Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...French security officials confide to TIME that when Italian police arrested Ayachi and Gendron late last year, the Italians were not aware of the ongoing investigation into the network to which the two men allegedly belonged. For more than a year, authorities in Belgium and France had been arresting suspected radicals whom they allege have connections to the same network - climaxing in a Dec. 11 raid in Brussels that took 14 people into custody. Most of those arrested remain in detention as Belgian authorities continue investigating the case of what they described at the time as a looming suicide bomb...
...According to French officials, Ayachi and Gendron had left Brussels sometime before the Dec. 11 raid, but nobody knew to where. It turns out that - unbeknownst to Belgian or French authorities - Ayachi and Gendron had actually been arrested in November, after Italian police stopped the camping car in which they were entering southern Italy and discovered five illegal Palestinian and Syrian aliens hiding inside. (See pictures of Fatah vs. Hamas...
...Italian and French officials now say they believe the pair had been trying to furtively return to Europe from Syria, where they had picked up the five Palestinian and Syrian illegals as volunteers for their suspected planned attacks. "We know what kinds of activities [Ayachi and Gendron] had been up to after watching them for months, and they'd never run illegal aliens into Europe before," says a French counter-terrorism official. "You can be pretty sure if they were arrested by the Italians bringing five illegals in when they did, it wasn't to organize a little round...
...police were not aware of the Franco-Belgian surveillance operation, they had no reason to suspect the five people in the back of the camping car of anything other than trying to illegally cross the border. While police held Ayachi and Gendron, they let the other five go. The French official says the Italians had "no reason not to do what they always do with illegal aliens - they expelled them." The upshot: nothing much is known about the five suspected suicide bomber volunteers beyond their nationalities. "That means they're still out there somewhere, presumably as ready to strike...
...they aren't the only ones. French authorities involved in the surveillance of the network that was the target of the Dec. 11 Brussels raid worried that the intervention was premature, allowing other suspected radical members - known to have been in Afghanistan or to be en route back to Europe - to go to ground once word of the bust got to them. "They're still out there, and we have no idea if they were involved in the recruitment of the five [Palestinian and Syrian] suspected suicide bombers - or whether those kamikazes might have been trained and recruited...