Terror's Tracks

Did Fakhet have help from al-Qaeda or other outside groups? Investigators think so. Fakhet was not on any agency's radar screen even a year ago, but he appears to have linked up with remnants of an alleged al-Qaeda cell in Spain, most of whose members, mainly Syrians, were arrested in November 2001. Among them was Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan who was one of the the first arrested in Madrid for the train bombings. After they picked him up, police found a note in his apartment bearing the cell-phone number of another Moroccan who had long been on their wanted list: Amer Azizi, a veteran of the Bosnian and Afghan wars in the 1990s, who is suspected of helping to organize a key meeting in Spain between Mohamed Atta and other 9/11 operatives in July 2001.

So is AzizI the Madrid mastermind? That's not clear. He was among the six targets who the police failed to nab during the 2001 roll-up of the al-Qaeda cell. According to a Spanish indictment against him last year, Azizi flew to Tehran before the arrests. Investigators lost his trail, even though he came back to Madrid soon after and sold his car. There are unconfirmed reports that he was aided in getting from Tehran to Afghanistan by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the shadowy Jordanian thought to be the operational leader of Ansar al-Islam who is accused of orchestrating a series of attacks in Iraq.

"Azizi could have been the one coordinating from the outside, but we don't know," a Spanish Interior Ministry official tells TIME. "We're looking for him, but not necessarily for March 11." But the Spanish News Agency reported last week that in late 2002 or early 2003, Fakhet asked Azizi to bring in jihadists from the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group (GICM) to help execute an attack in Spain. Azizi reportedly told Fakhet that he'd have to recruit locally. Still, the presence of Azizi's cell-phone number in Zougam's apartment could mean that Azizi had helped after all.

What is the GICM? The Moroccan group, listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. since 2002, is believed to have helped launch a coordinated series of suicide bombings in Casablanca last May, killing 33 innocents and 12 bombers. Moroccan political analyst Mohammed Darif sees GICM as "part of al-Qaeda," but says its role in both Madrid and Casablanca "was to provide the people who would carry out attacks; the people higher up who planned the attacks were not Moroccans."

A French counterterrorism official agrees that GICM's "members — if not the organization itself — were at the heart of the Spanish strikes." And the group may have connections elsewhere in Europe. Last week French police arrested 13 people, and by week's end they were still holding six of them, including an Afghanistan-hardened Moroccan suspected of being the leader of a GICM cell in France. Investigators say the detainees had been under surveillance for months, but that the Spanish bombings made a defensive roundup seem prudent. "If the GICM decided to attack a target in France, it would be doing so using the kind of people we arrested this week," says the French counterterror official. "Some of these people have what we'd consider potentially high-level operative status. We can't say they'd been switched on, but we do think they're on standby."

Are there other terror cells around Europe? Yes. British officials last week charged six of nine men arrested between March 30 and April 1 with terror offenses; those six remain in prison. They are mostly of Pakistani origin, and prosecutors will be asking them to explain the 600 kg of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, commonly used as an explosive, found in a self-storage unit in west London. A Hamburg court last week allowed Mounir el-Motassadeq, a Moroccan friend of Mohamed Atta, to leave prison on his own recognizance pending a new trial. The court threw out his February 2003 conviction on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization and accessory to more than 3,000 counts of murder, arguing that the court had been unable to consider possibly exculpatory evidence from alleged al-Qaeda member Ramzi Binalshibh, who is in American custody.

Justice, however measured, may be less central to many Europeans' concerns these days than simple safety. As Leganés resident Juani Lopez waited for her bus last week, she was nervous. The previous day, a man had climbed aboard her bus well before it was due to leave and left a case by the driver. "The driver shouted at us all to get out immediately, but it was a false alarm," she says. The man had just stepped out to buy a pack of cigarettes. In Leganés and throughout Europe, that wariness is beginning to feel less like a jangling case of nerves and more like a permanent feature of European life after 3/11.