Algerian faces US extradition demand

‘Jihad Jane’ plot to assassinate Swedish artist

DUBLIN, Feb 28, (AP): An Algerian man wanted by American authorities over the abortive “Jihad Jane” plot to assassinate a Swedish artist was arrested while leaving an Irish courthouse Wednesday and could face US extradition demands within hours.

Ali Charaf Damache, 47, had just walked free from a court in Waterford, southeast Ireland, after three years in an Irish prison when detectives acting on an American extradition warrant rearrested and escorted him, handcuffed, to an unmarked police car. Court officials said his extradition proceedings could begin Thursday in Dublin High Court.

The FBI and US Justice Department accuse Damache of being the ringleader behind an unrealized 2009 conspiracy to target artist Lars Vilks in Sweden over his series of drawings depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) as a dog. Muslim extremists in Iraq had offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who killed Vilks, who was never attacked.

US prosecutors say Damache, who has lived in Ireland since 2000, recruited two US women via jihadist web sites to help him target Vilks. One of the women who billed herself as “Jihad Jane,” Colleen LaRose, was arrested by the FBI soon after she returned from Ireland in September 2009. Damache married the other woman, Jamie Paulin Ramirez, in a Muslim ceremony on the day she arrived in Ireland from Colorado that same month. Ramirez and Damache were arrested in their Waterford home in March 2010; she voluntarily returned to the United States to face charges there. Both LaRose, now 49, and Ramirez, now 34, have pleaded guilty — LaRose to conspiring to kill Vilks, Ramirez to lesser charges of aiding terrorists — and are imprisoned in the United States pending their sentencing, which has been repeatedly delayed. LaRose faces up to life in prison, Ramirez a maximum 15 years.

Irish detectives investigating Damache’s links to both women trawled his telephone records and discovered he had telephoned a Michigan attorney, Majed Moughni, the lead organizer of an Arab-American protest in Detroit called to denounce Islamic extremists. Moughni told police he received a telephoned death threat the day after that January 2010 demonstration — and taped it.