Norway will refuse Jordan’s request for the extradition of the suspected leader of an Iraqi Kurdish Islamist extremist group unless Amman can provide more information on the drug-trafficking charges against him, officials said Thursday. “We need more information before we can take this case to the courts to establish whether there is probable cause for his extradition,” Norwegian chief prosecutor Lasse Qvigstad told AFP. He said he had asked the Norwegian foreign ministry to request more information from Jordan. Mullah Krekar, 46, is the suspected leader of Ansar al-Islam, or “Supporters of Islam,” an extremist alliance of Muslim guerrillas that was holed up in the remote mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan but was wiped out by US and Kurdish troops in the Iraq war. Prior to the war, the United States accused Ansar al-Islam of having links to al-Qaeda and the regime of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Jordanian authorities have claimed that Mullah Krekar began smuggling heroin to compensate for money it used to receive from al-Qaeda before the September 11 attacks on the United States. Full Story
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