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Posted on 07/12/2004 10:38:12 AM PDT by dennisw
July 12, 2004 The Talkative Terrorist on Tape: Madrid Plot 'Was My Project' By ELAINE SCIOLINO and JASON HOROWITZ
ADRID, July 10 — Terrorists are not usually talkers. But the man who calls himself the mastermind of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid is an exception.
For nearly three months, the Italian police have eavesdropped on Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, "Muhammad the Egyptian" as the 32-year-old Egyptian is known. The contents of his conversations, both in custody in Milan and before his arrest last month, have provided the police with a mother lode of information about the secret world of a man who claims to have recruited suicide bombers and organized terrorist operations in the name of Islam.
Senior Spanish investigators believe that Mr. Ahmed played an important role in the Madrid bombings, which killed 190 people, and could indeed be the architect of the operation, although they are still searching for other leading suspects. The Italian authorities arrested Mr. Ahmed after his monitored conversations spoke of an imminent attack in an undisclosed location.
Dozens of pages of transcripts obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials in Spain, Italy, Germany and France have shed light on Mr. Ahmed and his ability over the years to take on new identities, cross borders and avoid the police as he pressed his cause against the West. They also offer a case study of the challenges and frustrations Europe faces in monitoring radicals, routing out sleeper cells and prosecuting and convicting those they arrest.
In Germany in 1999 and 2000, Mr. Ahmed served 16 months in a detention center, feigning different Arabic accents and pretending to be a "stateless Palestinian" seeking political asylum.
In Madrid in 2001 and 2002, he befriended a group of radical Muslims, some of whom were involved in the March 11 bombings and were killed in a suicide operation while trying to escape the police.
In a Paris suburb in 2003, he eked out a living as an illegal construction worker and house painter. In Milan in 2004, he lived in an apartment in a tidy, upscale neighborhood, where he seemed to spend most of his day watching Arabic-language movies and news on satellite television.
"We looked for a job for him," said Ghazi Bidel, a 27-year-old Egyptian pizza maker who was his roommate in Milan. "But he said he didn't want to work."
Last April, shortly after the Spanish police found Mr. Ahmed's Italian cellphone number in the address book of one of two men suspected of involvement in the plot, the Italian police began tapping Mr. Ahmed's phone and bugging his apartment.
In the taped conversations, Mr. Ahmed calls himself "the thread behind the Madrid plot," discusses an imminent terrorist operation in an unidentified location and the deployment of suicide martyrs to Iraq, and complains about his marriage and money problems. He shows off a computer program that activates numerous cellphones simultaneously — similar to the technology used in the Madrid attacks — and says he was in Madrid days before the bombings.
He declares that nationality does not matter in holy war, that he has converted drug dealers and criminals to the faith and that Muslims are allowed to marry Christians as a means of acquiring false documents. He describes the ease of buying false documents but stresses quality, saying, "If you don't know who used them, it is dangerous."
He takes what he calls a "beautiful photo" of Yahia Ragheh, a 21-year-old Egyptian he is grooming to become a suicide bomber — and who was arrested with him — and tells him that it will be sent to his family and other militants after his death. He boasts that while the Americans possess nuclear weapons, he has seen "something in the form of a hair dryer" that causes "the most horrible death possible" by suffocation.
Even after his arrest on June 7, Mr. Ahmed was still talking. In a conversation with Mr. Ragheh in a holding cell that night, Mr. Ahmed predicted that he faced a grim future behind bars. "The minimum is 30 years," he said. "I am too trapped."
Some of the conversations are included in a confidential Italian arrest warrant for the two men last month and were first reported by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
From the point of view of the Italians, their handling of the case — from the discovery and monitoring of Mr. Ahmed to a flood of information they passed on to Spanish investigators even before his arrest — is evidence of first-rate police work and bilateral cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
The Italians are confident that the conversations can provide the basis of a case against Mr. Ahmed in Italy. Last Tuesday, a Milan court ruled that the conversations were admissible in court and described Mr. Ahmed as a member of Al Qaeda's terrorist network and a "promoter and organizer of a terrorist organization spreading Islamic terrorism" who had played "a high-level role" in the Madrid bombings.
But the case has also divided the police and intelligence and law enforcement officials in Spain's new Socialist government, exposing rivalries between agencies and a lack of trust among career officials and less experienced political appointees.
While some senior Spanish officials have expressed delight that Italy has Mr. Ahmed safely behind bars, others are upset that it has not yet granted Spain's request for extradition.
"This situation doesn't speak very well about European cooperation against terrorism," said Fernando Reinares, the new senior adviser on counterterrorism to the Spanish interior minister.
