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Spain Ignored Evidence That Zougam Stole Telephones and Committed Other Crimes
From the Wall Street Journal, March 19, "Morocco to Madrid, A Bomb Suspect Grew Radicalized." I’m not able to link to the article, so I typed the following excerpts.
Three years ago, Spain’s national police stormed the apartment of Jamal Zougam, a 30-year-old Moroccan immigrant who ran a cellphone business in Madrid. Among items they seized: phone numbers for suspected terrorists ..... The raid followed a request by a French magistrate who suspected Mr. Zougam was involved in terrorism. But the Spanish police figured the evidence wasn’t strong enough to arrest Mr. Zougam, or even to seek a judge’s permission for a wiretap. .... According to a senior French counter-terrorism official, Spain took a year to respond to France’s request to raid Mr. Zougram’s home. And Moroccan authorities said they warned Spain last year that Mr. Zougam ... was a member of a dangerous cell. ....

In 1999, the [Zougam] brothers ... opened a cellphone shop down the street.... It sold cellphones and cellphone cards, repaired phones and rented out booths for long-distance calls. The phones they sold were cheap, and business boomed. "Soon after they first opened the shop, they were selling so many cellphones and doing such an unbelievable volume that we in the neighborhood thought for sure that the phones were stolen," says Felix Cuesta, who tends a convenience store across the street. .... Wiretap transcripts indicate Mr. Zougam was associated with a new group of friends centered on Imad Edin Barakat Yarkas ... a man Spanish police later accused of leading a Madrid cell ... providing false documents, stolen credit cards ....
The usual activities, just as it calls for in the Koran...
In 2001, he [Zougam] got into a knife fight in a Madrid restaurant ... According to transcripts of wiretaps, a friend told Mr. Yarkas that Mr. Zougam ... stabbed the man’s friend, called Said, punched him, and hit him with an iron bar, but was stabbed too. Both landed in the hospital. Said threatened to tell police that Mr. Zougram’s business dealt in stolen cellphones.... A few months later, Mr. Zougam .... blurted out [in a wiretapped phone conversation with Yarkas] that he had obtained two passports.... All through the spring and summer of 2001, Mr. Yarkas used the phone shop to make calls to contacts around Spain, as well as to pick up unidentified merchandise ....
That usually translates to explosives or jihadis...
Following the raid on Mr. Zougam’s apartment, Spanish authorities asked for and received authorization to wiretap the homes and mobile phone of several people in the Madrid cell, but not Mr. Zougam. A senior Spanish anti-terrorism official says there wasn’t enough evidence against Mr. Zougam to tap his phone. ....
This is the lawn order approach to terrorism in action...
In June [2003] Moroccan authorities alerted Spanish officials that Mr. Zougam, whom they suspected of links to terrorism, had returned to Spain and was "particularly dangerous," according to the Moroccan government. Spain evidently didn’t heed the warning, letting Mr. Zougam continue to operate freely.
The Anzar government would have been re-elected last Sunday if it had simply prosecuted, jailed and then deported these Moroccan criminals a couple of years ago for dealing in stolen telephones and passports. The first step to fighting terrorism is to enforce laws against Moslem illegal immigration and criminal activities. This should be clear to the Spanish population and even to the Socialist government.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-03-20
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=28638