Eurabia Alert: There are also connections to Britain, Belgium and Malika El-Aroud, the jihad propagandist who was collecting “unemployment” benefits. “Italy charges two Frenchmen with Al-Qaeda terror plots,” from Agence France-Presse, May 12:
ROME (AFP) “” Italian authorities charged two French prisoners Tuesday with membership of an Al-Qaeda cell which was allegedly preparing an attack on France’s main international airport, police said.
The pair, who have spent the last six months in a prison in Bari, were accused of identifying Paris’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport as one of their targets and they had also planned an attack in Britain.
French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, however, told lawmakers in Paris there was no proof that the two suspects were plotting to bomb the airport.
The two men were identified as an imam, Bassam Ayachi, 62, a French national of Syrian descent, and a 33-year-old French citizen, Raphael Gendron, according to police in the southern city of Bari.
They were charged with membership in an Al-Qaeda cell and were active in propaganda campaigns for Muslim extremists and running recruitment rings for jihad fighters, Alliot-Marie told the French National Assembly.
“We do not have any facts leading us to seriously believe that there was a threat to attack Roissy,” she said.
The two were residents of Brussels, where Ayachi was the religious leader of the Belgian Assabil Islamic Centre, a statement from Bari police said.
Ayachi and Gendron were presented with the charges in their jail cell Tuesday after an investigation by magistrates Roberto Rossi and Francesca Romana based on documents found in their camping car.
The men were accused of having “planned and organised terrorist attacks and guerrilla actions.”
Police also said the probe had proved “the concrete membership of the two men in the international terrorist organisation named Al-Qaeda.”
“Bassam Ayachi appears to be one of the spiritual guides at the European level while Raphael Gendron, a computer expert, had an important role in media propaganda,” the police statement said.
Equipped with arms and explosives, the two men had also set up a recruitment and training network for militants “ready to commit suicide attacks or to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,” authorities said.
The lawyer for the pair told Belgian television there “is no basis to this case.”
“The accusations are levelled today whereas they have been imprisoned since November,” added Sebastian Courtoy, who has previously defended the pair in other cases in Belgium.
France, Britain and Italy have soldiers serving in a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.
French and Belgian anti-terrorism police had been tracking the two men for allegedly running a recruitment ring for Islamic fighters to be sent to Afghanistan, an official said in Paris.
Ayachi and Gendron were also linked to a Belgian-based jihadist website called “Minbar” that has been shut down.
“They were being closely watched by the French but mostly by the Belgians,” said a source close to the case who asked not to be named.
Suspicions were fuelled after a group of illegal migrants who investigators say may have been Islamic fighters returning from Afghanistan were discovered in the two men’s camper in Bari in November.
The discovery of the migrants in Bari led to the arrest of six suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in Belgium a month later.
Among the Belgian six was Malika El Aroud, whose first husband was killed in a 2001 suicide attack against Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance battling Afghanistan’s then ruling Taliban movement.
Writing under the name Oum Obeyda, Aroud was considered one of Europe’s most prominent cyber-jihadists. Her second husband Moez Garsalloui was the administrator of the Minbar website.