Raid in Bosnia finds proof of Islamist network

By Nicholas Wood International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2005

SARAJEVO A police raid last month on an apartment near this city's airport uncovered evidence of an imminent suicide bombing, intensifying the fears of Western security services that Bosnia is becoming a haven for Islamic radicals.

The raid was carried out after an extensive surveillance operation by the Bosnian police and Western intelligence services. It turned up an arsenal of weapons in the apartment, including suicide vests; about 30 kilograms, or 65 pounds, of exploding bullets; high explosives; and a machine pistol.

Investigators said they also had found a suspected suicide videotape in which three men - at least two of them teenagers - are seen asking forgiveness from God for their "sacrifice," a recording made just hours before the raid.

The two teenagers, a Turk who had been living in a Muslim community in Denmark and a Swede of Bosnian heritage, were arrested. The third person on the tape was not identified.

Subsequent investigations by the Bosnian police have led to the arrests of three more men, all Bosnian citizens, whose identities have not been revealed. Two of them were arrested Nov. 19 and accused of providing support for the group.

The third man was detained Nov. 24 and charged with supplying explosives. The police said they had seized 10 kilograms of explosives kept by the same man in a forest outside Sarajevo.

The weapons seizures and arrests, most notably of the two teenagers found in the apartment in the suburb of Ilidza, have provided government and international officials in Bosnia with evidence of a working terrorist cell.

This has also shed light on a complex web that stretches well beyond the Balkans and that security services fear could threaten Western Europe.

Diplomats and international officials close to the investigation describe it as a series of overlapping networks, in which young Muslims from Scandinavia have been recruited as possible suicide bombers and sent to Bosnia.

Government officials in Sarajevo say the group in Bosnia used the former Yugoslav state as a staging ground for attacks elsewhere in Europe.

"All the indicators show that Bosnia is a territory where they can come and rest, organize their activities and then go and carry out" an attack elsewhere, Dragan Mektic, Bosnia's deputy security minister, said in an interview.

The police have accused two of the Bosnian suspects with planning an attack in "internationally protected property," a commonly used law enforcement euphemism for an embassy.

But senior Western diplomats and Mektic said there were no indications that the target of the Ilidza cell was in Bosnia.

The potential for Bosnia to become a terrorist base has long been a concern of security services in Europe. The 1992-1995 conflict ripped apart Bosnia's Muslim, Serbian and Croatian populations, opening the way for weapons smuggling and organized crime.

The religious and ethnic overtones of the war attracted, at a minimum, dozens of Muslim fighters from the Middle East, many with experience fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, who brought with them the influence of radical Islam.

In January 2002, six Algerians living in Bosnia were accused of plotting an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. No evidence of the alleged plot was made public, and a Bosnian court dismissed the charges and ordered the men released.

But the Bosnian government, under pressure from Washington, transferred them to U.S. custody. They were flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they remain.

Bosnia has given passports to more than 800 former fighters and aid workers from the Middle East. Both the United States and Saudi Arabia have accused Bosnia of giving passports to known terrorists, sometimes under aliases.

Few details have been revealed about those believed to be coordinating the Sarajevo group. But Mektic and international officials close to the investigation say that Bosnia's liberal passport policy as well as its porous borders made it appealing as a terrorist base, despite the presence of several thousand European Union-led peacekeepers.

The background of the two men in custody has helped investigators make connections between the Bosnia operation and the rest of Europe.

Abdulkadir Cesur, 18, and Mirsad Bektasevic, 19, were arrested in the raid near the airport. Both had traveled to Bosnia three weeks earlier, according to Bosnian border police records.

Cesur is Turkish but has Danish residency, and Bektasevic left Bosnia at the age of 6 and became a Swedish citizen.

Acting on phone records, a senior international official close to the Bosnian investigation said, the Bosnian police tipped off their counterparts in Denmark about the possibility of a parallel group in Copenhagen.

On Oct. 27, the police in Denmark, working with the Bosnian authorities, arrested four men, all between the ages of 16 and 20, and seized computers, computer discs, books with radical Muslim literature and Danish kroner worth about $32,000, from separate addresses.

Since then, three more people have been detained in connection with the Bosnian arrests. Out of the seven, none of whom have been identified, six attended the same mosque in Copenhagen.

One international official close to the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is formally the responsibility of Bosnia's state prosecutor, said that the group had sought to recruit suicide bombers from established immigrant communities.

"They are indoctrinated into thinking that they could be a huge cause for their people," said the official. "They are young and impressionable and potentially disenfranchised from the society they find themselves living in."

Bektasevic's background appears to fit that description. Unemployed since leaving school a year and half ago, he had begun to attend a mosque in Gothenburg, said his mother, Nafija Hamedovic.

"Some people frightened him and talked to him about hell, and told him he would be tortured in hell if he does not pray and does not believe," she said.

But she dismissed the idea that he could have been a suicide bomber, explaining that he had gone to stay with her relatives in Sarajevo and that he had no outside support.