HEADLINE: Worldwide arrests
BYLINE: Ed Blanche
BODY:
Security agencies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia have in recent weeks rounded up several groups of suspected followers of Osama bin Laden, alleged to be the central figure in a loose alliance of Islamic militants, in a series of interlocked operations that point to growing international co-operation against transnational
terrorism.
The dozens of suspects arrested in Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK were all part of a European network that the authorities have linked to Bin Laden. This was in turn connected to another group of Islamists on trial in the USA on charges of plotting a series of bomb attacks.
While these successes against Bin Laden's organisation, known as Al-Qaeda (The Base), together with increased electronic surveillance of his infrastructure and financial dealings, have hurt his operations, they have not diminished the danger he poses.
"Like any good terrorist, he's modified his approach and changed some of his standard operating procedures to reflect the increased scrutiny that his organisation has come under," said a senior US counterterrorism official.
Bin Laden, indicted by Washington for the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed 224 people, remains in Afghanistan under the protection of the fundamentalist Taliban. However, western security officials believe they have him rattled.
The genesis for several of the European security operations was a raid carried out by German police and the elite GSG9 anti-terrorist unit in Frankfurt on 26 December 2000, in which four militants - two Iraqis, an Algerian and a French Muslim - all members of the so- called 'Meliani Commando,' were captured. They had a cache of firearms and chemicals for making explosives. Despite these seizures the biggest prize was the discovery of an amateur video cassette of
the French city of Strasbourg where the European Parliament sits, leading investigators to believe that bombings in the city had been planned.
The alleged leader of the Meliani unit, a 40-year-old Algerian named Mohammad Bensakhria escaped the Frankfurt swoop. His fingerprints were found in the apartment rented by the unit. On 22 June, Spanish police, working with secret service operatives, arrested him in the southeastern city of Alicante. Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy
described Bensakhria as "one of the most wanted men pursued by western security services in recent months".
Spanish and French prosecutors say Bensakhria and his team had been trained in Afghanistan by Bin Laden's organisation. The Meliani unit had links with Islamic militants arrested in the UK and Italy earlier this year, according to official sources in Germany and Spain.
Bensakhria, who is also wanted by the USA and Interpol, is to be extradited to France. Its leading anti-terrorism judge, the redoubtable Jean-Louis Bruguiere, issued an international arrest warrant for him after interrogation of the Meliani activists caught in Frankfurt indicated that they were planning attacks in France.
According to intelligence sources, Bensakhria had stayed - illegally - in Strasbourg in May 2001 and was in Alicante waiting for a courier to bring him false documentation identifying him as a French citizen.
On 4-5 April, five Tunisians, connected to the Frankfurt cell, were arrested in Milan and the nearby town of Busto Arsizio by Italy's anti-terrorist brigade on suspicion of supplying weapons and false documents to Islamic militants operating in the UK, Germany, France and Belgium. A sixth man, an Algerian linked to the Meliani group,
was arrested in Germany.
Those arrested in Milan were believed to be part of a cell operating out of Gallarate in northern Italy that had planned an attack on the US Embassy on Rome's Via Veneto in January.
On 13 February, UK police arrested six Islamic militants, at least one of whom was believed to be a close associate of Bin Laden, after several months' surveillance. The police seized computer disks and false credit cards and identity documents. Among those arrested was Omar Abu Omar, a Jordanian linked to the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe
Islamique Arme - GIA), which is fighting the military-led government in Algeria's nine-year civil war.
Jordanian security officials say he was the paymaster of a network operating under Al-Qaeda's aegis, which had planned attacks against Americans in Jordan in late 1999. The Jordanians indicted 28 alleged Bin Laden operatives in 2000 - 12 of them in absentia - in that plot. Sixteen were sentenced to prison terms. Suspects were extradited to Amman from Syria and Pakistan.
However, western counter-terrorism officials said that investigation was most noteworthy for the treasure trove of computer disks the Jordanians uncovered. These, they said, contained details of Bin Laden training camps, logistics and financial operations. The disks also provided data that helped track and identify suspects in a bombing plot in the USA. On 28 February, the UK banned 21 organisations deemed to be fronts for terrorists, including those considered to have links with Bin Laden. More than half the groups
were Muslim.
On the same day that Bensakhria was arrested, 22 June, police in India announced they had arrested a fourth man on suspicion of involvement with a planned bomb attack on the US Embassy in the Chanakyapuri diplomatic enclave in New Delhi. The embassy's visa section, considered its most vulnerable point, was the target area.
