Maof - As Europe Hunts for Terrorists, the Hunted Press Advantages

and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Published: March 22, 2004

MADRID, March 21 — On a quiet Sunday afternoon, the ancient Madrid neighborhood of Lavapi?s is a picture of European multiculturalism.

Spanish matrons with sprayed helmets of golden hair stroll arm in arm with husbands wearing black berets. A young man with a purple mohawk sips coffee after coffee. Nearby, a few Nigerians lean against a wall, telling stories of the night before. Young Moroccans drift buoyantly down the street.

On several nights last week, however, the neighborhood that has long been a haven for Muslim immigrants looked more like a battleground. The police raided Moroccan-owned shops for evidence in the Madrid terror bombings. Investigators hunted witnesses. Handcuffed suspects, hooded with garbage bags, were hustled into waiting cars.

The battle that broke into the open in Lavapi?s is being fought in shadows all over Europe, as the police and intelligence agents confront the growing numbers of Islamic militants who blend easily with other immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.

The unfolding Spanish investigation has shown that the terrorists continue to exploit a tactical advantage. The militants operate in an ever-changing constellation of cells, moving freely from country to country across the continent, guided by opportunity and fanaticism. The agents tracking them are constrained by jurisdictional and bureaucratic boundaries. Intelligence is far too infrequently shared, investigators say, often leaving information about dangerous militants woefully incomplete.

"There is an enormous amount of information, but much of it gets lost because of the failures of cooperation," Baltasar Garz?n, the Spanish investigative judge, said in an interview. "We are doing maybe one-third of what we can do within the law in fighting terrorism in Europe. There is a lack of communication, a lack of coordination, and a lack of any broad vision."

At least three of the suspects in the Madrid attacks were known to European and Arab intelligence officials for some time. One suspect, a 30-year-old Moroccan named Jamal Zougam, raised suspicions in Spain, Morocco and France, consorted with militant leaders from at least five countries and had his home searched by the police, yet was never thoroughly investigated. He has denied any involvement in the bombings.

Mr. Zougam's ability to maneuver on the fringes of scrutiny was hardly unique. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, another young Moroccan named Mohamed Daki, who was living in Germany, acknowledged to the police that he knew members of the Hamburg cell that planned the attacks. But the authorities did not track him. He resurfaced last April near Milan, where the Italian authorities charged him with conspiring to recruit terrorists to fight against Americans in Iraq.

In the span of barely two decades, Europe has gone from being a refuge for Arab radicals, to a staging ground for terrorist attacks elsewhere, to a prized target for Islamic terrorists. Between the Sept. 11 attacks and the Madrid bombings, the European authorities say they thwarted a string of plots — the European Parliament building, the American Embassies in Paris and Rome, the 13th-century cathedral of Strasbourg, France. But in recent months, senior intelligence officials worried openly that it was only a matter of time before terrorists struck a major European city.

The Madrid bombings, which killed 202 people and wounded 1,700, suggested that terrorists linked to Al Qaeda could not only modify their tactics, but also adopt a mind-set different from the one investigators thought they knew.

Suicide bombers were replaced by triggering devices engineered with cheap cellphones. While disciples of Osama bin Laden are known for favoring symbolism in their targets, these plotters seemed more political. The Madrid attackers struck just three days before the Spanish elections, which dislodged a government that supported the American-led invasion of Iraq. When Mr. Zougam arrived in court after five days incommunicado, he reportedly asked the clerks, "Who won the elections?"

The tactical shift that seemed to concern intelligence officials most was the silence of the terrorists. Officials noted an eerie absence of the communications "chatter" usually detected in the days before and after attacks.

"It was the quiet that was so odd," one intelligence official said. "It was so quiet, so quiet. We haven't seen that before."

The Seeds of Jihad

Militant Clerics, Restless Youths

Fifteen years ago, the call for jihad first echoed in the most militant of mosques in London, Hamburg and Madrid.

Fiery imams, like Sheik Abu Hamza al-Masri of the Finsbury Park mosque in a rundown north London neighborhood, found a ready audience. Mostly they were restless Muslim youths, whose families had streamed into Europe seeking asylum from persecution in their home countries, but who wound up embittered by the struggle for economic opportunity. In some young people, the seeds of a war on the West took root, and thousands traveled to Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan where they learned to fire weapons and use explosives.

