9 Held in Alleged Plot in Turkey

A Turkish court Monday charged nine suspected members of a group linked to Al Qaeda with plotting to bomb the NATO summit scheduled next month in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul.

Turkey’s CNN-Turk television news channel said at least three of the suspects had been planning a suicide bomb attack against President Bush, who will be among dozens of Western leaders expected to attend the June 28-29 gathering.

U.S. officials in Ankara, the Turkish capital, said they had learned of the arrests through the Turkish media. They declined to comment.

The court in the northwestern city of Bursa charged the nine suspects with “membership in an outlawed organization.” They face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

The charges came after police arrested at least 25 suspected members of a terrorist cell last week in raids in Bursa and Istanbul. Seven of those detained in Bursa were released Monday after interrogation. Nine questioned in Istanbul also have been released.

Turkish officials said the nine charged in Bursa were members of Ansar al Islam, but it was unclear whether it was the same group with that name formed by ethnic Kurds in Iraq’s mountainous northern region.

Oguz Kagan Koksal, the local governor, told a news conference that police had searched the Bursa suspects’ homes where equipment and manuals on how to make remote-controlled bombs were seized. Scores of rifles and handguns as well as videotapes showing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden training militants at a camp in Afghanistan were also found.

Koksal said those arrested had also planned to attack a synagogue in Bursa before going to Iraq to fight U.S. soldiers.

Ansar al Sunna, which some officials say is either a different name for Ansar al Islam or a splinter group, claimed responsibility for the February suicide bombings in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil that claimed more than 100 lives. U.S. and Iraqi Kurdish intelligence sources have tied Ansar al Islam to Al Qaeda and say the Kurdish group has shifted its operations to the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul after U.S. forces attacked its mountain bases last year.

“The connection between Ansar al Islam and Turkey is new,” said a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are aware, however, of small groups of Turks fighting alongside Iraqis against the Americans” in Iraq, the diplomat said.

Concerns about security have grown since November, when more than 50 people were killed in four suicide bomb attacks against British and Jewish targets in Istanbul, a city of 10 million people.

The four men who carried out the attacks are said to have been ethnic Kurds from an Islamist stronghold in southeastern Turkey who may have had ties to Al Qaeda. Police investigations revealed that most of the perpetrators had either been trained or fought alongside Islamic militants in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Russian breakaway republic of Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last month a top Spanish counter-terrorism official revealed that suspects accused in the Madrid train bombings in March had held secret meetings in Istanbul to plan the terrorist attacks, which killed 191 people.

The Madrid attack has been blamed on Islamic militants allied, at least philosophically, with Al Qaeda.

In addition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit, Istanbul will hold the Eurovision song contest, which is televised throughout Europe, this month and a gathering of Islamic foreign ministers in June.

Muammer Guler, the governor of Istanbul, insisted that his city was secure and that the NATO summit would go ahead as planned. “We have taken all precautions; we are in full control,” he said.