Al Qaeda in Europe

by Lorenzo Vidino

  In the summer of 2001, Spanish authorities began monitoring the conversations of several Islamic fundamentalists operating in the Madrid area, but Zougam's telephone was tapped only briefly. When Yarkas and most of the members of his cell were arrested in November 2001, Zougam was not charged. Even though Yarkas had frequently spoken with him and had often used his shop to make phone calls or to meet other members of the network, there was no evidence that Zougam had committed any crime.37 It was common knowledge that Zougam was involved in radical activities, but investigators lacked sufficient evidence to charge him or even to maintain a constant tap on his phone. Because the tapes of his conversations were given low priority, they were set aside for months. And since the Spanish counterterrorism authorities had only seven parttime Arabic translators, who were overwhelmed by their workload, most of the tapes were not translated at all.38

  Zougam's name surfaced again after the May 2003 Casablanca bombings, which had been carried out by young suicide bombers recruited in the slums of the Moroccan city by experienced veterans of Afghanistan. Even though he appeared to be happily integrated into the mainstream in Spain, where he ran a fairly profitable business and drove a fancy red car, Zougam stayed closely tied to his native Morocco; he returned to Tangier frequently to stay with his father, a muezzin in one of the city's mosques.39 It was in Tangier, a hotbed of radicalism separated from Spanish territory only by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, that Zougam began to befriend local radicals and was introduced to fundamentalism.

  Zougam became a close associate of the Beniyach brothers, three Tangier natives who are equivalent to royalty in al Qaeda. Abdullah Beniyach died in December 2001 in Afghanistan fighting American forces in the battle of Tora Bora. His brother Abdelaziz is a veteran of Bosnia and Chechnya who met repeatedly with Abu Musab al Zarqawi and was arrested in Spain after the Casablanca bombings.40 Authorities believe that Zougam met with Abdelaziz Beniyach in Morocco a month before the Casablanca bombings. Zougam was also friends with a third Beniyach brother, Salahuddin, a one-eyed fighter who is shown in a Chechen video attending a briefing for commanders led by Ibn ul Khattab. Salahuddin is currently detained in Morocco, accused of taking part in a conspiracy to blow up a French refinery.41

  In Tangier, Zougam also became fascinated with the fiery sermons of Mohammed Fazazi, the Moroccan imam who had preached at Hamburg's al Quds mosque to the future 9/11 hijackers and had moved back to Morocco before the United States was attacked. Fazazi, who in 2003 was sentenced to thirty years in jail by a Moroccan court for his role as a spiritual leader of Salafia Jihadia, the group responsible for the Casablanca bombings, played a large part in Zougam's radicalization. Spanish wiretaps recorded Zougam telling Yarkas he had offered Fazazi financial support from the Madrid cell.42 "You should speak to him," Zougam told Yarkas in August 2001. "I told him that if he needed contributions we could get them from where the brothers are."43

  After the Casablanca bombings, Moroccan authorities cracked down on Islamic fundamentalists operating in the country. Fazazi, the Beniy- achs, and several other associates of Zougam were either arrested or investigated. Zougam, who had returned to Madrid three weeks after the bombings, was also investigated, but there was not enough evidence to charge him. "Morocco informed the Spanish that he went to Spain and that he was a quite dangerous person. There was no evidence against him in Morocco, but they asked Spain to investigate him," said frustrated a Moroccan official.44 For the third time, Spanish authorities received intelligence detailing Zougam's dangerous ties and views, but since he technically had committed no crime, no action could be taken. Zougam provides one of most dramatic examples of the current inability of European legal systems to effectively deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism.

