Newsweek reports that an important al Qaeda operation has been broken in Switzerland, with global implications.
A little-noticed investigation by Swiss federal police has uncovered the existence of an apparent terror-support network with ties to the upper levels of Al Qaeda—including an operative believed to have played a role in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the May 2003 bombing of a housing complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Posted by Alan at August 29, 2004 08:43 AMThe discovery of a largely invisible Al Qaeda network in the peaceful alpine nation has gotten virtually no public attention outside of Switzerland.
But criminal charges outlined in a July 30 Swiss prosecutor’s report—obtained by NEWSWEEK—seem to confirm the worst fears of many U.S. counterterrorism officials: that, despite a concerted assault by Western intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, Osama bin Laden’s organization has maintained a resilient operational structure that has a global reach, even larger than had been previously suspected.
Regardless of what is ultimately shown about the precise connections of the suspects to particular Al Qaeda attacks, the true importance of the case may be the evidence of a remarkably efficient transnational terror operation. According to the Swiss report, the Yemeni and Somali document forgers were in contact with confederates literally across the globe—in France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Somalia and the Maldives. The United States isn’t mentioned, but U.S. officials take no comfort in that. They fear that similar rings are still operating within American borders—as yet undetected.