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Europe
Suspected Swedish Jihad Recruiter Charged in Greece
2016-02-04
[AnNahar] A Greek court on Tuesday formally charged a Swedish jihadist of Bosnian origin with "terrorist activity" after he and an alleged accomplice were caught trying to cross into The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
, a justice source said.

Mirsad Bektasevic, 28, is a suspected jihadist recruiter operating under the codename 'Maximus'.

He had been incarcerated
Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up!
in Sarajevo in 2005 after a police search of his home found an explosives belt, explosives and a video of a masked man advocating attacks against the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

According to U.S. officials, Bektasevic at the time belonged to a small group of holy warriors hoping to create an Al-Qaeda affiliate group in Sweden, where he moved as a boy during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2007, a sentence reduced to eight years on appeal, and was released in 2011.

Bektasevic and another 19-year-old Swedish passport holder of Yemeni origin -- identified by Greek media as Al Hasani Amer -- were arrested over the weekend at the bus station of Alexandroupolis, near the border with Turkey.

They were found in possession of two machetes, army uniforms and other combat paraphernalia.

Both have been charged with membership of a terrorist group and bearing combat weapons with the aim of supporting a terrorist group.

Their lawyer said they were in the area for tourism and had purchased the weapons as souvenirs.

The two men arrived in Greece by plane from Sweden nearly two weeks ago, traveling by bus to Thessaloniki and then to Alexandroupolis with tickets bound for Turkey, police said.

Security concerns in Europe are high after revelations that some of the jihadists behind the Gay Paree terror attacks in November slipped into Europe posing as refugees.
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Home Front: WoT
Terrorism charges against Georgians detailed
2008-12-11
Atlanta terrorism defendants Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee communicated with and gave information to terrorists bent on waging violent jihad, according to new indictments by a federal grand jury.

In newly amended indictments against each man, prosecutors added information on the breadth of the defendants’ communications before their arrests two years ago. Both men are charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. That includes their trying, in 2005, to join Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group that India blames for the bloody three-day siege of Mumbai last month.

Ahmed and Sadequee have pleaded not guilty and will be tried separately. Ahmed’s trial is set for June 1 in federal court in Atlanta. Sadequee is to stand trial next August. They are being held without bond.

Ahmed’s lawyer, Jack Martin, said the new indictment does not substantially change the allegations against Ahmed or his defense. “And, once again,” Martin added, “it’s quite clear from the indictment there’s no allegation he committed any terrorist act or act of violence whatsoever.” Don Samuel, a lawyer for Sadequee, said his client will plead not guilty to this indictment as well. “Nobody’s heard our side yet,” he said. “The grand jury hears only the government’s side of the story.”

During an April 2005 trip to Washington, Ahmed, a former Georgia Tech student, and Sadequee, of Roswell, recorded amateurish videos of “symbolic and infrastructure targets for potential terrorist attacks,” said the indictment. In one video, Ahmed and Sadequee pass the Pentagon as they drive toward Washington. “This is where our brothers attacked the Pentagon,” Sadequee says on the video, the indictment said. The videos were sent to Aabid Hussein Khan, who is in prison in England for possessing articles for terrorism.

According to Tuesday’s indictment, when he was arrested in June 2006, Khan had the videos recorded by Ahmed and Sadequee. Khan also had maps and timetables for the Washington and New York public transit systems; information on truck routes into New York; schematics of the financial district in lower Manhattan; aerial photos of the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and information on paramilitary training camps in Pakistan, the indictment said.

Separately, the new indictment said, between August 2005 and April 2006, Sadequee was in contact with a number of supporters of violent jihad. They included Mirsad Bektasevic, who was arrested in Bosnia Herzegovina in October 2005 after being found with more than 20 pounds of plastic explosives, firearms, bomb-making materials and a manifesto promising an attack on Western interests, the indictment said.
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Europe
Danish Teenager Sentenced in Terror Plot
2007-02-16
Judges throw out jury convictions on 3 others

A Danish court on Thursday convicted a 17-year-old defendant on terror charges and sentenced him to seven years in prison for involvement in a botched plot to blow up a target in Europe. Three other suspects in the case were cleared of offenses.

The court found Abdul Basit Abu-Lifa guilty of involvement in a terror plot uncovered in Bosnia in October 2005 with the arrest of two men allegedly preparing to carry out a terror attack.

