Posted on 12/07/2003 2:09:42 PM PST by joan
By Graham Johnson Investigations Editor
A TERRIFYING threat to Britain's security can today be revealed by the Sunday Mirror.
With the country on its highest-ever state of alert amid fears of a Christmas terror strike our investigators infiltrated a cell of Muslim extremists - and bought enough Semtex to blow up Oxford Street and the Houses of Parliament or down 40 Lockerbie jets.
Last night one of the men we dealt with was under arrest. The other was believed to have been assassinated by his own terror masters for blowing their cover.
Our 13.5kg haul of Semtex - in 108 sticks - is one of the biggest ever seized from terrorists and could have potentially armed 30 suicide bombers.
And chillingly the explosive, which we bought for £10,000, was of a form that doesn't show up on metal detectors, making it much easier to smuggle into Britain.
A small amount of the explosive was allegedly found here last week as police arrested more than 20 terror suspects.
Posing as members of the Real IRA, we were also offered three shoulder-held missile launchers, an anti-aircraft gun, and enough machine guns, hand grenades and landmines to equip a small army.
We made our deal in Kosovo, a breeding ground for fanatics with al-Qaeda links.
Our contact was the deputy commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) Niam Behljulji, known as Hulji. The group were trained by Bin Laden's men.
Astonishingly, we met him under the noses of the British Army and UN forces - who remain as peacekeepers following Kosovo's bloody war with Serbia.
Hulji, is said to supply terrorists across Europe and has been accused of massacring Serbian women and children during the war.
He even posed grinning for a photograph, holding the severed head of one his victims.
But we won him over by playing on one of his weaknesses...he is a huge fan of Irish rock band U2.
He couldn't wait to deal with us when we promised him one of the band's CDs - which we had signed with a fake message from lead singer Bono.
He told us: "I can give you enough Semtex for a small war. Do you need it for terrorism?"
Our investigation, carried out with Channel 5 sleuth Donal MacIntyre for his series MacIntyre's Millions, began when we arrived in Kosovo posing as members of the Real IRA.
Our first contact was with a Mafia arms dealer called Sinbad Sadkutz, who acts as a middleman for Hulji.
Sadkutz arranged a meeting with Hulji in a KLA-run cafe which was surrounded by armed guards and had been swept for "bugs".
Hulji said: "The plastics (Semtex) is the old type. No metal strips inside. It cannot be detected at airports. It is untraceable - no chemical markers."
He then offered us an anti-aircraft gun similar to one used by Iraqi dissidents last week to hit a US DHL cargo plane as it landed in Baghdad.
We next met Sadkutz in a Mafia-run brothel called The Massage Club, and agreed to buy 15kg of Semtex for £10,000.
To make sure the deal went through smoothly, Hulji insisted that we hand over a "human deposit" hostage and £7,500 in euros.
Our "deposit" was my fellow investigator Dominic Hipkins. He was to be held in a terrorist-owned bungalow - opposite the British ambassador's residence in Pristina - while the deal was sorted out.
Four days later Sadkutz took our man to collect the Semtex from his nearby home and the pair returned to the bungalow, the explosives packed into a sports holdall.
The grey-brown Semtex, wrapped in brown grease-proof paper marked "explosive", looked and felt like child's play dough.
But when burnt with a lighter it produced an intense blue flame - proving it was Semtex. As a Sunday Mirror investigator tested the explosive, Sadkutz grinned as he said: "15kgs can blow up all this neighbourhood."
After Sadkutz had left, we found the KLA had hidden 1.5kg of lead in the lining of the bag so that the actual Semtex weighed 13.5kg, instead of the 15kg we had negotiated for.
For safekeeping, our investigators buried the Semtex on a hill overlooking the British Army base in Kosovo and took a satellite reading of the exact position.
We then told the British Police in Kosovo, part of the UN presence there, exactly were it was.
It was later retrieved by a our investigators and a Finnish bomb disposal squad - who told us the hill had been mined during the war.
Following our investigation, with the whole country on red alert, 12 local policemen were arrested on terrorist charges.
The officers, said to be members of a secret cell aiding Kosovan extremists, are suspected of plotting to blow up a bridge and a power station.
