Militants find foothold in Balkans

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The raid netted explosives, rifles, other arms and a videotape pledging vengeance for the "brothers" killed fighting Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police found the cache in an apartment occupied by an underground group that was aiming to blow up the British Embassy in Sarajevo, Western intelligence officials said.

The Oct. 19 bust in Sarajevo confirmed a suspicion among several intelligence agents that Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans are becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks in Europe.

In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al-Qaida, composed of non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, adjacent to Bosnia. "It's yet another evolution in the tools used by terrorists."

Parts of the Balkans, stuck in lawless limbo after years of war in the 1990s, are ripe recruitment territory for Middle East radicals, intelligence officials say. Bosnia is still divided among Muslim, Croatian and Serbian population areas, even if nominally united under the 10-year-old Dayton peace agreement that ended ethnic warfare.

Muslim enclaves in Serbia are restive, and Muslim-majority Kosovo remains an estranged province campaigning for independence six years after NATO bombing forced out Serb-dominated Yugoslav troops.

The Balkans have long been a freeway for smugglers of cigarettes, drugs, weapons and prostitutes. "All the conditions are present. Embittered Muslims, arms, corruption — everything underground operators need to get established," said the Western intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The raid on the Sarajevo group, which was said to have had contacts with cells in Denmark and Britain, was not the only event that raised concern. During the summer, Italian and Croatian police arrested five people who allegedly plotted to bomb the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Vatican City in April.

In addition, Serbian police accidentally came across a key suspect in the March 2004 bombings of Madrid commuter trains while he was traveling through the country by train. He arrived in the Balkans in July, and Serbian police investigators conjecture that he was seeking haven either in Bosnia or Kosovo and perhaps safe passage to the Middle East. They quickly extradited the man, Abdelmajid Bouchar, a Moroccan citizen, to Spain.

U.S. and allied intelligence officers have long worked together in Sarajevo to keep an eye on Islamic radicals in Bosnia. After the Sept.11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the CIA and other foreign agencies set up a joint, fortified headquarters to keep tabs on terrorism suspects in Bosnia, a Western intelligence source in Sarajevo said.

The spy teams operate separately from the chief international overseers of Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative, according to the official.

During the three-sided war in Bosnia, hundreds of fighters from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries flocked to Bosnia to fight on behalf of the Muslim faction against Croats and Serbs. Many of the foreign mujahedeen, or holy warriors, were expelled after the war, according to the Bosnian government, but others remained and received passports.

Today, parts of Bosnia framed by the cities of Zenica, Tuzla, Sarajevo and Travnik are home to these immigrants and compose the core regions for Islamic militancy, Bosnian police and Western intelligence officials say.

Until recently, the immigrants tried to keep a low profile. Western intelligence officials here and in Belgrade surmised that they wanted to exploit Bosnia as a logistics and transit point and not invite a crackdown from local police or European Union peacekeepers.

The Sarajevo arrests changed that perception. A Bosnian Interior Ministry official, Robert Cvrtak, released the names of four detainees from the raid: Cesur Abdulkadir, who is of Turkish heritage; Mirsad Bektasevic, a Swedish citizen of Bosnian origin; and Bajro Ikanovic and Almir Bajric, both Bosnian citizens. Among their activities, Bosnian police said, were hiding explosives inside lemons and tennis balls and trying to set up training camps in the hills near Sarajevo.

A week ago, Bosnian police arrested a fifth suspect in the town of Hadzici, near Sarajevo. The police found about 20 pounds of explosives hidden in woods near his home. The man, whose name has not been made public, is suspected of being in charge of providing explosives to the rest of the group.