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Germany Accuses Iraqis Over Insurgency
German prosecutors on Tuesday accused a 30-year-old Iraqi man of recruiting militants for the Iraqi insurgency and smuggling wounded fighters back to western Europe for treatment. Federal prosecutor Kay Nehm said Lokman M. was a leading figure in the West European branch of militant group Ansar al-Islam, with close ties to its leader in Iraq and to other members in Italy and Sweden. In a second case, also involving Ansar al-Islam, Nehm said he believed that three Iraqis arrested last Friday had been planning to assassinate visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, despite the authorities' failure so far to discover any weapons or explosives. "We are convinced that we prevented an attack on Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi," Nehm told a news conference. Nehm's accusations were among the most detailed to emerge so far concerning alleged activities of Iraqi militants in Europe, and their links to the insurgency raging against U.S.-led forces and the interim Iraqi government. Nehm said Lokman M. had procured medical equipment for fighting units in Iraq and arranged for volunteer fighters to travel there. "In addition to that, he was responsible for smuggling members who had been wounded in Iraq into western Europe for medical treatment," the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "In this way, in September 2003 he organized, among other things, the smuggling in of a severely wounded leading official of Ansar al-Islam from Italy via France to Great Britain." Security sources say fighters have traveled to Iraq from a number of European countries to join the insurgency. A probe into Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, the suspected brains behind the Madrid train bombs in March, indicated he recruited volunteers in France, Belgium and Italy to fight in Iraq. In Italy, a judge charged six North Africans in September with recruiting suicide bombers to go to Iraq. Prosecutors are also investigating a suspected recruitment network in France. They believe French militants may have entered Iraq via Syria, noting an increase in the number of French Muslims traveling to the country, ostensibly to study Islam, in 2003. A 19-year-old Franco-Tunisian man was killed in fighting in the rebel Iraqi town Falluja in July. The European Union's counter-terrorism chief told Reuters in an interview last week such recruitment represented a worrying trend. Among other things, security officials fear militants who gain experience in Iraq will return and pose a threat back home. Nehm gave further details of the probe into the alleged Allawi plot, saying the three suspects had been detected via intercepted phone calls in which they spoke in code. One of them, Berlin-based Rafik Y., had carried out a reconnaissance trip in the German capital and reported by telephone that he had "inspected the building site." Nehm said Rafik, after getting the go-ahead from the others, initially considered targeting Allawi at an event last Thursday evening where the premier had been due to meet Iraqi exiles. When this was canceled in the light of the intercepted phone calls, he switched his attention to a Friday morning meeting Allawi was due to hold with businessmen at Deutsche Bank in Berlin, Nehm said. The three men were arrested in raids in the early hours of Friday, but that meeting too was canceled as a precaution. Nehm said last week the alleged plot was an "ad hoc" affair and the raids had been launched after police intercepted a series of increasingly "hectic" telephone conversations pointing to an attack.
Posted by: Steve 2004-12-07 |
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