A four-year old crafts website was invaded by Islamist terrorists who filled it with hidden files filled with the radical writings of a top aide to Osama bin Laden, including “The International Islamic Resistance Call,” Abu Musab al-Suri’s 1,600-page manifesto advocating jehad, reports The Detroit News.



The website was hacked a year ago by followers of Suri, a Syrian-born Al Qaeda leader, who turned the website into an online reading room for aspiring mujahadeen, the specialists said.



A link to the hidden files on the website was circulated on bulletin boards frequented by Muslim extremists for a year, said Jarret Brachman, director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.



Regular visitors to www.carriagehouseglass.com could never see the hidden material, specialists said. Only visitors who knew the address of the pages inside could access the cache of downloadable Arabic writings, and see the flash animation featuring the Kaaba, the black stone cube that Muslims face when they pray in Mecca.



Brachman and other researchers had been aware of the files, but said the intrusion onto the site was not unusual in the burgeoning world of online Islamic extremism. “This is a very tangential, very peripheral site that only those who are actively following this sort of literature would be accessing,” Brachman said. “It doesn’t cause me alarm: these guys are pests in terms of this stuff,” he said. “This is standard procedure for these guys to post this kind of material.”



Piggybacking on Carriage House Glass, which is password-protected, allowed extremists to avoid using a credit card or other traceable data needed to start a new website, said Rita Katz, director of the Search for International Terrorist Entities in New York. “Of course, it’s a disturbing phenomenon, but we know that Al Qaeda and the jihadist online community is quite sophisticated, and they use our own techniques against us,” Katz said. “It’s disturbing because it could happen to anyone.”



As more terrorist training grounds shut down globally, more extremists are going online, said Steven R. Corman, an Arizona State University professor who has studied the shift.