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Hints of ‘another Madrid’
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WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence had picked up warnings recently that the al-Qaida terror network or its followers were seeking to duplicate the dramatic 3/11 Madrid train bombings in another European city, two knowledgeable sources said Thursday. |
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The information lacked details on what city might be the target or when the attacks might occur, but it appeared to foreshadow Thursday's London mass-transit bombing, which was similar to the 2004 Madrid attacks that also targeted commuter trains at rush-hour.
Some of that information had been culled from a notebook belonging to Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the No.3 official in al-Qaida and the group's operations chief, who was arrested in Pakistan in May, one intelligence source said.
"There was some intelligence that they wanted to do another Madrid in Europe," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This came from al-Libbi's secret notebooks."
An administration official familiar with current counterterrorism intelligence confirmed the United States had picked up the unspecified warning of Madrid-style train attacks in Europe, but the source provided no further details.
Both British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and U.S Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said there had been no warning of an imminent attack in London.
In London, bombs on three commuter trains were detonated by timers, not cell phones, as were used in Madrid, one U.S official said. A fourth blast on a double-decker bus appears to have been the work of a suicide bomber, according to the preliminary investigation, the sources said.
In addition, two unexploded bombs were recovered from trains, one source said.
A previously unknown group calling itself The Secret Organization of al-Qaida in Europe posted a claim of responsibility for the London attacks on a Web site popular with Islamic militants, but it couldn't be verified last night.
In Madrid, terrorists planted 10 bombs on four commuter trains on March 11, 2004 -- or 3/11, as it came to be known -- killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,400. Investigators later found three unexploded bombs and determined that they were rigged with cell phones as detonators.
The heads of the CIA and FBI have said the Madrid train bombings were carried out by local Muslim terrorists who might have been inspired by al-Qaida but not necessarily directed by them, in an effort to force Spain to remove troops from Iraq.
Despite the al-Libbi notes, counterterrorism experts said the London bombing could also highlight a new and troubling phase of the anti-terror fight. That would mean the enemy isn't merely al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and his direct operatives but an unknown number of loosely affiliated Islamic extremists.
"Our enemy now is so unknown to us ... that we have no sense of what al-Qaida is anymore," said Juliette Kayyem, a leading terrorism expert at Harvard University. "This will make our job so much more difficult."
The London attack "suggests that the terrorist threat is strong enough, organized enough and able to bypass numerous intelligence agencies ... the enemy is in better shape than we believed," she said.
The attacks come after the arrest of al-Libbi, and other events have caused some outside the United States to say al-Qaida was on the ropes and even U.S. officials to claim success against the terror group.
"It should be a wake-up call," said Fred Burton, a former State Department counterterrorism official now with Stratfor, a private intelligence group. "If you look at al-Qaida of the future, this is the type of al-Qaida operation we're going to be faced with: soft targets, high casualty count and an extreme amount of shock and awe. It has woken up the world that al-Qaida is still a very dangerous organization."
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