SA: Safe haven for al-Qaeda?
10/12/2002
Cape Town - South Africa could be providing a safe haven for al-Qaeda, from where the organisation - driven from European cells after 9/11 - can regroup, raise and launder money, and plan its next terror operation.
The American Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that there was mounting evidence of al-Qaeda's presence in SA.
Especially after last month's attacks in Kenya, there is growing concern among South African and American law enforcement officials that Islamic extremists, including al-Qaeda, "are using South Africa's open society as a safe haven", the Journal said.
The Journal quoted a senior US official as saying: "Our guys are taking a careful look again at South Africa. We are detecting so much smoke lately that something's got to be burning somewhere."
Reports are that various Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, are laundering money through SA, smuggling gold, diamonds and cash through its ports - especially Durban and neighbouring Mozambican ports - to Dubai and Pakistan.
Biochemical weapons
In particular, they are investigating the possibility that these groups are looking to obtain dangerous germs from South Africa's former biological warfare scientists.
The mysterious death of Major-General Tai Minnaar, a former army general, in September, highlighted this possibility.
Minnaar died after he was exposed to the same biochemical used by Dr Wouter Basson in Project Coast, Rapport reported on Sunday.
At the time of Minnaar's death, the police unit for crime against the state was investigating the possibility that anthrax was being sold to Arabs.
Intelligence circles allege Minnaar was helping the American CIA find out if Project Coast's biochemical weapons were being sold to al-Qaeda, Rapport said.
Minnaar and his fiancée, Romay Harding, allegedly kept anthrax in an ice cream tub in their fridge somewhere in a Pretoria suburb.
Two test tubes filled with the serum and hidden under ice and six cans of soda water in a cooler bag, were allegedly handed to a policeman.
The Journal quoted Gideon Jones, the FBI trained former head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the SAPS, as saying South Africa is "a perfect place to cool off, regroup and plan your finances. The communications and infrastructure are excellent ... and our law enforcement is over-stretched."
Dating back to 1997
Al-Qaeda's connections to South Africa apparently date back at least to September 1997, when an Islamic cleric from Pakistan, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzi, the "legal adviser" to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, visited South Africa to preach pro-Taliban, anti-American messages, the Journal said.
Shamzi is a key supporter of Osama bin Laden and backed the al-Qaeda leader's religious decree declaring war on Americans.
Investigators now suspect that Shamzi's trip to SA was aimed at expanding the Taliban/al-Qaeda network for future strategic purposes, including finding refuge for fleeing operatives.
In 1998, shortly after the bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania, Khamis Khalfan Mohamed, an al-Qaeda operative from Tanzania, fled to South Africa, using a false name and passport. He lived in South Africa until he was arrested in Cape Town in 1999 and extradited to the US.
"Given the fact that they already have done it once, we figure they may try it again," said the Scorpions' Sipho Mgwema.
'More fanatics'
Shortly after the recent Kenya attacks on an Israeli-owned hotel on the outskirts of Mombasa, the mayor of that city said that as far as he knew the real concentration of al-Qaeda on the continent was not in his country, but in South Africa.
"They have many more fanatics than we do," the Journal quoted him as saying.
A radical South African Muslim group, the Movement Against illegitimate Leaders, or Mail, last year claimed that 1 000 South Africans had gone to Pakistan and Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight against the US attacks on the country following September 11.
Mail also boasted that it had 2 000 men ready for jihad (holy war).
An independent consultant investigating organised crime in the Durban area, Jenny Irish, said many Pakistanis arrive in South Africa in transit from Dubai and Karachi and fail to make their connecting flights.
"They just disappear," she was quoted as saying by the Journal.
"We keep hearing about safe houses in the Durban area which process these people and move them on."
Gold
A recent mining report said the country loses an estimated 35 tons of gold a year from its mines, valued at about $350m.
Captain Danie Meyer of the South African Police Service's Gold and Diamond Enforcement Branch says most of the gold disappears in the direction of Dubai, which is suspected by American officials of being the hub of al-Qaeda's underground financial network.
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