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| Africa: North |
| Al-Qaeda member to go on trial in Algeria |
| 2005-04-20 |
| A suspected al Qaeda agent who divulged a plot to attack Britain is due to go on trial on terror-related charges in Algeria on Wednesday, officials said. Mohamed Meguerba, 37, was arrested in Algeria in December 2002 after jumping bail in Britain, where he had given police information in the biggest British terrorism case since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. Information he gave interrogators led to the arrests of 100 people in an anti-terrorism sweep in Britain. One of them, Kamel Bourgass, was convicted last week of a plot to launch chemical and bomb attacks. Meguerba faces accusations of being a member of a terrorist organisation operating abroad and of one active in Algeria. He also faces charges of using fake documents and other more minor crimes. A government official said he expected a trial on Wednesday, but the Justice Ministry declined to comment and an Algiers court official said: "We have nothing to say. This is a matter for the security services." Fearing extradition, Meguerba told Algerian authorities that plotters in Britain were keeping deadly ricin poison in a skin-cream jar and planned to smear it on door handles. British police did not find the poison but found recipes to make it. "After his arrest, he eventually gave information about a terrorist plot in England, in which he admitted playing a part," said prosecutor Nigel Sweeney in Britain. The two-year-long British trial convicted Bourgass, who was accused of being the ringleader. But the jury cleared the four North Africans alleged to have been co-conspirators. Prosecutors then decided to drop charges against another four North Africans. Meguerba's story is similar to that of many Algerians who left home for Europe in the early 1990s. Among them were exiles who attended London's Finsbury Park Mosque, where some Islamic extremists met, later going to training camps of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Afghan camps were full of thousands of men, many North Africans, willing to fight an Islamic holy war against "infidels". "He was a normal guy, who did not regularly pray at the mosque. There's very little on him before he went to Europe," said an Algerian security expert, who declined to be identified. He is believed to have left Algeria in the 1990s and married an Irish woman in 1997. After a move to London, when he attended Finsbury Park Mosque, he left for bin Laden's El-Farouk camp in Afghanistan in late 2000 where he learned combat, chemicals and explosives, security experts said. "He is believed to have fallen off a horse in combat with the Taliban and has since had a bad back and poor left leg," one said. The authorities believe Meguerba, who was able to travel and fit in easily with fluent French, English and Arabic, was asked by al Qaeda to take part in the first attacks in Europe. But after an arrest in Amsterdam he later made his way to Britain. He was later arrested there, but skipped bail and made his way back to Algeria, apparently with the help of Algerian rebels. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |