Piercing Al Qaeda's camouflage

You find them all over Europe, on the outskirts of big cities everywhere: neglected suburbs ranging from the modest to the poor, where immigrant families have made their homes.

In Spain those families are mostly Moroccan; in France they have come from all over North Africa; in Germany they are mainly of Turkish origin; in England of Pakistani, Indian, or Bangladeshi background.

But they all have one thing in common, police investigators are discovering. They offered an ideal environment for Al Qaeda operatives seeking to blend into their surroundings and thus evade detection by the authorities.

The latest round of terrorist suspect arrests in Europe - last week's sweep caught 16 men and one woman in Leicester, central England - was a case in point. Leicester's 35,000 Muslim citizens have built themselves 19 mosques and Islamic centers. In some of them, Al Qaeda agents apparently spread their message and found new recruits.

"Parts of Europe have significant visible minorities, people that Al Qaeda could merge naturally with," says Michael Levi, professor of criminology at Cardiff University in Wales.

"Like organized crime groups, they could blend into routine activities."

Since Sept. 11, European investigators have uncovered a picture of their continent that they had barely glimpsed before - as a key refuge, logistical base, and organizational headquarters for Al Qaeda.

Police have arrested scores of suspected Al Qaeda members in France, Italy, Germany (where the ringleaders of the Sept. 11 hijackers lived), Belgium, Holland, Spain, Bosnia, and Britain.

Europe offers more than just ethnic camouflage, however, to North African or Middle Eastern terrorists.

European integration has helped them. In the European Union, which has done away with most border controls, they can slip from one country to another without risking passport checks, for example.

And the lack of full integration has helped them too, since police and judicial agencies remain under national control. "They have traded on coordination weaknesses in intelligence in different countries," says Prof. Levi. "People never put the whole picture together."

Geographically, Europe sits in a strategic part of the world, with good communications links to the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. It offers attractive targets itself for terrorists: French police have uncovered what they say was a plot led by alleged Al Qaeda member Djamel Beghal to blow up the US Embassy in Paris, and Italian police last year arrested several men in connection with a plan to blow up the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

At the same time, says Magnus Ranstorp, an expert at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland, Al Qaeda cells can take advantage of "the lack of intrusiveness of the authorities into ordinary peoples' lives."

Radical Islamist clerics have been able to preach "jihad" openly in mosques in many European countries, protected by free speech laws.

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