Al Qaeda in Europe

by Lorenzo Vidino

  71. Ibid.

  72. Sean O'Neill, "Three on Terror Charges but Tube Plot Ruled Out," Telegraph, November 18, 2002.

  73. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 177.

  74. O'Neill, "Three on Terror Charges but Tube Plot Ruled Out."

  75. Ahmed Rashid, "Hunt for Algerians to Foil Bin Laden Attack on G8 Meeting," Telegraph, July 13, 2001.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE RICIN PLOT

  One day the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street. Lands will not be liberated by individuals, but by an army. Eventually there'll have to be a Muslim army. It's just a matter of time before it happens.

  -Anjem Choudray, leader of the London-based radical organization al Muhajiroun (June 2003)

  I would like to see the Mujaheddin coming into London and killing thousands, whether with nuclear weapons or germ warfare. And if they need a safehouse, they can stay in mine.

  -Abu Yusuf, British-born member of al Muhajiroun (Luton, April 2004)

  FROM PARIS TO CHECHNYA AND BACK

  As they progressed in their investigation, the French counterterrorism magistrates Jean-Louis Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Ricard, two veterans of France's fight against Islamic terrorism, realized that key militants linked to the Frankfurt cell had managed to escape the Christmas raid in the German city and the subsequent arrests in London and Milan. Some of them, like Mohammed Bensakhria and Yacine Aknouche, were caught in other European countries and put on trial in Paris, as we saw in chapter 6. But others had left the European scene. Bruguiere and Ricard became particularly interested in two Algerian men who had managed to flee Germany and-according to information gleaned from arrested members of the network-had gone to Chechnya.

  The struggle in Chechnya, which will be further analyzed in chapter 7, has attracted hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists from Europe; they have joined local fighters and Arab volunteers struggling to gain independence from Russia. Fundamentalists have frequently referred to the plight of the Chechen people and their stubborn resistance to draw young Muslims to the Islamist cause. The Algerian network formed strong ties with the group of Arab fighters who began to establish a presence in the Caucasus in the early 1990s, and its leaders raised funds and recruited volunteers to support the militants fighting against Russian forces.

  As they were monitoring every step made by members of the Algerian network throughout Europe, French authorities discovered that at least one French volunteer, Xavier Djaffo, had been killed by Russian forces while fighting in Chechnya. Djaffo was a French citizen who had been recruited at London's Finsbury Park mosque, and his death in 2000 made French authorities pay close attention to the volunteers streaming to Chechnya. The French were concerned not so much about the militants' engagement with Russian forces as about what might happen once battlehardened jihadists returned to France. Paris worried that Chechnya could become a new Afghanistan, a place where militants could gain experience in warfare and terrorist tactics. The events of the 1990s showed that the terrorists used the knowledge acquired in Afghanistan and Bosnia for attacks against the West, and the authorities did not want to have to deal on French soil with veterans of Chechnya.

  The DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, France's internal intelligence agency) saw a disturbing surge in the number of militants going to the Caucasus in the early spring of 2001, right after the arrests in Frankfurt and London. The Algerian network was, in fact, using Chechnya as it had once used Afghanistan. The French militants were joining other Arab fighters who had set up their base in the Pankisi Gorge, a mountainous area just a few miles from the Chechen border that was not patrolled by the Georgian authorities. The gorge is a congenial refuge for guerrillas, who can retreat and hide in its many caves after carrying out attacks in Chechnya. Groups of Chechen rebels and foreign terrorists had established a presence there after the Russians reinvaded Chechnya in 1999.1

  In particular, the DST received information that two Algerians who had lived in Germany and were linked to the Frankfurt cell were among those who had traveled to the Caucasus. Said Arif and Mabrouk Echiker were both veterans of Afghanistan and members first of the GIA (Groupes Islamiques Armes, or the Armed Islamic Group) and then of the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat, or the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), and they were wanted by European authorities because of their involvement in the Strasbourg plot. Despite all the arrests it had suffered, the Algerian network could still count on hundreds of operatives and a web of cells that was able to provide funds, safe houses, and false documents. Rabah Kadre replaced Abu Doha at its top, and in March 2001 the entire organization worked to get Arif and Echiker out of Europe.

  Laurent Mourad, a member of the network living in London, was dispatched to Germany specifically to help them.' Before reaching Arif and Echiker, Mourad traveled to Paris, where he declared that he had lost his French passport; he was promptly issued another one. The old passport, which he had never lost, was given to Arif as a "clean" document. This was an old trick, used by Mourad both in France and in the United Kingdom, as he had declared his passport stolen five times.' After he joined them in Germany and supplied them with cash, Arif and Echiker decided to travel separately to lessen the chances of the police finding them. Arif journeyed directly to Italy, while Echiker went to Paris first, staying in a safe house supplied by the network in a multiethnic area near boulevard Magenta.' In Italy, Mourad bought them airline tickets for Tbilisi, Georgia.' After traveling to Georgia, Arif and Echiker settled in the Gorge, where they met other al Qaeda operatives.6

  But Arif and Echiker were just the tip of the iceberg. After months of thorough investigation, the DST identified a group of about twenty militants who had left France for Chechnya.' Some of them were pious Muslims who did not belong to any group but were moved by the suffering of the Chechen people and had decided to fight alongside Chechen forces. For example, one of them, Khaled Ouldali, an Algerian who grew up in the Bordeaux region and had briefly been a member of the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut, or the Islamic Salvation Front), traveled twice to Chechnya and, according to the DST, fought in the battalion of the Arab commander Ibn ul-Khattab against Russian forces. Ouldali was arrested by Georgian forces in the Pankisi Gorge in August 2002,8 but he has never been proved to have a connection with any network. Most men who traveled to the Caucasus, however, were Algerians or French citizens of Algerian descent who belonged to the Algerian network headed by Abu Doha in London.'

  A steady movement of militants toward the Pankisi Gorge began in the first months of 2001, but the importance of the region grew significantly after 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan. In the first months of 2002, after US and allied Afghan forces destroyed bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, al Qaeda operatives scattered throughout the world. Hunted by American forces and wanted by authorities in most countries, the terrorists sought new places where they could establish their presence. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the notorious Jordanian terrorist who is believed to be behind most of the current attacks in Iraq, played a key role in the redeployment of al Qaeda operatives.10 Reportedly, al Zarqawi moved to Iran and, subsequently, to Northern Iraq, where he teamed up with members of Ansar al Islam, a small Kurdish Islamist group with training camps in the area. Al Zarqawi also directed the departure of his closest lieutenants from the training camp he used to run on the outskirts of the western Afghan city of Herat. While some of them traveled with him and joined Ansar al Islam in Kurdistan, others settled in the Pankisi Gorge."

  According to Georgian officials, in early 2002 a group of about sixty Arab computer, communications, and financial specialists, military trainers, chemists, and bombers established themselves in the area. Using sophisticated satellite-based and encrypted communications, the group worked to support both Arab fighters in Chechnya and terrorists throughout the world planning attacks against US interests. Report
edly, in 2002 the "Pankisi Arabs" tried to buy a large amount of explosives that Georgian security officials believe was intended for a major bomb attack on US or other Western targets in Russia. The plan was disrupted by Georgian officials working with their US counterparts. 12

  According to US military intelligence, the man dispatched by al Zarqawi to be his representative in the Caucasus was Abu Atiya (also known as Adnan Muhammad Sadik), a former instructor at the Herat camp. In the Pankisi Gorge, Abu Atiya, a Palestinian who had lost a leg during the Chechen war, trained militants in the use of toxic gases, with the aid of what Georgian authorities described as "Middle Eastern chemists skilled in poisons." In the summer of 2002, Abu Atiya plotted to ship toxic substances from the camps in Georgia to Turkey." The scheme was discovered in July 2002 by the CIA, which warned Turkish authorities that a man (at the time misidentified as a Georgian) named Abu Atiya had sent a poisonous biological or chemical substance to a man in Turkey. The CIA believed that the substance was to be used against American and Russian targets in Turkey.14

