Hidden Threat

Neighbors were jolted from their beds before dawn last Friday when Spanish police burst into flats in an apartment block in the small country town of Banyoles, north of Girona. Simultaneous raids were taking place in a dozen other apartments across northeastern Spain. By the end of the day, investigators held 16 suspects — 14 believed to be Algerian and two believed to be Moroccan — of the 20 originally detained. They discovered large quantities of bomb-making material, manuals on chemical warfare, and equipment to manufacture false credit cards and identity documents, as well as a cache of timers, fuses and remote-control devices. According to Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, the gang was preparing a chemical attack.

Two days before and 950 km away in Badia Polesine, a remote town of 10,000 in Italy's industrial northeast, Carabinieri paramilitary police raided an abandoned farmhouse after monitoring a group of immigrants suspected of holding illegal weapons. No weapons were found, but sniffer dogs located a kilogram of C4, the explosive used in last year's Bali bombing, inside a sock thrown into a dirty-clothes hamper. Five Moroccans were arrested. Later, police searched a nearby apartment that was used as a makeshift mosque and found a local map with a nearby NATO base circled on it, as well as a list of all the NATO facilities in the vicinity.

And just two days before that in another pre-dawn raid, this time in a shabby neighborhood in North London, a police helicopter swooped down on the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park while 150 police battered down doors and broke windows to conduct a search of the building. Seven men, six North Africans and one East European, were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000. At the end of the week, two North Africans remained in custody under the Terrorism Act, one man was released and four others held on alleged immigration offenses. The operation, linked to the discovery of traces of the deadly poison ricin three weeks ago in a nearby neighborhood, also uncovered a stun gun, a fake firearm, a CS gas canister and a slew of passports, credit cards and identity cards, many believed to be forged.