NY Times: From Tapes, a Chilling Voice of Islamic Radicalism in Europe – New York Times
From Tapes, a Chilling Voice of Islamic Radicalism in Europe – New York Times
Playing an Internet video one evening last year, an Egyptian radical living in Milan reveled as the head of an American, Nicholas Berg, was sawed off by his Iraqi captors.
“Go to hell, enemy of God!” shouted the man, Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, as Mr. Berg’s screams were broadcast. “Kill him! Kill him! Yes, like that! Cut his throat properly. Cut his head off! If I had been there, I would have burned him to make him already feel what hell was like. Cut off his head! God is great! God is great!”
Yahia Ragheh, the Egyptian would-be suicide bomber sitting by Mr. Ahmed’s side, clearly felt uncomfortable.
“Isn’t it a sin?” he asked.
“Who said that?” Mr. Ahmed shot back. “It is never a sin!” He added: “We hope that even their parents will come to the same end. Dogs, all of them, all of them. You simply need to be convinced when you make the decision.”
Unconvinced, Mr. Ragheh replied: “I think that it is a sin. I simply think it is a sin.”
The blunt exchange is contained in an 182-page official Italian police report that has not been made public, but is widely available in court circles and frames the judicial case against the two men. “The Madrid attack was my project, and those who died as martyrs were my dearest friends,” Mr. Ahmed boasted in one intercepted conversation.
Ahmed seems to be some kind of cameleon:
A onetime house painter who was able to take on new identities, hopscotch across Europe and dodge the police who had him on their watch lists, Mr. Ahmed is believed to have links to radicals in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Saudi Arabia. The police report calls him a recruiter of suicide bombers for Iraq and at least one other terrorist operation, probably in Europe. For the Italians, Mr. Ahmed is emblematic of the new enemy in their midst.
War, terrorism and death are very popular among the two as was the case with the so called Hofstadgroup:
The attraction to death was a constant feature. One evening, Mr. Ahmed opened a file named, “Allah has said that each person has tasted death,” with links to subjects like “death is easy” and “the tomb.”
A song Mr. Ahmed listened to one weekend went: “We are terrorists, we want to make it known to the world, from West to East that we are terrorists, because terrorism, as a verse of the Koran says, is a thing approved by God.”
The sites are filled not only with calls for the destruction of Israel but also raw anti-Semitism. In one question-and-answer session with a Saudi sheik who is asked what suicide operations against Jews are allowed under Islamic law, the sheik responds that Jews are “vile and despicable beings, full of defects and wickedness.” God, he added, “has ordered us to wage war against them.”
They have enough plans or should I say hope?
On May 24, 2004, Mr. Ahmed discussed an “operation” that had started four days before with a would-be suicide bomber living in Belgium named Mourad Chabarou. Mr. Chabarou said he would be “completely ready” in 25 days, and the two men planned to meet in Paris.
Then came a conversation that struck closer to home. “Rome, we are entering Rome, Rome, if God wishes we are entering, even entering Rome,” Mr. Ahmed told Mr. Ragheh, the other potential suicide bomber, as if in a trance. “Rome, Rome, we are opening Rome with those from Holland. Rome, Rome, if God wishes, Rome is opening. It will be. It will be.”
Does he have some doubts about God?
In a holding cell shortly after his arrest, he worried aloud to Mr. Ragheh that the police “will find the pages I downloaded.”
He displayed none of the serenity he tried to impose on his disciples. He cursed whoever betrayed him to the police and predicted he would spend at least 30 years in prison.
“Things here are strange, they are strange, strange,” he confided to a friend. “I do not understand a thing.”
The friend tried to comfort him, saying: “Why do you torture yourself in this way? Leave everything in the hands of God.”
But Mr. Ahmed seemed inconsolable, adding later in the conversation, “Believe me, I swear to you, I’ve had this feeling before and I haven’t heard the voice of God.”
