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Police see more European citizens involved in terror activities

Police see more European citizens involved in terror activities

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.
 


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