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Terror Threat From Pakistan Said to Expand

The Spanish police took Mohammad Ayub to his bakery in Barcelona on Jan. 19 to look for evidence after arresting him. He was accused of taking part in a meeting with explosives experts. Credit
Quique Garcia/El Mundo

This article was reported by Elaine Sciolino, Victoria Burnett and Eric Schmitt and written by Ms. Sciolino.

BARCELONA, Spain — As the terrorism suspects congregated in the largely Pakistani neighborhood here over the past few months, they were joined by a young man who called himself Asim. He had come from the Pakistani borderlands where the leadership of Al Qaeda is said to have regrouped.

The suspects, he later told Spanish investigators, envisioned a wave of spectacular attacks: Coordinated suicide bombings would start in this city’s vast subway system and then sweep through Portugal, Germany, France and Britain if certain demands were not met.

Asim had been sent to Spain to be a suicide bomber, but he also was an informant for French intelligence working in the no man’s land of Waziristan in Pakistan. After he got word to his handlers of an impending attack, Spain’s military police swooped into the neighborhood of Raval in the early hours of Jan. 19 and arrested 14 men. Now the officials unraveling the case say it demonstrates the growing threat of terrorist activities migrating to Continental Europe from Pakistan.

The largely Pakistani cell formed quickly in Barcelona with support, and perhaps direction, from the tribal areas of Pakistan, the authorities said. According to the arrest warrant in the case, three suicide bombing suspects arrived in Spain within the last four months and the bomb making suspect had recently spent five months in Pakistan.

With Spain preparing for elections next month, the suspected plot was an eerie echo of the March 11, 2004, Madrid transit bombings, which killed 191 people just days before the last election.

In the weeks since the arrests, Spanish officials have backed off their claim that an attack was imminent. They seized evidence like broken timing devices and small quantities of explosives. But they acknowledged that without more evidence of bomb making, they were relying heavily on the testimony of the informant to make their case, which had blown the cover of a rare intelligence source with access to Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Even so, in interviews, Spanish, American and other European officials — most speaking on condition of anonymity because the inquiry is not over — said the plot was indicative of the terror threat from Pakistan.

“That these people were ready to go into action as terrorists in Spain — that came as a surprise,” said Judge Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s highest antiterrorism magistrate. “In my opinion, the jihadi threat from Pakistan is the biggest emerging threat we are facing in Europe. Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.”

That threat has been felt elsewhere. Two of four suicide bombers who attacked London’s transit system in July 2005 had trained at a camp in Pakistan. Four of the five British men convicted last April in a plot to blow up targets in London using fertilizer bombs were of Pakistani origin and some had trained at a makeshift terrorist camp there.

Last September, when the German authorities broke up what they suspected was a plot to bomb an American Air Force base and the Frankfurt airport, they said three of the suspects, two of them German citizens, had trained at terrorist camps in Pakistan.

Officials say the Barcelona case points to a more serious dynamic: Pakistanis with no apparent previous links to Europe who appear to have been sent there on a terrorist mission.

“We had 20 terrorists show up in Spain that had been trained in Pakistan that were going to be suicide bombers, fanning out over Europe,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Although some of the suspects had in fact been living in Spain, Mr. McConnell’s remarks underscored statements by the Spanish authorities that in addition to the 14 suspects who had been arrested, others had eluded arrest.

American officials acknowledged that they had monitored phone calls to Pakistan by some of the suspects, and Mr. McConnell cited the case as a reason that United States intelligence agencies needed to retain electronic surveillance authorities.

Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba of Spain compared the plot to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying: “It looks as if there is an international connection. There appears to be a boss outside.”

“Somebody sent this individual to Spain,” he added, referring to the informant.

Spain Draws Pakistanis

Spain’s Pakistani community has grown from a few thousand residents a decade ago to about 70,000 today, as immigrants have been drawn to Spain by easy entry and to Barcelona’s Raval district by cheap rents. They have injected new life into the decrepit neighborhood, opening small businesses, but law enforcement officials say some have engaged in petty crimes like money laundering and credit card fraud.

Pakistanis have also sent home millions of dollars through the informal system of money transfers, some of it financing extremist groups there, the officials add.

In late 2004, the police arrested 11 Pakistani men on suspicion of plotting to attack two landmark buildings in Barcelona, financing terrorism and drug trafficking, although only six were convicted, two for document forgery.

The Spanish authorities had long had some of the current Barcelona suspects under surveillance. The police were also monitoring the activities in the Tariq bin Ziad mosque and a small underground prayer room in the Raval neighborhood, both identified with the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative missionary group that is suspected of being used as a recruiting ground for radicals.

The informant working for the French arrived in Barcelona by train from France on Jan. 16 to join the suspects in the plot, he told the police. Tipped off by French intelligence, Spanish intelligence operatives set Operation Cantata in motion.

The next day, French and Spanish agents, working together, spotted two suspects tossing a plastic bag into the garbage. Inside, the agents found wires, broken timing devices, latex gloves, wire cutters, computer connectors, lead ball bearings, tubes for firework rocket propellers and small traces of a black powder containing potassium perchlorate, an explosives component commonly found in fireworks.

On Jan. 18, as agents continued to watch, one of the men bought a wireless-equipped laptop computer and a camcorder, perhaps, the Spanish authorities assumed, to record suicide tapes or messages containing demands.

Photo

His son Nadeem Ayub says his father is innocent.Credit
Stefano Buonamici for The New York Times

The suspects prayed together for jihad and sacrifice; they phoned family members, perhaps to say goodbye, Western intelligence officials said.

In the evening, agents watched as the men left the mosque in groups of two. Carrying backpacks, they snaked through the streets of the Raval district as if to elude detection, then reunited at the prayer room.

The informant relayed a series of increasingly panicked messages to his handlers that the attack was getting closer, several Spanish officials said. “We found ourselves in a critical situation and decided to neutralize the threat,” said a senior official in the Guardia Civil, Spain’s military police. “The risk was so high — not only for Spain but for other countries.”

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In the early hours of Jan. 19, the police raided the mosque, the prayer room and three apartments, arresting 14 people.

In the prayer room, the police seized four timers, empty pyrotechnic cartridges, multicolored wires, latex and kitchen gloves, batteries of varying voltages, cables that could be used for detonators and a small amount of nitrocellulose, according to an inventory of the searches.

But already, four of the men have been released.

“They asked me, ‘What is your name? Where do you live? Are you into jihad? Did you see the bomb?’ ” said Mohamed Imran, a 30-year-old itinerant construction worker who was released after five days. “I said, ‘No jihad. No bombs. This is all a lie.’ ”

Of those still in custody, all are either Pakistani or of Pakistani origin, except for one Indian citizen. In questioning by prosecutors, all have denied being part of a terrorist conspiracy, the Spanish authorities said.

Two other suspects are being tracked in Barcelona, and another is believed to be hiding in the Netherlands, Spanish officials said.

After the arrests, Judge Ismael Moreno, in his 72-page arrest order, and Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido described the attack as imminent.

But Spanish law enforcement officials were clearly disappointed. There was no hard evidence of a bomb factory, no viable explosive devices or even enough explosive material to assemble bombs.

Investigators are struggling to understand the gap between the informant’s version of events and the physical evidence they found.

The informant apparently had seen much more bomb-making material than was seized by the Spanish authorities, according to a Western official with direct knowledge of the case. The extra material had disappeared, apparently with one of the suspects who fled, the official added.

Guardia Civil investigators are operating under the assumption that the group may have been rehearsing an attack.

“We believe they were getting ready for an attack, but it wasn’t as imminent as we initially were informed,” said Mr. Rubalcaba. Without sufficient physical evidence, Spanish law enforcement officials apparently decided they had to turn France’s informant into a protected witness for the prosecution. They gave him the code name “F1.”

He told Spanish interrogators that the first bombing in Barcelona would be followed by demands from Al Qaeda through Baitullah Mehsud, a powerful militant commander in the South Waziristan tribal area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. If the demands were not met, there would be a second strike and then a third in Barcelona, followed by attacks elsewhere in Europe.

One senior European official said the demand was to involve the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, although senior Spanish and American officials said they could not confirm that claim.

“If they didn’t comply, there would be one in Germany,” the informant said, according to a secret transcript of his statements, whose contents were verified by several people with access to the document. “If they didn’t comply, France. If they didn’t comply, Portugal. If they didn’t comply, Britain. There are many people ready there.”

While senior Western intelligence officials do not rule out the possibility that Mr. Mehsud or his organization supported the suspects, they are skeptical that he ordered the attack. And they are less certain that the suspects posed a real threat outside of Spain.

The arrest order identified two suspects as the ideological leaders: Maroof Ahmed Mirza, 38, a Pakistani national and legal resident of Spain, and Mohammad Ayub, 63, who is accused of taking part in at least one meeting with explosives experts. According to American intelligence officials, each man was trained in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Mr. Mirza, who teaches at the Tariq bin Ziad mosque and sometimes acted as the prayer leader, was known for his hate-filled sermons and calls for the faithful to join the fight in Iraq, according to the police, who monitored sermons there.

An Unusual Suspect

Mr. Ayub seemed like a strange fit for a suicide bomb plot. A grandfather with a score of grandchildren, he holds Spanish citizenship and had worked in Spain for 24 years as a dishwasher and as a cook before retiring 13 years ago. “We don’t understand this big movie plot that they have created,” said Mr. Ayub’s son Naveed Ayub. “There are 20,000 Pakistanis in this neighborhood who’ll tell you my father is innocent.”

According to the arrest warrant, three suspects identified by the informant as would-be suicide bombers arrived through other European cities: one from Pakistan via Sweden in October, a second via Germany in November, a third via Portugal in December or January. Hafeez Ahmed, who was to be the bomb maker, spent five months in Pakistan last year, the warrant said.

For all the international intrigue surrounding the suspects, the case has caused diplomatic friction among investigators. Spain’s handling of the French informant has enraged officials at France’s intelligence agencies and eroded trust between the countries, French and other European officials said. The informant’s value as a source was destroyed when he was made a prosecution witness and the contents of his statements were leaked to the news media.

Vicente González Mota, the prosecutor in the case, meanwhile acknowledged that the case may be difficult to prosecute with the current evidence.

“All the information will come out in court,” Mr. Mota said, adding, “The problem is — is what we have enough?”