Sadkutz was arrested on Thursday by British police operating in Kosovo. And there were strong rumours last night that Hulji had been assassinated for compromising the KLA's terror operations.
But the KLA were not the only group interested in selling terrorist weapons. While we were in the Balkans word had quickly spread that the Real IRA wanted to buy weapons. In neighbouring Croatia we bought a machine gun and a Walther PPK pistol.
In Belgrade, the capital of nearby Serbia, the local Mafia emailed us to offer a cache of anti-tank missiles, Kalashnikovs, a mortar and illegal landmines for £50,000.
And in neighbouring Montenegro, on the Adriatic coast's version of the Costa Del Crime, another war criminal was selling death on an industrial scale.
The man, known as Vesko - a former bodyguard of Serbian warlord Arkan - offered to supply us with 20 rocket-propelled grenades, 20 shoulder-fired missiles and 20 Spider machine guns used by the SAS.
To return to Britain, our investigators followed the route used by gun-runners out of the Balkans. We drove the short distance into Montenegro then sailed by car ferry from Bar to the Italian port of Ancona, blending in with holiday makers.
Once there they flew home - but could have easily taken a coach through Italy and France to Calais or hidden among thousands of asylum seekers hitching rides on fruit lorries and train carriages.
Last night a spokesman for Scotland Yard said: "Britain is on a high state of alert, only one below the highest level.
"That means we know the terrorists are planning to attack targets in the UK."
MacIntyre's Millions: Semtex For Sale, Channel Five, 9pm, December 17.
NYCR, the only sick thing is support to documented BIN LADEN ALLIES AFTER 911.
Bin Laden has trained KLA Albanians in Afghanistan terror camps and you are fully aware of that fact.
I suppose that is possible, but I have heard of no such instance. In Afghanistan we found Brits, Aussies, Canadians, and Americans as well as "tourists" from all the North African and Arabian shield countries who were with or trained by Al Qaeda, but I am unaware of any Albanians. Is there any primary source evidence you can cite for this claim?
documented BIN LADEN ALLIES AFTER 911.
Well, again, what have the Albanians done to support Bin Laden? We know that in Kosovo after 9-11, former KLA fighters volunteered to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the people offered to give blood and they held candle-light processions in sympathy. In Macedonia, one of the motivations for the leaders of the ethnic Albanian uprising to maintain a cease-fire after the sumer of 01 was a desire not to be perceived as affiliated in any way with the 9-11 event or those involved with it. And of course the country of Albania itself has provided troops to help the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan, has voted to support the USA in international fora, has offered up its territory for bases and overflights, and has provided training areas for U.S. ground, naval, and air forces. Plus with tens of thousands of Americans in the Balkans for years and years, there have been no American casualties caused by Albanians.
So, DTA, how are the Albanians Bin Laden allies?
Do you really believe I made it up? If only. You ain't seen nothing yet. Through "poor innocent Albanians" OBL got access to the ...
Terror camps in Afghanistan were run by OBL. Kosovo Albanians were invited to train in those camps.
Having in mind the risk assessment, OBL would not invite Kosovo ALbanians in his secret camps and spend his own funds to train his enemies.
If this is not a logical enough for you, here is more.
Zavahiri's brother has trained KLA terrorists.
The traces of Kosovo Albanians were found in Afghanistan. Your info has been edited for some reason. One of them even boasted of combat experience against Americans and Serbs and advised of terrror attacks in the U.S. such as Disney parks.
Last but not least, the drugs makes terrorist world go round. Kosovo Albanians are improtant link in turning Afghan poppy crop into Greenbacks.
In the war agaist terror, one is either with us or against us.
What do you think, where Kosovo Albanian terrorists fit into the picture?
Question for you: Any idea why Daniel Pearl was killed?
Serbs have a saying: beware of those who are not aftaid of God and can not be ashamed of their actions in front of the people. Do you know by chance someone fitting this description? I do.
Is it that all Englishmen are stupid or is it that only English journalists are this stupid? They paid $17,000 for 30 pounds of Semtex (or more likely, Playdoh)?!? $570 a pound? A 10,000% mark up? Hell, I'm in the wrong business! The guys that sold the stuff to these reporters are probably still ROTFLTAO!