  After the operation in Turkey was thwarted, Abu Atiya's attention switched from the Middle East and Russia to Europe. It is then that the Algerians came into play: with their unparalleled knowledge of the Continent, they were the ideal operatives to carry out the operation. During the fall of 2002, the DST received information that several French/ Algerian militants who had been trained in the Pankisi Gorge were making their way back to Europe. Worried about their intentions, the DST placed several known members of the Algerian network under close watch to see if they were in contact with the returnees. On November 9, British authorities arrested Rabah Kadre, the man who had become the Algerian network's leader after Abu Doha's arrest, amid reports that he was planning an attack using chemical weapons. On the other side of the English Channel, tension was growing, as Kadre's arrest was further indication that the Algerian network was trying to go into action once again. In early November, the DST passed a secret dossier on the movements of radicals to and from the Caucasus to the counterterrorism magistrates Bruguiere and Ricard. It warned of an "organized attempt by al Qaeda linked radical Islamists to manufacture or acquire chemical or biological weapons to be used in attacks," and it also stated that the men behind the effort were "veterans of Afghanistan with chemical and biological expertise who have recently returned from fighting Russian forces in Chechnya."15 On November 13, relying on the long preparatory work done by the DST, Bruguiere and Ricard formally opened an investigation on the "Chechen network."16

  The investigation bore fruit very soon. On December 16, 2002, the DST raided an apartment in the Paris suburb of La Corneuve and arrested four individuals-three Algerians and a Moroccan.11 According to French authorities, in the apartment police found two canisters of butane gas, $5,000 in cash, Islamist propaganda, false documents, and "electronic materials."18 The "electronic materials" seized were devices that would have enabled the terrorists to detonate a bomb using a mobile phone.19 Other items found in the rundown apartment concerned French authorities even more: the DST also discovered a protective suit for use against chemical and biological weapons and several products that are commonly used to manipulate toxic substances. The substances found in the apartment were analyzed, and one of them was cyanide. The raid yielded important evidence proving that the DST's fears were well founded-the network was indeed pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

  One of the individuals arrested, Merouane Benahmed, was very well known to French authorities, as he had been an emir of the GIA.20 Benahmed, a twenty-nine-year-old with joint French-Algerian nationality, was a specialist in making bombs using electronic devices who had received his training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan; his wife, Sali- ahlebik, was also arrested.21 Benahmed had left Afghanistan before the US invasion of the country and had traveled to Georgia and Chechnya for further training in the summer of 2001.22 At the beginning of 2002, Benahmed made his way back to France after a short stay in Barcelona. Despite having been on the country's most wanted list for almost two years, Benahmed managed to return to Paris, where he rejoined the other members of the network.23 The Algerians coming back from the Caucasus apparently favored the route through Spain, a country where the GSPC has established a strong presence: On December 21, another North African, Noureddine Merabet, was arrested at the French-Spanish border while trying to return to France. Merabet confessed to French authorities that he was linked to the individuals arrested at La Corneuve and that he, like Benahmed, had trained in the camps located in the Pankisi Gorge.24

  Much was made of the arrests by French authorities, who described those apprehended as "people ready for everything, ready to die."25 But the threat was far from being over. Just a few days after the operation at La Corneuve, the DST raided two other apartments in another Paris suburb, Romainville. French authorities had received information that Menad Benchellali, a known al Qaeda recruiter, had returned to Romainville; fearing he might be linked to the La Corneuve cell, they decided to arrest him. Benchellali, who had a formal education as a chemist, was known to have trained in Afghanistan and had spent time in the Pankisi Gorge in 2001.26 When on Christmas Eve, French authorities carried out a raid in Romainville, Benchellali and other three Algerian men were arrested.21 In the apartments, the DST found cash, several tapes about the jihad in Chechnya, false documents, and a handwritten list of chemical substances that could be used to produce toxic gases such as cyanide, along with the required quantity and their prices.28 Police also found methylene blue, a substance commonly used as an antidote to cyanide poisoning.29

