Word: gendron
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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...
...only after Belgian and Italian authorities compared notes earlier this year that Italian officials realized Ayachi and Gendron might have been up to something more dangerous than a people-smuggling scheme. That, Italian investigators say, allowed them to piece together material evidence alongside secretly recorded conversations between the two men that indicated that their intent at the time of their arrests had been to proceed towards eventual terror strikes in France...
...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...
...Still, there's only limited comfort to be had from the arrests of Ayachi and Gendron. Because Italian 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...