Author: Vivienne Walt
Publication: Boston Globe
Date: June 13, 2004
Three months after massive bomb
blasts in Madrid killed 190 people, officials in Europe say they believe
they are facing a growing number of terror operatives who are European
citizens, rather than foreign infiltrators, greatly complicating the ability
of investigators and police departments to track planned attacks on the
continent.
Investigators from Italy, France,
and Britain who met here recently said they sensed that organizations inspired
by Al Qaeda were increasingly opting to use local citizens to carry out
critical tasks in missions. With several key Al Qaeda figures now in jail,
and the rest on the run, the benefits for the strategy is evident: Those
holding European passports can slip easily across the borders of 25 European
Union countries, sometimes avoiding police detection for months or years,
according to investigators.
"Until now there has been a perception
that all international terrorism came from abroad, from the Maghreb, from
the Middle East, from Afghanistan," said Britain's deputy police commissioner,
Peter Clarke, the country's antiterrorism chief. "The parameters have changed
completely," he said, speaking at a two-day conference on terrorism last
weekend, held outside Florence and hosted by New York University Law School's
Center on Law and Security.
In late May, Clarke oversaw the
arrests of eight terror suspects in Britain who were believed to have planned
a bomb attack against civilians in a crowded British city. The group had
stored half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the main ingredient used
in the powerful bomb in a packed Bali nightclub in 2002, which killed 202
people.
The police breakthrough, code-named
Operation Crevice, came after months of bugging telephone lines and tracking
suspects, in which they followed a web of leads across Europe and the Middle
East. When the plans filtered down to the ground in Britain, the operation
seemed to have been left in the hands of British citizens, however. "That
is something that is deeply worrying to us," Clarke said.
More jolting to authorities was
the group's youthfulness. Five of them are teenagers. And one of the apparent
masterminds of the plot is a 22-year-old computer science student and star
cricketer, who until his arrest last month had been expected to play for
England's national team some day.
Police in Italy, Belgium, and Spain
arrested 15 people last week on suspicion of plotting the Madrid bomb attacks
on March 11, as well as planning spectacular attacks elsewhere, including
perhaps on the Paris underground Metro and at a NATO facility in Brussels.
Those arrested were mostly Palestinian, Jordanian, Moroccan, and Egyptian.
Investigators here said last weekend
that although many conspiracies were organized by foreigners, they fear
that national citizens were increasingly playing key roles in the networks
that support them.
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's top
antiterrorism magistrate and a leading analyst of international Islamic
terror groups, said investigators had noticed a growing number of European
women who had married Muslim immigrants involved in extremist organizations
in France, Norway, and Spain. "These women convert and very quickly embrace
a very radical conception of Islam," Bruguiere said in an interview in
Florence.
He said he and other investigators
believe the networks are using marriage as a method to acquire European
passports for their foreign operatives, thus allowing the men to build
links with groups across the continent without much detection. "It is very
useful for these groups to marry women like this, since the men then have
the legal ability to get nationality," Bruguiere said.
Aside from the ability to move freely,
European citizens appear also to be valuable in transferring money without
raising alarm among bank officials or police departments, according to
investigators.
Muslim communities in Italy have
begun financing jihad organizations by fining their members for petty offenses
without reporting them to the Italian police. Investigators say they are
keenly aware of such tactics, having first seen them at work within the
Mafia.
"A lot of crimes are being solved
within communities simply by paying money to jihadi causes," said Armando
Spataro, deputy public prosecutor in Milan, where two of the 15 men arrested
last week lived. Spataro said investigators believe some of the money was
spent manufacturing forged documents -- an industry whose origins in Italy
date to the Mafia. "There are lots of small sums of about 8,000 euros or
so [about $9,700] which are transferred," he said.
The proliferation of forged documents
-- whether used by foreign operatives or Europeans -- is increasingly regarded
as one of the biggest failings of the continent's antiterror efforts. Europeans
are able to travel across borders simply by showing a driver's license.
Yet those too are now forged, in an effort to conceal well-known suspects
when they cross borders.
Even without forged documents, stolen
passport numbers are rarely reported to police, however, and border officials
rarely check whether passports are false, say investigators.
"The super-super majority of border
officers are not checking against any lists to see if passports are stolen
or counterfeit," said Ronald K. Noble, general secretary of Interpol, the
France-based international police authority, to which 181 countries belong.
The organization has recently begun listing all stolen and lost passports
on a worldwide computer database for every border post.
Noble said police officials still
had no way to issue worldwide alerts, however. He said police increasingly
dreaded finding a plot to create mass destruction through a biological
agent, with little way for them to warn other governments. "If we had the
name and photo and fingerprints of that person, we couldn't get it out
to the world's police forces unless we use CNN or Al-Jazeera," Noble said
in an interview here.
With the daunting task of unraveling
amorphous networks with few identifiable leaders, investigators said it
was now essential to tackle problems within the Muslim communities themselves.
That idea, though hardly new, is growing increasingly urgent as local mosques
and community leaders apparently succeed in drawing European citizens into
plans for violent attacks on the continent.
"What has emerged is the recognition
that we need to look inward at our own communities," Clarke said. He said
investigators were still grappling with why seemingly middle-class Europeans,
many of them children of immigrants who appear to have bright futures ahead
of them, would choose to join terror organizations. "We really need to
begin to understand this, if we are to make progress," he said.