http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/867403/posts
Excerpt:
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.
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Refs
66. "Spanje en Marokko Ruziën Over Illegalen," NRC Handelsblad, 6 September 2001, p. 5; Mario Ribiero, "Espanha: A Invasao," Focus (Lisbon), 26 August 2001, p. 106-107.
67. Steven Adolf, "'Taliban van Baskenland' Onder Druk Door Antiterreur," NRC Handelsblad, 1 October 2001, p. 5.
68. ibid.
69. Reuters, 9 November 2001.