Quotes of the Day

Neighbors were jolted from their beds before dawn last Friday when Spanish police burst into flats in an apartment block in the small country town of Banyoles, north of Girona. Simultaneous raids were taking place in a dozen other apartments across northeastern Spain. By the end of the day, investigators held 16 suspects — 14 believed to be Algerian and two believed to be Moroccan — of the 20 originally detained. They discovered large quantities of bomb-making material, manuals on chemical warfare, and equipment to manufacture false credit cards and identity documents, as well as a cache of timers, fuses and remote-control devices. According to Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, the gang was preparing a chemical attack.

Two days before and 950 km away in Badia Polesine, a remote town of 10,000 in Italy's industrial northeast, Carabinieri paramilitary police raided an abandoned farmhouse after monitoring a group of immigrants suspected of holding illegal weapons. No weapons were found, but sniffer dogs located a kilogram of C4, the explosive used in last year's Bali bombing, inside a sock thrown into a dirty-clothes hamper. Five Moroccans were arrested. Later, police searched a nearby apartment that was used as a makeshift mosque and found a local map with a nearby NATO base circled on it, as well as a list of all the NATO facilities in the vicinity.

And just two days before that in another pre-dawn raid, this time in a shabby neighborhood in North London, a police helicopter swooped down on the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park while 150 police battered down doors and broke windows to conduct a search of the building. Seven men, six North Africans and one East European, were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000. At the end of the week, two North Africans remained in custody under the Terrorism Act, one man was released and four others held on alleged immigration offenses. The operation, linked to the discovery of traces of the deadly poison ricin three weeks ago in a nearby neighborhood, also uncovered a stun gun, a fake firearm, a CS gas canister and a slew of passports, credit cards and identity cards, many believed to be forged.

The string of arrests in Spain, Italy and Britain all took place in areas with large immigrant populations, especially from North Africa, and involved shared intelligence among Spanish, Italian, British and French security officials. The raids could turn out to be among the most prominent successes to date in Europe's battle against terrorism. But they are also worrying signs that there could still be many extremists at large across the Continent, plotting fresh attacks.

Spain has proved to be an important link in al-Qaeda's European terror network. Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, visited Salou on Spain's Costa Dorada in the summer of 2001. Investigators believe the trip was part of the final planning for the Sept. 11 attacks. Since November 2001, 40 people have been detained by Spanish police as part of their terror investigations.

Aznar said the detainees were members of an extremist Algerian Islamic movement with known ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and described the raids as "an extremely important strike in the war on international terrorism." Guillermo Ruiz Polanco, the investigating magistrate who ordered the operation after consultation with French and British authorities, said he was analyzing intelligence that the suspects had connections to the group that carried out the Bali bombing last October, in which 200 people died.

Italian authorities say it is still too early to know what exactly the suspects in Badia Polesine might have been planning. In addition to the explosives and map, several letters — written in Arabic and addressed to locations in England — were discovered. Since Sept. 11, the police have arrested 55 men, mostly North Africans, on suspicion of terrorist activity. According to one Italian intelligence officer, there are roughly 1,200 suspected terrorists still at large in the country. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in Rome for bilateral talks, acknowledged the looming threat during an impromptu press conference. Ashcroft praised Italy's success, saying: "The arrests are concrete evidence that Italy takes terrorism seriously and fights it aggressively."

Italian investigators are nervous about the effect that an eventual U.S.-led war against Iraq could have on sleeper cells in the country. Italy, like Spain and Britain, is seen as supporting American plans in Iraq, and an invasion could trigger terrorist reprisals in Europe. "Terrorist activity hasn't increased in recent weeks," says a top Italian antiterrorism official. "But this is a particularly serious moment. Everything depends on what happens on the international front. If there is no war, there is less of a possibility for an attack."

The threat of terrorism was clearly on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's mind last week when he told the Commons Liaison Committee that he believed it was "inevitable" that the country would be targeted, given the terrorist network uncovered by recent arrests. After the makeshift ricin laboratory was found three weeks ago, seven North Africans were arrested, most of them identified as Algerians by French investigators; five were eventually charged with chemical weapons production and terrorism offenses. The following week, another ricin-linked raid on a flat in Manchester led to the arrests of four more North Africans, one of whom was charged with the fatal stabbing of a policeman, but not terrorist offenses. Two others were detained for alleged immigration offenses, and a fourth was charged under the Terrorism Act.

