MADRID, Spain, 14 April 2005 — A Spanish judge has indicted 11 Pakistanis on charges of planning attacks in Barcelona and helping finance Al-Qaeda by sending money to individuals suspected in terror attacks in Kenya, Tanzania and Pakistan.
The 11, arrested late last year, were charged by National Court Judge Ismael Moreno with plotting terrorist acts and collaborating with a terrorist group.
In his indictment, released late Tuesday, the judge said the 11 “formed a group in Barcelona whose aim was to provide aid for the worldwide ‘jihad’ from Spanish soil ... with the objective of contributing financially to concrete terrorist actions or to those who carried them out.”
The indictment said Mohammad Afzaal, who was detained in September 2004, could be the group’s leader. Moreno said Afzaal allegedly traveled to Dubai last year to meet an unidentified Al-Qaeda leader. At the alleged meeting, he was told “to maintain a terrorist cell operative in Spain and in Norway or Denmark with the aim of financing Al-Qaeda and preparing terrorist attacks,” Moreno wrote in the indictment.
Moreno said that in one operation on April 9, 2004, Afzaal sent 2,450 euros to Egyptian Rabei Osman Ahmed. Ahmed was extradited to Spain from Italy in December and is considered a key figure in the Madrid commuter train attacks of March 11, 2004 in which 191 people were killed.
Another of the Pakistanis, Shahzad Ali Gujar is accused of sending money between May and August of last year to a suspect in the US Embassy bombings of 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania.
He also allegedly sent money to another suspect wanted in connection with an assassination attempt on Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the killing of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, according to the indictment.
Gujar is also believed to have transferred money to a computer expert allegedly involved in a planned an attack on London’s Heathrow Airport.
The indictment said that Gujar also met with two March 11 suspects, Otman El-Gnaout and Saed El-Harrak, between March 8-12, 2004, according to the indictment.
The magistrate said that in the arrest raids, police found computer videos of the March 11 attacks and others from around the world. They also found video footage of prominent buildings in Barcelona such as the 1992 Olympic Village, the city’s twin office towers and the Maremagnum commercial complex located near the port.
The judge said that Afzaal, although living in Barcelona, had made a reservation to stay at an expensive hotel located in one of the towers in March 2002. He did not stay at the hotel.
The indictment, however, says that days after the March 11 attacks last year he booked into another hotel located in Barcelona’s World Trade Center complex.
Up to their arrests, the Pakistanis allegedly dealt in drugs and forged documents, the judge said.
Indicted along with Afzaal and Ali Gujar were Nasser Ahmad Khan, Masood Akhtar, Shafqat Ali, Mahmood Anwar, Adnan Aslam, Farhat Iqbal, Irfan Khan, Qamar-Uz-Zaman and Mohammad Choudhry Aslam.
Dozens of suspect radicals have been arrested in Spain since the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington and more following the March 11 train bombings last year. Judicial authorities believe the militants began using Spain as a recruiting and financial support base in the mid-1990s.
