MADRID, 12 September 2003 — An Al-Jazeera reporter who interviewed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden after the Sept.11 attacks was kept in custody here yesterday as Spain’s anti-terrorist judge accused him of links to the Islamic militants.
Two years to the day after the attacks in the United States which killed around 3,000 people, Judge Baltasar Garzon said he believed Tayssir Alluni had helped to structure Al-Qaeda “at national and international level by financing, controlling and coordinating ... this criminal organization.”
Alluni, a reporter with the Arabic satellite television station, had “from 1995 integrated an extremist Islamic (group) of a terrorist nature,” based in Spain and which provided a “support structure” to Al-Qaeda.
Garzon’s conclusions, contained in a 25-page written summary obtained by AFP, showed he was convinced after interviewing Alluni and after reading material from foreign intelligence sources that there was sufficient reason to keep him in detention pending charges.
The 56-year-old reporter engaged in activities “which did not limit themselves to participation at meetings between ‘friends’ (holding) ‘political or religious discussions’ as Tayssir Alluni asserts,” the report said.
Defense sources described the decision as a surprise as they had hoped “either for his release or at least a conditional release.”
And the Doha-based Al-Jazeera television station reacted with astonishment and anger at the news their reporter was to remain in custody.
“This is much more than a disappointment. There will be consequences, there will be demonstrations in the Arab world and appeals to boycott tourism (in Spain) and Spanish products,”, the station’s Brussels correspondent Ahmad Kamel, in Madrid to monitor developments, told AFP.
Alluni found fame in the Arab world for exclusive reporting from Afghanistan during the US war on the Taleban, interviewing Bin Laden and later reporting from Baghdad on the war in Iraq.
But Garzon excluded any “direct relationship” between the reporter and “the most serious acts” of terror which Al-Qaeda is alleged to have carried out.
Whereas Garzon initially only suspected Alluni of “collaboration” with Al-Qaeda he hardened that stance Thursday.
And amid fresh warnings of further attacks, Garzon said he had concluded the radical organization was still active “thanks to sleeper cells” whose members he said had to be “neutralized”.
