Ties Run Deep in Probe of Spain Blast

It seems clear now that Jamal Zougam had dangerous connections.

During a trip from Madrid to Tangier in August 2001, Spanish police wiretaps tracked the Moroccan-born shopkeeper’s movements into the heart of an extremist underworld girding for a global offensive.

In his hometown of Tangier, Zougam joined a fellow Moroccan who had just helped arrange a meeting in Spain of plotters preparing the Sept. 11 attacks, according to court documents. Zougam also spent time with hard-core jihadis, or so-called holy warriors, who would be arrested after suicide bombings in Casablanca, Morocco, last year, documents show.

And Zougam made a pilgrimage to Mohammed Fizazi, a radical imam whose words were his weapons. Fizazi’s anti-Western sermons in Tangier and Hamburg, Germany, are a thread linking the Sept. 11 attacks, the Casablanca blasts and the recent train bombings in Madrid.

But until the morning of March 11, when 10 backpack bombs tore through four trains here, killing 202 people and wounding more than 1,500, investigators say they saw few signs that Zougam intended to hurt anyone.

Now he is in custody as their primary suspect in the attack. The trail of phone equipment used as remote detonators leads to the 30-year-old Zougam, who witnesses say was aboard one of the trains.

During the six years that Spanish investigators monitored the daily lives of dozens of Al Qaeda’s men in Madrid, they decided that Zougam was a third-tier associate of a classic logistics cell. If the accusations against him are true, the remnants of that cell underwent a lethal transformation. As Islamic networks reconfigured after the war in Iraq, a deep-cover support team stepped up to become front-line killers, investigators say. The “sleepers” awoke.

The investigation so far suggests a locally driven plot of limited scope and resources. Unlike previous grand schemes that were managed from afar by Al Qaeda’s inner circle, the new reality of Madrid seems more frightening: Small terrorist groups don’t need much guidance to inflict devastation. As Al Qaeda evolves into an elusive and fragmented threat that is more ideology than organization, the case shows how difficult it has become for law enforcement to identify the enemy before it is too late.

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Assimilating in Spain

The suspects’ longtime familiarity with their adopted homeland didn’t mitigate their cruelty, investigators say. The railway slaughter three days before national elections was as calculated as it was indiscriminate. It helped topple the Spanish government and weaken the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, producing Al Qaeda’s biggest “victory” since the destruction of the World Trade Center.

“I still find it hard to believe,” a Spanish law enforcement official said. “In some of these countries that are logistical bases -- Germany, France -- you see extremists who don’t have roots, who are lumpen. Angry at the society. Many of our suspects have businesses, Spanish wives, kids in school. They speak Spanish impeccably, without an accent. They are very polite, cultured. In interrogations, even the ones who don’t have formal education are polite and well-spoken.”

Zougam and three other Moroccan suspects in the train bombings are believed to have been on the fringes of a cell of entrepreneurial Syrians and streetwise Moroccans that was largely dismantled by authorities in late 2001.

Until then, the Madrid cell had a remarkable reach. Its leaders allegedly recruited holy warriors and helped them get to Afghanistan, Chechnya and Indonesia. They met with ideologues in London, Germany and the Middle East. They allegedly furnished documents and logistics for the Sept. 11 plotters.

Yet the Madrid suspects seemed comfortable in a society that is Western Europe’s closest to the Arab world in its culture, history and geography. The Spanish good life rubbed off. Although a fervent Muslim, Zougam smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol and occasionally made the rounds of Madrid’s late-night discos, acquaintances say.

Omnipresent wiretaps here -- and high-tech surveillance by U.S. and European intelligence -- did not pick up threatening talk directed at Spain, authorities say. Although Islamic terror had struck close to Western Europe with recent attacks in Morocco and Turkey, the region’s security services gave the impression that the menace was under control. Despite breathless headlines, occasional plots broken up in London, Paris and elsewhere rarely got close to drawing blood.

Spain seemed an unlikely target because it was valuable to the extremists for recruitment, finance, access to North Africa and plotting violence elsewhere. Besides, Zougam and the other alleged train bombers were aware that they were known to police.

After Zougam’s name surfaced in connection with the Casablanca attacks last year, police lacked enough evidence to prove a crime or warrant physical surveillance, investigators said. But they did monitor him, according to officials.

“The extremists here are worried about getting arrested,” a veteran Spanish counter-terrorism investigator said in an interview several months ago. “They are keeping a low profile. They aren’t moving. But of course, a group could always come in from outside the country and try something.”

