Posted on 07/19/2002 5:23:54 PM PDT by knighthawk
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — A suspect wanted in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris has been extradited from Canada and ordered held in a Dutch jail for investigation, prosecutors said Friday.
The Algerian-born suspect, identified in court documents as Amine Mezbar, 34, was transferred to the Netherlands Thursday evening and brought before a judicial commission Friday in Rotterdam, where two other suspects in the case also are being held.
No trial date has been set, said Marjan van Kempen of the public prosecutor's office. In the normal judicial process, the judicial commission's task is to affirm a suspect's detention and set the parameters for the investigation.
Mezbar, who won a Canadian residency permit under the name Adel Tobbichi in April 2000, agreed to be extradited after he was arrested June 21 in Montreal on a Dutch warrant. He has used at least four names in the past, and authorities were not sure of his true identity.
The warrant said he was wanted for conspiracy to commit a terrorist explosion, forging passports, drivers' licenses and credit cards, possessing stolen passports and impersonation.
Mezbar lived in a Rotterdam apartment with Jerome Courtailler, a 27-year-old Frenchman, and Mohammed Berkous, also 27, an Algerian who is also know as Abdelghani Rabia, who were arrested two days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Police found about 60 stolen documents when they raided the apartment, including 26 passports from various countries, as well as videos showing speeches by Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network.
Mezbar's fingerprints were found at four sites where passports were stolen in the Netherlands in 1997 and 1999, according to the warrant.
Wiretaps cited in the warrant link Courtailler and Berkous to Nizar Trabelsi, a 32-year-old Tunisian believed to have been the designated bomber in the plot to attack the U.S. embassy in Paris during the summer of 2002.
Trabelsi also was arrested on Sept. 13 in Belgium and remains in detention there. Prosecutors say he trained in military camps in Afghanistan for a suicide mission in Europe.
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