(Washington) The United States on Friday removed five groups from its blacklist of “foreign terrorist organizations”, including the disbanded Basque separatist movement ETA and the Japanese Aum sect, after years without violence.
Posted at 1:05 p.m.
ETA, a group long active in Spain and France, where it has committed numerous attacks, is accused of being responsible for the deaths of more than 820 people but dissolved itself in 2018, eight years after having decreed a ceasefire -fire.
The Jewish extremist group Kahane Chai, linked to former rabbi Meir Kahane, as well as the Palestinian jihadist organization Mujahideen Shura Council around Jerusalem are among the movements removed from the list, as previously reported by the state department.
The others are Aum Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth), the Japanese sect whose members carried out the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, and the Egyptian Islamist group Jamaa islamiya, once led by the “blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahmane, who died in prison in the United States.
The inclusion of these groups on this blacklist had enabled Washington to impose draconian sanctions on them, in particular financial ones.
The regular review required by US law has determined that these movements “are no longer engaged in terrorism or terrorist activities, and no longer have the capacity or the intention to do so”, US diplomacy said. in a press release.
She believes that this is a recognition of the “success of Egypt, Israel, Japan and Spain in removing the terrorist threat from these groups”.
Removing these organizations from the US State Department’s blacklist does not mean that they are permanently cleared by the United States. They remain at this stage on another list, that of the US Treasury, which also allows sanctions, although less restrictive.