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Two Failed Terrorism Trials Raise Worry in Europe
Failed terrorism prosecutions in Germany and the Netherlands this week have highlighted Europe's patchy record in securing convictions and prompted some to ask if laws need to be tightened. Ihsan Garnaoui, a 34-year-old Tunisian, was acquitted in Berlin Wednesday of trying to form a terrorist group, even though judges considered it proven that he had planned to carry out at least one bomb attack in Germany at the start of the Iraq war in March 2003. The same day, Dutch teenager Samir Azzouz was cleared of planning attacks on Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, a nuclear reactor and government offices. He had been found in possession of machinegun cartridges, mock explosive devices, electrical circuitry, maps and sketches of prominent buildings and chemicals prosecutors said could be bomb ingredients. Legal experts and security analysts said such cases raise a difficult question: in the absence of an actual attack, how close must a suspect be to detonating a bomb before prosecutors can demonstrate guilt? "We cannot wait until attacks have been carried out and the dead are lying on the street," prosecutor Silke Ritzert said in her summing-up of the Garnaoui case.Maxime Verhagen, Christian Democrat leader in the Dutch parliament, said tougher laws might be needed. "I ask myself whether the men who flew into the twin towers could have been convicted in the Netherlands if their plans had been intercepted in good time," he said, referring to the al Qaeda attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Hundreds of terrorist suspects have been arrested in Europe since 2001, but only a small proportion successfully prosecuted. Some visible successes have come in Belgium, which jailed a Tunisian for 10 years in 2003 for plotting to blow up a NATO military base, and France, which convicted 10 men last December for planning to bomb Strasbourg Christmas market and another six last month for conspiring to blow up the U.S. embassy in 2001. Elsewhere, some prominent cases have collapsed for lack of evidence, like the trial of nine Moroccans accused of plotting to poison the water supply to the U.S. embassy in Rome in 2002. Prosecutors have often encountered the problem that intelligence which forms the basis for arrests may not amount to legal proof or may not be useable in court for fear of compromising secret sources. Posted by: Paul Moloney 2005-04-11 |
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