The pair, Swedish national Mirsad Bektasevic and Abdulkadir Cesur, a Turk living in Denmark, were convicted by a Bosnian court last month of planning an attack aimed at forcing foreign troops to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The exact target of the plot remains unclear.

In the Danish case, police arrested Abu-Lifa and the three others on Oct. 27, 2005, after a tip from Bosnian police. Investigators used mobile phone records and Internet chats to link the defendants in Denmark to the Bosnian plot.

A jury in the Eastern High Court said Thursday there was enough evidence to prove that all four defendants were involved in the plot, but the three-judge panel disagreed and overturned the verdicts against all but Abu-Lifa. Under Danish law, judges have the right to overturn any decision made by the jury. "It is very, very rare that this happens," said Thorkild Hoeyer, the attorney for one of the freed defendants, Elias Ibn Hsain.

Prosecutors had demanded at least eight years in prison for Abu-Lifa, a Danish citizen of Palestinian descent, but the judges gave him a seven-year sentence, citing his young age.

Imad Ali Jaloud, who prosecutors said was the leader of the group, refused to speak to media as he left the courtroom. Another acquitted defendant, Adnan Avdic, blubbered cried quietly inside the packed courtroom after it became clear he would be released. An attorney for Abu-Lifa, Anders Boelskifte, said there was no decision yet on whether they would appeal the ruling.
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Terror Networks
Local Manpower Key To New Al-Qaeda Strategy, Expert
2006-08-30
Belgrade, 30 August (AKI) - This month's foiled air terror plot in Britain is the latest reminder to Europe and the United States of their vulnerability, but a leading Serbian terrorism expert warns that scrutinising every Arabic or Asian face at airport security checks is pointless. "Terrorists are among us, and what has been smuggled across the border is invisible, the poisonous ideology which perceives the West as an emanation of evil" Darko Trifunovic told Adnkronos International (AKI). Trifunovic says the new al-Qaeda strategy is to "indoctrinate or poison the hearts and minds of youngsters to motivate them for the future terror operations."

Trifunovic, a professor at Belgrade University's Faculty of Security Studies, was among the first to warn about the changing tactics of the international terrorist network and the role of the so called “white Al-Qaeda” in exporting terrorism to Europe and the United States.

Terrorists no longer come directly from the Islamic countries, but use local youths who have previously been indoctrinated with radical Islam, says Trifunovic. Most of the London bombers were of Pakistani descent but had were full British citizens. Some white Americans and Australians had fought for Al-Qaeda in Iraq and were now being processed at Guantanamo American base in Cuba.

In this new strategy Bosnia, alleges Trifunovic, has proven to be an ideal place for such activities and hundreds of Muslim war orphans have gone through indoctrination courses and terrorist training camps, operated by the mujahadeen who stayed behind after the 1992-1995 Bosnia civil war, where there was an influx of foreign Muslim fighters. "Can you imagine the motivation of a youth whose parents have been killed in the war? You can practically send them to any task and they will carry it out," says Trifunovic.

Trifunovic believes that Al-Qaeda already has "white cells" in every country with substantial Muslim population and that is what will make the fight against terrorism more difficult in the future. "Last year’s London bombings and recently averted air plots have shown that a terrorist could be your neighbour, just over your backyard fence, who until yesterday seemed to be a ‘nice man’, going quietly about his business," says

According to Trifunovic, the most precious contribution of the mujahadeen who went to fight in Bosnia wasn’t in the battlefield but in the indoctrination of local Muslim youths, argues Trifunovic, who is also an associate of Washington-based International Strategic Studies Association.

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia have been tracking radical Islamists who remained in the country after the war and many have been questioned for links to international terrorism. Six of them, all Algerians, were arrested and handed over to the US Government and are still believed to be held in Guantanamo base in Cuba, Trifunovic says. Bosnian authorities are currently scrutinizing some 1,500 citizenships granted to foreigners, and 38 have already been revoked, Security minister Berisa Colak recently revealed.

Osama Bin Laden directly aided Bosnian Muslims financially, by procurement of weapons and by training, Trifunovic maintains, saying that aid was extended to the separatist ethnic Albanians in Serbia’s southern province of Kosovo and in Macedonia.

