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His view that Israeli, U.S. and U.K. interests are legitimate targets raises concerns any Westerners could be targeted

“IK leader Doku Khamatovich Umarov is a fervent Islamist who espouses AQ’s [Al-Qaeda’s] ideology of global jihad,” wrote ITAC, a joint agency comprised of members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, RCMP and other security agencies. “His view that Israeli, U.S. and U.K. interests are legitimate targets raises concerns any Westerners could be targeted.”

The Russian government has said it is trying to guarantee the games will be safe, and plans to use CCTV cameras and drones to keep watch on Sochi, but the Canadian report shows the security challenges it faces.

The threat of terrorism has loomed over the Olympics since 1972, when the Palestinian Black September faction murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich summer games.

During the 1996 summer games, two people died and 111 were injured in a bombing at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. Eric Rudolph said he did it to embarrass the U.S. government for allowing “abortion on demand.”

But while some terrorist groups view the Olympics as an opportunity to gain world attention for their causes, the events tend to have blanket security, making it less likely an attack will succeed.

Security is a particular concern for Sochi, a city on the Black Sea close to a region of Southern Russia where a bloody Islamist insurgency with its roots in the Chechnya war has been waged.

In addition to attacking Russian security forces, the IK is blamed for the bombing of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in 2011, the 2010 bombing of the Moscow subway and a 2009 train bombing that killed 27. One of the Canadian intelligence reports says the IK was also behind the 2004 massacre of 186 children at a school in Beslan, about 400 kilometres east of Sochi.

While he had called off the targeting of civilians in February 2012 amid bad publicity, Umarov lifted his moratorium six months ago and called for attacks on the Sochi Olympics, urging “maximum force … to disrupt these satanic games.”

According to a summary of the video in one of the intelligence reports, he said: “They plan to hold the Olympics on the bones of our ancestors, on the bones of many, many dead Muslims buried on our land by the Black Sea. We as mujahedin [soldiers of God] are required not to allow that, using any methods that Allah allows us.”

The report said Russia’s Federal Security Service was “implementing security measures” and that local press had reported there would be increased security checks at major train stations. A “Safe Sochi” program, involving “a coordination centre channeling information from around the region,” was also reportedly being set up, it said.