Ten suspects have been arrested: nine Moroccans and a Spaniard. In response to the bombings, the alleged founder of the Al Qaeda cell here testified at his own request last week before Judge Baltasar Garzon, the investigative magistrate who arrested him in 2001.

Imad Barakat, a rotund, 41-year-old Syrian Spaniard, probably realized that the bloodshed in Madrid would hurt him in his upcoming trial on charges that include aiding the Sept. 11 plot. During his testimony, he condemned the Madrid bombings and described his relationship with Zougam as casual. He declared that only Takfir wal Hijra, a vicious, Egyptian-born Islamic extremist group, would be capable of the mass murder of women and children, according to justice officials.

In fact, the investigation suggests that Barakat was a kind of mentor to Zougam, even if Barakat had no role in the train plot, according to investigators and court documents.

“This is the result of the seed that Barakat planted,” a senior Spanish law enforcement official said. “It hadn’t grown enough before. Now it has grown. What drove them into action was the war in Iraq.”

Zougam and the others burrowed deeply into Western society before they allegedly turned on it with a vengeance, police say.

Zougam migrated to Spain as a child. His family members divided their lives between Madrid and Tangier, which lies just across the Mediterranean from southern Spain. They were part of a busy transborder flow that recalls the migratory culture at the California-Mexico line. Zougam and his half-brother, Mohamed Chaoui, shared a ground-floor apartment in Madrid with their mother and two sisters.

Zougam’s devout mother, Aicha, has been the subject of European investigations of extremism along with her son, according to the senior official.

Neighbors say the lean, curly-haired Zougam, who is unmarried, ran a produce store before opening a cellphone business in Lavapies, a neighborhood where historic Castilian Madrid meets new immigrant Madrid. Zougam was a regular at a table near the counter of the Baraka restaurant with Chaoui and their business partner, Mohammed Bekkali, who are also accused in the attacks.

The three favored jeans and track suits and were clean-shaven and modern, acquaintances said.

“Yes, [Zougam] went to dance clubs, and yes, he liked girls,” said a fellow immigrant, who identified himself as Laya. “So what? He’s young. He’s normal. He’s a hard-working person. Everybody spoke well of him.”

During questioning before a judge last week, all three insisted that they were innocent and were at home asleep when the blasts occurred.

“Their alibi is being investigated,” an official said. “There are several witnesses who say they saw Zougam aboard one of the trains.”

In the late 1990s, Zougam became known to anti-terrorism police examining the orbit of Barakat, a veteran of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. A father of five, Barakat is married to a Spanish woman who was an actress before converting to Islam. He was a salesman with a bombastic, freewheeling manner, and some people found him hard to take seriously.

Even during intercepted conversations, Barakat had lighthearted moments that seemed to contradict the image of a terrorist cell leader -- unless he was talking in code. One day in 2001, the alleged finance boss of the Al Qaeda cell, Mohammed Galeb, called him asking to borrow a tape of Julio Iglesias in concert in Egypt. Barakat had lent it to someone else, according to court documents.

“So what songs should we put for dancing?” Galeb asked.

“Now I dance to the rhythm of the darbuka,” Barakat responded with laughter, referring to a musical instrument. “If you would have called me earlier, I would have saved you a tape.”

Nonetheless, Barakat was respected in global Islamic circles, police say. In London, he was a frequent houseguest of Abu Qatada, believed to be Al Qaeda’s top cleric in Europe. Barakat introduced Abu Qatada to Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a Syrian German now jailed as the alleged recruiter of the Sept. 11 plotters, according to Spanish police wiretaps.

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International Web

Under Barakat’s guidance, police say, the restless, temperamental Zougam became involved in an international web of Islamic influences. One was Fizazi, the Tangier imam who preached at the Hamburg mosque frequented by the Sept. 11 cell. Fizazi became the spiritual leader of Moroccan fundamentalists and probably influenced the Hamburg hijackers, investigators say.

“Friday I went to pray with Fizazi,” Zougam reported triumphantly in a call from Tangier to Madrid on Aug. 15, 2001, according to court documents. “I talked to him, I told him if he needed donations, we could get them from the brothers.”

Zougam also traveled to Norway to meet Mullah Krekar, the exiled founder of Ansar al Islam, a Kurdish group now active in Iraq, investigators say.