One example of the apparent lack of coordination in Spain is that important Spanish intelligence officials complain that they have not been given access to voice copies of Mr. Ahmed's conversations in Arabic, which they say are crucial for intelligence gathering. But senior Spanish police officials acknowledge that the Italians began turning over the voice recordings to the Spanish magistrate in charge of the investigation even before Mr. Ahmed was arrested.
Spain and Italy complain that Egypt, which is loath to acknowledge that its citizens are involved in terrorism abroad, has refused to provide information about Mr. Ahmed.
According to an internal Spanish Interior Ministry document, in Egypt Mr. Ahmed was a member of the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was attached to an explosives brigade during his military service and spent time in a maximum security prison for terrorist activities.
The request for information "was communicated to the Egyptian services," the report said. "Unfortunately, these services have given us no data."
Meanwhile, Spanish investigators and intelligence officials are struggling to determine who exactly "Muhammad the Egyptian" is and how big a role he played in the bombings.
Spain's deputy prime minister, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, said at a news conference on June 11 that Spain had formally requested Mr. Ahmed's extradition because he had "very important responsibility" for the attacks. The confidential extradition request of June 8 calls him "one of the people directly involved in the attack."
But a senior Spanish intelligence official said that based on the scanty evidence, even those descriptions might be misleading. "We exaggerated to get the Italians to act," the official said.
The Italians have the right to bring Mr. Ahmed to trial for crimes committed on their soil before considering Spain's extradition request.
The only physical evidence found by the Spanish authorities against Mr. Ahmed is paper-thin: the presence of his cellphone number in an address book believed to belong to either Fouad Morabit, a Moroccan, or Basel Ghalyoun, a Syrian. Mr. Ahmed was identified by a witness as having been in the apartment near Madrid where the train bombs were assembled. And the Italian authorities have evidence that Mr. Ahmed called the cellphone of Mr. Morabit, who has been arrested in Spain, after the bombings.
Other potential evidence was found in Mr. Ahmed's computer, seized during the raid on his Milan apartment, including a downloaded program that allows the simultaneous setting of alarms on up to a dozen telephones, diagrams of explosive briefcases, vests modified for suicide attacks and a video showing the decapitation of Nicholas Berg, an American killed in Iraq in May.
Mr. Ahmed said in an intercepted conversation on May 26, "The Madrid attack was my project, and those who died as martyrs were my dearest friends."
"I was ready to blow myself up, but they stopped me, and we obey God's will," he said. "I had wanted a heavy burden, but I didn't find the means. This plan cost me a lot of study and patience. It took me two and a half years."
In a conversation on June 4 in which Mr. Ahmed was wooing Mr. Ragheh into becoming a suicide bomber, Mr. Ragheh posed for the photograph that was to be distributed after his martyrdom.
"Come a little closer," Mr. Ahmed said. "Stop, move just a little. Like this it will be a marvelous day, with your face illuminated. You have a light around your face. It's not artificial. It's a luminous light that will never leave your body."
Mr. Ahmed told his young charge that he listened to soothing cassette tapes of martyrdom continuously, and told him to do the same.
"They will make everything easier when you feel them enter your body," he said, explaining that a suicide mission "takes five minutes, and then everything blows up."
Mr. Ahmed talked and talked, despite expressing repeated concern that his phone was tapped, saying on April 12, "Listen to me, brother! Let's stop here. I don't want us to be caught through the telephone!"
Despite all that talking, Mr. Ahmed has refused to cooperate with Italian investigators since his arrest and solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Milan.
Still, said Viviana Bossi, Mr. Ahmed's court-appointed lawyer, he does not like the silence.
"He doesn't want to be isolated," Ms. Bossi said. "He complains about not being able to talk to anyone except himself. He is suffering."
Elaine Sciolino reported from Madrid for this article and Jason Horowitz from Milan. Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Lebach, Germany; Renwick McLean from Madrid; and Hélène Fouquet from Paris.
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Funny only the scrubs get to savor the glories of marytrdom.
He lived in Paris, Milan, Germany. He attacked Spain. Europe is wide open for Jihadist psycho killers. Meanwhile cowardly Europe dares to slam Israel for defending themselves from the same killers.
Hmmm, tinfoil time.
We have a pizza delivery guy in the neighborhood, works at a franchise place run by Middle Easterners.
This guy is spooky, never a smile (even for a good tip), with the dead-eye thousand mile stare. In his mid-30's. Seems like he been there a couple years. When in the store, if you look at the guy for a millisecond he's caught your glance, seems hyperaware of his surroundings.
Dunno, just makes the antenna go up.
OK, tinfoil off.
Yeah, maybe he's just freaked out by all the interaction with us dhimmis.
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