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By Root 1080 0

one in which to insert a trace as they had brought only one device. Early on Christmas Eve, Scotland Yard intercepted a call from a member of this cell to Abu Doha in London in which there was direct talk of an imminent attack. Abu Doha was one of the founders of the Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat, or GSPC. The excesses of the GIA in Algeria during the 1990s had even alienated such spiritual godfathers as Abu Qatada, the Palestinian Omar Mahmoud Othman, who issued the GIA’s newsletter Al-Ansar from London. One result of this was the formation of the GSPC, which while refraining from the GIA’s mindless violence inside Algeria made up for it by swimming into the wake of Al Qaeda. Abu Doha met bin Laden in Afghanistan and agreed to put his European network at his disposal like a temporary franchising operation. That was how Ahmad Ressam ended up crossing the Canadian-US border to blow up LAX. The call from Frankfurt to London forced the German police to act. They raided the Frankfurt flat, arresting four of the five-man cell. Two of them were failed asylum seekers living in Britain who, despite committing crimes like drug dealing, had not been deported by the British. Another was a convicted GIA terrorist with French citizenship, which did not stop him moving freely between Britain, France and Germany. A fourth was an Algerian who had been refused leave to stay by the Germans when he admitted having procured arms and ammunition for the FIS, but who then disappeared anyway, except when he was repeatedly arrested for theft.

In an apartment used by this cell, German police found thirty kilograms of potassium permanganate, a chemical usually sold in quantities of five to ten grams to treat children with eczema. It is also suitable for making bombs. The men had disguised themselves as respectable doctors embarking on an aid mission to Africa, who visited forty-eight pharmacies near Frankfurt airport claiming they had forgotten they needed prescriptions for the chemical in their haste to reach the paediatric clinics where they intended to do good. This hard-luck story worked on most pharmacists. In another apartment rented by the group, the German police found a twenty-minute videotape recording a journey from Baden-Baden to Strasbourg. In Strasbourg the camera focused on the cathedral façade, and especially on shoppers in the Christmas market. There was a soundtrack in Arabic: ‘These are the enemies of God taking a stroll … These are the enemies of God. You will go to hell. God willing.’ The plan seems to have been to put bombs inside pressure cookers, but there is no certainty, for at their trial the defendants maintained silence, only to shriek, ‘You are all Jews. I don’t need the court. Allah is my defender. Our only judge is Allah,’ as they were sentenced. The entire plot had been organised from London, where many members of the cell lived. The British arrested Abu Qatada, and then Abu Doha as he tried to flee from Heathrow. Italian police rolled up a Milan-based cell after their extensive electronic eavesdropping revealed that a Munich-based Libyan was trying to replay the Strasbourg attack with the aid of a toxic-gas attack.68

The continent’s lax asylum laws meant that, whereas in 1983 there were eighty thousand asylum seekers, by 1992 the figure was seven hundred thousand, with highly organised smuggling rings bringing in many more illegally, often in deplorable circumstances. This laxity enabled several serious Islamist players to gain a foothold, despite the fact that they routinely told multiple lies to gain the requisite permissions, as when Abu Hamza contracted a bigamous marriage with an Englishwoman in order to gain leave to stay. Even when they broke the terms of their asylum or committed crimes, as in the case of the entire Strasbourg group, it was the exception rather than the rule that any European government would deport those concerned. The Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Shibh claimed to German authorities that he was ‘Omar’ fleeing persecution in his native Sudan. Even before they rejected his claim, Ramzi bin