Israelis point up Palestinian links to bin Laden

For Saed Hindawi, learning how to fire assault rifles and make bombs at a military camp in Afghanistan seemed the natural thing to do.

All the Palestinians in school with him in Pakistan were doing it. It was important that, as a Palestinian, he be able to fight Israel too.

Today, Hindawi is in prison in Israel and on trial in a military court for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts against Israeli targets. Israeli authorities say he is one of scores of Palestinians who have trained in military camps inside Afghanistan under the direction of the country’s Taliban regime or of groups loyal to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

To Israel, Hindawi represents the channel through which operatives connected to bin Laden have attempted to infiltrate the Gaza Strip and West Bank. One group alleged to have ties to bin Laden was busted last year in Gaza, and its members face a drawn-out prosecution. Like Hindawi and other Palestinians, they allegedly received weapons training in Afghanistan.

Hindawi, who is 27, has not been charged with belonging to an illegal organization or with having ties to bin Laden. But senior Israeli security officials say he fits the pattern that has given the bin Laden network a foothold in Palestinian territory.

What makes his case especially intriguing is that he is the son of the Palestinian Authority’s police chief in Hebron. Officials have not made any connection between the father and Afghan terrorist networks.

Hindawi was arrested Feb. 13, 2000, as he attempted to return to the West Bank from Jordan. The alleged Gaza cell, led by Nabil Oukal, was broken up in the summer of 2000; Oukal was arrested June 1 that year as he attempted to leave Gaza for Pakistan.

Much of 1999 and early 2000 were tense months, with numerous signs of attempts by bin Laden loyalists to organize in this region. Militants said by authorities to be members of bin Laden’s al-Qaida network were arrested in Jordan in December 1999 and accused of plotting to kill a large number of Israelis and Americans celebrating the advent of the new millennium in the Holy Land. In January 2000, Lebanese army troops clashed with Sunni Muslim extremists near the country’s northern border with Syria. Diplomatic and intelligence sources suggested at the time that the extremists were part of another new cell trained and financed by bin Laden.

Closer to Israel, the cases of Hindawi and Oukal came to light. But then, on Sept. 29, 2000, with the new Palestinian intifada, concern over bin Laden was quickly eclipsed by the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian fighting in decades.

Israeli authorities contend that bin Laden has not made greater inroads in their nation and the Palestinian territories because of the tight control the Jewish state maintains over its borders and the ability of Israeli-paid agents to penetrate and spy on Palestinian groups. The officials also say that with other home-grown extremist groups battling Israel, especially in the new intifada, bin Laden can dedicate his resources elsewhere and focus on American targets.

“We have not been bothered by bin Laden since the beginning of the intifada,” said Gideon Ezra, Israel’s deputy minister for public security. “Maybe we don’t know everything, but bin Laden is not our problem. We have our own little bin Ladens.”

Palestinian officials and human rights groups maintain that Israeli authorities recklessly invoke the name of bin Laden to silence any opposition and to discredit suspects. It is difficult to challenge accusations when such a global bogey man is involved.

In both the Hindawi and Oukal cases, families and lawyers say the defendants have been subjected to sleep deprivation and other physical and psychological pressure aimed at coercing testimony.

But if the charges prove true, the two men represent a clear link to the same camps that have trained thousands of extremist fighters to wage holy war in countries all over the world.

Hindawi was born to a family in exile. He grew up in Lebanon during that country’s brutal civil war and the Israeli invasion to drive out Palestinian guerrillas who ran roughshod over swaths of the country. His father, known as Tarek Zeid, was a senior member of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s entourage, a guerrilla commander who fought Israel with determination.

But Zeid followed Arafat in embracing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that was launched with the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. He returned to his homeland, first to Gaza and later to Hebron in the West Bank when Arafat and other leaders of the PLO were allowed to go back. He became police chief in Hebron.

Instead of accompanying the family to Palestinian territory, however, Hindawi went to Pakistan in 1994 to attend college. In a sense, he was following in his father’s footsteps: Zeid had a year of specialized armored corps training at a Pakistani military school in 1974.

Zeid says that Pakistan, as a poor country, was an affordable place for his son to study. Hindawi’s expenses came to $100 a month, he says, and the tuition was paid for by a scholarship. Pakistan endows university scholarships for about 40 Palestinians a year, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education.

Hindawi earned a master’s degree in marketing from Sindh University and left Pakistan for the West Bank in March 1999, according to his family. He didn’t settle in well, was a bit of a loner and did not seem happy, associates recall. Soft-spoken and religious, though not exceedingly so, he was hoping to start a business and find a wife, his father says, and was working in the region’s largest rock quarry in the meantime.

He made frequent trips to Jordan -- to see a grandmother, according to the family. He may have benefited from his father’s VIP card, of the kind issued by Israel to top Palestinian officials, which could have eased his travel and allowed him to circumvent close inspection by Israeli border guards.

Returning from Jordan on Feb. 13, 2000, he was arrested by Israeli authorities and accused of illegal weapons training as well as conspiring to commit terrorist acts against Israeli targets.

The Israelis allege that Hindawi and two other Palestinian students from his university took two weeks of training at a complex of military camps in Darunta, just north of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in June 1998. Hindawi received instruction at a camp run by a reputed bin Laden associate known as Abu Khabab in subjects ranging from explosives and bomb-making to the assembly and firing of Kalashnikov assault rifles, the Israelis charge.

Starting in November 1998, according to the indictment, Hindawi and 15 other men trained for two months at the same camp. This time, they allegedly concentrated on the use of submachine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and sniper rifles. Most of the trainers were from Morocco, the indictment says.

Israeli authorities allege that Hindawi and two other Palestinians, also newly trained, then plotted to carry out bombing and shooting attacks against Israeli targets in revenge for Israel’s military operations in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Hindawi has confessed to the charges related to the military training but denies that he intended to attack Israelis, says his lawyer, Abed Assali. A Palestinian man arrested with him has been sentenced to three years in prison.

“He said he was very bored over there and with the others they talked about attacking Israel but it wasn’t serious,” Assali said. “They never made a decision (to carry out an attack) and never discussed it seriously.”

Assali, like Hindawi’s family, is convinced that the case against Hindawi is a minor one that has become exaggerated in the current climate.

“It suits the Israelis to make more of it now,” Assali said.

The Hindawi case attracted no publicity. Only when Oukal was arrested did it set off alarm bells.

Oukal’s case, which has been widely reported in Israeli and foreign newspapers since his arrest last year, presents stronger allegations of a bin Laden connection. The Israelis contend that bin Laden operatives attempted to infiltrate Palestinian territory by hooking up with an existing extremist organization, Hamas.

Oukal, a longtime activist in Hamas, traveled to Pakistan in October 1997 with other members of a devout Muslim sect. Israeli authorities claim that he received military training in the first months of 1998, then returned to the Gaza Strip in July. Also in 1998, he received additional training in a camp in Kashmir and visited offices said to belong to bin Laden in the Afghan capital, Kabul, according to the Israeli indictment, which was filed Aug. 24, 2000.

Like Hindawi, the Israelis allege, Oukal received advanced weapons training under Abu Khabab.

Back in Gaza, the indictment says, Oukal began to set up a cell that planned to plant bombs in Israeli markets, kidnap soldiers and launch missiles toward Jewish settlements there. He also allegedly planned to recruit Israeli Arabs, who live inside Israel and are not subject to the same travel restrictions as Palestinians.

But before any such plans could come to fruition, Oukal was seized by Israeli special forces amid a blaze of gunfire at Rafah, the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.