Wash Post: European police rivalries benefit terrorists

A Radical Who Remained Just Out of Reach
Suspect in Madrid Attacks Moved Freely in Europe

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 14, 2004; Page A01


Photo:
http://tinyurl.com/3o7co
Caption:
Italian police display photographs of Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, left, also
known as "Mohamed the Egyptian," or Mohamed Fayad, and another unidentified
man.
Photo Credit: Stefano Rellandini -- Reuters


SAARBRUECKEN, Germany -- Shortly after departing this southwestern German
city on a Paris-bound train, a mysterious foreigner was pulled aside by
police at the French border. The passenger claimed to be Palestinian, but
carried no identification. He wouldn't say where he was going, or why.

Assuming they had caught an illegal immigrant looking for a better life in
Europe, German authorities jailed the Arabic-speaking man in June 1999 and
prepared to deport him. But they were unable to confirm his identity or
figure out where to send him, so they moved him to a loosely supervised
asylum camp for illegal immigrants. Officials there paid little attention
when he vanished two weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in
the United States.

The man who would later be code-named "Mohamed the Egyptian" by his Islamic
radical friends resumed his illegal travels across Europe in 2001, taking
advantage of the continent's open borders to move freely among Germany,
Spain, France, Italy and possibly other countries.

Over the next three years, investigators say, he recruited volunteers for
suicide missions, frequented fundamentalist mosques and played a key role in
planning the biggest terror attack on European soil, the train bombings in
Madrid on March 11 this year.

All along, Mohamed -- whose legal name is Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed -- was
able to dodge police and counterterrorism officials in at least three
countries. They repeatedly put him on watch lists under a variety of names,
but failed to figure out what he was up to, according to interviews with
European investigators and a review of court and immigration documents.

"I know who they are, but they don't know who I am," the former Egyptian
army officer said to a friend in Milan this past June, shortly before he was
arrested by Italian police, who had been recording his conversations. "You
confuse them, they won't know where you came from. . . . You're clandestine,
but you move around with no problem."

The case highlights Europe's weakest defense in its fight against terrorism:
As the continent removes internal barriers to trade and travel, Islamic
militants find it easier to move around undetected. When they do attract
notice, cell members can often stay a step ahead of the law by changing
their names or slipping across borders, aided by long-standing bureaucratic
and legal obstacles that prevent European counterterrorism officials from
working together more closely.

"They are able to exploit the weaknesses that exist in our system," said
Joerg Ziercke, president of the Bundeskriminalamt, Germany's federal law
enforcement agency. "They change routes, go across borders. We must close
the gaps that we have in our information systems, and we must ensure that
terrorists do not use one country as a haven while they are acting in
another country."

European leaders have moved to address the vulnerabilities by adopting such
measures as common legal standards that make it easier to issue arrest
warrants and extradition orders across the continent. But they have had a
tough time reaching consensus on many other proposed reforms. Europe has
also struggled to overcome resistance among counterterrorism agencies to
share sensitive information with neighboring countries or cooperate on
prosecutions.

For instance, France has been trying for nine years to extradite Rachid
Ramda, a suspect in the 1995 fatal bombing of a Paris Metro station. Ramda
is in custody in London, but his case remains tied up in the British courts.

Another breakdown in cooperation surfaced last month, when Spanish police
said the ringleader of a cell suspected of plotting to blow up the Supreme
Court building in Madrid was being held in a Swiss jail. At first, Swiss
authorities denied they had custody of the suspect, Mohamed Achraf, but then
acknowledged they did.

Swiss intelligence officials later said they had suspected Achraf of ties to
Islamic radicals in Spain but didn't notify Swiss police or the Spanish
government. Swiss Justice Minister Christoph Blocher blamed the mix-up on
"an information breakdown."

Antonio Vitorino, former European commissioner for justice and home affairs,
called the Madrid bombings "a wake-up call" that underscores the need to
eliminate old rivalries among the many intelligence and law enforcement
agencies in Europe that fight terrorism.

"We cannot fix this overnight," Vitorino said to a group of journalists at a
dinner in Brussels last summer, shortly before leaving office. "The sharing
of intelligence among member states is still far from desirable. . . . We
Europeans are all equally targeted by the terrorist threat, and we all
should be equally involved in fighting it."

A Natural Leader

The asylum camp in Lebach, Germany, has enough cinder-block apartments to
house about 1,500 immigrants. They are mainly North Africans, Turks and
Palestinians. Most stay a few months as they wait for German authorities to
decide whether they can remain in the country for the long term.

On Sept. 13, 2000, a man calling himself Mohamed Abdul Hadi Fayad arrived at
the camp after spending a year in jail and quickly assumed a leadership role
among the residents. He presented their grievances to camp authorities. He
spoke Arabic, English and Spanish, which made him useful as an interpreter.
He also put together a makeshift mosque and led prayers during Ramadan.

"He called himself 'the Imam,'" recalled Barbara Paulus, a case worker at
the camp in Lebach, a town of about 22,000 near the regional capital of
Saarbruecken. "We didn't have any problems with him. The others respected
him. He reported their problems and talked to us on their behalf."

Fayad was an anonymous foreigner who had been arrested a year earlier on his
way to Paris. Soon after the arrest, he requested asylum. Though he had no
papers, he identified himself as a stateless Palestinian who had been living
in Lebanon. He said he arrived in Europe in April 1999 on a flight to
Frankfurt and had been staying with a friend there.

The German government usually grants asylum as a matter of policy to
Palestinians, but officials were unable to verify Fayad's story. Lebanese
and Palestinian authorities said they could not confirm his identity and
suspected he might be North African, according to a German law enforcement
official involved in the case.

Immigration officials denied Fayad's asylum request. But Germany could not
deport him because officials didn't know where to send him. That situation
is common in Germany, where about one in 20 asylum seekers is unable to
verify their claimed nationality.

With his case in limbo, Fayad remained at the Lebach camp for almost a year.
Residents are forbidden from leaving the local area, but they are not
confined or closely monitored. As a practical matter, camp officials say,
there is little they can do to make sure people stay.

So it didn't strike anyone as unusual when Fayad vanished. He was last seen
in the camp on Aug. 29, 2001, when he came to the main office to pick up his
twice-weekly food rations. Three weeks later, immigration officials notified
the Lebach town hall that Fayad was no longer a resident and crossed his
name off their case list.

"Each month, a lot of people disappear here," said Paulus, the case worker.
"I don't know how they do it, but each month we have to close a lot of
files."

Always on the Move

Investigators have since established that the man had left the camp before,
traveling across Europe under a variety of identities and passports.

In January 2001, he was seen with Islamic radicals in Madrid, police
reported. Six months later, he applied for a residency permit in the Spanish
capital under the name Rabei Osman el Sayed Ahmed, producing an Egyptian
passport as proof of identity, according to a German law enforcement
official involved in the case.

On Sept. 6, 2001, a few days after he left Germany for good, he visited the
Egyptian Embassy in Madrid and applied for a duplicate passport, saying he
had lost his old one, the official said. That is a common trick in producing
false identity documents -- the old passport is altered and given to someone
else.

Soon after the visit, Ahmed attracted renewed attention in Germany and
Spain, but for different reasons.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, German authorities investigated
thousands of fundamentalist Muslims in the country to determine if any had
ties to the Hamburg cell that planned the hijackings.

As part of this sweep, they reexamined the case of the stateless Palestinian
who turned out to be Ahmed, prompted by people in the Lebach camp who noted
he had disappeared a few days before Sept. 11 and seemed extreme in his
religious beliefs. Investigators later determined he was not connected to
the attacks, German officials said.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, Spanish counterterrorism officials opened a separate
investigation into Ahmed in December 2001 after they noticed that he was in
frequent contact with members of a suspected cell of Islamic radicals, court
papers show. One month later, Spanish investigators notified German law
enforcement officials that they had Ahmed under surveillance and requested
information about his background, according to reports compiled by German
diplomats in Madrid.

