On a damp, gray day in March 2004, the Dutch traffic police stopped a Belgian driver for a broken headlight and accidentally stumbled onto a major investigation of Islamic radicals.
The driver was Khalid Bouloudo, a Belgian-born baker and former Ford automobile factory worker. During a routine check, his name turned up on an Interpol watchlist, for an international arrest warrant from Morocco charging him with links to a Moroccan-based terrorist organization and involvement in suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003.
The random arrest set into motion a cascade of events that underscores the extent of the radicalization of young Muslims throughout Europe - and a rapidly expanding and homegrown terrorist threat.
The case suggests connections to individuals and groups that have provided support to criminal and even terrorist operations in a number of other countries. This wide distribution of terrorist sympathizers and supporters has presented even small countries like Belgium with difficult law enforcement problems, forcing them to employ new investigative methods and pass tougher laws. For more than a year, the Belgian counterterrorism police had been gathering information about Bouloudo and his contacts in an investigation code-named Operation Asparagus, after the plump white asparagus grown in the eastern border area where they lived. His arrest abruptly cut short the operation.
Fearing that Bouloudo's contacts would go underground or try to flee, the counterterrorism forces started a series of raids throughout the country, dismantling over the next few months what they believe was a sophisticated network that supported the terror bombings in Casablanca and in Madrid in 2004 and that is also suspected of trying to recruit fighters for the insurgency in Iraq.
Next month, the case of the Asparagus 18, as the suspects might be called, finally goes to trial in Brussels. For the first time, Belgian prosecutors will be using an antiterrorism law that came into effect at the end of 2003 that specifically criminalizes a terrorist act and association with terrorists and imposes a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
None of the 18 men indicted - most of them Moroccan-born or of Moroccan descent and ranging in age from 24 to 42 - have been charged with committing or even plotting a specific terrorist act in Belgium.
Instead, the trial will highlight how over the past decade, Belgium has become a support center for terrorists in Europe, offering safe haven, false documents and financing.
Prosecutors hope to prove that the cell's members provided material support, including lodging and false papers, to the bombers who killed 190 in Madrid last year.
Among the other charges are the fabrication and the use of false documents, illegal entry and residence in Belgium, possession of illegal weapons and criminal association with a terrorist enterprise - in this case the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, or GICM, a loose-knit organization founded by Moroccans, many of whom were trained in Afghanistan before the Taliban was overthrown. Bouloudo is believed to be one of them.
"The case is a prototype of the new, post-Afghanistan network a little bit of everything: native-born radicals, immigrants from Morocco, travel to places like Saudi Arabia, connection to operations like Madrid," said Glenn Audenaert, head of Belgium's federal police force. "It's like handling a number of particles of mercury, toxic in themselves and even more toxic when they come together."
Despite a well-integrated Moroccan immigrant population that has lived and worked in Belgium for more than half a century, the country in recent years has become the destination of choice for many French-speaking immigrants who are put off by France's intrusive security and intelligence services and tougher laws.
It was in Belgium, for example, that the two Tunisian killers of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan resistance leader who was assassinated in September 2001, received logistical support. Disguised as journalists, they carried Belgian passports and had traveled to Afghanistan from Belgium.
Even defense lawyers involved in the Asparagus 18 trial acknowledge the attractiveness of Belgium as a support center for international criminal and even terrorist activity.
"Belgium has become a logistical base for these people," said Didier de Quévy, a defense lawyer who has been involved in terrorist cases in the past and is representing one of the defendants. "They have come here because the penalties have been light."
Indeed, Belgium's terrorism-fighting tools are limited, even though Brussels, as the headquarters of both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is the closest Europe comes to having a Continental capital.
It has no equivalent of a Central Intelligence Agency and only a few intelligence officers work abroad. Only 50 police officers, detectives and special agents are assigned nationwide to monitor the Muslim community for potential terrorist plots.
Investigators complain that suspects in Belgium can be held for only 24 hours - compared with up to four days in France - under the vague charge of suspicion of association with criminals. And the hurdles to use intrusive investigative methods, like wiretaps, to obtain evidence in terrorist-related cases are more onerous than in many other European countries.
The wake-up call that Belgian laws against terrorism were too lax followed the case in 2003 of Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian former soccer professional and cocaine addict, for a plot to drive a car bomb into an American air base in northeast Belgium. Despite a confession and material evidence, prosecutors were forced to think creatively to win the maximum sentence - 10 years in prison - using, among other laws, one from 1934 that banned all private militias. If the new law had been in effect, police investigators said, Trabelsi's sentence could have been doubled.
In the Asparagus 18 case, prosecutors will be relying heavily on information gathered from foreign governments and foreign intelligence sources, a practice that defense lawyers have vowed to challenge. Wiretaps and audiovisual surveillance tapes will also be introduced as evidence, which has been unusual in the past and whose admissibility will be tested under the new law for the first time.
"The proof is very thin," said Christophe Marchand, a defense lawyer for one of the suspects. "Much of the evidence comes from statements made by people interrogated abroad."
Belgian police officers and prosecutors involved in the investigation, meanwhile, believe they have a strong case, saying that they have been stunned by the organization and discipline of the accused and the reach of their contacts abroad. The Asparagus 18 were able to take on new identities, cross borders to places like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia and avoid the police along the way.
One of the men, a 28-year-old Moroccan named Youssef Belhadj, was arrested in Belgium in 2004 and extradited to Spain this year in connection with the Madrid bombings. Some Spanish investigators are convinced that he is the person speaking in a video for a group called Al Qaeda in Europe that claimed responsibility for the Madrid attacks. He will be tried in absentia.
A 25-year-old Moroccan named Mourad Chabarou is suspected of trying to recruit insurgents for Iraq and of helping to finance and provide material support to the Madrid bombers, in particular of sheltering one of the suspected bombers. In telephone conversations monitored by wiretaps and electronic bugs for weeks by Italian authorities last year, Chabarou and an Egyptian man who claimed to have organized the Madrid bombings discuss what investigators believe was a terrorist plot to be carried out by someone currently in France.
Particularly distressing for Belgian investigators is that four of those standing trial were born and raised in Maaseik, a picturesque 13th-century Flemish-speaking town of 24,000 on Belgium's eastern border with the Netherlands, where they were also arrested.
A small Moroccan population has lived here since the 1950s, when the region needed low-cost workers for the now defunct coal mines. There are no slums here. Even the poorest area of town has clean streets and flower boxes in the windows.
The first visible sign of Islamic radicalization came in the past few years, when a handful of Muslim women began appearing in public with their faces veiled in black.
"I started received phone calls from the people of the city," recalled the mayor of Maaseik, Jan Creemers. "'There is something bizarre happening here, we see strange veiled women,' they said."
The city imposed a fine of $150 on any woman who refused to reveal her face, arguing that it was a security issue. The only woman in town who refused was the wife of Bouloudo. |
(AKI) - In a surprise move, some of the main defendants in the maxi-trial for the 2004 Madrid train bombings began a hunger strike on Thursday. According to various Spanish websites Youssef Belhadj, Hassan el Haski, Rabei Osman el Sayed (known as Mohammed the Egyptian, arrested in Italy in June 2004) and Abdeljamid Bouchard announced their decision in letters sent to the prison authorities. The first three are considered the "brains" behind the 11 March, 2004 attack in which 191 people were killed. The prosecution says the fourth, Abdeljamid Bouchard, was one of those who physically carried out the bombings.
The judge in charge of the inquiry into the Madrid train bombings travelled to Morocco to interrogate a suspect in the case. Judge 
Thirteen men have gone on trial in Belgium accused of membership of a militant group that has been linked to bombings in Madrid and Casablanca. Prosecutors say the men - all Moroccans or Belgians of Moroccan descent - did not take part in bombings themselves, but supported others who did. Defence lawyers say the only evidence against some of them is that they knew men charged with serious crimes. The men are accused of belonging to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM), accused by the US of aiming to establish an Islamic state in Morocco and supporting al-Qaeda's jihad against the West. Some are accused of providing false papers, safe houses and other logistical help to GICM militants. Correspondents say this is one of the most important terror trials in Europe since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. 
Evidence continues to mount that the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004 were planned in Belgium by a group of terrorists who were under surveillance at the time by security service agents. 
Spanish police investigating the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid arrested 13 people Friday suspected of being linked to Islamic militancy, the Interior Ministry said. A Syrian man, 39-year-old 
MADRIDA man believed to be the Al Qaeda spokesman in Europe was expected to be extradited to arrive in Madrid after being extradited from Belgium. A Belgian court rejected an appeal from Moroccan-born 
The ministry said four of those arrested had close links to