Terror experts: Look at radicals from Algeria

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 30, 2001

Here's a tip for those seeking to make sense of the ever-widening circles of investigation welling up from the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks on New York and Washington:

Keep an eye on Algeria.

Terrorism experts believe that the turbulent history of this North African nation, just across the Mediterranean from Spain and France, has given rise to a radical underground movement with a scope that is both extensive and menacing.

And evidence suggests links between Algerian extremists and the followers of the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, whom the United States has named as the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 destruction.

"You put these Algerian groups together with al-Qaida and you've got an incredible pool of talent," said Christopher Harmon, a terrorism expert at the Marine Corps General Staff College in Quantico, Va.

Amid the swirl of allegations that have emerged from Europe following the attacks on the United States -- including plots against the U.S. Embassy in Paris, NATO headquarters in Brussels and a summit meeting of Western leaders in Genoa, Italy, last July -- a clear picture of the international investigation has yet to emerge.

Even so, developments of recent days hold several links to Algerian groups or nationals.

An Algerian pilot suspected of training four of the hijackers appeared in a London court Friday after he was detained at the request of the FBI. Prosecutors say that Lofti Raissi, 27, visited the United States several times in June and July of this year "to ensure that the pilots were capable and trained" for the hijackings.

An attorney said Raissi, whose wife works for Air France at Heathrow Airport, adamantly denies any involvement in the attacks.

Federal agents are questioning a French-Moroccan man, Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, believed to have links to the Sept. 11 hijackings. He was detained last August in Minnesota after his unusual behaviour was reported by a flight school. According to his brother, Moussaoui was obsessed with the extremist Algerian Islamic movement.

Spain's national police, working with the FBI, last week arrested six men alleged to be members of an Algerian Islamic cell called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. The group allegedly used credit card fraud to finance their activities, which included the forgery of identity documents and airline tickets.

French police say members of another Islamic group, who go on trial next week for alleged criminal activity in France, were part of an Algerian organization, the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, engaged in a bitter struggle with that country's military regime.

The GIA is believed to have been founded by Algerian veterans of the 1979-89 Afghan war against the Soviets, in which bin Laden played an important logistical role.

The willingness of Algerian radicals to die fighting the West stems from their country's bloody colonial history and brutal independence struggle with France in the 1950s. Added to that, they blame the United States and Europe for standing by during elections in 1992 when a military coup denied certain victory to a popular Islamic coalition.

"It doesn't surprise me at all that we have reached this point," said Sami Hajjar, director of Middle East studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "You've got all the makings of a fertile recruiting ground for radicals."

Rather than uphold the democratic process, Washington and the European Union, focused at the time on dealing with the aftermath of the Gulf War and the crisis in the Balkans, decided not to intervene.

Fearing a radical Islamic government in control of Algeria's rich supplies of oil and natural gas, they stood by while the military launched a brutal offensive to crush the Islamists.

"The Europeans and the Americans completely abrogated their responsibility," said Beverley Milton-Edwards, a professor of Islamic politics at Queen's University, Belfast. "In the wake of the Gulf War they encouraged Arab states to democratize. But when it didn't turn out to their liking they put the brakes on it."

A brutal civil war followed, as Islamic militants turned to armed struggle. Although the Algerian government has been able to keep a lid on the Islamic movement, many militants escaped into exile.

Some joined Islamic groups in other wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, where it's believed they came into contact with bin Laden's veteran Afghan Arab fighters. Some were recruited by al-Qaida for political and military training in the Sudan and Afghanistan.

"After the war they spread out everywhere," said Harmon, of the Marine Corps General Staff College. "The Algerian diaspora has been bewildering for intelligence people to follow."

Many exiles found refuge in France, among a large French-speaking Algerian community which numbers more than 1-million people. But integration has not been easy, and Algerians complain they endure a second-class status confined to North African ghettos.

It wasn't long before Europe began to feel the effects.

In December 1994, GIA operatives hijacked an Air France Airbus-300 on the ground at Algiers airport, as it prepared to depart for Paris. For two days the hijackers lectured the passengers on the Koran and demands for the creation of an Islamic republic in Algeria.

After one passenger was executed, French officials allowed the plane to fly to Marseilles. There, the hijackers demanded the plane be refueled and continue on to Paris. Before that could happen, French commandos stormed the plane, killing all four Algerian extremists.

Months later, French police were on the alert for Islamic militants again. Their attention was drawn by a string of robberies, including a heavily armed attack on a Brink's security van in a supermarket parking lot near Roubaix in northern France.

Investigators traced that attack to a GIA cell, which also included several former Afghan and Bosnian fighters.

In the spring of 1996, antiterrorism police raided a GIA safe-house in northern France. In the ensuing gunbattle, four suspected members of the so-called "Roubaix gang" were killed.