Last November Bosnian police arrested four local youths and a Turkish citizen, Abdukladir Cesur, on suspicion of plotting to bomb the embassy of a European country in Sarajevo. It later turned out they were connected with a similar group in Denmark. One local youth, Mirsad Bektasevic was only 18, and others were not much older. Trifunovic says they shouldn’t be jailed but sent to some sort “re-indoctrination” to make them realize their mistakes. “Jailing these youths would only further radicalize them and prepare them to be martyrs for the Islamic cause,“ sys Trifunovic.

Apart from Bosnia, another “spring board for Islamizing Europe, according to Trifunovic, is Kosovo, whose majority ethnic Albanian Muslim population is seeking independence from Serbia. Besides camouflaged Al-Qaeda cells, two new, until now unknown groups, Gjurma and Tablighijammat, have been noted there, preaching radical Islam. Behind all these activities is Iranian intelligence and mostly Saudi cash, Trifunovic believes.

On the local scale, each country might breed its own seeds of terrorism, which is fed on real or perceived injustice, like the Basque issue in Spain, or the Kurdish problem in Turkey, says Trifunovic. “But globally, it is a conflict of civilizations, in which Islamic extremists see the West and the United States as their deadly enemies.”
Link


Terror Networks
The online face of terror
2006-06-13
At 3.55 p.m. on October 19, 2005, a squad of anti-terrorist police rang the doorbell of a ground-floor apartment in the Bosnian capitol of Sarajevo. The door was opened by Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year old Bosnian native who had spent most of his life in Sweden, and who held a Swedish passport. According to an official English translation of a Bosnian indictment, the police showed Bekasevic a search warrant and their ID cards, but Bektasevic refused to move out of the doorway and allow them in. Then he started trying to push one of the officers back out the door, exclaiming: “Who are you to search my house, you trash.”

Police subdued Bektasevic and barged into the apartment. Inside, they found Bektasevic’s room-mate, a Dane of Turkish extraction named Abdulkadir Cesur, sitting on a sofa with his hand under his coat. Police moved to wrestle the coat off Cesur, at which point they discovered he had in his hand a pistol with a silencer. Cesur’s finger was on the trigger and a bullet was in the chamber. Police knocked the pistol out of Cesur’s hands and wrestled him to the floor. Their search of the apartment proved productive: among items discovered were a home-made “suicide belt,” a quantity of factory-made explosives and a Hi-8 videotape with footage demonstrating how to make a home-made bomb. The tape included this bloodcurdling voiceover: “Here, the brothers are preparing for attacks…These brothers are ready to attack and inshallah, they will attack al-Qufar who our killing our brothers and Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan…and many other countries. These weapons are going to be used against Europe, against those whose forces are in Iraq and in Afghanistan…” Subsequent analysis by Britain’s Home Office determined that the voice on the tape was “more than rather likely” that of the suspect Mirsad Bektasevic.

Within a day or two of the Bosnia arrests, police in Britain had staged their own, related, series of arrests. Two London men were arrested on terrorism related charges, which included allegations that they were in possession of computer images showing how to make car bombs and "martyrdom operations vests." One suspect, Younis Tsouli, was also charged with possessing computer images of "a number of places" in Washington, D.C. (A third suspect faced terror-funding charges.) Counterterrorism officials in the United States and Britain told NEWSWEEK at the time that the evidence suggested some of those connected with the U.K. suspects may have been targeting the White House and Capitol complex for attacks using homemade bombs. As we reported at the time, the British suspects were believed to have been in e-mail contact, via Hotmail accounts, with a suspected jihadist recruiter who used the Internet nom de guerre Maximus. According to the officials, Maximus was initially based in Sweden and moved to Sarajevo, where investigators believe he helped run a network recruiting European youth to go to Iraq.
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Europe
Bosnian link to Canadian arrests
2006-06-08
The arrest of 17 suspected terrorists in Canada last weekend may be linked with the similar actions in Bosnia-Herzegovina last year, Bosnian media reported Wednesday. The Prosecutor's Office of the Sarajevo-based Bosnia-Herzegovina State Court, according to reports, handed over to their Canadian colleagues some information obtained in a couple of operations by Bosnian police against suspected terrorists last year.

Bosnia's intelligence service (OSA) detained in October last year Mirsad Bektasevic, a Muslim with Swedish citizenship and of Serbia and Montenegro origin, Turkish citizen Abdulkadir Cesur and Bosnian citizen Bajro Ikanovic, all suspected of planning suicide attacks on Western diplomatic missions in Bosnia.
From Bosnia to Sweden to Canada oh my.
A certain amount of weapons and explosives, as well as video tapes with instructions for a prayer before the suicide attacks, was found in the suspects' homes during the operation.

Bektasevic, Cesur and Ikanovic, who have been in custody since the arrest, last month pleaded not guilty before the State Court, where the trial against them has been ongoing. The court did not confirm or deny involvement in the arrests in Canada.

A spokesman for Bosnia-Herzegovina Prosecutor's Office, Boris Grubesic, told media that during the investigation into suspected terrorist activities last year the office contacted many countries. However, he refused to give details of the contacts or reveal the names of the countries involved.

The arrests of Bektasevic and Cesur in the Bosnian capital last year led to a number of arrests in Denmark where five men and one woman were detained last November over suspected terrorist activities, believed to be linked with the alleged terrorist group in Bosnia.
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Europe
Terrorists recruiting Caucasian Muslims
2006-04-18
His code name was Maximus, and he held secret meetings in a shabby room at the Banana City Hotel on the outskirts of Sarajevo.

Bosnian police put him under surveillance, and in a raid last fall on his apartment on Poligonska Street, authorities seized explosives, a suicide bomber belt and a videotape of masked men begging Allah's forgiveness for what they were about to do.

What they planned, investigators believe, was to blow up a European embassy. But compounding their concern, they say, was the ringleader's background: Maximus turned out to be Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year-old Swedish citizen of Serbian origin with ties to a senior al-Qaida operative.

Terrorists have been working to recruit non-Arab sympathizers _ so-called "white Muslims" with Western features who theoretically could more easily blend into European cities and execute attacks _ according to classified intelligence documents obtained by The Associated Press.

A 252-page confidential report jointly compiled by Croatian and U.S. intelligence on potentially dangerous Islamic groups in Bosnia suggests the recruitment drive may have begun as long as four years ago, when Arab militants ran up against tough post-9/11 security obstacles.

"They judge that it is high time that their job on this territory should be taken over by new local forces ... people who are born here and live here have an advantage which would make their job easier. By their appearance, they are less obvious," the report reads.

Arabs, it adds, "have become too obvious, which has made their job difficult."

Bosnia's minister of security, Barisa Colak, acknowledged the existence of the intelligence report but said authorities had no concrete evidence that recruitment efforts are widespread. There are no known cases of a Balkan "white Muslim" recruit being involved in an actual attack.

"Even so, we have to be extremely careful and serious and not miss anything," he told the AP.

Even if systematic recruitment has been occurring, citizens of ex-Yugoslavia need visas to travel to Western Europe or the United States _ a complicated and time-consuming process.

Dragan Lukac, the deputy director of SIPA _ Bosnia's equivalent of the FBI _ said authorities are taking no chances. Undercover counterterrorism agents have placed dozens of suspects under 24-hour surveillance and the country is "very intensively" sharing information with the FBI, the CIA, Scotland Yard and other agencies, he said.

"Bosnia has become a breeding ground for terrorists, including some on international wanted lists. We can clearly say that," Lukac told the AP in an interview.

Some disaffected young Bosnians may be receptive to the terrorist message: After the U.S.-led military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was considered "almost fashionable" to spout extremist sentiment in public, Lukac said, especially among those "frustrated and influenced by ideology, Islamized through various extremist streams."

Authorities who arrested Bektasevic and several alleged associates last October tipped off police in Britain, who quickly arrested three suspected British Muslim accomplices. They also alerted authorities in Denmark, who took seven others into custody. Investigators say they since have established that Bektasevic maintained close ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Since the 2001 attacks on the United States, Bosnia has deported dozens of Arabs and other foreign Muslims for suspected ties to terrorist groups or alleged involvement in dummy charities believed to have raised cash to bankroll attacks.

In February, the country launched an exhaustive review of all cases in which citizenship was granted to foreigners dating back to 1992 and vowed to deport any with suspected links to terrorism.

Police also confirmed they are keeping close tabs on dozens of mujahedeen _ Islamic fighters who came to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim side in the 1992-95 war. Although most left for other conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and elsewhere, some stayed and married local women.

The vast majority of Bosnia's Muslims rejects the mujahedeen's fiery brand of Islam. Yet young, restless men frustrated with 40 percent joblessness and angered by real or perceived insults to Islam can be open to hard-line dogma, the Prague-based think tank Transitions Online said in a recent report.

