Yahia: What do you mean, even if they take your fingerprints they cannot find you?
Ahmed: Yes, if you want I can show you that now I have certain fingerprints and tomorrow a different set. I know a technique that does not ever lead to your fingerprints. I know who I am, they don't know who I am; you are illegal but you go around legally.91
In Lebach, Ahmed immediately emerged as a leader. Fluent in English and Spanish, he became the spokesman for the more than two thousand asylum seekers living in the camp, dealing with German authorities on their behalf. Ahmed also became the main imam of the camp, preaching his radical views to hundreds of Muslim detainees. His sermons attracted the attention of local authorities, who began to monitor him sporadically.92 The surveillance was not very tight, however, and a couple of weeks before the attacks of 9/11, Ahmed disappeared from the camp. "Each month, a lot of people disappear here," commented one employee. "I don't know how they do it, but each month we have to close a lot of files." The "disappearances" might be explained by the camp's lack of any guards or barriers to prevent the asylum seekers from leaving.93 Illegal aliens-and in this case, terrorists-are free to "escape" whenever they want.
From Lebach, Ahmed moved to Madrid, where, as already noted, he befriended Fakhet and his group. He then moved to Paris, where he became involved in forging documents to facilitate the immigration of other militants. He returned to Madrid, but left the Spanish capital for Italy shortly before the March 11 attacks. In Milan, he began to plan new operations. Conversations were intercepted by DIGOS between Ahmed and two North Africans, one in Paris and one in Brussels, who apparently were receiving his orders for an attack. Italian authorities, afraid that a sequel to the Madrid attacks was in process, shared the content of the wiretapped conversations with their French and Belgian counterparts in real time, and arrests were made in both countries.94
But in Milan, the Egyptian also continued his recruiting efforts, and Yahia, his young roommate and fellow countryman, was the ideal recruit. The twenty-one-year-old, who had immigrated illegally to Italy just a few months earlier, immediately developed a morbid fascination with Ahmed's tales of jihad and martyrdom. Day and night, the two watched gruesome videos and listened to radical tapes. The following conversation taped by DIGOS is particularly telling:
Ahmed: When you see brother Mohammed [the librarian of a Milan mosque, either the ICI or Via Quaranta], ask him to show you the material. There you'll find what you want; if you are interested in culture there are the books and more.
Yahia: Yes.
Ahmed: Tell Mohammed to introduce you to the great culture, it will teach you everything, in the library there is everything you are interested in, if you are really interested in jihad, if you want to see movies of all the operations, they have been all documented, only Spain is missing.
Yahia: All?
Ahmed: All, all. And you also see the brothers, you see the movies from Chechnya, Afghanistan, Algeria, thousands of things, thousands ...
Yahia: And where does all this stuff come from?
Ahmed: After September 11 I was forced to move everything from Spain to Paris because in Spain there was too much movement of secret services ... [inaudible] ... I began with the normal things up until the very important things.
Yahia: Good.
Ahmed: Look, you watch them and start studying for jihad, for jihad and martyrdom.
Yahia: Is there also audio material about this?
Ahmed: There is everything, but I think that for you it would be better to read, so that each page enters inside you and explains the meaning to you. There are about 2,000 pages that teach you what is the meaning of jihad. Then you can listen. Look at me, I always have the cassette on martyrdom, I always listen to it.
Yahia: Do you have it here?
Ahmed: Yes, yes, I have it here right now, "The strength of the martyr." I also have other ones that talk about martyrdom, many others. But listen to me, you also have to start watching the videos, watch and learn, there are about 300 tapes of actions of the mujahideen in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Algeria, Kashmir, and in other countries. Technically they are very interesting tapes, there you can learn many things, they are particular tapes.
Yahia: Can I listen to this? So that I start to memorize.
Ahmed: Please.
[Ahmed turns the stereo on and they listen to the tape.]
