Global terrorism thread

The Monster with 21 Faces sent its first letter on May 10, 1984, to the giant food company Ezaki Glico following the kidnapping and escape of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of Glico. The letter stated it had laced $21 million worth of the company's confections with potassium cyanide soda, and it later threatened to put them on store shelves. None of these poisoned candies were found, but Glico products were removed from stores, resulting in a loss of more than $20 million and the laying off of 450 part-time workers.

Threatening letters with white powder suspected to be potassium cyanide were recently sent to a total of 18 companies, police sources said Tuesday.

The letters include those delivered to the Tokyo headquarters of major dailies the Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun, and offices of drugmakers in Tokyo, Osaka and Hokkaido, according to the sources.

Letters to the Tokyo-based companies contained messages threatening to produce and distribute fake drugs, they said.

A letter sent to the Asahi on Friday threatened to distribute drugs laced with potassium cyanide, a highly toxic substance, unless Bitcoin worth 35 million South Korean won (about ¥3.4 million) was paid, the newspaper said. It did not say to whom the money should be paid. A similar envelope was delivered last week to the Mainichi’s Tokyo offices.

According to NHK, police identified some of the powder as potassium cyanide.

Some of the letters were sent under the names of former senior members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, including its guru, Shoko Asahara, who were executed last year for a series of crimes including the deadly 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department and others are investigating the cases on suspicion of attempted extortion.

The police suspect that the threatening letters were sent by a single person or entity, given the similarity of their content, the source said.

Shamima Begum - the schoolgirl who fled London to join the Islamic State group in Syria - has said she never wanted to be an IS "poster girl".

Ms Begum told the BBC she wants the UK's forgiveness, adding: "I actually do support some British values."

She said it was "wrong" innocent people died in the Manchester attack, but added: "It's a two-way thing... kind of retaliation" because IS was targeted.

Ms Begum, 19, left Bethnal Green four years ago with two school friends.

The actions of the women attracted a mass of publicity at the time and there has been more debate about Ms Begum's plight since she was found in a Syrian refugee camp by the Times newspaper last week after reportedly leaving Baghuz, IS's last stronghold in the country.

She has since given birth to a baby boy and says she now wants to return to the UK.

In an interview with the BBC's Middle East correspondent Quentin Sommerville on Monday, Ms Begum said: "I don't actually agree with everything they've done.

"I actually do support some British values and I am willing to go back to the UK and settle back again and rehabilitate and that stuff."

She said: "The poster girl thing was not my choice."

When it was suggested that her going to Syria might have been a "propaganda victory" for IS, Ms Begum said: "I did hear a lot of people were encouraged to come after, but I wasn't the one who put myself on the news."

She said she was "the one who made the choice" to come to Syria, adding: "Even though I was only 15 years old, I could make my own decisions...

"But I will admit, it's my fault right now. I just want forgiveness really, from the UK. Everything I've been through, I didn't expect I would go through that.

"Losing my children the way I lost them, I don't want to lose this baby as well and this is really not a place to raise children, this camp."

Fair justification

Asked about the Manchester Arena attack in 2017 in which 22 people - some of them children - were killed in a bombing claimed by IS, she said: "I do feel that is wrong. Innocent people did get killed."

She said: "It's one thing to kill a soldier, it's fine, it's self-defence. But to kill people like women and children just like the women and children in Baghuz who are being killed right now unjustly by the bombings - it's a two-way thing really...

"This is kind of retaliation. Their justification was that it was retaliation so I thought that is a fair justification."

Ms Begum said she is sorry to all the families who have lost people because of the attacks in the UK and other countries.

"That wasn't fair on them," she said. "They weren't fighting anyone. They weren't causing any harm. But neither was I and neither were other women who are being killed right now back in Baghuz."

Earlier, the lawyer representing Ms Begum's family said she is "damaged" and will need mental health support.

Tasnime Akunjee also said her family are prepared to raise her newborn baby away from "IS thinking".

He said Ms Begum - who is legally British - had still not been in contact with her family and the family are trying to get the government to provide travel documents for Ms Begum and her newborn son, who he said has a right to citizenship.

"The family fully expect her to be quite damaged and so they would want an assessment around Shamima, and also as much help around her mental health and recalibration effectively into normal thinking as possible," said Mr Akunjee.

"In terms of any criminal proceedings, that's something she invariably will face depending on what evidence is against her."

Ms Begum left the UK February 2015 with two other schoolgirls, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase. Kadiza is thought to have died when a house was blown up, and the fate of Amira is unknown.

Mr Akunjee also called for an "urgent inquiry" into how Ms Begum and the other schoolgirls were able to travel to Syria.

Previously, Ms Begum said she escaped from Baghuz, Islamic State's last stronghold in eastern Syria, two weeks ago.

Her husband, a Dutch convert to Islam, is thought to have surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters.

Under international law, the UK is obliged to let a Briton without the claim to another nationality return home.

But the government does not have consular staff in Syria, and says it will not risk any lives to help Britons who have joined a banned terrorist group.

If Ms Begum is able to reach a British consulate in a recognised country, it is thought security chiefs could "manage" her return.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid wrote a comment piece in the Sunday Times and said he would "not hesitate" to prevent the return of Britons who travelled to join IS.

Meanwhile, Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick has said it is "incredibly complicated" to stop IS brides.

She said police try to stop people travelling when officers know they are "travelling with ill-intent".

Ms Dick was on ITV's Good Morning Britain where she responded to a report in the Times newspaper claiming that, in a separate case, a schoolgirl who was stopped as she was about to catch a flight to join Islamic State in December 2014 was never prosecuted.

Europe is beefing up its rules to keep terrorists from making homemade bombs with domestic products.

The pressure to tighten restrictions is growing thanks to the return of hundreds of fighters from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, and fears they may use their bomb-making skills in Europe.

The European Commission, along with the Parliament and Council, agreed to toughen up a 2013 regulation by ending national schemes that allowed people to buy chemicals that could be used to make bombs simply by showing an ID card. The final text was approved by EU ambassadors last week, and it still has to be signed off by the Parliament's plenary.

The rules, which should go into effect around the end of 2020, will now require businesses to report "suspicious" sales of some substances within 24 hours — and the change expands them to include online sales platforms like Amazon and eBay.

New substances can be added to the list of banned substances in an effort to keep up with terrorists' innovations.

"You’re never going to be able to 100 percent prevent access," said Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, an NGO. "It’s about increasing the hurdles for terrorists to get to the stuff."

The changes came because the EU recognized that existing rules are too porous. A 2017 European Commission appraisal found that its current regulation “does not guarantee a sufficient level of protection of the safety of the general public.”

Homemade explosives were used in the "vast majority of terrorist attacks in the EU," the appraisal found, including Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015, Brussels in 2016, and Manchester in 2017.