AL QAEDA’S NORTH AFRICAN CONNECTION

Posted By on October 16th, 2009

October 15, 2009

Exclusive: Al Qaeda’s North African Connection (Part One of Two)

Adrian Morgan

 

The Nuclear Scientist

 
On the morning of Thursday October 8, 2009, two suspected Islamists – believed to have links to al Qaeda – were arrested at Vienne in Isère, southeastern France. The men were brothers of Algerian origin, 32-year-old Dr Adlène Hicheur and 25-year-old Dr Halim (Zitouni) Hicheur. They were arrested at their parents’ home.
 
After three days, Halim Hicheur was released without charge. His brother, however, was detained in Paris, where the pair had been subjected to intensive interrogation. On Monday, October 12th, Adlène Hicheur was officially charged for “association with criminals with relation to a terrorist enterprise.”
 
Adlène Hicheur was an employee at CERN, the nuclear research estalishment which site on the border of France and Switzerland. Founded in 1954, CERN is famous for its particle accelerator research, in particular its Large Hadron Collider, which is partly funded by the USA.
 
The Large Hadron Collider sends hadrons around a circular track at high speed in opposite directions – their trajectory guided by magnets – and then forces them to collide. The reactions at impact, conditions that are thought to mimic the forces present at the Big Bang, are intensely studied. Of particular interest is the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle that is smaller than any other subatomic particle. So far it has never been found, but the Large Hadron Collider’s collision chamber is expected to be the most likely place where the theoretical particle’s presence might be detected.
 
Adlène Hicheur works on the Large Hadron Collider project. After his arrest, CERN issued a statement in which it affirmed that his work “did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism.” The spokesman claimed that Hicheur had been ill for most of the year and had rarely been at work. It should also be noted that the Large Hadron Collider has been offline since last year.
 
Hicheur’s career has been impressive: he gained a PhD at Stanford University in California, and in 2005 he was a research fellow at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Chilton, Oxfordshire. He had also been employed in university cities in Britain – London, Manchester, Durham in England and Edinburgh and St. Andrews in Scotland.
 
French judicial sources have revealed that Hicheur has already confessed to being connected to al Qaeda, and had been plotting a terror attack. On Friday October 9th, France’s Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, said that magistrates would “doubtless establish what the targets were in France or elsewhere, and perhaps indicate that we have avoided the worst.”
 
Over the past 18 months, French intelligence agents have been monitoring Hicheur’s online communications. Immediately prior to the arrests, they believed that Hicheur was ready to prepare for mounting a terrorist attack. A French security source has claimed that Hicheur’s plans were already advanced. Monetary transactions had already taken place, and the scientist apparently planned to stage an attack against a giant oil refinery owned by the company Total. The exact refinery is not mentioned, but an explosion at a massive refinery could have “caused an explosion which would have destroyed a city the size of London.” Additionally, Hicheur is thought to have placed French President Nicolas Sarkozy and others on a hit list for assassination.
 
Hortefeux and also the anti-terrorist judge Christophe Teissier (who ordered the arrest) have both been criticized. Brice Hortefeux has been condemned for publicly announcing the arrest of the two brothers, as this action could send terror contacts underground. Teissier has been criticized for making the arrest as soon as he appeared to have evidence that Hicheur was plotting an attack: if he had waited a bit longer, it was argued, then more details about the contacts would have emerged.
 
The group with whom Hicheur has been linked is now known as “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (the Maghreb is the region of North Africa including Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria). This group was formerly known as GSPC ( Groupe salafiste pour la prédication et le combat or Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat). GSPC had been active in France for some time, and also in Spain, Belgium, and Italy. GSPC, in turn had been an offshoot of the radical group known as GIA (Group Islamique Armé or Armed Islamic Group).
 
The GIA
 
The birth of the GIA took place in 1992. In June 1991 in Algeria, an Islamist political party known as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had called for then President Benjedid to resign. Elections were due to have taken place, but FIS agitation caused these to be delayed. On June 18th, an interim government with no party affiliations, led by Sid-Ahmed Ghozali, had taken charge of the country. In December elections took place but the Islamist FIS party won the majority of the vote.
 
As FIS campaigned on a ticket that promised to destroy democracy, the military took action. In January 1992, they staged a coup. This led to a civil war which lasted until around 1999. Between 70,000 and 200,000 people, mostly civilians, died in clashes between an alliance of secularist parties against the Islamist groups. Against this background, the GIA was born. Its Arabic name was al-Jama’ah al-Islamiyah al-Musallaha.
 
