Group Suspected of Plot on U.S. Embassy in Paris

Coordinated U.S., European and Middle Eastern investigations may have foiled another terrorist suicide plot, this one to blow up the U.S. Embassy here with a car bomb, intelligence and law enforcement sources said Saturday.

A group of Islamic militants was arrested last week in Belgium and the Netherlands. Media reports said as many as eight were taken into custody. Among them was a Tunisian named Nizar Trabalsi, 30, who had recently trained at Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan terrorist camps. Trabalsi was believed to be the intended suicide bomber.

According to two law enforcement sources, the attack was intended for next year.

One European intelligence source said the conspiracy was uncovered after the arrest about a month ago of a French-Algerian in the United Arab Emirates, after a tip from U.S authorities.

The man, Jamal Beghal, allegedly revealed that he had been assigned to establish a terrorist network in France to attack American targets. The source said Beghal told interrogators that “someone had to make a suicide action in France against American interests.”

An intelligence source said that both Trabalsi and Beghal had had contacts with Abu Jaffar, a top recruitment and training lieutenant of Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

On Monday, a day before the assaults on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington, French anti-terrorist investigator Jean-Louis Bruguiere opened a formal inquiry into the possible plot against U.S. interests in France.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said Saturday that American officials had nothing to add regarding the arrests or the reported plot against the embassy.

“The embassy is aware of the reports of this type,” spokesman Richard Lankford said. “We don’t comment on the embassy’s security postures.”

U.S. officials have “full confidence” in French law enforcement authorities, Lankford added. The U.S. Embassy in Paris, like others around the world, reduced staffing last week but remained open under increased guard by French police, who after Tuesday’s attacks blocked the surrounding streets with vehicles and riot gates.

Belgian and Dutch authorities were tight-lipped about the arrests, in part due to strict privacy rules regarding criminal cases. However, media reports disclosed that Belgian police confiscated an AK-47 assault rifle and unspecified documents from Trabalsi’s apartment.

European intelligence sources said the arrests coincided with an international crackdown on suspected terrorist cells in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s devastation in America.

One Western intelligence official described it as a continentwide effort by law enforcement and counterterrorist agencies to search for anyone with an Afghanistan connection that might suggest a link to Bin Laden. A number of people are under surveillance, he said.

“Everybody is being screened. Anybody who may have a link is being looked at and everything they did in the last year. Everybody is working on Code Red,” the official said.

Bruguiere has been investigating a violent, North African-dominated terrorist network with links to Bin Laden for some time. He worked closely with U.S. officials in the investigation of the attempt in late 1999 by the network to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Bruguiere said he believes the same terrorist organization was involved in last week’s massacres in the United States.