Spain has made rapid arrests in connection with the horrific train bombings on Thursday.
Spain's interior ministry announced Saturday that five suspects — including three Moroccans possibly linked to extremist groups — were arrested in the Madrid bombings that killed at least 200 people. The five were arrested in connection with a cell phone inside an explosives-packed gym bag found on one of the bombed commuter trains.The other two suspects had Indian passports, a ministry spokesman said. Also being questioned were two Spanish citizens of Indian origin.
The suspects "could be related to Moroccan extremist groups," Interior Minister Angel Acebes said. "But we should not rule out anything. Police are still investigating all avenues. This opens an important avenue."
Earlier, the interior ministry said that autopsies of the dead so far show no evidence of suicide bombings, suggesting that Islamic terrorists who use such tactics might not have been involved. Acebes told a news conference that the Basque separatist group ETA was still the No. 1 suspect in Thursday's bombings, but the government has not ruled out al-Qaida, which had threatened to target U.S. allies from the Iraq war, including Spain.
Note that Moroccans are involved, reminding me of the terrorist strike just last May in Casablanca, believed to have been conducted not by al Qaeda itself but by a local "franchise."
Meanwhile, it been reported that U.S. troops are operating in North Africa, hunting more terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda.
US special forces are hunting for Islamic militants linked to Al Qaeda along Algeria's southern border with Mali in a little-known military operation aimed at destroying a key North African recruiting hub for Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network, according to US and Algerian officials.Small teams of elite US soldiers have been working with local security forces in recent months in the Sahara Desert in an effort to capture or kill members of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, a radical Islamic organization that has pledged its allegiance to Al Qaeda and is suspected in terrorist plots in Europe and the United States, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.
The joint effort marks another front in the war on terrorism and a watershed in US-Algerian relations. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Washington stepped up military assistance to Algiers in its 12-year civil war against Islamic extremist groups. The US military involvement is also part of a larger US antiterrorism campaign in the vast, desolate Sahel region of North Africa -- which touches the nations of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad -- that US intelligence officials fear could become a primary training ground for radicals exporting terrorism around the world.
US government officials with access to official reports said the US special forces have been working with Algeria and neighboring countries to trap members of the Salafist group, which is on the US terrorism list. The group, also known by its acronym, GSPC, was founded in 1998 at the urging of bin Laden as an offshoot of the Armed Islamic Group, the violent domestic opposition to the Algerian government.
It appears to have eclipsed its parent organization as the country's main Islamic rebel group, while broadening its ties to other militants outside the country, US intelligence officials say.
Many of the group's members, estimated to be as high as 3,000 fighters, are believed to be veterans of bin Laden's Afghanistan training camps.
"Almost all the Al Qaeda cells that have been picked up in Europe have some link to this group," said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism specialist at the Investigative Project, a think tank in Washington. "These are the descendants of the Al Qaeda training camps who have gone home."
Perhaps now the Mediterranean is the up-and-coming nexus of activity in the war on terror, and their war on all of us.
Posted by Alan at March 13, 2004 03:21 PM