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| Europe |
| Spanish cell part of a network that spanned 5 other countries |
| 2005-11-25 |
| An Islamic gang linked to Al Qaeda was broken up by Civil Guards in a simultaneous operation in three Spanish provinces on Wednesday. The group allegedly supplied funds and false documents to terrorist cells belonging to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), close associates of Osama bin Laden in North Africa and Europe, said the Minister of the Interior, José Antonio Alonso. The operation, carried out during the night and on Wednesday morning, resulted in eight arrests in the province of Alicante (in Torrevieja), two in Granada and one in Murcia. Searches were made in ten private homes and businesses - at least two telephone call centres and a mechanical workshop - belonging to suspects in the three provinces. The Ministry of the Interior said that Civil Guards had seized, among other things, a kilo of cocaine and 35,000 euros in cash, the profits, according to sources involved in the investigation, from drug trafficking operations, robbery and the forgery of bank cards. This was how, said the sources, some of those under arrest obtained funds that were then handed over to terrorist cells. A large amount of documentation was also discovered during the searches, as well as bank cards and the material for forging them. The investigators consider that the cell was in charge of financing and logistics for GSPC, a radical branch of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and sent documents to the latter in Algeria to facilitate the entry of members into Europe and their movement from one country to another within the continent. GSPC is the Al Qaeda associate with the greatest presence in Europe, along with the GIA, the alleged instigator of the March 11th attacks in Madrid last year. Civil Guards suspect that the gang arrested forms part of a group that exists further afield, at an international level. Data have, therefore, been passed on to five other countries - Germany, Holland, the U.K., Belgium and Denmark - about links between the people under arrest and North Africans living in these countries so that it can be established whether they form part of the same Islamic network. The Minister of the Interior said that nothing made the forces of law and order suspect that the group arrested were âplanning a terrorist attack in the short or medium term in Spainâ. He explained that the arrests constituted a preventative measure against the real threat of Islamic terrorism, in order to âcut offâ these infrastructure groups âat the rootâ and thus to prevent them from maturing and developing into operative terrorist cells. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |