Hours before police averted last week's attacks, an internet forum featured a message telling Islamists to "Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed".
Al-Hesbah is one of the most important online meeting places for al-Qaeda operatives and supporters, according to experts. They say the members-only message board is used by Sunni militants to post messages and videos documenting their fight against the West.
Yigal Carmon of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), which reports on Islamist activity, has described al-Hesbah as being one of the "five major Islamist websites in the world".
At 8.09am last Thursday, 17 hours before the bomb near
Piccadilly Circus was found, a 300-word posting by Abu Osama
al-Hazeen appeared on al-Hesbah telling other users to rejoice. The
forum has previously featured tributes to jihadists as well as
hints on how to safely donate money to Islamist causes
without detection.
Rita Katz, director of the Site institute, which monitors
international terrorism, told the US House of Representatives in
February that al-Hesbah was used by terrorists. She said that this
year the forum announced that one of its members had carried out a
successful suicide attack in Iraq and that another
had been killed fighting US forces in Baghdad.
Memri reported last October that a posting on al-Hesbah called for protests against Apple after it erected a glass cube, "clearly meant to provoke Muslims", outside a store in New York. The post called the cube "a blatant insult to Muslims" for its likeness to the Ka'aba, Islam's holiest site. - ( Guardian service )