Belgium, Britain Hold 10 Terror Suspects

Police in Belgium and Britain announced the arrests Wednesday of 10 suspects in an offensive against suspected Islamic terrorists, including a Tunisian-born Belgian citizen accused of being a top figure in the Al Qaeda network in Europe.

Law enforcement officials said Tarek Maaroufi, 36, played a lead role in a Brussels-based cell that carried out the assassination of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance military chief Ahmed Shah Masoud two days before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Maaroufi, who is also wanted for extradition to Italy, faces charges in Belgium of conspiracy, document fraud and recruiting for Al Qaeda.

A West European investigator involved in the case said British police were going after an even bigger target: Omar Mahmoud Othman, known as Abu Qatada, a Palestinian cleric widely considered by law enforcement in Europe to be the dominant Al Qaeda ideologue on the continent.

“These are pivotal figures in the Islamic networks,” the European police official said. “We are going after the ideologues now. Abu Qatada sent hundreds of young men to the training camps. He and Maaroufi had contacts everywhere in Europe and Afghanistan too.”

Although the investigator said British authorities planned to arrest Abu Qatada on Wednesday, the Home Office in London would not confirm that he was among eight foreign nationals arrested under a tough new anti-terror law. One of them is believed to be a Palestinian.

Islamic sources in London said Abu Qatada, 41, had not been arrested. They said he went into hiding two days earlier to avoid the reach of the new Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, a law crafted largely with him in mind.

“I don’t think they’ll catch him,” said Anjem Choudary, spokesman for Al Muhajiroun, an Islamic activist group.

In any case, veteran European investigators regarded the series of arrests and the implementation of the anti-terror law as breakthroughs. Maaroufi and Abu Qatada have become embarrassments to the Belgian and British police respectively as symbols of the difficulty of fighting terrorism across European borders.

Wanted Extremists Used Legal Loopholes

Despite accusations piling up against them, both men skillfully took advantage of jurisdictional barriers, lax laws and the loose and murky structure of Al Qaeda, according to law enforcement officials.

The two Islamic extremists have all but thumbed their noses at police in Europe, investigators complain, while Al Qaeda leaders have been killed or have fled into caves during the U.S. military assault on Afghanistan.

Abu Qatada has political asylum, lives in a government-subsidized apartment in London and preaches angry anti-Western sermons in a Baker Street mosque that is a suspected hotbed of Al Qaeda recruiting.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent indicted in the United States last week as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 hijack attacks, allegedly worshiped at the mosque and became a disciple of the cleric, European law enforcement officials said.

Maaroufi, who describes himself as a writer and student, collects unemployment benefits. But he travels extensively, lends money to Muslims in need or just released from prison, and runs an obscure organization in Brussels called the Institute for Research and Study of Civilizations, according to Belgian police.

He was convicted in 1995 of terrorist activities related to Algerian extremist violence in France, but his sentence was suspended.

Prosecutors Call Suspect Cell’s ‘Spiritual Chief’

In April, Italian prosecutors alleged that Maaroufi, who knows Abu Qatada, was the “spiritual chief” of a Tunisian-dominated network with cells in Italy, Belgium, Britain, Spain, Germany and other nations. Although Italian authorities requested his extradition, Belgium does not extradite its citizens.

Instead, Belgian police built a case against him based on the investigation of a Tunisian ring that, along with accomplices in London, allegedly provided fraudulent documents for two Tunisian suicide bombers who assassinated the charismatic Masoud.

Maaroufi knew Dahmane Abd Sattar, one of the Brussels-based assassins who gained access to Masoud by posing as television journalists, according to a law enforcement official. Maaroufi allegedly was part of the group that provided stolen Belgian passports and plane tickets to the killers, according to authorities. He was arrested Tuesday at his Brussels apartment along with an unidentified North African accused of dealing in stolen documents.

“Maaroufi is part of the same network that furnished the fake passports,” said Jos Colpin, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office. “I have the impression that he is an important person in the network.”

It is not just prosecutors and police who see Maaroufi and Abu Qatada as top figures in Al Qaeda’s European operations, a loose array of autonomous, self-financing networks. Maaroufi and suspected terrorists in Milan provided damaging evidence against themselves during conversations that were caught on tape by Italian intelligence agents between January and April.

Maaroufi talked strategy after other terror suspects were arrested in Germany and spoke in code about criminal activities including suspected plots against U.S. targets, according to the Italian prosecutors’ report.

At one point, prosecutors say, he urged an accomplice in Milan eager to carry out an attack to be cautious, exclaiming: “Listen, listen, take my advice, I’m older than you.”

In a more relaxed conversation, Maaroufi joked about an interview he had just granted an Italian journalist in which he denied being a terrorist. “The journalist gave me information, he told me I’m wanted in Italy,” Maaroufi chuckled, according to the transcript. “I told him I know very well I’m innocent and I have no links . . . I just know poor people [laughter].”

The Italian case against Maaroufi is also based on surveillance of his meetings with suspected terrorists in Belgium and Italy. It will now be passed on to Belgian authorities along with case files from Britain and Spain, according to law enforcement officials.

A Spanish magistrate has accused Maaroufi and Abu Qatada of being leading ideologues, recruiters and fund-raisers for Al Qaeda, calling the London cleric Europe’s “supreme moujahedeen.”

Authorities hope that the evidence from around the continent will bolster the case against Maaroufi and overcome Belgium’s weak anti-terrorism laws.

“Maaroufi could be talking on the phone every day with [Al Qaeda leader Osama] Bin Laden and that would not necessarily be a crime under Belgian law,” a European law enforcement official said.

The fate of Abu Qatada in Britain also remains to be seen. The members of a Milan cell spoke of him as a religious thinker, preacher and fierce hero of the Islamic struggle, according to the transcript. British authorities have frozen his assets in a terror crackdown.

Describing Abu Qatada as a chief of Bin Laden’s terror network, the Italian transcripts said accused Milan terrorist cell boss Essid Sami ben Khemais told accomplices that Abu Qatada took secretive precautions and avoided incriminating conversations, letters and phone calls, according to the transcript.

“If somebody is very important you can’t put him in danger and you can’t send just anything to his address . . . that’s discretion,” Ben Khemais said. “The example is Sheik Abu Qatada.”

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Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in London contributed to this report.