600 Bosnian cops raid Islamist village

Bosnian Islamists: Not fans of Obama or Israel apparently.

The largest police operation in Bosnia since the 1992-1995 civil war just took place… and it consisted of an armed raid by 600 police officers on a strange Wahhabi commune in the northeast.

Official word is fairly mum. The Bosnian State Prosecutor’s Office confirms a 600-officer raid on the village of Gornja Maoca, whose residents are adhere to Saudi-style Wahabbi Islam rather than the secular faith practiced by most Muslim Bosnians:

The isolated village is home to ethnic Bosnian families belonging to the Wahhabi sect – an austere brand of Sunni Islam promoted by extremists, including the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida fighters. Some of the villagers had fought in Bosnia’s war.

About 600 police officers raided the village looking for people suspected of “jeopardizing Bosnia’s constitutional order and spreading national, racial and religious hatred,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The spokesman for the Prosecutor’s Office, Boris Grubesic, said police detained several residents in the raid, without giving details.

Gornja Maoca’s residents refuse to send their children to public schools, in violation of Bosnian law, and have a communal ban on owning televisions or using telephones. The community’s leader, Nusrat Imamovic, runs a tight, creepy ship:

Imamovic, a naturalized Austrian citizen living between Vienna and the northern Bosnian village of Gornja Maoca, near the city of Brcko, founded and lead a small Wahhabi community which was closed to outsiders. Children in the community do not attend public schools, but are instead given lectures held by Imamovic in accordance with a Jordanian school program.

Imamovic became better known to the Bosnian public when he and six other Wahhabis, three of them naturalized Austrian citizens, assaulted Bosnian Serb Mihajlo Kisic in Brcko in 2006. After a short trial, the seven were given symbolic sentences and released on parole and some of them returned to Vienna. Among the seven was another Wahhabi cleric, Effendi Nedzad Balkan (also known as Ebu Muhammed), a Vienna-born Serbian Muslim, the leader of Vienna’s Sahaba Mosque and the alleged financier of Wahhabis in the Sandzak region of Serbia.

Furthermore, Imamovic is a close associate of Muhamed Porca, the imam of the Al-Tawhid Mosque in Vienna. Bosnian security services believe that Porca, a former Bosnian imam, is a key financial and ideological supporter of radical forces in Bosnia.

According to the BBC, the entire village has been under surveillance for years, apparently under suspicions of terrorist links. Founded on the site of a Serbian village that was depopulated in the 1992-1995 war, Gornja Maoca was previously linked to a string of attempted terrorist attacks in Italy. Residents were also linked to a number of apartments in Croatia and Italy that were stocked with explosives.

As these things go, the residents of Gornja Maoca also run a militant Islamist website. Put Vjernika (The Pilgrim’s Path) shows Barack Obama standing in front of an Israeli flag on its homepage, along with a banner logo of a blood-stained al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and armed Islamist soldiers carrying a black flag. For those who read Bosnian, here is the village’s response to the police raid.

For more from the Islamist fringes of the web, the Caucasian Mujahideen have also written about the raid.

But the big question remains… Why did the police raid happen now? What did the Bosnian authorities hope to find? Or hope to stop?