As the toll of the three wildfires in California continues to mount it is being reported that arson is suspected as the cause of the conflagration. More than 800 homes have been destroyed and 28,000 people have fled in the face of the hellish inferno, which sounds like the plan Al-Qaeda was floating on Islamist message boards late in October:

From The Daily Express:

ISLAMIC extremists are threatening an environmental disaster by sparking a series of catastrophic wild fires.

Western intelligence agencies fear that Al Qaeda terrorists are planning a “global fireball” in a new departure in its war on the West.

Deliberately lighting forest blazes in Europe, the US and Australia would not only stretch emergency services but leave insurance companies facing multi-billion pound damage bills as the credit crunch bites.

The fires would also create a pollution disaster, with billions tons of climate change gases escaping into the atmosphere.

The so-called “forest jihad” is being championed by Islamic scholars and Osama Bin Laden’s terror strategists who believe setting fire to dry woodlands will produce maximum damage for minimum risk.

Western security services have picked up internet chatter which spells out in graphic terms the terrorists’ thinking.

One message warns: “Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organisation were to claim responsibility for the forest fires. You can hardly begin to imagine the level of fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia and in Australia.”

[…]

In one warning picked up by monitoring services, exponents of the forest jihad declared: “Scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands.”

California has had several suspicious fires in the last few years, and in a state struggling with a broken economy these fires are particularly devastating.

Adam Housely is all over this story. Breitbart and Fox have more.