A Poisonous Plot

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Ricin is already lodged in the memory of many older Britons. In 1978, in one of the more bizarre political killings of the cold war, Georgi Markov — a dissident Bulgarian writer and broadcaster living in London — died after being shot in his right thigh on Waterloo Bridge with an umbrella rigged to fire a minuscule pellet containing ricin.

Now the Wood Green neighborhood finds itself at the nexus of a web of terror that stretches from Algeria to Afghanistan, Paris to the Pankisi Valley, London to Los Angeles. "Even the successful actions by antiterrorism officials confirm evidence that al-Qaeda's numbers are swelling," says independent French terror expert Roland Jacquard. "Each raid that involves the arrest of several known operatives also turns up names and pseudonyms of people investigators never heard of. These names, which have neither faces nor backgrounds, number in the hundreds now."

Just how the suspects came to be apprehended last week has not been revealed. But information from French antiterrorist investigators confirms that most if not all of them are Algerians, and suggests that core members of their group are so-called Chechen Islamists, an international mix of al-Qaeda operatives (including many North Africans) trained in Afghanistan as well as in camps set up in the Caucasus before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The al-Qaeda camps in Georgia's Pankisi Valley — which until a Georgian security crackdown last year was a lawless haven of guerrillas, drug dealers and kidnappers — specialize, says Jacquard, in training recruits in the use of explosives and in basic chemical terror, including the poisoning of water and food supplies. Indeed, Georgian security sources say the al-Qaeda operatives in the Pankisi region — who moved out in the middle of last year when Georgia began cracking down on them — included Middle Eastern "chemists" skilled in poisons. Many of them, Georgian sources told Time, subsequently ended up in U.S. hands — when Georgians thwarted poison attacks against American citizens and installations in other parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

One of the main al-Qaeda lieutenants in the Chechnya-Georgia region, says Jacquard, is a Jordanian known as Abu Atiyya. In addition to overseeing the deployment of militants to training camps, he is thought to play a key role in reassigning trained personnel to terror networks, including setting up sleeper cells in such places as Azerbaijan and Turkey. It's believed that within the last year, Abu Atiyya ordered a group of 15 "Chechens" to gravitate to Europe via Turkey.

Six of those 15, according to French sources, were among nine people arrested in raids last month in La Courneuve and Romainville, north of Paris. Investigators say they have no doubt the groups were working together to produce toxic-chemical bombs. Merouane Benahmed, an Islamist known to have received explosives training in Afghanistan and the Caucasus, was among those arrested in La Courneuve on Dec. 16. Eight days later, Menad Benchellali, a self-proclaimed "chemist" and veteran of Afghan camps and the Pankisi Valley, was caught in Romainville.

Material evidence collected during the Romainville raids leaves little doubt that the cell was planning an attack, French sources say. Subsequent testimony indicated that the plot was to target the Russian Embassy in Paris — to punish Russia for its poor treatment of the Chechens. Whatever the intended target, the toxic potential of the chemicals that Benchellali admits listing or writing out as formulas suggests that an enclosed space, with limited aeration, was the goal — not the exterior of a building. But two other "Chechens" who were part of that network around Paris may have escaped the raids and fled to London. The two, officials say, could be among the seven men — aged from their late teens to their 30s — who were arrested last week. While all of this was still difficult to verify, the details of the case may become clearer this week, when five of the London suspects are to appear in court.