A March 12 article about the profiling of terrorists misidentified the school attended by a Canadian witness in a terrorism trial. The witness, Zenab Armend Pisheh, was a student at Carleton University of Ottawa, not Carleton College of Northfield, Minn.
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Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile
Bakker and other analysts said more attention should be devoted to understanding the personal experiences that motivate people to become radicals. For example, Dutch researchers said they suspect one reason why more young women are becoming involved in radical networks in the Netherlands is that they come under the influence of "Moroccan lover boys." Authorities use the phrase to describe charismatic Romeos who manipulate emotionally needy women into committing criminal acts. "These are really down-to-earth things that we should not underestimate," Bakker said.
Indeed, there are clear signs that al-Qaeda cells and affiliates are intentionally recruiting supporters from nontraditional backgrounds as a way to avoid detection, according to European intelligence officials and analysts.
  A woman in Brussels reads news of Muriel Degauque, 38, a Catholic from the southern Belgian city of Charleroi who converted to Islam, traveled to Iraq and blew herself up in November 2005. The incident still perplexes Belgians. (2005 Photo By Geert Vanden Wijngaert -- Associated Press) |
In London, eight male al-Qaeda suspects are currently on trial for an alleged plot to blow up unspecified targets in Britain with bombs made of ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizers. According to testimony at the trial, which began in March 2006, the defendants persuaded a Canadian woman, whom they had met on the Internet, to wire money on their behalf because she was less likely to attract suspicion.
Zenab Armend Pisheh, a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., said a member of the cell asked her to wire more than $5,000 so the defendants could go to Pakistan in 2003 to attend an al-Qaeda training camp. "He said it had to be a woman because sisters don't get caught -- brothers get caught if they send money," Pisheh said in a statement to British investigators.
According to trial testimony last fall, Pisheh met one of the defendants, Anthony Garcia, of east London, in an Internet chat room and quickly fell in love; they became engaged without ever meeting face to face. He introduced her to other accused conspirators, including the man who asked her to wire the cash.
Garcia is of Algerian descent, but testified in September that he legally changed his name from Rahman Adam to further his ambitions as a fashion model and because the Latin-sounding name "had a better ring to it." British investigators, however, believe he was trying to conceal his Muslim and Arab background from police.
John Horgan, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said terrorist groups are constantly trying to catch law enforcement officials off guard.
"One guiding principle for terrorist groups is to always maintain the psychological edge and the upper hand by doing things that are surprising to the enemy," he said. "So you'll see the use of a child, the use of a woman."
Among those arrested last August in London in the alleged transatlantic hijacking plot, for example, was Cossor Ali, a 24-year-old mother married to another suspect in the case. British investigators suspect that she or her husband planned to smuggle liquid explosives onto a flight in their infant daughter's bottle.
In the Dutch study of terrorism suspects in Europe, only five of the 242 suspects examined were women. But Dutch counterterrorism officials said they have seen a significant rise in the number of female suspects in the past two years.
"It seems that it will be simply a matter of time before these women also become actively involved in violence," the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, known as AIVD, reported a year ago in a unclassified analysis of terrorism trends in the country.
In May 2006, two months after the intelligence analysis was released, British police stopped Hor, the young Dutch Moroccan mother from Zutphen, and her husband at Luton airport outside London. Although it is unclear what prompted the stop, investigators said they found suspicious files on the husband's laptop computer, including instructions for building a homemade rocket launcher and explosives.