  The most important figure arrested in Romainville, Menad Benchellali, told French investigators that he wrote the list of chemical substances in order to "fabricate explosives to kill Russians in Chechnya and Israelis in Palestine," but he did not rule out the possibility of attacks inside France.30 As chapter 1 noted, Benchellali had attempted to produce ricin and botulin in his parents' Lyon apartment with the help of his entire family. Another of the arrested militants, Belmehel Beddaidj, confirmed that the Romainville cell was directly linked to the one in La Corneuve and that the two groups, under the leadership of Merouane Benahmed, were planning to strike Russian targets. The series of arrests showed that the investigators' suspicions were right. As the director of DST, Giles Leclair, told a CNN interviewer, "They are coming from the same region, most of them are Algerian, trained [in] the same place, in some camps in Afghanistan, and at the same time in Georgia in the Pankisi Gorge. They have the same trainers. And it seems, if we can recognize what we found in the searches, that they wanted to start chemical attacks."31

  In a matter of days, the French had dismantled two dangerous cells of militants who had trained in the Caucasus. Though they were not yet certain that these cells were planning attacks in France, the French attitude toward terrorism was proactive: "it was better to arrest them before rather than wait until after,"32 as interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy put it. As the investigation progressed, French authorities discovered more about the group's intentions. The police learned that the group was ready to carry out a strike against the Russian Embassy in Paris. The men chose this target to avenge the death of several militants killed by Russian forces over the preceding months. Primarily, they wished to punish the Russians for the death of Ibn ul-Khattab, a Saudi fighter who had led the foreign mujahideen in Chechnya since 1997 and was revered as a hero by Islamists throughout the world; his stature only grew after Russian intelligence killed him with a poisoned letter in 2001. The group also wanted to avenge the killing of the members of the Chechen commando unit that had seized the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow on October 23, 2002.33 Three days later, Russian Special Forces pumped an undisclosed narcotic gas into the theater to incapacitate the terrorists and then stormed it, killing all forty-five commandos but also leaving more than one hundred twenty theatergoers dead.

  In using the death of Khattab and the extermination of the Chechen commandos to justify their planned attack against the Russian Embassy, the
Algerian militants were clearly showing support of and gratitude to their hosts in the Caucasus.34 But the men also named a more personal reason for choosing a Russian target: to avenge the death of one of their Algerian "brothers" who was killed while fighting in Chechnya, a man they identified only as "Al Moutana."35 French authorities deduced from the information collected that "Al Moutana" was none other than Mabrouk Echiker, the man who had managed to leave Europe with Said Arif after the thwarted Strasbourg attack and who had led the way to the Caucasus for other members of the Algerian network.36

  That Echiker's death was a motivation underscores the close relationship between the members of the Paris cells and the Algerian network that suffered numerous arrests in Frankfurt, London, and Milan in the first months of 2001. Other connections emerged as the investigation went forward. French Interior Minister Sarkozy declared that Benahmed, the expert in electronic devices arrested at La Corneuve, was "linked" to the group in Frankfurt. French authorities added that Benahmed had direct ties to Abu Doha and Rabah Kadre, the Algerian network's leaders in London.37 In particular, Kadre and Benahmed had reportedly shared an apartment in Paris in the summer of 2001.38 The magnitude of the mistake made by British authorities-who failed to hold Kadre after they arrested him in March 2001 when he was trying to fly to Saudi Arabia with Abu Doha-became more obvious with each piece of evidence. After his release, Kadre traveled around Europe and reorganized the network. Benahmed was one of the French operatives he sent to Georgia. Kadre also made sure that once the Algerian militants returned from the Caucasus, they were sheltered and supported by his operatives, who provided them with safe houses, false documents, and money. Even though he was already in jail when the raids in La Corneuve and Romainville took place, Kadre played an important role in planning the intended attacks in Paris.