When Zougam befriended French disciples of Abu Qatada, he appeared on the radar of French investigators, according to French and Spanish officials. Acting on a French request made in 2000, Spanish police searched his apartment on June 13, 2001, according to court documents. Police found phone numbers for Barakat and other extremists as well as a video of combat in Chechnya starring two of Zougam’s longtime friends from Tangier.

The Benayich brothers, Salahadin and Abdulaziz, were globe-trotting holy warriors and ex-convicts. Along with their brother Abdullah, who died fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the brothers were like the jihadi Three Musketeers.

They were perhaps the most dangerous of the suspects monitored by Spanish investigators, who charged Barakat with providing lodging, funds and identity papers to the Benayiches.

Nonetheless, police did not find evidence implicating Zougam. It has not been confirmed whether he spent time at an Al Qaeda training camp.

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Alleged Sept. 11 Links

There is also no evidence that Zougam knew of the Sept. 11 attacks in advance. In hindsight, however, wiretap transcripts suggest that he was a more relevant figure in the cell than previously believed, investigators say. Zougam was in close contact with Barakat and others during a key period in the summer of 2001 when they were allegedly helping the Sept. 11 plotters, according to documents.

Mohamed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged coordinator of the Hamburg cell, met in Spain in July 2001 to finalize preparations for the hijacking attacks -- a sit-down that operatives in Spain helped organize, police say. A Madrid-based Moroccan named Amer Aziz has been tied to those meetings and identified by Al Qaeda prisoners in U.S. custody as a direct accomplice of the Sept. 11 plotters, according to the senior law enforcement official.

Aziz was with Zougam on Aug. 2, 2001, when they called Barakat on their way to Morocco, court documents show. Two days later, a worried Zougam phoned Barakat in Madrid because police had stopped him at the ferry crossing to Morocco, according to documents.

“When I got there, the Spanish police told me they were waiting for me in the boat, they looked in the computer, my name came up and they told me to wait there,” Zougam said. “Now I’m suspicious.”

In 2002 and 2003, Zougam traveled to and from Morocco, where Al Qaeda operatives reportedly recruited and trained disciples of Fizazi for the Casablanca attacks last May. The suicide bombings killed 45 people at five targets, including a Spanish restaurant. The backpack bombs and multiple targets resemble the train attacks, although the lack of suicide bombers in Madrid departed from the Al Qaeda terrorist network’s usual style.

Casablanca revealed a new operating model by a decentralized Al Qaeda: low-cost and autonomous. It relied on spiritual figures such as Fizazi, who was convicted after the attacks for inciting terror.

In the aftermath, Moroccan police arrested hundreds of suspects, including Salahadin Benayich. In June, Spanish police across the strait in Algeciras arrested his brother, Abdulaziz, who had shaved off his body hair in the purification ritual that precedes suicide attacks. The brothers were not accused of involvement in the Casablanca attacks, but rather in a network that plotted follow-up attacks, officials say.

A captured associate of the Benayiches in Tangier, Frenchman Pierre Richard Robert, told Moroccan interrogators that their potential targets included a refinery and a plutonium shipment in France. Because of Zougam’s friendship with the Benayiches, Spanish police scrutinized him in a secret investigation related to Casablanca, according to the senior official.

Dubious about the harsh methods of Moroccan police, however, European investigators felt that evidence of direct ties to Casablanca was lacking.

The train plot apparently teamed the Madrid merchants with more recently arrived Moroccan operatives, including people involved in Casablanca, officials say. The group obtained the explosives from a Spanish ex-convict who, after meeting them through an intermediary he met in jail, arranged to pilfer the dynamite used in the attacks from a mining quarry where he worked, officials say.

Zougam remains the central figure based on evidence related to cellphone equipment from his store that was used as remote detonators.

But the identity of the mastermind is not clear. Could a handful of immigrant shopkeepers have done it on their own? The Moroccan networks have ties to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Palestinian Jordanian accused of organizing bombings in Iraq.

“For the moment, Zougam is the most important one we have,” the investigator said. “It seems logical that there was someone above him who planned it. That’s what we are trying to find out.”

The lesson may be that, even with its founders on the run in the wilds of Pakistan, the Al Qaeda movement still has clandestine hit squads capable of enormous damage in Europe.

“You don’t need that many people for this operation,” the senior official said. “You have an imam who lays down the doctrine, people who follow him, and that makes it a group. The cause is known, the targets are ample. And they don’t need orders to act.”

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Special correspondents Bruce Wallace and Cristina Mateo-Yanguas contributed to this report.