Pizzas galore!

According to a detainee, Abu Atija, who graduated from Zarqawi’s terrorist camp in Afghanistan, (tasked) at least nine North African extremists from 2001 to travel to Europe to conduct poison and explosive attacks. Members of this network have been apprehended in France, Britain, Spain and Italy — 116 operatives connected to this global web have been arrested. Three of those (the detainee) identified by name were arrested in France last December.

The detainee says the plot also targeted Britain. Later evidence, again, proved him right. When the British unearthed a cell last month, one British police officer was murdered.

Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that al-Qaeda would no longer support activities against Baghdad. Early al-Qaeda ties were forged by secret Iraqi intelligence high-level contacts with al-Qaeda. Members of both organisations have met at very senior levels.

In 1996 a foreign security service tells us that bin Laden met a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, and later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence service.

Saddam became more interested as he saw al-Qaeda’s appalling attacks. A detained al-Qaeda member tells us that Saddam was more willing to assist al-Qaeda after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Saddam was also impressed by attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.

A senior defector, one of Saddam’s former intelligence chiefs in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s to provide training to al-Qaeda members on document forgery.

Al-Qaeda continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

(A) senior al-Qaeda terrorist detainee says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan did not believe that al-Qaeda labs were capable (of making) chemical or biological agents. They went to Iraq. The support included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapon training for two al-Qaeda associates (from) December 2000.

(The detainee) says that a militant, Abu Abdula al-Iraqi, had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula al-Iraqi characterised (relations) with Iraqi officials as successful.

The nexus of poisons and terror is new. The nexus of Iraq and terror is old. The combination is lethal.”

Assessment: A logistic HQ for Osama bin Laden’s network in Saddam Hussein’s capital was the strongest indication of Iraq’s links with the September 11 terrorists (Dominic Kennedy writes).

Colin Powell gave the most detailed account so far of how a notorious al-Qaeda poisoner is being allowed to operate with impunity in Iraq. Many of (the) allegations of links between al-Qaeda and Saddam will be dismissed by critics.

But details of a sting operation by the Americans, using a friendly security service to test whether Saddam was willing to hunt down Zarqawi, will be harder to ignore.

America has long named Zarqawi as the “missing link” between al-Qaeda and Saddam, describing how the fighter was given a new leg in Baghdad last summer, replacing one lost in Afghanistan.

But the allegation that Zarqawi brought two dozen al-Qaeda affiliates to the capital, who have since spent eight months freely moving people, money and supplies, was startling.

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