The Controller: How Basil Hassan Launched Islamic State Terror into the Skies.

• Author: Albaek, Mette Mayli

One day in February 2013, the bell rang at the home of well-known historian and Islam critic Lars Hedegaard on a residential street in Copenhagen. It was a mailman delivering a parcel, and Hedegaard went down to the front door to receive it. According to the police, the mailman drew a gun and fired a shot at close range that barely missed Hedegaard's right ear. They got into a scuffle, and the assailant fled on foot. (1)

Danish police believe Basil Hassan, a radicalized Danish-Lebanese engineering graduate, was the fake mailman. But by the time, weeks later, that they established he was a suspect (which they would keep secret as their investigations progressed), (a) Hassan had left the country to embark on the next stage of a terrorist career that would see him become one of the most dangerous Islamic State international attack operatives.

This article tells the story of Hassan's path to terrorism, his role in building up the Islamic State's drone-warfare program, and his orchestration of the Islamic State's 2017 Sydney airline plot. (2) It also tells the story of the multi-year investigation by Danish police and security services, which eventually shut down the drone procurement network and put several of Hassan's accomplices behind bars. This article is based on a two-year investigative report by the authors for DR, the Danish public broadcaster, that included reporting inside Syria and Iraq, as well as in Turkey, Denmark, other European countries, and the United States. These efforts culminated in the broadcast of two documentaries, a 16-episode podcast series, and the publication of a series of news reports in 2019. (3) The article draws on hundreds of pages of transcripts from the trial of Hassan's drone procurement accomplices in Denmark, which was attended by the authors and resulted in three individuals--Fady Mohammed, Coskun Simsir, and Umut Olgun--being convicted in December 2019. (b) It also draws on dozens of interviews with close associates of Hassan as well as law enforcement and counterterrorism officials in Denmark, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. (4)

The Making of an Assassin

On a summer's day in 1987, in a housing project in the medium-sized provincial Danish town of Askeroed near Copenhagen, Basil Hassan--the youngest of three children--was born. (5) As a child, Hassan played soccer in the yard and Donkey Kong on his Game Boy with the other boys. The Hassans were moderate Muslims, and their home seemed open and loving. When Basil Hassan was a teenager, the family moved to the multicultural district of Norrebro in Copenhagen. Hassan did well in high school and was popular, however, he and one particular schoolmate drew attention. Hassan and his friend, Rawand Taher, sometimes dressed in Islamic clothing, and they eagerly discussed religion during breaks and warned their classmates against being non-believers. (6)

In their 2006 school yearbook, their classmates jokingly predicted that the two friends would end up as the leaders of "the new Islamic State" and that the Danish intelligence service should "watch out." (7) Ironically, Hassan and his friend would become top Islamic State terrorists less than a decade later. Taher became front-page news in Denmark when he was killed in 2015 in a targeted U.S. drone strike in Syria. (8)

In a 2006 class photo, Hassan and Taher are seen standing side by side, smiling. By that time, Hassan had started frequenting Islamist circles in the Greater Copenhagen area, and several of Hassan's acquaintances had been arrested in the first Danish jihadi terrorism case after 9/11. In late 2005, Danish authorities charged four people in the Copenhagen suburb of Glostrup with terrorism offenses. Hassan was questioned as a witness, making it clear that he has been on the Danish Intelligence and Security Service's (PET) radar since at least 2006. In fact, because of his close relations to several convicted Danish jihadis, PET tried to recruit Hassan as an informant in 2011, but he rejected them several times. (9)

In the Glostrup case, Abdul Basit Abu-Lifa, a 17-year-old friend of Basil Hassan, received a seven-year sentence for planning terrorism. The Glostrup case was connected to a group of Islamist extremists in Bosnia, which included several people from Scandinavia. One of them was a young Turkish man called Abdulkadir Cesur, who had befriended Hassan while living in Denmark. Cesur was arrested in Bosnia in October 2005 and in 2007 received a 13-year sentence for traveling "to Sarajevo to carry out a terrorist attack on the territory of Bosnia or another European country." (10) The sentence was later reduced to six years and four months. (11) Danish investigators believe that years later, Cesur played a key role in Hassan's Islamic State drone procurement network. (12)

