Author: Elaine Sciolino
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 16, 2004
They speak in an ever changing code.
The word for prison might be hospital. Passport becomes book, or sometimes
djellaba, the simple robe worn by men in North Africa. Explosives is honey
or sneakers.
And when someone says "the soccer
team is ready," an illegal operation is about to start.
The Moroccan branch of militant
Islam is not new. But intelligence officials here and in Europe say that
until this past year they failed to penetrate its communications and missed
its significance. The French worried about Algerians and Tunisians; the
Spanish focused on Basques. Belgium, whose Muslim population is largely
Moroccan, had fewer than three dozen counterterror specialists in its police
force.
Since suicide bombings in Casablanca
in May last year that killed dozens, and the devastating train bombings
in Madrid this March, Moroccan groups have been seen as central to the
terrorist threat in Europe, forcing intelligence and law-enforcement officials
to adjust their strategies.
It has been a tortuous undertaking.
Morocco has been among the West's closest Arab allies and has long been
instrumental in pursuing Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Although Moroccan
and European officials now agree that there is a new Moroccan threat, they
disagree over its nature and origin - and how to contain it.
One problem is simply identifying
major Moroccan terrorists. Two months after the Madrid train bombings,
Spanish investigators believe that its mastermind may still be at large.
The French and Belgian police successfully
dismantled Moroccan cells in their countries after the Madrid attacks,
but they are convinced that other cells may have burrowed further underground.
Moroccan terrorists, intelligence
and police experts say, know how to blend in.
"There are cells in which the Moroccans
are well integrated into the population," Pierre de Bousquet, the head
of the Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, France's counterintelligence
service, said in an interview. "So they do not seem suspicious. They work.
They have kids. They have fixed addresses. They pay the rent. The networks
are dispersed throughout Europe and are very autonomous."
In addition to uneven cooperation
among law enforcement and intelligence agencies within Europe, there is
the problem of tensions that have surfaced between European and Moroccan
officials.
Although the two sides are working
together to investigate the Madrid bombings, the Moroccans have complained
that their pleas for help after the Casablanca attacks were largely ignored
until terrorists struck the heart of Europe.
They also have expressed frustration
that laws in many European countries are not tough enough.
In April a court in Hamburg, Germany,
allowed a Moroccan who was the only person convicted in connection with
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States to leave prison pending
a new trial.
Three weeks later a court in Rome
acquitted 12 people, including 9 Moroccans, who were arrested in 2002 and
accused of being associated with a terrorist organization.
"The Madrid bombings finally have
forced the Europeans to make their investigations more serious and their
cooperation quicker and more operational," Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco's
chief of security, said in an interview. "But we are victims of laws and
guarantees that protect the rights of individuals at the expense of cracking
down against organized crime."
Intelligence and law-enforcement
officials in Spain, France and Belgium say that their Moroccan colleagues
have refused to face the fact that Moroccans have banded into autonomous
terror cells that can carry out attacks without outside organization, logistical
support or money.
The day after the Madrid bombings,
senior Moroccan officials were shown a video made by the bombers in which
a masked man explained in Arabic who was responsible for the attack. The
Moroccans insisted that the voice was that of a European, while the Spanish
authorities said he was Moroccan, according to Moroccan and Spanish officials.
Ángel Acebes, Spain's interior
minister at the time, announced publicly the next evening that the man
had a Moroccan accent, and the Moroccans backed down.
Many European officials also have
expressed frustration with Morocco's tendency to blame Al Qaeda for ordering
and organizing every plot, rather than view it as a more widespread ideological
inspiration.
"It's easier for the Moroccans to
place responsibility outside Morocco and blame Al Qaeda, because it frees
them from responsibility," said one senior Belgian intelligence official.
"They refuse to see there's an internal component of the problem, one of
poverty and despair."
For their part, Moroccan officials,
who have issued 44 international arrest warrants for suspected terrorists,
have accused European countries of being slow or unwilling to extradite
suspects they have captured.
Britain, for example, has refused
to extradite Muhammad al-Gerbouzi, whom Morocco has identified as a battle-
hardened veteran of Afghanistan and a planner of the Casablanca attacks
as well as a founder of the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Group, identified
by the United Nations as a terrorist network connected to Al Qaeda.
An international arrest warrant
from Morocco showing a blurry photo of a bearded Mr. Gerbouzi states that
he is wanted for "criminal association with relation to a terrorist enterprise,
preparation of the commission of terrorist acts, collection of funds to
finance terrorist acts, an attack on the internal security of the state
and complicity in the falsification and use of passports."
