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The secret war. Part 2
Police believe up to 30 more 'spectaculars' are planned
The secret war. Part 1
War on Terrorism - Observer special
Martin Bright, Antony Barnett, Burhan Wazir, Tony Thompson and Peter
Beaumont in London; Stuart Jeffries in Paris; Ed Vulliamy in
Washington; Kate Connolly in Berlin; Giles Tremlett in Madrid; Rory
Carroll in Rome
Sunday September 30, 2001
The Observer
While Beghal was devising his murderous plots, other cells in Hamburg
and across Germany were busy too, almost certainly unaware that their
efforts were being duplicated across a continent - but pursuing the
same aim. Among them was an intelligent, disaffected and darkly
handsome young man whose name and face have become synonymous with
the slaughter in America on 11 September.
His name was Mohamed Atta and he would soon be notorious for flying a
hijacked jet into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.
Three of the dead hijackers, police would quickly establish, had come
from Hamburg.
A team of agents dispatched by the FBI to Germany has been focusing on the northern
city of Hamburg, where three of the men who died in the planes and four others who
were on the FBI's initial list of suspects studied at
universities. Investigations have spread to other universities throughout the country
thought to have links with the terrorist cell. In several German states,
investigations were last week under way to uncover hundreds of
suspected 'sleepers'.
What has emerged in the past week is that - like Beghal and his friends in both Paris
and London - Atta was not unknown to the authorities.
Indeed he was under surveillance between January and May last year after he was
reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for
the production of explosives and for biological warfare
. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the
German authorities about their investigation.
The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises
the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the mens' arrest. The
German interior ministry has defended the police,
saying there was never enough information to lead to arrests, although suspicions were
growing about what the men were up to. Indeed, so alarmed were the authorities that
last year federal police ordered state prosecutors
to investigate the structure of the bin Laden cells in Germany.
And like the group around Beghal, Atta's organisation was also using Britain both as a
way station on its route to commit terror in the US, and as an alleged home base for
some of those suspected of supporting them. The F
BI has revealed that 11 of the hijackers who died in the US had been in transit
through Britain. More seriously, US officials believe, the group associated with Atta
also used Britain. Among this group was the so-called '
twentieth hijacker', 33-year-old Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman whose brother has
accused Islamic fundamentalists in Britain of brainwashing him.
Moussaoui crossed the Channel in 1992, living in Brixton and hoping to get a job in
international commerce and earn a good wage. Nine years later he was cheering in his
American prison cell as he watched television pictur
es of passenger jets crashing into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
In August Moussaoui had been arrested in Minnesota after instructors at the Pan-Am
International Flight Academy told police of the peculiar behaviour of the pupil who
did not want to learn how to take-off or land - only h
ow to maneuver the plane in the air.
Moussaoui's time in Britain appears to have been crucial to his transformation from
hothead to active terrorist, nurtured in Britain's Islamist fringe. His brother,
Abd-Samad Moussaoui, said: 'He began to change when he w
ent to Britain. It was there that he got drawn into an extremist group. All alone in
London he found friendships within the Islamic fundamentalist groups littered around
London's mosques. I noticed a change in his attitud
e when he came back to France. He became racist, a black racist,' said his brother.
'I saw how they operate when my brother came back to France with a friend he had met
in Britain. He was indoctrinating the friend, just as he had been indoctrinated
himself, and his aim was to control all aspects of his l
ife. He had become a little guru.'
Abd-Samad last saw his brother in the mid-1990s, when he tried one last time to turn
him against on fundamentalism. But to no avail. His younger brother walked out and
went to train in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan and
Chechnya. The next time Abd-Samad saw his brother was on a list of suspected
hijackers responsible for the US atrocities.
And Moussaoui was not alone. Also in Britain was another key figure US and European
investigators now believe was key to the US end of the plot. What has also become
clear in the past few days is that the story of the Ger
man, French and British cells is a story repeated across Europe. In bedsits and shared
apartments across a continent, quiet young men were studying, working and praying -
and meeting to prepare the secret war against the
West, ordered by bin Laden and his closest lieutenants or by the leaders of the groups
in alliance with him.
The picture is of a vast and nebulous terrorist organisation of affiliated networks,
each with largely autonomous cells, but all working to the same end: targeting US
interests around the world, each planning 'a spectacul
ar'.
It was a conspiracy protected by its investment in the principal of 'redundancy'. The
police could intercept one, two, even a dozen cells, but other cells would still
remain actively pursuing their targets. It was a redun
dancy built into the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon themselves.
Multiple teams hijacking multiple aircraft would ensure at least one reached its
target.
The planned attacks on the G8 summit and US targets across Europe, investigators in
Italy now suspect, were the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, yesterday it was revealed that
Italy's secret service believed that up to 30 more
'spectaculars' may be in the pipeline, including a number envisaging some sort of
airborne assault, some of them aimed at London and other European capitals, including
the Vatican
According to Rodolfo Ronconi, head of Italian Interpol, there was a possibility that
those involved in the attacks on America used Italy as cover to enter Europe. 'We are
talking about sleeper cells,' Ronconi said last we
ek.
The picture that Ronconi and other European officials have painted of the network of
cells across Europe has been consistent with the methodology of bin Laden, the patient
planner ready to invest years in setting up attac
ks, and allowing his men wide operational autonomy.