--Boot Hill
--Boot Hill
Your evidence consists of one document allegedly written by an Albanian who boasted of his KLA combat experience against Americans and advocated suicide bombings. Since the KLA did not fight against Americans and since you can count the number of Albanian suicide bombers on no fingers, the document is not very credible. Even if authentic, it represents a very small piece of information amidst an overwhelmingly large body of evidence that indicates exactly the opposite of what you are trying to spin.
[In Bin Laden's book "Jihad Against America"] he lists various militant groups that he says are "helping Afghanistan in its fight against the infidels" around the world. They include the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Libyan Jihad Fighters, the Abu Sayyaf rebels of the Philippines, and what it calls "jihad militants" from Burma, Bosnia, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Note that Bin Laden does not mention the KLA, Kosovo, or Albania.
From your link it appears you are a subscriber to a conspiro-theory that Pearl was killed in Pakistan because he wrote articles a few years ago saying that Milosevic's massacres and atrocities in Kosovo were not the same as genocide. Yeah, that was it.
Publishing tall stories about alleged Serbian crimes is a shortcut for Pulitzer. Liars like Gutman, Rohde, and frauds like Samantha Power are the proof.
Daniel Pearl came to Kosovo to make a breakthrough story about alleged Serbian crimes (judged by the tone of his published articles he was no Serb friend). He was searching for the proof of "genocide". Instead of the planned outcome, he realized the magnitude of the official spin.
He became capable to see through the fog of lies that Clinton administration and media were spinning on behalf of Islamist terrorists.
When he came to Pakistan, he knew where to look and see things gullible Western journalists could not see, even when in plain view. Perhaps that's why he was a threat. He paid the price for becoming competent.
The social network diagram of Daniel Pearl's murderers is interesting enough to justify close examination.
For a change, perhaps you could contributing a bit of info here?
Does playdoh burn with an intense blue flame like they say semtex does? You do not the background on these investigative reporters - if they have degrees in chemistry, experience with semtex, military background, and so on. They are doing a show about semtex airing on British TV next week. I doubt people who aren't more positive about semtex would devote an entire show on the stuff.
$570 a pound? A 10,000% mark up? Hell, I'm in the wrong business! The guys that sold the stuff to these reporters are probably still ROTFLTAO!
If the "strong rumours" are correct, then at least one of the guys can laugh no more, as he was assassinated.
Maybe here's a reason--from the very first source on the link you provided:
Joint raids in recent years in Tirana by the CIA and Shik, the Albanian secret service, have led to several arrests
Maybe bin Laden does not appreciate Albanian& US cooperation.
That same summer, CIA and Shik units arrested several men who were wanted by Egypt for plotting terrorist acts. The men were extradited to Egypt, tried and executed.
Perhaps bin Laden is upset with the Albanians for arresting his operatives and sending them to be executed.
The spotlight fell on bin Laden in Albania with the arrest in 1998 of a French passport holder, Claude Kader... He confessed to being a member of one of bin Ladens groups and told investigators he had been sent to give weapons to the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army...The KLA had promised US officials it would not co-operate with fundamentalists. Mr Kader said the KLA had turned him down and that he had returned to Albania, still with his weapons
Maybe the reason bin Laden didn't cite the Albanians in his list of buddies is because KLA guerrillas in the middle of fighting the Serbs were so disdainful of bin laden that they sent his emissary packing and wouldn't even touch the weapons he offered.
DTA, posting a link to a google search is not an argument--it is at best a cop-out and at worst--for you--proves exactly the opposite of your position. Now here's a link with some serious bin laden connections.
Defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the United States is holding several hundred foreign fighters captured in Iraq, the majority of them Syrians. Others include Saudis, Sudanese, Egyptians, Yemenis, Moroccans, and Albanians, according to US government officials and terrorism specialists.
USA Today: Report: Bin Laden linked to Albania"
Head of Albania's intelligence service fired for working with CIA and revealing al-Qaida links
Money-laundering expert: No quick way to cut off al-Qaida funds "Albania has Islamic banks"
Philippine's Linked to al-Qaida (Osama's brother-in-law used local fronts to export into Albania)
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