The GIA came into being in July 1992, but was not officially allied to the FIS or FIS-armed wing AIS (Islamic Salvation Army) which came into being in 1993. GIA’s first public declaration was a threat. It warned that all foreigners should leave Algeria by December 1, 1993, or they would become targets.
 
Many of GIA’s fighters had come from the battlefields of Afghanistan, where they were Muhajideen against the Soviets. The first leader – Mourad Sid Ahmed, alias Djafaar al-Afghani – had fought in Afghanistan. He was killed in a gun battle in Algiers on February 26, 1994. His successor was Djamel (Jamal) Zitouni (pictured) who led the GIA until he was killed on July 16, 1996.
 
 
One of the first major terrorist attacks carried out by the GIA took place at a busy terminal in Houari Boumediene Airport in Algiers on August 26, 1992. Eleven people were killed and more than 100 injured. Two other bombs were placed at Air France’s Algiers office, and at the office of Swissair. The Air France bomb went off, but an evacuation had taken place, and the Swissair bomb was defused.
 
One individual – a member of FIS – was executed the following year for the airport bombing. Other people were tried in absentia. One of these was Abdelghani Ait Haddad, who fled to France where he stayed for nine years. He arrived in Britain and was jailed in December 2001, but he was finally released by Britain’s Home Secretary on February 15, 2002 due to lack of credible evidence.
 
 
Another individual who was tried in Algeria in absentia for the airport attack was Mourad Ikhlef (pictured), who fled to Canada in 1993. Ikhlef had been found guilty of the attack and was sentenced to death. He was granted refugee status in 1994, but on February 28, 2003 he was deported to Algeria. He was arrested and jailed for “membership of a terrorist group operating abroad aiming to harm the interests of Algeria.” He was freed on March 26, 2006 with other charges against him dropped. On April 3, 2006 he was re-arrested and appears to still be in an Algerian jail.
 
The atrocities carried out by GIA were many. These included targeted assassinations. Respected academic Djillali Lyabes was killed on March 16, 1993. Laadi Flici, an Algerian member of parliament, was killed on March 17, 1993. Anti-Islamist writer Tahar Djaout was attacked on May 26, 1993 and died on June 2, 1993. Psychologist Mahfoud Boucebsi was stabbed and killed on June 15, 1993, and then-sociologist Mohammed Boukhobza had his throat cut in Algiers on June 22, 1993. Boukhobza’s children, who were tied up, were forced to watch. TV journalist Rabah Zenati was killed on August 3rd, and on August 21st, Kasdi Merbah, a former prime minister who had fought in the war for independence from France, was assassinated. With him were killed his brother and his son.
 
March 10, 1994 – playwright Abdelkader Alloula was killed. On May 8, 1994 French Catholics Henri Verges and Sister Paul-Hélène Saint-Raymond were murdered in the library of the Casbah. On October 23, 1994, two Spanish-born nuns, Sister Esther Paniagua Alonso and Sister Caridad Alvarez Martin were killed on their way to Mass. On December 27, 1994, four priests, all belonging to the White Fathers order, were murdered in Tizi-Ouzou in the Kabilye region. Jean Chevillard, Alain Dieulangard and Christian Chessel came from France, while their colleague Charles Deckers was Belgian-born. They were killed in the courtyard of their mission.
 
 
In 1995, GIA launched attacks upon the Paris subway system. Metro stations were subjected to bombing campaigns between August and November. St Michel Metro was bombed on July 25, 1995. This incident killed eight people and seriously injured 87. The bomb had comprised explosives and nails packed into a glass vessel, causing laceration injuries to its victims. The financier of the bombings, and the man responsible for the St Michel subway station attack, was Rachid Ramda. He fled to Britain in November 1995 and was detained in prison, fighting extradition to France.
 
Ramda was finally extradited on December 1, 2005. Ramda was sentenced to 10 years in jail on March 29, 2006. Two other individuals, Boualem Bensaid and Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, were sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in the Paris subway attacks on October 30, 2002. Bensaid had already been serving a 30-year sentence for a failed plan to attack a high speed train travelling from Lyon to Paris on August 26, 1995. Another member of the cell, Khaled Kelkal, was shot by police on September 29, 1995. His notebooks led to the arrest of Bensaid.
 
The presence of GIA in Europe was not only to carry out terror attacks upon their tradition enemies. Through its contacts in Europe, the GIA was able to raise funds through drug running, and also trafficking of weaponry.
 
