MADRID, 27 April 2004 — Despite round-the-clock teamwork by European anti-terrorism agencies in the wake of last month’s train bombings here, persistent barriers to cooperation and coordination make Europe vulnerable to attack, senior European and US police officials, prosecutors and other experts say.
Justice systems clash, policing styles diverge, and open borders allow terrorists far more mobility than their pursuers. For years, the Al-Qaeda terrorist network has taken full advantage of these factors — and Europe’s democratic, tolerant environment — using the continent as a base for recruitment, logistics and plotting attacks elsewhere. The Madrid train attacks, which killed 191 people, showed how Al-Qaeda used that infrastructure to carry out its first successful strike in a Western Europe that was caught off guard, investigators say.
“There’s a lack of trust among security services and among countries,’’ said Baltasar Garzon, Spain’s best-known anti-terrorism magistrate. “There’s a lack of solidarity. Self-interest dominates. What we need is a European intelligence community. We are straitjacketed by absurd formalities that distract from what should be essential.’’
Investigative cooperation depends largely on political dynamics and personal chemistry among Europe’s counterterrorism magistrates, prosecutors, police and spies. Europe wants to build regional justice and policing systems one day, but governments find it hard to relinquish the national-security powers that are the core of their sovereignty. Instead, it has been largely up to investigators to develop informal cross-border alliances and friendships.
“Without being alarmist, I think we will have to deal with other grave episodes of terrorism in Europe in the future,’’ said Stefano Dambruoso, one of Italy’s top anti-terrorism prosecutors. “The most important thing now is that we have to abolish borders for police and prosecutors so that they can work together and move around Europe without problems.’’
After the Madrid bombings, cooperation kicked into a higher gear. Police from across Europe hurried to Madrid this month to get a status report from Spanish investigators about the train attacks and leads to pursue in a half-dozen countries. Prosecutors in Milan, Italy, shared a dossier on Algerian extremists with colleagues from Madrid. British police raided homes in London searching for suspects who had received phone calls from a hideout here just before seven suspected bombers blew themselves up during a shootout with police.
But officials offer a litany of complaints about neighboring countries and sometimes about their own as well.
Critics say the Spanish authorities underestimated Islamic terrorists because they were obsessed with Basque separatist terrorists. Neighbors complain that the British have allowed Islamic ideologues to turn London into a jihadi capital. The French have a reputation for being haughty and selective about sharing information. The Germans, Belgians and Dutch often have trouble keeping suspects in jail because of weak terrorism laws, other countries say. And observers see the Italians as being hampered by internecine conflicts.
The complaints tend toward exaggeration. Until Madrid, Europe’s security forces used considerable expertise about terrorism to fend off a series of Al-Qaeda plots. But the weaknesses have lingered for years despite widespread agreement about increasing dangers.
“Everyone’s scrambling,’’ said a US law-enforcement official who works with European police. “They might share a little bit more. But everyone holds tight. They don’t have a coordinated system.’’
Although the European Union has responded to the Madrid bombings by appointing a “czar’’ to coordinate counterterrorism efforts, veteran law-enforcement officials see the move as essentially symbolic. After the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, European leaders announced with great fanfare that Europol, the EU’s fledgling police force, would spearhead the fight against terrorism. But today, Europol remains on the sidelines, officials said.
Within Europe, the clash between intelligence and justice affects the relationship between mainland countries and Britain, whose spy services dominate the nation’s anti-terrorism efforts. Britain’s common-law court system, which resembles US justice, also differs from the continent’s mostly Napoleonic-style judiciaries, which are more secretive and dominated by the investigative magistrate, a mix of prosecutor and judge. Spain, France and Italy have tough conspiracy laws, but Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium do not.
Two major terrorism cases in the Netherlands have ended in acquittals after judges threw out evidence because it had been gathered by Dutch spies rather than police. In Germany, with its decentralized policing structure and strict protections of individual rights, suspected Al-Qaeda operatives remain free even though they face arrest in other countries.
It’s not clear whether better cooperation could have helped head off the Madrid plot. But the episode shows the need to speed up the legal machinery. And the intelligence-gathering strategy of letting networks operate under surveillance, experts say, must now be balanced against the harsh lesson of Madrid. Although it is Spain’s support for the war in Iraq that made land Madrid in the terrorists’ crosshairs, nations that opposed the war are worried as well.
