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Zarqawi Said Planning Chemical Attack in Europe
Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is believed to be planning a chemical weapons strike in Europe, Agence France-Presse reported today (see GSN, March 1). “We in Europe have been afraid that a big bang is coming sometime and that Zarqawi is planning it,” an official with Germany’s BND intelligence agency said in the April edition of the German magazine Cicero. The al-Qaeda affiliated operative and his associates have sought weapons components in the north Caucasus region of Russia and in Georgia, the source said. It remains unknown if their efforts succeeded, another BND official said. “We only know that he is working on it,” the official said. About 150 German security personnel have been looking for clues on a possible attack, focusing on Berlin and the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg, according to Cicero (Agence France-Presse, March 30). Meanwhile, U.S. officials said that a former Iraqi solider being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba had helped plot chemical attacks in Pakistan against the U.S. and other embassies, the Associated Press reported today. The suspect was a “trusted agent” of Osama bin Laden in al-Qaeda and also worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan, AP reported. A two-page summary of evidence against the 39-year-old man states that he went to Pakistan in 1998 with an Iraqi intelligence agent “for the purpose of” using chemical mortars against embassies. The Iraq Survey Group that searched for Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction reported in September that an Iraq-based insurgent group in 2003 had produced nine chemical mortars containing the toxic pesticide malathion, AP reported. The mortars apparently went unused (Robert Burns, Associated Press/Miami Herald, March 30).
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