A city with a long history of Jewish Torah scholarship is the latest place to experience the discovery of a local Islamic terror ring.
Police raided an apartment in Vilnius (Vilna) Monday, acting on intelligence information that weapons and Jihadist literature were being stored there.
Three Lithuanian Muslims were arrested on terror-related charges when police raided the apartment, which was being used as a makeshift mosque. The Baltic BNC network said literature and pamphlets inciting violence and providing logistical information for terrorist attacks were discovered in the prayer room.
Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, is home to 30,000 of Lithuania’s 110,000 Muslims. Lithuania, a former Soviet-bloc country with a population of 3.6 million people, joined European Union in May 2004. Recent investigations into the proliferation of nuclear materials have pointed to Lithuania as a major site of nuclear smuggling.
Before the Holocaust, Vilnius was nearly half Jewish, home to 100,000 Jews, with 240,000 more living in the surrounding countryside. Vilnius, famous for the revered Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman, was home to 105 synagogues at one point. 90 percent of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and there are only 6,500 Jews remaining in the country today – 5,000 of whom live in Vilnius.
Last year, Jewish cemeteries in the Lithuanian towns of Vilnius, Plunge, Kaunas and Kursena from the 17th century and onward were desecrated and vandalized.
IslamOnline quotes a study done by the ‘Helsinki Human Rights Group’ saying that Islam is expected to become one of the main religions in Lithuania within 20-30 years. Lithuania has twelve mosques as well as an established Islamic group working to gain new converts to Islam. According to IslamOnline, a large number of Catholic Christians and other non-Muslim Lithuanians have embraced Islam over the past years.
Police raided an apartment in Vilnius (Vilna) Monday, acting on intelligence information that weapons and Jihadist literature were being stored there.
Three Lithuanian Muslims were arrested on terror-related charges when police raided the apartment, which was being used as a makeshift mosque. The Baltic BNC network said literature and pamphlets inciting violence and providing logistical information for terrorist attacks were discovered in the prayer room.
Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, is home to 30,000 of Lithuania’s 110,000 Muslims. Lithuania, a former Soviet-bloc country with a population of 3.6 million people, joined European Union in May 2004. Recent investigations into the proliferation of nuclear materials have pointed to Lithuania as a major site of nuclear smuggling.
Before the Holocaust, Vilnius was nearly half Jewish, home to 100,000 Jews, with 240,000 more living in the surrounding countryside. Vilnius, famous for the revered Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman, was home to 105 synagogues at one point. 90 percent of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and there are only 6,500 Jews remaining in the country today – 5,000 of whom live in Vilnius.
Last year, Jewish cemeteries in the Lithuanian towns of Vilnius, Plunge, Kaunas and Kursena from the 17th century and onward were desecrated and vandalized.
IslamOnline quotes a study done by the ‘Helsinki Human Rights Group’ saying that Islam is expected to become one of the main religions in Lithuania within 20-30 years. Lithuania has twelve mosques as well as an established Islamic group working to gain new converts to Islam. According to IslamOnline, a large number of Catholic Christians and other non-Muslim Lithuanians have embraced Islam over the past years.