Spanish police smash Iraq terror cell

Spanish police arrested 15 people today suspected of recruiting people for Iraq’s insurgency, including possible suicide attacks, breaking up a cell in close contact with al-Qaida and terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, officials said.

Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso told a news conference the cell had two people ready to be sent to Iraq to wage “holy war”.

The arrests were the result of an investigation that began in January, the minister said. The cell already sent “several” people to fight in Iraq, he said without giving a precise figure.

More than 100 police officers staged raids that led to the arrests in the regions of Catalonia and Andalusia as well as in Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, he said.

Police arrested eight Moroccans and people from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Belarus, Ghana, France and Spain, the ministry said later in a news release.

The cell was allegedly led by a 25-year-old Iraqi, the ministry said.

It identified him as M. Hiyag and said he went by the alias Abu Sufian and that he had “very close access” to al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who leads al-Qaida in Iraq and is blamed for most of the terror attacks against the US-led coalition.

Sufian “personally controlled a certain group of individuals willing to travel to Iraq as mujahedeen, probably for suicide attacks”, the ministry said.

Police agents specialising in Islamic terrorism, explosives or scientific investigation made the arrests in the cities of Lerida, Malaga, Nerja, Seville and Palma on the island of Mallorca.

It was at least the third time this year police arrested people accused of involvement in Iraq insurgency recruitment networks.

Alonso did not say if the new detainees were linked to these people.

Two men – an Algerian and a Moroccan – were detained in the eastern Valencia region and in Gerona in the north of Spain on suspicion of forming a network accused of recruiting people to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq.

A week earlier, eight men accused of belonging to a Syrian-based network that allegedly recruited people to stage suicide attacks in Iraq were jailed by a Spanish court.

Today’s arrests also marked the fourth time in less than a month that Spanish police have arrested people suspected of Islamic extremist activities.

In a series of arrests beginning in late November, 19 people were arrested on suspicion of belonging to or collaborating with the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, an Algerian-based extremist group that has declared allegiance to al-Qaida.

Seven were jailed on preliminary charges of belonging to a terror cell, one still has to go before a judge and the others were released.

Spain has arrested nearly 200 Islamic terror suspects since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, which investigators say were planned in part in Spain.

About half of them were arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings of last year, in which 191 people were killed and more than 1,500 wounded. Of these suspects, 26 have been jailed, although dozens more who were questioned and released are still considered suspects.