MS Risk Blog

Colombia and ELN Begin Peace Negotiations

Last week, members of Colombia’s ELN left-wing rebel group and government negotiators began talks seeking to end more than five decades of conflict.

The negotiations were launched at a ceremony in the capital of Ecuador, Quito, where the talks will be held. Ecuador is hosting the first round of negotiations, with Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Norway and Venezuela acting as guarantors.   The chief ELN negotiator, Pablo Beltran, has urged both sides to rally around the points that united them and to leave aside their differences.   He further called on the rebels to officially suspend its kidnapping policy during the negotiations. The ELN relies on the ransom obtained from kidnappings to finance its activities. Mr Beltran disclosed that peace would not be achieved through more repression, adding “we need a political solution. We are willing to take responsibility for the mistakes we have made but we expect the other side to do the same.

The top government representative, Juan Camilo Restrepo, meanwhile disclosed that he expected to draw from the lessons of the negotiations with the FARC in order to reach a peace accord with the ELN. Both officials however agreed that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the country to achieve peace.

The ELN, or National Liberation Army, is Colombia’s second largest rebel group.   It was founded in 1964 with the stated aim of fighting Colombia’s unequal distribution of land and riches, which was inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959.   The talks were initially due to begin at the end of October last year however they were delayed as the Colombian government refused to sit down for formal negotiations while the rebels still held Odin Sanchez, a former congressman. Mr Sanchez was released on 2 February 2017 while on 6 February, the group released a solider it had been holding hostage for two weeks. The soldier, Freddy Moreno, was handed over to delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Arauca province.

The talks come just months after the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with Colombia’s largest rebel group, the FARC. In November 2016, the Colombian government signed a revised peace agreement with the country’s largest group, the FARC, after four years of negotiations in the Cuban capital, Havana. Members of the FARC have ben gathering in “transition zones,” where they are to demobilise and lay down their weapons under the supervision of United Nations monitors. According to government officials, the last of the FARC rebels are expected to reach the designated debilitation areas by 15 February.

France Once Again in the Grip of Islamic Terror

Last Friday (3 February), another attempted terrorist attack took place in Paris, when French soldiers shot and critically wounded a man who attacked them with a machete at the Louvre while shouting “Allah Akbar”. Reportedly, a group of four soldiers guarding the entrance of the Louvre shopping centre had refused him to entry with two backpacks. When the troops stopped him, he launched the attack, wounding one of the soldiers. Hundreds of visitors were inside the museum after the incident and were evacuated. According to the police, the man has been identified as Abdullah Reda Refaei al-Hamamy, a 29-year-old with Egyptian identity paper who arrived in France last month.

After initially refusing to talk, the man, who remains under arrest in hospital, has confirmed his identity. Agence France-Presse has reported that Hamamay had visited Turkey in 2015 and 2016. Afterwards, he entered in France on 26 January on a flight from Dubai and stayed at an apartment costing € 1,700 (£ 1,470) a week near the Champs Elysees that had been reserved last June, months before he applied for a tourist visa in October.
The man’s father, a retired Egyptian police general, said his son had never shown any signals of radicalisation. He said his son is a sale manager and also justified his stay in Paris as a business trip. According to his family, Hamamy was expected to go back to the Emirates soon, as he has a wife and a seven-months old son and they have accused French authorities of seeking to justify their shooting with false allegations.
No group has claimed the attempted attack so far, and no link to extremism was found during a search of the apartment. Moreover, after few days, Hamamy has broken the silence about his intentions, claiming that he acted of his own will and intended only to damage works of art at the gallery as a symbolic attack on France.
However, investigators do not fully believe his statements after they found out a series of tweets posted in Arabic few minutes be fore the assault was launched. In those posts, in which he exalted Allah and the creation of an Islamic State, he does not refer to ISIS by its Arabic acronym, Daesh, but used the phrase “Dawlat al-Islam”, which is commonly used to refer to the group’s territories by its supporters.
Egyptian officials, who are collaborating with French authorities, have declared that local security agencies are gathering information to help establish if he was a member of any militant groups or had been radicalised in the past. In the meantime, President Francois Holland has labelled the act as “clearly an act of terrorism” and prosecutors in Paris said they would ask judges to file preliminary charges of “attempted terrorist murder” and “terrorist criminal conspiracy”.
Since 2012 the country has struggled against Islamic terrorism, which has already caused 250 victims. A French mayor and member of the French National Assembly, Jaques Myard, has blamed the Schengen agreement, which allows traveling throughout much of the EU without border-controls. According to Mayard, France is in a dark place, as it has to face to threats: the threat of terrorists coming from abroad, and an internal threat, because of its large Muslims community. He reiterated that, although not all Muslims of course are radicals, over 10,000 of those could be radicalised across France. In those conditions it is impossible to really prevent anything, since it is impossible to have 100 per cent security everywhere. The only possible thing for citizens to do, Mayard added, is to be vigilant and always on guard, alerting the police every time they see something suspicious.

Security Advisory: Maritime – Gulf of Guinea (9 February 2017)

 Executive Summary

On 8 February 2017, the LPG tanker GAZ PROVIDENCE was attacked and boarded by pirates in the Bight of Bonny, 40 nautical miles south of Bonny Island, Nigeria. The vessel was approached by a motor skiff with armed men on board. The crew on board the vessel managed to send out a distress signal to the local authorities and the Nigerian Navy. The Nigerian navy dispatched the navy ship Okpabana to the scene, rescuing the vessel and all 21 crewmembers on board. All crewmembers have been reported safe. The pirates managed to flee the scene after stealing some valuables and cash. They did not cause sufficient damage to the vessel. The vessel headed to Port Harcourt, where it will be inspected before returning to service. An investigation of the incident is currently underway.

This incident comes after pirates kidnapped seven Russians and one Ukrainian crewmember after they attacked the cargo vessel BBC CARIBBEAN off the coast of Nigeria. The attack was confirmed late on 7 February 2017. 

Security Advisory

MS Risk continues to warn that the Gulf of Guinea region, and particularly waters off Nigeria, remain dangerous, and the threat of attack, hijacking and kidnapping remains very high.

Any vessels transiting this region are advised to remain on high alert at all times. Masters should increase watches and identify national assets in the region, such as warships or coast guard vessels that could be contacted in the event of an emergency. Crewmembers should remain vigilant and on the look out for any suspect vessels and actions should be taken in order to prepare all crewmembers in the event of an attack.

After several weeks of relative calm in this region, these two attacks are likely to encourage other pirate incidents.

CSIS Warns Energy Companies of Increased Risk of Cyber Espionage

According to a classified document, Canada’s main spy agency, CSIS, last year warned energy companies about an increase risk of cyber espionage and attacks on pipelines, oil storage and shipment facilities and power transmission towers using homemade explosives.

The warning, which was made in May last year by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) highlights an additional risk for the energy sector, where opposition to pipelines has increased in Canada and the United States. Reuters, which has seen the document under access-to-information law, has reported that it features speaking notes prepared for a CSIS briefing with energy and utilities sectors stakeholders, adding that an unidentified official specifies a threat from foreign state-owned firms looking for confidential information about investments or takeovers. The official disclosed in the document “you should expect your networks to be hit if you are involved in any significant financial interactions with certain foreign states.” The official went on to say in the document that the hackers would want information on anything from valuations to tax records and clients names. The official stated that the agency had collected evidence of such espionage in the past.  The document also warned that the sector was “vulnerable to explosives” and identified potential targets. In the document, the CSIS official referred to “terrorist attacks” since 2014 in Canada and abroad, stating that even large-scale attacks are “technically simple.”

The document, parts of which were obscured for security reasons, did not show the foreign states whose companies may be linked to industrial espionage or their purported Canadian victims. A spokeswoman for Public Safety Canada, which oversees CSIS, stated that there had been “growth in attempted cyber attacks,” however she declined to comment on the specific incidents or threats, citing the demands of privacy and national security.

In 2012, CSIS told the Canadian government that takeovers by Chinese companies may threaten national security. At the time, China’s state-owned CNOOC Ltd had bid for Canadian producer Nexen Inc. Last year, five oil pipelines carrying Canadian crude in the US were halted in coordinated attacks by environmental protesters. The attacks demonstrated the ease with which people with no technical expertise can disrupt the industry. While energy companies already use surveillance cameras, helicopters, remote sensors and drones in order to monitor some 119,00 km (74,000 miles) of pipelines across the country, which carry 3.4 million barrels of crude a day, and have an agreement to collaborate during an emergency, security experts and energy industry officials have said that it is impossible to lower the threat to zero.

CIA Releases 13 Million Pages of Declassified Documents Online

This month, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released about 13 million pages of declassified documents online. The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files, which had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland.

The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA. Documents that have been released online include the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousands of pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

The more unusual records that have been released are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying, but sometimes precise, accuracy, leading the researches to write that he “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.”

While most of the information has technically been publically available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access ass the records were only available on four computers located in the back of a library at the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day.