Six Terror Suspects Held in Paris

On the fifth day of a law enforcement assault on terrorist networks in France, police Tuesday arrested six suspected associates of Richard Reid, the Al Qaeda operative convicted of trying to destroy a Paris-Miami flight with explosives concealed in his basketball shoes.

The arrests in and around Paris were part of an investigation of a Pakistani-dominated network that allegedly built Reid’s shoe bombs and sheltered, funded and supervised him before the attempted attack on an American Airlines jet in December. The suspects are North Africans and Pakistanis, including a Pakistani imam at a suburban mosque, a top French law enforcement official said.

The latest sweep brought to 17 the number of accused extremists captured in raids here since Friday. Although the crackdown on three Islamic networks linked to Al Qaeda grows out of longtime investigations of a web of plots, it also responds to fears that terror cells in Europe are regrouping in order to carry out a major attack.

Those concerns peaked after the Nov. 9 arrests in Britain of three Algerians suspected of plotting an attack in London. Led by Rabah Kadre, an accused leader of an Algerian-dominated network in Europe, the men allegedly scouted the London subway system and other potential targets, according to law enforcement officials.

Reflecting close cooperation among European investigators, some of the raids in Paris targeted the same London-based network to which Kadre allegedly belonged. The biggest catch of the lot was Slimane Khalfoui, 27, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who has been on the run for two years. He is wanted in a failed plot to bomb the cathedral in Strasbourg during the Christmas holidays in 2000.

Like Kadre in London, Khalfoui was a prominent figure in the Algerian network in Europe, authorities said.

“This was an important catch,” the French law enforcement official said. “He is as important, or more important, than Kadre in the network.”

Khalfoui had been hiding at his sister’s apartment in Montfermeil, a high-crime suburb northeast of Paris. He was captured Monday when a contingent of anti-terrorist investigators, backed by riot police and firefighters, stormed into an arson-scarred housing project where youth gangs have been known to make common cause with Islamic extremists and toss Molotov cocktails at police from rooftops.

Khalfoui saw combat with Islamic fighting forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, authorities said. Like Kadre, he was allegedly a close associate of Amar Makhlulif, known as Abu Doha, an Algerian arrested in February 2001 as the accused mastermind in the plot to attack LAX with a car bomb during millennium celebrations at the end of 1999. Abu Doha is also suspected of overseeing the Strasbourg plot.

The raids Monday also produced the arrests of four other men and a woman, all described as Algerians or French Algerians.

It was not clear whether investigators think Khalfoui was involved in the alleged plot in London. British authorities have said little more about that case other than to deny media reports that the suspects were about to unleash a poison gas attack on the subway there.

Law enforcement sources in Europe say some of those reports were exaggerations. But they also say the London suspects were “significant players,” in the words of one investigator, and that their apparent preparations for a terrorist act generated legitimate concern.

Members of the Abu Doha network have in the past expressed interest in using chemical weapons, according to the convicted would-be bomber in the LAX plot, Ahmed Ressam. He has described training with such weapons at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Because the networks in that case and others extend from Britain and France into Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, French investigators are working with police in those countries as well. The crackdown, led by Jean-Louis Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Ricard, France’s top anti-terrorist magistrates, began Friday with the arrest of Redouane Daoud, 25, an Algerian fugitive who broke out of a Dutch prison June 5.

Daoud allegedly has ties to a Tunisian network in Belgium that furnished fraudulent passports to two suicide bombers who posed as journalists to assassinate a leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan two days before the Sept. 11 attacks. After catching Daoud, police rounded up four alleged associates Friday and Saturday.

As for the shoe-bomber case, the French law enforcement official said it is too soon to tell whether the suspects were direct accomplices of Reid, who received instructions via Internet from Pakistan while in Paris.

Under France’s tough anti-terrorism laws, the suspects can be held for four days without being charged.

“We are making progress,” the French law enforcement official said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”