WASHINGTON - THE global jihad landed in Linda Spence's e-mail inbox during the summer of 2003, in the form of a message urging her to verify her eBay account information.
The 35-year-old New Jersey resident clicked on the link, which took her to a counterfeit eBay site where she unwittingly keyed in personal financial information.
Ultimately, Ms Spence's information wound up in the hands of a young man in Britain who, investigators said, was the brains behind a terrorist cell that sought to facilitate deadly bombing attacks against targets in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
The masters of online terrorism
Younis Tsouli, 23
THE computer expert and consummate hacker was born in Morocco and lived in west London. He is seen as the ringleader of the gang.
It was not until weeks after his arrest in October 2005, for inciting terrorism using the Internet, that police learned he was the individual who until then had been known to counter-terrorism officials only as 'Irhabi007', Arabic for 'Terrorist007'.
Tsouli, who called himself a 'jihadist James Bond', was thought to have hacked into dozens of websites.
He then used them to host huge computer files, mostly videos of beheadings and suicide bombings filmed in Iraq. He also spent a great deal of time creating and disseminating tutorials on hacking and hiding one's identity online.
He admitted conducting an online campaign urging Muslims to wage a holy war against non-believers.
On his laptop, the authorities said they found a folder named 'Washington' that contained short video clips of the US Capitol grounds, the World Bank building, a hazardous chemical response vehicle and fuel tank storage facilities in the Washington metropolitan region.
Also on the laptop were instant message chat logs and a PowerPoint presentation detailing how to construct a car bomb.
Judge Charles Openshaw, who sentenced Tsouli to 10 years' jail, recommended that he be deported to Morocco after serving his sentence.
Tariq Al-Daour, 21
If Tsouli was the ideological leader of the group, the UAE-born Al-Daour was the financier and logistics coordinator. The two had never met and had communicated only online, detectives said.
On one computer seized from Al-Daour's West London apartment, investigators said they found some 37,000 stolen credit card numbers.
Alongside each credit card record was other information on the ID theft victims, such as the account holder's address, date of birth, credit balances and limits.
The law student wa s jailed for 6-1/2 years.
Waseem Mughal, 24
THE biochemistry graduate was born in Britain and lived in Chatham in south-eastern England.
He was found with a computer containing a 26-minute video in Arabic featuring instructions on preparing a suicide bomb vest, along with a recipe for improvised explosives.
He received a jail sentence of 7-1/2 years.
WASHINGTON POST, REUTERS
Investigators say Ms Spence's stolen data made its way via the Internet black market for stolen identities to 21-year-old Tariq Al-Daour, one of three British residents who pleaded guilty this week to a terrorism charge of using the Internet to incite murder.
Much has been written about radical Islamic groups' use of the Internet to propagandise and recruit new members.
The British investigation, however, revealed a significant link between Islamic terrorist groups and cyber crime, and experts say security officials must do more to understand and confront cyber crime as part of any overall strategy for combating terrorism.
Investigators in the United States and Britain say the trio used computer viruses and stolen credit card accounts to set up a network of communication forums and websites that hosted everything from tutorials on computer hacking and bomb-making to videos of beheadings and suicide bombing attacks in Iraq.
'They were among a very small group of individuals who had successfully made the leap from ad hoc terror cell to something close to Al-Qaeda simply by using the Internet,' said counter-terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann, who runs GlobalTerrorAlert.com.
The authorities said another member of the trio, 24-year-old Waseem Mughal, was found with a computer containing a 26-minute video in Arabic featuring instructions on preparing a suicide bomb vest, along with a recipe for improvised explosives.
The third and perhaps most well-known member of the group, Moroccan-born Younes Tsouli, 23, grew adept at setting up sites to host massive video files and other propaganda.
Investigators said he eventually became the de facto administrator of the online jihadist forum Muntada al-Ansar al-Islami, at one time the main Internet public relations mouthpiece of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda's former leader in Iraq.
The three men this week became the first people to be convicted of inciting terrorist murder via the Internet after a two-month trial. They were sentenced on Thursday to prison terms ranging from 61/2 to 10 years.
Mr Kohlmann said the gang began in 2003 to lay the groundwork for the Internet strategy that terrorist organisations would adopt over the next few years.
According to documents obtained from British law enforcement officials, the three men used stolen credit card numbers to make purchases at hundreds of online stores, armed with shopping lists of items that fellow jihadists might need in the field.
The authorities also say the men laundered funds from stolen credit card accounts through more than a dozen gambling websites.
Investigators zeroed in on the group in October 2005, following a tip-off from the Bosnian authorities.
Officials there had just arrested Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year-old Swedish national of Bosnian origin, and Abdul Cesur, a 21-year-old Danish man of Turkish heritage, as the two were preparing for a bomb attack on European soil. Bektasevic had saved one of the British trio's phone numbers on his cellphone.
The two men were later convicted and sentenced to more than 13 years in prison.
Last March, US investigators arrested two men for allegedly working with Tsouli and others to produce the videos discovered on Tsouli's laptop.
Three months later, the Canadian authorities arrested 17 people and charged them with attempting to blow up targets in Canada.
Apparently, the men had all communicated with one another on a jihadist Internet message board.
'The power of the Internet means that people who don't ordinarily fit the terrorist profile can now be part and parcel of it,' said Mr Kohlmann.
Jihadist groups have since moved their Internet operations further underground. Experts said most of the major forums have consolidated their operations into a small number of password-protected forums known as the Al Fajr Centre.
Still, Tsouli's legacy lives on, said Ms Rita Katz, director and co-founder of Site Institute, which gathers intelligence on jihadist activity by monitoring online forums.
His hacking and anonymity tutorials are widely traded on jihadist forums, and variations of his online codename 'Irhabi007' - such as Irhabi008 and Irhabi009 - remain some of the most popular screen names on those sites.
WASHINGTON POST
'They were among a very small group of individuals who had successfully made the leap from ad hoc terror cell to something close to Al-Qaeda simply by using the Internet.' MR EVAN KOHLMANN, a counter-terrorism expert who runs GlobalTerrorAlert.com