Indeed, a spate of terror scares which rattled Italy earlier this year is being
revisited by intelligence agents to see if they can detect the hand of Osama bin Laden.
In January the US Embassy in Rome had its first security closure in a decade because
of an alleged plot by three Algerians to launch a suicide attack. In April Italian
police smashed what they said was another Islamic fun
damentalist plot to bomb the European parliament in Strasbourg, France. An
alternative target was said to be the cathedral in Strasbourg. Five suspected members
of a terrorist group - all Tunisian and believed linked to
Osama bin Laden - were arrested near Milan while German police seized another suspect
in Munich.
'For the first time, we believe we can determine a direct link between Islamic
terrorist cells and training camps in Afghanistan,' said Stefano Dambruoso, an
investigating magistrate. The Milan cell allegedly recruited vo
lunteers in Europe to be trained as mercenaries, trafficked arms and provided false
identity papers.
In Spain, too anti-terrorist police were last week busy moving against other 'sleeper
cells', descending on five towns and villages and arresting six Algerian migrant
workers. The six men, allegedly members of the bin Lad
en-backed Group for Call and Combat, are likely to be charged with membership of an
illegal armed group.
'This was a sleeper unit,' explained Spain's national police chief Juan Cotino last
week. He described the group as also a support unit for other cells linked to bin
Laden across Europe, providing forged documents, passpo
rts and credit cards.
Among those arrested in Cascante, a small town in northern Navarre, was 26-year-old
Mohamed Belaziz, who was detained at the nondescript flat he shared with other
Algerian migrant workers. Among his possessions - seized b
y police - was a diary, roughly scribbled in bad Arabic and even worse Spanish, which
they claimed was proof of his contacts with a Europe-wide Islamic terror network.
A list of contacts included names in Britain, Ireland, Rome and Frankfurt. It also
referred to a trip made, or due to be made, to London and Ireland. Police claimed
Belaziz was a suicide bomber in the making.
The jottings in his diary certainly showed him to be depressed. 'All is emptiness. I
hate life,' he wrote. 'They hate us. I am going to hold on, in Allah's name, but one
day...' he adds, before trailing off in illegible A
rabic.
Belaziz is believed to have been the right-hand man of Madjid Sahouane, owner of the
Albadil, the only Islamic 'halal' butchery in nearby Pamplona. His workers yesterday
insisted police had got the wrong man.
Sahouane, however, was often away, travelling in his white van, supposedly to buy
produce in both Spain and France. Police suspect he was often on other business,
following the instructions of the Salafist cell's leader,
Mohamed Boualem Khnouni, alias Abdallah.
Boualem Khnouni's operations were based in the eastern town of l'Alcudia de Crespins.
Like most of those arrested, he lived the life of an immigrant labourer, changing jobs
and never appearing to be wealthy - although his
flat was stuffed with computer and forgery equipment.
Spanish police said they had been watching him for nearly two years. He had moved into
an apartment that had previously belonged to suspected members of Algeria's GIA group
- which is, in turn, close to the Salafists. Ban
ned in Britain, the Salafists were also on the list published last week of 27 groups
and individuals whose funds the US wants to freeze.
With no proof that he had broken any laws, they had decided not to arrest the man they
now say was in contact with some of Europe's most dangerous terrorists. When they
finally acted, it was at the insistence of the Belgi
an investigating magistrate dealing with Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian suspected of
plotting to blow up the Nato headquarters in Brussels. Trabelsi, the judge said, had
travelled to Spain in July for meetings with the Salafi
sts.
Not only had they been in contact with Nizar, but police said they had also provided
support to another potentially lethal bin Laden cell, known by the codename 'Meliani'.
This cell - broken up by police in Frankfurt, Mil
an and the Spanish city of Alicante over the past year - was made up of north Africans
who had been through training camps in Afghanistan. They were armed with machine
pistols, grenades and explosives. The Meliani cell's
12 members had been planning a bomb attack on Strasbourg Cathedral and another attack
on the US embassy in Rome. Cell leader Mohamed Bensakhria was arrested in June in
Alicante. He was described at the time as 'one of the
most wanted men pursued by Western security services.'
In a crowded corner of the prayer room in Finsbury Park Mosque last night, Muslims
huddled together to speak of Tafkir-wal-Hijra. The group, around 20-strong, are a
regular presence at the mosque -Tafkir members regularly
stand watchfully outside on Friday afternoons, distributing anti-Western literature.
'I remember them as hard line fundamentalists,' says Abu Saeed, 25, a Finsbury Park
Mosque regular. Saeed, a self-described orthodox Mu
slim, says even he was surprised by the strength of Tafkir's anti-
Western sentiments. 'But they don't look like fanatics as we know
them,' he says. 'They're dressed like Westerners, have polite manner,
but used to hand out literature saying that smoking and alcohol is
punishable by death. Even by the standards of Finsbury Park Mosque,
they were an extreme lot.'
Other visitors to the mosque recalled the group trying to recruit
young men into their organisation. 'It's not like we think they are
recruiting to fight a Jihad,' says one man. 'But they are asking
young men to take a stand against what the Americans are doing to the
Muslim Ummah.'
That 'stand' - for some at least within the group - envisaged mass
murder.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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