Word: beghal
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Emirates authorities relayed their stunning information to officials in Europe, who immediately placed Beghal?s operatives under surveillance. Although French investigators say the planned strikes were still months away, the Sept. 11 U.S. attacks prompted Belgian and Dutch police to move immediately, just in case European timetables had been advanced. That, complained France?s top antiterrorist investigator Jean-Louis Brugière, not only halted monitoring to identify other members of the cabal, but also risked provoking the flight of network members in France and Spain. As it turned out, police raids in France interrupted terror suspects in the process...
...brother trained at the Afghan camps and is currently in a French prison for terrorism-related crimes. Also apprehended was Nizar Trabelsi, 31, a Tunisian and former pro soccer player, who was lured from an errant life of drugs and alcohol by the redemption of radical Islam. Moving on Beghal?s identification of Trabelsi as the designated bomber for the U.S. embassy attack, Belgian police raided his apartment and found automatic weapons and documents related to the assault. The search of a nearby restaurant turned up bomb-making materials. "It?s still unknown exactly how the attack...
Though that threat now appears reduced, French police say troubling insights were gained in the sweeps. Like the authors of the U.S. attacks, the Beghal network members would have merited scant attention had they not first been fingered by Beghal. Virtually all were married, had children and held steady jobs; few had any association with known radical groups. Nothing in the past of fugitive Daoudi, for example, gave cause for suspicion, or indicated a sympathy with terrorist causes. Respected by his peers as a talented computer scientist, he secretly applied his skills to ensure safe Internet communication between network members...
...uprooting of the Beghal structure is a small victory against terrorism, but the international cooperation that produced it still has a long way to go. The decentralized justice systems of countries like Germany and Italy, for example, make coordinating domestic antiterrorist operations difficult. Nations like the Netherlands and Denmark have been slow to identify the terrorist threat in the absence of attacks on their territory. "If you have even a small population of motivated radicals, there?s a threat," the French official says. "If you?ve got a U.S. embassy, you house a target. If you have innocent people...
Though European police got lucky in unmasking the Beghal plotters, scores of sleepers unknown to security forces are in place, awaiting activation. And with bin Laden now breaking up his Afghan camps ahead of expected U.S. strikes, hundreds more will be working their way back to Europe and North America to join them in the weeks to come...