"A pool of potential white recruits carrying Bosnian or even Western passports would presumably be of great value to terrorists," it said, calling the Balkan country "a deeply traumatized society susceptible to extremism."

"Muslims are going through a very tempting time," conceded Mustafa Ceric, the leader of Bosnia's Islamic community. He insisted, however, that there was no stomach for extremist violence after years of devastating ethnic conflict.

"If we wanted terrorism, we had a chance to do so in the heat of our suffering, and we did not," he said in an interview.

NATO's top commander in Bosnia, U.S. Brig. Gen. Louis Weber, concurred in an interview, saying Bosnian Muslims overwhelmingly are moderate and secular, and the terror threat is fairly low because "there isn't a large community that would support that kind of activity here."

Although Ceric keeps close tabs on Bosnia's imams, the 6,500 European Union peacekeepers who now patrol Bosnia are one-tenth the number NATO deployed nationwide in 1995, meaning far fewer outside eyes and ears combing the country to disrupt any recruitment effort.

The U.S.-Croatian report says infiltration actually dates back long before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. It says Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations have been crisscrossing the Balkans for more than 15 years, financed in part with cash from narcotics smuggling and coming from Afghanistan and points further east via Turkey, Kosovo and Albania.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, evidence has emerged that extremists have been trying to carve out a beachhead in the Balkans. The region is home to 8 million Muslims, roughly a third of Europe's Islamic faithful, and arms and explosives are easily obtained in what Lukac calls "a kind of El Dorado" for criminals.

Several Islamic militants who fought in the former Yugoslavia went to Spain, bringing back new military skills and expertise as well as access to contacts throughout Europe, a Western diplomatic official with intimate knowledge of counterterrorism measures in Spain told the AP on condition of anonymity.

"Yugoslavia was a meeting point," he said.

Among the Islamic leaders Bosnian authorities are monitoring closely is Nezim Halilovic, chief mufti of the King Fahd Cultural Center. The mosque, one of dozens being built around Sarajevo with Saudi donations, can accommodate 5,000 people and is part of a $9 million complex that includes a library, a sports hall, restaurants and classrooms for studying Arabic and the Quran.

Its imam has repeatedly has been accused of using his sermons to preach violence in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Israel, Iraq and Kashmir. Nothing like that was heard at one of his recent noon prayer sermons; addressing throngs of heavily bearded men and burqa-clad women, he spoke proudly of "bringing Bosnian Muslims back to Islam."

Halilovic denies he is a radical and insisted Bektasevic and the others arrested last autumn were the victims of an elaborate setup.

"This is just a trick played on the Muslims," he said in an interview. "They were framed to bring the world's attention on Bosnia-Herzegovina as a 'terrorist country.' Europe and the whole world should not be afraid of Bosnian Muslims."
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Europe
Former Bosnian mujahideen under surveillance
2006-02-18
Authorities are monitoring up to 250 Arab Muslims who fought in Bosnia's 1992-95 war, including some who are suspected of having links to international terrorism, a top police official said Thursday.

Zlatko Miletic, director of police for the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia, told reporters that the Muslims under surveillance all live in or around the northeastern village of Gornja Maoca, where they settled after the war. Miletic said the Muslims were among 740 who obtained Bosnian passports during or just after the war, and that the names of nine men appeared on Egypt's list of most-wanted terror suspects.

He declined to identify the nine, and said Bosnian authorities could not be certain they were still in the country.

Police are keeping close tabs on ''200 to 250'' of Gornja Maoca's Muslims, and believe some have ties to global terrorist organizations, Miletic said. Others were suspected of involvement in the illegal smuggling of explosives and other crimes, he said, derisively referring to those being watched by police as ``mongooses.''

Several thousand mujahedeen, or Islamic fighters, came to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim side against Serbs and Croats after Bosnia dissolved into ethnic conflict in the early 1990s.

On Thursday, Bosnia's Council of Ministers set up a nine-member commission to review all cases in which citizenship was granted to foreigners dating back to 1992, Security Minister Barisa Colak told The Associated Press.

''It's for sure that all those who got citizenship illegally will be stripped of it and deported,'' Colak said. He also confirmed that ''a certain number of people who are interesting from a security perspective'' were under surveillance.

