Spain Arrests 16 Al Qaeda Suspects

Spanish police arrested 16 people Monday who are suspected of recruiting Al Qaeda fighters to send to Iraq, officials said.

The group’s alleged leader, a 25-year-old Iraqi known as Abu Sufian, had access to Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, and probably sent his recruits on suicide missions, the Interior Ministry said.

The 16, of several nationalities, sent volunteers to Iraq “to wage jihad as members of the Al Qaeda network,” Spanish Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso told a news conference.

He said the group had two fighters ready to send to Iraq at the time of the arrests.

The involvement of outsiders in attacks in Iraq was highlighted last month when a 36-year-old Belgian woman blew herself up on the outskirts of Baghdad in what was believed to be the first suicide attack in Iraq by a European woman.

Among those detained Monday in raids across Spain was a Belarus-born man who had trained in Chechnya and was an expert in chemical weapons, the ministry said.

A suspect born in Ghana is the imam of a mosque in the southern Spanish city of Malaga and another, from Morocco, used to be an imam in the same city.

Others arrested were born in Spain, Morocco, Egypt, France and Saudi Arabia. Later Monday, an Algerian was arrested in the southern city of Granada as part of the same operation, a police spokesman said.