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| Europe |
| Spain arrests al-Qaeda suspects |
| 2003-01-24 |
| Spanish police have arrested 16 people in a major operation against suspected al-Qaeda militants in the north-eastern Catalonia region. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said that the arrests were extraordinarily important, adding that explosives and chemical materials that could be used in a terrorist attack were seized. Two barrels were causing particular concern, with some unconfirmed reports in the Spanish media saying they contained the deadly poison ricin. Dear God! Barrels of the stuff? I hope that report's wrong! BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the police appear to have thwarted not only a plot but an actual attack. More than 150 anti-terrorist police agents took part in the pre-dawn swoop against the suspected al-Qaeda cells in Barcelona and elsewhere in Catalonia. Yeah, with a couple barrels of poison, I guess they did... According to some local media reports, the people arrested in Spain had been trained in al-Qaeda camps under the control of Osama Bin Laden. Interior Minister Angel Acebes said they were mostly Algerians, and suspected Islamic militants of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. We expected they'd likely be North Africans... The raids, which were ordered by Judge Guillermo Ruiz Polanco, took place after a lengthy investigation assisted by the French and British authorities. "The dismantled network has connections with terrorists arrested recently in France and Britain who were preparing to carry out attacks, using explosives and chemical materials," Mr Aznar said. It sounds like all the watching they've been doing at Finsbury mosque is paying off all at once. So Abu Hamza's outlived his usefulness and can now be dumped back to Yemen or someplace else where he has a death sentence waiting for him — if Blair and Blunkett have the guts... Some of those detained are thought to be on their way to Madrid to be interrogated. "Juan! Send up more giggle juice!" Over the course of the past year, Spain has arrested about 20 people thought to have links with the militant Islamic organisation. However, many of these have been released on bail because of lack of evidence. Several of the arrests have taken place in Catalonia, which has a large immigrant population from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. "Arrested because of lack of evidence" would seem to be the hallmark of piss-poor performance by the court system, often helped along by fear of "human rights" weinerheads who don't figure they, personally, would be in range of the barrels of deadly poison. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #2 "It sounds like all the watching they've been doing at Finsbury mosque is paying off all at once." Either that, or the word's out that the balloon is going up very shortly, and they've decided that it's time to move from the stage of making-the-list to the stage of crossing-off-names. |
| Posted by: Old Grouch 2003-01-24 18:30:51 |
| #1 Hopefully if the Spanish captured barrels of the stuff that means they pretty much got it all. |
| Posted by: Yank 2003-01-24 11:32:05 |