But several others escaped.

Four days later, not far away -- in the city of Lille, where preparations were being made for a meeting of the G7 conference of finance ministers -- a huge bomb partially exploded in front of a police station.

If it had gone off as planned, police said, it would have devastated everything within a radius of 1,000 feet of the blast.

Earlier this year in Paris, 28 people appeared in court accused of being members of the GIA-linked Roubaix gang. The court heard that the network, with links to bin Laden, smuggled Islamic militants into western Europe on false papers. Their trial begins on Tuesday.

The group was headed by four men, including Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian militant with links to al-Qaida. Investigators believe Ressam is a key to understanding the global reach of al-Qaida.

That's because Ressam is currently in U.S. custody, after being caught trying to enter Washington state from Canada on Dec. 14, 1999, in a car loaded with explosive components and four handmade timing devices. He was charged with plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport as part of a series of attacks planned to coincide with the new millennium.

Now awaiting sentencing, he is cooperating with U.S. investigators.

Ressam and other co-conspirators in the bomb plot were said to be part of a group in Algeria who received training in bin Laden terrorist camps in Afghanistan. The alleged mastermind of that plot, Algerian Abdelmajid Dahoumane, was arrested in Algiers in March when he arrived from Afghanistan. He is awaiting trial in Algeria.

According to Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French investigator who headed the Roubaix investigation, U.S. officials have been slow to recognize the threat posed by Algerian groups.

Combating them now will be no easy task.

"We are facing a system that is developing in a horizontal manner, very much like a spider web," Bruguiere testified at Ressam's trial in Los Angeles in April. "It changes its nature very quickly. And this makes the fight, the struggle, very difficult."

Police are just beginning to understand the scope of the Algerian network. Earlier this year, British authorities launched Operation Odin, directed at a London group believed to be a contact point for radical Islamic operatives in Europe and a recruitment center for North Africans to train in the bin Laden camps.

In February, police in London detained 11 men, mostly Algerians, on terrorism, fraud and forgery charges. One of the men arrested in London was Mustafa Labsi, a former roommate of Ressam in Montreal. Labsi is believed to have accompanied Ressam to Afghanistan for military training. He is awaiting possible extradition to France, where he is charged with involvement in the Lille police station attack.

Another of the London detainees was Haydar Abu Doha, a 37-year-old Algerian, who authorities believe is a key figure in the North African jihad network. In court testimony Ressam named Abu Doha as one of his contacts in the Los Angeles airport bomb plot.

U.S. authorities also have linked Abu Doha to an alleged conspirator in a second millennium terrorist plot to detonate bombs at several sites in Jordan often visited by American and Israeli tourists.

According to an affidavit filed by the FBI case agent, Ressam and Abu Doha hatched the Los Angeles plot while undergoing training in Afghanistan. From his base in London, Abu Doha later helped Ressam plan the attack, including discussing escape routes to Europe and North Africa.

The affidavit also states that Abu Doha arranged for recruits to travel to training camps financed and operated by bin Laden, "as well as their entry into and out of countries in which various terrorist "operations' were to take, or had taken, place."

One of those may have been the plot to assassinate President Bush and other G8 leaders meeting in Genoa.

Last week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that his country's intelligence services had picked up information that bin Laden wanted Bush assassinated.

"It was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives," Mubarak said in a Sept. 13 statement.

Italian police have confirmed that, as a precautionary measure, antiaircraft batteries were set up in Genoa to provide additional protection during the meeting.

The threat to the U.S. Embassy in Paris was uncovered after a French-Algerian, Djamel Begal, was arrested with a false passport in Dubai in July.

Begal, 35, was said to be on his way back to Europe from Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he had undergone training. He admitted being the link between three terror cells in Europe.

On the day before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the French announced they were beginning an investigation into a terror plot. After the Sept. 11 attack, some of the alleged conspirators who had been under surveillance were swiftly rounded up.

Months earlier, arrests by police in Milan, as well as detentions and the seizure of explosives in Frankfurt, led police to another Algerian-led extremist cell, which allegedly was planning strikes on a number of European cities.

The alleged leader of the so-called "Meliani cell," a 40-year-old Algerian named Mohammad Bensakhria, was arrested by Spanish police in June of this year in the southeastern city of Alicante.

Spanish and French prosecutors say Bensakhria and his team had been trained in Afghanistan by bin Laden's organization.

According to Stefano D'Ambrosio, the Italian magistrate who ordered the April arrests, the Milan cell was linked to 40-50 other activists spread across Europe.

"Islamic terrorism in Europe is a deeply rooted phenomenon," he told Jane's Intelligence Review -- one that "regenerates itself continuously."

- Information from Jane's Intelligence Review, the Los Angeles Times and the Times of London was used in this report.

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