STOCKHOLM, 14 December 2005 — A 39-year-old Swede accused of terrorism by the United States has been arrested in Prague.
The man, who was not identified, is wanted by the CIA spy agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which accuse him of being terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden’s “man in Sweden”, Swedish tabloid Expressen reported yesterday.
The US has tried to obtain his extradition for several years, accusing him of setting up Al-Qaeda training camps in the US state of Oregon in 1999, but Sweden has refused to hand him over, the paper said. The man was on a Czech Airlines flight from Stockholm to Beirut on Sunday, but never got there after stopping over in Prague, the paper said.
The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed that a Swedish man was missing but would not confirm the newspaper’s report.
“The man’s brother has asked us to look into the matter. He did not arrive in Beirut and the brother suspects that he got stuck in Prague,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Miriam Mannbro told AFP yesterday. However, the first secretary at the Swedish Embassy in Prague, Leena Jaanson, told Expressen that the 39-year-old was arrested when he landed in the Czech capital. The paper said that the Swede was also accused of having links to the group that carried out the July 7 bombings in London.
Expressen met the 39-year-old earlier this year when he denied having anything to do with the London bombings. But he stressed that he “loved Bin Laden”. “You don’t have to be a terrorist to love Bin Laden,” he told the paper.
According to the Expressen newspaper, the man was accused in Sweden of plotting terrorist attacks several years ago but was freed for lack of evidence.
The man was later sentenced to a year behind bars on a weapons offense.