According to General Laanigri, Osama
bin Laden authorized Mr. Gerbouzi to open a training camp for Moroccans
in Afghanistan in the beginning of 2001. Last December, Mr. Gerbouzi was
tried in absentia in Morocco for his involvement in the Casablanca attacks
and given a 20-year sentence.
"We know for certain from confessions
of those we have arrested that the preparations for the Casablanca attack
were made at a meeting in Istanbul in January 2003 that al-Gerbouzi attended,"
General Laanigri said.
But the British government has no
extradition treaty with Morocco and has refused to extradite Mr. Gerbouzi,
a 44-year-old father of six who lives in a rundown apartment in north London.
British officials say there is not enough evidence to arrest him, General
Laanigri said.
In an interview with The Guardian
last month, Mr. Gerbouzi dismissed charges that he was linked to radical
Islamic groups as "complete nonsense," adding that he had never been to
Afghanistan, worshiped at an Islamic center in west London and drove his
children to school. "I have nothing to hide," he said.
Some senior intelligence officials
in Europe said they suspected that Mr. Gerbouzi was being protected by
the British authorities because he was an informer, while others said he
was no longer dangerous because he was so carefully watched. Another complicating
factor is the fact that Morocco still has the death penalty while European
Union countries do not.
British officials declined to comment
on the case.
European officials also have complained
that their Moroccan counterparts reflexively tend to blame the Moroccan
Islamic Combatant Group for all terrorist activity, while many Europeans
intelligence officials are convinced that the group is more an ideological
concept than a structured organization. Almost half of the Moroccans wanted
on international terrorist arrest warrants issued by Morocco are listed
as having links to the group.
The group is the successor to an
earlier guerrilla organization that wanted to overthrow Morocco's monarchy.
But faced with the improbability of such an ambitious goal, a number of
its followers moved to Europe.
In Europe as well as Morocco, they
were recruited by Al Qaeda and sent as volunteers to Afghanistan, where
Moroccans had set up their own training camp. By the end of the 1990's
Moroccans who trained in Afghanistan were calling themselves the Moroccan
Islamic Combatant Group.
But European intelligence officials
said the group has no hierarchy, membership roster or formal manifesto
and has never claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack.
"It is reassuring for the Moroccans
to give a name to the radicals," said one French intelligence official.
"But it's a virtual movement." Another French official described it as
"a plant that doesn't need to root in soil that appears suddenly and grows
without an apparent structure."
In 2002 the group, known by its
initials in French, G.I.C.M., was put on a United Nations list of terrorist
organizations linked to Al Qaeda, and in 2003 was added to the State Department's
list of terrorist organizations.
Months after the Casablanca attacks,
Morocco began to link many of those suspected of involvement with the organization.
"Now we have a situation where Morocco
gives you a long list, tells you everyone on the list is a member of G.I.C.M.
and asks you to put them all in jail," said one senior Belgian official.
"You cannot just issue arrest warrants without proof."
The Moroccans have also altered
their claims about evidence. Senior intelligence officials from two European
countries said they had been told by their Moroccan counterparts days after
the Casablanca attacks that the attacks had been ordered and financed by
Al Qaeda, even though the suicide attackers were Moroccans from a slum
outside Casablanca.
The proof, the Moroccan officials
said at the time, was a bank transfer to the group of between $50,000 and
$70,000 from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant. [The C.I.A.
has identified Mr. Zarqawi as probably being the hooded terrorist who beheaded
Nicholas E. Berg, a young American businessman, in Iraq.]
Moroccan officials now say that
there was no bank transfer, only the informal disbursal of several smaller
amounts of money as charity payments to the families of Moroccans who had
fought in Afghanistan.
Despite the problems, there is a
growing realization in Morocco and European countries that they need each
other. The Spanish authorities said they were able to identify six of seven
bombers who blew themselves up in an apartment after the Madrid bombings
thanks to DNA samples of their family members taken by Moroccan authorities.
When Jean-Louis Bruguière,
France's most senior antiterrorist investigatory magistrate, visited Morocco
in late March he was shown evidence that led directly to arrests outside
Paris several days later and the disbanding of a Moroccan cell suspected
of involvement in the Casablanca bombings.
"We would have had a hard time finding
them," Mr. de Bousquet, the French counterterrorist expert, said. "Morocco
helped provide information that led to the arrests."