  Zougam's was just the first in a long series of arrests: in the year following the attacks more than seventy individuals have been detained in connection with the train bombings.45 In the early hours of March 25, police arrested five more men involved in the plot. One of them, the Moroccan national Hamid Ahmidan, was a known drug trafficker; in his apartment police found a stash of more than twenty kilograms of hashish and cocaine. Another man arrested on the same day was Basel Ghalyoun, a Syrian who had been involved with Yarkas's cell and was well-known to Spanish counterterrorism authorities.46 Ghalyoun is believed to have been one of the men who placed the bags filled with explosives on the trains. A victim of the attacks who recognized Ghalyoun's picture gave a disturbing account of his cold-bloodedness. The young Romanian immigrant was commuting to the Atocha station with a fellow countrywoman when she and her friend noticed a young, good-looking man sitting near them. The three exchanged quick "flirtatious smiles" before the man rushed off the train. When the women yelled to him that he had forgotten his backpack, he pretended not to hear. A few minutes later, the bomb in the backpack went off, killing one of the Romanians and injuring the other. The survivor recognized Ghalyoun as the handsome man who had smiled at her. "She identified him right away," said a Spanish investigator. "She said she would never forget that face, that smile, as long as she lived."47

  The Spanish investigation was progressing quickly; by the end of March, almost twenty people connected to the attacks had been detained, including at least two of the men who had physically placed the backpacks on the trains. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the newly elected prime minister, had ordered the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, leading many Spaniards to hope that "al Qaeda would forget about Spain." But their hopes were illusory. At 11 AM on April 2, a Spanish railway worker spotted a supermarket bag some sixty kilometers south of Madrid on the tracks of the high-speed train that connects the Spanish capital to Seville. It contained twelve kilograms of Goma 2 ECO, the same explosive used in the March 11 attacks.48 That the bag was dry despite an overnight rain indicated that it had been placed on the tracks that morning.49 The explosives were connected to a detonator by a one hundred-thirty-meter cable but lacked a trigger, making an explosion impossible.50 Apparently, the terrorists had been interrupted before they could finish the device. The entire line was closed, reopening only after every tie of the tracks was checked. Three days earlier, workers had surprised five men digging a hole on the tracks of the high-speed train that connects Madrid to Lerida. The men fled immediately, but authorities believe that the March 11 bombers were behind both incidents.5' Spain had not yet been "forgotten" by the terrorists.

  Meanwhile, Spanish authorities were continuing their investigation of the March 11 bombings. The stock of thirty SIM cards sold by the two Indians to Zougam proved to be essential to the probe. While half of them had been employed in the attacks, the other fifteen were still being used by terrorists linked to Zougam. And though authorities could not determine the individuals using the cards, they could locate with some precision where the cards were being used.52 On April 3, electronic signals brought investigators to Leganes, a bleak commuter neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid. After methodically showing pictures around and asking questions to locals, investigators homed in on a five-story building at number 40, calle de Martin Gaite.53

  After police officers buzzed the apartment where they believed the terrorists were hiding, a voice with a thick Moroccan accent answered. They were clearly on the right track. As soon as they entered the building, a young North African man who was taking out the trash spotted them and ran away. Agents tried to chase him, but the man-later determined to be Abdelmajid Bouchar, a local track champion-was faster. 14 A few seconds later, voices from the upper floors yelled "Allah u Akhbar!" (God is great) and began spraying the officers with bullets fired from a machine gun.55 It was the beginning of the "siege of Leganes," a dramatic operation that led to the death of seven of the perpetrators of the March 11 attacks. The men barricaded themselves inside the apartment; when contacted by police negotiators, they threatened to blow themselves up with the entire building. By 8 PM, authorities had evacuated the residents of adjacent apartment buildings and cordoned off the area, laying siege to the apart
ment with hundreds of men.56

  While the authorities' attention was focused on the Leganes siege, the Madrid offices of the Spanish daily newspaper ABC received a fax handwritten in Arabic. It was signed by Abu Dujan al Afgani, the same man who had claimed responsibility for the train bombings on the tape found near a Madrid mosque two days after the attacks. In the fax, al Afgani said his organization, which he called "al Qaeda in Europe," had already showed its force by carrying out the "blessed attacks of March 11" and by planting a bomb on the tracks of the Madrid-Seville railway. He therefore demanded the immediate withdrawal of Spanish forces not only from Iraq but also from Afghanistan, where the Zapatero government was planning on redeploying some of the returning troops. "If these demands are not met," threatened al Afgani, "we will declare war on you and ... convert your country into an inferno and your blood will flow like rivers .1117 Simply distancing Spain from the conflict in Iraq was clearly not enough.

