U.K.: YOUNG BRIT MOSLEMS TARGETS FOR RECRUITMENT

Young British Muslims targeted by terrorist recruiters
Djallal Malti

LONDON -- Young British Muslims are the focus of Britain's security services, who fear that terrorist groups see them as their preferred target for recruitment.

Discussing the terrorist threat to Britain, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency, issued a stark warning last week.

"Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers," Manningham-Buller told academics at Queen Mary's College in London on Thursday.

"It is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalized and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow citizens or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield," she said.

Paul Wilkinson, a professor at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University in Scotland, agreed that young British Muslims were increasingly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.

The security services are worried "that there are considerable efforts being made by the extremist organizations to recruit further young people into the groups that are being trained and indoctrinated to carry out terrorist attacks," Wilkinson told AFP.

"I think that in the long term the most important thing we can do is to make sure that young people are not being lured into this...," he added.

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