AQ: Premature Suicide Edition

Doesn't sound like such a great recruitment tool for al Qaeda, does it? Suicide prematurely whether you like it or not. We are talking plague. You know, the kind that spreads rapidly and kills horribly. This story first surfaced in The Sun, now the Washington Times gets some confirmation on the biological or chemical weapons experiment turned deadly:

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday.

The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria.

He said authorities in the first week of January intercepted an urgent communication between the leadership of al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda's leadership in the tribal region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. The communication suggested that an area sealed to prevent leakage of a biological or chemical substance had been breached, according to the official.

"We don't know if this is biological or chemical," the official said.

As the Robb/Silverman commission concluded, they have been working on this stuff since the 90's. There is some discussion it might have spread beyond this cell, as al Qaeda uses human couriers to evade higher-tech surveillance. The Algerian cell was apparently working on unconventional weapons to target Europe. More from the Counterterrorism Blog.