An affiliated group existed in Montreal called Fateh Kamel, named after its founder, a naturalized Canadian from Algeria. Arrested in 1999 for supporting a terror plot against targets in France, Kamel was freed in January 2005. According to the Jamestown Foundation, the Fateh Kamel cell and a linked cell in Istanbul (led by Mokhtar Kaddi) gained finances from credit card fraud and theft, including vehicle theft. One of the members of the Montreal cell was Ahmed Ressam, the “Millennium Bomber.”
 

 
In Algeria, GIA continued to mount terror attacks against their own people, and against heir sworn enemies – Christians, Jews and foreigners. On March 27, 1996, seven Trappist (Cistercian) monks who lived at the Notre Dame de l’Atlas monastery at Tibhirine were kidnapped. Armed GIA members came to the monastery claiming they needed a doctor. The monastery’s ailing 82-year-old medic was among the seven individuals taken hostage. The heads of the monks were discovered lying by a roadside on May 30, 1996. Their bodies were never recovered. Djabel Zitouni would later announce that the monks had been killed on May 21, 1996. The announcement ran: “We have slit the throats of the seven monks, in accordance with our promise.”
 
In 2002, an Algerian security officer, Abdelkadr Tigha, claimed that the monks were initially kidnapped by a small Islamist group supported by the Algerian army, and then handed over to the GIA. The monks were decapitated by the GIA when the governments of Algeria and France refused to negotiate their release. In July 2009, a French general, Francois Buchwalter, asserted that the Algerian army was responsible for the monks’ deaths. French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to release classified documents related to the case.
 
 
After Djamel Zitouni was killed in a battle for power on July 16, 1996, Anton Zouabri became the leader of GIA. He announced that “in our war, there is no neutrality. Except for those who are with us, all others are renegades.” Zouabri’s war against anyone not considered an ally was ferocious and lacking in conscience. The elderly, women children and even babies had their throats slit. Throughout 1997, atrocities against civilians proliferated. Entire villages and entire families would be targets for Zouabri’s army. As well as slitting throats, they also burned some victims alive. Many bodies were mutilated.
 
Some GIA and GSPC operatives previously found a spiritual home in Britain at Finsbury Park Mosque when it was taken over by hook-handed preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri. In September 1997, Zouabri admitted responsibility for atrocities against civilians, declaring all Algerians to be infidels in the journal Al-Ansar. Abu Hamza responded by withdrawing his support. On the night of February 8, 2002, Zouabri and two associates were killed in a gunfight in Boufarik, his hometown.
 
The successor to Antar Zouabri was Rachid Oukali, also known as Abou Tourab. The death of Zouabri marked the end of GIA’s period of “power” in Algeria. Many of its operatives had fled abroad, and these would later rejoin the group when it had rebranded itself as GSPC.
 
GIA carried on for a couple of years but by 1998 it had already become a weakened force, riven into factions that had descended into banditry. In August 2002 in the Chlef region, members of the GIA killed 21 members of an extended family. Even a three-month-old baby was shot.
 
The Algerian government had announced a truce with AIS on October 1, 1997 and at the start of 2000, the AIS disbanded.
 
GSPC
 
The September 1997 declaration that all Algerians deserved death for not supporting GIA apparently offended al Qaeda’s leadership to a point that they wanted a new group to replace it. In May 1998, the GSPC was formed, under the leadership of Hassan Hattab, who had been a GIA district leader in Kabiliye. Even though he had been involved in some of the massacres of civilians, Hattab preferred the group to attack soldiers and representatives of Algerian authority rather than ordinary people.
 
 
Hattab was assisted in forming the GSPC by a GIA leader for the Sahara and Sahel regions called Molhtar Belmokhtar. This individual, born on June 1, 1972, had been to Afghanistan at the age of 19 and had there met other luminaries in the mujahideen. Belmokhtar returned to Algeria around the time the civil war began.
 
In 2003, Hassan Hattab was ousted from his role as leader, apparently because he was seen to be too moderate. Belmokhtar then went into a semi-independent position, consolidating his relations with the factions in the south, rather than being allied too strongly with the GSPC leadership. At the time of this writing, Belmokhtar is emerging as a force in his own right. Hassan Hattab would surrender to the Algerian authorities on September 29, 2007.
 
