[Infowarrior] - Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile

[Richard Forno]

Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile
European Officials Say Traits of Suspected Islamic Extremists Are Constantly
Shifting

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 12, 2007; A01

ZUTPHEN, Netherlands -- On the surface, the young Dutch Moroccan mother
looked like an immigrant success story: She studied business in college,
hung out at the pub with her friends and was known for her fashionable taste
in clothes.

So residents of this 900-year-old river town were thrown for a loop last
year when Bouchra El-Hor, now 24, appeared in a British courtroom wearing
handcuffs under an all-encompassing black veil. Prosecutors said she had
covered up plans for a terrorist attack and wrote a letter offering to
sacrifice herself and her infant son as martyrs.

"We were flabbergasted to learn that she had become a fanatic," said Renee
Haantjes, a college instructor who recalled her as "a normal Dutch girl."

People in Zutphen may have been surprised, but terrorism suspects from
atypical backgrounds are becoming increasingly common in Western Europe.
With new plots surfacing every month, police across Europe are arresting
significant numbers of women, teenagers, white-skinned suspects and people
baptized as Christians -- groups that in the past were considered among the
least likely to embrace Islamic radicalism.

The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European
counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to
predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex,
ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more
irrelevant.

"It's very difficult to make a profile of terrorists," Tjibbe Joustra, the
Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism, said in an interview. "To
have a profile that you can recognize, so that you can predict, 'This guy is
going to be radical, perhaps he will cross the line into terrorism' -- that,
I think, is impossible."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/11/AR2007031101
618_pf.html