ISLAMIC JIHAD TRIAL PAPERS DETAIL AL QAIDA'S RUTHLESS TACTICS

Qaida at Work: Islamic Jihad Trial Papers Detail Ruthless Tactics

Susan Sachs New York Times Service
Thursday, November 22, 2001

CAIRO To support their terrorism, they skimmed money from a charity for Muslim orphans in Albania and robbed an Italian diplomat's home in Jordan. They acquired or forged seals from universities, border guards and the Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry.

They brooked no dissent or deceit: Suspecting that the 15-year-old son of one member in Sudan was an informant, they murdered the boy.

These were the hard-hearted, often itinerant men of Qaida at work, according to thousands of pages of documents produced for a 1999 trial of members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the terror group with whom Osama bin Laden eventually merged. These men used the Muslim pilgrimages to Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia as a cover for recruiting new members or passing cash from one member to another. They moved money around the globe to bail members out of jail in Algeria or Canada, and to finance applications for political asylum and thus implant terrorist cells in Western Europe.

The merger of Qaida and Islamic Jihad, gradual at first over a decade, then formalized in 1998, vastly enhanced Mr. bin Laden's reach and organizational ability.

After 1981, before moving under Qaida's umbrella, Islamic Jihad rarely scored successes in its attacks on Egyptian officials or interests. But the network that the two groups developed ranged across the world, extending from the United States to Yemen, from Azerbaijan to Britain. The headquarters in Afghanistan has been damaged, but not yet destroyed, by the American-led attacks.

U.S. officials accuse Jihad leaders and Mr. bin Laden of conspiring to plot murders, including the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa three years ago.

The confessions and investigative reports, provided to The New York Times by Montasser Zayat, the lawyer in Cairo who represented most defendants in the trial, show that the Egyptians provided tactical support for Qaida by forging travel documents, transferring money and arranging communications.

In early 1998, when the two groups announced that they had formed the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, the focus of Islamic Jihad shifted from overthrowing the Egyptian government to attacking U.S. interests. The merger also appeared to increase the Egyptians' sense of purpose, according to the confessions of defendants in the trial.

"Osama wanted to launch a guerrilla war not only in the Arab and Islamic world, but in the whole world," one Jihad member, Ahmed Ibrahim Sayed Naggar, said during his interrogation by Egyptian security agents.

"He believed these attacks would force America and its allies to change their policy in the Middle East and the Islamic world, and this would fulfill the ultimate goals of the Front. It would show the weakness of these Arab and Islamic leaders compared to the Front."

It is not clear what role Islamic Jihad or its leaders may have played in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington. But its fate is now intimately linked to that of Qaida; earlier this month, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, Jihad's leader and now Mr. bin Laden's second in command, was at Mr. bin Laden's side in a mud-hut hideout somewhere in Afghanistan, according to a Pakistani journalist who met with them.

The scope of the Jihad network is illustrated by the countries where the 107 defendants in the 1999 trial were arrested - Albania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. It was Egypt's biggest terrorism trial since that of Jihad members in 1981 for the assassination of Mr. Sadat. In what became known as "the trial of the Albanian returnees," the court convicted 87 people and sentenced 10 of them to death, including Dr. Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon, who was tried in absentia.

Mr. Zayat, the lawyer, said that the defendants were "certainly" tortured by Egyptian intelligence agents before they confessed to being Jihad members and gave up the names of their contacts. He declined to speculate on whether the content of the confessions was less credible because of the torture. There have also been reports that the CIA, which worked with the Albanian authorities to make arrests there, looked the other way when the Albanians used torture to extract confessions.

(Albania, whose chaotic transition from Communist rule after 1990 made it a magnet for the fugitive terrorists, was the first European state to join the more than 50 members in the Organization of the Islamic Conference.) However the confessions were obtained, they corroborated and amplified descriptions of the terrorist network from previous Egyptian trials, the New York trial of the embassy bombers and more recent investigations in Europe of Qaida. Many defendants in the 1999 trial said they had been members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad for nearly 20 years. They had served time in Egyptian prisons together after the killing of Mr. Sadat, as did Dr. Zawahiri, and had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. But many were also younger recruits, in their early 30s. They arrived in Afghanistan after the fighting stopped, when the anger of men like Dr. Zawahiri and Mr. bin Laden was turned on the United States and its Arab allies. They were drawn to the movement by conviction.

"It has nothing to do with age or era," said Mr. Zayat, who has defended thousands of Islamic militants over the years and served time in prison for his youthful involvement in an extremist movement. "It is ideology" with literature that "promotes the idea of jihad." The defendants in the 1999 trial described a network of isolated cells throughout the Middle East and Europe, staffed by people who kept in contact with Qaida and Jihad leaders in Afghanistan. Several men said that they had acquired forged passports, including a forged Saudi Arabian passport, from contacts in Damascus and Latakia in Syria during the 1990s.

They made frequent reference to Mr. bin Laden as the organization's financier and some spoke of a safe house that he financed in San'a, Yemen, the country where the U.S. destroyer Cole was rammed by suicide bombers in a boat in October 2000, with 17 sailors killed. The network maintained bank accounts in many countries - England, Germany, Poland and Albania, among them - and would send small amounts, less than $2,000 at a time, through the accounts to support the activities of its members.

Several defendants also referred to men living in Britain, Austria and Germany who worked with Jihad.