By PAUL HAVEN
The Associated Press
Monday, May 29, 2006; 12:43 PM
MADRID, Spain -- European intelligence networks have thrown a blanket of surveillance over a small but fiercely violent cast of Islamic militants, many homegrown with no direct links to al-Qaida, whose fingerprints they expect to find on the Continent's next big terrorist attack.
Senior security officials across Europe warned in interviews with The Associated Press that the relative ease and low cost of an attack, combined with the anger and isolation felt by Muslim populations, mean more bloodshed is almost inevitable.
The officials painted a picture of a diverse group of militants with competing agendas, vastly different social and educational backgrounds and a litany of gripes that makes it difficult to predict their next move. While they may be motivated by Osama bin Laden's call for worldwide jihad, they mostly operate independently of al-Qaida's leadership, the officials said.
"There is no profile; they come from everywhere," said Manfred Murck, deputy director of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which tracks extremist activity in the northern city of Hamburg, home to three of the four Sept. 11 suicide pilots. "You can't concentrate on certain targets, you can't concentrate on certain persons ... Everything is possible, anything goes, and you just have to try and be as close as you can to the whole group."
The two deadliest recent attacks in Europe _ the London bombings of last July 7 and the Madrid blasts of March 11, 2004 _ dramatically illustrate the problem.
Two of the London bombers had shown up on the periphery of another terror investigation, but authorities did not deem them dangerous enough to merit closer surveillance.
Spanish authorities say they were also monitoring several of the bombers in the months before the Madrid attack _ and actually stopped a car carrying the group's military planner in late February, unaware he was leading a caravan of other terrorists transporting explosives. They thought they were dealing with drug traffickers and let them go.
Armed partially with the lessons learned from those bombings, intelligence services throughout Europe are ramping up surveillance, even at the risk of provoking protests from civil liberties groups.
_ In Spain, where 191 people died in the bombing of four trains, authorities have tripled the number of agents concentrating on terrorism and are watching some 250 suspected radicals, according to a senior intelligence chief at the heart of the country's counterterrorism operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
_ In London, where four suicide attackers killed 52 bus and subway passengers, senior police officers say they are concerned about 40 to 60 people living in Britain who have received training at camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and who are believed intent on carrying out attacks. Another 400 are believed to be sympathizers.
_ In Italy, authorities are watching 74 people on suspicion of financing terrorism, said Gen. Pasquale Debidda of the financial police. Germany's Murck said about 170 potentially violent radicals are under surveillance in Hamburg, and that they were believed to have another 2,000 sympathizers.
The numbers look small, but the threat isn't.
In France, authorities have blocked at least a dozen attacks in the past decade, said Louis Caprioli, the former assistant director of the DST, the country's main counterintelligence agency. Tore Bjoergo, a terrorism expert at the Norwegian Police University College, put the number of thwarted attacks throughout Europe at 30 to 40 since 9/11.
Officials and terror experts say the main threat is from homegrown militants, deeply rooted in their adopted countries but still linked to networks in the Muslim world.
Most of the Madrid bombers were North African immigrants. The London attacks were carried out by three British citizens of Pakistani descent and a fourth from Jamaica. And the highly public killing of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh in 2004 was carried out by a Muslim of Moroccan background.
No link to al-Qaida has been established in any of the incidents, though British authorities are still looking into a trip two of the bombers there made to Pakistan in the year before the bombings.
Said Heinz Fromm, Germany's domestic intelligence chief: "One today cannot talk any longer of a central leadership role of al-Qaida." Bin Laden's group has become a "diffuse, amorphous organization" that provides inspiration for attacks, rather than a guiding hand, he said.
Riots in heavily Muslim inner cities of France, and the global Islamic outburst over the publication of Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, have further heated the climate for terrorism.
"We have recorded a significant increase in the number of threats" because of the cartoons, said Lars Findsen, the intelligence chief in Denmark.
The Internet is replacing militant mosques as the main meeting site for potential terrorists, said Sybrand van Hulst, the director of the Netherlands' CIA equivalent, the AIVD. It has also become their manual.
The Spanish intelligence chief said a search of the Madrid plotters' computers found they had often visited Global Islamic Media, the al-Qaida-linked Web site, before the attack and after, when they needed advice on making their getaway.
Authorities believe they learned how to rig their cell-phone bombs on the Web and even used the same brand of phones _ Mitsubishi Trium T110s _ as did the group behind the 2002 attacks in Bali.
The official said similarities between otherwise-unrelated attacks were evidence of the Web's power to spread terror information. The suicide attacks in London and those in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, were both carried out using the same peroxide-based explosives, which are easily made with common materials, but are extremely powerful.
The official said the terrorists don't know each other but chat a lot online, sharing their lessons and tactics. "They have recipes (for how to carry out an attack). It is the classic do-it-yourself handbook," he said.
The cost of an attack has also dropped sharply.
The Sept. 11 attacks were complicated and expensive, involving international bank transfers and months of training. The London attacks, according to British Home Secretary John Reid, cost just $15,000.
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Associated Press writers Mar Roman in Madrid; Dave Rising in Hamburg, Germany; David Stringer in London; Pierre-Antoine Souchard and Verena von Derschau in Paris; Ariel David in Rome; Karl Ritter in Stockholm; Doug Mellgren in Oslo, Norway; and Toby Sterling in Amsterdam contributed to this report.