Ahmed: Go to Mohammed and learnj95
Ahmed spent hours showing Yahia how to activate mobile phones via computer, focusing specifically on software with which a user can send the same text message to a number of previously selected mobile phones. The technology-savvy Ahmed introduced his disciple to "Oxygen Phone Manager 2," a program that enables a computer to command all the functions of a Nokia cell phone. The importance of this lesson is obvious: The bombs on the Madrid trains were set off by mobile phones activated from a distance.96
While under constant surveillance by Italian authorities, the two men read books and watched tapes about jihad. Ahmed was also obsessed with the Internet, spending hours surfing the Web for Islamist sites. Together, he and Yahia watched online clips of Western hostages being murdered by Zarqawi's group in Iraq. "Watch closely. This is the policy of the sword. Slaughter him! Cut his head off! God is great!" cheered Ahmed like a soccer fan at a game during the footage of the beheading of Nicholas Berg, the twenty-six-year-old American businessman beheaded by Zarqawi in May 2004. And when Yahia, horrified by the guttural noises made by the American as his captors chopped at his neck, asked if such killing was not a sin, Ahmed was quick to respond: "It's never a sin! It's never a sin for the cause. Everyone must end up like this."97
Ahmed was brainwashing Yahia, turning the already-radicalized young man into the weapon that has made Islamic terrorism so successful: a suicide bomber. As another conversation proved, he had done similar work in Madrid months earlier, showing the same tapes and giving the same speeches to Fakhet and the other train bombers who blew themselves up in Leganes:
Ahmed: These are very particular tapes ... they teach the direction of the martyr. These make everything easier, when you listen to them they enter inside your body, but you have to listen to them continuously. I listen to them continuously.... Even now that I am working during the break, I use both the CD and the cassette ... while for you it is better if you listen to the cassettes first and then to the CD.
Yahia: Fine.
Ahmed: In particular, this tape has an amazing voice ... it enters inside your veins. Everybody in Spain learned this cassette by heart. It gives you a lot of security and tranquillity. It takes away your fear.
Yahia: Come on, come on, give me one so that I can learn it.
Ahmed: Yes, but you have to learn it by heart.
Yahia: No, no ... I will learn it by heart.98
MORE AL QAEDA LINKS, MORE ATTACKS
The evidence incriminating Ahmed, who was extradited to Spain in December 2004,99 is solid. But Spanish authorities are convinced that Ahmed is not the attacks' only mastermind and are still pursuing other leads. One man who might have had a leading role in the bombings is Amer Azizi, whose fingerprints were found in the country house used by the cell to fabricate the bombs. 100 The experienced Moroccan jihadi, who married a Spanish woman and lived in Spain for almost a decade, is believed to be the link between the loose-knit group of immigrants from Lavapies and al Qaeda's leadership. "Without a doubt, he was more important that the Tunisian," commented a Spanish official. "Azizi was the brains, he was the link between the Moroccans and the rest of al Qaeda."101
Born in Morocco in 1967, Azizi is a battle-hardened militant who fought in Bosnia and, in the late 1990s, trained in the Afghan camp of Martyr Abu Yahyia, where hundreds of other Moroccan fundamentalists received instruction.102 The graduates of the camp later formed the nucleus of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain, or GICM), one of the organizations believed to be behind the 2003 Casablanca bombings. Operating out of Madrid, where he established close
relations with Yarkas, Azizi is a true globe-trotter of jihad, having met with known terrorists on four continents. He is also believed to have had close connections with some of the key players in the 9/11 attacks; Spanish magistrates have accused him of organizing the crucial July 2001 meeting between Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh in Cambrils, a Spanish coastal town. Moreover, his phone number was found in the possession of the would-be "twentieth hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui, when the French native was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001.103
In Madrid, Azizi, who was also known as Othman al Andalusi, frequented the Alhambra restaurant and drank water from Mecca with the other Moroccans at Berraj's barbershop, becoming friends with Fakhet and Zougam.104 While some reports indicate that he had a reputation of being a drug addict, his religious zealotry was well-known to Spanish counterterrorism officials, who had monitored him since the end of the 1990s.105 Azizi had fully displayed his fanaticism on June 10, 2000, after the death of Syria's president, Hafiz al-Assad. When the ambassadors from Arab countries went to the Madrid mosque attended by Yarkas's cell, Azizi attacked them, decrying their mourning for an "apostate ruler" and yelling, "Why do you come to pray for an infidel?" 106
Three months later, Azizi traveled to Istanbul, where he met with other leaders of the Moroccan network to set up new routes by which recruits could travel to the Afghan training camps.107 It was after the Istanbul meeting that Azizi crossed paths with Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was then running a camp near Herat, a few kilometers from the Iranian border. Azizi apparently began sending the militants he had recruited to Afghanistan via Iran; at least two of them stayed to train in Zarqawi's camp. 108 And when Azizi managed to escape the November 2001 antiterrorist crackdown, leaving Spain two days before the wave of arrests that dismantled much of the Madrid cell, he found refuge in Iran, where Zarqawi was also reportedly hiding after the fall of the Taliban.109
Spanish authorities have repeatedly searched for a link between Abu Musab al Zarqawi and the Madrid bombings. Azizi could be this linkan operative who had extensive ties to Spain, knew most of the perpetrators, and had been in close contact with Zarqawi. Investigators believe that Azizi may have sneaked back into Spain shortly before the attacks to coordinate the operation under Zarqawi's orders. A senior Spanish official told the Los Angeles Times, "There are people who have seen Azizi in Spain after the attacks. It looks like he came back and may have directed the others. If he was here, his background would make it likely that he was the top guy. We have reliable witness accounts that he was here in significant places connected to the plot. The idea of Azizi as a leader has become more solid."110
In Spain, Azizi's most trustworthy contacts were two Syrian brothers, Mouhannad and Moutaz Almallah. The men were detained in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but soon released. The men were rearrested in the spring of 2005, when Spanish authorities realized that, "according to all we know to this point," without the "recruiting, indoctrination and direction of the Almallah brothers, the March 11 attacks possibly would not have occurred."111 But the importance of the Almallah brothers was not initially fully grasped by Spanish authorities, who had also received a very detailed tip on them a year before the attacks. On February 12, 2003, the wife of Mouhannad Almallah entered a Madrid police station and told officers that her husband was planning a car bomb attack in Madrid and that the likely targets were the towers of Plaza de Castilla, a modern and imposing structure located on one of Madrid's busiest arteries. The woman told officers that her Madrid apartment was often visited by men who watched jihadi tapes, and she identified a few of them as key players in the March 11 plot such as Fakhet and Gha- lyoun.12 The story, which constitutes another example of how Spanish authorities did not pursue Islamist terrorists aggressively enough before March 11, is also extremely important in showing that attacks in Spain had been planned well before the country landed its support to the US invasion of Iraq, since the conflict had not even begun when Mrs. Almallah tipped Spanish authorities off.13
Another hypothesis advanced by investigators is that Azizi was acting as the deputy not of Zarqawi but of Abu Musab al Suri, the former editor of the Al Ansar, the newsletter of the GIA (Groupes Islamiques Armes, the Armed Islamic Group) mentioned in chapter 4. Al Suri, a longtime resident of Spain who had obtained citizenship by marrying a Spanish convert to Islam, had developed close contacts with Yarkas and other members of the "old" Madrid cell before moving to London and then to Afghanistan, where he worked as a trainer in an al Qaeda camp. 14 At the time of the Madrid attacks, al Suri was believed to be operating out of Iran; authorities suspect that he was the one who, in December 2003, dispatched Azizi to Spain to supervise the operation. I"
In fact, in November 2004, the FBI told Spanish authorities of intelligence indicating that the individual who had assisted Atta and Binalshibh in their July 2001 meeting was the same person who activated the Madrid cell that carried out the bombing. While the FBI is not wholly certain that this man was Amer Azizi, it is convinced that he was acting on behalf of al Suri. In November 2004, the US State Department offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of al Suri, who (according to some sources) could have recently spent some time fighting beside Zargawi's insurgents in Iraq.16
Even as authorities explore the strong connection to al Qaeda, they are led by the backgrounds of the perpetrators to investigate their links to Moroccan terrorist groups such as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and Salafiya Jihadia. As already noted, most of the March 11 bombers were Moroccans, and most had significant ties to both groups. Drawing on the evidence they have collected over more than two years, Spanish and Moroccan investigators see the Madrid attacks of March 2004 as the second large operation conceived by the same network that carried out the Casablanca bombings in May 2003. The links between the two operations are multiple.
One of the men who, along with Ahmed, assumed a leadership role in the Madrid cell after Yarkas's arrest was a Moroccan, Mustafa al Mauymouny. He is considered to be one of the top leaders of Salafia Jihadia, and he spent time in Madrid before being arrested in Morocco for his role in the Casablanca bombings."' In a change that could be interpreted as symbolizing a switch in the Madrid cell's affiliation, in 2003 Fakhet broke up with the daughter of Ahmed Brahim, the jailed moneyman of the "old" al Qaeda cell in Spain, and married Mauymouny's sixteen-year-old sister. Mauymouny also paid the rent of the countryside house where the bombers assembled the explosives."' Another connection between Casablanca and Madrid is a thirty-five-year-old Moroccan imam, Hicham Temsamani, who during his time in Madrid became one of the spiritual leaders of the group that met at Berraj's barbershop in Lavapies, leading the prayers and water drinking.1' Temsamani served as imam at a mosque in Toledo as well, and he was arrested in June 2003 by Spanish authorities for his alleged involvement in the Casablanca bombings and in a plot to blow up a refinery in France.120 Temsamani also provides one of the links between Moroccan Islamic fundamentalism and drug trafficking, as his brother Rachid is one of Morocco's most famous drug lords, controlling the shipment of tons of hashish, cocaine, and Ecstasy from his native Tetuan to Spain and the rest of Europe.121 Indeed, a powerful alliance was forged between drug kingpins and religious fanatics in Tetuan, a smuggling paradise in northern Morocco. This was the hometown of Jamal Ahmidan, who financed the March 11 bombings by drug trafficking. According to Spanish authorities, Ahmidan, a known drug dealer, obtained the explosives from a Spanish miner who had been convicted of drug-related offenses in exchange for thirty kilograms of hashish.122 And Ahmidan also flew to the island of Mallorca shortly before March 11 to arrange the sale of hashish and Ecstasy, planning to use the profits for additional attacks. 121 His scheme was hardly newMoroccan groups used drug money to finance both the thwarted attacks against American ships in Gibraltar in 2002 and the Casablanca bombings-but terrorists' use of drug trafficking is viewed with growing alarm by European authorities; they believe that terrorist organizations have infiltrated around two-thirds
of the Moroccan hashish trade, worth about $12.5 billion annually.124
Following Takfir's ideology of "necessity permits the forbidden," the Madrid bombers used any means available to achieve their murderous goals. They dated women, drank wine, and even sold drugs. But everything was done for the cause, and their behavior had the approval of senior figures in the network, respected leaders with more religious knowledge. One of those leaders, a Spanish official revealed, was Yarkas: "We know that when Barakat [Yarkas] had been consulted in the past, he justified drug trafficking if it was for Islam. He saw it as part of jihad." 115 According to Moroccan intelligence, the sale of drugs for the Madrid bombing was legitimized by a fatwa issued "within the organization responsible for the attacks," which "provided religious legality to the use of criminal acts, such as drug trafficking, to finance the perpetration of any action aimed at destroying the infidel enemy." 126
The Madrid plot is a puzzle that will be difficult to solve in its entirety. Authorities are sure that no single group ordered the attacks. Those involved were Moroccan Islamists belonging to local terrorist groups, remnants of the pre-9/11 al Qaeda network operating in Europe, experienced jihadis linked to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and drug traffickers with newly acquired sympathy for fundamentalist Islam-a combination that represents the new face of al Qaeda in Europe. A year after the attacks, more than seventy individuals have been arrested and almost forty thousand pages of evidence collected.121 Yet authorities still do not have the full picture: "The great majority of the perpetrators are identified, dead or in prison," said a senior Spanish counterterrorism official interviewed by the New York Times on the one-year anniversary of the attacks. "But we cannot say that we have all of them. There are questions that remain unclear. The most important is: Who masterminded March 11?"128
And even as Spanish investigators are trying to find all the answers about March 11, new threats continuously emerge. On the night of April 19, the body of Francisco Javier Torronteras, the Spanish agent who had died in the explosion of the Leganes apartment, was pulled from his tomb in a Madrid cemetery, dragged for six hundred meters, mutilated, doused with gas, and burned.'29 The barbaric act, which the Spanish Interior Ministry called an "Islamic rite of revenge,"130 showed that Islamic fundamentalists were still active in the country. More evidence came in the following six months that despite Spain's withdrawal from Iraq, the terrorists had not "forgotten about Spain."
Al Qaeda in Europe Page 34
