Abderrazak Mahdjoub is the man every intelligence officer in Western Europe wants to talk to these days. The 30-year-old Algerian known as ’the Sheikh’ is being held by German authorities who believe he heads a continent-wide terrorist operation for Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam) .... By all accounts, Mahdjoub is providing his European interrogators with a detailed picture of a clandestine network that authorities say smuggles would-be suicide bombers to Iraq for the jihad against the occupation forces. At the same time, European governments are becoming increasingly fearful that they will become targets themselves as the terrorist networks proliferate. In December 2003, the EU police agency, Europol, warned: "The fact that no Islamic extremist attack has been committed in the EU [since October 2002] should not be considered as a diminution or an absence of threat." ....
| The Sheikh was nabbed in in November. He'd been detained in Hamburg in July on suspicion of involvement with bomb attacks in Spain but was released due to lack of evidence — the witnesses, I guess, were all dead. Italy wants to chat with him, and I'm guessing he's one of the sheikhs who figured in the Milan intercept. I hope he's singing loud and that the lyrics make sense. He looks like a really valuable catch. |
|