Word: beghal
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Some of the best leads on al-Qaeda's directorate now seem to be coming from Djamel Beghal, a French-Algerian who is suspected of being an al-Qaeda ringleader and who was arrested in Dubai in July on his way from Pakistan to Europe. After being convinced by Islamic scholars in Dubai of the evils of terrorism, Beghal started talking. (He is now back in France and has attempted to retract his confession.) Beghal has said that while in Afghanistan in March, he received instructions from Abu Zubaydah on a bombing campaign against American interests in Europe, including...
...Sept. 21, he made the same trip; this time, running not from his family but from the law. Daoudi slipped away from his apartment on the Boulevard John F. Kennedy after police across Europe started to round up the network that Beghal had assembled for his operations. (French investigators think Daoudi was the computer-and-communications whiz kid of the group.) Daoudi knew Britain well. He and Beghal had hung out there with Jerome Courtailler, one of two French brothers who had converted to Islam. For a while, Courtailler lived in south London with Zacarias Moussaoui, another French child...
...having left one eye and both hands in Afghanistan. He was granted British citizenship in 1985, and his mosque in Finsbury Park, tucked among Victorian row houses one tube stop from Arsenal's soccer stadium, has become famous worldwide for preaching jihad. Moussaoui, the Courtailler brothers and Beghal all attended prayers there. Beghal is said also to be a follower of Abu Qatada, a radical who preached jihad from a community center on Baker Street and whose bank account, allegedly with $270,000 in it, was frozen by the Bank of England in mid-October...
European analysts now believe that Takfir thinking has won converts among terrorist groups. Beghal is Takfiri, and Daoudi is thought to be. Roland Jacquard, one of the world's leading scholars on Islamic terrorism, says flatly, "Atta was Takfiri." It is not just soldiers of al-Qaeda who may be following the Takfir line. Mustafa was executed in 1978, but his ideas lived on; the beliefs of al-Zawahiri's Al Jihad were dominated by Takfiri themes. Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, says of Zawahiri, "He is their ideologue now... His ideas negate...
FOILED SEPT. 13, 2001 PARIS AND BRUSSELS Evidence of plots to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris, and possibly also NATO headquarters in Brussels, was uncovered after the earlier confession of Djamel Beghal. The information, despite being partially retracted, led to arrests...