MADRID, 19 September 2003 — Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas was a stocky, middle-aged used car salesman, who had lived quietly in Madrid for years with his Spanish wife and their children.
But yesterday, the Syrian-born Spaniard was in prison preparing his reply to an indictment accusing him of being “directly involved with the people in charge of preparing and developing the suicide terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 in the United States.”
Barakat Yarkas, 40, also known as Abu Dahdah, was arrested in November 2001, accused by Spain’s top investigative judge, Baltasar Garzon, of directing an Al-Qaeda cell in Spain.
On Wednesday, Garzon widened his charge in the indictment against Barakat Yarkas and 34 other men — including Osama Bin Laden — accusing him and nine of the others of planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
It was the first known indictment of Bin Laden for the devastating strikes against New York and Washington.
“What they’re accusing him of makes no sense. The evidence is so flimsy,” said Barakat Yarkas’ wife, Maria Luisa Martin, speaking from her Madrid home, where she cares for the couple’s five children. Another is on the way. Soto del Real prison, where her husband is being held, allows conjugal visits.
Martin spoke as Spanish police acting on orders from Garzon arrested another five suspects. They were not among the 35 in the indictment, but four were linked to people named in it. Reports said Garzon will question them this weekend.
Garzon’s indictment was a dramatic, sweeping move against Al-Qaeda elements in Spain and abroad. Some Spanish newspapers criticized the inclusion of Bin Laden as a pointless gesture by a magistrate who loves publicity.
Garzon said he was acting because the terror network used the country as a base to plot the Sept. 11 attacks. Many on the indictment list are already in Spanish jails, and Garzon issued or reissued arrest warrants for 16 on the list.
Garzon’s nearly 700-page document details supposedly damaging taped telephone conversations that Barakat Yarkas had shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks with a man known only as Shakur. Barakat Yarkas met him as a casual acquaintance in the United Arab Emirates in the mid-90s, Martin said.
In one of these conversations, on August 27, 2001, Shakur said that, among other things, “they had entered the area of aviation and had even slashed the throat of the bird,” the indictment said. Barakat Yarkas and Shakur laughed during this particular exchange, the indictment said.
The document also recalls that Barakat Yarkas’ phone number was found in an address book at a Hamburg apartment shared by accused Sept. 11 plotters who included Mohamed Atta, a suspected ringleader and one of the suicide pilots.
Like Barakat Yarkas, whom she last visited two weeks ago, Martin insists her husband is innocent.
“My husband does not know Mohamed Atta. He doesn’t know that group. We didn’t know about Al-Qaeda until Sep. 11,” she said.
Barakat Yarkas’ lawyer, Jacobo Teijelo, says the taped conversations show his client knew nothing of any terrorist plot.
Teijelo said the phone number found in the Hamburg flat was from a previous home and eight years out of date.
Barakat Yarkas is also accused of spending years hiring holy warriors and sending them for training and fighting to countries including Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia, and raising an undetermined amount of cash to pay for their operations.
Garzon’s indictment charges Barakat Yarkas took over this position in 1995 from a man known as Sheik Saleh — the alleged leader of several Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.
But support of holy warriors is not a terrorist act, argued Teijelo.
“There were wars going on in those countries, not terrorism, so no one there was funding terrorism,” Teijelo said.
Until his arrest, Barakat Yarkas and his wife were living in an apartment in Madrid. Barakat Yarkas supplemented his income from selling used cars imported from Germany by occasional sales of Persian rugs, clothes, wood and — if he found a good batch — honey, according to Martin.
Barakat Yarkas “had his ideas about Islam,” according to Martin, but he was no zealot.
The couple first met one summer evening in the mid-1980s, in a Madrid cafe, a month after Barakat Yarkas had arrived in Spain.
Martin, who had been pursuing a career as an actress and had roles in several early films of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, was not a Muslim.
“People assume that my husband would have forced me to convert, but he didn’t. I’ve only worn a veil for five years.”
Teijelo believes his client is guilty only of a crime of ideology.
“In this country it is a crime to be a radical Muslim. My client is innocent of the attacks in New York. He didn’t incite anyone to make these attacks,” Teijelo said.