Hassan Hattab was succeeded by Nabil Sahrawi. In September 2003, Sahrawi announced that GSPC had allegiance to Al Qaeda. Back in September 12, 2002, a Yemeni senior figure within al Qaeda had been killed by Algerian security forces near Algiers. Apparently, Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan had been in the region since June 2001.
 
In March 2003, 32 foreign tourists were kidnapped from southern Algeria by GSPC activists. Michaela Spitzer, one of the abductees, died of exhaustion in the desert. Some were released. The group wanted $5 million ransom money for each hostage, to gain income with which to purchase weaponry. Finally, on August 18, 2003 the remaining hostages, who had been transported to Mali, were freed.
 
In Algeria in 2005, most of the 409 fatalities that took place as a result of terrorist conflict were caused by battles between the GSPC and the army and security forces. On Thursday September 29, 2005, the Algerian government let its civilians decide in a referendum whether or not to give an amnesty to Islamist fighters and outlaws (including the GSPC, which at this time was the only group with influence). The citizenry decided to grant an amnesty to the Islamists, if they promised to lay down their weaponry.
 
On October 1, 2005, almost as soon as the results of the referendum had been announced, GSPC’s leader Abu Musab Abdelwadud made an announcement on one of its websites. His message read: “The Jihad will go on … we have promised God to continue the Jihad and the combat.” On the same day, three Algerian civilians were killed in terrorist actions, almost certainly carried out by GSPC. Two people died when their vehicle ran over a land-mine in Medea province, and a 62-year-old breeder of animals was decapitated in M’Sila province.
 
Abu Musab Abdelwadud – whose real name is Abdelmalek Droukdel – took over the running of GSPC after Nabil Sahrawi was killed in a gun battle with Algerian security forces on June 18, 2004. The battle took place in the Kabilya mountains, 150 miles east of Algiers, the capital. Sahrawi’s deputy, widely tipped to replace him, was killed in the same fight.
 
GSPC in Europe and beyond
 
Abu Doha was a leader of a GPSC cell, who had earlier trained at al Qaeda’s Khalden training camp in Afghanistan. On July 2, 2001 an indictment was made against him, registered at the Southern District of New York. The indictment claims that around spring 1998, Doha planned with others to use a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.
 
Doha went to London in May 1999 and here, using contacts based at Finsbury Park Mosque, he apparently coordinated the activities of extremists. According to Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory, the authors of The Suicide Factory (p 117), Doha operated in the mosque with the knowledge of hook-hande Abu Hamza, and “exerted a major influence over the conduct of affairs at the mosque.”
 
A British judge, Mr Justice Ouseley, noted of Abu Doha:
 
“In Afghanistan he had held a senior position in the training camps organizing the passage of mujahideen volunteers to and from those camps. He had a wide range of extremist Islamic contacts inside and outside the United Kingdom including links to individuals involved in terrorist operations. He was involved in a number of extremist agendas. By being in the United Kingdom he had brought cohesion to Algerian extremists based here and he had strengthened the existing links with individuals associated with the terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
 
Abu Doha went under many aliases: Amar Makhlulif, Didier Ajuelos, Dr. Haider, The Doctor, Rachid Boukhalfa and Rachid Kefflous. He was arrested in February 2001 as he tried to leave to go to Saudi Arabia. He was carrying a false passport.
 
Doha was held in Belmarsh Jail, while he fought extradition to the United States.
 
As listed in his U.S. indictment, Doha is generally assumed to have been behind the plot to bomb Los Angeles airport, the “Millennium Bomb Plot.” Ahmed Ressam (aka Benni Antoine Norris) was the individual who was scheduled to attack LAX airport on December 31, 1999. Ressam had links to the Fatah Kemal cell in Montreal. Ressam was staying illegally in Canada, adopting an assumed name. He was arrested at Port Angeles, Washington State, as he tried to enter the U.S. from Canada onboard a ferry. He was driving a rented car. Inside this vehicle were four bombs. Initially it was thought that Ressam had intended to blow up Seattle’s Space Needle, as he had pre-booked a room in a motel nearby.
 
 
Ressam was convicted at a court in Los Angeles on April 6, 2001. On the same day, he received a five-year jail sentence from a French court. Tried in absentia, he was convicted of belonging to a network of Islamist groups. In the U.S., Ressam was convicted on nine counts, including attempting to blow up LAX airport. However, it was not until Wednesday July 27, 2005 that he was finally sentenced. He received 22 years in jail, 13 years less than the amount sought by prosecutors..
 
