Spanish daily details role of Youssef Belhadj in Madrid bomb attack BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Feb 28, 2005
Text of report by D. Martinez and P. Munoz, "Al-Qa'idah spokesman in Europe travelled to Madrid at end of 2003 to order 3/11 massacre", published by Spanish newspaper ABC web site on 28 February; subheadings as published: Madrid: Now, just before the first anniversary of the 3/11 attacks, the police have managed to clear up one of its first and main uncertainties: which Al-Qa'idah man travelled to Madrid to order the carrying out of the massacre? The question now has an answer: Youssef Belhadj, spokesman in Europe of the organization led by Usamah Bin-Ladin. Also attributed to this Moroccan, who was arrested in Belgium on 1 February, is authorship of the communique in which responsibility for the attack was claimed, which was recorded on the video found in a rubbish bin near the M-30 mosque [in Madrid]. At the request of [Spanish] Judge del Olmo, Youssef Belhadj was arrested in Belgium just hours after the police arrested four members of his family in Spain. Belhadj stayed at the home of his female cousin and his two nephews in Leganes when almost three months before the killings he travelled from Belgium to Madrid to activate the cell. According to sources in the investigation, the Moroccan met several of the actual perpetrators of the massacre, including Serhane Abdelmajid Fakhet, [alias] The Tunisian, and some of the fugitives: Mohamed Afalah (right-hand man of Allekama Lamari), Abdelmajid Bouchar and Mohamed Belhadj, who, like Youssef Belhadj, belong to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, the terrorist organization on which all the lines of investigation into the attacks converge. Its definite connection to Al-Qa'idah was agreed in February 2002 during a meeting which the top leaders of the Libyan, Moroccan and Tunisian Islamic Combatant Groups held in Istanbul (Turkey). In this "summit", the three factions, as well as being incorporated into Al-Qa'idah's North African network, agreed that they should wage the "jihad" in the countries where the terrorist cells were established. This meant that to wage the "holy war" a "good Muslim" did not have to go to the places where there was an open conflict with Islam, such as Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan or Iraq. One of the consequences of the "Istanbul agreements" was the role to be played thereafter by Youssef Belhadj, who combined his activity as Al-Qa'idah spokesman in Europe with his membership of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. He was arrested in Belgium for his membership of this terrorist organization, along with other Islamists, on 19 March 2004, that is to say, eight days after the Madrid attacks. In July he was released on bail with the requirement that he remain on Belgian territory. However Belhadj circumvented this measure at least once. After his arrest on 1 February [2005] the investigators of the 3/11 massacre learnt that the Moroccan travelled to Spain at the end of 2003 to meet the Madrid cell. [all dates as published] Response to the Iraq war Belhadj was with Serhane "The Tunisian", the spiritual leader of the 3/11 cell, who, together with Driss al-Chebli (arrested for his connection with Abu Dahdah's cell) and Mustafa Maymouni (leader of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group in prison for the Casablanca attacks), expressed their wish to carry out attacks in Spain in response to the Iraq conflict and the Spanish government's stance. Having been left on his own on account of the arrests of Chebli - in "Operation Date" - and Maymouni, The Tunisian, with the decision already having been taken to carry out attacks in Spain, made use of different groups of Islamists to form the operational cell. One of them was the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, of which Mohamed Afalah, Mohamed Belhadj and Abdelmajid Bouchar were members in Spain, and Youssef Belhadj also met them in Madrid. This is not the only link between the fugitives Afalah, Belhadj and Bouchar and the Al-Qa'idah spokesman for Europe, whose extradition to Spain is pending. In fact two days after the explosion at the flat in Leganes (3 April 2004), Mohamed Afalah, one of the fugitives, telephoned his brother Ibrahim from Barcelona to ask him to go to "the house of Ibrahim [Moussaten] in Leganes" to ask for Youssef Belhadj's telephone numbers in Belgium. Moussaten, arrested by the police on 1 February with three other family members, is the nephew of his mother's side of Youssef Belhadj. Ibrahim obtained the telephone numbers and gave them to his brother in a second call made by the fugitive. Hence the investigators suspected from the start that the destination of the three fugitives after the suicide of the seven terrorists in Leganes was Belgium, although the Netherlands was also indicated as a possibility. Training camp As well as facilitating the escape of Afalah, Bouchar and Belhadj, the police believe that Ibrahim and Mohamed Moussaten are supposedly linked with the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group's structure in Europe, specifically with the leaders of this organization arrested in Belgium (in March 2004) and France (June 2004). In fact one of the Moussaten brothers had received a proposal from his uncle Youssef Belhadj to go to a training camp in Afghanistan to train as a mujahedin (fighter). Source: ABC web site, Madrid, in Spanish 28 Feb 05 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Give underprivileged students the materials they need to learn. 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