French Link Suspect to Bombing

PARIS —  There is one federal prisoner in Seattle whom French police really want to meet: Ahmed Ressam. Accused of trying to smuggle nitroglycerin and a trunkload of other bomb-making materials into the United States, he is also a bombing suspect in France.

“He is on the short list of 20 suspects for the Port Royal bombing,” a 1996 rush-hour attack on a Paris subway that killed four people and injured 91 others, a French anti-terrorism official said Thursday. “There’s not been a single arrest yet.”

Ressam, an Algerian, is alleged to be a member of what French officials describe as a globe-girdling “nebula” of extremist Islamic organizations whose genesis was the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan. He either belonged to or was close to a band of gunmen who staged a series of holdups in the northern French city of Roubaix three years ago, the officials say.

Until now, authorities in the United States have been trying to determine whether Ressam and a second Algerian, who was arrested at the Canadian border in Vermont on Sunday, were small-timers or militants from a large, well-organized group that might pose a serious threat to Americans during the end-of-the-year holidays.

Having monitored the growth of extremist Algerian networks throughout the 1990s, the French authorities take the threat of a bombing or other terrorist act linked to the arrival of 2000 as a very real possibility--in France, the United States or another country.

“The risks of a holiday attack are most serious,” Roland Jacquard, one of France’s top experts on Islamic extremism, said when asked to evaluate Ressam’s alleged actions.

France Increases Police Strength

In recent days, Jacquard said in an interview, France’s plan for reinforced police patrols and other counter-terrorism measures has been stepped up to its highest level. A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry would not confirm or deny that but said 60,000 additional police had been put on duty nationwide as of Thursday.

According to law enforcement officials in Paris, who spoke on condition they not be identified, Ressam’s alleged membership in the international brigades of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, suggests that any plan underway in the United States is no penny-ante operation.

GIA fighters, some of them veterans of the armed fight against the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, are known to have contacts and receive financing from Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile and Islamic militant who is on the FBI’s most wanted list, French officials noted.

A leading Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, even reported Thursday that Ressam learned to make bombs at Bin Laden’s own base of operations in eastern Afghanistan.

“This man [Ressam] is a professional,” an agent of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Service told the newspaper. “We know he has ties to Bin Laden.”

According to U.S. authorities, Islamic zealots linked to the Saudi were behind the devastating 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than 200 people, including 12 Americans, died in the coordinated attacks.

French authorities also believe that Ressam received a combat course in Pakistan, where many members of the hard-line Muslim Taliban militia that controls most of Afghanistan received basic military training. Ressam also was in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the officials say, and may have been part of the international brigade of Muslim moujahedeen who battled the Serbs and Croats during the Balkan republic’s war earlier this decade.

Bin Laden was also allegedly in touch, through the funding of an Islamic magazine, with a London-based Algerian exile, Rachid Ramda, who is suspected by French counter-terrorism experts of masterminding a series of terror bombings in Paris that killed eight people and hurt 159 others in 1995.

In February 1998, Bin Laden issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims to kill Americans throughout the world, at any time or place.

The cache allegedly found in Ressam’s car--nitroglycerin, timing devices and a highly explosive fertilizer component known as urea--”is exactly what you find in the videocassettes made by Algerians who have been in the camps in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Jacquard, who gives briefings on terrorism to Canadian President Jacques Chirac.

The second Algerian arrested, Bouabide Chamchi, 20, was taken into custody after bomb-sniffing dogs found suspicious residue in the automobile in which he tried to cross the border at Beecher Falls, Vt., U.S officials said. Chamchi was carrying a forged French passport, they said.

For more than a year, French law enforcement sources said, they have been cooperating with the FBI and other American agencies to track the movements of Bin Laden and his henchmen and to anticipate where a terrorist act might take place.

Last October, two French investigating magistrates went to Montreal, where Ressam was then living, to try to meet with him and another Algerian also suspected in the Port Royal attack. But the judges were unable to locate the two men.

On Wednesday, Ressam pleaded not guilty to charges he made false statements to U.S. customs officials, smuggled nitroglycerin across the border, transported explosives, committed a felony while carrying explosives and possessed unregistered firearms--what appear to be timing devices that were found in his car.

He was arrested Dec. 14 after taking a ferry from British Columbia to Port Angeles, Wash., about 60 miles northwest of Seattle.

Group Embraced Extremist Causes

The GIA, fighting a savage war against the Algerian government since 1992, has spawned an international support group that canvassed for arms and explosives in Bosnia to use in other extremist Muslim causes and helped its leaders travel covertly in France, England and Belgium, French officials said. It embraced the causes of militant Islam worldwide--from Afghanistan and Bosnia to the anti-Russian resistance now underway in Chechnya.

Ressam is also suspected of having abetted or taken part in the exploits of the “Roubaix gang,” a group of armed robbers that French authorities say tried to raise funds for Islamic causes through holdups in 1996. Four members of the gang were killed when a SWAT team from an elite French police force laid siege to their Roubaix hide-out on March 29, 1996.