While some of his friends went to prison for terrorism, Hassan got into engineering school. He was technically adept and loved gadgets, and people close to him in his teenage years recount how he tried to hack other people's computer systems. He was also security conscious, taping over his laptop camera and avoiding speaking near telephones. (13)

In 2010, Basil Hassan received his engineering degree from the Technical University of Denmark, but he wanted to learn other skills. Among other things, he started training to become a pilot. The Danish intelligence agency PET believes that the skills Hassan was acquiring later helped propel him into his role for the Islamic State. (14)

Linking Up with the Islamic State

After the February 2013 assassination attempt, Basil Hassan fled by train to Germany and then took a flight to Turkey. In the years that followed, he alternately stayed there, in Lebanon, and in Syria. (15)

It is not clear how or when Hassan was recruited into the Islamic State, but five of the individuals convicted for their role in the Glostrup-Sarajevo network are believed to have become closely involved with the group. Danish investigators believe this helped pave the way for Hassan to join the group. The risk he took in attempting to kill Hedegaard likely not only gave him a certain cachet among jihadis but could have contributed to him being trusted by the Islamic State as well as helped him into a senior operational position.

Hassan had kept in touch with the Sarajevo terrorist plotter Cesur since 2010 and visited him in prison in Bosnia, and when Cesur was released early and moved to Turkey, their friendship continued. While Basil Hassan was being hunted by the Danish police, he stayed with Cesur in Turkey, among other places. The Danish intelligence services believe they can link Cesur to the Islamic State through the terrorist organization's internal documents that were found in the possession of Hassan's Danish terrorist network. Some of these documents were discovered on a USB flash drive and others on several hard drives. (16)

Another of Hassan's friends from the Glostrup-Sarajevo case, Abu Lifa, joined the Islamic State after being released from prison in 2010, according to Danish authorities. (17c)

According to Bosnian authorities, two Bosnians who were convicted for their role in the Sarajevo group--Bajro Ikanovic (18) and Senad Hasanovic--went to Syria in 2013, (19) and there are many photos online of the two posing with weapons alongside the Islamic State. (20) The Atlantic reported that prior to his death in the spring of 2016, Ikanovic was the leader of the biggest Islamic State military training camp in northern Syria. (21) He is also believed to have been close to the Georgian Islamic State senior leader Omar al-Shishani. (22)

Mirsad Bektasevic, a Swedish national who was convicted for his role in the Sarajevo group, also developed ties to the Islamic State. In 2017, he was convicted in Greece of having joined the Islamic State and intending to go to Syria with weapons. (23)

The Spreadsheet of Drone Purchases

Within months of Hassan becoming a suspect, Danish police began monitoring Basil Hassan's travel pattern in the Middle East, his bank accounts, and his friends in Denmark. In the fall of 2013, the police were alerted when Hassan purchased numerous parts for model planes and gadgets for simple drones through various Danish and non-Danish websites. Investigations eventually established that Hassan was the one setting up the network and pulling the strings. He had the equipment delivered to various Danish addresses, and then his friends went to the post office and sent it on to Basil Hassan in Turkey or Lebanon, often packed with chocolate, children's clothes, or potato chips. (24) According to court documents filed by Danish prosecutors, Basil Hassan made sure the equipment ended up with the Islamic State. (25) At the time, police were not sure of the intended purpose of the equipment. Only later did it become apparent that he was making purchases for what would evolve into the Islamic State's drone program. (26)

The purchases were meticulously recorded in an electronic spreadsheet that the Danish investigators believe was created by Hassan and named "Expenses and tracking"--a document that the Danish police later found during an April 2014 search in Copenhagen targeted against what would later turn out to be accomplices in Hassan's drone network. In the document, Basil Hassan had recorded the parcel tracking numbers, purchase invoices, and prices of the drone parts, and the accounts show that Hassan from the fall of 2013 until his arrest in the spring of 2014 was responsible for purchasing model plane parts amounting to more than $120,000. (27d)

According to testimony provided by military drone experts at the 2019 trial, the purchases show that Basil Hassan and the people around him were experimenting with and developing an advanced and professional drone program. They were buying individual parts for building drones such as remote controls, propellers, current regulators, and speed controllers. (28)

According to the analysis of Danish...