Officials: Peacekeepers, Bosnian police
disrupted terrorists' attack plans
By Gregory Piatt,
Stars and Stripes
Overshadowed by the U.S.-led fight against global terrorism, NATO peacekeepers and
local police in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last month disrupted a terrorist network
allegedly planning attacks on U.S. bases and other Western targets in the Balkan country.
The Bosnian government said this week about 20 people were under police scrutiny, and
10 suspects of Arab origin had been deported since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the
United States.
Of those, six Algerian suspects are in custody for being a threat to a safe and secure
environment in Bosnia, and five others have been arrested following threats to the U.S.
and British embassies, which were closed for five days last week, officials said.
According to a report on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, terrorists were planning
to use small private aircraft in a suicide attack on Eagle Base, the main U.S.
installation near Tuzla, and on the smaller U.S. base near Srebrenica, Camp Connor.
The United States has 3,100 peacekeepers in Bosnia — most of them at Eagle Base
and about 200 troops at Camp Connor. However, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization
official declined to say whether the U.S. bases were terrorist targets, saying he
wouldn’t comment on intelligence.
But NATO and its peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, where there are 5,000 U.S.
peacekeepers, are on high alert, the official said on the condition of anonymity.
In Bosnia, U.S. Army Capt. Matthew Handley, official spokesman for Eagle Base,
wouldn’t confirm or deny specific threats to U.S. bases or discuss any information
about it.
"Discussing these types of issues could endanger SFOR personnel, which is why we
have not discussed these issues in the past and will not do so now," Handley told
Stars and Stripes.
Handley would only recite the prepared statement that all NATO and SFOR officials are
giving in response to the detentions:
"We believe that we have disrupted a terrorist organization in [Bosnia and
Herzegovina], thanks to the excellent cooperation between SFOR, Bosnian officials and
NATO."
When asked whether those detained were linked to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida
terrorist network, Capt. Daryl Morrell, SFOR spokesman in Sarajevo, said, "our
investigation is ongoing."
SFOR has made a "significant roll up of terrorism and terrorists in Bosnia,"
but the ongoing operations have been difficult, though, a senior U.S. military official
said in Stuttgart, Germany, this week.
"Part of the difficulty in Bosnia is that you have a lot of potential terrorist
groups there, because there’s not a highly developed FBI, if you will — or local
rule of law — that you would have in Germany, France or England," the official
said on condition of anonymity. "So SFOR has had to step into the void and has had to
do that. And they have done significant work in that regard."
Islamic radicals or terrorists from the Middle East are nothing new to Bosnia, which is
44 percent Muslim. From 1992 to 1995, radical Islamic fighters fought alongside
Bosnia’s Muslims, who were battling Christian Croats and Serbs in the country’s
civil war.
The 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war, ordered all foreign fighters out of
Bosnia by January 1996, but about 200 those fighters remained. They gained Bosnian
citizenship after marrying local women and settled mainly in the central village of
Bocinja Donja.
Some of those Islamic fighters, or mujahadeen, who fought in Bosnia, have been
linked to terrorist acts, including three of the four Saudi nationals who confessed to the
1995 bombing of a U.S. base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
SFOR monitored the former fighters that remained in Bocinja Donja until this year when
the Bosnian government evicted them from the village. Since then, they have dispersed
throughout Bosnia.
When mujahadeen lived in the village, the local press reported that training
camps were set up for terrorists and soldiers to fight in the wars in Chechnya and Kosovo.
But NATO and SFOR officials said they haven’t found any training camps linked to the
Islamic fighters or to others.
Ivana Avramovic in Bosnia and The Associated Press contributed to this
report.
Back to October stories
Page Two news roundup
Stories from September, 2001
Stories from August, 2001
Stories from July, 2001
Stories from June, 2001
Stories from May, 2001
Stories from April, 2001
Stories from March, 2001
Stories from February,2001
Stories from January, 2001
Stories from December, 2000
Stories from November, 2000
Stories from October, 2000
Stories from August and September, 2000
Stories from June and July, 2000
Home |
