Posted on 03/23/2002 1:28:30 PM PST by Spar
Al-Qaida Plot Revealed in Sarajevo
Sat Mar 23,10:48 AM ET
By ALEXANDAR S. DRAGICEVIC, Associated Press Writer
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) - Al-Qaida terrorists planned a devastating attack on Americans in Sarajevo after meeting in Bulgaria to identify European targets, a high-ranking Bosnian official said Saturday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that intelligence reports on the meeting in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, prompted a special government session Thursday night to discuss threats against the U.S. Embassy and embassies of European countries. He did not name the countries.
At the Sofia meeting, members of al-Qaida decided that "in Sarajevo something will happen to Americans similar to New York last September," said the official. He did not say when the al-Qaida meeting was held or who attended.
The U.S. Embassy in Bosnia shut down to the public on Wednesday after receiving word of a possible terrorist threat. The embassy closed entirely on Friday.
U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Karen Williams declined to comment on the situation Saturday. Bosnian special police forces were seen around the compound along with normal U.S. security units.
In Sofia, Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry said it had received no information on such a meeting, either "from Bosnian authorities or from any other official sources." It promised an investigation if "this information proves to be serious."
On Tuesday, just a day before the U.S. Embassy received the threats, Bosnian police raided an Islamic charity, Bosnian Ideal Future, also known as Benevolentia International Foundation, seizing weapons, plans for making bombs, booby-traps and bogus passports.
On Friday, police announced they had arrested Munib Zahiragic, a Bosnian citizen and the head of the Bosnian chapter of the charity. Zahiragic is also a former member of the Bosnian Muslim secret police, AID.
Zahiragic was arrested on charges of espionage, which carries a maximum 10 years in prison. No details on whom he was supposed to be spying for were released.
As a part of the war on terrorism, Bosnia's government in January ordered an investigation into the work of foreign humanitarian agencies. Two weeks ago, investigators reported funds were missing from three Islamic charities, among them Benevolentia.
The United States recently froze the assets of Benevolentia, with head offices in Illinois and New Jersey.
The U.S. and British embassies were closed for several days in October because of terrorist threats. They reopened after local police arrested six naturalized Bosnians, all of them Algerian natives, suspected of plotting post-Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. interests in Bosnia and elsewhere.
The suspects were handed over to U.S. authorities in January, and now are being held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Five of the six were employed as humanitarian aid workers; one was suspected of being Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s top lieutenant for Europe.
More than 1 million Muslims live in Bosnia, most of them native to the country but also including dozens of former Islamic fighters, or mujahedeen, who came mostly from the Middle East to fight on the Muslim side in the 1992-1995 war against the country's Serbs and Croats.
You and your ilk are patheticRacism is what makes you pathetic. Shared ideals, courage and righteousness are what sets the USA (minus losers like you) and the Turks apart from the rest.
I pretty much have respected your differing opinions, and on more than one occassion you've made me thing/research, etc. But you've kinda lit off a bit in this thread, to put it mildly. Maybe too many people ganging up on you? Bad hair day? I must go smoke now, stress you know, lol...
You do present what appears to be an accurate assessment Bin Laden's lack of DIRECT involvement with the US in the Afghanistan/Soviet war days, but thats certainly not the whole picture, is it? And to say that Bin Laden never led anyone? He most certainly did lead his own band of Arab "freedom fighters", albeit more on making roads and camps and caves in the war with the Soviets.
And now lets be even more accurate, and rather than dismiss totally any US/CIA involvement with the now deemed Afghan terrorists, lets state for the record that some of the Afghan "freedom fighters" the US aided against the Soviets, are now some of the same people we call "terrorists."
If you can stomach this interview of Bin Laden from a few years ago by Robert Fisk of "The Nation", this paragraph is interesting:
I doubt if Osama bin Laden understands the hierarchy of US hate figures--or whether he would care if he did. The Afghan conflict against the Soviets molded him, taught him the meaning of his religion, made him think. "What I lived in two years there," he told me, "I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere." When he brought his 9,000 Arab fighters to support the Afghans in their conflict against the Soviet occupation army, hacking out the mountain trails with his construction equipment, building hospitals and arms dumps, he became a war hero. Some of his current Afghan fellow fighters had been trained earlier by the CIA in the very camps that were the target of the recent US missiles--but whereas they had been called camps for "freedom fighters" when US agents set them up in the early eighties, now they had become camps for "terrorists." He and his comrades never saw "evidence of American help" in Afghanistan, he told me, but he must have been aware of the CIA's presence.
Talks with Osama bin Laden
But you've kinda lit off a bit in this thread, to put it mildly.LOL! You're funny :^D
And now picked up by our EU "allies" to promote their own socialist agenda.
EU refusing to recognize terrorist groups
Odd, isn't it, that a double standard is employed by the EU when dealing with terrorists. They're against one group, but if another group does the same thing, they refuse to even freeze financial assets. Why? Who knows. Probably too many politicians on the dole.
REPARATIONS FOR THOSE WHO SUFFERED AT THE HANDS OF THE CRUSADES!
REPARATIONS TO ABLE FOR CAIN'S ACTIONS!
RESTORE DRUID WORSHIP WITHIN THE UK!
DOGS TO REPAY CATS FOR CENTURIES OF ANTAGONISM!
Not if those who support the EU have their way. Sorry, can't have it both ways with the EU and their socialistic plans. It's either all the way or nothing. A "little" quickly becomes more and more and more. Thankfuly the US seems to be going through a wake-up call after 9-11. Hopefully we won't go asleep again.
What jury? The jury representing probably 10% of the population? Maybe in your mind, but not in the majority.
This is the best you can do when debating a subject? Pathetic.
Dare you to prove my sources false.
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