Belgium arrests 14 terror suspects

By Dan Bilefsky International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2005

The Belgian police arrested 14 suspects Wednesday in a series of dawn raids aimed at breaking up a terrorist network that the Belgian authorities said was planning attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq and included a female Belgian suicide bomber who blew herself up in Baghdad three weeks ago.

The sweep, which took place in Brussels, Charleroi, Antwerp and Riemst, was aimed at arresting members of the group surrounding the suicide bomber. The Belgian antiterror police said the group was recruiting across Europe for volunteers to take part in the insurgency being led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq.

The police said they had found evidence of planning for more attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq. They said suspects of Belgian, Tunisian and Moroccan origin had been arrested.

"We have been able to prevent attacks against other U.S. targets as a result of these arrests, judging by what we found in the premises of the suspects," said a senior Belgian antiterror official, who declined to give his name because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

Glen Audenaert, head of the Belgian federal police, said Belgium was determined to destroy the network, which is believed to have links to other networks across the Continent. "We knew it was on our territory," he said, and it "aimed to send volunteers for the jihad to the battlefield."

The arrests are part of an attempt by Belgium, the headquarters of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to clamp down on terrorist cells linked to Al Qaeda that are believed to be using the country of 10 million people as a logistical back office and recruitment ground. The arrests are part of a wider European effort to root out fundamentalist networks that are providing recruits for the Iraq insurgency.

The police said the Belgian suicide bomber was a woman who had converted to Islam and had become a fundamentalist after marrying a radical Muslim man of Moroccan origin.

"This is how she came into contact with the organization that allowed her to become a fighter for jihad," Audenaert said.

She was the only casualty in her attack Nov. 9 on a U.S. military convoy south of Baghdad. The police said a Belgian passport had been found on her body, along with papers that showed she had entered Iraq through Turkey. The suicide bomber's husband was killed in Iraq in a separate incident, the police said.

As part of the investigation into the Belgian terrorist network, the police in Paris said they had arrested a 27-year-old Tunisian man on Wednesday who was alleged to have links to the Belgian network and to have been an acquaintance of the suicide bomber's husband. The police said they had evidence that the man had made frequent trips between Paris and Brussels and had been providing logistical support for the Belgian network.

Belgium has a large Muslim community in which terrorists can hide.

Earlier this month, 13 Belgian and Moroccan nationals went on trial in Brussels, charged with taking part in the attacks last year on four Madrid commuter trains that killed 191 people and in the Casablanca bombing that killed 45 people in 2003. The suspects are charged with providing a safe house, false papers and logistical help to members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, a fundamentalist group linked to Al Qaeda.

The police say Belgium also has become a center where terrorists procure false identity papers. Two men posing as television journalists who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, two days before the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, were traveling on fake Belgian passports, blanks for which had been stolen during break-ins at the Belgian Embassy in the Netherlands and its consulate in Strasbourg.





Graham Bowley contributed reporting from Brussels.