.[30] He was reported to have been captured with “28-year-old Munir Awad and 19-year-old Safia Benaouda, and their two and a half-year-old boy.” The most recent allegations state the four Swedes were traveling to Miranshah in Waziristan, to meet Zahir Noor, alleged to be a Taliban leader. Ghezali is reported to have explained that the group were traveling to Lahore to participate in what Swedish newspaper The Local described as “a harmless meeting with a Muslim revivalist movement, Tablighi Jamaat.”
The Swedes were released on 10 October 2009.[31][32][33] They were placed on a plane to Sweden at 800 GMT. Rehman Malik Pakistan’s Minister of the Interior had told Swedish diplomats on 6 October 2009 that he would be receiving a formal report on the Swedes on 7 October 2009, and that he would make a decision about their continued detention at that point. Swedish paper The Local reported one additional anonymous allegation, that the group “were found in a prohibited area near a nuclear power facility.”
Ulrika Sundberg, the Swedish Ambassador, accompanied the Swedes to their flight.[31]
As of the time of their release Swedish officials had still not received a formal report from Pakistan explaining why the four were detained.[31]
During a 23 November 2009 press conference Ghezali’s lawyers offered more details of the trip.[34][35][36] The asserted that Ghezali and his companions had made a last minute decision, during a tour of middle eastern countries, to alter their plans to include Pakistan in their itinerary. They were told by their tour coordinator that the visas for travel within Pakistan could be arranged upon their arrival.
His lawyers expressed concern that Swedish intelligence officials continued to keep Ghezali under surveillance. They expressed concern that the press speculation that his travel to Pakistan had been inspired by support for jihadism was unfair and unsupported by any evidence.
Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.
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