A senior member of al-Qaeda has told interrogators that the terrorist network tried to attack the 2002 Soccer World Cup in Japan, according to sources in Japan and the United States.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the most important al-Qaeda operative so far captured, is believed to have revealed the plot earlier this year, saying the only reason the attacks were never carried out was because al-Qaeda had not been able to build up a network in Japan. The information was passed to the Japanese government, which hosted the 2002 event with South Korea, by US counterterrorist officers.
The news will raise fears that terrorists will try to hit the Olympic Games in Greece this summer or the Euro 2004 football championship in Portugal next month.
The American CIA and FBI are taking the lead role in coordinating intelligence-gathering, pooling the resources of dozens of different secret services from around the world.
Both events are massive security challenges. The three-week football championship starts on June 12 and is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of fans. Portuguese police last week staged a dress rehearsal of a ”nightmare scenario”, a terror attack on a crowded train.
Analysts say that militants are keen to carry out an attack in Greece or Portugal to demonstrate that their ability to strike symbolic targets in the heart of the West is undiminished, despite the campaign launched to degrade their networks since September 11.
”Bin Laden himself would love to pull off something like this,” one intelligence source said. ”But there are lots of autonomous groups who would be very keen to do something too.”
Other analysts point out that the Olympics would allow the targeting of countries such as the US without having to travel through newly security-tight borders.
”Hitting anything in the US or, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom is now quite hard. This is an opportunity to strike ‘the enemy’ without overcoming all the security that has been added since 2001,” one said.
Intercepted communications between militants reveal a strong interest in both the Olympics and Euro 2004, intelligence sources said, though it is unclear if plans have progressed beyond the ”aspirant” stage.
The exact details of the planned attack in Japan are unknown but, if they followed patterns of other al-Qaeda-style strikes, would have been aimed at causing mass casualties. The US and England sides progressed to the latter stages of the tournament and would have been prime targets.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s claims are corroborated by a Japanese police investigation into a former French soldier who appears to have tried to set up a terror cell in Japan immediately after the World Cup.
Lionel Dumont, a 33-year-old convert to radical Islam, entered Japan on July 17 2002 and stayed on a series of 90-day visas until he left for Malaysia on September 14 2003. He was arrested last December in Munich and extradited to France on Tuesday.
Dumont, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, was wanted for crimes, including the killing of a policeman in Bosnia and attacks on a police station and armoured bank car in France.
According to Japanese press reports, Dumont’s telephone records reveal that he received a call from a ”Jamaican-British” militant later arrested in the UK.
A loud blast was reported on Saturday at a closed and empty courthouse in central Greece, authorities said. There were no reports of injuries.
According to officials, the blast occurred in the city of Larissa just after 8pm inside the central courthouse. The court was closed for the weekend and the amount of damage inside the building was not known.
Police said the cause of the explosion was being investigated. — Guardian Unlimited Â