While European intelligence agencies focused more on domestic terrorism — the I.R.A. in Britain, the Basque group ETA in Spain — Europe became a fertile recruiting ground for Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

"Al Qaeda's European infrastructure has always been far more ingrained and widespread than their presence in North America," said Matthew A. Levitt, a senior fellow in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Eventually, Europe became a staging area for terrorism — most notably the Sept. 11 attacks, planned in Germany and Spain. Afterward, as the Europeans swept up hundreds of suspected terrorists, intelligence officials began to fear attacks on their own soil. Initially, intelligence agencies showed an unusual cooperation in defusing several plots.

As pressure on Al Qaeda's leadership mounted, the militants adapted. Radical imams took their message underground. Muslim extremists appeared to regroup into smaller, more transient cells, intelligence officials say, with fewer discernible ties to the Qaeda hierarchy.

New groups emerged and new associations developed among established ones. In recent months, officials say, Ansar al Islam, the militant group that was entrenched in northern Iraq before the war, has reasserted itself in Europe, recruiting operatives to fight in Iraq. The officials say the move reflects an alliance forged between Ansar and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bin Laden confederate who American officials say is behind a recent series of deadly bombings in Iraq.

"As Al Qaeda's superstructure was taken down, one option was to press in new directions, put resources somewhere else," said a senior American counterterrorism official. "One of these directions now seems to be Ansar."

The more diffuse terror threat played into the weaknesses of the Europe's patchwork intelligence system.

"The problem with intelligence in Europe is that we are far too bureaucratic and fragmented across borders," said a senior German intelligence official. "Our security is much less integrated than our business or transportation infrastructures. We also have many different languages, while the terrorist cells all speak Arabic. The extremists also move relatively freely across borders. In this sense, ironically, they are more European than we are."

For years, European officials have talked about the need for a central repository for information about terrorist groups, but agencies have been reluctant, officials say. "If the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are fighting constantly about information, how do you think it is with the French and the Germans?" said one Spanish official.

At a European Union meeting in Brussels on Friday, counterterrorism officials agreed to appoint a "terrorism czar" to facilitate sharing of information about suspected terrorists. But even last week, German officials were furious that Spain had initially refused to divulge the type of explosives used in the Madrid bombings.

Elusive Suspects

Itinerant Militants Slip Across Borders

In this atmosphere, perhaps it is not surprising that many suspects slipped through the cracks. One was Mohamed Daki, a 38-year-old Moroccan man, who came to Germany on a student visa to study engineering. According to the German authorities, Mr. Daki never enrolled in college, but he did find his way to Al Quds mosque in Hamburg, where he met members of the Qaeda cell that planned the Sept. 11 attacks.

Beate Ragi, whose husband was a friend of Mr. Daki, said in an interview: "My husband admired Daki because he was a true believer. He had visions and spoke in tongues."

When the German police questioned Mr. Daki three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, he acknowledged that he knew members of the cell and that one of them, a fugitive named Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was registered as his roommate, according to German court documents. "I know why I am here," Mr. Daki said when the police took him in for questioning, according to transcripts of his interrogation. But Mr. Daki apparently lied when asked whether a second suspect in the Sept. 11 plot was also registered at his apartment. German officials now acknowledge that they never investigated further.

With no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Daki, the German police let him go. But, officials now concede, they also lost track of him. And, apparently, his name was not added to any international list of suspicious persons.

Mr. Daki became another itinerant militant moving across Europe, intelligence officials said. He apparently attracted no attention in the spring of 2002 when he moved from Hamburg to Milan where Italian investigators say they suspect Mr. Daki eventually joined a Qaeda-related venture: recruiting fighters to take up arms against the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Although American and European intelligence officials say they suspect the recruitment is linked to Mr. bin Laden through Mr. Zarqawi, it is not clear that Mr. Daki had any high-level contacts.

Even so, just as he had become ensnared in a terrorism investigation in Hamburg in 2001, he fell under suspicion in Milan last March.

The Italian authorities tracking the Milan cell eavesdropped on a call Mr. Daki had received from a man in Syria who had been in frequent contact with the Milan cell. His message was urgent: Mr. Daki and others had been detected and should flee.

"Listen to me attentively," the caller said, according to Italian police transcripts. "Wait for my call. Move yourself to France and await orders."

