NATO links planned terrorist attacks
in Bosnia to bin Laden's network
By Gregory Piatt,
Belgium bureau
BRUSSELS, Belgium — At least one of the four people SFOR detained late last month
for planning attacks on U.S. bases in Bosnia and Herzegovina has connections to Osama bin
Laden’s al-Qaida network, NATO’s secretary general said on Friday.
Since Sept. 11, the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, known as SFOR, has
detained more than a dozen people on the suspicion of terrorist activities.
A number are in detention and others have been deported, Secretary-General Lord George
Robertson told reporters.
"At least one person had links to al-Qaida," Robertson said.
And a North Atlantic Treaty Organization official, speaking on the condition of
anonymity, said that the four detained by SFOR were part of an al-Qaida cell operating in
Bosnia.
A Jordanian, an Egyptian and two people with Bosnian passports were detained on Sept.
25. The Jordanian and Egyptian were detained at a hotel in Sarajevo and the two Bosnians
were detained in the vicinity of the Saudi High Commission for Relief, SFOR said earlier
this month.
The Jordanian and Egyptian have since been deported because SFOR has no mandate to
charge them and the Bosnians "didn't want any part of them," the NATO official
said.
According to news reports, they were planning a suicide attack with private planes on
Eagle Base near Tuzla and Camp Connor near Srebrenica. The United States has 3,100
peacekeepers in Bosnia with the bulk of them at Eagle Base and 200 troops at Camp Connor.
The NATO official said the detentions came just days before the planned attack.
"They were not just intending to attack, they were going to attack," the
official said. "They were that close."
Robertson wouldn’t elaborate on how wide al-Qaida operations are in Bosnia, saying
that would compromise ongoing SFOR security and intelligence operations.
The secretary-general said that NATO has no information on al-Qaida terrorist cells
operating in Kosovo, where there are 5,000 U.S. peacekeepers.
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