To many, the raid on the Finsbury Park mosque was a sign that the ricin scare had finally convinced British police to crack down on what's regarded as a magnet for radicals. For much of last week police trooped in and out of the red-brick mosque, as vanloads of cops kept watch from inside metal crowd barriers. While there seemed little scope for counter-action by angry mosque supporters, authorities were taking no chances. When a hooded youth in a long black gown approached the barriers, an undercover cop in jeans and trainers suddenly materialized beside him. Meanwhile, from inside the tightly curtained mosque, police emerged at intervals with computers and plastic sacks of discs and documents.

By Thursday night, the police had finished their search and withdrawn, handing over the keys to the mosque trustees. But Friday morning, the mosque was still shut — this time it was the trustees who had padlocked the building, and even had its lower windows barricaded in corrugated aluminum. The mosque's firebrand cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri, who lost one eye and most of two arms to a landmine in Afghanistan, was instead forced to hold Friday prayers in the street for some 150 worshipers, a service given protection by the police. The trustees have clashed for years with Abu Hamza, who effectively took control of the mosque after he arrived there in late 1996 (see box).

Abu Hamza was briefly arrested in 1999 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but British police have made no effort to silence him. In the U.S., he is accused of having ties with the Islamic Army of Aden, which claimed responsibility for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and of links with James Ujaama, an American awaiting trial for allegedly attempting to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon. Ujaama reportedly ran a website in London for Abu Hamza. The Yemenis also want to question Abu Hamza about his alleged involvement in a plot in Yemen, where his son and stepson were both arrested on terrorist charges. And Abu Hamza has also annoyed Britain's Charity Commission by refusing to stop preaching, despite a ban they placed on him last spring. Last week, however, the Commission said he had met a new deadline for making his case and that it would be reviewed over the next weeks.

The Finsbury Park mosque has long been rumored to be a center for jihad recruitment under the aegis of Abu Hamza. Many prominent terrorist suspects spent time there, though Abu Hamza says he did not know any of them personally. Abu Hamza's anti-Western rhetoric and militancy has earned him a sinister reputation, but his supporters say he has done a great deal for the community by encouraging young men to take up religion rather than drugs and alcohol. Since Sept. 11, the mosque has been under constant surveillance, not only by British security services but also by the intelligence agencies of Muslim nations, whose governments Abu Hamza regularly denounces.

Indeed, many moderate Muslims have drifted away from the North London Central Mosque, put off by Abu Hamza's jihad rhetoric and the shifting crowd of itinerant young Muslim men, many of them Algerian, to whom he offers shelter and anonymity. Still, the raid did leave bruised feelings in the Muslim community, despite police insistence they avoided searching the prayer hall and covered their shoes before entering the building. Omar Bakri, the founder of the extremist Al-Muhajiroun movement and a visiting preacher at Finsbury Park, calls the raid a way "to silence the Muslims before bombing Iraq." But Algerian Refugee Council founder Mohammed Sekkoum, who claims Abu Hamza is tarnishing the image of Muslims, was also unhappy. "The raid was very aggressive, a mosque is after all no different from a church or a synagogue," he says.

The fact that the last few weeks' raids and arrests have all involved North Africans, many of them Algerians and many of them asylum seekers, could have a worrying backlash. Sekkoum warns there are up to 100 Algerian asylum seekers in Britain said by the community to have committed terrorist acts in Algeria. Already there are voices in Britain demanding a more rigorous system for removing failed asylum applicants. "We Algerians are killed in our own country and now we are seen as dangerous here," says Abu Maria, an Algerian who was at Abu Hamza's prayers last Friday. "We can't go anywhere."

In Italy, too, tension is high after restrictive anti-illegal immigration laws came into effect last year that make it obligatory for police to detain anyone without proper papers. The crackdown limits the possibility for immigrants to begin building a life for themselves, and "forces some into illicit activity, like producing false documents, that offers support to terrorist organizations," says a Bologna prosecutor involved in terrorism investigations. "Immigration doesn't mean terrorism. Of course, the terrorist can take advantage of this movement and hide himself within the thousands of upstanding immigrants." Separating legitimate immigrants from would-be terrorists is the next challenge for Europe's intelligence agencies.

• HELEN GIBSON London, JEFF ISRAELY Rome and JANE WALKER Madrid
• Police raids show that the threat of terror is real