Europe takes new tack on terror
Patrick E. Tyler The New York Times
Thursday, April 8, 2004
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Authorities are using pre-emptive arrests to avert attacks
LONDON With a new threat of terrorism coursing through Europe, intelligence and police authorities say they are acting more aggressively, with greater emphasis on pre-emptive action to roll up networks of Islamic militants whose members may not have committed crimes, but who have the skills or ideological resolve for violence.
In the wake of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, and the suicidal confrontation in that city between a holdout band of Moroccan extremists and the Spanish police over the weekend, Europeans have felt increasing alarm at the prospect of a new wave of terrorism in the region.
In national capitals and the European Union headquarters in Brussels, political leaders are under pressure to respond. Huge anti-terror sweeps and arrests have followed in Britain, Belgium and France, and related arrests have been made in Canada and Saudi Arabia.
Intelligence monitoring of international communications has intensified, but investigators say connections to the "terrorist central" that Al Qaeda once represented no longer seem so important for some groups that identify with the cause but have their own skills and resources.
Police also see homegrown cells of extremists in Europe reaching out to international networks for expertise or guidance. They could be oblivious to other cells, perhaps in other immigrant communities, of hardened "jihadists" - holy warriors who served their time in Afghanistan training or fighting with the Taliban before returning to Europe.
Several intelligence chiefs warned that the war in Iraq and the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict were adding to the intensity of anti-Western sentiment among Europe's Muslims.
"Iraq has touched the Islamic mainstream in Europe," one senior official said. "This is causing great concern because we believe that as a broader group is radicalized, the support network for violent extremists will expand." European intelligence officials said that some recent raids represented less a new threat than a shift in tactics to deal more aggressively with an existing one.
"It is quite obvious that there is pressure in Europe to see law enforcement action and results," said a senior European intelligence official. "The detentions in France after the Madrid bombings are an illustration of this."
The French had kept a group of Moroccan-born militants under surveillance for some time, but had no specific cause to arrest them when the police struck in dawn raids on Monday, seizing 13 men with suspected links to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group.
A senior French official admitted as much Tuesday, saying, "There was no evidence they were preparing an imminent attack in France." The crucial factor was that they had traveled to Afghanistan, where they had learned to use weapons and make explosives. "When they come back, they have certain ideas and certainly a technical capacity for action," the French official said.
The new French counterterrorism motto, he said, is "Every time we discover a cell, we eliminate it as a pre-emptive measure."
In Britain, the shock of the Madrid attacks made a developing threat seem more imminent.
Scotland Yard suspected that a group of young Britons of Pakistani origin had become radicalized by fiery imams in local mosques and might have reached out to international terror networks, perhaps even Al Qaeda.
They, too, had been under surveillance by security services before the Madrid bombings, officials here said. Soon after the attack, 700 British police officers conducted the largest antiterrorism operation in years, arresting nine men of Pakistani origin in and around London.
One, a 17-year-old, was charged Tuesday with "conspiracy to cause explosions with intent to injure or damage property" after the police found more than 1,000 pounds, or about 450 kilograms, of ammonium nitrate in a storage locker near the center of London.
In the post-Madrid mobilization in Europe, Germany has been quiet, but German intelligence officials say they are not lulled by the calm.
"Most of the Al Qaeda cells in Germany have been prosecuted and destroyed," said Carl Heinrich von Bauer, deputy head of the North Rhine-Westphalia state police. "But whenever one terrorist gets arrested, one, two, three or more men will fill his space somewhere else."
With German forces now deployed in Afghanistan, the government assumes that Germany is on the target list.
One of the first governments to act after the Madrid blasts was Belgium, where the police arrested four members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group in the week after the attacks.
The preponderance of ethnic Moroccans under surveillance in the Spanish, French and Belgium antiterror operations reflects not only the size and dispersal of Moroccan immigrants across Europe, but the intense disaffection of a growing fraction of young, mostly unemployed Moroccans who are vulnerable to the call to radicalism.
The growing quandary for the tough new antiterror strategy is its effect on millions of law-abiding immigrants from the Middle East who were thrown under suspicion after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, and even more so since Madrid.
Though police officials have gone to great lengths to reassure Muslim communities, and Muslim councils have asked mosques to preach nonviolence and cooperation with the police, social tensions are rife, intelligence chiefs say.
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune |
