[Nettime-bold] LAT: Bosnia Seen as Hospitable Base and Sanctuary for Terrorists

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000080235oct07.story


Los Angeles Times


SUNDAY REPORT
Bosnia Seen as Hospitable Base and Sanctuary for Terrorists

                                                                      
By CRAIG PYES and JOSH MEYER and WILLIAM C. REMPEL, TIMES STAFF
WRITERS

ZENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists
who became Bosnian citizens after battling Serbian and Croatian forces
present a potential terrorist threat to Europe and the United States,
according to a classified U.S. State Department report and interviews
with international military and intelligence sources.
The extremists include hard-core terrorists, some with ties to Osama
bin Laden, protected by militant elements of the former Sarajevo
government. Bosnia-Herzegovina is "a staging area and safe haven" for
terrorists, said a former senior State Department official.
The secret report, prepared late last year for the Clinton
administration, warned of problem passport-holders in Bosnia in
numbers that "shocked everyone," the former official said. The White
House leaned on Bosnia and its then-president, Alija Izetbegovic, to
do something about the matter, "but nothing happened," he said.
Although no evidence connects any Bosnian group to the suicide
hijacking attacks of Sept. 11 blamed on Bin Laden, U.S. and European
officials are increasingly concerned about the scope and reach of Bin
Laden networks in the West and the proximity of Bosnia-based
terrorists to the heart of Europe.

A number of the extremists "would travel with impunity and conduct,
plan and stage terrorist acts with impunity while hiding behind their
Bosnian passports," the former official said.
In several instances, terrorists with links to Bosnia have launched
actions against Western targets:

* An Algerian with Bosnian citizenship, described by a U.S. official
as "a junior Osama bin Laden," tried to help smuggle explosives in
1998 to an Egyptian terrorist group plotting to destroy U.S. military
installations in Germany. The shipment included military C-4 plastic
explosives and blasting caps, the former U.S. official said. The CIA
intercepted the shipment, foiling the attack.

* Another North African with Bosnian citizenship belonged to a
terrorist cell in Montreal that conspired in the failed millennium
plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

* One of Bin Laden's top lieutenants--a Palestinian linked to major
terrorist plots in Jordan, France and the United States--had
operatives in Bosnia and was issued a Bosnian passport, according to
U.S. officials.

After the foiled plot against American bases in Germany, the U.S.
suspended without public explanation a military aid program to Bosnia
in 1999 in an attempt to force the deportation of the Algerian leader
of the group, Abdelkader Mokhtari, also known as Abu el Maali.
Finally, after the U.S. went a step further and threatened to stop all
economic aid, Izetbegovic agreed to deport El Maali. But the Algerian
was back in Bosnia within a year. Two months ago, he was reported to
be moving in and out of the country freely. He is now thought to be in
Afghanistan with the leadership of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda group,
according to a senior official for the NATO-led peacekeeping force,
SFOR, in Bosnia.

President Clinton's secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, personally
appealed to Izetbegovic to oust suspected terrorists or rescind their
Bosnian passports.

The effort by top State Department aides continued through the last
days of the administration. "It wasn't just one meeting, it was 10 to
12, with orders directly from the White House," said a former State
Department official.

Izetbegovic declined the appeals, several sources said, apparently out
of loyalty to the fighters who had come to his country's rescue. The
president argued that many had married Bosnian women, had taken up
farming and were legal citizens.

"The point we kept making to Izetbegovic was that if the day comes we
find out that these people are connected to some terrible terrorist
incident, that's the day the entire U.S.-Bosnia relationship will
change from friends to adversaries," the former State Department
official said.

Senior U.S. and SFOR officials believe that some hard-line members of
Izetbegovic's political party gave direct support, through their
control of the Foreign Ministry and local passport operations, to
foreign Islamic extremists with ties to Bin Laden.
Although Izetbegovic stepped down in October 2000, many hard-liners
remain in Bosnia's bureaucracy, and they are suspected of operating
their own rogue intelligence service that protects Islamic extremists,
military and intelligence sources said.

Last week, Bosnia's new interior minister, citing "trustworthy
intelligence sources," said scores of Bin Laden associates may be
trying to flee Afghanistan ahead of anticipated U.S. military
reprisals for the Sept. 11 attacks, seeking refuge among militant
sympathizers in Bosnia. The minister, Mohammed Besic, vowed to
intercept any who try to enter the country.

U.S. and SFOR officials acknowledge that the new coalition government
in Sarajevo has become much more responsive to fighting terrorism. A
senior State Department official lauded Sarajevo this year for
"working with the international community" in trying to clamp down on
suspected terrorists.

Since Sept. 11, Bosnia has launched an audit of passports and mounted
a more intensive crackdown on naturalized citizens who are wanted by
foreign law enforcement agencies. After years of inaction, several
international fugitives have been arrested this year and extradited.
Western Interests in Balkans May Be at Risk
Bosnia has a large Muslim population, most of whom do not practice a
strict form of Islam.

A senior State Department official cautioned that "a lot of people's
interests are served by hyping the terrorism problem in the Balkans,"
referring to anti-Muslim sentiment among other ethnic groups there.
But, he added, "that is not to say there are not bad people who would
exploit the weaknesses in the government and the lax security and use
[Bosnia] as a place to hide."

To date, Western interests in the Balkans have not been terrorist
targets. However, a senior peacekeeping official in Bosnia said local
police report that "there are plans to attack the Western interests
here in Bosnia after any future retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan. We
don't have anything to confirm it."
Bosnia has traditionally served as "an R&R [rest and recreation]
destination" for members of Bin Laden's organization and other
extremists, according to U.S. officials and the peacekeeping force.
"They come to Bosnia to chill out, because so many other places are
too hot for them," said a former State Department official active in
counter-terrorism.

They also use Bosnian passports to travel worldwide without drawing
the kind of scrutiny that those who hold Middle Eastern or North
African documents might attract, officials said. Bosnian passports are
particularly valuable for ease of travel to other Muslim countries
where no visa requirement is imposed on Bosnians.
Under the Izetbegovic government, the immigration system was so
unregulated that Bin Laden allies "would get boxes of blank passports
and just print them up themselves," the former State Department
official said.

A military official said that "for the right amount of money, you can
get a Bosnian passport even though it's the first time you've stepped
foot into Bosnia."

Among those who Western intelligence sources say was granted Bosnian
citizenship and passports was Abu Zubeida, one of Bin Laden's top
lieutenants. Zubeida, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, was in charge
of contacts with other Islamic terrorist networks and controlled
admissions to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. He arranged
training for unsuccessful millennium bomb plots in Canada and Jordan
and a recently foiled suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Paris,
according to court records and investigative reports.
Zubeida also asked LAX bomb plot figure Ahmed Ressam to get blank
Canadian passports that would allow other terrorists to infiltrate the
United States, according to testimony from Ressam, who was convicted
in the bomb plot and is cooperating with investigators.

Another terrorist with Bosnian credentials is Karim Said Atmani, a
Moroccan who was Ressam's roommate in Montreal and who was in the
group that plotted to bomb LAX, according to testimony. The Bosnian
government arrested him in April, and Atmani was extradited to France,
where he awaits sentencing on terrorism charges.

Beginning in 1992, as many as 4,000 volunteers from throughout North
Africa, the Middle East and Europe came to Bosnia to fight Serbian and
Croatian nationalists on behalf of fellow Muslims. They are known as
the moujahedeen. A military analyst called them "pretty good fighters
and certainly ruthless."

"I think the Muslims wouldn't have survived without this" help,
Richard Holbrooke, the United States' former chief Balkans peace
negotiator, said in a recent interview. At the time, U.N. peacekeepers
were proving ineffective at protecting Bosnian civilians, and an arms
embargo diminished Bosnia's fighting capabilities.
But Holbrooke called the arrival of the moujahedeen "a pact with the
devil" from which Bosnia still is recovering.

The foreign moujahedeen units were disbanded and required to leave the
Balkans under the terms of the 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace accord. But
many stayed--about 400, according to official Bosnian estimates.
Although the State Department report suggested that the number could
be higher, a senior SFOR official said allied military intelligence
estimated that no more than 200 foreign-born militants actually live
in Bosnia, of which closer to 30 represent a hard-core group with
direct links to terrorism.

"These are the bad guys--the ones you have to worry about," the
official said.

But he also said that "hundreds of other" Islamic extremists with and
without Bosnian passports "come in and out" and that Bosnia remains a
center for Al Qaeda recruiting and logistics support.

Bin Laden Reportedly Financed Recruits

A U.S. counter-terrorism official confirmed that "several hundred"
former moujahedeen remain in Bosnia. "Are they a threat? Absolutely.
Are we all over them? Absolutely," he said.
The fighters were organized as an all-moujahedeen unit called El
Moujahed. It was headquartered in Zenica in an abandoned hillside
factory, a compound with a hospital and prayer hall.
Bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world
through his businesses in Sudan, according to Mideast intelligence
reports. Other support and recruits for El Moujahed came, at least in
part, through Islamic organizations in Milan, Italy, and Istanbul,
Turkey, that European investigators later linked to trafficking in
passports and weapons for terrorists.
A series of national security and criminal investigations across
Europe have since identified the El Moujahed unit in court filings as
the "common cradle" from which an international terrorist network grew
and ultimately stretched from the Middle East to Canada.
Abu el Maali, its leader during the Bosnian war, remains an enigmatic
figure, charismatic and popular within the moujahedeen but barely
known outside. He briefly appeared in a propaganda video on El
Moujahed during the war, but his face was digitally removed before
distribution.

French court documents say El Maali now is the leader of terrorist
cells in Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Court testimony, confidential police records and interviews with
European intelligence officials show how El Maali marshaled recruits
from the West and Muslim countries to assemble the infrastructure of
what would become a terrorist organization.
Two French converts to Islam, both in their mid-20s, were among the
early volunteers for El Maali's ranks in the Bosnian war. Christophe
Caze, a medical school dropout, and Lionel Dumont joined El Moujahed
to provide humanitarian services. But once assigned to the moujahedeen
unit in Zenica, they immediately "plunged into violence," an associate
told French police.
A French judicial official said their eventual passage to terrorism
was strongly influenced by El Maali, with whom they became close. El
Maali "exerted a lot of influence on the fighters . . . which led them
to commit these violent actions under the cover of Islam," the
magistrate said.

The converts emerged as leaders, rendering impassioned exhortations to
younger volunteers to defend Islam "by all means," according to court
records. They also began setting up a clandestine network in France,
creating multiple identities, encoding phone lists and recruiting
followers they could call into action later. Court records say that
Caze, working as a medic, recruited future terrorists among the
wounded he treated.
At the war's end, U.S. officials focused on state-sponsored terrorism
and worried about getting Iranian fighters back to Iran. Less clear
were the implications of loosely allied extremist groups and
individuals.

Looking back, peace negotiator Holbrooke blamed imprecise and "sloppy
intelligence" for failing to distinguish which Muslim groups posed a
threat to the United States. It turned out that Iranian fighters went
home. Many of El Maali's trained warriors did not.

Spasm of Violence Hits Northern France

In Bosnia, most of the violence stopped with the peace accord in 1995.
But in January 1996, it broke out again--on the streets of northern
France.

A puzzling crime wave swept the area around Roubaix, a gritty,
Muslim-majority town near the Belgian border. Small groups of men
began holding up stores and drivers. They brandished machine guns and
wore hoods and carnival masks. Two people were killed.
On March 28, just before a Group of 7 summit of leading industrial
nations that would bring top ministers to Lille, police discovered a
stolen car abandoned in front of the police station. It was parked
askew. And it contained a bomb packed into three gas cylinders rigged
to devastate everything within 600 feet. It was disarmed.
The next night, a special tactical squad surrounded a house at 59 Rue
Henri Carette in Roubaix that had been linked to the booby-trapped
car. Police fired thousands of rounds into the building. The house
erupted in flames because of munitions inside, police said later. Four
charred bodies were recovered.

Two men fled the barrage and inferno. At a police roadblock just
inside Belgium, another furious gun battle erupted. One of the men was
killed, and his accomplice was wounded.

In the getaway car, police found rocket launchers, automatic weapons,
large amounts of ammunition and grenades. They also recovered an
electronic organizer containing coded telephone contacts, nearly a
dozen of them in Bosnia. The dead ringleader was identified as
Christophe Caze, the young medic who went to fight in Bosnia.
French authorities, confused about the motives for the spasm of gang
violence, considered it a new phenomenon, calling it "gangster
terrorism." Their investigation uncovered what may have been the first
terrorism cell exported from Bosnia.
After an investigation of the surviving associate, Caze's electronic
organizer and other evidence recovered by French police, the robbery
gang was identified as nine militants who attended a local mosque.
Most of them had undergone military training at the El Moujahed
compound in Bosnia.

The armed robberies were a radical form of fund-raising by Caze and
his associates to benefit their "Muslim brothers in Algeria." Their
high-powered weapons were smuggled home from the Bosnian war.
Caze's organizer was described by one official as "the address book of
the professional terrorist." It contained phone contacts in England,
Italy, France and Canada, as well as direct lines to El Maali's Zenica
headquarters. It led French authorities to trace travels and phone
records and to set up electronic surveillance.
French counter-terrorism officials soon realized they had stumbled
upon more than a band of gangsters. Five years before the
sophisticated terrorist assault on the U.S., the French were starting
to uncover loosely linked violent networks spreading into several
countries, all tied together by a common thread: Bosnia.
One of the phone numbers in the dead terrorist's organizer led to a
suspect in Canada: Fateh Kamel, 41, who ran a small trinkets shop in
Montreal.

French authorities say Canada rejected their initial request to
investigate Kamel, calling the dapper Algerian "just a businessman."
But Kamel also was a confidant of El Maali. He spoke frequently to the
Bosnia moujahedeen chief over his wife's cell phone. Kamel had gone to
Bosnia early in the war, suffered a shrapnel wound in one leg and been
treated at the El Moujahed hospital by Caze, the young medic.
Kamel first came to the attention of European intelligence officials
in 1994, when Italian agents tracking suspected terrorists stumbled
upon him recruiting fighters in Milan for El Maali's brigade.
After the Dayton accord, French police say, Kamel became deeply
involved in terrorist logistics. He was "the principal activist of an
international network determined to plan assassinations and to procure
arms and passports for terrorist acts all over the world," according
to a French court document.

In 1996, an Italian surveillance team recorded Kamel discussing a
terrorist attack and taped him declaring: "I do not fear death . . .
because the jihad is the jihad, and to kill is easy for me."
During the same period, Kamel assisted other North African extremists
relocating to Canada, exploiting the country's lax immigration laws
and Quebec's eagerness for French-speaking immigrants such as
Algerians.

According to French investigators, Kamel was the leader of a terrorist
cell in Montreal. Other members included Ressam, Atmani and a third
roommate, Mustafa Labsi.

Like Kamel, Atmani had served in Bosnia and was close to El Maali. A
U.S. law enforcement official described Atmani as a "crazy warrior
with a nose so broken and twisted that he could sniff around corners."
Later, authorities believe, the three roommates went to Afghanistan
together to train for a terrorist attack on the United States. They
returned to the West after learning that their target would be Los
Angeles International Airport. The conspiracy was interrupted when
Atmani was deported from Canada to Bosnia.

When Ressam, traveling alone, was captured at the border with
explosives in his rental car, U.S. officials tried to track down his
former roommate Atmani. Authorities had information that he was
traveling between Sarajevo and Istanbul, but Bosnian officials denied
even that Atmani had been deported there. Investigators later learned
that Atmani had been issued a new Bosnian passport six months earlier.
Atmani was part of the hard-core terrorist group noted in the secret
State Department report. He remained beyond the reach of international
extradition until this year, when he was arrested and turned over to
France by Bosnia's new coalition government. He awaits sentencing on
terrorism charges.

Kamel, the alleged ringleader of the group, was arrested in Jordan and
was extradited to France, where he is in prison on a terrorism
conviction. Ressam and Labsi also have been jailed. All of the members
of the former Montreal cell have been convicted of being operatives in
a terrorist network that originated in Bosnia.
James Steinberg, deputy national security advisor in the Clinton
administration, said that although the U.S. works closely with
countries in the Balkans to deal with "the problem of these cells,"
the very nature of secret terrorist organizations confounds those
efforts.

"It's one thing to [arrest] the people you know [are terrorists], but
then the others . . . bury themselves even deeper," he said.


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