Arrests in France Raise Concern of Chemical Attack

French police have arrested four suspected Islamic extremists in possession of suspicious chemicals and a special anti-contamination suit, authorities said Tuesday, worsening fears that Al Qaeda is plotting a large-scale terrorist attack in Europe during the holidays.

Anti-terrorism police made the discovery Monday in an apartment and a basement storage room of a housing project where they arrested three Algerians and a Moroccan, authorities said.

The raid in the heavily Muslim Paris suburb of La Courneuve was part of a crackdown across France that has produced more than 20 arrests in recent weeks. The three men and one woman captured Monday allegedly have ties to a suspect in an alleged plot in London involving chemical products, according to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Police in the La Courneuve raid found “two 13-kilo [29-pound] containers, empty, two vials of liquid that is now under analysis and a military suit for nuclear, bacteriological and chemical protection,” Sarkozy told legislators Tuesday.

Until technicians at a military laboratory identify the substances seized in the raid, it is impossible to know whether the materials are lethal.

Still, the presence of the anti-contamination suit makes it more likely that the suspects were experimenting with toxic products, according to European law enforcement officials.

Police identified only one of the four suspects, Mirwani ben Ahmed, who had been wanted on charges related to a foiled plot to bomb a cathedral in Strasbourg during the Christmas holidays in 2000. Ben Ahmed, 29, is believed to have undergone training in the use of chemical weapons, a French law enforcement official said.

Sarkozy called the case “very serious.” The interior minister said the suspects “had spent time in Chechnya.”

Referring to the London suspect, Rabah Kadre, Sarkozy said the men and the woman “were in relation with ... Kadre, arrested [in November] for planning an attack using chemical products.”

“With these four [suspects] here, it was better to arrest them before rather than after,” Sarkozy said. “When you find people with this kind of material, there is no doubt that arresting them was the right move.”

The fear of a massive terrorist attack extends beyond France into Britain, Germany and Italy. European counter-terrorism officials interviewed Tuesday said they were scrambling in response to a threat that has escalated with the approach of the Christmas holidays, the backdrop for past Al Qaeda attempts.

Arrests in France and elsewhere have revealed that a cadre of combat-hardened extremists has been returning to Europe from Chechnya, where Muslim rebels are fighting Russian rule, and other places where they took refuge after the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan last year, according to investigators. The extremists appear intent on carrying out the major strikes threatened against Europe by Osama bin Laden and his associates, investigators said.

And persistent intelligence information has raised the specter of a possible chemical attack, they added.

“The French are very worried about a chemical attack,” said a counter-terrorism investigator in a neighboring European nation. “Everybody is very worried. This is the fear. There is a strong fear of a spectacular attack. And after Sept. 11, what could be spectacular? A chemical attack.”

Sarkozy’s comments about Kadre were significant because the interior minister asserted that the London suspects arrested last month had been involved in a plot to use chemical weapons. Kadre, the alleged leader of a London-based network dominated by North Africans, was arrested shortly after returning to the British capital from Slovakia. British tabloids claimed that he was the lead man in an imminent poison gas attack on the London subway, but British authorities denied those reports.

Prosecutors in Britain have not made public any evidence outlining a specific plot. Kadre and two other suspects pleaded not guilty Monday at a hearing in London.

Nonetheless, investigators in other countries have offered a different picture. Although European investigators say no chemical weapons were found in connection with the London plot, they say suspicions linking the London suspects to an eventual chemical attack were credible. In a rare interview published last week, the director of France’s lead counter-terrorism agency said there was intelligence information about chemical weapons in the British case.

Indeed, the British arrests last month resulted partly from information passed on by French investigators, according to several European sources.

A crackdown here led by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France’s top anti-terrorism magistrate, has taken aim at one of the most violence-prone networks operating in Europe. Its alleged leader, an Algerian named Abu Doha, is behind bars in Britain awaiting extradition to the United States on charges that he masterminded an attempt to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of millennium celebrations in 1999. He has also been linked to the plot involving the Strasbourg cathedral.

The testimony of the convicted would-be bomber in the LAX plot, as well as wiretaps in Italy, showed that members and associates of the network allegedly led by Abu Doha had trained with crude poison gas in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and discussed the use of chemical weapons.

Kadre had assumed Abu Doha’s role as a key figure in the network, investigators say, and allegedly was at work reorganizing Al Qaeda in Europe.

A top Al Qaeda suspect said to be commanding a campaign targeting Europe is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian reputedly knowledgeable about chemical warfare, according to German and Italian intelligence officials.

French authorities must now clarify whether the suspects arrested Monday had the means and expertise to carry out a major attack. It is reasonably difficult for terrorists to prepare and unleash chemical weapons, especially harder-to-obtain agents such as VX, a nerve agent.

In addition to the vials and the protective suit, police found fraudulent identification papers and $5,000 in cash at the housing project, authorities said.