The other three suspects, including a Sudanese and an Indian, had been arrested a week earlier with 6kg of RDX, detonators and timers, according to the Indian media. Police said the group was also suspected of plotting to attack the US mission in Dhaka, capital of neighbouring Bangladesh.
On 6 April, a Los Angeles court convicted Ahmad Ressam, an Algerian, on nine counts of terrorism for conspiring to bomb US cities as part of a so-called millennium plot, which President Bill Clinton attributed to Bin Laden in 2000. Ressam, 33, made legal history that day, for only hours earlier a French court had sentenced him in
absentia to five years in prison for belonging to an underground network supporting Islamic militants that stretched from Canada to Turkey. The computer disks seized in Jordan provided invaluable information for investigators.
French authorities said that the cell was linked to Bin Laden but those allegations were not addressed during the trial. Fateh Kamel, who holds Algerian and Canadian passports, was the cell's alleged ringleader and was sentenced to eight years behind bars. He was considered to be Ressam's link to the Islamists' clandestine network
in Europe, originally established by the outlawed GIA as a safe-house and gun-running operation.
Both men, and several other Algerians who were convicted in the Paris trial, were allegedly part of the so-called Roubaix Gang of Islamic militants - long pursued by the gun-toting magistrate Bruguiere. The gang was named after the town in northern France where it operated until the cell was broken up after a fierce gun battle with anti-terrorist police in March 1996 in which four suspected gang members were killed. Several suspects escaped and fled to Bosnia where they had earlier undergone military training
with Muslim forces.
Ressam and Kamel allegedly trained in Afghanistan at camps run by Bin Laden in 1998-99. Police surveillance photos produced during the Paris trial showed Kamel, who had been extradited from Jordan in March 2000, in a Milan safe house run by Islamic militants, providing yet another link between the various cells operating in western Europe.
Ressam was arrested in the USA on 14 December 1999, when he arrived from Canada aboard a ferry driving a car carrying 58kg of high explosives and bomb-making materials allegedly intended for bombing Los Angeles International Airport and other US targets. The alleged mastermind of that plot, Algerian Abdelmajid Dahoumane, was arrested in Algiers in March when he arrived from Afghanistan. He is expected
to stand trial in Algeria.
Coming hard on the heels of the conviction of four Islamists in New York on 29 May for the East Africa embassy bombings, the first US conviction of anyone linked to Bin Laden, the two trials were seen as a major breakthrough in the war against transnational terrorism.
More trials of suspects in the embassy bombings are scheduled.
Faced with a prison sentence of up to 140 years, Ressam agreed to testify against one of his alleged accomplices in the millennium plot, another Algerian emigre from Montreal, Mokhtar Haouari, in return for leniency in sentencing. By breaking 17 months of silence since his arrest, prosecutors in the USA and France are hoping he will shed some light on the secretive world of transnational terrorism and particularly on Bin Laden's operations.
Nevertheless, the Italian magistrate who spearheaded his country's swoops in April, Stefano Dambruso, is the first to admit that the immense difficulties in rooting out such cells. The Milan cell, he believes, was linked to 40-50 other activists spread across Europe.
"Islamic terrorism in Europe is a deeply rooted phenomenon," he said. "Every investigation takes away only a small part of the members and weapons of each cell... It's simply impossible to determine how many members these networks have... Islamic terrorism in Europe... regenerates itself continuously."
Despite the enormity of the task the Europeans face, their successes in recent months reflects the growing co-ordination between their police forces and intelligence agencies in tracking down Islamist cells. In each of the operations listed above, officials acknowledged this co-operation and the unprecedented degree of intelligence-sharing.
Washington, aided by several defectors from Bin Laden's group, is also finally spreading its international anti-terrorist network now that the continental USA has become a target. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) now has some 45 bureaux in foreign capitals and the Central Intelligence Agency is intensifying its counterterrorism
operations. The USA has taken a renewed interest in Algeria since President Abdulaziz Bouteflika was elected, with military backing, in April 1999 and in particular since Ressam and other Algerians were arrested at the end of that year for the millennium bombing plot.
That marked the first time the GIA, founded by Algerian veterans of the 1979-89 Afghan war against the Soviets, had extended its operations beyond western Europe, raising concern they had been drawn into Bin Laden's orbit. It is significant that the GIA has never targeted US citizens in Algeria, although the group has been blamed for the murder of some 120 foreigners since 1992. So the apparent willingness of some of its activists to bomb US cities
indicates a threat from that quarter that had not existed before. Early in 2001, FBI director, Louis Freeh, visited Algiers to seek closer co-operation with Algerian intelligence. |