  Meanwhile, the situation inside and outside the Leganes apartment was becoming more tense by the minute. The seven men who had been cornered by Spanish authorities were some of the planners of the train bombings, associates of Zougam who were now willing to die. On that Saturday afternoon, the group had intended to carry out more attacks, with a local shopping center and a Jewish center in Avila as the likely targets. Seeing the unusual movements of police in the quiet suburban community of Leganes, the terrorists thought they had been identified and returned to their apartment, waiting to face the police in a final standoff.58 "We will die killing," they shouted from the windows of their secondfloor apartment.59 Inside, they donned traditional white robes and began drinking water from Mecca, acts of purification before death. They chanted Islamic songs and recited verses from the Quran. They also telephoned their families in North Africa and Spain, telling them about their plans to kill themselves rather than be caught by the "infidels." One of them, Jamal Ahmidan, called his mother in Morocco and said, "Mom, I'm going to paradise. I am ready."60 The men were getting ready to die as martyrs. Reportedly, they even called Belmarsh prison, the London penitentiary where Abu Qatada, al Qaeda's spiritual leader in Europe, was then being detained, possibly seeking a religious edict to justify suicide.6"

  One of the men inside the apartment, Abdennabi Kounjaa, had previously written a letter to his son in Morocco in which he announced his plans to die. "I ask God to give me the martyrdom so I can be reunited with you in paradise," wrote the thirty-four-year-old, who authorities believe to have been one of the men who left backpacks on the trains on March 11 and placed the unexploded bomb on the tracks of the Seville-Madrid railway. Kounjaa told his young son, "I don't stand living like a weak and humiliated person under the watch of the infidels. I prefer death to life." He added, "I ask you to have faith in God and that you follow the mujaheddin brothers in the world and maybe one day you'll be one of them, because that's what I expect from you."62

  After hours of fruitless negotiations, at 9 PM Spanish police decided to storm the apartment: they tore down the front door and fired tear gas inside. It was the sign that the terrorists were expecting, and a few seconds later they detonated twenty kilograms of explosives, killing themselves and mortally injuring Francisco Javier Torronteras, an officer of the special forces who had entered the apartment. The walls of three floors of the buildings were shattered by the explosion, which was so violent that the body of one of the terrorists, Jamal Ahmidan, was hurled into a swimming pool in the building's courtyard .61

  In the rubble of the apartment, police found a badly damaged tape that forensic experts were nevertheless able to reconstruct. It showed three men wearing balaclavas and white robes and holding automatic weapons as they read a statement to the camera, following a style commonly used by suicide bombers around the world. The video, which authorities believe was shot on the day of the apartment siege, contained new threats against Spain. The men promised to continue their "jihad until martyrdom" if Spain did not "leave Muslim lands," and threatened: "You are not safe and you know that Bush and his administration will bring only destruction. We will kill you anywhere and in any manner." Even as the terrorists linked their actions to Spain's alliance with the Bush administration, they also looked to the past as they claimed to be ready to achieve "martyrdom in the land of Tarek Ben Ziyad."64 Ben Ziyad was the Moorish general who began the invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, conquering the southern regions of Spain. The group also revealingly called itself "the brigade situated in al Andalus."65

  The men who immolated themselves inside the Leganes apartment were the operational leaders of the March 11 bombings and of the failed attacks that followed. Most of them, like Zougam, were young North African immigrants who lived a double life in Europe. While immersing themselves in the more mundane aspects of Western life, dating women, pursuing successful careers, and going to clubs with friends, the men also flirted with radicalism, worshiping in one of Madrid's main mosques and creating a radical subgroup within it. They entertained casual relationships with known radicals and were all known to counterterrorism officials as marginal figures in the Islamist underworld. The men were an odd mix of petty criminals, students, small entrepreneurs, and drug dealers whom few suspected of harboring such deep hatred for the West. Undetected by authorities, the men planned one of the bloodiest terror attacks in Europe's history.

