Word: tunisians
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...Madrid suburb and sweeps in several countries, antiterrorism efforts in Europe intensified last week. Three suspects in last month's Madrid train bombings blew themselves up as Spanish police engaged them in a standoff Saturday night that also killed an agent. Officials had earlier in the week identified a Tunisian man, Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, as "leader and coordinator" of the train blasts that killed 191, and they had a warrant for his arrest as well as the arrests of five Moroccan accomplices. It wasn't immediately clear whether Fakhet was linked to the raid. The standoff occurred just...
...questions - answered and unanswered - in Europe's antiterror campaign. Who headed the Spanish cell? Investigative judge Juan del Olmo believes Fakhet, the man on the tape, was the "dynamizing element" of the Spanish cell. Although most of those involved in the 3/11 bombings were Moroccan, he was Tunisian - hence his nickname "El Tunecino." His biography has striking parallels to that of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Hamburg 9/11 cell. After growing up in a middle-class family in Tunis, Fakhet moved to Madrid in 1994, armed with €29,500 in Spanish-government scholarships to study economics. "At first...
Building Bridges THE MIDDLE EAST Syrian officials last week rejected Israeli President Moshe Katsav's invitation for his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad, to visit Jerusalem for talks. But Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom is a traveling man. He's met repeatedly with senior Tunisian, Bahraini, and Qatari officials, as well as King Mohammed VI of Morocco and Jordan's King Abdullah. Next week, Shalom will become the first Israeli Foreign Minister to visit Jordan since the onset of the intifadeh more than three years ago. But the trip Shalom wants most of all, to Damascus, remains out of reach. Senior...
Meanwhile, passenger lists for Air France flights scheduled around Christmas included about a dozen names that were "of interest," says a U.S. intelligence official. Most notable was a name matching that of a Tunisian jihadist who holds a pilot's license. On Christmas Eve six Air France flights between Paris and Los Angeles were summarily canceled. "The Americans came to us with extremely detailed and explicit intelligence information," says a French official. "The Americans felt with so many questions still looming, the safest thing would be to cancel the flights--an opinion we shared. It's as simple as that...
...French had been worried about a holiday-season attack. Plainclothes members of an elite branch of the French police were installed on international flights that were considered sensitive. But so far, French officials have nothing tangible to show for the abundance of caution. The passenger suspected of being a Tunisian radical turned out to be a child who coincidentally shared the same name. Likewise, the British Airways flight to Dulles--a route that had also been mentioned in electronic chatter--netted no arrests...