THE arrest of terror suspects creates considerable speculation because the security forces involved are invariably tight-lipped. There may be other suspects, other links to be followed up and the certainty that however many terror cells may be cleaned up, there will be others, now or in the future. Thus the arrest of two German converts to Islam and a Turk this week and the discovery of 1500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide, Al-Qaeda’s preferred ingredient for homemade bombs, has produced little immediate information. The main assertion is that the authorities have foiled a “massive” attack on US targets in Germany, likely to have been timed for Sept. 11.
There is, however, room to deduce that the authorities have known about the suspects for some time. They claim that all three men attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan last year. It seems that one of the men was also arrested in December, suspected of spying on at US base but then released. That arrest may have been a mistake by police who did not realize the group was already under surveillance. At all events, the impression given at the moment is that the authorities have had the suspects under close observation for well over a year and only moved in when they believed an attack was imminent.
To have left the men at liberty for as long as possible makes sense in that it enables intelligence to build up a bigger picture of how Al-Qaeda cells operate and perhaps find some key information that will lead to top leaders, even to Osama Bin Laden himself. It does, however, carry a risk for innocent members of Germany’s Muslim community to which the conspirators belong. Such contacts spread suspicion in the same way as a dangerous infection. The lives of maybe hundreds of totally innocent people have been blighted and opened up to exhaustive covert investigation because of chance dealings they may have had with these three individuals.
If German police were merely toying with the suspects, perhaps provoking them to incriminate themselves further, did a similar situation exist last year with the planned suitcase bombings on two German trains. For some reason — perhaps interference by intelligence agents? — neither device exploded but this June, six Lebanese went on trial in Lebanon accused of the crimes.
Since 9/11, the world has learned to its cost, whether here in the Kingdom or in Bali or Madrid or London, the bloody price of terrorism. We must be grateful for the international counterterror network of cooperating police and intelligence services that has sprung up to meet the challenges. But we must be equally vigilant that in combating the evil of international terror, a new evil is not created in its place — that of xenophobia and bigotry. Many Americans, for instance, still have not got beyond the idea that all Muslims are terrorists. The dragnet gathering of Al-Qaeda terror suspects is also catching many totally innocent people whose blamelessness deserves public recognition.
