6 Islamic Militants Convicted in Paris Bomb Plot

"Beghal challenged a central piece of evidence: his confession to police
in the United Arab Emirates, who arrested him acting on a tip from the CIA
as he was en route from Afghanistan to Morocco to collect funds for the
plot."

LA TIMES

6 Islamic Militants Convicted in Paris Bomb Plot
By Sebastian Rotella
Times Staff Writer

10:02 AM PST, March 15, 2005

PARIS � A French court convicted six Islamic militants today of conspiring
to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris, culminating the lengthy, labyrinthine
case of a European terror network connected to key Al Qaeda leaders and
attacks.

The three-judge panel sentenced the ringleader of the Paris-based cell, a
39-year-old French Algerian named Djamel Beghal, to the maximum penalty of
10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit terrorism.

His convicted lieutenant, 30-year-old computer expert Kamel Daoudi,
received a nine-year sentence; two other suspects were sentenced to
six-year terms and others got three- and one-year terms.

The verdict was a victory for Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the dean of
France's powerful anti-terrorism magistrates, who opened the investigation
of the embassy plot on Sept. 10, 2001 amid increasing concern about
Islamic terrorism.

Al Qaeda's attacks the next day on the World Trade Center and Pentagon
sent European investigators into high gear: police in France, Belgium, the
Netherlands and Spain quickly rounded up alleged accomplices of Beghal,
aborting longtime surveillances to avoid new attacks.

The probe traced the alarming rise of a homegrown European network, whose
members ranged from working-class North African immigrants to middle-class
converts from an Alpine village.

Their collective odyssey led from radical mosques in Britain, where they
imbibed the teachings of the notorious cleric Abu Qatada, to training
camps in Afghanistan, where the plot was allegedly blessed by the
now-imprisoned Abu Zubeida, an accused Al Qaeda operations chief.

During the trial last month, prosecutors provided 45,000 pages of wiretap
transcripts, surveillance reports and other evidence alleging that the
group set up compartmentalized structures in France, Belgium and the
Netherlands in order to attack the embassy here. [more]

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