Cashpoint fraud funded terror attacks in Spain

The Moroccan-dominated al-Qa'eda cells responsible for terrorist attacks in Spain were funded by bank robberies and sophisticated cashpoint machine fraud in France, investigators believe.

Security officials suspect that the Moroccan-dominated cells based in Spain were sent hundreds of thousands of pounds by fellow extremists on the French side of the border, suggesting the al-Qa'eda bombings in Madrid last month were the result of international planning.

Last week, French police arrested Moustapha Baouchi, a Moroccan veteran of al-Qa'eda training camps in Afghanistan, where he was known for his electronics expertise. Baouchi was able to forge bank cards with information gathered using micro-cameras implanted in automatic teller machines, said one European intelligence official. The duplicate cards were then used to withdraw money.

As well as cloning cards, Baouchi's gang staged bank robberies in France. His brother Hassan, who was also among the six "hardcore" al-Qa'eda suspects arrested in Paris, was a security guard for a bank. One delivery of cash that he was supposed to be guarding went missing early last month after the vehicle was held up by six men. The amount of money seized has not been revealed.

"These are people trained in Afghanistan to act as leaders for the network, performing different tasks in different countries, including raising money in France," the security official said. "These plots discovered in Europe clearly identify how the network operated."

Spanish police have not yet tracked down senior leaders of the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which has been blamed for the Spanish bombs that killed more than 190 people. They include Abel Azizi, who co-ordinated cells across Europe, and Karim Mejjati, who is said to be the link between the group and Ayman Al Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born senior al-Qa'eda leader.

Arrests of middle-ranking group members, however, have allowed officials to track links between cells across Europe. Last week, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that Azizi met Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet - the alleged ringleader of the train bomb gang - at the turn of the year. Fakhet, who died when the gang members blew up their apartment in Madrid before a police raid last Saturday, is believed to have been ordered by Azizi to plot the train attacks.

Spanish investigators believe that Azizi was a leading figure at camps run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a one-legged extremist thought to be in Iraq directing the insurgency against the American-led occupation.

Yes, I agree.

Below are excerpts of two articles showing connection between ETA and islamic terrorism:

http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1982/09b.html
SOVIET TERROR LINKS FOUND IN LEBANON
Reed Irvine - Editor September B 1982

---snip--
Despite the evidence that was provided by captured terrorists such as Hader and information obtained from other sources, our media and Western governments in general went along with the fiction that the Soviets had nothing to do with terrorism. The Soviets contended that they had no control over the use the Palestinians made of the arms they gave them. Claire Sterling says that Western governments were all too willing to go along with that fiction. She points out that in the spring of 1980, Dutch police arrested four Spanish terrorists who were heading home after receiving terrorist training in South Yemen, a Soviet satellite. They confessed that they were part of a group of 13 that had been sent for training by the Basque terrorist group, ETA. Miss Sterling says this made headlines all over Western Europe, but no government was willing to confront the Soviets or the Palestinians with this evidence of their meddling in the internal affairs of Western Europe, employing terrorism.

--snip--
Professor Abraham Miller, editor of the publication Terrorism, the Media and the Law, states that the Israelis discovered hundreds of non-Palestinian terrorists. He said, "They consist of members of the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Irish Republican Army.

Along with these are Basque separatists, Argentinian Marxists and an assortment of would-be killers from Niger, Mall, Sudan, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Palestinians who have been trained at Soviet bases at Simveropol have returned to the Middle East to impart their terrorist skills to eager students from across the globe. The curriculum at Simveropol also contains strong doses of Marxism-Leninism in the unlikely event that the student terrorist did not come to the Soviet Union with sufficient ideological commitment."
------

http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/commentary.html

26 May 2002
Bin Laden's Terror Networks in Europe

---snip---

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.
--- snip ---

French nab suspect in robbery for Islamic militants

21 Nov 2004 15:23:51 GMT

Source: Reuters
By Emmanuel Jarry

PARIS, Nov 21 (Reuters) - France has arrested a man believed to have robbed more than a million euros from Paris cash machines to finance a Moroccan network blamed for bombings in Madrid and Casablanca, the Interior Ministry said on Sunday.

The cash machine technician with Brink's security company took the million euros ($1.30 million) from funds meant to fill the machines and made a fake robbery report to police to explain its disappearance, a ministry spokesman said.

Police originally doubted the assertions of Hassan Baouchi, who said in March that three masked men had forced him to empty cash machines in six different suburban Paris banks, but had no evidence at the time to detain him.

But France's DST counter-intelligence agency, which had his brother Mustapha arrested in April on suspicion of running the Moroccan network in France, picked up enough evidence to suspect the 23-year-old Hassan in a conspiracy.

"Hassan Baouchi organised his own kidnapping and the theft of the money for the cash machines," the ministry spokesman said. "The stolen money was destined to finance the activity of terrorist activities in France and abroad," he said.

The spokesman said the Baouchi brothers were linked to the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group (GICM), blamed for a May 2003 suicide bombing in Casablanca that killed 45 people.

The GICM network in France was also suspected of giving logistical aid to the suicide bombers in the Madrid train attacks last March, which killed 191 people.

A suspected accomplice, named only as Nasser B. and said to be linked to Chechen rebels, was arrested last month in Algeria with 40,000 euros in cash, police said.

Police said several men involved in these networks grew up together in a suburb north of Paris.

The stolen money has not been accounted for, said Eric Ehrsam, spokesman for Brink's in France. ($1=.7677 Euro)

Looks like they finally got around to arresting the Brinks guard. Notice another memeber of the gang was picked up with 40 k in Euros had links to Chechen " rebels".

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