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| Europe |
| Redux on Spanish GSPC arrests |
| 2005-12-24 |
| SIX men suspected of recruiting Islamist radical volunteers to fight in Iraq and other countries were placed in custody today in Madrid on terrorist charges, legal sources said. The men were carrying out "operations of proselytism and recruitment of people who after the necessary indoctrination would have been sent to 'Islamist' conflict zones," according to senior magistrate Fernando Andreu. The aim, he said, was that "either they became 'martyrs' in suicide attacks or joined insurgent terrorist groups in Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir or selected places in Asia." Three are accused of "membership of a terrorist organisation", among them Hiyang Maan alias Abu Sufian, 25, an Iraqi suspected of heading the cell and being in contact with Abu Mussab Al-Zarkawi, head of the Iraqi section of the al-Qaeda network.peThe other two are Andrey Misura, 30, also known as Amin Al Anari, a Belarussian considered a chemical weapons expert who underwent military training in Chechnya, and Osama Agharbi, 22, a Moroccan student. The three others – Mohammed Srifi Nali, Bouchaib Kaka and Spaniard Jose Antonio Dona Martin – were placed in preventive detention for "collaboration with a terrorist organisation." Spanish police detained 16 men on Monday in nationwide swoops in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands: eight Moroccans, an Algerian, a Belarussian, an Egyptian, a Frenchman, a Ghanaian, an Iraqi, a Saudi and a Spaniard. Two other Moroccans turned themselves into the police and they and 10 of those detained on Monday have been provisionally freed. According to Andreu their investigations took police to a mosque in Malaga in southern Spain where a radical version of Islam was preached and recruitment activities carried out. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |