It was a scoop of truly global proportions. Just a few weeks after al-Qaeda redefined the world news agenda for a generation of journalists by attacking New York and Washington on September 11 2001, television reporter Taysir Alouni interviewed the planet’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.
”The battle has moved to inside America. We will continue this battle, God permitting, until victory or until we meet God,” Bin Laden warned him during an hour-long chat recorded inside a tent.
Last week, however, it was looking like a scoop too far. Former al-Jazeera television correspondent Alouni was sent to jail for seven years by a Spanish court, which deemed he had not just cultivated al-Qaeda contacts as he pursued Bin Laden, but had also actively collaborated with them.
His meteoric career as a star war correspondent for what has fast become one of the world’s most famous television news stations has been cut short.
”He was found guilty of doing his job. It was because of that Bin Laden interview,” his wife Fatima al-Zahra said after the verdict. She will now appeal on behalf of the 50-year-old Syrian-born reporter, while facing several years of looking after their five children on her own.
The Bin Laden interview was not, in fact, the direct reason for the court’s verdict. But it was mentioned in a judgement that contained what was, according to whom you speak, either a frontal assault on journalism or a warning that not everything goes when it comes to chasing a world exclusive.
”Journalistic truth, like all other truths, cannot be obtained at any price,” the 450-page judgement read. ”Taysir Alouni committed the wrongdoing of collaborating with a terrorist group and, for that, he must now pay.”
”This whole trial was, from the very beginning, politically motivated,” al-Jazeera chief editor Ahmed Sheikh says. ”It is a precedent that is very negative for all of us in the media … The court violated a legal principle in interpreting the principle of doubt not as in favour of the defendant but against him.”
Alouni’s relationship with al-Qaeda started well before he began working with al-Jazeera, according to the judgement. A trained economist, he moved to Spain in the 1980s, teaching Arabic and doing various other jobs before ending up as a translator for Spain’s EFE news agency. While there, he met some of the people who, many years later in Madrid, would be his co-defendants in Europe’s biggest-ever al-Qaeda trial. He also met the senior al-Qaeda figures who would not just influence his future career as a journalist, but also be his eventual nemesis.
In 2000 his career leapt forward when he was appointed to open and then run a Kabul bureau for al-Jazeera, while Afghanistan was still governed by the Taliban regime. It was a big step for Alouni.
”I still remember when I went with him to Kabul to open the bureau. It was his first appearance in television journalism. I was there helping show him how to do it in front of a camera, how to edit a story, to cut it and deliver it,” Sheikh says. ”He just mastered the whole thing very quickly. He was a very good journalist — dedicated, balanced, with integrity and honour.”
In Kabul, apart from interviewing Bin Laden, he was the first to show damage caused to civilian targets by American bombs. ”He was able to capture images of civilian victims in the destitute villages of Afghanistan and the miserable streets of Kabul,” the al-Jazeera website which campaigns for his release says. ”His coverage triggered international outrage over the US action in Afghanistan.”
Shortly after he fled the city, as the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, a US bomb destroyed his bureau. He himself was set upon by unknown attackers as he witnessed events he refuses to talk about. ”Scenes that, I’m sorry, I could not describe to anybody,” he once said.
Al-Jazeera was impressed. When war broke out in Iraq, he was sent to cover it. Authorities on both sides disliked him. Saddam Hussein ordered his expulsion. Then the Americans again attacked the al-Jazeera bureau, killing a staffer. A vast network of al-Jazeera helpers around the country allowed him to stay ahead of others in reporting the war. ”The American troops didn’t like us because we contradicted through images and words what the Americans said,” he explained afterwards.
Crucial to Alouni’s early successes, however, were the names he already had in his contact book when he arrived in Kabul. While living in Spain, he had befriended fellow Syrian Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas. Barakat was last week sentenced to 27 years after being found guilty of holding a command role in al-Qaeda and collaborating with the September 11 plotters. Alouni claimed he had cultivated Barakat for professional reasons. ”I was hoovering up professional information,” he said.
The court disagreed, saying things went much further. ”Taysir Alouni did not belong to the group led by Barakat. He possibly felt superior to it … but he collaborated with it,” the judgement reads.
In Spain he had also got to know Mustapha Setmarian and Mohammed Bahaiah, two al-Qaeda leaders who would be his key Kabul contacts. Alouni helped Bahaiah obtain Spanish residency papers by allowing him to say he was living at his Granada home — when he was actually in Turkey. When he went to Kabul, Alouni also took $4 000 to Bahaiah. This, he told the court, was done as a favour to a friend who owed Bahaiah money.
Alouni said his regular Kabul encounters with Bahaiah and Setmarian had a single aim — to gain intimate knowledge of al-Qaeda and to make contacts within the Taliban regime. ”I took advantage of the situation to extract information from them on what the Taliban were, on what al-Qaeda was and on other organisations,” he explained.
The court, once again, disagreed. The reporter, they claimed, traded ethics for access. ”Taysir helped them, not out of that sense of helping which forms part of the favours that all good Muslims should do for their fellows, but in order to obtain … exclusive information on al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime,” the judges said.
Alouni denied knowing that Setmarian and Bahaiah were al-Qaeda members. The court, yet again, did not believe him. He argued that carrying money was an act of Muslim good manners. ”I took it, and that is not a bad thing … If you refuse you are looked upon badly. What is more, I was interested in these people because of the information that I needed.”
His boss at al-Jazeera agrees. ”This is part of our culture. Taysir did it on a personal, individual basis,” says Sheikh. The broadcaster is backing Alouni’s appeal. In the meantime, it wants him bailed because of a heart condition.
The channel is not the only organisation worried by the sentence. ”It sets a dangerous precedent, particularly for anyone who seeks to interview Bin Laden in the future,” says Jean-Francois Julliard of the watchdog Reporters Without Borders. ”Journalists have always investigated terrorist groups. It’s part of our job.”
Alouni may now be wondering whether that first major scoop was worth it. Al-Jazeera did not even screen it. Some of it was eventually shown, however, by CNN.
The court insists that too high a price was paid for the scoop. ”Supposing that what he did in Afghanistan was done in order to get an interview with Bin Laden (which the defendant claims). If that aim had been achieved using methods that did not require punishment, it would merit recognition as a sign of his great worth; but when this achievement is the result of previous wrongdoings, the professional must face up to the consequences of the law,” the judges said.
”We are convinced that he is innocent,” says Sheikh. ”He will never lose his job.” — Â