LONDON — The police in Finland arrested Iraqi twin brothers on Tuesday suspected of being members of the Islamic State and of shooting 11 unarmed prisoners in Iraq in June 2014, Finnish news reports said Thursday.
Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation said on Thursday that the men had arrived in Finland in September and were arrested following an investigation. News reports said they did not resist arrest.
Finnish law enforcement officials did not specify whether the men had arrived as part of the influx of migrants to Europe from the Middle East and beyond. But the Finnish national broadcaster, Yle, reported that the men, age 23, were asylum seekers, and the arrests intensified concerns that terrorists were slipping into the stream of refugees in an effort to avoid detection by security forces.
Fears that Islamic radicals might be entering Europe posing as migrants were fanned in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris last month when the police discovered a Syrian passport near the body of one of the suicide bombers. The authorities said that the same passport or a copy of it had been used by a refugee to register on the Greek island of Leros in October, and then in Serbia and Croatia.
Like a number of other European countries, Finland has been taking steps to make the country a less attractive destination for migrants, who have long sought to reach the northern European nations with reputations for the most generous social welfare systems and most welcoming societies. The sheer scale of the refugee flow — roughly a million migrants have reached Germany alone this year — has overwhelmed Europe, and has led nations along the main migrant trail to restrict access to all but those coming from the most war-torn nations: Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/world/europe/finland-islamic-state-iraq-arrests.html?ref=world