  The story of Jamal Ahmidan, the man whose body was hurled into the empty pool of the Leganes complex after the apartment's explosion, is typical. The thirty-four-year-old Moroccan, whose cousin Hamid had been arrested two weeks after the attacks and found with twenty kilograms of drugs, had helped lead the entire operation. According to Spanish authorities, Ahmidan, using a false Belgian passport, had rented a house in the countryside outside Madrid where the terrorists had assembled the explosives and built the bombs. And investigators also believe that it was Ahmidan who procured the explosives used in the attacks, purchasing them from a Spanish miner he had met while trafficking drugs.66 As a criminal, Ahmidan seemed not to fit the classic profile of the Islamic fundamentalist, if there is such a thing. He left his native Tetuan, a poor town in northern Morocco, in 1993 to escape a conviction for murdering his accomplice in a robbery.67 Ahmidan moved to Madrid, where his brothers owned a small shop in Lavapies, a melting pot neighborhood where immigrants from various homelands live and work side by side. Falling back immediately and comfortably into a life of crime, continuing to sell ecstasy and hashish, Ahmidan adopted the nicknames "Mowgli" and "El Chino." At the same time, he began to befriend some of the radicals that gravitated toward Yarkas. In 1999 he was detained for drugrelated offenses; sent to a detention center in Mortalez to await deportation, Ahmidan showed all his charisma. "He set himself up as an imam and told guards he would come back and kill them," recounted a Spanish official. "No one took him seriously then, but he already had quite a fol- lowing."68 Like K, the Algerian terrorist described in chapter 6 who managed to escape a British facility housing asylum seekers that detainees burned down, Ahmidan started a small fire and escaped from Mortalez. He was subsequently captured and finally deported to Morocco.69

  Back in his native Tetuan, he was arrested for the crime he had committed in 1993 and spent two and a half years in jail.70 There Ahmidan met many Islamic fundamentalists, veterans of Afghanistan who had been detained by the Moroccan government for their subversive activities and who were recruiting young, disaffected men. Fascinated by them, he slowly embraced their fanatic and militant interpretation of Islam. When he came out of jail in 2002, he was a completely changed man. In the summer, he decided to leave Morocco and return to Madrid using a forged Belgian passport.71

  Back in Lavapies, Ahmidan lived as he had before, frequenting clubs and dating a Spanish woman who favored provocative outfits.72 Nor did he stop trafficking with drugs, as he and his brothers allegedly smuggled large stocks of hashish from Morocco to Spain. "We all knew that Ahmidan was a drug trafficker," said an official at the Madrid mosque where Ahmidan and most of
the March 11 bombers used to worship, "but we would have never imagined that he was also a terrorist."73 But Mowgli lived a double life. Though he continued to sell drugs, he stopped using them himself.74 He began attending services at the mosque where some of the followers of Yarkas used to meet and befriending other radicals. Following the teachings of Takfir wa'l Hijra, Ahmidan hid his true feelings to deceive "the infidels"; deep within, his religious fanaticism was growing.

  Lavapies was the ideal place for Ahmidan to meet like-minded Muslims. He became friends with other young men from his native Tetuan, including Rachid and Mohammed Oulad, two brothers who bounced from odd job to odd job in the neighborhood. Another Tetuan native was Abdennabi Kounjaa, the man who wrote the letter to his son before dying; he had grown up a few yards from Ahmidan, and the two became good friends in Madrid.75 Kounjaa had close ties to a network that specialized in smuggling stolen cars from Spain to Morocco. In 1999 Kounjaa himself was arrested at the Spanish border while attempting to cross the Moroccan border with a car that had been stolen in Italy.76 The four Tetuan natives, who had known each other since childhood and had spent their young adulthood on the streets of Madrid, became radicalized together in Lavapies and died together in the Leganes apartment.77

  Ahmidan befriended other Moroccans living in Lavapies as well. Several local Muslims used to meet in the barbershop of Abdelhouahid Berraj, a native of Tangier, where they drank water that Berraj had brought home from his pilgrimage to Mecca. The rite also attracted Jamal Zougam, whose phone shop was located just a few meters from Berraj's, on the same street.78 A few meters past the barbershop and Zougam's phone store was another meeting point for the men, an Arab restaurant called Alhambra, a name reminiscent of the Moorish heritage in Spain. There, in 2001, Zougam stabbed a man because he attempted to bring a dog inside the restaurant, an act perceived as insulting by Islamic fundamentalists. After the stabbing, Yarkas, the leader of the Madrid cell, was warned by an associate that "the young people got into a fight." Yarkas immediately called Zougam's half-brother, Mohammed Chaoui, and told him to "clean out the shop. "79