Bosnian authorities have stepped up their monitoring of fundamentalist Islamic groups and individuals since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

In October, police in Sarajevo raided an apartment and arrested two men after seizing plastic explosives, a suicide belt and a videotape in which a masked man begged Allah's forgiveness for the sacrifice the group was about to commit. More suspects were arrested in Bosnia, Britain and Denmark in what authorities said was a terror cell plotting an attack on a European embassy.

The probe began Oct. 19, when police in Sarajevo arrested Mirsad Bektasevic, 19, a Swedish citizen, and Cesur Abdulkadir, 18, a Turkish national, on suspicion they were preparing terrorist activities. Three Bosnian nationals later were arrested in follow-up raids.

None has been formally charged, and Miletic did not link the surveillance in Gornja Maoca to the Sarajevo case.

''Over the past few months, we gathered enough material evidence to support the filing of formal charges, and I hope the state prosecutor's office will do so soon,'' he said. Under Bosnian law, terror suspects can be held for up to six months without charges.

Bosnian police arrested 16 terrorist suspects in 2005, among whom five were suspected of involvement in international terrorism, Miletic said. He said some were involved in illegal weapons smuggling and that others were charged with endangering international personnel in Bosnia.

About 6,500 troops with the European Union peacekeeping force patrol the country, and hundreds of other foreigners work for the United Nations and other international organizations.

Although the vast majority of Bosnia's Muslims are secular or embrace a moderate and tolerant form of Islam, authorities have expressed concern about the presence of radical elements. Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries have built numerous mosques and set up dozens of charities in Bosnia since the end of the war, including several that have been shut down because of suspected links to terrorism or terrorist financing.
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Europe
Terrorists establish Balkans foothold
2005-12-02
The raid netted explosives, rifles, other arms and a videotape pledging vengeance for the "brothers" killed fighting Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police found the cache in an apartment occupied by an underground group that was aiming to blow up the British Embassy in Sarajevo, Western intelligence officials said.

The Oct. 19 bust in Sarajevo confirmed a suspicion among several intelligence agents that Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans are becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks in Europe.

In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, adjacent to Bosnia. "It's yet another evolution in the tools used by terrorists."

Parts of the Balkans, stuck in lawless limbo after years of war in the 1990s, are ripe recruitment territory for Middle East radicals, intelligence officials say. Bosnia is still divided among Muslim, Croat and Serb population areas, even if nominally united under the 10-year-old Dayton peace agreement that ended ethnic warfare.

Muslim enclaves in Serbia are restive, and Muslim-majority Kosovo remains an estranged province campaigning for independence six years after NATO bombing forced out Serb-dominated Yugoslav troops.

The Balkans have long been a freeway for smugglers of cigarettes, drugs, weapons and prostitutes. "All the conditions are present. Embittered Muslims, arms, corruption -- everything underground operators need to get established," said the Western intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The raid on the Sarajevo group, which was said to have had contacts with cells in Denmark and Britain, was not the only event that raised concern. During the summer, Italian and Croatian police arrested five people who allegedly plotted to bomb the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Vatican City in April.

In addition, Serbian police accidentally came across a key suspect in the March 2004 bombings of Madrid commuter trains while he was traveling through the country by train. He arrived in the Balkans in July, and Serbian police investigators conjecture that he was seeking haven either in Bosnia or Kosovo and perhaps safe passage to the Middle East. They quickly extradited the man, Abdelmajid Bouchar, a Moroccan citizen, to Spain.

U.S. and allied intelligence officers have long worked together in Sarajevo to keep an eye on Islamic radicals in Bosnia. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the CIA and other foreign agencies set up a joint, fortified headquarters to keep tabs on terrorism suspects in Bosnia, a Western intelligence source in Sarajevo said.

The spy teams operate separately from the chief international overseers of Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative, according to the official.

During the three-sided war in Bosnia, hundreds of fighters from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries flocked to Bosnia to fight on behalf of the Muslim faction against Croats and Serbs. Many of the foreign mujaheddin , or holy warriors, were expelled after the war, according to the Bosnian government, but others remained and received passports.

Today, parts of Bosnia framed by the cities of Zenica, Tuzla, Sarajevo and Travnik are home to these immigrants and compose the core regions for Islamic militancy, Bosnian police and Western intelligence officials say.

Until recently, the immigrants tried to keep a low profile. Western intelligence officials here and in Belgrade surmised that they wanted to exploit Bosnia as a logistics and transit point and not invite a crackdown from local police or European Union peacekeepers.

