FIGHTING BACK     Anatomy of a Busted Cell
	Terrorists are now recruiting from within European communities
	By BRUCE CRUMLEY | Paris

Posted Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005; 10.53BST
Europe's current jihad generation has at least one advantage over its radical predecessors: new trainees don't need to leave home to learn the terror trade. That means recruits to extremist movements, like the suspected July London bombers, rarely show up in intelligence data banks. This latest mutation in terror tactics is in part a response to the ability of European governments to get an early fix on militants trained abroad. On the basis of an exclusive briefing with French counterterrorism officials, Time was able to reconstruct how one French militant group trained in the Caucasus was broken up. Here's how the cell was busted in Dec. 2002:

A group of around 10 men with ties to radicals in militant Algerian networks traveled to Georgia's Pankisi Valley in May 2001. There they enlisted in camps used to train foreign fighters eager to join the Chechen insurgency. But according to a French security official, those installations — supported by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's prewar Iraq-based Ansar al-Islam — also turn out many fighters who "made no effort to aid the Chechen jihad." Those in the Paris cell, he says, "went to learn terror techniques and return to France to wage jihad here." Their aim: to detonate chemical bombs across Paris.

The group never got the chance. In Dec. 2002, roughly 10 months after the men returned to France, eight were arrested in raids on two suburban apartments where police say they had been preparing to construct toxic-gas bombs. The other two were nabbed in subsequent busts, along with five other co-conspirators. Investigators found a stash of evidence: empty chemical containers, written formulas and a protective antiradiation suit, plus — hidden in a washing machine — detonators and electric devices that could be used for remote activation. "Two years before the Madrid attacks, these guys were planning to use cell phones to detonate bombs from a safe distance," the antiterror official says. The suspects admitted they were planning a strike on the Russian embassy in the name of the Chechen jihad. But subsequent confessions revealed they also had other targets in mind for a mid-2003 bombing spree, including the Paris Metro, public city buildings, police stations and at least one central Paris department store. Although the plan was thwarted, the official says the preventive operation was not a complete success. "We know the group received canisters with poisons provided by Ansar al-Islam," the investigator says. "We didn't find these, and we don't know if they were stored, or entrusted to others still out there."

The key to uncovering the cell lay in tracing its connections to other known terror activists. French intelligence services watched known associates of the Algerian network and new recruits to the Caucasian camps, enabling French police to tail suspects from the moment they returned to Europe. Phone intercepts recorded discussions between operatives in France and their allies in Spain about toxins and chemicals they could use in bombing strikes, and regular analysis of their dumped trash revealed attempts to produce homemade napalm. That obvious trail, says the official, "is in stark contrast to the London bombing suspects or the Islamists we're discovering in France these days." Now the extremists have wised up, and recruit men who are European-born or raised, and integrated into local society. These, he says, "are people capable of striking from nowhere."

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