[iwar] [fc:'I.saw.al-Qaeda.agent.recruit.the.shoe.bomber']

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-01-07 07:24:47
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 07:24:47 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:'I.saw.al-Qaeda.agent.recruit.the.shoe.bomber']
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                      SATURDAY JANUARY 05 2002
           'I saw al-Qaeda agent recruit the shoe bomber'
                          BY DANIEL MCGRORY
                             London Times

  INTELLIGENCE services are investigating claims that Richard Reid,
the alleged shoe bomber, was recruited by al-Qaeda’s chief
talent-spotter in Europe while he was sleeping rough at a London
mosque.
Among the group of young Muslims staying at the Finsbury Park Mosque
at the same time was a former professional footballer, Nizar Trabelsi,
who was allegedly chosen to be al-Qaeda’s first suicide bomber in
Europe. The Tunisian-born Mr Trabelsi was meant to blow himself up
inside the US Embassy in Paris that would signal the start of a series
of attacks on European targets.
A British Muslim has told The Times that he was in Finsbury Park
Mosque in the spring of 1998 and saw Mr Trabelsi with Richard Reid and
the al-Qaeda lieutenant, who, European police believe, recruited the
suicide bombers. Their meeting is seen as evidence that Mr Reid, 28 —
who allegedly tried to blow himself up on an aircraft over the
Atlantic last month — was not working alone as he claims, but was
under orders from al-Qaeda agents who have used London mosques as a
recruiting centre for years.
So far Mr Reid, who is in a Boston jail, has refused to tell FBI
agents anything about the plot to blow up American Airlines Flight 63
from Paris to Miami with plastic explosive hidden inside his boots.
Police suspect that Mr Reid was chosen by an Algerian, Djamal Beghal,
who lived in Britain for a time with his wife and two sons and who is
alleged to be al-Qaeda’s operational commander in Europe.
Softly spoken and intelligent, Djamal Beghal is known to have received
his instructions in person from Osama bin Laden, who gave him incense,
prayer-beads and toothpicks when the pair last met in Afghanistan in
July 2000. He was arrested shortly afterwards in Dubai as he headed
back to Europe to finalise the attack plan.
Rashid Hussain, 29, who saw all three men in Finsbury Park mosque,
told The Times: “Trabelsi and Reid were physically very distinctive.
Both were over 6ft 4in tall. They didn’t say very much. Both appeared
a bit shy and always seemed to be huddled in conversation with Beghal,
who was clearly the boss.”
Other suspects now being held in the United States, France, Italy and
Spain are also known to have visited the same London mosques.
The Finsbury Park complex is run by Abu Hamza al-Masri, who lost a
hand and an eye in an Afghanistan bomb blast. The suspected terrorists
were also seen at prayer meetings held by another militant cleric, Abu
Qatada, at the Four Feathers Youth Club near Baker Street. The
cleric’s bank accounts have been frozen because of his suspected links
with al-Qaeda.
Both Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza say that they do not know these al-Qaeda
suspects, adding that many thousands of Muslims visit their mosques
and attend their meetings and they are not required to register their
names.
Security chiefs in The Netherlands, Belgium and France, together with
Scotland Yard, are now trying to piece together the complicated links
that Mr Reid had with al-Qaeda.
A senior figure in the BVD, the Dutch intelligence service, said: “All
routes seem to lead back to London, but still nothing is being done
about the clerics.” Juan Cotino, the Spanish national police chief,
has described London as the hub of the recruitment drive.
A senior source in the Belgian police said: “It cannot be coincidence
that the same faces were in the same mosque at the same time in
London.”
Nobody ever asked the young men sleeping rough in these mosques why
they were there. Some were homeless. Others, such as Mr Reid, were
drug-users who had been in prison. Scattered among them were agents
from al-Qaeda, who saw these social misfits as ideal recruits.
New converts to Islam were known as the “white moors”. Al-Qaeda picked
on the most vulnerable — yet trained them well enough that today none
of those arrested has betrayed what they know of bin Laden’s future
plans.
Mr Hussain, a former warehouse worker in South London, was one of the
converts. He recalls the fiery speeches by Abu Hamza and the efforts
afterwards by Mr Beghal to encourage recruits to do more than just
talk about jihad. “There was talk about training camps in Afghanistan
where they would learn about weapons. It scared me but some there, you
could see, were hooked.”
Three men with whom Mr Hussain sat with in an upstairs room in the
five-storey mosque near Arsenal Football Club’s Highbury stadium would
be brainwashed into undertaking suicide missions.
The first was Zacharias Moussaoui, the muscular business studies
graduate who is the first person to be charged in America with being
part of the hijack plot. It is alleged that he should have been on
board one of the aircraft on September 11. He was the most aggressive
of the three. Two brothers from France, David and Jerome Courtellier,
were among guests to stay at his flat in Brixton.
Their father, who has a butcher’s business in the foothills of the
Alps, said that he did not recognise his sons after their time in
London. The white, middle-class young Frenchmen grew beards and took
to wearing Arab robes.
David Courtellier told how at Finsbury Park Mosque he was given cash,
a fake passport and the telephone number of a contact in the Paksitani
frontier city of Peshawar who would take him to an al-Qaeda camp. When
his Jerome was arrested in Rotterdam, two days after the attacks on
the World Trade Centre, police found fake documents and equipment for
cloning credit cards.
Dutch police are investigating reports that Jerome Courtellier helped
Mr Reid to find work on construction sites while he was in Amsterdam.
Mr Reid, who has a Jamaican father and English mother, divided his
time between Amsterdam, Brussels and London, as well as travelling
extensively in the Middle East. What FBI agents are still trying to
discover is whether he slipped into Afghanistan during his stay last
year in Pakistan.
US security chiefs say they have intercepts of Mr Reid making regular
telephone calls to Mr Moussaoui in London. Belgian police are
concentrating on Mr Reid’s links with Mr Trabelsi, who like him had
been in prison for drug offences and theft.
When Mr Trabelsi was arrested in September police allegedly found an
Uzi sub-machinegun and a store of the chemical ingredients for the
explosive TATP. TATP was the explosive found in Mr Reid’s boots.

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