One Reason To Still Love The French

Many in the U.S. administration deplored France's intransigence over the war on Iraq. But they have little to complain about when it comes to the war on terrorism. French authorities tell TIME that the June 2 arrest near Paris of Christian Ganczarski, 36, a German alQaeda sympathizer who allegedly traveled often to terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan, was carried out by French intelligence services working closely with their U.S. counterparts.

Ganczarski left Germany last November and surfaced in late April in Saudi Arabia, where authorities decided to expel him. But U.S. officials, French sources say, persuaded the Saudis to send him home via Paris--where police could detain him. "The Germans couldn't or wouldn't charge Ganczarski," says a French antiterrorist official. "The Americans wanted him out of commission and his terrorist links fully explored." German officials knew that the suicide bomber responsible for the April 11, 2002, explosion at a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia--which killed 21 people--called Ganczarski shortly before launching his attack. They also knew that the Tunisian terrorist called al-Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is now in U.S. custody, around the same time. (Ganczarski denies involvement in the plot.) The phone connection was not enough to prosecute him under German laws. French laws, on the other hand, provide for a looser definition of complicity in terrorism, allowing investigating magistrates to jail Ganczarski as a probable coconspirator in the Djerba attack. That's not all they will be looking into. One of the telephone numbers that German officials found at Ganczarski's home was for Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the 9/11 attacks who was arrested last September in Pakistan. --By Bruce Crumley and Steve Zwick