Brazilian group swears allegiance to ISIS and says it is ready to train "martyrs".
The Brazilian radical group Ansar al-Khilafah Brazil declared its support for the Islamic State through a Telegram channel and pledged allegiance to extremist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdad; the group posted that "if the French police couldn't stop the attacks in France, the training given to the Brazilian police won't work" and said its members are "prepared for the sacrifice of becoming martyrs"; this was the first time a South American group pledged allegiance to ISIS.
247, with Ansa - A radical Brazilian group declared its support for the Islamic State through a Telegram channel. According to Rita Katz, director of the NGO SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors terrorist activities on the internet, the group, calling itself Ansar al-Khilafah Brazil, swore allegiance to the extremist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdad and wrote a threat in Arabic: "If the French police couldn't stop the attacks in France, the training given to the Brazilian police will be useless."
According to SITE, the Brazilian group Ansar al-Khilafah Brazil posted that its members are "prepared for the sacrifice of becoming martyrs." According to Rita Katz, this was the first time a group from South America had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Katz stated on Twitter that the situation is "worrying: Islamic State channels in Western languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, German, etc.) have shown a drastic increase in activity."
When contacted by the press, neither the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) nor the Institutional Security Office commented on the matter. Last week, the French newspaper Liberation reported that European security authorities had identified a threat of an attack in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympics, allegedly carried out by a Brazilian. At the time, the Minister of Defense, Raul Jungmann, said there was no real threat to the security of the games.