While Spanish police kept an eye on Ahmed, he worked as a painter in Madrid
and married a Tunisian woman, according to investigators and a former
roommate. He was apparently aware that he was being monitored and tried to
keep low.

In a later conversation taped by Italian investigators, Ahmed told a friend
that he spent years planning the Madrid attacks and had to be very cautious.

"In Spain I used different nationalities: Jordan, Egyptian, Palestinian,
Syrian," he said. "Until my friends said it was enough -- I should be
careful or I'll get caught. . . . After 9/11, I was forced to move
everything from Spain to Paris, because in Spain, there was a lot of
movement from the secret service."

Keeping a Low Profile

Ahmed left Madrid for Paris in February 2003. French investigators said he
spent five months there, again working as a painter and frequenting a mosque
in an immigrant neighborhood. How often he went is unclear. A cleric at the
mosque, a two-story beige building with bars on the windows, said he didn't
recall seeing Ahmed. "I've been working here for 15 years, but I never knew
him," Ahmed Abou Hachem said.

Few other details have emerged about Ahmed's stay in France. But while he
was in Paris, he again attracted fresh interest in a neighboring country.

In April 2003, German prosecutors opened another investigation into his
activities. Frauke-Katrin Scheuten, a spokeswoman for the German
prosecutor's office, said the case remained open now but declined to say
what prompted it.

Ahmed returned to Madrid from Paris in July 2003. Four months later, Spanish
police issued a report warning that they were investigating "the structure
of a possible al Qaeda cell in Spain" headed by Ahmed, and that the cell had
"links to other European countries." It is unclear if the report was shared
with other European countries. One month after the warning, Ahmed moved on,
this time to Italy.

Authorities Close In

In Milan, Ahmed sought work again as a painter and shared apartments with
other Egyptian immigrants, moving frequently. He told roommates he was
feuding with his wife in Spain and was worried she would report him to
authorities, court papers show.

Italian authorities were not aware of his presence until April, five months
after he arrived, when they were contacted by Spanish officials.

The Madrid commuter train bombings, which killed 191 people and injured
thousands, touched off a furious investigation by Spanish authorities. The
probe turned up Ahmed's cell phone number in the electronic address books of
two suicide bombers and another suspect.

What followed was a rare case of successful cross-border coordination.
Investigators traced the number and determined the phone was being used in
Italy. They informed Italian authorities, who placed Ahmed under
surveillance and bugged his phone and apartment in Milan.

According to transcripts of the wiretaps contained in an arrest warrant
affidavit, Ahmed bragged to a roommate that "I was the leader of Madrid,"
adding that "the Madrid bombings were my project, and those who died as
martyrs there were my beloved friends."

Italian police arrested him June 8, after hearing him discuss plans for
another attack, possibly a suicide assault in Belgium, Italian officials
said. In a computer in his apartment, they found photos of suitcase bombs
similar to ones used in the Madrid attacks.

Investigators say there is still a lot they don't know about Ahmed; for
instance, does he take orders from an international terrorist group and how
did he come to Europe in the first place? They also disagree on whether he
directed the Madrid attacks as he claimed in the wiretaps or if he was
inflating his role.

In court papers, Spanish and Italian prosecutors charged that Ahmed was the
"organizer of the terrorist group responsible for the attacks in Madrid" and
also accused him of being the "coordinator of terrorist cells operating in
various European countries," including Belgium, France and Spain.

Armando Spataro, an Italian prosecutor and chief of the antiterrorism
investigative unit in Milan, said investigators were convinced Ahmed was a
key figure in Islamic radical circles. "We know he was important because he
was the one who coordinated all the communications," Spataro said. "Only an
important figure could have been able to move as much as he did and keep in
contact with all these people."

Investigators said Ahmed hadn't talked since his arrest. One of his Italian
lawyers, Viviana Bossi, said that he "denies any responsibility regarding
all the charges."

He remains in jail in Milan, where he is fighting attempts to extradite him
to Spain.

Special correspondents Sarah Delaney in Milan and Shannon Smiley contributed
to this report.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Nov13.html