Journey into the shadows surrounding Zaoui

When CATHERINE FIELD tried to pursue the truth about Ahmed Zaoui she plunged into a tangled web of intrigue, bitter rivalry and deceit


Ever since Ahmed Zaoui left his native Algeria nearly 11 years ago, he has run the gauntlet of arrest, police investigation, spells in prison and house detention in connection with his ties to radical Islamists.

Yet to probe Zaoui's time in France, Belgium and Switzerland is to plunge into a world of intrigue, conspiracy theory and political machination. It is muddied by rivalries between security agencies, whose distrust of each other was sometimes so fierce they misled each other.

Distortion is added by ambitious politicians, who lashed police to come up with quick results to calm an anxious public. And, finally, there was the ruthlessness of the terrorists, as quick to plant bombs in train stations as to enact bloody revenge on fellow radicals.

Pinning down the evidence about Zaoui's role amid these shifting sands is difficult and the full picture may never emerge.

It was in a ground-floor reading room of the imposing Palais de Justice on Paris' Ile de la Cite, a short walk from Notre Dame cathedral, that I first realised that even Diogenes and the lantern with which he searched in daylight to find one honest man would be struggling.

After weeks of phone calls, going from one Justice Department office to another in search of approval to view the court's dossier, there at last lay what I hoped would be the key: 28 folders, each around 8cm thick, stacked in piles of three.

They had been hauled in on a steel trolley by a disgruntled court clerk. This was Case Number 93.31.33.90.13, "Operation Chrysanthemum". These buff-coloured folders would - perhaps - contain the evidence that allowed a Paris judge to convict Zaoui in absentia of "complicity in forging documents, handling stolen goods and taking part in association with criminals with the aim of preparing an act of terrorism".

It seemed a huge dossier for such nebulous charges. But the reason became clear: Chrysanthemum was more than just a crackdown on minor crime, it was the first operation aimed at smashing the terrorists' support network. The theory behind this was that if you cut off logistics then the terrorists would find it difficult to plan and execute attacks.

The trigger for this operation was a fax sent by the militant Algerian group GIA (Groupe Islamique Armee - Islamic Armed Group ) to a London-based, Arabic-language newspaper, Ashark Al Ansat, on October 26, 1993, claiming responsibility for the abduction of three French nationals and the killing of two Russian officers in Algeria. Four days later, a letter signed by Le Conseil Superieur des Forces Armees Islamiques was delivered to the Paris headquarters of Agence France-Presse (AFP), the French news agency, warning that abductions and attacks against foreign companies could continue if the French Government continued its support of the Algerian regime. French authorities feared these attacks could be carried out on home soil.

In a two-day operation, starting on November 9, 1993, police staged a huge crackdown on Algerian exiles, hauling in more than 90 suspects. They targeted not only GIA but FIS (Front Islamique du Salut - the Islamic Front for Salvation), the group to which Zaoui belonged and which claims a non-violent policy.

The crackdown involved simultaneous raids on dozens of locations, including the homes of two FIS militants in France who had contact with Zaoui: Abdelhak Boudjaadar, whose apparent role was party propagandist, and Mohamed Djeffal, whose official role was adviser to the FIS but who appears mainly to have provided forged documents for Algerians in exile.

Zaoui, though, had gone to ground, resurfacing in neighbouring Belgium.

But the French campaign unfolded over almost eight years and although Zaoui escaped the 1993 swoop he was hauled in from Belgium in 1995.

The continuing investigation was exhaustive and the manpower almost limitless. According to the Justice Department files, it drew on resources from France's justice and interior ministers, from the domestic intelligence agency, called the DST, and the Services Regionaux de Police Judiciaire (SRPJ), a section of the police that specialises in organised crime, in 14 cities.

The court files contain pages and pages of lists of telephone calls made by defendants; wodges of documents provided by their banks showing money flows.

One thick file contained just the printouts of files and downloads from a computer found at the home of Boudjaadar.

Document number D8948 is a transcript of the May 7, 1998, interrogation of Zaoui by investigating magistrate Roger Le Loire and DST agent Lionel Franceschi.

Reading this 5 1/2-hour-long interview, it is clear that Le Loire and Franceschi were unable to provide any evidence to pierce Zaoui's denial that he had any link with terrorism or terrorists. Any evidence was circumstantial. He admitted having visited Boudjaadar in France in 1993.

The last file, containing the court summary of the offences and background to the operation, gave good background but nothing proved any link with the GIA.

Every one of the six defendants was suspected of associating with criminals but there were no details of these criminals; there was nothing on the men that Zaoui had supposedly been in contact with.

After reading the 28 volumes of the only publicly available evidence against Zaoui, it became clear I lacked a complete picture of the French case against him.

Why? One small folder seemed to provide the key. It was described as containing evidence from the DST. But in it were only photographs of the accused.

So where was the evidence from the biggest agency fighting terrorism on French soil? This implied that the evidence had never been seen publicly but had been given to the Government. Was it so sensitive the intelligence services did not trust the judge to read it? Or was it so circumstantial that the judge would throw it out?

What also later emerged is that the case against Zaoui seems to have been made foggier by infighting among France's police apparatus.

In Operation Chrysanthemum, there were at least four different agencies: the Serious Crime Squad; the anti-terrorist division of the judicial police (the DNAT); the DST; and the foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE.

The rivalry between the DNAT, the Serious Crime Squad and the DST is legendary, with each claiming pole position in the fight against terror and organised crime. Each agency is said to guard its sources so closely that there is often little exchange of information between the enforcers.

This traditional wrangling between rival agencies may well have affected France's preparedness for the fight against terrorism. In the mid-1990s, exiled members of the FIS and other Islamist groups flooded into France and the GIA intensified its battle against the hated former colonial power which had backed the Algerian military. In August 1994, the GIA slaughtered five French embassy officials in Algiers. In December, four Islamic militants were killed when French commandos stormed a hijacked plane at Marseilles airport.

Fearing a wave of revenge attacks, French authorities immediately turned up the pressure on the Islamist networks across Europe. The man behind this sweep was France's hardline, bluntly spoken conservative interior minister, Charles Pasqua. As part of that sweep in March the following year Zaoui was arrested by Belgian police backed by prosecutors from the Serious and Organised Crime Unit. He was placed on remand in Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels.

While Zaoui was behind bars, a series of terrorist attacks was carried out in the French capital. In all there were eight bombings or attempted bombings in Paris between July and October 1995 that killed eight people and wounded 200 others.

Putting together the pieces of the overall jigsaw meant speaking to former and present intelligence officials. These sources eventually proved to be invaluable, for they cast light - some, not all - on the unofficial side of the case. What their agencies found, but have never released into the public domain, clearly influenced their government's course of action and determined Zaoui's fate.

The experience I had in France found an echo when I sought the evidence against Zaoui that was presented before Belgian judges.

Investigating magistrate Bernard Michels at the Belgian Justice Department's terrorism division refused our request to view the court ruling in Zaoui's conviction in November 1995 for criminal association and having a false passport.

However, Michels did supply the document to the New Zealand embassy, which requested it.

Again, I turned to intelligence officials to fill in the gaps. These sources explained that once Zaoui's application for refugee status was denied, the authorities tried to resettle him in a third country, Sudan. It is unclear why Zaoui decided against this move and why, with what appears to be the connivance of the Belgian authorities, he was allowed to flee to Switzerland. But there he again became the focus of zealous politicians hungry for quick scalps.

On November 17, 1997, Islamic militants attacked a group of tourists in the Egyptian city of Luxor. More than 30 of the victims were Swiss residents of the area where Zaoui had been housed. The Swiss fingered Zaoui and threatened him with expulsion.

Intelligence sources are confident Zaoui played no part in the massacre. However, by curbing his activities inside Switzerland, politicians could claim they were acting against Islamists.

Unsure of what to do with him, the Swiss at one stage bundled him across the border to France where he was arrested and placed in a safe house in Normandy.

Again, there is no publicly available record of this because his interrogation was handled as an "administrative" matter, which did not need approval from a judge or magistrate. Intelligence sources also say that by this stage the animosity between the DST and the DNAT had so intensified that the two sides were arguing over who would interrogate Zaoui. Once the French had completed their questioning of Zaoui, he was shunted back to Switzerland, which bundled him out to Burkina Faso, West Africa, in 1998.

He left there in 2000 and after a stay in Malaysia arrived in New Zealand in December 2002 by way of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.

The convoluted encounters between Zaoui and the intelligence services reveal something of the secret world of double-dealings that are never seen by the public and speak mightily about the events that determined how Zaoui eventually washed up in New Zealand.

And if what one of these intelligence sources says is confirmed - that Zaoui was never a major threat to European security and chose to inform on his colleagues - the deadliest threat he is fleeing may come not from the Algerian junta but from his former comrades.

TOP GUNS

In his lengthy encounters with French investigators Ahmed Zaoui has been dealt with by some of the biggest names in the legal establishment. The judge in his Paris trial was Herve Stephan, who handled the investigation into the death of Princess Diana and the case of Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner. The investigating magistrate in Zaoui's Paris trial was Roger Le Loire, famous for issuing a subpoena against Henry Kissinger during his investigation of French nationals who vanished during the regime of Chile's General Pinochet. The senior examining magistrate specialising in anti-terrorism, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, has said Zaoui's organisation supported those behind bombings in France. In Normandy he was interrogated both by Madame Laurence Le Vert, a senior judge and Roger Marion, then director of the anti-terrorist division of the judicial police (DNAT).

Herald Feature: Ahmed Zaoui, parliamentarian in prison

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