Madrid 'plotted in Sahara'

2004-03-20 19:35

Rabat - Last week's deadly Madrid train bombings were plotted by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in North Africa's so-called "terrorism triangle", the Moroccan daily Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribia reported on Saturday.

The daily quoted sources as saying Moroccan intelligence agencies were able to track the movements of people suspected of masterminding the Madrid attacks in what it described as an "al-Qaeda rear base", located in a desert area along Morocco's borders with Mali, Mauritania and Algeria.

The "triangle" was said to be home to two groups which recently joined the al-Qaeda network: Morocco's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat and a Moroccan branch of the Islamic Salvation Front, the paper said, without providing further details.

Fled to Sahara

But it quoted the sources as saying that as Moroccan security services tightened their noose around local Islamic extremists, many of those militants have fled to the remote Sahara region where arms trafficking is widespread.

The paper said most of the recent terror attacks in Europe were planned in that Saharan base.

It said several movements of suspected terrorists in Europe were merely a "decoy" to hide the Saharan rear base from the prying eyes of security services, particularly US intelligence which it said recently set up a monitoring post in southern Algeria.

The paper said its sources did not rule out that Spain's top al-Qaeda suspect, Spanish-Syrian Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, might have played a minor role by sheltering Islamic militants suspected of terrorism.

Spanish police suspect six Moroccans planted the bombs aboard four crowded commuter trains in Madrid March 11, killing 202 people.

Three of the Moroccans were arrested, including prime suspect Jamal Zougam, 30, who has alleged links to al-Qaeda and to suicide bombings in Casablanca that left 45 dead in May 2003.

Moroccan extremists have been implicated in several other major attacks in recent years, including the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the attacks on Morocco's cosmopolitan economic hub Casablanca in May last year.

- AFP