The caller was Abderazek Mahdjoub, a resident of Hamburg who also had ties to Sept. 11 hijackers. Italian officials have charged that Mr. Mahdjoub, operating from Hamburg, headed the Milan cell.

According to a senior German intelligence official, Mr. Mahdjoub had been under observation by German domestic intelligence since at least 2000. But Italian investigators were unaware of the German intelligence about either Mr. Mahdjoub or Mr. Daki until the Italians arrested members of the Milan cell last April, officials of both countries said.

Eighteen months after Mr. Daki was first questioned in Hamburg, he was charged with aiding the Milan cell's logistics and forging documents.

"Looking back," said one Hamburg police investigator, "I would say that we should have asked more pointed questions than we did."

Pieces of a Puzzle

Investigators Struggle to Assemble Clues

European intelligence officers have asked questions about Jamal Zougam for at least four years. But they did not begin to get all of the answers until the Madrid attacks.

Mr. Zougam, the most noted of the 10 suspects arrested so far in the Madrid bombings, appears from court records and intelligence files to be a kind of militant Zelig — shuttling between Morocco and Spain, befriending prominent extremists in several countries and worshiping with two well-known radical clerics.

In 2000, the French became interested in Mr. Zougam during their pursuit of David Courtailler, a French convert to Islam now being tried in a terrorism case in Paris. The Moroccan authorities came upon Mr. Zougam later, as they pursued a pair of Moroccan militants, the Benyaich brothers, implicated in the 2003 bombings of a Spanish social club and other sites in Casablanca.

By the time French investigators asked Spain for information about Mr. Zougam, he had already been detected in the intercepted telephone calls with the accused head of a Qaeda cell in Spain, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas. In June 2001, the Spanish police searched Mr. Zougam's apartment and found telephone numbers and other information that showed his ties to other suspected members of Mr. Yarkas's cell.

That cell took on new importance after Sept. 11, when investigators concluded it had assisted the hijackers who carried out the attacks. Although Spain arrested 40 Qaeda suspects over the next two years, Mr. Zougam was not among them.

How Mr. Zougam escaped the net is not entirely clear. Spanish court documents suggest he had frequent contact with Mr. Yarkas, but one Spanish investigator described him as "a follower, a secondary figure." Another Spanish law-enforcement official said the police focused more directly on Mr. Zougam in 2002, but by then he had grown notably more cautious about using the telephone.

He apparently had many phones to use. The Spanish official said it was probably no accident that Mr. Zougam and one of his confederates, Said Chedadi, were both linked to the sale of falsified telephone cards and the fraudulent use of cellphones.

"They may have 20 phone cards to use," the official said. "You might get up on one or two, but even then it is extremely difficult to follow them. One of them will say, `Let's go eat cherries at the usual place.' But what are `cherries?' What is `eating?' What is the `usual place?' You have to analyze the voices, the codes, who is who."

"Every new phone number you get leads you to 10 more phones that talk to that person," the official added. "Very quickly it becomes 100 phones, and you have to do paperwork every month to justify the surveillance on each phone."

The Spanish authorities have long experience battling terrorists, particularly the Basque separatist group ETA. And even before Sept. 11 they had been monitoring Mr. Yarkas and his associates for six years. But while the Sept. 11 attacks elevated the importance that the Spanish authorities accorded to the Islamist cells in their midst, they pursue them with a fraction — perhaps one-third or one-fourth — of the agents they assigned to ETA, two Spanish officials said. Like other Western governments, Spain has few Arabic speaking agents and little capacity to infiltrate militant cells.

None of the intelligence services that took note of Mr. Zougam rang what sounded like an alarm to the Spanish authorities. "It was all fairly vague," one Spanish official said.

In the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, fingers were pointing all around. A French official said it took months for the Spanish to address their initial request for information about Mr. Zougam. Spanish officials insisted they were the only ones that pursued him seriously. A Moroccan official said the Spanish were told early last summer that Mr. Zougam was "very dangerous," but did not get back to them to ask any question — until after the bombs in Madrid.

"We're facing challenges we didn't face before," said Judge Garz?n, the Spanish magistrate. "If we don't act, if we don't make changes in real time, we are going to be lost."

Tim Golden reported from Madrid, Desmond Butler from Germany and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Italy.

Published: NYT March 22, 2004

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