" Bin Laden's Terror Networks in Europe (Long but informative) The Mackenzie Institute ^ | May 26, 2002 | Emerson Vermaat
[SNIP]
4. Spain, Italy and the Balkans
The closeness of Spain and Portugal to North Africa make them important targets for illegal migrants seeking entry into the European Union. Spain accuses the Moroccan police of cooperating with migrant traffickers who pay corrupt officials to turn a blind eye. Spanish authorities now speak of an invasion. [ 66 ] Moroccan criminal networks in Spain are involved in money-laundering, and trafficking in drugs and human beings.
Increasingly, Spain faces the problem of young North African and Arab immigrants using its territory as a meeting place for staging terrorist attacks elsewhere. Spain is considered a safe haven for terrorists where the risks of police interference are minimal. Spanish police estimate that about two hundred Islamic extremists with ties to eighteen terrorist groups entered Spain in 2000. [ 67 ] While French security and intelligence services have gathered detailed information on Islamist terrorist networks for more than two decades, the Spanish services are still poorly equipped to face a problem that is relatively new to them. For years, their focus has been on the homegrown terrorism of the Basque separatist movement ETA.
Spanish authorities now fear that the Islamist and Basque radicals have formed an alliance of sorts. Some ETA terrorists visited the same Middle Eastern training camps as a number of Islamic extremists.
Representatives from ETA and Osama Bin Laden reportedly met in Brussels, but there were frictions after the Islamic fundamentalists refused to continue the meeting in the presence of a Basque woman who preferred to stay.
Spanish sources claim that Mohammed Atta, the suicide pilot from Hamburg who was the first to fly into the World Trade Center in New York, also tried to forge links between al-Qaeda and ETA terrorists. [ 68 ] Just before Christmas 1999, ETA planned an attack on the Picasso Tower in Madrid. The American architect of the Picasso Tower was Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan; but it is not clear whether ETA got the idea from Muslim extremists. [ 69 ] What is known is that al-Qaeda cells in Europe, the United States and Canada planned terrorist attacks around Christmas 1999 and the subsequent Millennium celebrations.
Atta in Spain
[BIG SNIP--see original link for much more info on Al Qaeda in Spain]"
RADICAL ISLAMIC SECT TARGETS CHIAPAS
... Most of the converts apparently live in the community of La Esperanza outside San Cristobal, and were introduced to Islam by Spanish missionaries from the Morocco-based Murabitun World Movement. One of the missionaries, Aureliano Perez, was reportedly deported by Mexican immigration authorities in 1998 for his links to both the Zapatistas and the Basque separatist group ETA. Perez denied the charges. (EFE, May 26, 2001) The Murabitun take their name from the medieval Berber dynasty in Spain, and their web site (www.murabitun.org) reads: "Throughout a post-Christian West of unprecedented darkness, the Murabitun are springing up like the dragon's teeth and have established communities centered around Ribats, or outposts, at highly significant points throughout the world...
All these things seem like wheels within wheels.
This, actually, was not even the report I was looking for - I was seeking a report on some radical Muslims who were deported from Mexico last summer or fall for their activities. In the course of the article, it mentioned that the head of ETA in Mexico (not sure if this would be Perez or not) had converted to Islam. I still can't find the details on that one, though.
But there do appear to be connections.