MADRID, 20 November 2004 — A leading journalist with the Arab television network Al-Jazeera charged in Spain over his alleged links to the Al-Qaeda network has been rearrested, a Spanish judicial source said yesterday.
The decision to detain Tayssir Alluni, a Spaniard of Syrian origin, was taken after a request by the Spanish prosecutor’s office for undisclosed reasons.
“They arrested him in the evening (Thursday) at his office and police officers arrived to tell me this morning that they were taking him to Madrid at around 8:00 a.m. today,” his wife Fatima Alluni said from her home in the southern city of Grenada.
Alluni was first arrested on Sept. 5, 2003 in Grenada, where he lives with his family.
He was one of 35 people — including Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden — charged with links to, or membership of, the Islamic network and of using visits to Kabul to forge links with Al-Qaeda. Suffering from a heart defect, he was released on bail the following month, but was told that he was not allowed to leave the country.
Alluni found fame with exclusive reporting from Afghanistan during the US-led war on the Taleban launched in October 2001, interviewing Bin Laden and later reporting from Baghdad on the war in Iraq.
Fatima Alluni said she had no idea why the Spanish authorities should have arrested her husband again.
“They came to warn me so that I could bring him some of his things and his medicine, but I can’t go to Madrid to be with him, I have a three-month-old child and I can’t leave.”
Earlier she told Al-Jazeera television that she was surprised that her husband had been arrested. She accused top Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon of making the case “a personal affair” and demanded her husband’s release “because there is no new evidence” against him.
Alluni’s lawyer could not be contacted. Al-Jazeera has consistently stood by its reporter since his arrest and has accused the United States and Israel of inciting Spain to incriminate him.
The Spanish authorities recently turned down a request by Alluni for accreditation enabling him to cover the first trial connected to the March 11 train attacks in Madrid in which 191 people died.
