By DPA
Islamabad : The arrest in Germany this week of three suspects in an alleged plot to blow up US military and civilian targets has again raised the spectre of terrorist training camps in Pakistan that groom killers to wreak havoc in the Western world.
The claimed existence in the remote tribal belt near the Afghanistan border of centres run by Taliban insurgents, Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network and other Islamic extremist groups is not new.
US intelligence agencies assert that such facilities exist and regular visits to Pakistan by top administration officials have focussed on the need for counter-terrorism ally President Pervez Musharraf to ensure they are eradicated.
But while acknowledging that terrorist and insurgent “elements” are present in the tribal areas, Islamabad sharply rejects claims that bin Laden’s network in particular has reconstituted itself there and is now coordinating global operations from Pakistani soil.
“There are no terrorist training camps (here), whether Al Qaeda or anyone else’s,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said after officials in Germany Wednesday announced the arrests of two German converts to Islam and a Turkish Muslim suspected of planning attacks.
Remarks by Germany’s Federal Prosecutor-General Monika Harms that they were members of the Uzbekistan-linked Islamic Jihad Union and had received training in Pakistan in 2006 were “just claims”, Aslam said, noting that there had been no formal contact by German authorities concerning such a connection.
But despite the efforts of the Pakistani military to tame the mountainous tribal areas, independent experts do not doubt the existence of terrorist training camps in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) where they are located.
“Most of them are in north and south Waziristan and were mainly established after 2001 when the US invasion of Afghanistan forced Al Qaeda militants and the members of other Islamic resistance movements from Chechnya, Tajikistan and other parts of Central Asia to flee to these areas,” said Ismaeel Khan, a respected authority on terrorism and bureau chief of the Dawn newspaper in the NWFP capital of Peshawar.
“The militants are well trained in warfare skills and in making and using highly sophisticated explosive devices,” Khan said, noting that intelligence agencies in Pakistan, the United States and other Islamic countries trained many of the foreign fighters to engage Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “This knowledge has now been handed down to the next generation of the militants,” he added.
While Islamabad is rigid on the issue of camps, Pakistani security forces on the border say they are struggling to stem the arrival of suspected terrorist trainees via Afghanistan, especially at the Tuftan crossing in the southwest Balochistan province.
“We pick up around a dozen such people every week,” a senior official said on condition of anonymity. “It is possible that many others might have passed the crossing without coming into our notice as hundreds of people travel through it every day.”
After questioning, suspects are handed over to state intelligence agencies, he said, adding that individuals and groups from Western Europe use two main routes to reach Pakistan for training purposes or to join the conflict against NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The first is from Eastern Europe via Russia, Central Asia, Turkey or Iran and finally to Balochistan. Or they travel directly to Turkey, Iran and into the same province. The same routes are used to move people and material to the West.
There are also established mechanisms for the financing of training operations, according to Khan.
“Many locals as well as Muslims living abroad who sympathize with the cause and objectives of the jihadi forces give them donations. The funds are in millions (of dollars), which are sent here through the old Hawala system of transferring money,” he said, referring to the unofficial but widespread practice whereby funds are deposited with individuals abroad and paid out by an associate at the other end, like a regular wire transfer.
Meanwhile, recruits are also believed to receive religious indoctrination at some of Pakistan’s thousands of Islamic madrassa seminaries, and learn how to assemble suicide bomb vests and build explosive devices.
According to German prosecutor Harms, the three arrested men had accumulated some 730 kg of hydrogen peroxide, from which bombs similar to those used in London in July 2005 were to be made.
Two of the London bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, are known to have visited Pakistan shortly before they and two other British Muslims blew up three underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people.
In December last year, British police were trying to trace a gang of British Muslims dubbed the “English brothers”, which included nine Britons, two Norwegians and an Australian who were believed to have been smuggled into Waziristan in October 2005.
The group was thought to be under the command of an Al Qaeda veteran suspected of training some of the Britons accused of the alleged plot in 2006 to blow up passengers planes flying to the US from Heathrow airport.