France refutes Powell

Cbass · 02-11-2003, 03:07 PM

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Originally posted by France

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France refutes Powell terror claim

AFP - No link has ever been established between an alleged top al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and Iraq, despite years of intelligence surveillance by France of the most radical Islamic movements, senior French anti-terrorist sources said.

The sources, who did not wish to be named, said this contradicts claims made before the UN Security Council by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who used Zarqawi's case as proof of an alliance between the Baghdad regime and the al-Qaeda network.

Powell argued on Wednesday that Iraq was harbouring Zarqawi, a Jordanian known to US intelligence services as one of al-Qaeda's top experts on chemical and biological weapons.

The 36-year-old Zarqawi, an Afghan war veteran, is accused by Jordan of involvement in the murder of a US foreign aid official in 1999, and has been sentenced in absentia for planning attacks on Western targets there.

The US Central Intelligence Agency is also looking into Zarqawi's possible involvement in a foiled plot to use ricin to poison food for British troops.

In a diagram illustrating links between Zarqawi and Iraq, Powell included the photos of two Islamic militants Merouane Benhamed and Menad Benchellali, who were arrested last year in Paris.

But the French intelligence sources said: "At no point did the DST (French anti-terrorist and counter-espionage services), which organised these arrests, establish the slightest link between these two men and al-Zarqawi."

Benhamed and Benchellali are considered by French intelligence services as operational members of the so-called "Chechen network", a reference to fighters who received training in the Russian breakaway republic of Chechnya.

"Al-Zarqawi's name never once appeared in our different investigations into the 'Chechen link' and its operational members active in Europe," they added.

"We do not understand how the Americans -- through Colin Powell's words -- were able to arrive at such conclusions about al-Zarqawi's so-called ties with both Iraq and with the 'Chechen link' operatives whom we arrested in France last year," the anti-terrorist officials said.

Zarqawi, whose real name is Fadel Nazzal al-Khalayleh, is still at large.

Arab commentators brushed aside Powell's claims he was in Iraq, saying that Saddam Hussein's secular regime would be anathema for the fundamentalist Islam of al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's network, is blamed for the September 11, 2001 suicide plane attacks in New York and Washington which killed more than 3,000 people.