French official says Turkish group behind aid ships had early terrorism ties

PARIS — France's former top anti-terrorism judge said Wednesday that the Turkish Islamic charity behind a flotilla of aid ships that was raided by Israeli forces on its way to Gaza this week had ties to terrorism networks and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian arrested in Port Angeles, Wash., in December 1999 on his way to bomb Los Angeles International Airport as part of an al-Qaida plot.

The Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, had "clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad," former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Bruguiere, who led the French judiciary's counterterrorism unit for nearly two decades before retiring in 2007, didn't indicate whether IHH now has terror ties, but said it did when he investigated it in the late 1990s.

"They were basically helping al-Qaida when [Osama] bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil," he said.

Some members of an international terrorism cell known as the Fateh Kamel network then worked at the IHH, he said. Kamel, an Algerian-Canadian dual national, had ties to the nascent al-Qaida, Bruguiere said.

Among Kamel's followers was Ressam, who is serving a 22-year prison sentence.

"IHH had a role in the organization that led to the plot," Bruguiere said, reiterating sworn testimony he made in a U.S. federal court during Ressam's trial.

Bruguiere issued an international warrant for Kamel, Ressam's former mentor, who was extradited from Jordan to France in 1999 and sentenced to eight years in prison on terror-related charges.

IHH vehemently denies ties to radical groups. The group is not among some 45 groups listed as terrorists by the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

Nine people on board the IHH flotilla were killed by Israeli forces on Monday.

"We are a legal organization," IHH board member Omer Faruk Korkmaz said Wednesday in response to Bruguiere's statements. "We have nothing to do with any illegal organization," he said.

"We don't know Ahmed Ressam or Fateh Kamel," Korkmaz said. "We don't approve of the actions of any terrorist organization in the world."

French investigators found in the 1990s that "several members of Fateh Kamel's network worked at the IHH as a cover," Bruguiere said. "It was too systematic and too widespread for the NGO [nongovernmental organization] not to know" their real goal, he said.

The former judge, renowned for tracking down convicted terrorist Carlos the Jackal, said he didn't believe the IHH could have been infiltrated by terrorists without its knowledge.

The judge said he was personally involved in a raid with French and Turkish police at IHH headquarters in Istanbul in 1998, where they found weapons, false documents and other "incriminating" material.

Bruguiere, 67, is now the coordinator for the European Union in a terrorism-finance-tracking program jointly run with the United States.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters on Wednesday that "we know that IHH representatives have met with senior Hamas officials in Turkey, Syria and Gaza over the past three years. That is obviously of great concern to us."

But, he said the U.S. could not "validate" that IHH has connections to al-Qaida.