Ressam’s co-conspirators who were sought by America were Samir Ait Mohamed and Abu Doha. Samir Ait Mohamed, a former law student, had lived in Montreal at the time of Ressam’s arrest. Ressam had intended to give evidence against him, but in 2003, he stopped cooperating with investigators. Ressam had originally been assisting United States officials by describing how Afghanistan training camps were set up. His decision to stop talking caused the plans for a trial of his accomplice to be abandoned. Samir Ait Mohamed remained in Canadian custody until Wednesday January 11, 2006, when he was quietly deported back to Algeria.
 
One of Ressam’s former room-mates was Mourad Ikhef, who had apparently given him advice on the plan to blow up LAX airport. As a result of his alleged involvement with this plot, Ikhef was deported back to Algeria in 2003.
 
Additionally, Ahmad Ressam’s testimony against Abu Doha was vital to the United States being able to pursue a legal case. The decision by Ressam to no longer cooperate led to the United States to withdraw their indictment against Abu Doha in August 2005. In Britain, the authorities had been holding Doha in Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire. They were aware of bugged phone conversations from 2001, involving Algerian extremists based in Italy, which referred to planned attacks by their British brothers.”
 
Doha was being held in custody with a view to deporting him back to Algeria. Doha went to an appeals court to challenge deportation and won. In April 2008, fitted with an electronic tagging device, he was released under strict curfew conditions.
 
Abu Doha, described by the Foreign Office as having “direct links to Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda figures”, was also thought by some investigators to be the man “controlling” Kamel Bourgass who also worshipped at Finsbury Park Mosque. Bourgass often slept at the mosque.
 
 
 
Bourgass gained notoriety for his plans to create ricin poison, extracted from the beans of the Castor Oil Plant (Ricinus communis) and also for his murder of a serving British police officer. Bourgass had employed four aliases since 2000 when he arrived in Britain from Algeria.
 
On April 13, 2005 Bourgass was given a 17-year jail term for plotting to spread the toxin ricin and other poisons on the streets of Britain. He was officially convicted of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by the use of poisons and/or explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury.” Four other individuals, Samir Asli, Khalid Alwerfeli, Mouloud Bouhrama and Kamel Merzoug, had similar charges against them dropped. On April 8, 2005, a jury found that three associates of Bourgass, Mouloud Sihali, David Khalef, Sidali Feddag and Mustapha Taleb, were not guilty of “conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.”
 
Bourgass at this time was already serving a life sentence for the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake. This had been handed to him in June 2004. The British authorities vaguely became aware of a plot to leave poisons on a tube (subway) train in London. This information came from Algeria, and the authorities quickly reacted to it, in a measure dubbed “Operation Springbourne.” On January 3, 2003, anti-terrorist police raided an apartment above a drug store at 352, High Road in Wood Green, North London. In the apartment they found castor beans, chemical processing material, and photocopied recipes for ricin. Additionally, £4,000 was found in an envelope hidden inside a cupboard. Bourgass was nowhere to be found. He was sleeping at Finsbury Park Mosque.
 
A few days later, Bourgass fled north on a bus, hoping to leave the country. He went to an apartment in Crumpsall Lane, Manchester. When this apartment was raided by police, Bourgass stabbed D.C. Oake eight times.
 
On February 12, 2003, Colin Powell spoke of the ricin found in Europe claiming it had originated in Iraq. The ricin allegedly found in Bourgass’ Wood Green “factory” was not imported, and neither was it in the concentrated strength that had been widely reported then and subsequently. In fact, even though chemical tests had initially registered the presence of ricin, there was no ricin. The recipe was nowhere near complete. Even if the recipe had been completed according to the exact instructions, the poison would not have been toxic through contact. The photocopied material was not from an al Qaeda manual, as suggested at the time, but from a translation of a passage from The Poisoners’ Handbook.
 
Despite this, a year after Bourgass was arrested, a GSPC group based in Vénissieux, Lyon, were found with ricin. Additionally, there were several plots in France and elsewhere in Europe in which the GSPC certainly intended to cause widespread death and destruction. Individuals involved in some of these plots were associates of Abu Doha.
 
In Part Two, I will describe how GSPC officially became part of the Al Qaeda command structure. I will document the various European plots that were attemted by the group, and also what is known about their current activities in Algeria and elsewhere.
 
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Adrian Morgan is a British based writer and artist. He has previously contributed to various publications, including the Guardian and New Scientist and is a former Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. He is currently compiling a book on the demise of democracy and the growth of extremism in Britain.

 

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