The Sarajevo arrests changed that perception. A Bosnian Interior Ministry official, Robert Cvrtak, released the names of four detainees from the raid: Cesur Abdulkadir, who is of Turkish heritage; Mirsad Bektasevic, a Swedish citizen of Bosnian origin; and Bajro Ikanovic and Almir Bajric, both Bosnian citizens. Among their activities, Bosnian police said, were hiding explosives inside lemons and tennis balls and trying to set up training camps in the hills near Sarajevo.

Last Thursday night, Bosnian police arrested a fifth suspect in the town of Hadzici, near Sarajevo. The police found about 20 pounds of explosives hidden in woods near his home. The man, whose name has not been made public, is suspected of being in charge of providing explosives to the rest of group.

Police officials here say Bektasevic, 19, also ran a Web site on behalf of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who heads the insurgent group al Qaeda in Iraq. He had pictures of the White House in his computer, they added.

Bektasevic operated under the code name Maximus and kept in touch with a group of at least three men in Britain. British police arrested them in early November, according to press reports.

A week after the original Sarajevo arrests, police in Copenhagen detained four men ages 16 to 20 and said they had planned suicide bombings somewhere in Europe. "We had a very short period to investigate, but our information indicated that their action was imminent," said a police spokesman, Joern Bro. The Danes believed that the Copenhagen suspects had been in contact by phone and e-mail with Bektasevic.

In August, police in Croatia arrested five Bosnians whom Italian military intelligence had fingered for involvement in a plot to bomb the papal funeral. The group originated in Gornja Maoca, a town in northeastern Bosnia, and had planned to smuggle rocket launchers, explosives and detonators into Italy. The plot fell apart, Western intelligence officials said, when a suspect was arrested in Rome in April. The Croatian police, acting on a tip from the Italians, found the others in Croatia.

The capture of Bouchar, suspected in the Madrid train bombings, in Serbia in July surprised police there. They had thought he was just another Middle Easterner traveling illegally through the country until an Interpol fingerprint check revealed his identity.

Authorities say Bouchar had narrowly escaped death or capture shortly after the Madrid attacks, when police there sealed off an apartment where suspects were hiding. Seven men died in the residence by detonating explosives. Bouchar, however, was taking out garbage at the time and fled, Serbian and Spanish officials say.

He traveled to Brussels, where he expected to obtain forged documents, authorities said. However, his contacts there were either under arrest or fleeing police. He moved on and spent time in Austrian and Hungarian jails, but was freed. No one in either country checked his fingerprints.

When picked up heading toward Belgrade, he was wearing a new business suit. Western intelligence officials in Belgrade note that Serbia, although predominantly non-Muslim, has pockets of Muslims in the Sanjak region near Montenegro as well as Kosovo and other areas along the province's border.
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Europe
Sweden Searches for Accomplices to Suspected Terror Plot
2005-11-13
Swedish security police and prosecutors are investigating whether a Swede arrested in Sarajevo last month on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack had accomplices, Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter reported yesterday. Mirsad Bektasevic, an 18-year-old Swedish citizen originally from Serbia-Montenegro, was arrested along with a Danish citizen of Turkish origin on October 20, suspected of planning an attack. “One of the reasons I have launched a preliminary investigation is that he is so young. It is not unreasonable to suspect that someone (in Sweden) has had influence over him,” chief international prosecutor for Stockholm Tomas Lindstrand told Dagens Nyheter.

Large quantities of explosives and weapons were found during a raid of the Swede’s Sarajevo apartment, as well as e-mail correspondence with several of seven people since arrested in Denmark, also on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks. Recent news reports have also indicated that Bektasevic may be a so-called recruiter who used the Internet nom-de-guerre “Maximus” in his search for disaffected European youth willing to go to Iraq to join the insurgency. Lindstrand refused to comment on whether the Swede was in fact Maximus. He also declined to say if the investigation was focusing on any specific suspects in Sweden.

Bektasevic’s mother meanwhile told Dagens Nyheter that she was certain her son had been corrupted by “terrorists,” who convinced him to join a mosque in the southwestern Swedish city of Gothenburg. “He went there to pray. The ones who led him astray are terrorists,” she said.

Mosque board member Mohammed Mohsin however insisted that Bektasevic was not known there. “We do not know (him) and have not met him,” he told the paper, insisting that the mosque “has nothing to do with terrorism”.
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