SPAIN: Spanish police claimed yesterday they had broken up a terrorist network that was recruiting and aiding suicide bombers for attacks on coalition forces in Iraq.
Five hundred police officers were involved in raids across Spain and 16 alleged radical Islamists were arrested.
Eleven of them have been accused of having links to Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, considered to be al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq.
Spanish police yesterday named one man whom they believed had successfully carried out a suicide attack in Iraq last month. They also identified several others who had volunteered to travel to Iraq to carry out such attacks.
"Several members of the group had expressed their will to become martyrs for Islam," a police statement said.
Police say the network targeted yesterday was linked to two Moroccans who were arrested last year in Syria and accused of helping recruits into Iraq to join the insurgency. "Basically, what the police accuse them of is raising money and recruiting people to do activities abroad related with the international jihad," interior minister José Antonio Alonso told reporters.
Spanish police said that some of the men arrested yesterday had been involved in both the train bombings that killed 191 people in Madrid last year and in supporting suicide bombers in Iraq.
They named one member of the group, Mohamed Afalah, as having carried out a suicide attack in Iraq in May this year. "That action was presumably carried out between May 12th and 19th, though it is unclear what the target was," they said.
Afalah had escaped Spanish police who surrounded a flat in the Madrid dormitory town of Leganes last April. Police said Afalah had later been tracked to Belgium.
Yesterday's raids were in Barcelona, Valencia, Andalusia, and the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta.