France, Germany, Britain investigating suspects

At the end of July, police in the United Arab Emirates, acting on a tip from France, detained an Algerian believed to have spent time at the training camps in Afghanistan run by Osama bin Laden. Djamel Begal, 35, subsequently confessed to being part of a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris in the coming months, police say.

As a result of the information he supplied, police in France, Belgium and Holland placed more than 50 people under surveillance. After the attacks in New York and Washington, European police decided to act, and 13 of the suspects were arrested.

On Tuesday, French authorities placed three of those arrested in Paris under investigation, a formal step toward being officially charged. They are believed connected to the Algerian fundamentalist Salafist Group for Call and Combat, which on Monday was listed by President Bush among the groups and individuals banned from banking transactions because of their suspected links to bin Laden. Four more suspects were arrested in Paris Tuesday.

But Begal, French police say, mentioned nothing about planned attacks in America. Authorities in France reportedly alerted the U.S. authorities to a threat to their interests abroad in August, yet no clear link has so far emerged between the suspects arrested in the presumed French conspiracy and the hijackers in America.

It appears a separate group, also suspected of links to bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization, was plotting to attack U.S. interests in Europe at around the same time as the attacks in New York and Washington.

As FBI agents chase thousands of leads and hundreds of potential suspects connected to the suicide hijackers in the United States, their counterparts in Europe are hauling in dozens of suspected Islamic extremists. Most are being detained because their names appear on lists supplied by the FBI of people with whom the hijackers are believed to have had some form of contact.

British police are holding three people under anti-terrorism laws on suspicion of links to the hijackers. Germany has issued arrest warrants for two men suspected of ties to the three hijackers who apparently met while studying in Hamburg.

If a pattern is emerging, experts say, it is that there is no pattern, only that a new form of terrorism has arrived. In this form there may be dozens, or even hundreds, of individuals living in the United States, Europe and elsewhere who have at one time or another fallen under the sway of one or another militant Islamic organizations and who may be ready and waiting to undertake terrorist attacks against Western interests.

“There is a giant Terrorism Inc., but it is not as structured as we think,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.

“There are tens of different permutations between all kinds of groups that have set their differences aside, and we should probably be looking at individuals, not groups, to find out who is behind all this.”

On Sept. 9, two “journalists” were granted an interview with the leader of the Afghan opposition movement fighting the Taliban, Ahmed Shah Massood. Instead of asking him questions, they detonated explosives, killing themselves and a Massood aide. Massood died later.

Afghan opposition leaders believe bin Laden operatives deliberately killed Massood ahead of the hijackings, perhaps as a quid pro quo for Taliban support after the attacks.

That attack was blamed on the Vanguard of Conquest, one of the groups allegedly run by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian identified by the FBI as bin Laden’s chief tactician.