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The Talkative Terrorist on Tape: Madrid Plot ‘Was My Project’

Jul 12, 2004 9:21 am By Robert Spencer

Intriguing revelations about Madrid 3/11 and more, from the New York Times (thanks to the many who sent me this link):

MADRID, July 10 “” Terrorists are not usually talkers. But the man who calls himself the mastermind of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid is an exception.

For nearly three months, the Italian police have eavesdropped on Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, “Muhammad the Egyptian” as the 32-year-old Egyptian is known. The contents of his conversations, both in custody in Milan and before his arrest last month, have provided the police with a mother lode of information about the secret world of a man who claims to have recruited suicide bombers and organized terrorist operations in the name of Islam.

Senior Spanish investigators believe that Mr. Ahmed played an important role in the Madrid bombings, which killed 190 people, and could indeed be the architect of the operation, although they are still searching for other leading suspects. The Italian authorities arrested Mr. Ahmed after his monitored conversations spoke of an imminent attack in an undisclosed location.

Dozens of pages of transcripts obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials in Spain, Italy, Germany and France have shed light on Mr. Ahmed and his ability over the years to take on new identities, cross borders and avoid the police as he pressed his cause against the West. They also offer a case study of the challenges and frustrations Europe faces in monitoring radicals, routing out sleeper cells and prosecuting and convicting those they arrest.

In Germany in 1999 and 2000, Mr. Ahmed served 16 months in a detention center, feigning different Arabic accents and pretending to be a “stateless Palestinian” seeking political asylum.

In Madrid in 2001 and 2002, he befriended a group of radical Muslims, some of whom were involved in the March 11 bombings and were killed in a suicide operation while trying to escape the police.

In a Paris suburb in 2003, he eked out a living as an illegal construction worker and house painter. In Milan in 2004, he lived in an apartment in a tidy, upscale neighborhood, where he seemed to spend most of his day watching Arabic-language movies and news on satellite television.

“We looked for a job for him,” said Ghazi Bidel, a 27-year-old Egyptian pizza maker who was his roommate in Milan. “But he said he didn’t want to work.”

Last April, shortly after the Spanish police found Mr. Ahmed’s Italian cellphone number in the address book of one of two men suspected of involvement in the plot, the Italian police began tapping Mr. Ahmed’s phone and bugging his apartment.

In the taped conversations, Mr. Ahmed calls himself “the thread behind the Madrid plot,” discusses an imminent terrorist operation in an unidentified location and the deployment of suicide martyrs to Iraq, and complains about his marriage and money problems. He shows off a computer program that activates numerous cellphones simultaneously “” similar to the technology used in the Madrid attacks “” and says he was in Madrid days before the bombings.

He declares that nationality does not matter in holy war, that he has converted drug dealers and criminals to the faith and that Muslims are allowed to marry Christians as a means of acquiring false documents. He describes the ease of buying false documents but stresses quality, saying, “If you don’t know who used them, it is dangerous.”

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